Sure, but how do you keep the hundreds of cell tower systems running under a power outage? Today, once their UPS dies (and none of them are required to have more than a few minutes run time), the tower is down.
Can you imagine requiring a diesel generator for every cell tower system? How about the ones installed on the tops of buildings? No, not going to happen.
The California emergency phones are radiotelephones that are competely separate from any phone system. They connect only with CHP dispatchers I believe and cannot be used in any other way.
Understand that the reason phone sevice seems to have gotten cheaper is because we are moving from heavily regulated and tariffed landline connections to far less regulated cell phone and VOIP connections.
For example, the CO for land line connections is a building filled with batteries because they are required to supply the 48 VDC uninterrupted to land line phones to ensure they are available without interruption. No such guarantee of service is present for either VOIP or cell phones. With VOIP you are at the mercy of so many things that it would be impossible to provide any guarantee of service. With cell phones when the UPS for the cell tower runs out, that tower is down until the power comes back on. No guarantees whatsoever.
Could cell phone be made to be reliable? Doubtful. To have the same type of service guarantee as for land lines every cell tower would need a diesel generator and at least one person on duty at all times. Not going to happen.
Could VOIP be made reliable? If we are talking about the cable system type of VOIP, then it could but it would require lots of equipment that today doesn't even have a UPS have full battery capability so that the network would continue to operate in the face of an extended power outage. If we are talking about Vonage or similar services the answer is that it could not be made any more reliable than the flakiest piece of equipment between the telephone and where it joins the telephone network. That is going involve far more network equipment than you would believe and not everyone is going to have an interest in keeping their entire data center up in the face of a power outage.
I think the era of reliable telephone communications is just about over. People are abandoning the reliable network in favor of unreliable alternatives in droves and there really isn't any going back.
The basic problem with the healthcare system in the US is that it is pretending to cover the poor and elderly at bargain-basement prices while everyone else is pretending to pay premium prices to cover the shortfall. Only insurance companies get in there and contract for lower prices as well.
So now we have massive cost-shifting from the poor, the elderly, and the insured towards those that supposedly can pay enough to make up the difference. Then the government announces big cuts in payments for the elderly and expects that the system will just shift more costs around.
The whole system is now operating on the basis of shifting costs around so they are hidden from view. End result is that nobody has any idea of what something costs because everyone is paying a different amount.
It is also a fact that the US healthcare system is run quite a bit differently. People that are dying and are going to die anyway get 80-90% of the healthcare spending in the US. The rest of the planet treats these people as, well, dying, and lets them die. The US fights on to the end in what many would consider is useless and pointless (but expensive) battle. As long as the US healthcare system operates this way, there is no way a government-paid healthcare-for-all-for-free system would ever work - it would cost something like 50% of the GDP of the US to do it.
In trying to implement something like this what we are likely to see happen in the US is a huge rationed healthcare nightmare where the government is trying to cut costs at every opportunity. It will be single-payer, putting everyone involved with health insurance out of a job and this transition will be handled badly - dumping a few million more people out onto the streets. We will see the government mandating lower and lower prices and because they are the only payer, they get to make the rules. We will see a lot fewer providers as doctors and clinics just close up because they can't make it on the "new plan". Expect a new phenomon where a clinic closes in the US and reopen in Mexico or on some Carribean island where they can handle only clients that pay cash. Any story you have heard about waiting for months for "elective" surgeries will be here, only it will be worse only because of the depth of the cuts and the huge population. Expect to see a new health care ID card that is given to citizens and people with a valid visa and not given to illegal immigrants - immediate savings there.
For all of the GOP talk about repeal, I think the window may have closed. A lot of promises have been made and some have been starting to be fulfilled. These can't be taken back. I think we are stuck on this road, bumpy as it may be.
The government isn't doing squat to ensure that you aren't getting shot in the back. Police? Nobody cares about them anymore because they are so incredibly overworked it is at best a 50/50 chance the police will even show up within an hour. Punishment? Sorry, we are successfully prosecuting about 20% of the criminals, and by this I mean people that do rob people at gunpoint or knifepoint.
Where we are today is a target-rich environment for criminals, especially those that use violence to get what they want. You are safe, or at least think you are safe, because in a country of 330 million people where only 10-20% of them are violent criminals there are so many people to go through that they just haven't gotten around to you.
So what is the government doing for you? Mandating that you have health insurance so you can pay for getting patched up after getting robbed? The police are not there to protect you and ensure you are not robbed - they are there to clean up after you are robbed. The police will not stop someone on the street because he "looks like a violent felon". The justice system isn't there to deter crime, it is there once again to clean up after the crime - but is only being successful about 20% of the time.
The government would be doing a far better job eliminating all the prisons and police and simply having a cash dispenser on ever street corner handing out 10s and 20s to people so they didn't both the taxpayers.
