I suspect you are very, very wrong. There is no "contract" and just about any court will help you with that if necessary. What you have isn't even an employment agreement. It is extremely important to understand that because it will lead to a lot of grief if you do not.
In the USA you are generally employed under what is considered at-will rules. That means both you and your employer can terminate the relationship at any time, without notice and without cause. If you are in a union that changes things, but most people aren't in unions. There are some cases where there is an actual employment contract, but most employers stay far, far away from that sort of relationship.
The scope of the relationship can be pretty much whatever you and your employer agree on. If that means working for Pepsi and not drinking Coke ever, well, that is what it means. It does certainly mean that they can decide to fire all the Coke drinkers one day because they drank Coke with no other reason than that.
Just about everywhere you can be fired because I'm having a bad day. I don't need a reason - I just can't use any of the reasons that are currently protected, such as sex or race discrimination. Any other reasons are OK, like I whacked my elbow and decided to blame you.
Some federal contractors are subject to restrictions on this and require more documentation. Documentation never hurts when firing someone, but if you are doing work for the federal government it is likely required.
Just about everyone else though can fire anyone at any time for any reason, other than some protected ones.
You can try to use this as a criteria for hiring, but that will probably mean zero qualified candidates. Unless you are interviewing for a supermarket cashier (a job destined for the dustbin soon), they are going to have to have familiarity with the Internet - likely garnered through using it for what old fogies consider to be illegal purposes.
Yup, I'm an old fogie. And I don't think I have met anyone recently that would consider paying for music downloads. After all, they are free, aren't they? Extend the thinking that if it is available on the Internet, it must be OK to use it and you arrive at this problem. Whatever is there is available to be used, copied, redistributed as needed.
At least the people buying papers on the Internet are recogizing that work went into their production and this work should be compensated.
The biggest problem with wind power is that it is very difficult to build a wind farm where the power is actually needed. Moving electricity over long distances is difficult and expensive, especially considering it is almost impossible to build any sort of transmission line today without a huge public outcry. People "know" that power lines cause all sorts of health problems and are able to argue this pretty effectively.
The end result is that you can have a wind farm in some isolated place that doesn't do much for anyone. Or you can try to find a way to put one closer to where electricity is needed and face a huge public outcry over it. It isn't going to be easy.
Today, the transmission line infrastructure isn't great but the far bigger problem is that it is going to be very difficult to move into the future with new transmission facilities. You might be able to do it underground, but running high voltages underground isn't going to be like dropping in a fiber optic pipe. Cryogenic superconductors would be really nice, but again it isn't going to be something that people point to and smile saying "Look what they are doing to help us and reduce our energy bills!" It is far closer to the truth to envision an angry mob of people holding signs and lawyers getting injunctions to stop construction. Both will be TV every day until the project is cancelled.
Until a solution to this is found, we're not going anywhere. The transmission lines will be a disaster and generating plants will not be built. Wind farms will not be built where they are needed but will be built in places where they are not, demonstrating the folly of it because the electricity can't be sold.
Yes, but there is no actual requirement to have this "energy" stuff. Listen to enough folks on the edge of the environmental movement and it becomes clear that mankind lived for millions of years without electricity and the generation of electricity destroying the ecosystem.
So? Maybe we can just turn it off. Turn it all off. They seem to be getting a pretty good start in Texas right now. This is the result of deciding to allow people to block the building of transmission lines and generating plants while continuing to allow the population to increase mostly through immigration. Suddenly, there isn't enough electricity to go around. And the edge is a pretty hard one since we overbuilt so much in the1960s and 1970s nobody has really noticed until very recently.
Under the Geneva conventions enforced strictly, they should have been shot on the spot as non-uniformed combatants. POW status is only available to uniformed combatants. If you are trying to blend into the enemy civilian population you get shot, period.
So the US didn't do that. Instead, we treated them as some kind of cross between a combatant and a criminal with neither status being correct or even really definable. So you can't prosecute them as criminals because they haven't really broken criminal laws. Certainly they haven't broken any laws in the places where they were captured. You might be able to make up some kind of justification for them being criminals because of "conspiracy" but it has pretty well been established so far that even that kind of a stretch isn't going to work.
Treating them as a POW isn't going to work. The war isn't with Yemen or Afganistan or Islam. The war is with extremists that have linked a particularly vile form of Islam with the idea that they can reestablish the 12th century by fiat, explosives and death. There will never be a "winner" until they win because you can't really defeat a religion without wiping out all the adherents. If you can afford to take the really long view they are winning and are going to win in the end. It might take 200 years but they will eventually just out-populate the infidels. It is the way religions in the past have won wars and it works. Takes a really long time and uses up a lot of landscape and lives but it works.
Turning these folks over to some state, somewhere hasn't proved to work - nobody really wants them. For most of them, their own country (Yemen) has denied them repatriation. So there is no "sending them home". They can either be kept in a secure location or they can be turned loose, probably only in the US considering nobody else seems to want them. Repeatedly, various groups in the US (like the US Congress) has said they are not wanted in the US under any circumstances, even confined to prisons.
If there were any eligible islands, you might dump them there - but there are no truely remote islands anymore. You could give each one a handgun and put them down in Harlem and see how long they lasted. Probably not long, if there was any prior notice. I'm not sure there are any other options for these folks at all.
The problem with that thinking is that today there is a well established process for dealing with international murder investigations. Let's say you kill someone and run off to Israel. Israel may not agree with the policies of the country where the murder was committed, but the person will get tried, somehow. Same thing with just about everywhere else. Let's say you pick a country without any extradition process at all - Venezuela. Still, for murder you will face justice pretty much no matter what.
