The problem is that for most people once you have the zero-cost digital copy you have no need for the artist or his orginal physical copy. I claim that once I have seen Avatar a couple of times I have no need to possess it. Similarly, I don't need to possess the Mona Lisa having seen it.
I don't really need to go to the concert if I have listened to the music. And I won't ever go, period. You can say that sufficient people will go to support the artist, but I seriously doubt that. In the last 50 years the concert has gone from being a place where new works are performed to being a place where the worship of the artist takes place. Very few are deserving, and very few get paid anything real for concerts. Mostly these days live performances are a draw for a bar and the band gets very little out of it, if anything at all.
Promotion is driven by revenue. There are no prospects for revenue under the new regime. I don't think people really understand the death of promotion and the number of jobs really connected with it today. Still, we are going to see the end of promotion with the end of revenue from things like music.
Software is likely to be an ever-escalating war, with the only truce being in environments where piracy simply isn't tolerated. Law enforcement, for one.
Movies? I expect most revenue and theater showings to disappear within a few years. Even Netflix is an abberation today - there is no way people are going to pay even a miniscule amount to Netflix if they can have the content for free.
The problem in the USA today isn't a lack of quality teaching and quality schools or even a lack of quality curriculum. It is an attitude that doing well in school is for social outcast nerds and to be cool you have to ignore school and learning in general.
This is popularized by the hip-hop culture as well as other aspects of the currrent pop culture.
Contrast this with Asian children that are expected - no, required - to do well in school by their parents. Who is in the top of nearly all technology-oriented university programs? Asians. Why? Because they are getting the grades and it counts. Both for just "learning stuff" and getting a job later.
We can continue with a culture that will obviously lead to a nation like Idiocracy. Or we can change things. Feel-good programs where everyone gets a prize and self-directed learning isn't going to make the kind of change that is needed.
Something you are missing is that another reason for not disclosing another country's difficulties or embarrassments is it helps nobody. Whereas if China knows that the US knows something that they would rather not have public then China "owes" the US. The exchange of such IOUs make for diplomacy.
The other part of this is that when material damaging to a country run by reasonable men is made public they shrug it off. When material damaging to a country run by unreasonable, unreasoning, irrational men becomes public they find some peasants to execute, start a war, or otherwise deflect attention from it. Many countries are today run by reasonable, reasoning men - the rest not. The real question is going to be how many "reasonable" leaders there are. My guess is that in the coming weeks we are going to find out and be short at least one.
Expect the "bumming rides" part to last only a year or so... Russia is in no position to be flying missions without massive support (meaning cash) from the USA, and we're in no position to be sending cash to Russia when China would rather us send it to them.
So I would expect the closure of the ISS before the end of Obama's first term. It will be billed as something temporary, just to get by for a short while. Until someone realizes that without a crew making adjustments that it is going to go downhill fast.
Then there will be no reason for anyone from the US to go into space any longer. Maybe the Chinese will buy it, in exchange for some debt forgiveness. We owe them more than can ever be repaid, so this would be a raindrop in an empty bucket.
Do not forget that Toyota kept extending the battery warranty to ensure that there was a resale market for the Prius. This had to cost them significantly. The problem is a Prius with a worn-out battery is worthless because the battery (still) costs more than the car is worth. So Toyota sidestepped this by extending the battery warranty several times to be something like 10 years. So you could have two owners before the car was scrapped.
Without a resale market, the Prius wouldn't be selling at all today. It might be profitable, but with a 10-year battery warranty it is going to cost Toyota at least $5000 a car in battery replacement during the life of the car. I can't imagine there is an extra $5000 in the price of the car for this. So over the life of the car, Toyota is probably still losing money on it.
Yes indeed. There is no right to secrecy or privacy any longer.
If some pimpley teenager can feel good by posting some supposedly private information, it is going to happen.
Credit card info has all sorts of titilating information in it, so I would expect it to start hitting the Internet soon. You want to see what your Congresspeople are spending money on, right? Well, the same goes for the third grade teacher in the school down the road.
