Turkey has been fighting off (sometimes violently) those that want to take the country into a Muslim theocracy for the last 50+ years. Egypt has been battling the same sort of forces for about as long.
While it might be nice to think about a modern Muslim state, it is very unlikely. Iran isn't a very good model because the country was split between the 12th and the 20th centuries when the Shah was in power. Many other Arab states are similarly divided where the rural areas are extremely primative and the cities have a very moden veneer to them. But it doesn't seem to go very deep at all.
A concept that seems fairly obvious from past revolutions is that rarely do the instigators of a revolt actually get to decide how things turn out in the end. At no time did the folks in France in 1789 think things were going to turn out like the did in 1793. Nobody really thought that the Russian revolution would end up with the Reds winning the day and suppressing everything else with great fervor. So however the people feel today in northern Africa, the end result may be that Muslim fundamentalists get voted in simply because they are the most organized political body in the country.
A huge problem for that part of the world is that the boundaries between current nations are very artifical and were established by outsiders dividing up the territory. Historically, Egypt was much, much larger than it is today. Should the governments adopt a very Muslim tone it would not be surprising to see a single nation replace the indpendent ones along the northern coast of Africa. I would expect Sudan to be included in such a state. There is no realistic response the West can make to this - not only are we unprepared for this but it really isn't something we get to have much say in. Perhaps rightly so, but the consequences of what is going on now are going to affect the economies of all Western countries for a long, long time to come. Just the refugee situation alone is going to tax most of Europe for a long time.
Regulation? How? You make the stuff in China and slap a sticker on it that says IPV6 compliant or IPV6 capable or IPV6 registered and that is all it might take. After all, currently there is no capability to block imports of materials that violate US safety standards or patents once it arrives in port. It is all in containers and nobody is looking - there is just too much of it coming in. We are talking about tens of thousands of containers a day.
How do you think poisonous cat food got in? And lead-painted toys? The only way to stop that was to stop it at the source - there was never any blocking after the ship left for the US.
How do you think contain-loads of Chinese laborers come here?
For the most part the police recording statues and the enforcement of them is rooted in the idea that the person "in conference" with the police or being arrested is actually deserving of some kind of privacy. If it is legal to photograph and record the police when they are talking to you, then it is equally legal to photograph and record the police when they are arresting your neighbor - at least that is my understanding of how these laws came to be and how they are being enforced.
Of course, the corrallary is also true then, that you can be photographed and recorded when you are being stopped for a red light violation. And in the US there are few restrictions on what you can do with a photograph once has been taken. This means that having it appear in the local 10-page newspaper with the caption "Dangerous Criminal Arrested" when it was a traffic stop is perfectly OK. Of course, you might get the newpaper to print a retraction on page 8, but why would anyone look at that?
Further, today with Internet your picture and recording can end up in the hands of people worldwide.
So, think about exactly what you want. Is photographing the police and recording them something that is OK? Fine, then get the laws changed. But you don't get to decide that it is OK for you to do it but not anyone else. I don't think you get to say it is OK for the person the police are focusing their attention on right then to do it but not anyone else that happens by. This would effectively mean that any interaction with the police is public, which today it is not.
No, you wouldn't. No sane person would work for a company so stupid as to pay attention to such a random claim, and no HR department would dare run afoul of the law by refusing to hire you because of an anonymous child molestation allegation.
There is no such law that would get an employer in trouble for not hiring someone. I don't know of any place in the US where there are laws that force people to be hired. Now maybe if someone was stupid enough to stand up in court and testify that they didn't hire someone because they were black you might have a point. But no one but an idiot would do that - they would say there were better candidates, or that you didn't fit in the culture of the company they way they were hoping to find a candidate that would.
The signs on the street corner could be fingerprinted and someone might have seen you, even at 4:00 AM. Which is why people don't do this sort of thing - they might get caught and the possiblity is strong enough to be a pretty serious deterrent. However, on the Internet there is no deterrent and no chance of getting caught. So people do this sort of thing all the time.
With the way the Internet has evolved you can pretty much be assured that any truely salacious bit will get picked up by some sort of link farm/republisher. So the original "source" gets hidden behind other folks that figure it is good for a few ad clicks. Next thing you know, it is on Yahoo News.
A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Do you understand what is required to find out the identity of a non-anonymous poster might be? Let's say you have an IP address that was recorded with a post. So all you do is call up the ISP that it belongs to and get it, right? No. First you have to find a court that is willing to go along with a John Doe "Internet" lawsuit so you can serve the ISP with a civil discovery motion. There is maybe a 50/50 chance that the ISP destroys DHCP logs within 48 hours or even less just to ensure that they don't have to hassle with supoenas. If you get lucky, the ISP gets served within a week or two and maybe they have the information. If they do, maybe they fight it trying to protect their revenue... er, customer.
End result of this adventure is that unless you are prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars personally to drag someone into court the Internet is quite impervious to civil actions today. I can write a charming post about the adventures I had with your wife and my two dogs and make sure it is seen by every one of your neighbors. Pictures, too. And there isn't a damned thing you can do about it without expending incredible resources. Maybe your wife quits her job and you lose your house because you can't keep up the mortgage payments on one income. Tough. This is the Internet age we're living in and ISPs will go to incredible lengths to make sure their customers don't desert them and their staff doesn't have to spend hours digging through logs when they have better things to do.
If a forum actually knows who someone is, they might be forced to disclose it. But about the only way that happens is if there is some kind of fingerprint signon required. Credit card? Oh yeah, I paid for access but I never use it and let other people post under my name. Today there is virtually no way to legally connect to dots between something on the Internet and a person unless there are tracks on their computer and there is ample evidence that nobody else was using that particular computer.
Oh, yeah. One sure way to enable that connect-the-dots operation is to brag about your exploits. It is much harder to defend yourself legally against something that you are claiming you did than you might think. Most of the people prosecuted for stuff on the Internet had direct, physical evidence in their hands (like merchandise from credit card purchases) or downloaded information on "their" computer - or posted what a great service to humanity they just performed.