Unfortunately, if I put up a web site advertising counterfeit and illegal goods, like let's say Viagra and Vicodin without a prescription, there is virtually no possiblity of my being forced to do anything across international borders. Many countries view such things as meaningless because there is no concern about "online" anything. Also, many countries view legal requests from the US as just so much wastepaper. So if my web site is hosted in Netherlands and my fake drug company is based in Morocco or Bulgaria nobody is going to be able to do anything about it. I suppose after a couple of people die from fake drugs you might be able to hire a lawyer in the proper country to file some sort of lawsuit - except finding someone that will go up against any sort of organized crime activity in these sorts of places is pretty rare.
You see, there is this thing call "civilization" and in many parts of the world what you consider to be "civilized" is in pretty short supply. There just isn't enough to go around as it is and trying to exercise any sort of "rights" from outside is pointless and futile. OK, for murder there are some exceptions - nobody likes murder. But ripping off Americans and Europeans is just part of the national pastime. They are supposed to lose money on bogus schemes, fake goods and the like.
I used to work for the company that goes by the name NavTeq now.
The process is now actually driving each road segment. So, if there is an error reported what has to happen is a vehicle has to be scheduled to physically go there and drive on that road. This may not have been done for a while - there are not thousands of collection vehicles. I don't believe there were even high tens when I worked there. It is enormously expensive to do this, so it is just going to get scheduled.
How long? A year? Maybe. I would not expect anything quick.
Garmin is one of the most proactive companies out there - they change the data from NavTeq around a great deal. However, they just pass reported errors back to NavTeq. Fixing the data up so it can be displayed is tough - it takes most of the companies something like a year to build a new release. Garmin manages to publish updates four times a year. But even with that, they evidently have to rely on NavTeq for the geometry and do not try to adjust that - probably a good thing.
The one issue I have with Garmin of late is the speed limit data on roads. For the most part it is pretty accurate but it is one of those things that 95% accuracy means it is wrong 1 out of 20 times you look at the display.
Oh, and from what I have seen nobody else comes close to what Garmin does so there is no need to bother with any of the others. Magellen is good for humor, but nobody is looking for humor on the road.
Unfortunately, I think the game is pretty much up. iTunes might be a wildly popular music distribution tool, but it accounts for maybe 2% of the downloads. Sure, this is millions and millions, but it pales in comparison with the free distribution which is billions and billions.
I don't know anyone that purchases music. Everything they have they get from various techniques, including BitTorrent and various Gnutella (and similar) tools. The idea of paying for music is utterly foreign. Now I could certainly be on the tech bleeding edge here, but I just don't think iTunes is all that strong a force to contend with other than the fact it is a large, visible, legal distribution, so it is easy to measure.
What I also see is that in grade school children are being taught to pirate. The teachers pirate software for the classroom. The other students are coached by older siblings. Eventually the whole message sinks in and by the time they reach high school the idea of paying for stuff on the Internet is completely foreign to them. If it is out there, it must be for free and it must be OK or someone would have shut it down. The fact that it is still available day in and day out makes it clear that it has to be at least tolerated if not clearly legal.
I don't see how we can fight this tide. It has become too pervasive. It started with BBSs and floppy exchanges in the 1980s and it has grown from that. I'd say today that unless you are talking to someone that makes money from selling creative works (like an author, a painter or a photographer) they are unlikely to see anything wrong with downloading anything they can get their hands on from the Internet. It is a little late to try to convince people otherwise.
It would be interesting to have a system whereby books were "commissioned" by people that could pay for the author's time and from then on books would be free to everyone. The problem with this system is first and foremost you get what you pay for with it. Do you want all books to be commissioned by folks that can pay and nothing else is published?
You see, we tried this system with music. It worked, after a fashion, and what we have called "classical music" was all developed by people paid to create music to certain specifications. You will note that to most people "classical music" is all pretty much the same whether it was written in the 15th or 18th century or whether it was done in Italy or Austria. If you are happy with this sort of stagnation, by all means lets move to a patronage system for books, music, movies and any other creative works you can think of.
Sure it can. The problem is today there are three easily discerned classes of criminals. You have the guys that back into a snowbank leaving a robbery, leaving a perfect impression of their license plate. You have the guy that leaves no evidence behind and has a well-thought-out alibi and never gets caught. Lastly, you have the guy that kills someone in a moment of anger and then stands around going "Oh. Shit." until the cops come.
The police are quite well able to handle the first type. Sadly, for American society today they are mostly minorities - Black or Hispanic - leading to an overwhelming prison population of Black and Hispanic folks.
The white-collar crimes where someone does something stupid are also easily handled and these guys go away. Leaving out the "doing something stupid" part probably gets you a walk. This is easily pointed to by everyone as an example of the justice system being only for the rich - because the poor folks often either do something stupid or blab to someone who rats them out.
The clever folks that don't make stupid mistakes and don't blab about what they did are generally never caught. Today, law enforcement just doesn't have the time to dig deeply enough to even begin to build a case against these people. Unless something happens, they aren't ever going to be caught.
The moment-of-anger folks are truely the most sympathetic of the lot, because they did something that they probably would never do again and yet end up either on death row or in jail for life. For literally a bad decision and less than ten seconds of action. Unfortunately, these people aren't usually the ones that society in general gives any sort of a break to.
There is no attempt in the US to track visa violations. If you have something that looks real when you come in, you are in. If you have a real visa and overstay, again there is no enforcement whatsoever.
Now if you stand up in a crowded room and scream how you are here illegally you might get some people's attention. They would usher you out and keep you from coming back into that room. If you get stopped by the police... well, they are prevented from doing anything that might lead to some kind of immigration action. How can you be deported? I don't know - it is really, really hard.
All I can think of is they were complaining to Immigration folks about the money they were paying for being here illegally and wanted a refund from the government. Since the government is broke and laying off people THAT might get their attention.
The thing to keep in mind is that the concept of "woman" in Islamic terms is nearly a non-sentient tool to assist in reproduction. And maybe housekeeping. It isn't as if there was a real human life involved.
