There certainly are cases where the "corporate shield" is pierced and indivuduals are prosecured. Most of the time this happens when the corporation is so deeply embedded in the crime that it becomes apparent that the reason the corporation exists is to shield the people behind it. This happens most often in smaller corporations - I don't know of any case where a large publicly held corporation was pierced in this manner, mostly I would say because it has never been the case that such a corporation existed solely to shield the participants.
Sometime in about 50 years the people that are running around saying "See, I TOLD you it wasn't safe" will finally shut up. I don't see any new nuclear plant construction in the US for at least that long.
I think a pretty popular stance will be a lawsuit where the plant builder is supposed to prove that after an earthquake of unknown magnitude the plant would be undamaged and operating normally. Can't prove it? Well, no license then.
I don't think it matters what might actually happen in Japan any longer. Just the news reports (deluded and inaccurate as they are) alone are enough to make sure there is no new construction. If something bad does really happen, it might push nuclear plant construction out even further than 50 years.
A. In the US we are not building hydroelectric dams any longer. We are, in fact, dismanteling hydroelectric dams for ecological reasons.
B. In the US the chance of building and operating a new nuclear power plant went from 1:10000 to more like zero. As far as the people blocking any sort of construction are concerned, the technology has now proven itself unsafe. It's over, folks.
Constructing it would be infinately safe because it couldn't be done. Hoover Dam cost millions (49 million according to some figures) in the 1930s with a huge labor oversupply. Today it would cost hundreds of billions to build in the US and it would take 50 years to get through the environmental impact studies and such. It is impossible to build such things in the US today.
Also, such construction would be monitored to ensure that nobody was killed. This level of monitoring and safety would ensure that no work was actually done. Large-scale construction pretty much has foreknowledge that it will cost X lives per mile of tunnel dug, etc. Regardless of how much attention to safety there is, someone will do somthing stupid and pay for it. Today there would be lawsuits based on "if you knew people would die, why did you do it?" Just that foreknowledge will prevent such large scale construction from ever taking place. You can't sue someone for not doing something, regardless of how interesting and important it might be.
Besides, ask anyone. We're not building dams anymore, we're tearing them down.
Wikileaks may have inspired people in the Middle East to riot and overthrow their governments, much to the delight of some fundamentalist Islamic groups. The thousands that are being killed and the millions more that will likely be killed have to thank the folks reading the insipid, evil nature of their governments and knowing they will not withstand much of an onslaught.
My guess is that there will be a substantial power vacuum and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. End result will be some organized political/religious group will have enough name recognition to step in and promised order and peace. Maybe a few laws as well. After all, they will have the civil war next door in Libya to compare to - wouldn't want that here, would you?
When the dust settles we will see who is in charge - a loose association of secular people or an organized political/religious group that has been trying to gain power for decades. And do not believe for a second that people will always democratically vote for their best interests. Russia voted in Lenin and Stalin. France more-or-less invited Napoleon to take over. Gaza voted in Hamas. Why would you not believe that Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Libya and Tunisia would not vote to form a uniion under an Islamic theocracy?
It is a crime to destroy evidence, period. If I sue you and get a subpoena for your wife's panties and you burn them instead of turning them over you are committing a crime, regardless of the merit of the original lawsuit.
Now until the material has been ordered to be turned over or is part of a discovery motion it isn't evidence at all so destruction of it isn't a crime at all. If they had destroyed the information a week ago then there would be nothing anyone could do - no crime. Things can get a bit sticky if you destroy something in the face of a legal proceeding when it is likely that whatever you are destroying would be subpoeaned. Judges have been known to consider this evidence that you are guilty, liable or whatever and may take that into account in a decision.
The First Amendment protects people from laws being written that prevent them from speaking, it doesn't really help when they have already said or done something and there are other consequences stemming from it. While there are no laws against saying to someone that you want to kill them if you do so and they end up dead you can't use the First Amendment as a defense or as an alibi. You spoke out and a consequence of that is that you are now a suspect in a murder.
No, the would be charged with spoilation of evidence. They have already been informed that it is the Court's intent that the materials be turned over. Once that happens, it is evidence and destruction of it is called spoilation.
It wouldn't go well for the people that did it individually. I don't think there would be any "corporate shield" here at all.
No economy on the planet is as open as the US is to cheap cloned merchandise marketed as the original expensive stuff. And if you buy the fakes and have a problem you will likely as not complain to the original manufacturer - who, in their desire to have happy customers in the future just might fix things for you.
This isn't about protecting a market but protecting companies that are based in the US from extremely unfair competition from China and other East Asian countries with very low wages. Sure it is cheaper to make just about everything there and if you ship enough of it to the US it is will undercut anything made in the US. So the answer is to put all US manufacturers out of business and only buy from China? I'm not sure that leads to anything useful.
Protecting music and movies from pirates and the mass production factories outside the US is probably a losing game because it is all available to the Internet-savvy today for free. I don't know anyone that actually pays for music anymore - why would they? Movies are a little tougher, but the market is pretty much on its way to destruction no matter what and border controls aren't going to make a difference.
