It is currently frowned upon to post items on Ebay for sale that are illegal to sell (or even display) in France and Germany. Specifically, Nazi memorabilia. Pretty much so that any such auction is immediately terminated by Ebay administrators. Why? Is the sale of such items illegal in the US?
The same thing is likely to happen with YouTube. Videos that purport to be "Islamic training" will simply disappear within a few minutes of being posted. No government involvement, nothing legal being done at all. The videos aren't illegal in the US but they aren't really a good idea.
What about freedom of speech? Well, as some folks have pointed out it is currently illegal to post videos of a 12 year old getting her introduction into sex. Not just against the YouTube terms of service but actively illegal. I believe it is legal to post instructions on making nitroglycerin but instructing people where to place quantities of it is illegal.
The folks behind these sorts of videos aren't just telling people how to make bombs but are also offering suggestions on what to do with them after they are made. And what to do should they get their hands on a gun, like Nidal Malik did. Mr. Malik followed instructions very well, wouldn't you say?
With this in mind, there may actually be some grounds for the US to say the content of these videos is illegal. Unfortunately, the posters of these videos aren't in the US so arresting them is going to be difficult. Probably a moot point anyway. YouTube is going just make them disappear.
Today when you walk into a retail store you can pretty much be assured that if there are 20 other people in the store that one of them is there to steal something. Large stores try for 3% shrinkage and some achieve it - others are experiencing as much as 5%. That is 5% of total inventory. You might guess that a $20 DVD is easier to steal than a $2000 big-screen TV.
So stores employ security guards and put in surveillance systems to try to stop people from stealing. It doesn't work all that well and people are offended by being treated as if they are there to steal. But as many as 10% of the customers walking in the store are there to steal.
Do some searching and you will discover that when a movie is released there are "cam" versions of it available for download the very first day. In multiple languages. This means that the first day the movie came out there were multiple people taping the movie. It is now a fact of life that this happens. The theaters are pretty much on the verge of realizing they are utterly obsolete and like drive-in movie theaters of the past, the land is worth more than the theater is.
While a "cam" is certainly the worst possible way to watch a movie, it is the alternative of choice because it is first - you can't download the DVD for months after the release in the theater. Theaters are participating in their own destruction with every "cam" release on the Internet and they understand this. Like the store security guards, cameras and security systems this is an ineffectual attempt at staying in business. Stores cannot exist with a 5% shrinkage rate - or more bluntly if 5% of the store's inventory value is stolen the store will simply close.
Amazon probably doesn't have 5% shrinkage. Best Buy is trying for 3% and achieving it in a lot of stores.
I rarely go to movies with more than 20 people in the whole theater. Theaters can't continue to exist like that and will absolutely be closing. I think I would be surprised if there is a single one left in the US in 10 years.
Yes, anyone adhereing to a strict waterfall model today is probably being silly.
If you are doing internal-only development you can get away with constant change. When there are real outside users there is real, external documentation and marketing materials. There is a real date for a product launch, and things have to be stable for it.
Marketing materials need to be prepared and printed. If they take a bunch of screen shots and sent stuff to the printer Marketing will not be happy with the announcement that those are the "old" screens and the "new" ones are much better now.
An really funny scenario is some marketing type is going to give a demo of the product to some big customers (prospects, really) and no longer understands how the "new" product works after the latest round of changes.
Yes, I have seen that happen. The result is there are some new developers working on the product and the launch is delayed. Sometimes for a year. Sometimes the original developers have a hard time finding a new job.
Change is good, stability is good. The intersection of these two is really great. Anything that is too far away from the intersection tends to be bad, especially at the outer edges of either.
Yes, but be assured Google is also collecting information to be sold to companies about the habits and interests of people. What do you think a large grocery chain might pay for historical data indicating food items being searched for? Or what receipes are being searched for, indicating what food items people will probably be buying soon? From there they can tailor their special offers and drive people to their stores and away from the competition.
Pretty much any large to huge retailer has to be doing this kind of research and Google makes it a whole lot easier to get the data. I am sure Google is packaging it up and selling it in a nice bundle on a subscription plan as well.
You know, they just recently got a whole bunch of data on geographic distribution of wireless router brands. Do you think DLink and Netgear are interested in that sort of data?
Remember when Microsoft had Windows 95 searching for various applications and reporting back with the Windows registration what they found? Trust me, this wasn't the first instance of that sort of data collection for marketing purposes. Nor was it the last. Google has a huge data store of this sort of information and I am sure they are selling it.
If you can't point to a physical object (like cash) that was physically taken, then nobody has any right complaining. There is no "crime" because crime exists only in a physical space.
Right?