Another thing that is probably even more important is that "human life" is a brutal struggle to these people and ending it early is a reward. They are firmly focused on the afterlife in all things and in all considerations. So if taking some action is going to kill hundreds of people but ensures their happy destiny in an afterlife then the hundreds of people are meaningless - besides, it is just giving them into their afterlife early anyway. It is amazing what you can justify when you believe this.
And having a focus on an afterlife isn't unique to Islam. It is equally dangerous when this is the mindset of anyone. It makes them immune to most of the things that we like to think control and moderate human behavior.
The problem is, Google has taken over web advertising so completely that anyone would be an idiot to either advertise with someone else or place ads from some other ad vendor on their web site. They wouldn't get any revenue or customers.
So the "barrier to entry" for Google is the domination of the ad market, really. Until you can displace them from that there can be no "next big thing" because the "next big thing" will just starve. No venture capital because nobody will see any way to get money from a venture. So the dorm room startup stays in a dorm room with all the network capacity of a dorm room.
Sorry, but because we have allowed Google to become the data vendor of choice and the ad delivery vehicle of choice they are going to be really, really hard to displace, no matter what the technology might be in the future. Alta Vista died partly because of a lack of a real working revenue model and because of a lack of doing anything really innovative. Google started with innovation but now has a lock on both marketing data and ad delivery. This isn't going to be changing anytime soon.
I don't think Google paying off ISPs is going to make any difference at all, except it would mean lower bills for consumers.
Why do you want credit card companies to persecute their customers? Shouldn't they be reaching out to their customers with a more friendly business model?
You see, the way it works is the cardholder gets the stuff taken off their bill - usually no questions asked, it just happens. OK, so they want you to jump through some hoops for it, but it will happen no matter what.
Then the credit card company charges back the purchase to the merchant. The merchant should have insurance to cover this sort of thing, so it is no loss to them.
So who loses here? Nobody. Victimless crime.
The only problem is if the merchant doesn't have insurance. Too bad then. Should have gotten the insurance because it is going to happen to you eventually.
Obviously here the credit card company isn't going to prosecute anyone.
Oh, from a closer reading of your post it sounds like a DEBIT card was used, not a credit card. Well, the rules for those are different and banks are extremely reluctant to remove charges. Of course, they will charge back to the merchant anyway, just the same as a credit card. Except you might not ever get your money back from it and it just stays on your bill.
Simple rule here: never, ever use a DEBIT card online. Ever. There are no systemwide rules for how those transactions are cancelled as there are for credit cards. Use a debit card and lose your money. Period.
Your credit card will be compromised. It is a fact of life.
Your average waiter in a restaurant can make an extra $50-100 a week by turning nice fresh credit card numbers over to the right people. Credit card companies do not prosecute - ever. So, even if someone is caught they aren't going to do any time.
Magnify the opportunity and reward 1000 times for a credit card database.
I do not know of anyone ever that had to pay for their credit card being used fraudulently. Generally I get a phone call asking if some purchase was mine and when the answer is no it is removed from the bill and a new card is mailed out. Period. Nothing else.
I don't undersand what all the fuss is about. Yes, you will get a new credit card number periodically. So?
Certainly in the US, nobody is going to allow them to go anywhere near their home. Everyone knows that electricity causes cancer, autism and impotence. Power lines are just an excuse to build another hospital nearby. At least a lot of people have read that on the Internet.
Problem with the "just and reasonable" idea is that some folks do not have the same idea of what "just and reasonable" is. Different opinions.
Obviously Jeffery Dahlmer thought it was just and reasonable to kill and eat people. He might be an exception and even a little overboard, but quite a lot of people think killing and eating animals is just and reasonable. Small, furry, cute animals. Little creatures with faces. My daughter doesn't think it is just and reasonable to do so and she will be happy to lecture you for hours and hours on your failings as a human being for taking part in the killing and eating.
So, because of this should we all be vegans? Or are such things subject to majority rule? In many communities I would have no problem in forming a majority concensus that robbing banks is just and reasonable, mostly because the people forming this concensus have no money in banks, banks are insured and robbing them hurts nobody. So why not?
In the US we have a way laws get enacted. It may result in some laws that people do not find just and reasonable, such as allowing the killing and eating of small animals or disallowing the robbing of banks, but we seem to have these laws. People seem to be quite set in their ways on breaking as many of these laws as they can without suffering undue hardship - like prison. Any respect for laws seems to be a concept left behind in the 1950s with June Cleaver. You do what you want, hope not to get caught and hope to get off easy if you are.
You need to understand that if some data exists somewhere, it is likely it will be "leaked", "released" or "published". If it is damaging to someone - anyone - it is even more likely.
Nothing is going to be held back from this sort of exposure. Of what possible value would a list of accounts without names be? That certainly would not enable various governments to actually prosecute tax evaders. And giving governments the unredacted list but only publishing part of the information wouldn't seem to be in the Wikilieaks mold at all.
I don't think political persuasion matters much. This purpose is titilation and releasing hidding or secret information. This demonstrates the power of the leaker and the publisher and the powerlessness of the subject of the information. And believe me, it is all about the power.
First, I would be all in favor of carbon trading if I, as the owner of a software company got millions of "credits" to sell because I don't produce CO2 emissions. This gift would be offset by higher prices for everything - most of which would be passed on to customers.
Alas, it is unlikely to work out that way. More likely the only folks getting carbon credits would be those with businesses that today generate massive amounts of CO2.
The second part of this is that the way it is supposed to work is that these businesses would have to purchase more and more carbon credits to operate because their credits would be insufficient to cover their current (and future) output of CO2. So they would be faced with two alternatives: reduce CO2 emissions (at some cost) or buy carbon credits (at some cost).
Well, either way they go there would be increased costs. As we do not have a good way of pointing at a building and saying "X tons of CO2 are being emitted each day" it is highly likely that any such credit allocation scheme would be fraught with subjectivity and legal loopholes. This introduces massive uncertainity into the balance between reducing emissions and buying credits - there is no clarity between X real reduction and X credits being required.