Pretty much every Western country protects their own industries - except the US. Try importing 1000 unlicensed DVD players into Holland - they will be stopped at the port and turned away. In the US they will be on store shelves the next week. Try importing a fake Louis Vutton purse into France or some fake Italian shoes into Italy - you will be blocked at the port. Bringing one in for personal use probably isn't going to cause much of a stir but in the US today it doesn't matter if it is one or 1000, and it doesn't matter what company is being shredded because of the cloners.
I guess the point is to remove the last vestiges of manufacturing from the US. Want to start a company? Maybe you should first move to Thailand because with enough bribes anything is possible there.
Well, most other countries have very strict laws about importation of goods. If you travel from France to New York City and buy a fake Louis Vutton purse there it may be confiscated when you re-enter France. Certainly if you were a merchant in France and tried to import 1000 fake Louis Vutton purses to sell in France you would be blocked from doing so.
Let's say you want to import some cheap, unlicensed DVD players into Holland (home of Philips, licensor of DVD players). Good luck with that - Holland has port controls and does block unlicensed merchandise.
The US has no such importation policy. If you want to import poisonous cat food you can do it. Fake purses? Fine. Lead painted toys for children? Sure. Sometimes they stop pirated movies and software but considering there is something like 1 person to monitor 100 ships with thousands of container loads each it is not exactly a given that anything will be blocked.
By the way, in most countries you do not have the right to buy anything and bring it home. Try, just try bringing an apple into Australia. In the US if you buy a bucket of rancid, rotting chicken in Mexico you will have no problems bringing it into the US complete with the flies. Small difference there. Could you sell that bucket of rotting chicken to some homeless dude in Texas? Absolutely. There are no controls in the US.
Unlicensed DVD players? In the US anything selling for under $50 is certainly going to be unlicensed because the manufacturer pays $5 per player in license fees. So you don't really believe that the $30 DVD player that WalMart is making $15 on only cost the manufacturer $10 to make and is paying $5 in license fees? Hardly. Unlike the rest of the planet, the US has no controls whatsoever over its ports.
In most countries they at least protect their home-grown industries, like Louis Vutton in France and Philips in Holland. Not so in the US. If you build a business out of making computer peripherials you better make sure the firmware never gets out and it is a critical piece of it - because the US will smile happily while your business is defeated by cloners that will reproduce your hardware and sell it as yours right out from under you. Why do you think there are no US peripherial companies anymore? How hard do you think it is to buy a motherboard branded as "Intal" with a sticker on it that says "Intal Inside"? Really not that hard. Bet it would be pretty hard to buy an ASVS motherboard in Taiwan where the brand looked a lot like ASUS.
Why do you think people periodically get concerned about what could be brought into the US through its "open ports"? Right now, nobody is really worried and really wants cheap stuff no matter where and how it comes in. Did you notice all the controls that were put in place after the poison cat food came in? No, nothing changed. China was encouraged to not ship bad stuff to the US anymore but nothing, absolutely nothing was done to prevent more of the same from coming in. Just remember, there is virtually no industry that is safe in this environment except maybe nursing. Anything that involves making something can be defeated because it can be made cheaper and with less quality overseas - and then marked as the original item to fool people and put the "original" manufacturer out of business.
I can't agree more with closing down US ports to cloned merchandise of one form or another. If they get a law through that also at the same time makes it tougher to walk across the border with Mexico with cloned stuff, well, that's too bad. It isn't like that is where the problem is.
The problem is that is exactly what is happening with wireless services. OK, maybe you didn't bring the 20 friends. But the 20 other users are there and each and every one of them has an expectation of excellent service. Which cannot be fulfilled.
Wireless services were great for early adopters which then helped to sell the concept to lots of other people. When I hear about real estate salespeople with cellular modems so they can access MLS listing in their car I figure this has been oversold. When every single cell phone store is advertising some cell modem I am sure it is being oversold. And the problem with overselling wireless services is there isn't a great way to fix their being oversold.
It is very much like cable Internet services were when they first came out - you had a T3 (maybe) link from the node to the head end and 1000 homes connected to the node. Well, when more than 100 people figured out the Internet they would completely soak the T3 connection and at the time there simply was no good alternative. What the cable folks did was end up running fiber to the nodes but that took 5-10 years to accomplish and we are now starting to max out the fiber connections.
Japan maxed out TDMA services and ended up inventing PCS and microcells to be able to cope. It took years and even today isn't what anyone would call a perfect answer. When AT&T introduced their One Rate plan initially they maxed out in nearly every large city and there simply were no solutions. Sure, they added some microcell infrastructure in the very biggest of cities but it still hasn't helped all that much. Today it is still the case that in large cities if something big happens the cell phone infrastructure collapses almost instantly.
Wireless services were designed with the idea that usage would never come anywhere near the levels it is at today. And for the most part there is no real solution to this - there simply isn't the physical infrastructure to support everyone having and using a cell phone constantly. Likely as not, there will never be that physical infrastructure in place. Any wireless service today is going to suffer from the same problems, whether it is the WiFi at Starbucks, a cell modem or some WiMax service. They are all going to be oversold and overused at some point in time and the result for the end user is going to be very poor service if anything at all.