I keep hearing that justification. Someone is foolish and loses control of their bank account password. Someone else comes along and makes use of this information. The bank, having no idea who is defrauding whom, assumes their customer must be trying to pull a fast one and just tells them that it is too bad, they lost.
Because of course the alternative is that I will just run down to my bank and tell them someone broke into my account and stole that $10,000 that seems to be missing. Who knows? Maybe they will replace it. Unlikely, from where I am sitting but who knows?
Anyway, the idea that you can lose something important in a non-physical space really hasn't sunk in to everyone yet. Or even most people on the planet. So why is it a crime to steal money from someone on the street but not when you steal money from them online? Part of the problem is that the victim has to be complicit in the act of losing their money online in most cases. That immediately wipes out most law enforcement respect. It is like a naked woman being raped in a bar. If she is still naked when the cops arrive the chances of anyone being charged with rape is about zero.
As far as non-money crimes actually being crimes isn't this the site where unauthorized copyright infringement is routinely treated as a non-problem? Why do you think anyone else is going to respect your problems online? This is again a basic disconnect that a lot of people (the majority today) have with things that happen online vs. physical space.
A huge problem with the Kindle in China is that it does not handle Unicode. There are no Unicode fonts on the device. And all of the font hacks have been disabled with the latest software.
So, as long as they are reading in English the Kindle is fine. Non-English? Well, that language they speak in the UK is probably OK. Italian probably works mostly. Maybe French. But Cyrillic is a no-go. As is Japanese and Chinese.
Web pages aren't going to display very well that way in China.
The web advertising model isn't very profitable, unless you are in control of the advertising like Google is. Google makes billions because they are skimming off a percentage every time an ad is shown on a web page. Then they get a cut when someone clicks on an ad, as if that ever happens.
I believe most web advertising pays only when someone clicks on an ad, so the web site gets nothing except a pay-per-click. Which is almost zero.
Now, if you are big enough, you can handle your own advertising. Except Google has a huge advantage being the one-stop-shop for web advertising everywhere. Why would anyone advertise with anyone except Google? Unless it was for sites that Google specifically rejects like kiddie porn. And Republicans.
What might happen is a lot of people get together to aggregate their web advertising and subscriptions so that instead of trying to get people to pay $0.001 to read something they can instead pay $1 to read a bunch of different things.
If you look at this carefully, you discover that this "aggregation" is what a Media Company is.
Of course, there is a simpler Obama-esque model that is also possible. You have to register with the government to publish anything and the government then pays you. Everything is then free. Of course, if you write something that the current incarnation of the government doesn't like they can stop paying you. You don't have to stop publishing - that would be against freedom of the "press". Except you starve because there are no non-government jobs. And if there were, the taxes would be 100%. Maybe 110%.
But just think of the marketing intelligence value of scanning all the government email.
While it might not be all that valuable to Google's usual marketing intelligence customers, it would open up whole new markets to Greenpeace, Sierra Club and North Korea.
What you are missing is the contract is almost certainly not being awarded to Microsoft. Microsoft is probably not even a bidder.
There are hundreds of government suppliers that are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners that will be bidding. What Google seems to have wanted was to get into the RFQ process - the bid solicitation - so that the specifications did not describe a Microsoft solution. Similarly, it sounds like this actually specified a Microsoft solution, so Google has nowhere to go with this.
It isn't that there is only a single bidder - there will be hundreds of suppliers bidding on it. It is just that all the suppliers will be using the same basic solution with their consulting services and such added on.
The only fix is to get China to have some decent labor laws. The best way to do that is add a large tarif for any goods coming into the US from a country that doesn't meet our basic federal laws.
The US is legally prevented from doing anything to China with tariffs. The WTO prevents it. Clinton signed this for some reason with no thought whatsoever what the consequences might be. We are living with those consequences today.
Bush tried adding tariffs on European steel and we saw how that worked. It isn't going to happen with China, ever.
Oh, and we signed a MFN deal with them which precludes tariffs as well.
Pretty much the same difference as walking out your front door to pick up a newspaper while nude and being featured on the E! Channel nude. Or MTV. Or Fox News.
The first situation is one where if a very few neighbors aren't looking nobody sees anything, the second potentially everyone on the planet is watching. What Google has done with Street View is put everything in everyone's face all the time.
Do a search on YouTube for "street view". A lot of the early hits are Google-created but there are millions of matches. Mostly people with something to point out that they found on Street View for their 2.5 seconds of fame. So anything that is picked up by Google's cameras is likely to be immortalized forever. Check out what you get from "street view naked" and it might be clearer to you.
So whatever is caught is going to be seen by people with nothing better to do that search for the titilating. They are going to find it and preserve it. So that means if a kid is observed peeing in the bushes at 6 years of age his children are going to have it presented to them 20-30 years later.