That is exactly what happens today with the result you have predicted. The debit is just the cost of living without the institutional support of the prison. The minute the prisoner is released he has to find a way to support himself - which means in most cases crime is on the table.
I suppose if we had an effective dole program whereby someone could just sit and collect money from the government we wouldn't have that problem. We would have other, more interesting problems. But as things are today the sure bet is that a criminal will immediately return to crime to support themselves because it is all they know.
Yes, but consider that without a permanent criminal class what would law enforcement be doing? Well, they might be coming after you!
As things stand, law enforcement has plenty to do with what we would consider to be a permanent criminal class. Once someone is identified as belonging to this class they are pretty much excluded from every working in a decent paying job again. So, the only way they have to support themselves is through continuing their membership in the criminal class. That isn't to say they can't cross over between different subspecialities - like a mugger becoming a rapist or an embezzler robbing homes.
While you might consider this to be really unfair, a bigger problem is that as we have pretty much given up on the idea of reforming criminals as not being possible just what exactly are we supposed to do with the ones that are really in fact for-life criminals with no other interest, motivation or ability? Sure, what we have today is pretty rough if you do something stupid and get caught. You can be part of the very small percentage (1% maybe?) that committing some crime is a one-time thing never to be repeated. But how does anyone know? And, with the situation of jails and prisons being pretty much Crime U. today it is a wonder anyone comes out with any respect for the law or property rights of others.
Today when someone is released from prison it is around 70% chance that within five years they will be back. It is a revolving door and not just because former prison inmates have a hard time finding honest work. So what do we do with these people? Just keep cycling them through the system, over and over? Because that is what we are doing now. The minor problem with that is the "collateral damage" to the victims in between visits to the prison. You take a person that has learned nothing but crime and has no respect for law or property rights of others and put them on the street - they are going to rob someone. Now maybe the last time they were caught their victim was able to testify against them. So when they get out they have learned that leaving the victim around to testify is a bad idea. This takes a certain toll on the victim population.
The same problem occurs for nice, friendly white-collar crime. You take someone that has learned not to respect other people's property rights over, say, their email inbox. You put them in a prison with other people that have somewhat stronger feelings about property rights, along the lines of "I want what you have. Give!" End result is the nice white-collar spammer has learned that respecting property rights is a losing game and the next time they are in prison they want respect. Respect in prison has to be earned and doing hard time for holding up a store with a gun is certainly a few steps along the road to respect. Such a fine educational system we have instituted in our prisons don't you think?
So you can't really separate people at the beginning into piles divided by "violent" and "non-violent" crimes. If you mix them up in prisons - which is certainly going to happen - likely as not the non-violent crime ones learn all about violent crime and respect in the prison yard. So then you have turned someone from a one-time criminal into someone that is pretty much going to rely on crime as a way of life from then on.
I don't know how you separate the one-timer "oh I didn't mean to do it" sort from the folks that have a major attitude problem from the beginning. I don't think mixing them up in prison is doing anyone any favors at all. I would be in favor of pushing all the crimes that we can't allow to occur into a group and putting the folks that commit those crimes on an island somewhere. Probably a small island with lots and lots of population pressure and no guards or wardens. They would soon things out for themselves one way or another. Then we could have prisons for the one-time "oops" sort of people that were not criminal universities and could actually be structured in a way so as to make sur
In fact, it's up to the designers of the technology to consider users like her and make their services easier to use and more suited to the needs of users that don't understand how it works.
Designers? Are you serious? Do you actually believe there was an architected plan for Facebook in any incarnation at any time in its life?
Heck no, it wasn't designed - like just about everything out there today, it just grew. It grew and grew and grew until it was something huge (and likely as not utterly unmaintainable.)
There might be someone that thought about some different users and how they might interact with the service, but I don't think I would flatter them by calling them designers. I'm sure it is far more ad hoc than that so it can be considered to be "agile" and such.
So you would agree that Bradly Manning is responsible for every single civilian death in Northern Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc.)?
And the "wave of democratization" is likely going to be usurped by already-organized groups with political aspirations in these areas. Note that the folks that actually started both the French and Russian revolutions were nice, friendly people that never envisioned what was going to come out the other end. My guess is that the only organized groups there are in these places are Islamic fundamentalists that will institute a pan-Islamic calphate. After all, the borders of these nations are completely arbitrary and have no basis in history or geography. So why wouldn't they unite?
The whole Real ID mess came about because a number of states (Illinois for one) decided to abandon any real standard for issuing state-backed identification. I was recently in Germany and they accepted my Arizona driver's license as a valid ID - no passport required after the guy at the airport. I'm sure they would accept an Illinois driver's license equally well - in fact, they did the time before I went to Germany and was living in Illinois.
The problem is, in Illinois you an get a driver's license that says pretty much whatever the heck you want. When I got my first driver's license I had to come in with a certified copy of a birth certificate plus a bunch of other stuff that "proved" I had a valid address in the state. This changed a while back because it was decided that it would be better if illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers) had real driver's licenses from Illinois rather either nothing or a Mexican driver's license which I guess has equally bad standards as Illinois does now. But how do you prove who someone is when they have no papers of any sort? Well, in Illinois they decided they would take a rather unofficial note from the Mexican consulate that said this person seems to be who they say they are. And that is the extent of it.
In no way is this "official" document tracable back to someone taking responsibility for it. Could it be copied? Sure. Could it be forged? Absolutely. So then what good is an Illinois driver's license if I can get one that says I'm Albert E. Enstein? Not a whole heck of a lot.
The Federal response was the Real ID act with an attempt to shore up the driver's license to have some actual tracability back to a person and to keep them from having 17 of them in different names. I don't think Illinois signed on to it, however. And Real ID is likely going to fail to really be enforced so that means many states can be considered to be issuing utterly bogus documents which prove nothing. Next time you are in an accident and ask to see the other person's driver's license remember this - they might have gotten it out of a Cracker Jack box... I mean from Illinois or any one of the other states accepting Matricula Consular as a valid ID.