No, they can't just build the network out more. WiMax specifically isn't intended to work with a micro- or pico-cell infrastructure.
By the way, this absolutely means the phone in your pocket will be useless anytime something happens to a lot of people in your area. So the one time you really, really need to here about something - like the directions for evacuating - it isn't going to work for you. Absolutely, cell-only folks are an example of evolution in action.
I think a government definition of "unlimited" would probably stretch on for five or six pages with alot of words like "except" and "unless" featuring promentently. It would be quite readable, if you are used to regulations, legal briefs and court decisions.
Face it, regardless of some sort of regulation, it is going to mean whatever the heck the provider wants it to mean because the term "unlimited" has no meaning. What could possibly be unlimited? Obviously, the bandwidth has some fixed upper limit and is being sold as "burstable" not dedicated, meaning that you get what you get. So, if the bandwidth isn't dedicated there is no basis for saying there is a fixed amount of data that could be transferred over any given time period. So while there are clearly limits, the limits are dependent on the usage of the bandwidth resource and unknowable.
Clearly "unlimited" has no meaning in this context - there are limits but even the provider doesn't know them.
Unlimited might mean that they are going to impose limits beyond which the physical resources are limited. Well, that certainly could be the case because to the user it is unknown if the low data transfer rate is due to competition for resources or because the provider is artificially imposing a limit.
It will be interesting to see how the court case turns out. My guess is Clearwire just says that there was no imposed throttling and this was due to competition for the bandwidth due to overuse in that area. Present some nice pretty charts that are shown as evidence presented under oath. End of trial. Sorry customers, you didn't understand what you were buying.
There are other ways that are more secretive and much harder for users to control than cookies. Fingerprinting the user's computer isn't that hard and if you collect enough information through the browser you can probably do it with 99% accuracy or better. So then you can store the information on the server.
What this should do is annoy the crap out of users. The "proper" implementation is to ask with a popup every time a cookie would be stored. If the user has the browser confirming cookies this would result in two popups for every cookie - the more the better, right?
What this regulation seems to think they are addressing is some kind of special "tracking" cookie and not ordinary cookies that are used simply to save things like login information. I haven't read the regulation but from the article it sounds like they carved out some very small number of specific, none of which apply to my web site. So, do I assume the regulations aren't really going to apply to me?
Of course, there is the question of what possible point does this have for any US-based company? Would it mean that EU-affiliates would be prosecuted? Hardly. Would it mean that an EU subsidary would be prosecuted? Maybe. For a small US company, I'm not sure it has any meaning at all. Except we would get email from angry EU users trying to say that we were not following EU regulations and they were going to "turn us in to the Web police". Yes, I have gotten email like that before.
I think the real solution is for every web site to confirm every cookie individually. Annoy the crap out of users and make sure they know it is this new EU regulation that is requiring it. Maybe that would get some claification or a repeal. It sounds like an incredibly short sighted and pointless regulation.
The solution is for a popup to appear asking for permission for every cookie on every web page.
Without that, the folly of this will not be apparent. When Google asks for this for every web site that uses Google Analytics the folly of this will be apparent.
Trying to find some happy middle ground between what the EU regulators are asking for and what is acceptable is pointless. It is like arguing with a pig - you just annoy the pig and frustrate yourself.
Yes, but you are far less valuable to Google without knowing your habits that they can sell. So much less valuable that they are unwilling to provide service to you without said tracking.
I believe LORAN is gone. The US Coast Guard used to maintain the system worldwide - a friend of mine was stationed at a LORAN station in both Alaska and later in Japan, but they have shut down so many of the stations (if not all of them now) that is it unusable in many placed. If not all of them.
Well, I guess you haven't heard about all of the things that are actually reliant on GPS. Sure, it is used for consumer navigation and that could easily be replaced with a paper map.
But, did you know that the 60Hz synchronization of electrical generation in the US is reliant on GPS clocks? Lose GPS and the synch will drift and this results in disconnecting from the grid. I.e., power failures. I believe the previous synchronization systems were primarily manual tuning which was happily thrown out completely when the GPS clocking was available. No, nobody can go back now. At least not without some pretty significant down time.
And of course we are working up to a aircraft navigation and control system that will be 100% reliant on GPS. No GPS = planes do not take off. Not just passenger planes but also all air cargo.
Ships at sea used to use LORAN but the US Coast Guard has been dismantling the LORAN system they maintained. I believe it is gone now, so there is no going back.
Most of the stratum-1 NTP clocks (keeping the Internet clocks synchronized) are driven from GPS today. Not atomic reference clocks and not radios receiving WWV signals but GPS. Think about how much fun it is to synchronize databases when the system clocks aren't in agreement.
Are you getting the picture? GPS is used for way, way more than consumer navigation in cars. Lose the GPS system and today there is no backup and no possibility of continuing without some pretty major hiccups.