Sure, someone might have taken such a picture before but it is extremely unlikely they would have shared it very widely. Now it is shared with the planet. And it is forever. So imagine coming in to work and finding everyone in the office snickering over some picture which turns out to be a very embarrassing picture from your childhood. With Street View this idea just got about 1,000 times more likely.
I cannot believe that violating an internal privacy policy is actionable in any way. Perhaps they need to change their policy, but the fact is the policy is something the organization came up with and posted. It is not any binding agreement on the organization with their users.
Anyone that believes there are laws against disclosing information to advertisers needs to have a better understanding of how advertising on the Internet works.
The US isn't fighting an abstract concept. As much as they hate it, the real enemy is Islam. Except they can't admit it and will never do so.
The US has been fighting this since at least the early 1920s in the Phillipines and it really hasn't let up any. There has been a particular focus since 1948 with Israel in that part of the world, but we are seeing a general transformation in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
At some point, someone with nuclear weapons on the Islamic side is going to say enough is enough. It is really in everyone's best interest for the US to stay friendly with Pakistan, now isn't it? However, their interests are not the same as those of the US and at some point they are going to have to go after Israel.
I suppose the US has a way out of all of this - relocate the state of Israel to somewhere in Montana and cease all commerce with the Middle East. That would remove all those heathen McDonalds and Pizza Huts that are destroying the Arab culture. I don't see that happening.
Sure, it is a war, but it is a war that the US cannot admit is a war. It has to be a "global war on terror" rather than "my religion is right, yours is wrong", even though that is what it is going to come down to in the end. I don't see a war breaking out over stoning women or polygamy but religion has been the source of many, many wars.
I understand the #1 name for baby boys in England is Mohammed. Sounds like when the pushing and shoving comes along it is clear where the EU countries are going to be.
The problem that a lot of people seem to be missing is that the Chinese control the US 100% - up until the point where we say they do not. The US has two solutions: devalue the currency such that the debt is worthless and probably pointless as it could be paid off by anyone, or simply repudiate the debt, saying we don't owe it anymore.
There is no "international court" that would rap the US on the hand to say "No, no, you have to pay." If the President were to declare the debt null and void the US would take a big hit worldwide in terms of credit but the Chinese would be left holding the bag. A worthless bag.
Their solution would be to crash the economy first and be holding all the natural resource cards or at least as many as they could grab. They are doing the latter today with holding rare earth metals and making exclusive deals in Africa and South America. At some point they control enough resources that no matter what the rest of the world has to do their bidding.
I'm betting that isn't allowed to happen.
Sure, they don't want to crash Wall Street. It would, however, be in their interest to trigger "unrest" in the US in the form of riots over food, electricity and heat.
Yes, but the fact of the matter is that young people aren't going to be consumers of anything else except free on the Internet. If it isn't free piracy will make it free. Period, end of story.
Nobody is going to pay anymore.
The cable TV model, or really any subscription model, assumes that the content isn't available anywhere else. Well, today it is - one person subscribes, records the shows and posts them for the planet to consume for free. Why would anyone put that much effort into this process? Because in many cases they are committed to the idea of piracy destroying the revenue model that the planet operates on.
Think about it. When the only business model that younger people can envision involves giving away everything and hoping for donations the idea of getting paid for anything anymore is likely to go by the wayside. Today, we have paywalls and subscriptions as well as content being sold in stores and online. Tomorrow, or at least in the near future none of these are going to work, mostly because the consumers aren't going to go along with their side of the bargain. They will not pay because they don't have to and we are pretty much convinced that no power on Earth can make them pay.
The binary liquid explosive that triggered the liquids/gels ban is Hydrogen Peroxide and Hydrazine. Mix them and you get something between a boom and a fire that can't be put out.
The one I am waiting for is to have two people each drink one of these liquids and then vomit them up inside the aircraft. There is no way with US procedures that this would be detected.
I don't know about hydrazine, but hydrogen peroxide is going to test very, very much like water. Fizzy water, maybe.
I want to get the pricing on purchasing the geographicly broken down list of WiFi routers in the US. Now that this information is available, I am sure it is for sale.
So then we can see if Belkin, DLink or Netgear has a bigger presence in Tampa, FL.
Why would anyone want this data? Well, it might come in handy if you have found a backdoor into DLink routers. Or, if you are associated with a retailer that is about to offer a big discount on Netgear routers only to find out that they aren't very popular in your particular part of the world.
I guess the next question should be what else Google might have for sale now?
I cannot believe there is a real requirement for English anymore - it would be divisive and against the overall policy of diversity. OK, maybe they make you receite an oath in English, but that is probably about it.