Red Hat has their software with zero motivation to make it better documented, more user friendly or more robust. Every time it fails for a commercial user it is a sales opportunity for them. This is a very perverse incentive for a software company.
Admittedly, Red Hat's software product is pretty complicated. But they could certainly do better in the user-friendly category.
Good software with reasonable documentation and few defects doesn't need a support contract. Having the support contracts fund the company nearly insures the software will be buggy and hard to use.
When you rent a safe deposit box you are given a contract for that rental. When you rent a storage locker you again get a contract that you have to sign. In both cases the contract spells out specifically when the owner can access your box or storage locker and may mention when the owner can give access to law enforcement.
Cloud storage doesn't have that sort of a relationship - there is no contract only a very flexible terms of service that they can change at any time.
UPS and FedEx also pretty much have only their terms of service. I do not believe for a moment that if FedEx was handed a subponena that they would not turn over a package to law enforcement. I suspect if they had a package that they believed contained something illegal they would call local law enforcement and just hand it over as well. I am not really sure what would happen if a cop stopped a FedEx truck and demanded access to a package that was picked up or about to be delivered. I suspect the driver would say that he couldn't make that decision and punt on it.
They do indeed need to do that in cases where the operator of the service is suspected of having a hand in the illegal operation itself. Once you have the owner of the facility being an accessory the whole service is now suspect, regardless of there perhaps being innocent bystanders using the service as well. It could be argued that there is no way to tell the difference between an innocent bystander and an account being used in furtherence of the illegal operation.
A huge difference is that when you sign up for a storage locker there is a physical document being signed in ink by a person. A contract. This contract spells out specifically what the owner of the storage facility may and may not do and will often state under what circumstances they will allow access by others.
OK, when you save stuff in some cloud backup, where is the contract? There isn't one. You get to look a some terms of service and that all. And those terms of service can be changed or revoked at any time.
So it is very simple, in the absence of a contract, what the provider of the service can do - anything they want.
The problem is that the major media outlets refuse to acknowledge the existence of other parties. They can hold a rally that 100 people show up for and no news outlet will even mention it. AP and Reuters will ignore it, even if they are handed a press release.
Is it possible to engage a third party candidate in a debate of any sort with Republican or Democratic candidates? No.
The major problem is that for the most part the parties have not managed to garner 5% of the vote and until that threshold is met they are deemed to be irrelevant. Part of the problem is they aren't going to get 5% of the vote without being publicized by the media so we have a chicken-and-egg problem.
The last time there was a realistic third party Presidential candidate was in 1992 with Ross Perot. He did get more than 15% of the vote but the party he was fronting collapsed and has no candidates any longer. So the media's belief that these candidates are irrelevant keeps getting validated.
In reality the only way out of this situation is for someone from say the Libertarian party to cross over and become the Republican candidate. If they were elected this would go a long way towards making these parties relevant. I think that is the only way they will achieve relevance. Certainly getting 3% (or less) of the vote isn't going to do it.
So what is this magical consumer router that forces users to log in? Where is the database of users held?
Oh, so there is some pre-alpha software on sourceforge that was briefly maintained in 2006 that was going to do this on Linux. That isn't useful and doesn't help.
Remember, the first qualification on having freedom in computing is being able to program. That lets out 80-90% of the people on the planet.
Sorry, but revolution went out with the end of the 1960s. Nobody in the US is going to potentially risk their cushy existence on the possibility of a revolution succeeding... especially when it is well known what will happen should it fail. Yes, it is nice to dream but the people simply do not posess the will to do anything about the current situation.
What it would take for a true revolution in the US would be people dying on national TV to bring down the system. Blowing up buildings, shooting people with deer rifles, destroying infrastructure, etc. In the 1960s there might have been 100 people in the entire country that were willing to stand up and commit violent acts in the name of revolution. Most of them either were blown up by their own crude bombs or got shot by law enforcement. When law enforcement goes up against people that want to bring down the country pretty much everything is on the table - look up Fred Hampton sometime.
After that crop of people were removed from politics, one way or another - check out Tom Hayden for an example of a different way of exiting radical politics - there really were no others that came to replace them. Today we have the Occupy movement which has proven itself utterly pointless. They did not occupy, they did not disrupt and they did not have any effect. What would it take to get Wall Street firms to pay attention? Try shooting everyone entering a building. Or blowing up the building with a truck bomb. Sure, just like Timothy McVeigh, some folks would be killed in response.
But trust me, everyone sitting around the campfire singing "Kumbaya My Lord" isn't going to get a revolution started no matter how much the singers want it to. And that is all the Occupy movement ever was.