Any large business, especially a public corporation, is going to stick to certainity which means buying credits. Reducing emissions might work in some cases but when the credits required depend on legal definitions, fuel input, revenue and other such coupled but yet rather different measurements it is going to be very difficult to determine if a reduction in real emissions is going to result in any benefit at all to the company.
Another factor is going to be whether or not some sort of emission reduction is cheaper than the credits themselves. If you are running a coal burning power plant it may make some sense to look at carbon sequstration rather than buying credits - if carbon sequestration is allowed, which under some rules I have heard about it would not be. How else do you reduce emissions? Reduce the amount of coal coming in and therefore the amount of electricity going out and raise the prices to compensate for less revenue per KwH. This works really well if what is being actually measured for a power plant is the type and amount of coal being brought in. Obviously, another option would be to change to a lower-carbon (lower energy) coal. Again, you get less energy, less electricity generated and have to raise prices to continue operations. And for everyone else, electricity just gets a big price increase.
Each succeeding year under a cap-and-trade plan there are supposed to be fewer and fewer credits available to purchase and fewer given to businesses to have, use or sell. Problem is, without some sort of massive change in thermodynamics it is unlikely that you can burn X tons of coal and get less than Y tons of CO2 out of it. Nuclear in the US is probably just not an option - the Universities have spent 30-40 years training people that all things nuclear are just bad, including the so-called "nuclear family". Geothermal would be nice, except you can't build transmission lines in the US, smart, dumb or anything else - people know they cause cancer, autism and impotence and won't stand for them to be in their neighborhood. Solar is pretty safe, except it doesn't really help the US peak load time of 5-9 PM. Wind might do it, but there is that transmission line problem again.
Simple solution is to just start turning down the electricity output and if they can't rely on air conditioning, their refrigerator or their TV maybe they will move somewhere else. With fewer people in the US the 20% that are unemployed today might be able to get a job. Yes, if you count all the people of working age that aren't working it is way, way higher than the 10% "unemployment rate" the government likes to talk about - it could be more like 30% but it is at least 20%. That way we would have fewer emissions (from power plants) and fewer people driving and a lot less CO2 all across the board.
Real solutions are pretty evasive in this area, but fake solutions are easy to come up with. Cap and trade is a fake solution because, as you pointed out, it doesn't really make economic sense.
The major sources of CO2 currently are cars and power plants. The real solution isn't wind power because it isn't something that can replace base load generation, and the real solution probably isn't nuclear because it simply takes too long to build a nuclear power plant. The growth in the US has outstripped nearly all of the generation capacity there is and we are just about out of time.
The real power plant solution is probably to just start turning off coal plants. It is economically unfeasible to replace them with something that doesn't generate CO2 and any sort of cap and trade program is likely to just make electricity priced so high as to be out of reach for poor people. Add to that the costs for stores to operate would increase significantly and that is brick-and-mortar or online as both use lots of electricity.
Just turning off power plants would reduce the CO2 emissions and it would force people to think if they really want to come to the US in the first place, thereby limiting the growth. It is the growth that is destroying the infrastructure and the economy - if we had 20% fewer people than we wouldn't have 20% of the people out of work begging at the government window or your car window.
It would certainly change the perspective people have on things as well. If electricity became something unreliable and undependable you wouldn't have people buying food frozen half a continent away to store in their freezer. You would have to buy locally grown food frequently thereby further reducing CO2 emissions.
You can think of hundreds of things that would simply be better if there was restrictions on electric power availability.
One way or another, we are likely to be there soon. We aren't building lots of generating capacity and we are closing down old generating plants and decommissioning nuclear plants. At some point buying power from Canadian hydroelectric generation isn't going to help and we will certainly see widespread power management like they have in Florida and California already. In these places some people have little boxes that control their air conditioning - when the power company says it has to be off, the system is shut off. You get a discount on your bill by having such power management in areas where it is needed.
Wait until they start shutting off residential power during the day and offices at night. I don't think you have all that long to wait to see this happening.
We have a rather expensive drive that writes on special DVD media. It does not use dye - it literally punches holes in the media with a laser. This means the discs are not subject to degradation of the dye layer or thermal stress like ordinary write-once optical media.
Estimated life is 1000 years.
Check out the web page attached to this posting. Or look at the web site for Cranberry as they are using the same technology.
If California's law outlaws spam, then are current spammers able to insure that their messages aren't going to California? Or is it that the government isn't interested in spammers and only a few (very, very few) individuals have ever won a judgement against a spammer?
The problem is that unless you are willing to invest a significant portion of your life to the pursuit and persecution of a spammer, it is all meaningless. California's Attorney General's Office isn't going to take on spammers. A judgement won in California will have little effect in a non-US country and it may not have much effect in a different state. Want to prove what assets a spammer in Maine has from California? Good luck with that unless you are prepared to spend plenty of money.
The Internet is pretty much a consequences-free zone. Unless you are incredibly egotistical or stupid you can't be convicted of anything that happens "on the 'net." Of course, there are plenty of egotistical and stupid people stepping up to be prosecuted for crimes on the Internet every month or so. But the selling of fake drugs and scamming of people continues every single day.
stuff like "We need some younger, more active and agile people in here", then you aren't a developer over 30.
Plenty of management types have learned in other fields that all the really good stuff comes from people in their twenties. Look at Einstein: all of his major work was finished by the time he was 30. It is the same for all Physics PhDs today.
So management types think it is the same for development. Also, if you aren't moving into management then obviously you have reached your limit and can go no further than being a coder. Oh yes, most of the bosses that think like this have found that coder, programmer, analyst, developer and "software engineer" are all titles for the same person.
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I suspect you are very, very wrong. There is no "contract" and just about any court will help you with that if necessary. What you have isn't even an employment agreement. It is extremely important to understand that because it will lead to a lot of grief if you do not.