There is no way out of this really. The data wasn't disclosed by some hacker that broke into a poorly secured server - it was copied by someone with the right authorization to access the data. We have all been betting that we can trust the people that work at the bank, at Google, and everywhere else to keep secret and private stuff that should be. Well, all bets are off now.
Personally I think the fallout from the current round of disclosures (and the ones coming along) are going to be (a) War and (b) the general feeling that you can't trust anyone.
I'm not sure what the worst of these two are as there have been wars before but in the end the world went back to basically trusting nations. Now, it is clear that if anything is said to the US that it cannot be trusted to remain secret for very long. In theory because of how these disclosures happened you really can't trust any country to keep secret anything.
So war might be the lesser of two evils here. And war is almost certainly going to come out of this. Reasonable people would find other ways of dealing with this, but we aren't dealing with reasonable people. Too many of the nations of the world have leaders that are clearly not reasonable.
Even worse in some ways: it is clear that in reality nobody can be trusted. These disclosures were not the result of hacking into the server. They were the result of someone deciding to destroy the foundation of trust that has existed in diplomatic circles for hundreds of years if not thousands. So how do you know that someone isn't going to get pissed off and dump the contents of a mail server from an ISP? Or GMail. Or really any other digital data store anywhere? You don't know anything like that. Your credit card records showing purchases are now fair game for someone to "disclose".
Sure, it has always been that way. But the thin veneer of trust has been removed from all interactions. If it exists, it is probably not going to be kept private much longer.
Mobi is a format that is 100% owned by Amazon, soley by Amazon and only for Amazon's benefit. It is also undocumented and trade secret.
ePub I believe is partly documented but 100% owned by Adobe and only for Adobe's benefit.
PDF is also owned by Adobe and not really documented by has been reverse-engineered sufficiently to allow competing readers and writers. Unfortunately, the form of PDF that is usable by eReaders isn't documented.
So what else is there?
ASCII text is apparently not really owned by anyone but it is difficult to implement markup and different fonts. Non-ASCII characters are another problem if you are restricted to ASCII.
How did this guy get caught? It sounds like he was bragging.
It isn't like there is an obvious way to trace this sort of attack, so if you keep your mouth shut you are home free. Of course, for this scale individual that seems to be an impossible challenge. Have to brag, have to get caught.
What you are missing is that while we can sit back and look at how enlightened we all are in the West there are certain other folks who are going to be mightily embarassed by the content of this stuff. A reasonable person might be humbled by this but in a lot of countries there are leaders that are,... well, less than reasonable.
We haven't heard Iran's response to their Islamic neighbors (of a different sect) wanting to have the Iranian nuclear program dismantled - violently. This could be the trigger that Iran needs to attack Saudi Arabia. Or Israel. Or for a revelation in a few days pushing Kim Jong Il over the edge and turning North Korea's military loose on South Korea.
In short, we don't really know what the final reaction to this stuff is going to be and it is likely that some folks aren't going to be reasonable and enlightened about it. This has potentially made the world a far more dangerous place to be living. We are promised more exciting leaks coming soon as well. Nobody knows what might come out and who it might offend to the point of them deciding to start a war over it. Reasonable men wouldn't do this, but there are a lot of countries that are not ruled by reasonable men today. And some idiot in Sweden has decided to yank their chain. Not a good move.
I would agree that the Kindle makes a really awful device for watching videos, surfing the web or just about any activity other than reading books. The display is only gray scale and it is very slow compared to a LCD monitor. I would not want to do much writing on a Kindle as the keyboard is not really suited for it.
However, that being said, the Kindle is a really fine reading device and the free web connectivity means you can go out to web sites and download free books. It is not restricted in any way to Amazon. I have had a Kindle for almost two years and have spent maybe $100 total on Amazon books while downloading hundreds of free books. Yes, I travel a lot.
PDFs are only usable after being converted with something like Caliber or being processed by the (free) Kindle service. The problem is PDF is a page description language and the Kindle displays PDF documents as they were originally formatted. You can zoom out to see a page but it is a rare PDF document that fits on the screen in a viewable size. The Kindle DX was supposed to fix this and does to some extent but the problem still exists there as well - and the DX is just too big for most ordinary uses.