I suspect that if I loaned you my gun and you killed someone with it there would be a lot of discussion about how I am an accessory before the fact to the crime. If my business was to loan guns out to responsible individuals and you were shown to be otherwise a responsible individual I might not have a problem - but nobody is in the business of loaning out guns.
Could the loaner be charged with murder? Probably not, but their life would be rather difficult for a long period of time, possibly years.
No, I do not believe you can sue someone for allowing misuse of the Internet... after all, it is the Internet, right?
However, if I have an open access point and it is used to do objectionable things, this will be visited upon the account holder of the Internet account the access point is connected to. Two things that will pretty much guarantee prosecution in the US are sending threatening letters to the President and distributing child porn. If your access point is used for either of those it is pretty much a certainty there will be "trouble". How much trouble? Hard to say, but I suspect there will not be any computers in that home for a while while they are examined. Considering the backlog of most law enforcement forensic labs, it will be months if not years.
Actually, they can have your PC examined to see if any copyright materials are present on it. This is called "discovery" and that is indeed how it works. No, they do not get to confiscate it but they will have it seized and examined by a qualified forensic examiner.
We in the US would not have DirecTV had Al Gore not gotten the abomination called the Satellite Home Viewer Act passed. This makes it a Federal crime to illicitly decode DirecTV's signal.
In Canada there is no revenue model for DirecTV since anyone can decode the signal for free. Give it a month and there would be Chinese receivers flooding the market. Might be nice for some Chinese manufacturers, but DirecTV wouldn't get a dime. And HBO would cut them off.
That this exists at all is a result of Mr. Al Gore who sponsored and shepherded through the Satellite Home Viewer Act. What this did was made it a Federal offence to decrypt an encrypted signal that was broadcast. Until this was law it was perfectly legal to receive and decode any signal that happened to come into your home.
This was done, ostensibly, to stop people with a C-band dish from receiving HBO for free. The real effect of it was to create DirecTV and Dish Network - before this law was passed these services could not have existed because anyone could simply receive their signal and decode it. With the power of the Federal Government behind them, however, it became a viable business model.
Just something else we have to thank Al Gore for, in addition to the Internet.
OK, if you are interested in breast cancer that snippet just told you that racial disparities exist in survival rates. If anything meaningful about this was actually known, it would have been in the first couple of sentances. Since the first sentance says it is "new" research obviously there isn't much more to say about it. If you feel really strongly about this topic you can probably go read the 1000 words on the real page about how nothing more is known at this time but for most people they just got as much as they needed to know.
Google is doing everyone a big favor by condensing things down to what you need and leaving out what you don't. I suppose if you had breast cancer and were African-American you might want to read the rest of this article in case it says where to go to get treatment like a white person would but otherwise Google is saving the electrons that would have been used up showing you a useless page that doesn't say anymore more than the summary.
And yes, Slashdot is clear proof that people often don't even read the summary - the headline was all they wanted.
It would be interesting to see what happens if Google stopped providing snippets and stopped collecting headlines and just made up stuff they way they thought it should be. This would eliminate the problem completely and might work out even better. The only question would be, what would a made-up headline link to?
The content that you are finding freely available is there because someone, somehow is getting paid. What newspapers are doing today is putting it out there and hoping to get paid which isn't working out so well for them. That will clearly lead to the content not being there very long.
When the newspapers go away likely as not AP (you know Associated Press, with heavy emphasis on the word Press) and Reuters will both go away or severely cut back - because they aren't going to be getting paid either. So today you have 100 sources for the same thing because 100 newspapers and TV stations are simply slapping some ads on a page with AP or Reuters content on it - content they are paying for. What happens when 99 of those go away because the ads aren't paying the bills?
So far, the only real winner in Internet advertising is Google.
You seem to think the only sources of French news are in France. How about CNN or BBC? I'm sure they cover events and happenings in France.
Unfortunately, in some respects, when it comes to the Internet there is no such thing as a monopoly or even a cartel. France can't block news about France no matter how hard they try.
You understand that Google isn't just indexing but providing a means by which the content can be accessed without ever visiting the page that was indexed? There is little reason to visit the site unless you really want the "long form" and what the news web sites are finding is that more and more people simply don't need the "long form". They are perfectly happy with the snippet Google has generously provided.
The result of Google not listing them might be pretty bad, but having Google continuing to list them and have people bypass the site in favor of the snippet is probably worse.
But similarly-dressed and looking people might be stealthy Republicans there to ensure that their candidate receives all the votes. I don't think you can judge people about how they are dressed in this matter. The only people that should be watching elections are duly qualified and rigorously identified Democrats, er, I mean "democrats", you know, people that are interested in democracy. Having anyone else there might obstruct the progress of democracy.