In the USA you are generally employed under what is considered at-will rules. That means both you and your employer can terminate the relationship at any time, without notice and without cause. If you are in a union that changes things, but most people aren't in unions. There are some cases where there is an actual employment contract, but most employers stay far, far away from that sort of relationship.
The scope of the relationship can be pretty much whatever you and your employer agree on. If that means working for Pepsi and not drinking Coke ever, well, that is what it means. It does certainly mean that they can decide to fire all the Coke drinkers one day because they drank Coke with no other reason than that.
Just about everywhere you can be fired because I'm having a bad day. I don't need a reason - I just can't use any of the reasons that are currently protected, such as sex or race discrimination. Any other reasons are OK, like I whacked my elbow and decided to blame you.
Some federal contractors are subject to restrictions on this and require more documentation. Documentation never hurts when firing someone, but if you are doing work for the federal government it is likely required.
Just about everyone else though can fire anyone at any time for any reason, other than some protected ones.
You can try to use this as a criteria for hiring, but that will probably mean zero qualified candidates. Unless you are interviewing for a supermarket cashier (a job destined for the dustbin soon), they are going to have to have familiarity with the Internet - likely garnered through using it for what old fogies consider to be illegal purposes.
Yup, I'm an old fogie. And I don't think I have met anyone recently that would consider paying for music downloads. After all, they are free, aren't they? Extend the thinking that if it is available on the Internet, it must be OK to use it and you arrive at this problem. Whatever is there is available to be used, copied, redistributed as needed.
At least the people buying papers on the Internet are recogizing that work went into their production and this work should be compensated.
The biggest problem with wind power is that it is very difficult to build a wind farm where the power is actually needed. Moving electricity over long distances is difficult and expensive, especially considering it is almost impossible to build any sort of transmission line today without a huge public outcry. People "know" that power lines cause all sorts of health problems and are able to argue this pretty effectively.
The end result is that you can have a wind farm in some isolated place that doesn't do much for anyone. Or you can try to find a way to put one closer to where electricity is needed and face a huge public outcry over it. It isn't going to be easy.
Today, the transmission line infrastructure isn't great but the far bigger problem is that it is going to be very difficult to move into the future with new transmission facilities. You might be able to do it underground, but running high voltages underground isn't going to be like dropping in a fiber optic pipe. Cryogenic superconductors would be really nice, but again it isn't going to be something that people point to and smile saying "Look what they are doing to help us and reduce our energy bills!" It is far closer to the truth to envision an angry mob of people holding signs and lawyers getting injunctions to stop construction. Both will be TV every day until the project is cancelled.
Until a solution to this is found, we're not going anywhere. The transmission lines will be a disaster and generating plants will not be built. Wind farms will not be built where they are needed but will be built in places where they are not, demonstrating the folly of it because the electricity can't be sold.
Yes, but there is no actual requirement to have this "energy" stuff. Listen to enough folks on the edge of the environmental movement and it becomes clear that mankind lived for millions of years without electricity and the generation of electricity destroying the ecosystem.
So? Maybe we can just turn it off. Turn it all off. They seem to be getting a pretty good start in Texas right now. This is the result of deciding to allow people to block the building of transmission lines and generating plants while continuing to allow the population to increase mostly through immigration. Suddenly, there isn't enough electricity to go around. And the edge is a pretty hard one since we overbuilt so much in the1960s and 1970s nobody has really noticed until very recently.
Under the Geneva conventions enforced strictly, they should have been shot on the spot as non-uniformed combatants. POW status is only available to uniformed combatants. If you are trying to blend into the enemy civilian population you get shot, period.
So the US didn't do that. Instead, we treated them as some kind of cross between a combatant and a criminal with neither status being correct or even really definable. So you can't prosecute them as criminals because they haven't really broken criminal laws. Certainly they haven't broken any laws in the places where they were captured. You might be able to make up some kind of justification for them being criminals because of "conspiracy" but it has pretty well been established so far that even that kind of a stretch isn't going to work.
Treating them as a POW isn't going to work. The war isn't with Yemen or Afganistan or Islam. The war is with extremists that have linked a particularly vile form of Islam with the idea that they can reestablish the 12th century by fiat, explosives and death. There will never be a "winner" until they win because you can't really defeat a religion without wiping out all the adherents. If you can afford to take the really long view they are winning and are going to win in the end. It might take 200 years but they will eventually just out-populate the infidels. It is the way religions in the past have won wars and it works. Takes a really long time and uses up a lot of landscape and lives but it works.
Turning these folks over to some state, somewhere hasn't proved to work - nobody really wants them. For most of them, their own country (Yemen) has denied them repatriation. So there is no "sending them home". They can either be kept in a secure location or they can be turned loose, probably only in the US considering nobody else seems to want them. Repeatedly, various groups in the US (like the US Congress) has said they are not wanted in the US under any circumstances, even confined to prisons.
If there were any eligible islands, you might dump them there - but there are no truely remote islands anymore. You could give each one a handgun and put them down in Harlem and see how long they lasted. Probably not long, if there was any prior notice. I'm not sure there are any other options for these folks at all.
The problem with that thinking is that today there is a well established process for dealing with international murder investigations. Let's say you kill someone and run off to Israel. Israel may not agree with the policies of the country where the murder was committed, but the person will get tried, somehow. Same thing with just about everywhere else. Let's say you pick a country without any extradition process at all - Venezuela. Still, for murder you will face justice pretty much no matter what.
Unfortunately, if I put up a web site advertising counterfeit and illegal goods, like let's say Viagra and Vicodin without a prescription, there is virtually no possiblity of my being forced to do anything across international borders. Many countries view such things as meaningless because there is no concern about "online" anything. Also, many countries view legal requests from the US as just so much wastepaper. So if my web site is hosted in Netherlands and my fake drug company is based in Morocco or Bulgaria nobody is going to be able to do anything about it. I suppose after a couple of people die from fake drugs you might be able to hire a lawyer in the proper country to file some sort of lawsuit - except finding someone that will go up against any sort of organized crime activity in these sorts of places is pretty rare.