Maybe you missed the part about some states deciding that it was better for illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers, if you prefer) to have driver's licenses than not. As part of this decision the rules controlling how you got a driver's license were relaxed. No longer is there a need for a certified copy of a birth certificate or any other government document that offers a proof of identity. All that is needed is a note from somewhere (most often cited is the local Mexican consulate) that says this person might be who they say they are and no documents are available which prove otherwise.
End result of this is that if you are even somewhat clever you can get an official document issued by any number of US state governments which says precisely whatever they heck you want it to. Want a driver's license that says you are William Jefferson Clinton age 64? Not a problem. Take that and go rent car, run over some nice old lady and see the fur fly when Hillary tries to explain just what seems to have happened there. All this is possible because the standards for issuing state-backed IDs got thrown out and replaced with essentially no standard at all.
The problem with the structure of both DSL and cable based residential internet connections in the US is that it is a "star" configuration with a "neighborhood node" or DSLAM at the core. You can connect up many homes to the node before things start to degrade, but the limiting factor is the upper limit on the bandwidth between the Internet at large and the neighborhood node. Once you reach that limit all you can do really is split up the homes onto two nodes with separate feeds to the head end and the Internet.
Unfortunately, splitting a node is going to likely require running a new fiber link from the head end. Think that comes cheap? We are talking about trucks and heavy equipment here - digging, running fiber ducts, and burying it again. Where do they get the right-of-way for this? Consider that in many parts of the country the neighborhood node fiber link was put in 10-15 years ago when the neighborhood itself was being built on former farmland.
End of the story is that the "cap" is going to exist for a long time because there are major physical aspects to be overcome. This isn't upgrading a Cisco router to get better throughput. It is going to require substantial physical changes in the network that involve digging a lot of trenches in places where nobody wants a big trench dug these days.
The Internet in the US has been sold to users as what kind of speed they can achieve in "burst" mode for short durations. It has never been sold on the basis of getting consistent speeds over long periods of time to watch a movie from Netflix. The fact that you can get 20Mb/sec while downloading a 10MB file is meaningless if your average over an hour is 1.5Mb/sec. We are rapidly approaching the point where the node to head end connection cannot support IPTV requirements and Netflix will probably be the first on the block to notice. IPTV will be unusable for anyone with a crowded residential connection. I hope you have enjoyed your early adopter status because that is about to change.
I recently bought a Roku box and I give it two years maximum before it is unusable here in Phoenix. I suspect the "upgrade" will be to a box with a hard drive that downloads movies to buffer them but that will be a while in coming. And it is a completely different experience for the user.
One of the objections to letting criminals work is that stops being punishment. One of the most severe punishments you can inflict on people is to isolate them away from anyone they can reasonably interact with. When you take away the punishment for a lot of people there really is no difference between what they experience in their day-to-day lives before and after being convicted of a crime.
The problem today is that for a lot of inner-city minorities life is pretty hopeless. Prison isn't a lot different and they are with other people of their similar situation - their friends are either in prison or on their way there. So it isn't so much punishment for them, just isolation. Being somewhat confined in a different place. Not so bad, really, considering that all concerns about food and shelter are taken away.
Why do you think there are so many people in prison in the US today? You can point to locking people up for excessive parking tickets or minor drug offenses but that really isn't the answer. If prison was a completely unpleasent experience they would do whatever it took to avoid it. Instead we have at least one if not two generations of people that look at it as inviteable and really not so bad. The end result is that getting caught for some crime isn't much, if any, of a deterrent at all and with the current conviction rate at like 20% for most crimes it is clear that crime certainly does pay.
About people changing, I would say once you take an inner-city minority person that has grown up wit 50% of the people in their lives being involved in crime and some fraction of those being in prison you end up with a person that simply doesn't have any respect for what we would like to call "law and order". They will do whatever to get by and likely view prison as one more oppressive element in their lives piled on top of countless others. The view is that there is nothing that can be done about the oppressors - every other minority, white people, the government, the economy, unemployment, etc. So why not grab whatever is there for the taking? I don't think you can change people that much in an environment where they are constantly surrounded with reinforcing elements - all their friends from the inner city.
To really change people you would have to put them into a completely different environment. With no skills, limited education and a history of considering everyone outside their socioeconomic and racial background as oppressors this would be a real challange. Maybe put them on an tropical island somewhere where all they have to do is gather coconuts and mangoes. A few years of that might result in real change.
You need to understand where these laws and employment agreements come from. Let's say you are working for a company that makes socket wrenches. You get a great idea for a different way to attach the socket to the wrench. After some time you decide that you aren't liking your job so much and quit. You then file for a patent on your wrench idea and a different manufacturer picks up the idea and pays you for your patent.
The guy that actually did this was tied up in court for decades because of this and because of the money he got from the 2nd manufacturer.
Clearly there is a problem with this from the perspective of original employer. This case is a standard introduction to employment agreements and why they say what they say.
The attorney general of the US is appointed to that position by the President. He serves "at the pleasure of the President" who can fire him at any time for any reason. The attorney general is not really a political post, it is far closer to a patronage post.
The problem is that by putting computers in the hands of people that by definition cannot administer a complex system we have to have systems that do not need any administration. Combining this with the ability of the user to add software to the configuration is a disaster for security - the user has no clue what the software they are adding might be doing.
There are two possible solutions to this, neither of which is anyone moving towards. The first is the "App Store" model where the computer is completely locked down except for adding applications purchased through a single App Store where everything is checked, validated and secured. The other approach is that what 99% of the people with computers actually need is a "Web Appliance" that is totally locked down - no ability to add software. I suppose there is a third way where everyone with a computer is paying a service which administers their computer(s), doing things like installing software and configuration changes.
Any of these would work but both would infringe upon the rights of Russian business people to make money from the vast network of unadministered computers. It would also make it extremely difficult to reap vast amounts of money from ad networks because anyone with half a brain would block all ads from ever appearing on computers they were administering.
The end of this is that no such changes are going to take place We will always have insecure computers of which half are controlled by someone other than the putative "owner".