Some states have adopted official languages, but the Federal government has not. Therefore, I am pretty sure it is illegal to produce ballots only in English. This is one of the justifications for electronic voting machines as it is extremely impractical to produce ballots in Urdu and Farsi only to use three or four of them.
Mostly, I agree that the publisher/retainer ability to remove content is a capability that would be hard to make impossible but should not be used.
My understanding is that Amazon has done this twice, with one of the cases being pretty understandable. The ebook that was deleted was misrepresented to Amazon and at least in theory, Amazon was on the hook for some very large penalties to the rightsholder if they did not remove the book.
I am not really familiar with the other case where purchased materials were deleted from Kindles.
I would also agree that removing material from a lost or stolen Kindle would be very nice. Amazon has the ability to do this but they do not. They also have the ability to disable a lost or stolen Kindle and they do not. In fact, they probably have a good way of finding (within the limits of cell tower triangulation) a lost or stolen Kindle and they do not. It is not clear to me that they will even assist users in the case where a lost or stolen Kindle is used to purchase books for the new possessor - from the account of the original owner.
The scarce resource isn't the "information", it is the human effort of creating and the further human effort of editing and proofreading. Without editing and proofreading all you have is the worst sort of vanity press. This can be seen easily on fanfic web sites today. People motivated to write but in general haven't the skill to be published. And without editing and proofreading reading what is there is very, very painful.
Yes, a popular idea is patronage today. One person pays Stephen King a million dollars for him to write a book and nobody ever pays again. Right? Except what you get is a library full of books whose content is dictated by a few patrons. This is exactly what happened with music and opera patronage. You can argue that today's concept of Classical music wouldn't have ever come about except for that, but you can also argue that it was a utterly hidebound and rigid structure that prevented much real change in musical arts for centuries.
Why would anyone need to do this? An Amazon "account" is defined by the credit card - if the credit card is up to date and the email address points somewhere useful the account is "active". The concept of ownership of the account is meaningless because there is no real property right of the account itself.
OK, IANL and all that, but if your daughter has the password then she can continue using the account.
I, my wife and daughter all have Kindles under a single account. She has the password and would be fully capable of continuing to use the account after my death.
Well, one of the problems they are trying to solve is how to allow blind people to vote unassisted. With a piece of paper it is pretty much impossible.
How about making voting possible for each one of the 100+ languages that are spoken in the US today? It isn't just some wiseass walking up and asking for a ballot in Klingon. Lots of places that do not have "offical language" laws on the books are required to supply materials in the language spoken by the voter, not just some short list of common languages. It is impractical to print a lot of ballots on Urdu, for example, even when the community is known to have Urdu-speakers in it.
Some of the effects of trying to emphasize a multicultural society are just beginning to come home to roost.
The "Florida" problem of trying to interpret a ballot to judge intent is also possible with paper ballots, no matter how they are processed. It just doesn't happen with an electronic system.
Sure, it might seem that fraud is easier. But once the box of ballots leaves in a car nobody really knows what happens anyway - often they are just lost, even today. The biggest problem is speed of results - if official results are not available when the news programs want to announce results they will just make stuff up from exit polls and the like. This is why CBS News announced Al Gore the winner in 2000 around Midnight Eastern time when it was only after around 2:00 AM or so that the real results were in that he was not the clear winner.
There is no law on the Internet, except the "Law of the Internet".
The Law of the Internet is simple: you can get away with anything as long as you don't brag about it. Oh, and if you piss someone off you may face unimaginable consequences.
So, there are two lessons from this:
Don't brag about your exploits as you will be punished if you do.
Don't piss people off that are motivated to punish you.
The thing to realize about point 2 is that you are always going to piss people off. It is unavoidable if you have any interaction on the Internet. Posting a picture of your dog on Facebook will piss people off that hate dogs. Posting a picture of a cat on Facebook will piss people off that hate cats. There is no escape from this. All you can hope is that the pissed-off person has better things to do than make your life hell.
There is nothing "sustainable" about 6 billion people on the planet. The sooner the Greens come out of the closet on that the better. The problem is that the solution is pretty unpalatable to the majority of the human race.
Unfortunately, the Greens (and everyone else) wants to dance around the problem and pretend there is some other solution that will enable 6 billion (or more) people to live on the planet in perfect ecological harmony. Sorry, not even if we all live like Bangladeshi farmers. Turning the Western world into a third-world country doesn't fix the problem and doesn't help in the least the really long-term problems of energy use and human waste.
The real answer is for the teeming billions not to be confined to a single planet. The more immediate answer is to enable resources to be gathered from off-planet. Without any of this, the only answer is a much smaller population.
Of course, lying about it is much sweeter and far more interesting to people. It also can make Al Gore richer. But it has as much relation to reality as The Wizard of Oz.