The publisher isn't taking a risk but they are investing in the work. The editing and proofreading as well as having someone on staff that actually knows how to put together an eBook.
Look at self-pubished cheap books on Amazon and you will find that for the most part there has been no editing. Nothing, Nada. Editing is difficult and time consuming and most authors aren't really capable of doing a good job on their own work. Except for a few well-known cases (Asimov for one), every writer has needed a good editor and when they don't get it, it shows.
The other major failing that is clearly visible on Amazon is the lack of ability to use the tools available to make an eBook. No, you really can't just take a Word document and push it through and come out with a properly formatted eBook. But that is exactly what some folks have done. And the result is often unusable. They didn't check to see if whatever fancy stuff they tried to do with graphics was going to work on a Kindle. The graphics they used were too dark for a B&W display so they come out as a solid square of black. The text that was supposed to be near the graphic isn't. The table of contents is run together with the text of the first chapter. On and on,endless examples.
The problem is authors write and aren't so good at all the rest. Maybe they can take a stab at it but in many ways it is a waste of their time to try to learn all the ins and outs of publishing an eBook. It is like a musician trying to figure out how to do the band's taxes. Probably not the best use of their time.
Unfortunately, most self-published books are trash. Even if the author has the multiple skills to write and properly proofread the book, it is very unlikely they are any good at being an editor. No, "editing" in this context does not equate to being moderately skilled at using vi. It means being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, being able to discern when characterization is adding nothing to the book and is just padding and so on and so forth.
Mostly, writers really suck at doing that. So you end up with a book that had it been 30% shorter would be good but at the length the author wrote it the story bogs down and ends up being unreadable. Stephan King had that problem with some books - there is the original "author's" edition of The Stand and then the published version. King could get away with releasing the longer (padded?) version of the book years after the original was published because people would buy anything he wrote and would clearly pay for more of The Stand. Robert Heinlein had the same problem with Stranger in a Strange Land. Asimov wrote about his adventures in the writing game early on and how valuable having a really good editor was. Of course, later in life Asimov clearly was in a different league and would pretty much deliver a manuscript to the printer and it would be printed - untouched. But I don't believe most writers are in the same class as Asimov was.
Absolute, if we throw out the editors and proofreading we can have $0.99 books. Or $0.25 books even. Or free, just for the gratification of the writer. But they will be unlikely to be worth whatever is being paid for them. And that is the problem with cheap eBooks - they aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. How cheap can a book that is professionally proofread and edited cost? Probably the lowest level is going to be around $5 or so and that may be pushing it unless it is very, very popular. Ordinary books are probably not going to really get to be less that $7-$8. Anything below that you can pretty much consider "vanity press" and assume the author did everything himself.
Having read a few eBooks that were self-published I'd say it gives eBooks in general a bad name. Typos. Formatting problems because the finer points of the eBook process weren't clear and the author was trying to do something fancy. Repetition is a huge problem where the author has the same block of text or very close to it repeated three or four times close together in the book. In short, editing and proofreading is critical and the self-publisher has no choice but to forego it. Which usually means the result is crap. Sorry, but I think the conclusion that cheap eBooks are going to be nothing but crap is invitable.
In the US it is very simple - you, as a residential customer are buying "bursting" bandwidth, not dedicated. What you can get out of bursting is, well, what you get. No guarantees at all.
The second problem in the US is very simple. For both DSL and cable there is a "node" to which your home connection is connected. The uplink from the node to the rest of the Internet has a limited bandwidth and everyone connected to that node gets to share. When they advertise a 2Mb/sec connection from the home to the node and have 1000 homes connected to a single node (common with cable, less common with DSL) it is physically impossible to give everyone 2Mb/sec when the node connection to the rest of the Internet can only handle 500Mb/sec.
What we are experiencing in the US is increasing the node-to-home link speed to, say 20Mb/sec but still having the same bandwidth connection from the node. It works great until everyone is trying to use IPTV services and then it fails. Miserably.
Unmetered, because the computers belonged to (a) Bell Labs, (b) Universities and (c) Government. There were no other computers really on the UUCP network at that time.
UUCP = Unix to Unix Calling Program
There was no Windows. There wasn't much office networking. 3270 was the protocol that ruled the day. One of the machines at Bell Labs in Naperville, IL was a primary email gateway for a good part of the world at that time. I forget what the name was, but I was a consultant there at the time in the early 1980s.
Are you suggesting that every business have its fees and services reviewed by a government regulator? Said regulator would then need to have the power to accept or reject specific services and/or fees, right?
Every business? Or just the ones that the public uses? (The difference being, well, zero.)
Might want to see who gets elected as well. A huge problem is that there are very few established poltical organizations in those countries and the ones that do exist we wouldn't really like to see in power.
But whether we like it or not, the established and well known organizations are likely to end up in control. It won't be like Iran but it will almost certainly be like Gaza where Hamas was elected in a supposedly free and fair election.
If people want to vote in a new dictator, who are we to stop them?