You see, there is this thing call "civilization" and in many parts of the world what you consider to be "civilized" is in pretty short supply. There just isn't enough to go around as it is and trying to exercise any sort of "rights" from outside is pointless and futile. OK, for murder there are some exceptions - nobody likes murder. But ripping off Americans and Europeans is just part of the national pastime. They are supposed to lose money on bogus schemes, fake goods and the like.
I used to work for the company that goes by the name NavTeq now.
The process is now actually driving each road segment. So, if there is an error reported what has to happen is a vehicle has to be scheduled to physically go there and drive on that road. This may not have been done for a while - there are not thousands of collection vehicles. I don't believe there were even high tens when I worked there. It is enormously expensive to do this, so it is just going to get scheduled.
How long? A year? Maybe. I would not expect anything quick.
Garmin is one of the most proactive companies out there - they change the data from NavTeq around a great deal. However, they just pass reported errors back to NavTeq. Fixing the data up so it can be displayed is tough - it takes most of the companies something like a year to build a new release. Garmin manages to publish updates four times a year. But even with that, they evidently have to rely on NavTeq for the geometry and do not try to adjust that - probably a good thing.
The one issue I have with Garmin of late is the speed limit data on roads. For the most part it is pretty accurate but it is one of those things that 95% accuracy means it is wrong 1 out of 20 times you look at the display.
Oh, and from what I have seen nobody else comes close to what Garmin does so there is no need to bother with any of the others. Magellen is good for humor, but nobody is looking for humor on the road.
Unfortunately, I think the game is pretty much up. iTunes might be a wildly popular music distribution tool, but it accounts for maybe 2% of the downloads. Sure, this is millions and millions, but it pales in comparison with the free distribution which is billions and billions.
I don't know anyone that purchases music. Everything they have they get from various techniques, including BitTorrent and various Gnutella (and similar) tools. The idea of paying for music is utterly foreign. Now I could certainly be on the tech bleeding edge here, but I just don't think iTunes is all that strong a force to contend with other than the fact it is a large, visible, legal distribution, so it is easy to measure.
What I also see is that in grade school children are being taught to pirate. The teachers pirate software for the classroom. The other students are coached by older siblings. Eventually the whole message sinks in and by the time they reach high school the idea of paying for stuff on the Internet is completely foreign to them. If it is out there, it must be for free and it must be OK or someone would have shut it down. The fact that it is still available day in and day out makes it clear that it has to be at least tolerated if not clearly legal.
I don't see how we can fight this tide. It has become too pervasive. It started with BBSs and floppy exchanges in the 1980s and it has grown from that. I'd say today that unless you are talking to someone that makes money from selling creative works (like an author, a painter or a photographer) they are unlikely to see anything wrong with downloading anything they can get their hands on from the Internet. It is a little late to try to convince people otherwise.
It would be interesting to have a system whereby books were "commissioned" by people that could pay for the author's time and from then on books would be free to everyone. The problem with this system is first and foremost you get what you pay for with it. Do you want all books to be commissioned by folks that can pay and nothing else is published?
You see, we tried this system with music. It worked, after a fashion, and what we have called "classical music" was all developed by people paid to create music to certain specifications. You will note that to most people "classical music" is all pretty much the same whether it was written in the 15th or 18th century or whether it was done in Italy or Austria. If you are happy with this sort of stagnation, by all means lets move to a patronage system for books, music, movies and any other creative works you can think of.
Sure it can. The problem is today there are three easily discerned classes of criminals. You have the guys that back into a snowbank leaving a robbery, leaving a perfect impression of their license plate. You have the guy that leaves no evidence behind and has a well-thought-out alibi and never gets caught. Lastly, you have the guy that kills someone in a moment of anger and then stands around going "Oh. Shit." until the cops come.
The police are quite well able to handle the first type. Sadly, for American society today they are mostly minorities - Black or Hispanic - leading to an overwhelming prison population of Black and Hispanic folks.
The white-collar crimes where someone does something stupid are also easily handled and these guys go away. Leaving out the "doing something stupid" part probably gets you a walk. This is easily pointed to by everyone as an example of the justice system being only for the rich - because the poor folks often either do something stupid or blab to someone who rats them out.
The clever folks that don't make stupid mistakes and don't blab about what they did are generally never caught. Today, law enforcement just doesn't have the time to dig deeply enough to even begin to build a case against these people. Unless something happens, they aren't ever going to be caught.
The moment-of-anger folks are truely the most sympathetic of the lot, because they did something that they probably would never do again and yet end up either on death row or in jail for life. For literally a bad decision and less than ten seconds of action. Unfortunately, these people aren't usually the ones that society in general gives any sort of a break to.
There is no attempt in the US to track visa violations. If you have something that looks real when you come in, you are in. If you have a real visa and overstay, again there is no enforcement whatsoever.
Now if you stand up in a crowded room and scream how you are here illegally you might get some people's attention. They would usher you out and keep you from coming back into that room. If you get stopped by the police ... well, they are prevented from doing anything that might lead to some kind of immigration action. How can you be deported? I don't know - it is really, really hard.
All I can think of is they were complaining to Immigration folks about the money they were paying for being here illegally and wanted a refund from the government. Since the government is broke and laying off people THAT might get their attention.
The thing to keep in mind is that the concept of "woman" in Islamic terms is nearly a non-sentient tool to assist in reproduction. And maybe housekeeping. It isn't as if there was a real human life involved.
Another thing that is probably even more important is that "human life" is a brutal struggle to these people and ending it early is a reward. They are firmly focused on the afterlife in all things and in all considerations. So if taking some action is going to kill hundreds of people but ensures their happy destiny in an afterlife then the hundreds of people are meaningless - besides, it is just giving them into their afterlife early anyway. It is amazing what you can justify when you believe this.