The answer with PDF is to have a reader that automatically reflows the pages and use only PDF files which are designed for this sort of reflow behavior. My understanding is that this only happens with true Adobe software with Adobe DRM - which neither the Kindle or Nook has. Without this PDF documents should be converted to a format for the device for viewing. And if it doesn't convert well, it wouldn't have been readable on a Kindle or Nook anyway so forget about it.
In Chandler a number of parks had the wires to the lights removed. I guess it was pretty simple to pull the wires out from a single opening - just grab the wires, attach to pickup truck and pull.
This was probably done at night with the lights powered on.
The wire was replaced after the last time but I am just waiting for it to happen again. And Chandler police have way, way better things to do that try to catch copper thieves. Crime is big business here and we are catching some overflow from the drug smugglers and people smugglers.
Fat lot of good this does in the border states. What exactly are you going to do with a Mexican driver's license. Presumably this would have an address somewhere in Mexico on it as well.
I don't believe the Mexican police place a very high priority on assisting the arrest of copper thieves. Or pretty much anything else that might come from the US.
Copper theft is like shoplifting today - you can try to hold it down but it is always going to be there and it is just another tax on people. You can assume that if you have copper that someone will try to steal it sometime soon.
People are starving and this is a way to get a meal or two.
This should pose as a wakeup call to everyone - you clearly cannot trust governments, banks, pharamceutical companies or really anyone else. Everyone must be assumed to be untrustworthy until proven otherwise.
And the proof is often 50 years after they are dead. So the message is Trust Nobody.
The second thing is that if the government, banks and other corporations are evil and corrupt maybe we should do something about it? Boycotts are pointless but bombs, arson and executions might get somewhere. The idea would be that if you cannot trust the people with the power and money then they need to be eliminated. Maybe we can find some trustworthy people - or maybe things just need to be restructured in such a fashion so that nobody is required to be trusted any longer.
This is probably another under-30/over-30 sort of battle, but this time there might actually be enough motivation to cause a worldwide revolt against anyone with more than a couple of nickles to rub together. The current US President has presented one possible dividing line between good and evil - $250,000 - but there may a more realistic one that is much, much lower. Sadly for Mr. Obama, it would appear that he is clearly in the evil camp with earnings well above $250,000.
So? Are you ready for the revolution? Are you prepared to dedicate your life (or what is left of it) to eliminating oppression in the world by untrustworthy government and corporations? It sounds like Mr. Assange is clearly going down that road.
How about this scenario: you are sitting at a table with a large man with a heavy, large caliber semiautomatic pistol. He has acne scars, extreme BO and is easily the ugliest person you have seen that was still alive. He is emotionally unstable and is waving the gun around.
He asks you if you are think he is handsome. You have the option of telling the truth and perhaps discovering how unstable he really is or you can lie. You have five seconds to make up your mind.
See, the problem is that if you are honest to people like Mugabe you can find yourself in a grave somewhere in the jungle. Folks like this - and many of the rest of the world's leaders - are simply not interested in "honesty". They have an attitude problem a mile wide and are only interested in their opinions being confirmed by those around them. Everyone else is unimportant, especially if they don't agree with them.
Diplomacy is the art of being in the same room with a person like this and not getting shot but still conveying a viewpoint that is opposed to theirs. This isn't possible all the time but it is important to maintain contact even so.
Epoxy in the USB ports is pretty simple and relatively foolproof. Removing all optical media drives before computers are given to people is another step that is pretty common.
The idea that people should have full and complete access and the ability to copy anything to a USB device is utterly absurd these days. Most large companies have a pretty good handle on this because they have already been burned a few times or at least the things that have happened have been well discussed by HR-type people.
This has been thought of, but there are certain problems with having anything carrying the amount of power that would be required along the ground. Imagine for a moment all the cute little animal carcasses along the road where they got zapped.
Then look at the new interesting way of "defending turf" that street gangs could use with this nice way of executing folks that encroach on their territory.
The risks of having open-air high voltage and/or high current electricity are pretty high and have been resoundingly rejected.
