You do understand that "recycling" of a CFL bulb consists mainly of capturing the mercury and tossing the rest into a landfill, right? Since none of them are made in the US and there is no such thing as a "CFL bulb remanufacturing plant" there really isn't any choice. The process today is such that it would cost 100 times more to remanufacture a blown out CFL bulb than it costs to make a new one.
Making an new one can be automated to a large degree, or at least all the human interaction pushed down to slave or prison labor. To remanufacture a CFL bulb would require someone to carefully disassemble it and at the very least test the bulb and manually replace the electronics. Maybe even find the bad part in the electronics and replace it. Unfortunately, the electronics are probably potted in epoxy so they can't be poked at by a consumer - or repaired by anyone, ever.
Most CFL bulbs are going straight into a landfill. At best you can hope they are crushed in a contained environment so the mercury can be separated out.
99% of the difference would be solved by not using coal-fired generating plants. Yes, half a ton of coal has a lot of bad stuff in it, but we do not have to be using coal for power generation. And once that changes, the whole equation changes very much in favor of incandescent bulbs made in the US rather than Chinese-made CFL bulbs.
The problem is that from an investor point of view it is stupid to invest in a company that produces a product with a very limited market - expensive, quality CFL bulbs will only be sold to rich people that can easily see the difference.
The rest of the population will go to WalMart and buy the cheapest bulbs based solely on price. GE probably couldn't even get their bulbs into WalMart because they would be too expensive. WalMart has that kind of power in the marketplace today.
Manufacturing in the US is dead and we might as well face up to it. At least 20% of the population will be permanently unemployed and we might as well get used to that as well. But there will be no shortage of folks immigrating to the US to take low-wage jobs. And businesses will employ them and pay taxes to keep the 20% or more on permanent welfare.
Comes with being in the military. I believe as an officer you have to pretty much sign a statement saying you give the military approval of anything you write.
You say the guy is no longer on active duty? Fine, but if he was an officer he probably is still an officer, just not active duty. You have to go through a lot to actually resign your commission.
There is no common carrier status for ISPs in the US. There is something called Safe Harbor which seems to have stuck around between COPA and DMCA, but it isn't anything like a common carrier status.
So no, there isn't any whittling away of it because it doesn't exist.
You want to remain anonymous? Fine. Fund a trust have it invest in bonds and use the proceeds to pay for Internet service for yourself. The account is in the trust's name, period. You can have the administrator of the trust be very, very careful about disclosing who is behind the trust, even in the face of a subpoena.
If you are really worried, have the trust administered somewhere fun, like Lichtenstein. If someone wanted to try to pierce the trust they would have to file in Lichtenstein - good luck with that by the way.
You could also try using Venezuela or some other venue that is extremely hostile to the US. I think a Venezuelan court would through out such a request out of hand. While the Venezuelan government might ignore even their own laws to go after someone doing so on the behalf of the US (even the government or maybe especially the US government) would go nowhere.
Why would you pay $2 when you can have it for free?
A high percentage of pirates are just "collectors" anyway - they aren't watching the movies or listening to the music, they are just collecting. They aren't going to pay, ever.
Another high percentage of the folks downloading are doing it because they are sure what they are downloading is crap. They are just checking it out to make sure. They watch it and, yup, it is crap - they would never pay for crap like that.
There are a few people with high disposable incomes that would pay $2 online rather than $10 to buy the DVD. But then they are going to save it and share it with the planet. Where else do you think all the stuff that is available for downloading is coming from? Or, it is paid for with stolen (er, "borrowed") credit cards.
The people that aren't sharing what they get however they get it and are actually potential customers for such a service are so few that nobody is interested in even exploring that market. It is so small that is doesn't exist.
Another way to answer this is "So, how many ringtones have you bought this week?"
First off, it isn't the stupid parents that die, it is their children of yet indeterminate intelligence.