And having a focus on an afterlife isn't unique to Islam. It is equally dangerous when this is the mindset of anyone. It makes them immune to most of the things that we like to think control and moderate human behavior.
The problem is, Google has taken over web advertising so completely that anyone would be an idiot to either advertise with someone else or place ads from some other ad vendor on their web site. They wouldn't get any revenue or customers.
So the "barrier to entry" for Google is the domination of the ad market, really. Until you can displace them from that there can be no "next big thing" because the "next big thing" will just starve. No venture capital because nobody will see any way to get money from a venture. So the dorm room startup stays in a dorm room with all the network capacity of a dorm room.
Sorry, but because we have allowed Google to become the data vendor of choice and the ad delivery vehicle of choice they are going to be really, really hard to displace, no matter what the technology might be in the future. Alta Vista died partly because of a lack of a real working revenue model and because of a lack of doing anything really innovative. Google started with innovation but now has a lock on both marketing data and ad delivery. This isn't going to be changing anytime soon.
I don't think Google paying off ISPs is going to make any difference at all, except it would mean lower bills for consumers.
Why do you want credit card companies to persecute their customers? Shouldn't they be reaching out to their customers with a more friendly business model?
You see, the way it works is the cardholder gets the stuff taken off their bill - usually no questions asked, it just happens. OK, so they want you to jump through some hoops for it, but it will happen no matter what.
Then the credit card company charges back the purchase to the merchant. The merchant should have insurance to cover this sort of thing, so it is no loss to them.
So who loses here? Nobody. Victimless crime.
The only problem is if the merchant doesn't have insurance. Too bad then. Should have gotten the insurance because it is going to happen to you eventually.
Obviously here the credit card company isn't going to prosecute anyone.
Oh, from a closer reading of your post it sounds like a DEBIT card was used, not a credit card. Well, the rules for those are different and banks are extremely reluctant to remove charges. Of course, they will charge back to the merchant anyway, just the same as a credit card. Except you might not ever get your money back from it and it just stays on your bill.
Simple rule here: never, ever use a DEBIT card online. Ever. There are no systemwide rules for how those transactions are cancelled as there are for credit cards. Use a debit card and lose your money. Period.
Your credit card will be compromised. It is a fact of life.
Your average waiter in a restaurant can make an extra $50-100 a week by turning nice fresh credit card numbers over to the right people. Credit card companies do not prosecute - ever. So, even if someone is caught they aren't going to do any time.
Magnify the opportunity and reward 1000 times for a credit card database.
I do not know of anyone ever that had to pay for their credit card being used fraudulently. Generally I get a phone call asking if some purchase was mine and when the answer is no it is removed from the bill and a new card is mailed out. Period. Nothing else.
I don't undersand what all the fuss is about. Yes, you will get a new credit card number periodically. So?
There might be a problem with transmission lines.
Certainly in the US, nobody is going to allow them to go anywhere near their home. Everyone knows that electricity causes cancer, autism and impotence. Power lines are just an excuse to build another hospital nearby. At least a lot of people have read that on the Internet.
But transmission lines aren't being built.
Problem with the "just and reasonable" idea is that some folks do not have the same idea of what "just and reasonable" is. Different opinions.
Obviously Jeffery Dahlmer thought it was just and reasonable to kill and eat people. He might be an exception and even a little overboard, but quite a lot of people think killing and eating animals is just and reasonable. Small, furry, cute animals. Little creatures with faces. My daughter doesn't think it is just and reasonable to do so and she will be happy to lecture you for hours and hours on your failings as a human being for taking part in the killing and eating.
So, because of this should we all be vegans? Or are such things subject to majority rule? In many communities I would have no problem in forming a majority concensus that robbing banks is just and reasonable, mostly because the people forming this concensus have no money in banks, banks are insured and robbing them hurts nobody. So why not?
In the US we have a way laws get enacted. It may result in some laws that people do not find just and reasonable, such as allowing the killing and eating of small animals or disallowing the robbing of banks, but we seem to have these laws. People seem to be quite set in their ways on breaking as many of these laws as they can without suffering undue hardship - like prison. Any respect for laws seems to be a concept left behind in the 1950s with June Cleaver. You do what you want, hope not to get caught and hope to get off easy if you are.
You need to understand that if some data exists somewhere, it is likely it will be "leaked", "released" or "published". If it is damaging to someone - anyone - it is even more likely.
Nothing is going to be held back from this sort of exposure. Of what possible value would a list of accounts without names be? That certainly would not enable various governments to actually prosecute tax evaders. And giving governments the unredacted list but only publishing part of the information wouldn't seem to be in the Wikilieaks mold at all.
I don't think political persuasion matters much. This purpose is titilation and releasing hidding or secret information. This demonstrates the power of the leaker and the publisher and the powerlessness of the subject of the information. And believe me, it is all about the power.
What you are missing here is two things.
First, I would be all in favor of carbon trading if I, as the owner of a software company got millions of "credits" to sell because I don't produce CO2 emissions. This gift would be offset by higher prices for everything - most of which would be passed on to customers.
Alas, it is unlikely to work out that way. More likely the only folks getting carbon credits would be those with businesses that today generate massive amounts of CO2.
The second part of this is that the way it is supposed to work is that these businesses would have to purchase more and more carbon credits to operate because their credits would be insufficient to cover their current (and future) output of CO2. So they would be faced with two alternatives: reduce CO2 emissions (at some cost) or buy carbon credits (at some cost).
Well, either way they go there would be increased costs. As we do not have a good way of pointing at a building and saying "X tons of CO2 are being emitted each day" it is highly likely that any such credit allocation scheme would be fraught with subjectivity and legal loopholes. This introduces massive uncertainity into the balance between reducing emissions and buying credits - there is no clarity between X real reduction and X credits being required.