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There certainly are cases where the "corporate shield" is pierced and indivuduals are prosecured. Most of the time this happens when the corporation is so deeply embedded in the crime that it becomes apparent that the reason the corporation exists is to shield the people behind it. This happens most often in smaller corporations - I don't know of any case where a large publicly held corporation was pierced in this manner, mostly I would say because it has never been the case that such a corporation existed solely to shield the participants.
Sometime in about 50 years the people that are running around saying "See, I TOLD you it wasn't safe" will finally shut up. I don't see any new nuclear plant construction in the US for at least that long.
I think a pretty popular stance will be a lawsuit where the plant builder is supposed to prove that after an earthquake of unknown magnitude the plant would be undamaged and operating normally. Can't prove it? Well, no license then.
I don't think it matters what might actually happen in Japan any longer. Just the news reports (deluded and inaccurate as they are) alone are enough to make sure there is no new construction. If something bad does really happen, it might push nuclear plant construction out even further than 50 years.
A. In the US we are not building hydroelectric dams any longer. We are, in fact, dismanteling hydroelectric dams for ecological reasons.
B. In the US the chance of building and operating a new nuclear power plant went from 1:10000 to more like zero. As far as the people blocking any sort of construction are concerned, the technology has now proven itself unsafe. It's over, folks.
Constructing it would be infinately safe because it couldn't be done. Hoover Dam cost millions (49 million according to some figures) in the 1930s with a huge labor oversupply. Today it would cost hundreds of billions to build in the US and it would take 50 years to get through the environmental impact studies and such. It is impossible to build such things in the US today.
Also, such construction would be monitored to ensure that nobody was killed. This level of monitoring and safety would ensure that no work was actually done. Large-scale construction pretty much has foreknowledge that it will cost X lives per mile of tunnel dug, etc. Regardless of how much attention to safety there is, someone will do somthing stupid and pay for it. Today there would be lawsuits based on "if you knew people would die, why did you do it?" Just that foreknowledge will prevent such large scale construction from ever taking place. You can't sue someone for not doing something, regardless of how interesting and important it might be.
Besides, ask anyone. We're not building dams anymore, we're tearing them down.
Two things should happen then:
How many centuries did mankind survive without electricity?
Wikileaks may have inspired people in the Middle East to riot and overthrow their governments, much to the delight of some fundamentalist Islamic groups. The thousands that are being killed and the millions more that will likely be killed have to thank the folks reading the insipid, evil nature of their governments and knowing they will not withstand much of an onslaught.
My guess is that there will be a substantial power vacuum and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. End result will be some organized political/religious group will have enough name recognition to step in and promised order and peace. Maybe a few laws as well. After all, they will have the civil war next door in Libya to compare to - wouldn't want that here, would you?
When the dust settles we will see who is in charge - a loose association of secular people or an organized political/religious group that has been trying to gain power for decades. And do not believe for a second that people will always democratically vote for their best interests. Russia voted in Lenin and Stalin. France more-or-less invited Napoleon to take over. Gaza voted in Hamas. Why would you not believe that Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Libya and Tunisia would not vote to form a uniion under an Islamic theocracy?
But if you want to serve web pages in EU countries, cookies are about to become illegal.
No, the First Amendment doesn't apply because they were not prevented in any way from speaking out.
Consequences from that speach, well, that's a different matter entirely.
It is a crime to destroy evidence, period. If I sue you and get a subpoena for your wife's panties and you burn them instead of turning them over you are committing a crime, regardless of the merit of the original lawsuit.
Now until the material has been ordered to be turned over or is part of a discovery motion it isn't evidence at all so destruction of it isn't a crime at all. If they had destroyed the information a week ago then there would be nothing anyone could do - no crime. Things can get a bit sticky if you destroy something in the face of a legal proceeding when it is likely that whatever you are destroying would be subpoeaned. Judges have been known to consider this evidence that you are guilty, liable or whatever and may take that into account in a decision.
The First Amendment protects people from laws being written that prevent them from speaking, it doesn't really help when they have already said or done something and there are other consequences stemming from it. While there are no laws against saying to someone that you want to kill them if you do so and they end up dead you can't use the First Amendment as a defense or as an alibi. You spoke out and a consequence of that is that you are now a suspect in a murder.
No, the would be charged with spoilation of evidence. They have already been informed that it is the Court's intent that the materials be turned over. Once that happens, it is evidence and destruction of it is called spoilation.
It wouldn't go well for the people that did it individually. I don't think there would be any "corporate shield" here at all.
No economy on the planet is as open as the US is to cheap cloned merchandise marketed as the original expensive stuff. And if you buy the fakes and have a problem you will likely as not complain to the original manufacturer - who, in their desire to have happy customers in the future just might fix things for you.
This isn't about protecting a market but protecting companies that are based in the US from extremely unfair competition from China and other East Asian countries with very low wages. Sure it is cheaper to make just about everything there and if you ship enough of it to the US it is will undercut anything made in the US. So the answer is to put all US manufacturers out of business and only buy from China? I'm not sure that leads to anything useful.