Secondly, by risking herd immunity (yeah, go look it up) once a sufficiently large pool of people aren't vaccinated we are back in the 1600's as far as risk of infectious disease is concerned. A goodly number of the people on the Mayflower died after landing because of things like flu and other infectious diseases. A quick way back there is to lose herd immunity - it basically puts everyone at risk.
They set up a special court to deal with vaccine-related cases. I believe in part because a special court could try to address the rather technical issues involved.
Another reason for a special court was because a lot of judges wouldn't touch cases like this with a ten foot pole and they would simply be decided on the basis of bias and who got more articles in the Huffington Post.
The problem with cases like this is that they are extremely difficult to work with because the case itself doesn't deal with questions of law at all. It deals with the interpretation of very technical branches of science by laypeople. It isn't the science that is on trial, it is the interpretation of the science. And that means it is going to be a mess.
Well, if it is posted on the Internet then yes, I expect they now work for free. If it is on the Internet then it is available for anyone to use in any manner they see fit.
Lots of professional photographers have figured this out, sometimes from posting samples of their work.
What this article is talking about is the Adobe format that most of the libraries in Arizona seem to be using. It has an expiration date built into the format.
Kindle didn't include the Adobe software and can't deal with this format. Unfortunate in some ways but not others. EPUB would be a good addition to Kindle and is likely to show up at some point, but I don't think we will ever see Adobe's mobile software there.
Is this because if it was infinite nobody would need to buy a book anymore?
The library does not have the right to freely distribute books. It buys a limited number of copies and has the right to lend these out for a limited period of time. Period. Distributing unlimited digital (or physical) copies would essentially be usurping the author and copyright owner's rights to control distribution.
If anyone, anywhere (yes, I specifically am including truely-free.org) distributes digital copies of books in an unrestricted manner they are pretty much making a decision for the author and copyright owner. Some publishers, like TOR, hold the copyright and distribute some books for free. I believe the author has no veto of this as part of the publishing agreement. Fine - they signed up for this when they got the publishing deal. However, for someone like a library or a guy named Bruce to take it upon themselves to decide to distribute materials for free in an unrestricted fashion is clearly theft. They are taking something (rights) that do not belong to them.
You can argue all you want about how nothing material has been taken - except folks seem awfully concerned about rights now and then and I'd say taking right away is certainly theft. It is theft when governments do it, and it is theft when individuals do it.
You can argue all you want about how those rights should not exist and that is a reasonable discussion to have. Arguing that taking rights away isn't theft is not a reasonable discussion as can be seen when most other rights are taken away in one way or another.
The only reason ultra-cheap Chinese clones of Broadcom hardware aren't common today is because the lack of documentation. Anyone can tear the hardware apart and see what chips they are using and even, with an electron microscope, reverse-engineer a custom chip. But without the drivers and/or documentation there is no value in the hardware alone.
Now, with the complete documentation (the drivers are the documentation), there is no reason for anyone to spend more on Broadcom devices when they can just as easily just much cheaper clones. This will be a net win for manufacturers who will reap greater profits while not passing the savings along to customers. It pretty much means the end for Broadcom because they can't possibly compete with the clone makers.
Every time you use a credit card you should assume that someone in the back room is writing it down. Why? Because it is worth as much as $0.50. So if you are a waiter in a restaurant and can grab 100 credit card numbers a week that is like $50 in your pocket.
If you get caught, well, it wasn't that great a job anyway now was it?
One of my cards gets "borrowed" in this way every year. Sometimes the cards are used for purchases in the US, sometimes not. Sometimes they are for easily cancelled items online, sometimes the merchant gives the guy the merchandise and loses out. Most large stores have insurance for this kind of thing so they never lose anything.
Just a cost of doing business to the credit card companies. They will not prosecute because they think it is really bad form to have their customers arrested. Why they think someone committing a criminal act with a stolen credit card number is "their customer" I have no idea, but that seems to be the thinking.