Today most children are actually taught how to be "good victims". The thinking is that if you are nice to the person that wants your wallet they will take it and leave. The idea that they might not want a victim to identify them never seems to occur to them. Also, the idea that predators will be nice if we treat them nice is easily disproved watching a bit of nature TV shows. No matter how nice the gazelle is, the lion still eats the gazelle.
Absolutely, children should be taught that there are no points for being a victim and when fighting against a predator there are no rules. Anything goes. A bully that encounters a "nice victim" is going to learn a lesson that with the mere threat of violence they can get whatever they want. A bully that encounters someone taught not to be a victim at all may rethink the whole "bully" mindset.
Predatory people are often capable of learning, at least for a while. If they are deterred at an early enough age from being a predator, this may be a win for society in general as well as the potential predatory. Unfortunately, if you have someone that has found nothing but willing an nice victims until they are 20 or so it is probably too late to change them. Personally, I think the chances of changing these people away from predatory habits is about zero so we might as well put them down like a rabid dog. We have been pretending we can "fix" these people for entirely too long and there are way too many of these people walking around. This isn't just in the US either, but I do think we have both too much "good victim" training and too many cases where predators are allow to run free and prey on anyone they find.
Nobody except the "high art" magazines are using good paper these days. You are thinking of an era that has long passed us by. Good paper can be seen with Architectural Digest and a few (very few) others. The rest are using the cheapest paper and cheapest printing techniques possible.
No way does it cost Time $5 to print and deliver a copy. Perfect-bound books can be printed in large quantities for $1.25 each, so I would say Time is probably no more than $0.50 to print and maybe $0.75 to bulk mail it.
While it might have been true that a magazine would cost $5 to print in 1960, most magazines are printed much cheaper today. I don't know specifics about magazines today but it is a rare book today that costs more than $2 to print. You cannot tell me that it costs more than $1 to print People or Time, and I suspect the target is more like $0.75.
There might be some specialty magazines - think Architecture Digest - that cost more to print and are printed on heavier, high-quality paper. These magazines are almost collectables in their own right and are printed to last. People, Time and a lot of others are printed the cheapest way possible on thin low-quality paper.
The mailing cost for a magazine can easily be over $1. Given postage rates in the US today, even a bulk mailer is going to get stuck with high costs. When first-class mail was $0.15 in the 1970s you could probably get your thick copy of Popular Mechanics mailed for $0.25 or so but mailing rates have gone up. And today the bulk mailers are supporting a lot more of the USPS operation than first-class mail.
I will agree that downloading to a PC and moving with a USB cable is harder and has more steps than most people would like. However, you make it sound like Amazon is locking down the device somehow and that is far from the case.
It is trivial to visit a web site that offers Mobipocket content for free and download that using the built-in web browser. While www.manybooks.net is somewhat of a pain on the Kindle, it is quite functional and allows downloading of 100% of the books there for free. No charges. Amazon is picking up the tab for the data transferred in this manner.
There are also many other free book sites which offer Mobipocket (.prc or.mobi) content. Most of these will "work" with the Kindle browser which allows the books to be installed on the device immediately.
You can also use either Mobipocket Creator or Caliber to convert other content (EPUB, PDF, etc.) for use on the Kindle. Caliber will do the conversion within itself but doesn't have a lot of control over how things are converted. Mobipocket Creator requires some intermediate step to get the content into it, but does offer more control over the conversion process.
The printing costs almost nothing. Today, the mailing of a magazine probably costs more than the printing does. Do not believe that physical printing costs much - it doesn't - and doesn't factor into the prices of books and magazines much at all. It is heavily outweighed by the costs of the editorial staff.
Connect with what? The Kindle 1 and 2 do not have WiFi hardware.
The Kindle 3 has WiFi and this could make a difference in charges. But until Amazon wants to start having different pricing based on the device type they are going to have to support the millions of Kindle 2 units out there.
It is possible to load a Kindle with content through the USB connection, but this isn't very popular and requires a computer. I doubt many publishers want to set things up to be that manually operated.
This concerns a non-union employer firing an employee for making disparaging comments about (evidently) both her boss personally and her employer. The problem the NLRB had was with a policy that the employer had which appeared to prohibit communication between workers about wages, hours and working conditions which are protected by various union organizing regulations.
I have a huge problem with this for many reasons. First off, it sounds like it is clearly a step towards a very protected work environment where an employer can no longer fire people without cause. That is very, very troubling because what it leads to is complete stagnation. If I can't hire someone and a year later terminate them for whatever reason (or no reason), I'm not going to hire them in the first place without extraordinary reasons for doing so. So just add one to the ranks of the permanently unemployed. This is exactly the situation in most EU countries because of policies like this. And why they aren't troubled by 15-20% unemployement for the last 20 years or so.
Another problem is that if I find a employee is making public statements critical of me or my company they need to be gone. I don't need unhappy employees that are there because they need the paycheck. They aren't going to be doing their best work and their attitude will affect relations with customers. Now this NLRB ruling appears to say that we can't have a policy that says you can't make comments about the company publiclly? This sounds like trouble because it means that such policies need to be reviewed by labor lawyers.
Well, then you have Germany and other EU states. In Germany after you have been employed for six months it is basically impossible to fire someone. There is no "cause" that is good enough. Of course this means that any business that hires someone better be really, really certain they (a) need another person and (b) that person is the "right" person. Because after six months the decision is not reversable.
What this leads to is very simple: nobody gets hired. Little growth happens because of the overly-restrictive employment regulations. And with little growth of employment there is little growth of businesses. If a business can "get by" with five people the pressure to not hire the sixth is so great that it never happens.
Contrast this with the US where I can hire someone and after 18 months I can't justify keeping them because of lack of revenue. If it makes sense to hire the person, they get hired. If 18 months later it doesn't make sense, they are gone. Period. You can't do that in Germany.
That can be a problem alright. But all it means is the employer can't use the word "gay" or "black" when they are firing the person.
Don't like that? Work for a federal contractor or join a union. They have rules about how people can be fired. This, of course, means that people that should have been fired long ago are still there because nobody in management wants to put in the effort to get someone fired.