Slashdot Mirror
It is currently frowned upon to post items on Ebay for sale that are illegal to sell (or even display) in France and Germany. Specifically, Nazi memorabilia. Pretty much so that any such auction is immediately terminated by Ebay administrators. Why? Is the sale of such items illegal in the US?
The same thing is likely to happen with YouTube. Videos that purport to be "Islamic training" will simply disappear within a few minutes of being posted. No government involvement, nothing legal being done at all. The videos aren't illegal in the US but they aren't really a good idea.
What about freedom of speech? Well, as some folks have pointed out it is currently illegal to post videos of a 12 year old getting her introduction into sex. Not just against the YouTube terms of service but actively illegal. I believe it is legal to post instructions on making nitroglycerin but instructing people where to place quantities of it is illegal.
The folks behind these sorts of videos aren't just telling people how to make bombs but are also offering suggestions on what to do with them after they are made. And what to do should they get their hands on a gun, like Nidal Malik did. Mr. Malik followed instructions very well, wouldn't you say?
With this in mind, there may actually be some grounds for the US to say the content of these videos is illegal. Unfortunately, the posters of these videos aren't in the US so arresting them is going to be difficult. Probably a moot point anyway. YouTube is going just make them disappear.
Today when you walk into a retail store you can pretty much be assured that if there are 20 other people in the store that one of them is there to steal something. Large stores try for 3% shrinkage and some achieve it - others are experiencing as much as 5%. That is 5% of total inventory. You might guess that a $20 DVD is easier to steal than a $2000 big-screen TV.
So stores employ security guards and put in surveillance systems to try to stop people from stealing. It doesn't work all that well and people are offended by being treated as if they are there to steal. But as many as 10% of the customers walking in the store are there to steal.
Do some searching and you will discover that when a movie is released there are "cam" versions of it available for download the very first day. In multiple languages. This means that the first day the movie came out there were multiple people taping the movie. It is now a fact of life that this happens. The theaters are pretty much on the verge of realizing they are utterly obsolete and like drive-in movie theaters of the past, the land is worth more than the theater is.
While a "cam" is certainly the worst possible way to watch a movie, it is the alternative of choice because it is first - you can't download the DVD for months after the release in the theater. Theaters are participating in their own destruction with every "cam" release on the Internet and they understand this. Like the store security guards, cameras and security systems this is an ineffectual attempt at staying in business. Stores cannot exist with a 5% shrinkage rate - or more bluntly if 5% of the store's inventory value is stolen the store will simply close.
Amazon probably doesn't have 5% shrinkage. Best Buy is trying for 3% and achieving it in a lot of stores.
I rarely go to movies with more than 20 people in the whole theater. Theaters can't continue to exist like that and will absolutely be closing. I think I would be surprised if there is a single one left in the US in 10 years.
Yes, anyone adhereing to a strict waterfall model today is probably being silly.
If you are doing internal-only development you can get away with constant change. When there are real outside users there is real, external documentation and marketing materials. There is a real date for a product launch, and things have to be stable for it.
Marketing materials need to be prepared and printed. If they take a bunch of screen shots and sent stuff to the printer Marketing will not be happy with the announcement that those are the "old" screens and the "new" ones are much better now.
An really funny scenario is some marketing type is going to give a demo of the product to some big customers (prospects, really) and no longer understands how the "new" product works after the latest round of changes.
Yes, I have seen that happen. The result is there are some new developers working on the product and the launch is delayed. Sometimes for a year. Sometimes the original developers have a hard time finding a new job.
Change is good, stability is good. The intersection of these two is really great. Anything that is too far away from the intersection tends to be bad, especially at the outer edges of either.
Yes, but be assured Google is also collecting information to be sold to companies about the habits and interests of people. What do you think a large grocery chain might pay for historical data indicating food items being searched for? Or what receipes are being searched for, indicating what food items people will probably be buying soon? From there they can tailor their special offers and drive people to their stores and away from the competition.
Pretty much any large to huge retailer has to be doing this kind of research and Google makes it a whole lot easier to get the data. I am sure Google is packaging it up and selling it in a nice bundle on a subscription plan as well.
You know, they just recently got a whole bunch of data on geographic distribution of wireless router brands. Do you think DLink and Netgear are interested in that sort of data?
Remember when Microsoft had Windows 95 searching for various applications and reporting back with the Windows registration what they found? Trust me, this wasn't the first instance of that sort of data collection for marketing purposes. Nor was it the last. Google has a huge data store of this sort of information and I am sure they are selling it.
If you can't point to a physical object (like cash) that was physically taken, then nobody has any right complaining. There is no "crime" because crime exists only in a physical space.
Right?