You can't fight it and there is no "winning" in this. Live with it and cancel the purchases. I have never had a problem getting the charges removed. And like I said above, it happens to me a lot.
Not entirely a bad idea, but the concept behind storing the information on the device itself is so that nobody except the owner has possession of it. And, in theory, every authorized agency has immediate access to the information if they have physical access to the device.
The alternative is a massive database that virtually every government agency needs to access with everyone's information in it. Data mining that carries substantial risks but is an opportunity that just couldn't be denied. Also, because of the widely disparate agencies that need access what you end up with is something that is so open that everyone can get at it.
Think of the DMV data in the US. It is centralized by state but the police and DMV agents have access. As well as a few other agencies. Oh, and by the way, just about every private investigator has access. Now in most states because it was so wide open they got trapped into basically selling access subscriptions. So there are a few hundred organizations that pay for access to every state's records.
This is the scenario they are trying to avoid with having the person possess their own information and not having it in some large virtually uncontrollable database. Too many people need access - probably legitimately - but access for short periods of time for well defined purposes that happen to also include having the person in front of them.
The big national database might be a good idea, but the control and access problems have already been seen in way too many situations.
Today you have all kinds of jury selection processing that goes on. Basically, both sides get a little card that the prospective juror fills out with their name, address and other information. From that, if the trial justifies a real jury investigation, more than likely both sides pull a full background report on each and every prospective juror.
So for a murder trial when the defense asks a prospective juror if they know the defendant, they already know the answer. And they know what magazines the prospective juror subscribes to, what organizations they belong to and what their income is. Lying to get on or off a jury is perjury and as they already know the answers to the questions being asked, you will be found out. Whether they actually do anything about it or not is another question, but there is no question of it being known.
So there is no question of knowing the juror's names. The expectation is that all court officials have integrity and if they don't they don't stay court officials long.
Are jury investigations done for minor offenses? Probably not, because the defendant is paying for his side of it and the cost isn't warranted when the penalty isn't a long prison sentance.
I have to believe this goes on in Canada, UK and Australia as well as the US. Probably not so much in North Korea.
Not responding to a summons is pretty much taken as an admission of guilt. If you don't show up in court for your traffic ticket, you get to pay extra for that as well. Same thing goes for civil lawsuits.
Further, by having a "proxy" legal address on WHOIS you pretty much remove any right you might have to even respond to a summons. It is about time people learned that lesson. The requirement for serving someone with papers are very clearly spelled out in every state. Following them is all that is necessary. If that is not sufficient to reach the person or organization being sued, it was generally presumed to be the fault of the plantiff for not getting the right address and such. But now we have such "proxy" and dummy addresses that pretty much make a mockery of trying to serve legal papers. The reward for this is going to be a lot of default judgements.
Trying to hide behind such proxies and putting dummy addresses in WHOIS isn't very effective from a legal standpoint and it is supposedly prohibited according to ICANN rules. But today no registrar wants to follow these rules. So fake addresses (think 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC) and proxy addresses are the norm. This is a clear "buzz off" to the legal system and it will come home to roost.
Yup and trying that will get you 1 point for cleverness and a night in the local lockup.
Computers may require everything to be completely described in infinite detail. To some extent, it is the goal of computer languages to minimize this burden. Ascribing the requirement for computers to human interaction is the mark of... well, they don't call this place news for nerds for nothing.
Except in a non-traditional publishing environment there are no penalties for publishing libelous or slanderous material. You can publish whatever the heck you want and the target of your attack has virtually no recourse.
Oh they can try to sue you and it comes down to who can afford the more expensive lawyer. But it will never, ever get the material removed or retracted on the Internet. So in some people's eyes there will just be a new set of facts.
Of course if carried to its logical conclusion the 2nd Amendment has some input into this situation. Which is why libelous and slanderous material is best published anonymously.
Freedom of the press with the "press" being anyone that decides to publish something means that anyone can publishing anything at any time, anywhere. Good, right?