There is a further problem that you are missing. The loads today aren't all that randomly distributed. There is pretty high industrial/office load during the day but the real peak is from 5-9 PM where people are at home and turning on appliances and such.
Add to this a load of charging electric cars and you have a real mess on your hands.
The answer that everyone seems to be gravitating towards is the obvious one - just use less. Less electricity means less coal being burned and no need for real estate being dedicated to wind farms or solar PV farms.
It might also mean that California would be a lot less popular as a destination for people, meaning that the population would shrink. Fewer people means less electricity being used.
If the economy ends up being a little worse that Mexico's this would go a long way to stopping the migration from Mexico into California, further reducing the population.
See, maybe there is a bright spot without sacrificing the environment.
The problem is that the people operating these sites are utterly beyond any civil suit. They have the freedom to operate outside of any laws because of a US government investment - the Internet. So who has the most liability here? The web site owner, the US government or China? Sounds like someone is thinking that the US government has the most liability and I would agree. By building the Internet so it can operate as a lawless zone without any meaningful regulation the US government pretty much brought us spamming, phishing and scamming and allowed it to come right into the living room.
I'd say you can have due process when there is a "process" that affects these people. There isn't any today. And this action isn't anything useful - it takes 10 minutes plus TTL to be up and running with a new domain name and that is exactly how long these sites will be down. Google probably will have a high priority re-scan for them today or tomorrow. So this action was meaningless and futile.
Unfortunately, the other side of this is that the only way today there can be something effective like "due process" on the Internet is if everyone agrees to follow the same laws. That is unlikely to happen in anyone's lifetime. When exactly do you think Sudan will agree to follow US laws on murder? Or anyone else's laws for that matter.
The truck says Bob's Petroleum Products on the side. Bob drives over to the Badger Pipeline terminal to fill up. Where in this process it is known that the crude oil came from a BP-owned well?
Sorry, the information just isn't available.
Today the other problem is that the pipeline terminal may be connected directly to a refinery that is owned and operated by BP. Therefore in that region there isn't anything but gasoline from BP, period.
Unless you want to start pedaling to the grocery store you are going to be supporting BP, one way or another. You just may not know it and if that makes you feel better, then great.
The healthcare bill was very badly thought out and has a minor side effect that will bite everyone in the ass shortly. You see, the "mandate" for companies to provide healthcare or be fined is toothless - the fine is far too small to be meaningful. So every business from WalMart and McDonalds to the neighborhood donut shop is going to pull the plug on employer-provided healthcare.
And some will have to pay a fine. Considering the fine is less than a tenth of the cost of the healthcare policies that will be required under the new requirements the fine is nothing. And WalMart has certainly figured this out in their announcement that they are stopping all healthcare coverage.
So now everyone has to go on the government subsidy plan because nobody can afford the new policies with all their requirements for coverage. But they can get them with the government helping out. This almost puts the US on a government-funded healthcare system - except it is the insurance companies that make out like bandits. And everyone else suffers because of it.
The next step that you are going to see is that there isn't enough money in the government - with or without tax increases - to pay for it all. It might have been OK if everyone had insurance from their employer still, but that is over now. So the government foots the entire bill now. Except they can't and everyone knows it already.
The end game is absolutely the "death panels" where the government has folks that decide who gets coverage and who doesn't. Obviously, the old folks on Social Security and Medicare aren't going to get much. The younger folks with jobs that bring in lots of tax dollars get all the coverage they need. The result is exactly where England is today with an underfunded NHS where people would love to just be able to pay for the care they desperately need but cannot have at any price.
There will be a lot fewer people on Social Security this way, but I doubt anyone really thought that through either.
The US military is today in an impossible position with everyone on the planet trying to second guess and Monday quarterback every action. What this leads to is soldiers not doing their job and trying to figure out how it is going to look on YouTube. End result is people that shouldn't get killed getting killed, civilian or military.
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The problem is that for most people once you have the zero-cost digital copy you have no need for the artist or his orginal physical copy. I claim that once I have seen Avatar a couple of times I have no need to possess it. Similarly, I don't need to possess the Mona Lisa having seen it.