I keep hearing that justification. Someone is foolish and loses control of their bank account password. Someone else comes along and makes use of this information. The bank, having no idea who is defrauding whom, assumes their customer must be trying to pull a fast one and just tells them that it is too bad, they lost.
Because of course the alternative is that I will just run down to my bank and tell them someone broke into my account and stole that $10,000 that seems to be missing. Who knows? Maybe they will replace it. Unlikely, from where I am sitting but who knows?
Anyway, the idea that you can lose something important in a non-physical space really hasn't sunk in to everyone yet. Or even most people on the planet. So why is it a crime to steal money from someone on the street but not when you steal money from them online? Part of the problem is that the victim has to be complicit in the act of losing their money online in most cases. That immediately wipes out most law enforcement respect. It is like a naked woman being raped in a bar. If she is still naked when the cops arrive the chances of anyone being charged with rape is about zero.
As far as non-money crimes actually being crimes isn't this the site where unauthorized copyright infringement is routinely treated as a non-problem? Why do you think anyone else is going to respect your problems online? This is again a basic disconnect that a lot of people (the majority today) have with things that happen online vs. physical space.
A huge problem with the Kindle in China is that it does not handle Unicode. There are no Unicode fonts on the device. And all of the font hacks have been disabled with the latest software.
So, as long as they are reading in English the Kindle is fine. Non-English? Well, that language they speak in the UK is probably OK. Italian probably works mostly. Maybe French. But Cyrillic is a no-go. As is Japanese and Chinese.
Web pages aren't going to display very well that way in China.
The web advertising model isn't very profitable, unless you are in control of the advertising like Google is. Google makes billions because they are skimming off a percentage every time an ad is shown on a web page. Then they get a cut when someone clicks on an ad, as if that ever happens.
I believe most web advertising pays only when someone clicks on an ad, so the web site gets nothing except a pay-per-click. Which is almost zero.
Now, if you are big enough, you can handle your own advertising. Except Google has a huge advantage being the one-stop-shop for web advertising everywhere. Why would anyone advertise with anyone except Google? Unless it was for sites that Google specifically rejects like kiddie porn. And Republicans.
What might happen is a lot of people get together to aggregate their web advertising and subscriptions so that instead of trying to get people to pay $0.001 to read something they can instead pay $1 to read a bunch of different things.
If you look at this carefully, you discover that this "aggregation" is what a Media Company is.
Of course, there is a simpler Obama-esque model that is also possible. You have to register with the government to publish anything and the government then pays you. Everything is then free. Of course, if you write something that the current incarnation of the government doesn't like they can stop paying you. You don't have to stop publishing - that would be against freedom of the "press". Except you starve because there are no non-government jobs. And if there were, the taxes would be 100%. Maybe 110%.
But just think of the marketing intelligence value of scanning all the government email.
While it might not be all that valuable to Google's usual marketing intelligence customers, it would open up whole new markets to Greenpeace, Sierra Club and North Korea.
What you are missing is the contract is almost certainly not being awarded to Microsoft. Microsoft is probably not even a bidder.
There are hundreds of government suppliers that are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners that will be bidding. What Google seems to have wanted was to get into the RFQ process - the bid solicitation - so that the specifications did not describe a Microsoft solution. Similarly, it sounds like this actually specified a Microsoft solution, so Google has nowhere to go with this.
It isn't that there is only a single bidder - there will be hundreds of suppliers bidding on it. It is just that all the suppliers will be using the same basic solution with their consulting services and such added on.
The only fix is to get China to have some decent labor laws. The best way to do that is add a large tarif for any goods coming into the US from a country that doesn't meet our basic federal laws.
The US is legally prevented from doing anything to China with tariffs. The WTO prevents it. Clinton signed this for some reason with no thought whatsoever what the consequences might be. We are living with those consequences today.
Bush tried adding tariffs on European steel and we saw how that worked. It isn't going to happen with China, ever.
Oh, and we signed a MFN deal with them which precludes tariffs as well.
Pretty much the same difference as walking out your front door to pick up a newspaper while nude and being featured on the E! Channel nude. Or MTV. Or Fox News.
The first situation is one where if a very few neighbors aren't looking nobody sees anything, the second potentially everyone on the planet is watching. What Google has done with Street View is put everything in everyone's face all the time.
Do a search on YouTube for "street view". A lot of the early hits are Google-created but there are millions of matches. Mostly people with something to point out that they found on Street View for their 2.5 seconds of fame. So anything that is picked up by Google's cameras is likely to be immortalized forever. Check out what you get from "street view naked" and it might be clearer to you.
So whatever is caught is going to be seen by people with nothing better to do that search for the titilating. They are going to find it and preserve it. So that means if a kid is observed peeing in the bushes at 6 years of age his children are going to have it presented to them 20-30 years later.