I think everyone knows already that this will be the most corrupt election in the history of the US. We have the Republicans claiming there is voter fraud and clearly some jurisdictions are filtering registrations based on little or no criteria, while the Democrats are claiming there has never been any voter fraud in the face of the mere existance of "Crook" (Cook) County, Illinois. Vote fraud, not just voter fraud, has been the standard operating procedure there since the city of Chicago was incorporated. It elected JFK with clear evidence that it happened, so how anyone can deny there is voter fraud with a straight face astonishes me.
Unfortunately we are going to have an election where the winner is decided by about 12 people spread over six or more states. There will undoubtably be recounts and challanges with newly found absentee ballots until the end of December. The meaning of the phrase "statistically insignificant" will be brought home to people in a big way when it is clear to everyone that there is simply no way to decide a winner other than just... deciding. Likely the Supreme Court will be involved. The entire concept of the Electoral College will again be questioned, especially if the final winner is someone that clearly didn't get the most popular votes numerically.
Obviously, the Worlds Series should end on Election Night as well so we can get all the rioting and car burning out of the way once instead of having to do it twice. It is so inconvenient when cars are burned on two nights within a couple of weeks of each other.
The problem with an ordinary cell phone is that the battery runs down. Or the child forgets it somewhere. Or it drops out of the pocket/backpack/etc. somewhere and now you do not know where either the phone is or the child.
Solution to all of these problems is simple and obvious. First, you need a larger battery - so you get a car battery. Attach it to the cell phone with a car charger and wrap the entire assembly in an attractive package. Include two smallish handles on the sides. I suggest either a leather strap or duct tape to attach the child to this package securely.
Small children do not wander off when attached to a 30+ pound car battery. When they can wander about freely with the car battery it is less of a problem and, heck, you still have the phone there, right?
There is the small social problem of your 17 year-old daughter explaining to her date why she is duct-taped to a car battery wrapped in pink-and-white fabric, but she probably figured out some good stories starting when she was twelve. "My parents are crazy paranoid about kidnappers and drug dealers" probably works every time.
You have to wonder why they can't just throw in Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari in a "other browsers" folder and be done with this whole mess. What is the logic from their perspective? Why even bother with this fight anymore. What do they get out of it?
Um, freedom from lawsuits, for a start. Let's see, if they put Firefox on and the translation for some obscure language has mistakes in it - offensive mistakes - Microsoft now finds themselves in court defending their actions of including a defective product that they had no control over.
This isn't like a Linux distribution where it is clearly stated that it is a collection of random bits that have no affiliation with each other or the packager. Microsoft is delivering a unified product and goes to great lengths to make sure it appears as a unified product. Including random bits from other people destroys their brand to start with and opens them up to almost unlimited liability if there are problems.
About the only way they could "include" this would be as some sort of optional add-on that was clearly marked as not being anything from Microsoft and that this could be installed by the user at their discretion but had nothing to do with Windows at all. Clearly, they do not want to do that or it would have been done already. It would also introduce all sorts of support issues which would result in people calling Microsoft for support on stuff they know nothing about. Microsoft has enough people calling about non-Microsoft products already, they do not need any more of that sort of thing.
Nope, Microsoft packaging non-Microsoft products and putting them into the base of Windows isn't ever going to happen.
Let's say the EU decided to bankrupt Microsoft... which is what invalidating copyrights would do. The patents could be sold off, but it is doubtful that they would be worth much - they might get $10 million for the whole package.
Why would this bankrupt Microsoft? Because Microsoft has no other asset than copyright on the software. The software by itself is worthless, as would quickly be found by everyone. I do not see that EU could isolate this to EU residents only - it would suddenly become legal to make copies as desired and distribute Microsoft software. That would effectively eliminate all revenue the company receives.
Obviously, Microsoft would petition the US government for relief, which it would not get. However, the threat being made clear the US would have to do something. One option would be to do the same thing to some EU-based company but there are no EU-based companies with anything like the value of Microsoft in copyrights. Maybe revoking all copyrights of all EU companies, thereby bankrupting the entire EU software industry.
OK, so now 95% of the world is left without an operating system that is maintained and without an office suite that is maintained. Could Linux pick up the slack? Doubtful without a lot of man-years of effort, and in the environment we are talking about VC money for a software startup would be non-existent as would any other sort of financing. Apple would be in serious hurt because their rights to the iOS and OSX operating system would be seriously questioned. They might survive a bit longer because they would still be shipping "true blue" Apple products, but without any sort of protection half-assed clones would appear calling into question the value of all of the products. How would anyone know if they were buying an Apple product vs. a cheap clone?
I'd say there would be a lot of people out of work and there would be a big resurgence of desk calculators. And nobody other than hobbists would be putting money into computers and software.