I don't really need to go to the concert if I have listened to the music. And I won't ever go, period. You can say that sufficient people will go to support the artist, but I seriously doubt that. In the last 50 years the concert has gone from being a place where new works are performed to being a place where the worship of the artist takes place. Very few are deserving, and very few get paid anything real for concerts. Mostly these days live performances are a draw for a bar and the band gets very little out of it, if anything at all.
Promotion is driven by revenue. There are no prospects for revenue under the new regime. I don't think people really understand the death of promotion and the number of jobs really connected with it today. Still, we are going to see the end of promotion with the end of revenue from things like music.
Software is likely to be an ever-escalating war, with the only truce being in environments where piracy simply isn't tolerated. Law enforcement, for one.
Movies? I expect most revenue and theater showings to disappear within a few years. Even Netflix is an abberation today - there is no way people are going to pay even a miniscule amount to Netflix if they can have the content for free.
The problem in the USA today isn't a lack of quality teaching and quality schools or even a lack of quality curriculum. It is an attitude that doing well in school is for social outcast nerds and to be cool you have to ignore school and learning in general.
This is popularized by the hip-hop culture as well as other aspects of the currrent pop culture.
Contrast this with Asian children that are expected - no, required - to do well in school by their parents. Who is in the top of nearly all technology-oriented university programs? Asians. Why? Because they are getting the grades and it counts. Both for just "learning stuff" and getting a job later.
We can continue with a culture that will obviously lead to a nation like Idiocracy. Or we can change things. Feel-good programs where everyone gets a prize and self-directed learning isn't going to make the kind of change that is needed.
Something you are missing is that another reason for not disclosing another country's difficulties or embarrassments is it helps nobody. Whereas if China knows that the US knows something that they would rather not have public then China "owes" the US. The exchange of such IOUs make for diplomacy.
The other part of this is that when material damaging to a country run by reasonable men is made public they shrug it off. When material damaging to a country run by unreasonable, unreasoning, irrational men becomes public they find some peasants to execute, start a war, or otherwise deflect attention from it. Many countries are today run by reasonable, reasoning men - the rest not. The real question is going to be how many "reasonable" leaders there are. My guess is that in the coming weeks we are going to find out and be short at least one.
So the result may be a war.
Why would Google do anything about this? Are the sites involved using Google Ad Words? Sure they are. Google is supporting this.
Expect the "bumming rides" part to last only a year or so... Russia is in no position to be flying missions without massive support (meaning cash) from the USA, and we're in no position to be sending cash to Russia when China would rather us send it to them.
So I would expect the closure of the ISS before the end of Obama's first term. It will be billed as something temporary, just to get by for a short while. Until someone realizes that without a crew making adjustments that it is going to go downhill fast.
Then there will be no reason for anyone from the US to go into space any longer. Maybe the Chinese will buy it, in exchange for some debt forgiveness. We owe them more than can ever be repaid, so this would be a raindrop in an empty bucket.
Do not forget that Toyota kept extending the battery warranty to ensure that there was a resale market for the Prius. This had to cost them significantly. The problem is a Prius with a worn-out battery is worthless because the battery (still) costs more than the car is worth. So Toyota sidestepped this by extending the battery warranty several times to be something like 10 years. So you could have two owners before the car was scrapped.
Without a resale market, the Prius wouldn't be selling at all today. It might be profitable, but with a 10-year battery warranty it is going to cost Toyota at least $5000 a car in battery replacement during the life of the car. I can't imagine there is an extra $5000 in the price of the car for this. So over the life of the car, Toyota is probably still losing money on it.
Yes indeed. There is no right to secrecy or privacy any longer.
If some pimpley teenager can feel good by posting some supposedly private information, it is going to happen.
Credit card info has all sorts of titilating information in it, so I would expect it to start hitting the Internet soon. You want to see what your Congresspeople are spending money on, right? Well, the same goes for the third grade teacher in the school down the road.