Sure, someone might have taken such a picture before but it is extremely unlikely they would have shared it very widely. Now it is shared with the planet. And it is forever. So imagine coming in to work and finding everyone in the office snickering over some picture which turns out to be a very embarrassing picture from your childhood. With Street View this idea just got about 1,000 times more likely.
I cannot believe that violating an internal privacy policy is actionable in any way. Perhaps they need to change their policy, but the fact is the policy is something the organization came up with and posted. It is not any binding agreement on the organization with their users.
Anyone that believes there are laws against disclosing information to advertisers needs to have a better understanding of how advertising on the Internet works.
The US isn't fighting an abstract concept. As much as they hate it, the real enemy is Islam. Except they can't admit it and will never do so.
The US has been fighting this since at least the early 1920s in the Phillipines and it really hasn't let up any. There has been a particular focus since 1948 with Israel in that part of the world, but we are seeing a general transformation in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
At some point, someone with nuclear weapons on the Islamic side is going to say enough is enough. It is really in everyone's best interest for the US to stay friendly with Pakistan, now isn't it? However, their interests are not the same as those of the US and at some point they are going to have to go after Israel.
I suppose the US has a way out of all of this - relocate the state of Israel to somewhere in Montana and cease all commerce with the Middle East. That would remove all those heathen McDonalds and Pizza Huts that are destroying the Arab culture. I don't see that happening.
Sure, it is a war, but it is a war that the US cannot admit is a war. It has to be a "global war on terror" rather than "my religion is right, yours is wrong", even though that is what it is going to come down to in the end. I don't see a war breaking out over stoning women or polygamy but religion has been the source of many, many wars.
I understand the #1 name for baby boys in England is Mohammed. Sounds like when the pushing and shoving comes along it is clear where the EU countries are going to be.
The problem that a lot of people seem to be missing is that the Chinese control the US 100% - up until the point where we say they do not. The US has two solutions: devalue the currency such that the debt is worthless and probably pointless as it could be paid off by anyone, or simply repudiate the debt, saying we don't owe it anymore.
There is no "international court" that would rap the US on the hand to say "No, no, you have to pay." If the President were to declare the debt null and void the US would take a big hit worldwide in terms of credit but the Chinese would be left holding the bag. A worthless bag.
Their solution would be to crash the economy first and be holding all the natural resource cards or at least as many as they could grab. They are doing the latter today with holding rare earth metals and making exclusive deals in Africa and South America. At some point they control enough resources that no matter what the rest of the world has to do their bidding.
I'm betting that isn't allowed to happen.
Sure, they don't want to crash Wall Street. It would, however, be in their interest to trigger "unrest" in the US in the form of riots over food, electricity and heat.
Yes, but the fact of the matter is that young people aren't going to be consumers of anything else except free on the Internet. If it isn't free piracy will make it free. Period, end of story.
Nobody is going to pay anymore.
The cable TV model, or really any subscription model, assumes that the content isn't available anywhere else. Well, today it is - one person subscribes, records the shows and posts them for the planet to consume for free. Why would anyone put that much effort into this process? Because in many cases they are committed to the idea of piracy destroying the revenue model that the planet operates on.
Think about it. When the only business model that younger people can envision involves giving away everything and hoping for donations the idea of getting paid for anything anymore is likely to go by the wayside. Today, we have paywalls and subscriptions as well as content being sold in stores and online. Tomorrow, or at least in the near future none of these are going to work, mostly because the consumers aren't going to go along with their side of the bargain. They will not pay because they don't have to and we are pretty much convinced that no power on Earth can make them pay.
The binary liquid explosive that triggered the liquids/gels ban is Hydrogen Peroxide and Hydrazine. Mix them and you get something between a boom and a fire that can't be put out.
The one I am waiting for is to have two people each drink one of these liquids and then vomit them up inside the aircraft. There is no way with US procedures that this would be detected.
I don't know about hydrazine, but hydrogen peroxide is going to test very, very much like water. Fizzy water, maybe.
I want to get the pricing on purchasing the geographicly broken down list of WiFi routers in the US. Now that this information is available, I am sure it is for sale.
So then we can see if Belkin, DLink or Netgear has a bigger presence in Tampa, FL.
Why would anyone want this data? Well, it might come in handy if you have found a backdoor into DLink routers. Or, if you are associated with a retailer that is about to offer a big discount on Netgear routers only to find out that they aren't very popular in your particular part of the world.
I guess the next question should be what else Google might have for sale now?
I cannot believe there is a real requirement for English anymore - it would be divisive and against the overall policy of diversity. OK, maybe they make you receite an oath in English, but that is probably about it.