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Sure, but how do you keep the hundreds of cell tower systems running under a power outage? Today, once their UPS dies (and none of them are required to have more than a few minutes run time), the tower is down.
Can you imagine requiring a diesel generator for every cell tower system? How about the ones installed on the tops of buildings? No, not going to happen.
The California emergency phones are radiotelephones that are competely separate from any phone system. They connect only with CHP dispatchers I believe and cannot be used in any other way.
This isn't a model anyone would be happy with.
Understand that the reason phone sevice seems to have gotten cheaper is because we are moving from heavily regulated and tariffed landline connections to far less regulated cell phone and VOIP connections.
For example, the CO for land line connections is a building filled with batteries because they are required to supply the 48 VDC uninterrupted to land line phones to ensure they are available without interruption. No such guarantee of service is present for either VOIP or cell phones. With VOIP you are at the mercy of so many things that it would be impossible to provide any guarantee of service. With cell phones when the UPS for the cell tower runs out, that tower is down until the power comes back on. No guarantees whatsoever.
Could cell phone be made to be reliable? Doubtful. To have the same type of service guarantee as for land lines every cell tower would need a diesel generator and at least one person on duty at all times. Not going to happen.
Could VOIP be made reliable? If we are talking about the cable system type of VOIP, then it could but it would require lots of equipment that today doesn't even have a UPS have full battery capability so that the network would continue to operate in the face of an extended power outage. If we are talking about Vonage or similar services the answer is that it could not be made any more reliable than the flakiest piece of equipment between the telephone and where it joins the telephone network. That is going involve far more network equipment than you would believe and not everyone is going to have an interest in keeping their entire data center up in the face of a power outage.
I think the era of reliable telephone communications is just about over. People are abandoning the reliable network in favor of unreliable alternatives in droves and there really isn't any going back.
The basic problem with the healthcare system in the US is that it is pretending to cover the poor and elderly at bargain-basement prices while everyone else is pretending to pay premium prices to cover the shortfall. Only insurance companies get in there and contract for lower prices as well.
So now we have massive cost-shifting from the poor, the elderly, and the insured towards those that supposedly can pay enough to make up the difference. Then the government announces big cuts in payments for the elderly and expects that the system will just shift more costs around.
The whole system is now operating on the basis of shifting costs around so they are hidden from view. End result is that nobody has any idea of what something costs because everyone is paying a different amount.
It is also a fact that the US healthcare system is run quite a bit differently. People that are dying and are going to die anyway get 80-90% of the healthcare spending in the US. The rest of the planet treats these people as, well, dying, and lets them die. The US fights on to the end in what many would consider is useless and pointless (but expensive) battle. As long as the US healthcare system operates this way, there is no way a government-paid healthcare-for-all-for-free system would ever work - it would cost something like 50% of the GDP of the US to do it.
In trying to implement something like this what we are likely to see happen in the US is a huge rationed healthcare nightmare where the government is trying to cut costs at every opportunity. It will be single-payer, putting everyone involved with health insurance out of a job and this transition will be handled badly - dumping a few million more people out onto the streets. We will see the government mandating lower and lower prices and because they are the only payer, they get to make the rules. We will see a lot fewer providers as doctors and clinics just close up because they can't make it on the "new plan". Expect a new phenomon where a clinic closes in the US and reopen in Mexico or on some Carribean island where they can handle only clients that pay cash. Any story you have heard about waiting for months for "elective" surgeries will be here, only it will be worse only because of the depth of the cuts and the huge population. Expect to see a new health care ID card that is given to citizens and people with a valid visa and not given to illegal immigrants - immediate savings there.
For all of the GOP talk about repeal, I think the window may have closed. A lot of promises have been made and some have been starting to be fulfilled. These can't be taken back. I think we are stuck on this road, bumpy as it may be.
The government isn't doing squat to ensure that you aren't getting shot in the back. Police? Nobody cares about them anymore because they are so incredibly overworked it is at best a 50/50 chance the police will even show up within an hour. Punishment? Sorry, we are successfully prosecuting about 20% of the criminals, and by this I mean people that do rob people at gunpoint or knifepoint.
Where we are today is a target-rich environment for criminals, especially those that use violence to get what they want. You are safe, or at least think you are safe, because in a country of 330 million people where only 10-20% of them are violent criminals there are so many people to go through that they just haven't gotten around to you.
So what is the government doing for you? Mandating that you have health insurance so you can pay for getting patched up after getting robbed? The police are not there to protect you and ensure you are not robbed - they are there to clean up after you are robbed. The police will not stop someone on the street because he "looks like a violent felon". The justice system isn't there to deter crime, it is there once again to clean up after the crime - but is only being successful about 20% of the time.
The government would be doing a far better job eliminating all the prisons and police and simply having a cash dispenser on ever street corner handing out 10s and 20s to people so they didn't both the taxpayers.