Protecting music and movies from pirates and the mass production factories outside the US is probably a losing game because it is all available to the Internet-savvy today for free. I don't know anyone that actually pays for music anymore - why would they? Movies are a little tougher, but the market is pretty much on its way to destruction no matter what and border controls aren't going to make a difference.
Pretty much every Western country protects their own industries - except the US. Try importing 1000 unlicensed DVD players into Holland - they will be stopped at the port and turned away. In the US they will be on store shelves the next week. Try importing a fake Louis Vutton purse into France or some fake Italian shoes into Italy - you will be blocked at the port. Bringing one in for personal use probably isn't going to cause much of a stir but in the US today it doesn't matter if it is one or 1000, and it doesn't matter what company is being shredded because of the cloners.
I guess the point is to remove the last vestiges of manufacturing from the US. Want to start a company? Maybe you should first move to Thailand because with enough bribes anything is possible there.
Well, most other countries have very strict laws about importation of goods. If you travel from France to New York City and buy a fake Louis Vutton purse there it may be confiscated when you re-enter France. Certainly if you were a merchant in France and tried to import 1000 fake Louis Vutton purses to sell in France you would be blocked from doing so.
Let's say you want to import some cheap, unlicensed DVD players into Holland (home of Philips, licensor of DVD players). Good luck with that - Holland has port controls and does block unlicensed merchandise.
The US has no such importation policy. If you want to import poisonous cat food you can do it. Fake purses? Fine. Lead painted toys for children? Sure. Sometimes they stop pirated movies and software but considering there is something like 1 person to monitor 100 ships with thousands of container loads each it is not exactly a given that anything will be blocked.
By the way, in most countries you do not have the right to buy anything and bring it home. Try, just try bringing an apple into Australia. In the US if you buy a bucket of rancid, rotting chicken in Mexico you will have no problems bringing it into the US complete with the flies. Small difference there. Could you sell that bucket of rotting chicken to some homeless dude in Texas? Absolutely. There are no controls in the US.
Unlicensed DVD players? In the US anything selling for under $50 is certainly going to be unlicensed because the manufacturer pays $5 per player in license fees. So you don't really believe that the $30 DVD player that WalMart is making $15 on only cost the manufacturer $10 to make and is paying $5 in license fees? Hardly. Unlike the rest of the planet, the US has no controls whatsoever over its ports.
In most countries they at least protect their home-grown industries, like Louis Vutton in France and Philips in Holland. Not so in the US. If you build a business out of making computer peripherials you better make sure the firmware never gets out and it is a critical piece of it - because the US will smile happily while your business is defeated by cloners that will reproduce your hardware and sell it as yours right out from under you. Why do you think there are no US peripherial companies anymore? How hard do you think it is to buy a motherboard branded as "Intal" with a sticker on it that says "Intal Inside"? Really not that hard. Bet it would be pretty hard to buy an ASVS motherboard in Taiwan where the brand looked a lot like ASUS.
Why do you think people periodically get concerned about what could be brought into the US through its "open ports"? Right now, nobody is really worried and really wants cheap stuff no matter where and how it comes in. Did you notice all the controls that were put in place after the poison cat food came in? No, nothing changed. China was encouraged to not ship bad stuff to the US anymore but nothing, absolutely nothing was done to prevent more of the same from coming in.
Just remember, there is virtually no industry that is safe in this environment except maybe nursing. Anything that involves making something can be defeated because it can be made cheaper and with less quality overseas - and then marked as the original item to fool people and put the "original" manufacturer out of business.
I can't agree more with closing down US ports to cloned merchandise of one form or another. If they get a law through that also at the same time makes it tougher to walk across the border with Mexico with cloned stuff, well, that's too bad. It isn't like that is where the problem is.
The problem is that is exactly what is happening with wireless services. OK, maybe you didn't bring the 20 friends. But the 20 other users are there and each and every one of them has an expectation of excellent service. Which cannot be fulfilled.
Wireless services were great for early adopters which then helped to sell the concept to lots of other people. When I hear about real estate salespeople with cellular modems so they can access MLS listing in their car I figure this has been oversold. When every single cell phone store is advertising some cell modem I am sure it is being oversold. And the problem with overselling wireless services is there isn't a great way to fix their being oversold.
It is very much like cable Internet services were when they first came out - you had a T3 (maybe) link from the node to the head end and 1000 homes connected to the node. Well, when more than 100 people figured out the Internet they would completely soak the T3 connection and at the time there simply was no good alternative. What the cable folks did was end up running fiber to the nodes but that took 5-10 years to accomplish and we are now starting to max out the fiber connections.
Japan maxed out TDMA services and ended up inventing PCS and microcells to be able to cope. It took years and even today isn't what anyone would call a perfect answer. When AT&T introduced their One Rate plan initially they maxed out in nearly every large city and there simply were no solutions. Sure, they added some microcell infrastructure in the very biggest of cities but it still hasn't helped all that much. Today it is still the case that in large cities if something big happens the cell phone infrastructure collapses almost instantly.