Some states have adopted official languages, but the Federal government has not. Therefore, I am pretty sure it is illegal to produce ballots only in English. This is one of the justifications for electronic voting machines as it is extremely impractical to produce ballots in Urdu and Farsi only to use three or four of them.
Mostly, I agree that the publisher/retainer ability to remove content is a capability that would be hard to make impossible but should not be used.
My understanding is that Amazon has done this twice, with one of the cases being pretty understandable. The ebook that was deleted was misrepresented to Amazon and at least in theory, Amazon was on the hook for some very large penalties to the rightsholder if they did not remove the book.
I am not really familiar with the other case where purchased materials were deleted from Kindles.
I would also agree that removing material from a lost or stolen Kindle would be very nice. Amazon has the ability to do this but they do not. They also have the ability to disable a lost or stolen Kindle and they do not. In fact, they probably have a good way of finding (within the limits of cell tower triangulation) a lost or stolen Kindle and they do not. It is not clear to me that they will even assist users in the case where a lost or stolen Kindle is used to purchase books for the new possessor - from the account of the original owner.
The scarce resource isn't the "information", it is the human effort of creating and the further human effort of editing and proofreading. Without editing and proofreading all you have is the worst sort of vanity press. This can be seen easily on fanfic web sites today. People motivated to write but in general haven't the skill to be published. And without editing and proofreading reading what is there is very, very painful.
Yes, a popular idea is patronage today. One person pays Stephen King a million dollars for him to write a book and nobody ever pays again. Right? Except what you get is a library full of books whose content is dictated by a few patrons. This is exactly what happened with music and opera patronage. You can argue that today's concept of Classical music wouldn't have ever come about except for that, but you can also argue that it was a utterly hidebound and rigid structure that prevented much real change in musical arts for centuries.
We do not want that to repeat itself today.
Why would anyone need to do this? An Amazon "account" is defined by the credit card - if the credit card is up to date and the email address points somewhere useful the account is "active". The concept of ownership of the account is meaningless because there is no real property right of the account itself.
OK, IANL and all that, but if your daughter has the password then she can continue using the account.
I, my wife and daughter all have Kindles under a single account. She has the password and would be fully capable of continuing to use the account after my death.
Well, one of the problems they are trying to solve is how to allow blind people to vote unassisted. With a piece of paper it is pretty much impossible.
How about making voting possible for each one of the 100+ languages that are spoken in the US today? It isn't just some wiseass walking up and asking for a ballot in Klingon. Lots of places that do not have "offical language" laws on the books are required to supply materials in the language spoken by the voter, not just some short list of common languages. It is impractical to print a lot of ballots on Urdu, for example, even when the community is known to have Urdu-speakers in it.
Some of the effects of trying to emphasize a multicultural society are just beginning to come home to roost.
The "Florida" problem of trying to interpret a ballot to judge intent is also possible with paper ballots, no matter how they are processed. It just doesn't happen with an electronic system.
Sure, it might seem that fraud is easier. But once the box of ballots leaves in a car nobody really knows what happens anyway - often they are just lost, even today. The biggest problem is speed of results - if official results are not available when the news programs want to announce results they will just make stuff up from exit polls and the like. This is why CBS News announced Al Gore the winner in 2000 around Midnight Eastern time when it was only after around 2:00 AM or so that the real results were in that he was not the clear winner.
There is no law on the Internet, except the "Law of the Internet".
The Law of the Internet is simple: you can get away with anything as long as you don't brag about it. Oh, and if you piss someone off you may face unimaginable consequences.
So, there are two lessons from this:
Don't brag about your exploits as you will be punished if you do.
The thing to realize about point 2 is that you are always going to piss people off. It is unavoidable if you have any interaction on the Internet. Posting a picture of your dog on Facebook will piss people off that hate dogs. Posting a picture of a cat on Facebook will piss people off that hate cats. There is no escape from this. All you can hope is that the pissed-off person has better things to do than make your life hell.
There is nothing "sustainable" about 6 billion people on the planet. The sooner the Greens come out of the closet on that the better. The problem is that the solution is pretty unpalatable to the majority of the human race.
Unfortunately, the Greens (and everyone else) wants to dance around the problem and pretend there is some other solution that will enable 6 billion (or more) people to live on the planet in perfect ecological harmony. Sorry, not even if we all live like Bangladeshi farmers. Turning the Western world into a third-world country doesn't fix the problem and doesn't help in the least the really long-term problems of energy use and human waste.
The real answer is for the teeming billions not to be confined to a single planet. The more immediate answer is to enable resources to be gathered from off-planet. Without any of this, the only answer is a much smaller population.
Of course, lying about it is much sweeter and far more interesting to people. It also can make Al Gore richer. But it has as much relation to reality as The Wizard of Oz.