There is no way out of this really. The data wasn't disclosed by some hacker that broke into a poorly secured server - it was copied by someone with the right authorization to access the data. We have all been betting that we can trust the people that work at the bank, at Google, and everywhere else to keep secret and private stuff that should be. Well, all bets are off now.
Personally I think the fallout from the current round of disclosures (and the ones coming along) are going to be (a) War and (b) the general feeling that you can't trust anyone.
I'm not sure what the worst of these two are as there have been wars before but in the end the world went back to basically trusting nations. Now, it is clear that if anything is said to the US that it cannot be trusted to remain secret for very long. In theory because of how these disclosures happened you really can't trust any country to keep secret anything.
So war might be the lesser of two evils here. And war is almost certainly going to come out of this. Reasonable people would find other ways of dealing with this, but we aren't dealing with reasonable people. Too many of the nations of the world have leaders that are clearly not reasonable.
Even worse in some ways: it is clear that in reality nobody can be trusted. These disclosures were not the result of hacking into the server. They were the result of someone deciding to destroy the foundation of trust that has existed in diplomatic circles for hundreds of years if not thousands. So how do you know that someone isn't going to get pissed off and dump the contents of a mail server from an ISP? Or GMail. Or really any other digital data store anywhere? You don't know anything like that. Your credit card records showing purchases are now fair game for someone to "disclose".
Sure, it has always been that way. But the thin veneer of trust has been removed from all interactions. If it exists, it is probably not going to be kept private much longer.
Mobi is a format that is 100% owned by Amazon, soley by Amazon and only for Amazon's benefit. It is also undocumented and trade secret.
ePub I believe is partly documented but 100% owned by Adobe and only for Adobe's benefit.
PDF is also owned by Adobe and not really documented by has been reverse-engineered sufficiently to allow competing readers and writers. Unfortunately, the form of PDF that is usable by eReaders isn't documented.
So what else is there?
ASCII text is apparently not really owned by anyone but it is difficult to implement markup and different fonts. Non-ASCII characters are another problem if you are restricted to ASCII.
Mobi is at least well supported.
How did this guy get caught? It sounds like he was bragging.
It isn't like there is an obvious way to trace this sort of attack, so if you keep your mouth shut you are home free. Of course, for this scale individual that seems to be an impossible challenge. Have to brag, have to get caught.
Wikileaks is ego-driven. Julian Assange is the ego behind it clearly. Is there another inflated ego ready to step in? Maybe, maybe not.
What you are missing is that while we can sit back and look at how enlightened we all are in the West there are certain other folks who are going to be mightily embarassed by the content of this stuff. A reasonable person might be humbled by this but in a lot of countries there are leaders that are, ... well, less than reasonable.
We haven't heard Iran's response to their Islamic neighbors (of a different sect) wanting to have the Iranian nuclear program dismantled - violently. This could be the trigger that Iran needs to attack Saudi Arabia. Or Israel. Or for a revelation in a few days pushing Kim Jong Il over the edge and turning North Korea's military loose on South Korea.
In short, we don't really know what the final reaction to this stuff is going to be and it is likely that some folks aren't going to be reasonable and enlightened about it. This has potentially made the world a far more dangerous place to be living. We are promised more exciting leaks coming soon as well. Nobody knows what might come out and who it might offend to the point of them deciding to start a war over it. Reasonable men wouldn't do this, but there are a lot of countries that are not ruled by reasonable men today. And some idiot in Sweden has decided to yank their chain. Not a good move.
I would agree that the Kindle makes a really awful device for watching videos, surfing the web or just about any activity other than reading books. The display is only gray scale and it is very slow compared to a LCD monitor. I would not want to do much writing on a Kindle as the keyboard is not really suited for it.
However, that being said, the Kindle is a really fine reading device and the free web connectivity means you can go out to web sites and download free books. It is not restricted in any way to Amazon. I have had a Kindle for almost two years and have spent maybe $100 total on Amazon books while downloading hundreds of free books. Yes, I travel a lot.