Red Hat has their software with zero motivation to make it better documented, more user friendly or more robust. Every time it fails for a commercial user it is a sales opportunity for them. This is a very perverse incentive for a software company.
Admittedly, Red Hat's software product is pretty complicated. But they could certainly do better in the user-friendly category.
Good software with reasonable documentation and few defects doesn't need a support contract. Having the support contracts fund the company nearly insures the software will be buggy and hard to use.
As far as I know this technology is already being used for Nielson boxes to determine viewers that are in the room.
When you rent a safe deposit box you are given a contract for that rental. When you rent a storage locker you again get a contract that you have to sign. In both cases the contract spells out specifically when the owner can access your box or storage locker and may mention when the owner can give access to law enforcement.
Cloud storage doesn't have that sort of a relationship - there is no contract only a very flexible terms of service that they can change at any time.
UPS and FedEx also pretty much have only their terms of service. I do not believe for a moment that if FedEx was handed a subponena that they would not turn over a package to law enforcement. I suspect if they had a package that they believed contained something illegal they would call local law enforcement and just hand it over as well. I am not really sure what would happen if a cop stopped a FedEx truck and demanded access to a package that was picked up or about to be delivered. I suspect the driver would say that he couldn't make that decision and punt on it.
They do indeed need to do that in cases where the operator of the service is suspected of having a hand in the illegal operation itself. Once you have the owner of the facility being an accessory the whole service is now suspect, regardless of there perhaps being innocent bystanders using the service as well. It could be argued that there is no way to tell the difference between an innocent bystander and an account being used in furtherence of the illegal operation.
A huge difference is that when you sign up for a storage locker there is a physical document being signed in ink by a person. A contract. This contract spells out specifically what the owner of the storage facility may and may not do and will often state under what circumstances they will allow access by others.
OK, when you save stuff in some cloud backup, where is the contract? There isn't one. You get to look a some terms of service and that all. And those terms of service can be changed or revoked at any time.
So it is very simple, in the absence of a contract, what the provider of the service can do - anything they want.
The problem is that the major media outlets refuse to acknowledge the existence of other parties. They can hold a rally that 100 people show up for and no news outlet will even mention it. AP and Reuters will ignore it, even if they are handed a press release.
Is it possible to engage a third party candidate in a debate of any sort with Republican or Democratic candidates? No.
The major problem is that for the most part the parties have not managed to garner 5% of the vote and until that threshold is met they are deemed to be irrelevant. Part of the problem is they aren't going to get 5% of the vote without being publicized by the media so we have a chicken-and-egg problem.
The last time there was a realistic third party Presidential candidate was in 1992 with Ross Perot. He did get more than 15% of the vote but the party he was fronting collapsed and has no candidates any longer. So the media's belief that these candidates are irrelevant keeps getting validated.
In reality the only way out of this situation is for someone from say the Libertarian party to cross over and become the Republican candidate. If they were elected this would go a long way towards making these parties relevant. I think that is the only way they will achieve relevance. Certainly getting 3% (or less) of the vote isn't going to do it.
So what is this magical consumer router that forces users to log in? Where is the database of users held?
Oh, so there is some pre-alpha software on sourceforge that was briefly maintained in 2006 that was going to do this on Linux. That isn't useful and doesn't help.
Remember, the first qualification on having freedom in computing is being able to program. That lets out 80-90% of the people on the planet.
Sorry, but revolution went out with the end of the 1960s. Nobody in the US is going to potentially risk their cushy existence on the possibility of a revolution succeeding... especially when it is well known what will happen should it fail. Yes, it is nice to dream but the people simply do not posess the will to do anything about the current situation.
What it would take for a true revolution in the US would be people dying on national TV to bring down the system. Blowing up buildings, shooting people with deer rifles, destroying infrastructure, etc. In the 1960s there might have been 100 people in the entire country that were willing to stand up and commit violent acts in the name of revolution. Most of them either were blown up by their own crude bombs or got shot by law enforcement. When law enforcement goes up against people that want to bring down the country pretty much everything is on the table - look up Fred Hampton sometime.
After that crop of people were removed from politics, one way or another - check out Tom Hayden for an example of a different way of exiting radical politics - there really were no others that came to replace them. Today we have the Occupy movement which has proven itself utterly pointless. They did not occupy, they did not disrupt and they did not have any effect. What would it take to get Wall Street firms to pay attention? Try shooting everyone entering a building. Or blowing up the building with a truck bomb. Sure, just like Timothy McVeigh, some folks would be killed in response.
But trust me, everyone sitting around the campfire singing "Kumbaya My Lord" isn't going to get a revolution started no matter how much the singers want it to. And that is all the Occupy movement ever was.