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Turkey has been fighting off (sometimes violently) those that want to take the country into a Muslim theocracy for the last 50+ years. Egypt has been battling the same sort of forces for about as long.
While it might be nice to think about a modern Muslim state, it is very unlikely. Iran isn't a very good model because the country was split between the 12th and the 20th centuries when the Shah was in power. Many other Arab states are similarly divided where the rural areas are extremely primative and the cities have a very moden veneer to them. But it doesn't seem to go very deep at all.
A concept that seems fairly obvious from past revolutions is that rarely do the instigators of a revolt actually get to decide how things turn out in the end. At no time did the folks in France in 1789 think things were going to turn out like the did in 1793. Nobody really thought that the Russian revolution would end up with the Reds winning the day and suppressing everything else with great fervor. So however the people feel today in northern Africa, the end result may be that Muslim fundamentalists get voted in simply because they are the most organized political body in the country.
A huge problem for that part of the world is that the boundaries between current nations are very artifical and were established by outsiders dividing up the territory. Historically, Egypt was much, much larger than it is today. Should the governments adopt a very Muslim tone it would not be surprising to see a single nation replace the indpendent ones along the northern coast of Africa. I would expect Sudan to be included in such a state. There is no realistic response the West can make to this - not only are we unprepared for this but it really isn't something we get to have much say in. Perhaps rightly so, but the consequences of what is going on now are going to affect the economies of all Western countries for a long, long time to come. Just the refugee situation alone is going to tax most of Europe for a long time.
Regulation? How? You make the stuff in China and slap a sticker on it that says IPV6 compliant or IPV6 capable or IPV6 registered and that is all it might take. After all, currently there is no capability to block imports of materials that violate US safety standards or patents once it arrives in port. It is all in containers and nobody is looking - there is just too much of it coming in. We are talking about tens of thousands of containers a day.
How do you think poisonous cat food got in? And lead-painted toys? The only way to stop that was to stop it at the source - there was never any blocking after the ship left for the US.
How do you think contain-loads of Chinese laborers come here?
Regulation? Are you kidding?
For the most part the police recording statues and the enforcement of them is rooted in the idea that the person "in conference" with the police or being arrested is actually deserving of some kind of privacy. If it is legal to photograph and record the police when they are talking to you, then it is equally legal to photograph and record the police when they are arresting your neighbor - at least that is my understanding of how these laws came to be and how they are being enforced.
Of course, the corrallary is also true then, that you can be photographed and recorded when you are being stopped for a red light violation. And in the US there are few restrictions on what you can do with a photograph once has been taken. This means that having it appear in the local 10-page newspaper with the caption "Dangerous Criminal Arrested" when it was a traffic stop is perfectly OK. Of course, you might get the newpaper to print a retraction on page 8, but why would anyone look at that?
Further, today with Internet your picture and recording can end up in the hands of people worldwide.
So, think about exactly what you want. Is photographing the police and recording them something that is OK? Fine, then get the laws changed. But you don't get to decide that it is OK for you to do it but not anyone else. I don't think you get to say it is OK for the person the police are focusing their attention on right then to do it but not anyone else that happens by. This would effectively mean that any interaction with the police is public, which today it is not.
No, you wouldn't. No sane person would work for a company so stupid as to pay attention to such a random claim, and no HR department would dare run afoul of the law by refusing to hire you because of an anonymous child molestation allegation.
There is no such law that would get an employer in trouble for not hiring someone. I don't know of any place in the US where there are laws that force people to be hired. Now maybe if someone was stupid enough to stand up in court and testify that they didn't hire someone because they were black you might have a point. But no one but an idiot would do that - they would say there were better candidates, or that you didn't fit in the culture of the company they way they were hoping to find a candidate that would.
The signs on the street corner could be fingerprinted and someone might have seen you, even at 4:00 AM. Which is why people don't do this sort of thing - they might get caught and the possiblity is strong enough to be a pretty serious deterrent. However, on the Internet there is no deterrent and no chance of getting caught. So people do this sort of thing all the time.
With the way the Internet has evolved you can pretty much be assured that any truely salacious bit will get picked up by some sort of link farm/republisher. So the original "source" gets hidden behind other folks that figure it is good for a few ad clicks. Next thing you know, it is on Yahoo News.
A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Do you understand what is required to find out the identity of a non-anonymous poster might be? Let's say you have an IP address that was recorded with a post. So all you do is call up the ISP that it belongs to and get it, right? No. First you have to find a court that is willing to go along with a John Doe "Internet" lawsuit so you can serve the ISP with a civil discovery motion. There is maybe a 50/50 chance that the ISP destroys DHCP logs within 48 hours or even less just to ensure that they don't have to hassle with supoenas. If you get lucky, the ISP gets served within a week or two and maybe they have the information. If they do, maybe they fight it trying to protect their revenue ... er, customer.
End result of this adventure is that unless you are prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars personally to drag someone into court the Internet is quite impervious to civil actions today. I can write a charming post about the adventures I had with your wife and my two dogs and make sure it is seen by every one of your neighbors. Pictures, too. And there isn't a damned thing you can do about it without expending incredible resources. Maybe your wife quits her job and you lose your house because you can't keep up the mortgage payments on one income. Tough. This is the Internet age we're living in and ISPs will go to incredible lengths to make sure their customers don't desert them and their staff doesn't have to spend hours digging through logs when they have better things to do.
If a forum actually knows who someone is, they might be forced to disclose it. But about the only way that happens is if there is some kind of fingerprint signon required. Credit card? Oh yeah, I paid for access but I never use it and let other people post under my name. Today there is virtually no way to legally connect to dots between something on the Internet and a person unless there are tracks on their computer and there is ample evidence that nobody else was using that particular computer.
Oh, yeah. One sure way to enable that connect-the-dots operation is to brag about your exploits. It is much harder to defend yourself legally against something that you are claiming you did than you might think. Most of the people prosecuted for stuff on the Internet had direct, physical evidence in their hands (like merchandise from credit card purchases) or downloaded information on "their" computer - or posted what a great service to humanity they just performed.