PDFs are only usable after being converted with something like Caliber or being processed by the (free) Kindle service. The problem is PDF is a page description language and the Kindle displays PDF documents as they were originally formatted. You can zoom out to see a page but it is a rare PDF document that fits on the screen in a viewable size. The Kindle DX was supposed to fix this and does to some extent but the problem still exists there as well - and the DX is just too big for most ordinary uses.
The answer with PDF is to have a reader that automatically reflows the pages and use only PDF files which are designed for this sort of reflow behavior. My understanding is that this only happens with true Adobe software with Adobe DRM - which neither the Kindle or Nook has. Without this PDF documents should be converted to a format for the device for viewing. And if it doesn't convert well, it wouldn't have been readable on a Kindle or Nook anyway so forget about it.
In Chandler a number of parks had the wires to the lights removed. I guess it was pretty simple to pull the wires out from a single opening - just grab the wires, attach to pickup truck and pull.
This was probably done at night with the lights powered on.
The wire was replaced after the last time but I am just waiting for it to happen again. And Chandler police have way, way better things to do that try to catch copper thieves. Crime is big business here and we are catching some overflow from the drug smugglers and people smugglers.
Fat lot of good this does in the border states. What exactly are you going to do with a Mexican driver's license. Presumably this would have an address somewhere in Mexico on it as well.
I don't believe the Mexican police place a very high priority on assisting the arrest of copper thieves. Or pretty much anything else that might come from the US.
Copper theft is like shoplifting today - you can try to hold it down but it is always going to be there and it is just another tax on people. You can assume that if you have copper that someone will try to steal it sometime soon.
People are starving and this is a way to get a meal or two.
This should pose as a wakeup call to everyone - you clearly cannot trust governments, banks, pharamceutical companies or really anyone else. Everyone must be assumed to be untrustworthy until proven otherwise.
And the proof is often 50 years after they are dead. So the message is Trust Nobody.
The second thing is that if the government, banks and other corporations are evil and corrupt maybe we should do something about it? Boycotts are pointless but bombs, arson and executions might get somewhere. The idea would be that if you cannot trust the people with the power and money then they need to be eliminated. Maybe we can find some trustworthy people - or maybe things just need to be restructured in such a fashion so that nobody is required to be trusted any longer.
This is probably another under-30/over-30 sort of battle, but this time there might actually be enough motivation to cause a worldwide revolt against anyone with more than a couple of nickles to rub together. The current US President has presented one possible dividing line between good and evil - $250,000 - but there may a more realistic one that is much, much lower. Sadly for Mr. Obama, it would appear that he is clearly in the evil camp with earnings well above $250,000.
So? Are you ready for the revolution? Are you prepared to dedicate your life (or what is left of it) to eliminating oppression in the world by untrustworthy government and corporations? It sounds like Mr. Assange is clearly going down that road.
You have a rather funny idea about people.
How about this scenario: you are sitting at a table with a large man with a heavy, large caliber semiautomatic pistol. He has acne scars, extreme BO and is easily the ugliest person you have seen that was still alive. He is emotionally unstable and is waving the gun around.
He asks you if you are think he is handsome. You have the option of telling the truth and perhaps discovering how unstable he really is or you can lie. You have five seconds to make up your mind.
See, the problem is that if you are honest to people like Mugabe you can find yourself in a grave somewhere in the jungle. Folks like this - and many of the rest of the world's leaders - are simply not interested in "honesty". They have an attitude problem a mile wide and are only interested in their opinions being confirmed by those around them. Everyone else is unimportant, especially if they don't agree with them.
Diplomacy is the art of being in the same room with a person like this and not getting shot but still conveying a viewpoint that is opposed to theirs. This isn't possible all the time but it is important to maintain contact even so.
Epoxy in the USB ports is pretty simple and relatively foolproof. Removing all optical media drives before computers are given to people is another step that is pretty common.
The idea that people should have full and complete access and the ability to copy anything to a USB device is utterly absurd these days. Most large companies have a pretty good handle on this because they have already been burned a few times or at least the things that have happened have been well discussed by HR-type people.
This has been thought of, but there are certain problems with having anything carrying the amount of power that would be required along the ground. Imagine for a moment all the cute little animal carcasses along the road where they got zapped.