Wireless services were designed with the idea that usage would never come anywhere near the levels it is at today. And for the most part there is no real solution to this - there simply isn't the physical infrastructure to support everyone having and using a cell phone constantly. Likely as not, there will never be that physical infrastructure in place. Any wireless service today is going to suffer from the same problems, whether it is the WiFi at Starbucks, a cell modem or some WiMax service. They are all going to be oversold and overused at some point in time and the result for the end user is going to be very poor service if anything at all.
No, they can't just build the network out more. WiMax specifically isn't intended to work with a micro- or pico-cell infrastructure.
By the way, this absolutely means the phone in your pocket will be useless anytime something happens to a lot of people in your area. So the one time you really, really need to here about something - like the directions for evacuating - it isn't going to work for you. Absolutely, cell-only folks are an example of evolution in action.
I think a government definition of "unlimited" would probably stretch on for five or six pages with alot of words like "except" and "unless" featuring promentently. It would be quite readable, if you are used to regulations, legal briefs and court decisions.
Face it, regardless of some sort of regulation, it is going to mean whatever the heck the provider wants it to mean because the term "unlimited" has no meaning. What could possibly be unlimited? Obviously, the bandwidth has some fixed upper limit and is being sold as "burstable" not dedicated, meaning that you get what you get. So, if the bandwidth isn't dedicated there is no basis for saying there is a fixed amount of data that could be transferred over any given time period. So while there are clearly limits, the limits are dependent on the usage of the bandwidth resource and unknowable.
Clearly "unlimited" has no meaning in this context - there are limits but even the provider doesn't know them.
Unlimited might mean that they are going to impose limits beyond which the physical resources are limited. Well, that certainly could be the case because to the user it is unknown if the low data transfer rate is due to competition for resources or because the provider is artificially imposing a limit.
It will be interesting to see how the court case turns out. My guess is Clearwire just says that there was no imposed throttling and this was due to competition for the bandwidth due to overuse in that area. Present some nice pretty charts that are shown as evidence presented under oath. End of trial. Sorry customers, you didn't understand what you were buying.
There are other ways that are more secretive and much harder for users to control than cookies. Fingerprinting the user's computer isn't that hard and if you collect enough information through the browser you can probably do it with 99% accuracy or better. So then you can store the information on the server.
What this should do is annoy the crap out of users. The "proper" implementation is to ask with a popup every time a cookie would be stored. If the user has the browser confirming cookies this would result in two popups for every cookie - the more the better, right?
What this regulation seems to think they are addressing is some kind of special "tracking" cookie and not ordinary cookies that are used simply to save things like login information. I haven't read the regulation but from the article it sounds like they carved out some very small number of specific, none of which apply to my web site. So, do I assume the regulations aren't really going to apply to me?
Of course, there is the question of what possible point does this have for any US-based company? Would it mean that EU-affiliates would be prosecuted? Hardly. Would it mean that an EU subsidary would be prosecuted? Maybe. For a small US company, I'm not sure it has any meaning at all. Except we would get email from angry EU users trying to say that we were not following EU regulations and they were going to "turn us in to the Web police". Yes, I have gotten email like that before.
I think the real solution is for every web site to confirm every cookie individually. Annoy the crap out of users and make sure they know it is this new EU regulation that is requiring it. Maybe that would get some claification or a repeal. It sounds like an incredibly short sighted and pointless regulation.
The solution is for a popup to appear asking for permission for every cookie on every web page.
Without that, the folly of this will not be apparent. When Google asks for this for every web site that uses Google Analytics the folly of this will be apparent.
Trying to find some happy middle ground between what the EU regulators are asking for and what is acceptable is pointless. It is like arguing with a pig - you just annoy the pig and frustrate yourself.
Yes, but you are far less valuable to Google without knowing your habits that they can sell. So much less valuable that they are unwilling to provide service to you without said tracking.
I believe LORAN is gone. The US Coast Guard used to maintain the system worldwide - a friend of mine was stationed at a LORAN station in both Alaska and later in Japan, but they have shut down so many of the stations (if not all of them now) that is it unusable in many placed. If not all of them.
Well, I guess you haven't heard about all of the things that are actually reliant on GPS. Sure, it is used for consumer navigation and that could easily be replaced with a paper map.
But, did you know that the 60Hz synchronization of electrical generation in the US is reliant on GPS clocks? Lose GPS and the synch will drift and this results in disconnecting from the grid. I.e., power failures. I believe the previous synchronization systems were primarily manual tuning which was happily thrown out completely when the GPS clocking was available. No, nobody can go back now. At least not without some pretty significant down time.
And of course we are working up to a aircraft navigation and control system that will be 100% reliant on GPS. No GPS = planes do not take off. Not just passenger planes but also all air cargo.
Ships at sea used to use LORAN but the US Coast Guard has been dismantling the LORAN system they maintained. I believe it is gone now, so there is no going back.
Most of the stratum-1 NTP clocks (keeping the Internet clocks synchronized) are driven from GPS today. Not atomic reference clocks and not radios receiving WWV signals but GPS. Think about how much fun it is to synchronize databases when the system clocks aren't in agreement.