Except that means the only defense against libel and slander is to sue people. Unfortunately, once it is published on the Internet there is no such thing as a "retraction". It's there. It is a fact, and it will be quoted by people.
So I can say my neighbor is a child-molesting pig that steals social security checks from his ex-wife's mother. He fuels his car by syphoning gas from other cars in the neighborhood and always has a bunch of candy on the passenger seat for when he drives by schools. And then there is what I could tell you about his dog and his niece - the shows she puts on the in the backyard. The "freedom of the press" extended to the Internet means his only recourse now is to sue me and hope that he can afford a better (more expensive) lawyer than I can. Now, if I post this information anonymously and his employer (and future employers) find it, his life is pretty messed up and there is nothing that can be done at all - assuming my anonyminity holds up.
Sorry, but the Internet is the cheapest and most effective way of implementing any sort of WAN today. The idea of having your own fiber is gone - there is no point to it and the companies that were offering it have stopped. I don't think you can buy a dedicated fiber connection from New York to Chicago today at any price. Packet-switched on existing fiber? Sure, you can get that. It's called the Internet.
Maybe a few do for short-term outages, but do you understand what is required to keep a generator running for more than a couple of hours? There are no gasoline powered generators designed for that application. There are two types - some recent natural gas/propane ones and big diesel ones. There is no way they have diesel generators at each cell tower, nor is there any provision for refueling them.
Natural gas is a possibility, but I doubt it. Cell phones do not have the same requirements for staying functional during power outages so the ones I am familiar with have battery backup for a while and then just shut down.
Until there are mandates for cell phone operation to continue through a several-day power outage nobody is going to put that sort of investement into the system. Your landline CO has battery banks to power the system for days and there is a diesel generator at most of them with a refueling arrangement to keep it going for months if needed.
Sorry, but cell phones aren't supposed to be reliable in emergency situations. There is no requirement for them to be. Maybe someday.
Today, taking down vast portions of the country is pretty simple. Much of it depends on single physical locations to remain up because of the load and load balancing that is done. Remember it was one relay in Niagra Falls that triggered the 1966 outage and not much more than that that did the last one.
I'd say something around five sticks of dynamite could take out the entire East Coast for a couple of days. Hit one site and they might be able to route around it in 12 hours or so, but there is nothing that is going to prevent that 12 hours. And if you hit multiple sites it is going to take a lot longer than 12 hours.
Scary that we are tying our very existance to such a small number of transformers and such isn't it? How many people would die in January if there was a two-day power outage in New England? I'd say two days would be enough for people to seriously apeshit over where their next meal was coming from.
Nice idea, but it only works for those "smartphones" that operate on the Apple model with a tightly controlled, centralized application installation process.
Blackberry and Palm have no such thing - the user can put whatever they want on the phone and nobody can take it away from them.
I suspect most Android implementations allow some sort of distributed application install as well. Then we have all the phones that are carrier-tied for new applications. If you got in with Verizon then every Java-enabled phone could have your application on it. And once installed there isn't a carrier method for removing it - they can stop further distribution, but can't do anything with the phones that have it.
Who says you can't vote? In the US if you have a driver's license every state is required by law to register you to vote upon presentation of your driver's license. Period. No exceptions.
Now are you legally entitled to vote? No. But as you apparently have figured out, there is a reason for letting in as many undocumented workers as possible in the next couple of years. It will be a group that will vote for whomever will give them the most and, for them, there are no other considerations.
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You do understand that "recycling" of a CFL bulb consists mainly of capturing the mercury and tossing the rest into a landfill, right? Since none of them are made in the US and there is no such thing as a "CFL bulb remanufacturing plant" there really isn't any choice. The process today is such that it would cost 100 times more to remanufacture a blown out CFL bulb than it costs to make a new one.