I suspect that if I loaned you my gun and you killed someone with it there would be a lot of discussion about how I am an accessory before the fact to the crime. If my business was to loan guns out to responsible individuals and you were shown to be otherwise a responsible individual I might not have a problem - but nobody is in the business of loaning out guns.
Could the loaner be charged with murder? Probably not, but their life would be rather difficult for a long period of time, possibly years.
No, I do not believe you can sue someone for allowing misuse of the Internet... after all, it is the Internet, right?
However, if I have an open access point and it is used to do objectionable things, this will be visited upon the account holder of the Internet account the access point is connected to. Two things that will pretty much guarantee prosecution in the US are sending threatening letters to the President and distributing child porn. If your access point is used for either of those it is pretty much a certainty there will be "trouble". How much trouble? Hard to say, but I suspect there will not be any computers in that home for a while while they are examined. Considering the backlog of most law enforcement forensic labs, it will be months if not years.
Actually, they can have your PC examined to see if any copyright materials are present on it. This is called "discovery" and that is indeed how it works. No, they do not get to confiscate it but they will have it seized and examined by a qualified forensic examiner.
We in the US would not have DirecTV had Al Gore not gotten the abomination called the Satellite Home Viewer Act passed. This makes it a Federal crime to illicitly decode DirecTV's signal.
In Canada there is no revenue model for DirecTV since anyone can decode the signal for free. Give it a month and there would be Chinese receivers flooding the market. Might be nice for some Chinese manufacturers, but DirecTV wouldn't get a dime. And HBO would cut them off.
That this exists at all is a result of Mr. Al Gore who sponsored and shepherded through the Satellite Home Viewer Act. What this did was made it a Federal offence to decrypt an encrypted signal that was broadcast. Until this was law it was perfectly legal to receive and decode any signal that happened to come into your home.
This was done, ostensibly, to stop people with a C-band dish from receiving HBO for free. The real effect of it was to create DirecTV and Dish Network - before this law was passed these services could not have existed because anyone could simply receive their signal and decode it. With the power of the Federal Government behind them, however, it became a viable business model.
Just something else we have to thank Al Gore for, in addition to the Internet.
OK, if you are interested in breast cancer that snippet just told you that racial disparities exist in survival rates. If anything meaningful about this was actually known, it would have been in the first couple of sentances. Since the first sentance says it is "new" research obviously there isn't much more to say about it. If you feel really strongly about this topic you can probably go read the 1000 words on the real page about how nothing more is known at this time but for most people they just got as much as they needed to know.
Google is doing everyone a big favor by condensing things down to what you need and leaving out what you don't. I suppose if you had breast cancer and were African-American you might want to read the rest of this article in case it says where to go to get treatment like a white person would but otherwise Google is saving the electrons that would have been used up showing you a useless page that doesn't say anymore more than the summary.
And yes, Slashdot is clear proof that people often don't even read the summary - the headline was all they wanted.
It would be interesting to see what happens if Google stopped providing snippets and stopped collecting headlines and just made up stuff they way they thought it should be. This would eliminate the problem completely and might work out even better. The only question would be, what would a made-up headline link to?
The content that you are finding freely available is there because someone, somehow is getting paid. What newspapers are doing today is putting it out there and hoping to get paid which isn't working out so well for them. That will clearly lead to the content not being there very long.
When the newspapers go away likely as not AP (you know Associated Press, with heavy emphasis on the word Press) and Reuters will both go away or severely cut back - because they aren't going to be getting paid either. So today you have 100 sources for the same thing because 100 newspapers and TV stations are simply slapping some ads on a page with AP or Reuters content on it - content they are paying for. What happens when 99 of those go away because the ads aren't paying the bills?
So far, the only real winner in Internet advertising is Google.
You seem to think the only sources of French news are in France. How about CNN or BBC? I'm sure they cover events and happenings in France.
Unfortunately, in some respects, when it comes to the Internet there is no such thing as a monopoly or even a cartel. France can't block news about France no matter how hard they try.
You understand that Google isn't just indexing but providing a means by which the content can be accessed without ever visiting the page that was indexed? There is little reason to visit the site unless you really want the "long form" and what the news web sites are finding is that more and more people simply don't need the "long form". They are perfectly happy with the snippet Google has generously provided.
The result of Google not listing them might be pretty bad, but having Google continuing to list them and have people bypass the site in favor of the snippet is probably worse.
But similarly-dressed and looking people might be stealthy Republicans there to ensure that their candidate receives all the votes. I don't think you can judge people about how they are dressed in this matter. The only people that should be watching elections are duly qualified and rigorously identified Democrats, er, I mean "democrats", you know, people that are interested in democracy. Having anyone else there might obstruct the progress of democracy.