That is exactly what happens today with the result you have predicted. The debit is just the cost of living without the institutional support of the prison. The minute the prisoner is released he has to find a way to support himself - which means in most cases crime is on the table.
I suppose if we had an effective dole program whereby someone could just sit and collect money from the government we wouldn't have that problem. We would have other, more interesting problems. But as things are today the sure bet is that a criminal will immediately return to crime to support themselves because it is all they know.
Yes, but consider that without a permanent criminal class what would law enforcement be doing? Well, they might be coming after you!
As things stand, law enforcement has plenty to do with what we would consider to be a permanent criminal class. Once someone is identified as belonging to this class they are pretty much excluded from every working in a decent paying job again. So, the only way they have to support themselves is through continuing their membership in the criminal class. That isn't to say they can't cross over between different subspecialities - like a mugger becoming a rapist or an embezzler robbing homes.
While you might consider this to be really unfair, a bigger problem is that as we have pretty much given up on the idea of reforming criminals as not being possible just what exactly are we supposed to do with the ones that are really in fact for-life criminals with no other interest, motivation or ability? Sure, what we have today is pretty rough if you do something stupid and get caught. You can be part of the very small percentage (1% maybe?) that committing some crime is a one-time thing never to be repeated. But how does anyone know? And, with the situation of jails and prisons being pretty much Crime U. today it is a wonder anyone comes out with any respect for the law or property rights of others.
Today when someone is released from prison it is around 70% chance that within five years they will be back. It is a revolving door and not just because former prison inmates have a hard time finding honest work. So what do we do with these people? Just keep cycling them through the system, over and over? Because that is what we are doing now. The minor problem with that is the "collateral damage" to the victims in between visits to the prison. You take a person that has learned nothing but crime and has no respect for law or property rights of others and put them on the street - they are going to rob someone. Now maybe the last time they were caught their victim was able to testify against them. So when they get out they have learned that leaving the victim around to testify is a bad idea. This takes a certain toll on the victim population.
The same problem occurs for nice, friendly white-collar crime. You take someone that has learned not to respect other people's property rights over, say, their email inbox. You put them in a prison with other people that have somewhat stronger feelings about property rights, along the lines of "I want what you have. Give!" End result is the nice white-collar spammer has learned that respecting property rights is a losing game and the next time they are in prison they want respect. Respect in prison has to be earned and doing hard time for holding up a store with a gun is certainly a few steps along the road to respect. Such a fine educational system we have instituted in our prisons don't you think?
So you can't really separate people at the beginning into piles divided by "violent" and "non-violent" crimes. If you mix them up in prisons - which is certainly going to happen - likely as not the non-violent crime ones learn all about violent crime and respect in the prison yard. So then you have turned someone from a one-time criminal into someone that is pretty much going to rely on crime as a way of life from then on.
I don't know how you separate the one-timer "oh I didn't mean to do it" sort from the folks that have a major attitude problem from the beginning. I don't think mixing them up in prison is doing anyone any favors at all. I would be in favor of pushing all the crimes that we can't allow to occur into a group and putting the folks that commit those crimes on an island somewhere. Probably a small island with lots and lots of population pressure and no guards or wardens. They would soon things out for themselves one way or another. Then we could have prisons for the one-time "oops" sort of people that were not criminal universities and could actually be structured in a way so as to make sur
In fact, it's up to the designers of the technology to consider users like her and make their services easier to use and more suited to the needs of users that don't understand how it works.
Designers? Are you serious? Do you actually believe there was an architected plan for Facebook in any incarnation at any time in its life?
Heck no, it wasn't designed - like just about everything out there today, it just grew. It grew and grew and grew until it was something huge (and likely as not utterly unmaintainable.)
There might be someone that thought about some different users and how they might interact with the service, but I don't think I would flatter them by calling them designers. I'm sure it is far more ad hoc than that so it can be considered to be "agile" and such.
So you would agree that Bradly Manning is responsible for every single civilian death in Northern Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc.)?
And the "wave of democratization" is likely going to be usurped by already-organized groups with political aspirations in these areas. Note that the folks that actually started both the French and Russian revolutions were nice, friendly people that never envisioned what was going to come out the other end. My guess is that the only organized groups there are in these places are Islamic fundamentalists that will institute a pan-Islamic calphate. After all, the borders of these nations are completely arbitrary and have no basis in history or geography. So why wouldn't they unite?
The whole Real ID mess came about because a number of states (Illinois for one) decided to abandon any real standard for issuing state-backed identification. I was recently in Germany and they accepted my Arizona driver's license as a valid ID - no passport required after the guy at the airport. I'm sure they would accept an Illinois driver's license equally well - in fact, they did the time before I went to Germany and was living in Illinois.
The problem is, in Illinois you an get a driver's license that says pretty much whatever the heck you want. When I got my first driver's license I had to come in with a certified copy of a birth certificate plus a bunch of other stuff that "proved" I had a valid address in the state. This changed a while back because it was decided that it would be better if illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers) had real driver's licenses from Illinois rather either nothing or a Mexican driver's license which I guess has equally bad standards as Illinois does now. But how do you prove who someone is when they have no papers of any sort? Well, in Illinois they decided they would take a rather unofficial note from the Mexican consulate that said this person seems to be who they say they are. And that is the extent of it.
In no way is this "official" document tracable back to someone taking responsibility for it. Could it be copied? Sure. Could it be forged? Absolutely. So then what good is an Illinois driver's license if I can get one that says I'm Albert E. Enstein? Not a whole heck of a lot.
The Federal response was the Real ID act with an attempt to shore up the driver's license to have some actual tracability back to a person and to keep them from having 17 of them in different names. I don't think Illinois signed on to it, however. And Real ID is likely going to fail to really be enforced so that means many states can be considered to be issuing utterly bogus documents which prove nothing. Next time you are in an accident and ask to see the other person's driver's license remember this - they might have gotten it out of a Cracker Jack box ... I mean from Illinois or any one of the other states accepting Matricula Consular as a valid ID.