Are you getting the picture? GPS is used for way, way more than consumer navigation in cars. Lose the GPS system and today there is no backup and no possibility of continuing without some pretty major hiccups.
The publisher isn't taking a risk but they are investing in the work. The editing and proofreading as well as having someone on staff that actually knows how to put together an eBook.
Look at self-pubished cheap books on Amazon and you will find that for the most part there has been no editing. Nothing, Nada. Editing is difficult and time consuming and most authors aren't really capable of doing a good job on their own work. Except for a few well-known cases (Asimov for one), every writer has needed a good editor and when they don't get it, it shows.
The other major failing that is clearly visible on Amazon is the lack of ability to use the tools available to make an eBook. No, you really can't just take a Word document and push it through and come out with a properly formatted eBook. But that is exactly what some folks have done. And the result is often unusable. They didn't check to see if whatever fancy stuff they tried to do with graphics was going to work on a Kindle. The graphics they used were too dark for a B&W display so they come out as a solid square of black. The text that was supposed to be near the graphic isn't. The table of contents is run together with the text of the first chapter. On and on,endless examples.
The problem is authors write and aren't so good at all the rest. Maybe they can take a stab at it but in many ways it is a waste of their time to try to learn all the ins and outs of publishing an eBook. It is like a musician trying to figure out how to do the band's taxes. Probably not the best use of their time.
Unfortunately, most self-published books are trash. Even if the author has the multiple skills to write and properly proofread the book, it is very unlikely they are any good at being an editor. No, "editing" in this context does not equate to being moderately skilled at using vi. It means being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, being able to discern when characterization is adding nothing to the book and is just padding and so on and so forth.
Mostly, writers really suck at doing that. So you end up with a book that had it been 30% shorter would be good but at the length the author wrote it the story bogs down and ends up being unreadable. Stephan King had that problem with some books - there is the original "author's" edition of The Stand and then the published version. King could get away with releasing the longer (padded?) version of the book years after the original was published because people would buy anything he wrote and would clearly pay for more of The Stand. Robert Heinlein had the same problem with Stranger in a Strange Land. Asimov wrote about his adventures in the writing game early on and how valuable having a really good editor was. Of course, later in life Asimov clearly was in a different league and would pretty much deliver a manuscript to the printer and it would be printed - untouched. But I don't believe most writers are in the same class as Asimov was.
Absolute, if we throw out the editors and proofreading we can have $0.99 books. Or $0.25 books even. Or free, just for the gratification of the writer. But they will be unlikely to be worth whatever is being paid for them. And that is the problem with cheap eBooks - they aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. How cheap can a book that is professionally proofread and edited cost? Probably the lowest level is going to be around $5 or so and that may be pushing it unless it is very, very popular. Ordinary books are probably not going to really get to be less that $7-$8. Anything below that you can pretty much consider "vanity press" and assume the author did everything himself.
Having read a few eBooks that were self-published I'd say it gives eBooks in general a bad name. Typos. Formatting problems because the finer points of the eBook process weren't clear and the author was trying to do something fancy. Repetition is a huge problem where the author has the same block of text or very close to it repeated three or four times close together in the book. In short, editing and proofreading is critical and the self-publisher has no choice but to forego it. Which usually means the result is crap. Sorry, but I think the conclusion that cheap eBooks are going to be nothing but crap is invitable.
In the US it is very simple - you, as a residential customer are buying "bursting" bandwidth, not dedicated. What you can get out of bursting is, well, what you get. No guarantees at all.
The second problem in the US is very simple. For both DSL and cable there is a "node" to which your home connection is connected. The uplink from the node to the rest of the Internet has a limited bandwidth and everyone connected to that node gets to share. When they advertise a 2Mb/sec connection from the home to the node and have 1000 homes connected to a single node (common with cable, less common with DSL) it is physically impossible to give everyone 2Mb/sec when the node connection to the rest of the Internet can only handle 500Mb/sec.
What we are experiencing in the US is increasing the node-to-home link speed to, say 20Mb/sec but still having the same bandwidth connection from the node. It works great until everyone is trying to use IPTV services and then it fails. Miserably.
Unmetered, because the computers belonged to (a) Bell Labs, (b) Universities and (c) Government. There were no other computers really on the UUCP network at that time.
UUCP = Unix to Unix Calling Program
There was no Windows. There wasn't much office networking. 3270 was the protocol that ruled the day. One of the machines at Bell Labs in Naperville, IL was a primary email gateway for a good part of the world at that time. I forget what the name was, but I was a consultant there at the time in the early 1980s.
Are you suggesting that every business have its fees and services reviewed by a government regulator? Said regulator would then need to have the power to accept or reject specific services and/or fees, right?
Every business? Or just the ones that the public uses? (The difference being, well, zero.)
Might want to see who gets elected as well. A huge problem is that there are very few established poltical organizations in those countries and the ones that do exist we wouldn't really like to see in power.
But whether we like it or not, the established and well known organizations are likely to end up in control. It won't be like Iran but it will almost certainly be like Gaza where Hamas was elected in a supposedly free and fair election.
If people want to vote in a new dictator, who are we to stop them?