I think everyone knows already that this will be the most corrupt election in the history of the US. We have the Republicans claiming there is voter fraud and clearly some jurisdictions are filtering registrations based on little or no criteria, while the Democrats are claiming there has never been any voter fraud in the face of the mere existance of "Crook" (Cook) County, Illinois. Vote fraud, not just voter fraud, has been the standard operating procedure there since the city of Chicago was incorporated. It elected JFK with clear evidence that it happened, so how anyone can deny there is voter fraud with a straight face astonishes me.
Unfortunately we are going to have an election where the winner is decided by about 12 people spread over six or more states. There will undoubtably be recounts and challanges with newly found absentee ballots until the end of December. The meaning of the phrase "statistically insignificant" will be brought home to people in a big way when it is clear to everyone that there is simply no way to decide a winner other than just ... deciding. Likely the Supreme Court will be involved. The entire concept of the Electoral College will again be questioned, especially if the final winner is someone that clearly didn't get the most popular votes numerically.
Obviously, the Worlds Series should end on Election Night as well so we can get all the rioting and car burning out of the way once instead of having to do it twice. It is so inconvenient when cars are burned on two nights within a couple of weeks of each other.
The problem with an ordinary cell phone is that the battery runs down. Or the child forgets it somewhere. Or it drops out of the pocket/backpack/etc. somewhere and now you do not know where either the phone is or the child.
Solution to all of these problems is simple and obvious. First, you need a larger battery - so you get a car battery. Attach it to the cell phone with a car charger and wrap the entire assembly in an attractive package. Include two smallish handles on the sides. I suggest either a leather strap or duct tape to attach the child to this package securely.
Small children do not wander off when attached to a 30+ pound car battery. When they can wander about freely with the car battery it is less of a problem and, heck, you still have the phone there, right?
There is the small social problem of your 17 year-old daughter explaining to her date why she is duct-taped to a car battery wrapped in pink-and-white fabric, but she probably figured out some good stories starting when she was twelve. "My parents are crazy paranoid about kidnappers and drug dealers" probably works every time.
You have to wonder why they can't just throw in Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari in a "other browsers" folder and be done with this whole mess. What is the logic from their perspective? Why even bother with this fight anymore. What do they get out of it?
Um, freedom from lawsuits, for a start. Let's see, if they put Firefox on and the translation for some obscure language has mistakes in it - offensive mistakes - Microsoft now finds themselves in court defending their actions of including a defective product that they had no control over.
This isn't like a Linux distribution where it is clearly stated that it is a collection of random bits that have no affiliation with each other or the packager. Microsoft is delivering a unified product and goes to great lengths to make sure it appears as a unified product. Including random bits from other people destroys their brand to start with and opens them up to almost unlimited liability if there are problems.
About the only way they could "include" this would be as some sort of optional add-on that was clearly marked as not being anything from Microsoft and that this could be installed by the user at their discretion but had nothing to do with Windows at all. Clearly, they do not want to do that or it would have been done already. It would also introduce all sorts of support issues which would result in people calling Microsoft for support on stuff they know nothing about. Microsoft has enough people calling about non-Microsoft products already, they do not need any more of that sort of thing.
Nope, Microsoft packaging non-Microsoft products and putting them into the base of Windows isn't ever going to happen.
Let's say the EU decided to bankrupt Microsoft... which is what invalidating copyrights would do. The patents could be sold off, but it is doubtful that they would be worth much - they might get $10 million for the whole package.
Why would this bankrupt Microsoft? Because Microsoft has no other asset than copyright on the software. The software by itself is worthless, as would quickly be found by everyone. I do not see that EU could isolate this to EU residents only - it would suddenly become legal to make copies as desired and distribute Microsoft software. That would effectively eliminate all revenue the company receives.
Obviously, Microsoft would petition the US government for relief, which it would not get. However, the threat being made clear the US would have to do something. One option would be to do the same thing to some EU-based company but there are no EU-based companies with anything like the value of Microsoft in copyrights. Maybe revoking all copyrights of all EU companies, thereby bankrupting the entire EU software industry.
OK, so now 95% of the world is left without an operating system that is maintained and without an office suite that is maintained. Could Linux pick up the slack? Doubtful without a lot of man-years of effort, and in the environment we are talking about VC money for a software startup would be non-existent as would any other sort of financing. Apple would be in serious hurt because their rights to the iOS and OSX operating system would be seriously questioned. They might survive a bit longer because they would still be shipping "true blue" Apple products, but without any sort of protection half-assed clones would appear calling into question the value of all of the products. How would anyone know if they were buying an Apple product vs. a cheap clone?
I'd say there would be a lot of people out of work and there would be a big resurgence of desk calculators. And nobody other than hobbists would be putting money into computers and software.