Maybe you missed the part about some states deciding that it was better for illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers, if you prefer) to have driver's licenses than not. As part of this decision the rules controlling how you got a driver's license were relaxed. No longer is there a need for a certified copy of a birth certificate or any other government document that offers a proof of identity. All that is needed is a note from somewhere (most often cited is the local Mexican consulate) that says this person might be who they say they are and no documents are available which prove otherwise.
End result of this is that if you are even somewhat clever you can get an official document issued by any number of US state governments which says precisely whatever they heck you want it to. Want a driver's license that says you are William Jefferson Clinton age 64? Not a problem. Take that and go rent car, run over some nice old lady and see the fur fly when Hillary tries to explain just what seems to have happened there. All this is possible because the standards for issuing state-backed IDs got thrown out and replaced with essentially no standard at all.
The problem with the structure of both DSL and cable based residential internet connections in the US is that it is a "star" configuration with a "neighborhood node" or DSLAM at the core. You can connect up many homes to the node before things start to degrade, but the limiting factor is the upper limit on the bandwidth between the Internet at large and the neighborhood node. Once you reach that limit all you can do really is split up the homes onto two nodes with separate feeds to the head end and the Internet.
Unfortunately, splitting a node is going to likely require running a new fiber link from the head end. Think that comes cheap? We are talking about trucks and heavy equipment here - digging, running fiber ducts, and burying it again. Where do they get the right-of-way for this? Consider that in many parts of the country the neighborhood node fiber link was put in 10-15 years ago when the neighborhood itself was being built on former farmland.
End of the story is that the "cap" is going to exist for a long time because there are major physical aspects to be overcome. This isn't upgrading a Cisco router to get better throughput. It is going to require substantial physical changes in the network that involve digging a lot of trenches in places where nobody wants a big trench dug these days.
The Internet in the US has been sold to users as what kind of speed they can achieve in "burst" mode for short durations. It has never been sold on the basis of getting consistent speeds over long periods of time to watch a movie from Netflix. The fact that you can get 20Mb/sec while downloading a 10MB file is meaningless if your average over an hour is 1.5Mb/sec. We are rapidly approaching the point where the node to head end connection cannot support IPTV requirements and Netflix will probably be the first on the block to notice. IPTV will be unusable for anyone with a crowded residential connection. I hope you have enjoyed your early adopter status because that is about to change.
I recently bought a Roku box and I give it two years maximum before it is unusable here in Phoenix. I suspect the "upgrade" will be to a box with a hard drive that downloads movies to buffer them but that will be a while in coming. And it is a completely different experience for the user.
One of the objections to letting criminals work is that stops being punishment. One of the most severe punishments you can inflict on people is to isolate them away from anyone they can reasonably interact with. When you take away the punishment for a lot of people there really is no difference between what they experience in their day-to-day lives before and after being convicted of a crime.
The problem today is that for a lot of inner-city minorities life is pretty hopeless. Prison isn't a lot different and they are with other people of their similar situation - their friends are either in prison or on their way there. So it isn't so much punishment for them, just isolation. Being somewhat confined in a different place. Not so bad, really, considering that all concerns about food and shelter are taken away.
Why do you think there are so many people in prison in the US today? You can point to locking people up for excessive parking tickets or minor drug offenses but that really isn't the answer. If prison was a completely unpleasent experience they would do whatever it took to avoid it. Instead we have at least one if not two generations of people that look at it as inviteable and really not so bad. The end result is that getting caught for some crime isn't much, if any, of a deterrent at all and with the current conviction rate at like 20% for most crimes it is clear that crime certainly does pay.
About people changing, I would say once you take an inner-city minority person that has grown up wit 50% of the people in their lives being involved in crime and some fraction of those being in prison you end up with a person that simply doesn't have any respect for what we would like to call "law and order". They will do whatever to get by and likely view prison as one more oppressive element in their lives piled on top of countless others. The view is that there is nothing that can be done about the oppressors - every other minority, white people, the government, the economy, unemployment, etc. So why not grab whatever is there for the taking? I don't think you can change people that much in an environment where they are constantly surrounded with reinforcing elements - all their friends from the inner city.
To really change people you would have to put them into a completely different environment. With no skills, limited education and a history of considering everyone outside their socioeconomic and racial background as oppressors this would be a real challange. Maybe put them on an tropical island somewhere where all they have to do is gather coconuts and mangoes. A few years of that might result in real change.
You need to understand where these laws and employment agreements come from. Let's say you are working for a company that makes socket wrenches. You get a great idea for a different way to attach the socket to the wrench. After some time you decide that you aren't liking your job so much and quit. You then file for a patent on your wrench idea and a different manufacturer picks up the idea and pays you for your patent.
The guy that actually did this was tied up in court for decades because of this and because of the money he got from the 2nd manufacturer.
Clearly there is a problem with this from the perspective of original employer. This case is a standard introduction to employment agreements and why they say what they say.
The attorney general of the US is appointed to that position by the President. He serves "at the pleasure of the President" who can fire him at any time for any reason. The attorney general is not really a political post, it is far closer to a patronage post.
Yes, but who administers such a thing?
The problem is that by putting computers in the hands of people that by definition cannot administer a complex system we have to have systems that do not need any administration. Combining this with the ability of the user to add software to the configuration is a disaster for security - the user has no clue what the software they are adding might be doing.
There are two possible solutions to this, neither of which is anyone moving towards. The first is the "App Store" model where the computer is completely locked down except for adding applications purchased through a single App Store where everything is checked, validated and secured. The other approach is that what 99% of the people with computers actually need is a "Web Appliance" that is totally locked down - no ability to add software. I suppose there is a third way where everyone with a computer is paying a service which administers their computer(s), doing things like installing software and configuration changes.
Any of these would work but both would infringe upon the rights of Russian business people to make money from the vast network of unadministered computers. It would also make it extremely difficult to reap vast amounts of money from ad networks because anyone with half a brain would block all ads from ever appearing on computers they were administering.
The end of this is that no such changes are going to take place We will always have insecure computers of which half are controlled by someone other than the putative "owner".