Then look at the new interesting way of "defending turf" that street gangs could use with this nice way of executing folks that encroach on their territory.
The risks of having open-air high voltage and/or high current electricity are pretty high and have been resoundingly rejected.
There is a further problem that you are missing. The loads today aren't all that randomly distributed. There is pretty high industrial/office load during the day but the real peak is from 5-9 PM where people are at home and turning on appliances and such.
Add to this a load of charging electric cars and you have a real mess on your hands.
The answer that everyone seems to be gravitating towards is the obvious one - just use less. Less electricity means less coal being burned and no need for real estate being dedicated to wind farms or solar PV farms.
It might also mean that California would be a lot less popular as a destination for people, meaning that the population would shrink. Fewer people means less electricity being used.
If the economy ends up being a little worse that Mexico's this would go a long way to stopping the migration from Mexico into California, further reducing the population.
See, maybe there is a bright spot without sacrificing the environment.
The problem is that the people operating these sites are utterly beyond any civil suit. They have the freedom to operate outside of any laws because of a US government investment - the Internet. So who has the most liability here? The web site owner, the US government or China? Sounds like someone is thinking that the US government has the most liability and I would agree. By building the Internet so it can operate as a lawless zone without any meaningful regulation the US government pretty much brought us spamming, phishing and scamming and allowed it to come right into the living room.
I'd say you can have due process when there is a "process" that affects these people. There isn't any today. And this action isn't anything useful - it takes 10 minutes plus TTL to be up and running with a new domain name and that is exactly how long these sites will be down. Google probably will have a high priority re-scan for them today or tomorrow. So this action was meaningless and futile.
Unfortunately, the other side of this is that the only way today there can be something effective like "due process" on the Internet is if everyone agrees to follow the same laws. That is unlikely to happen in anyone's lifetime. When exactly do you think Sudan will agree to follow US laws on murder? Or anyone else's laws for that matter.
How would you know?
The truck says Bob's Petroleum Products on the side. Bob drives over to the Badger Pipeline terminal to fill up. Where in this process it is known that the crude oil came from a BP-owned well?
Sorry, the information just isn't available.
Today the other problem is that the pipeline terminal may be connected directly to a refinery that is owned and operated by BP. Therefore in that region there isn't anything but gasoline from BP, period.
Unless you want to start pedaling to the grocery store you are going to be supporting BP, one way or another. You just may not know it and if that makes you feel better, then great.
The healthcare bill was very badly thought out and has a minor side effect that will bite everyone in the ass shortly. You see, the "mandate" for companies to provide healthcare or be fined is toothless - the fine is far too small to be meaningful. So every business from WalMart and McDonalds to the neighborhood donut shop is going to pull the plug on employer-provided healthcare.
And some will have to pay a fine. Considering the fine is less than a tenth of the cost of the healthcare policies that will be required under the new requirements the fine is nothing. And WalMart has certainly figured this out in their announcement that they are stopping all healthcare coverage.
So now everyone has to go on the government subsidy plan because nobody can afford the new policies with all their requirements for coverage. But they can get them with the government helping out. This almost puts the US on a government-funded healthcare system - except it is the insurance companies that make out like bandits. And everyone else suffers because of it.
The next step that you are going to see is that there isn't enough money in the government - with or without tax increases - to pay for it all. It might have been OK if everyone had insurance from their employer still, but that is over now. So the government foots the entire bill now. Except they can't and everyone knows it already.
The end game is absolutely the "death panels" where the government has folks that decide who gets coverage and who doesn't. Obviously, the old folks on Social Security and Medicare aren't going to get much. The younger folks with jobs that bring in lots of tax dollars get all the coverage they need. The result is exactly where England is today with an underfunded NHS where people would love to just be able to pay for the care they desperately need but cannot have at any price.
There will be a lot fewer people on Social Security this way, but I doubt anyone really thought that through either.
The US military is today in an impossible position with everyone on the planet trying to second guess and Monday quarterback every action. What this leads to is soldiers not doing their job and trying to figure out how it is going to look on YouTube. End result is people that shouldn't get killed getting killed, civilian or military.