Any large business, especially a public corporation, is going to stick to certainity which means buying credits. Reducing emissions might work in some cases but when the credits required depend on legal definitions, fuel input, revenue and other such coupled but yet rather different measurements it is going to be very difficult to determine if a reduction in real emissions is going to result in any benefit at all to the company.
Another factor is going to be whether or not some sort of emission reduction is cheaper than the credits themselves. If you are running a coal burning power plant it may make some sense to look at carbon sequstration rather than buying credits - if carbon sequestration is allowed, which under some rules I have heard about it would not be. How else do you reduce emissions? Reduce the amount of coal coming in and therefore the amount of electricity going out and raise the prices to compensate for less revenue per KwH. This works really well if what is being actually measured for a power plant is the type and amount of coal being brought in. Obviously, another option would be to change to a lower-carbon (lower energy) coal. Again, you get less energy, less electricity generated and have to raise prices to continue operations. And for everyone else, electricity just gets a big price increase.
Each succeeding year under a cap-and-trade plan there are supposed to be fewer and fewer credits available to purchase and fewer given to businesses to have, use or sell. Problem is, without some sort of massive change in thermodynamics it is unlikely that you can burn X tons of coal and get less than Y tons of CO2 out of it. Nuclear in the US is probably just not an option - the Universities have spent 30-40 years training people that all things nuclear are just bad, including the so-called "nuclear family". Geothermal would be nice, except you can't build transmission lines in the US, smart, dumb or anything else - people know they cause cancer, autism and impotence and won't stand for them to be in their neighborhood. Solar is pretty safe, except it doesn't really help the US peak load time of 5-9 PM. Wind might do it, but there is that transmission line problem again.
Simple solution is to just start turning down the electricity output and if they can't rely on air conditioning, their refrigerator or their TV maybe they will move somewhere else. With fewer people in the US the 20% that are unemployed today might be able to get a job. Yes, if you count all the people of working age that aren't working it is way, way higher than the 10% "unemployment rate" the government likes to talk about - it could be more like 30% but it is at least 20%. That way we would have fewer emissions (from power plants) and fewer people driving and a lot less CO2 all across the board.
Real solutions are pretty evasive in this area, but fake solutions are easy to come up with. Cap and trade is a fake solution because, as you pointed out, it doesn't really make economic sense.
The major sources of CO2 currently are cars and power plants. The real solution isn't wind power because it isn't something that can replace base load generation, and the real solution probably isn't nuclear because it simply takes too long to build a nuclear power plant. The growth in the US has outstripped nearly all of the generation capacity there is and we are just about out of time.
The real power plant solution is probably to just start turning off coal plants. It is economically unfeasible to replace them with something that doesn't generate CO2 and any sort of cap and trade program is likely to just make electricity priced so high as to be out of reach for poor people. Add to that the costs for stores to operate would increase significantly and that is brick-and-mortar or online as both use lots of electricity.
Just turning off power plants would reduce the CO2 emissions and it would force people to think if they really want to come to the US in the first place, thereby limiting the growth. It is the growth that is destroying the infrastructure and the economy - if we had 20% fewer people than we wouldn't have 20% of the people out of work begging at the government window or your car window.
It would certainly change the perspective people have on things as well. If electricity became something unreliable and undependable you wouldn't have people buying food frozen half a continent away to store in their freezer. You would have to buy locally grown food frequently thereby further reducing CO2 emissions.
You can think of hundreds of things that would simply be better if there was restrictions on electric power availability.
One way or another, we are likely to be there soon. We aren't building lots of generating capacity and we are closing down old generating plants and decommissioning nuclear plants. At some point buying power from Canadian hydroelectric generation isn't going to help and we will certainly see widespread power management like they have in Florida and California already. In these places some people have little boxes that control their air conditioning - when the power company says it has to be off, the system is shut off. You get a discount on your bill by having such power management in areas where it is needed.
Wait until they start shutting off residential power during the day and offices at night. I don't think you have all that long to wait to see this happening.
We have a rather expensive drive that writes on special DVD media. It does not use dye - it literally punches holes in the media with a laser. This means the discs are not subject to degradation of the dye layer or thermal stress like ordinary write-once optical media.
Estimated life is 1000 years.
Check out the web page attached to this posting. Or look at the web site for Cranberry as they are using the same technology.
Flash is good for 5-10 years MAXIMUM. It is absolutely not a long term storage media.
If you are relying on flash storage for more than maybe 3 years, you are going to lose something important.
If California's law outlaws spam, then are current spammers able to insure that their messages aren't going to California? Or is it that the government isn't interested in spammers and only a few (very, very few) individuals have ever won a judgement against a spammer?
The problem is that unless you are willing to invest a significant portion of your life to the pursuit and persecution of a spammer, it is all meaningless. California's Attorney General's Office isn't going to take on spammers. A judgement won in California will have little effect in a non-US country and it may not have much effect in a different state. Want to prove what assets a spammer in Maine has from California? Good luck with that unless you are prepared to spend plenty of money.
The Internet is pretty much a consequences-free zone. Unless you are incredibly egotistical or stupid you can't be convicted of anything that happens "on the 'net." Of course, there are plenty of egotistical and stupid people stepping up to be prosecuted for crimes on the Internet every month or so. But the selling of fake drugs and scamming of people continues every single day.
stuff like "We need some younger, more active and agile people in here", then you aren't a developer over 30.
Plenty of management types have learned in other fields that all the really good stuff comes from people in their twenties. Look at Einstein: all of his major work was finished by the time he was 30. It is the same for all Physics PhDs today.
So management types think it is the same for development. Also, if you aren't moving into management then obviously you have reached your limit and can go no further than being a coder. Oh yes, most of the bosses that think like this have found that coder, programmer, analyst, developer and "software engineer" are all titles for the same person.