Today most children are actually taught how to be "good victims". The thinking is that if you are nice to the person that wants your wallet they will take it and leave. The idea that they might not want a victim to identify them never seems to occur to them. Also, the idea that predators will be nice if we treat them nice is easily disproved watching a bit of nature TV shows. No matter how nice the gazelle is, the lion still eats the gazelle.
Absolutely, children should be taught that there are no points for being a victim and when fighting against a predator there are no rules. Anything goes. A bully that encounters a "nice victim" is going to learn a lesson that with the mere threat of violence they can get whatever they want. A bully that encounters someone taught not to be a victim at all may rethink the whole "bully" mindset.
Predatory people are often capable of learning, at least for a while. If they are deterred at an early enough age from being a predator, this may be a win for society in general as well as the potential predatory. Unfortunately, if you have someone that has found nothing but willing an nice victims until they are 20 or so it is probably too late to change them. Personally, I think the chances of changing these people away from predatory habits is about zero so we might as well put them down like a rabid dog. We have been pretending we can "fix" these people for entirely too long and there are way too many of these people walking around. This isn't just in the US either, but I do think we have both too much "good victim" training and too many cases where predators are allow to run free and prey on anyone they find.
Nobody except the "high art" magazines are using good paper these days. You are thinking of an era that has long passed us by. Good paper can be seen with Architectural Digest and a few (very few) others. The rest are using the cheapest paper and cheapest printing techniques possible.
No way does it cost Time $5 to print and deliver a copy. Perfect-bound books can be printed in large quantities for $1.25 each, so I would say Time is probably no more than $0.50 to print and maybe $0.75 to bulk mail it.
While it might have been true that a magazine would cost $5 to print in 1960, most magazines are printed much cheaper today. I don't know specifics about magazines today but it is a rare book today that costs more than $2 to print. You cannot tell me that it costs more than $1 to print People or Time, and I suspect the target is more like $0.75.
There might be some specialty magazines - think Architecture Digest - that cost more to print and are printed on heavier, high-quality paper. These magazines are almost collectables in their own right and are printed to last. People, Time and a lot of others are printed the cheapest way possible on thin low-quality paper.
The mailing cost for a magazine can easily be over $1. Given postage rates in the US today, even a bulk mailer is going to get stuck with high costs. When first-class mail was $0.15 in the 1970s you could probably get your thick copy of Popular Mechanics mailed for $0.25 or so but mailing rates have gone up. And today the bulk mailers are supporting a lot more of the USPS operation than first-class mail.
I will agree that downloading to a PC and moving with a USB cable is harder and has more steps than most people would like. However, you make it sound like Amazon is locking down the device somehow and that is far from the case.
It is trivial to visit a web site that offers Mobipocket content for free and download that using the built-in web browser. While www.manybooks.net is somewhat of a pain on the Kindle, it is quite functional and allows downloading of 100% of the books there for free. No charges. Amazon is picking up the tab for the data transferred in this manner.
There are also many other free book sites which offer Mobipocket (.prc or .mobi) content. Most of these will "work" with the Kindle browser which allows the books to be installed on the device immediately.
You can also use either Mobipocket Creator or Caliber to convert other content (EPUB, PDF, etc.) for use on the Kindle. Caliber will do the conversion within itself but doesn't have a lot of control over how things are converted. Mobipocket Creator requires some intermediate step to get the content into it, but does offer more control over the conversion process.
The printing costs almost nothing. Today, the mailing of a magazine probably costs more than the printing does.
Do not believe that physical printing costs much - it doesn't - and doesn't factor into the prices of books and magazines much at all. It is heavily outweighed by the costs of the editorial staff.
Connect with what? The Kindle 1 and 2 do not have WiFi hardware.
The Kindle 3 has WiFi and this could make a difference in charges. But until Amazon wants to start having different pricing based on the device type they are going to have to support the millions of Kindle 2 units out there.
It is possible to load a Kindle with content through the USB connection, but this isn't very popular and requires a computer. I doubt many publishers want to set things up to be that manually operated.
This concerns a non-union employer firing an employee for making disparaging comments about (evidently) both her boss personally and her employer. The problem the NLRB had was with a policy that the employer had which appeared to prohibit communication between workers about wages, hours and working conditions which are protected by various union organizing regulations.
I have a huge problem with this for many reasons. First off, it sounds like it is clearly a step towards a very protected work environment where an employer can no longer fire people without cause. That is very, very troubling because what it leads to is complete stagnation. If I can't hire someone and a year later terminate them for whatever reason (or no reason), I'm not going to hire them in the first place without extraordinary reasons for doing so. So just add one to the ranks of the permanently unemployed. This is exactly the situation in most EU countries because of policies like this. And why they aren't troubled by 15-20% unemployement for the last 20 years or so.
Another problem is that if I find a employee is making public statements critical of me or my company they need to be gone. I don't need unhappy employees that are there because they need the paycheck. They aren't going to be doing their best work and their attitude will affect relations with customers. Now this NLRB ruling appears to say that we can't have a policy that says you can't make comments about the company publiclly? This sounds like trouble because it means that such policies need to be reviewed by labor lawyers.
Well, then you have Germany and other EU states. In Germany after you have been employed for six months it is basically impossible to fire someone. There is no "cause" that is good enough. Of course this means that any business that hires someone better be really, really certain they (a) need another person and (b) that person is the "right" person. Because after six months the decision is not reversable.
What this leads to is very simple: nobody gets hired. Little growth happens because of the overly-restrictive employment regulations. And with little growth of employment there is little growth of businesses. If a business can "get by" with five people the pressure to not hire the sixth is so great that it never happens.
Contrast this with the US where I can hire someone and after 18 months I can't justify keeping them because of lack of revenue. If it makes sense to hire the person, they get hired. If 18 months later it doesn't make sense, they are gone. Period. You can't do that in Germany.
That can be a problem alright. But all it means is the employer can't use the word "gay" or "black" when they are firing the person.
Don't like that? Work for a federal contractor or join a union. They have rules about how people can be fired. This, of course, means that people that should have been fired long ago are still there because nobody in management wants to put in the effort to get someone fired.