Making an new one can be automated to a large degree, or at least all the human interaction pushed down to slave or prison labor. To remanufacture a CFL bulb would require someone to carefully disassemble it and at the very least test the bulb and manually replace the electronics. Maybe even find the bad part in the electronics and replace it. Unfortunately, the electronics are probably potted in epoxy so they can't be poked at by a consumer - or repaired by anyone, ever.
Most CFL bulbs are going straight into a landfill. At best you can hope they are crushed in a contained environment so the mercury can be separated out.
99% of the difference would be solved by not using coal-fired generating plants. Yes, half a ton of coal has a lot of bad stuff in it, but we do not have to be using coal for power generation. And once that changes, the whole equation changes very much in favor of incandescent bulbs made in the US rather than Chinese-made CFL bulbs.
The problem is that from an investor point of view it is stupid to invest in a company that produces a product with a very limited market - expensive, quality CFL bulbs will only be sold to rich people that can easily see the difference.
The rest of the population will go to WalMart and buy the cheapest bulbs based solely on price. GE probably couldn't even get their bulbs into WalMart because they would be too expensive. WalMart has that kind of power in the marketplace today.
Manufacturing in the US is dead and we might as well face up to it. At least 20% of the population will be permanently unemployed and we might as well get used to that as well. But there will be no shortage of folks immigrating to the US to take low-wage jobs. And businesses will employ them and pay taxes to keep the 20% or more on permanent welfare.
Comes with being in the military. I believe as an officer you have to pretty much sign a statement saying you give the military approval of anything you write.
You say the guy is no longer on active duty? Fine, but if he was an officer he probably is still an officer, just not active duty. You have to go through a lot to actually resign your commission.
If the guy was just a grunt this wouldn't apply.
There is no common carrier status for ISPs in the US. There is something called Safe Harbor which seems to have stuck around between COPA and DMCA, but it isn't anything like a common carrier status.
So no, there isn't any whittling away of it because it doesn't exist.
You want to remain anonymous? Fine. Fund a trust have it invest in bonds and use the proceeds to pay for Internet service for yourself. The account is in the trust's name, period. You can have the administrator of the trust be very, very careful about disclosing who is behind the trust, even in the face of a subpoena.
If you are really worried, have the trust administered somewhere fun, like Lichtenstein. If someone wanted to try to pierce the trust they would have to file in Lichtenstein - good luck with that by the way.
You could also try using Venezuela or some other venue that is extremely hostile to the US. I think a Venezuelan court would through out such a request out of hand. While the Venezuelan government might ignore even their own laws to go after someone doing so on the behalf of the US (even the government or maybe especially the US government) would go nowhere.
Why would you pay $2 when you can have it for free?
A high percentage of pirates are just "collectors" anyway - they aren't watching the movies or listening to the music, they are just collecting. They aren't going to pay, ever.
Another high percentage of the folks downloading are doing it because they are sure what they are downloading is crap. They are just checking it out to make sure. They watch it and, yup, it is crap - they would never pay for crap like that.
There are a few people with high disposable incomes that would pay $2 online rather than $10 to buy the DVD. But then they are going to save it and share it with the planet. Where else do you think all the stuff that is available for downloading is coming from? Or, it is paid for with stolen (er, "borrowed") credit cards.
The people that aren't sharing what they get however they get it and are actually potential customers for such a service are so few that nobody is interested in even exploring that market. It is so small that is doesn't exist.
Another way to answer this is "So, how many ringtones have you bought this week?"
First off, it isn't the stupid parents that die, it is their children of yet indeterminate intelligence.
Secondly, by risking herd immunity (yeah, go look it up) once a sufficiently large pool of people aren't vaccinated we are back in the 1600's as far as risk of infectious disease is concerned. A goodly number of the people on the Mayflower died after landing because of things like flu and other infectious diseases. A quick way back there is to lose herd immunity - it basically puts everyone at risk.
They set up a special court to deal with vaccine-related cases. I believe in part because a special court could try to address the rather technical issues involved.
Another reason for a special court was because a lot of judges wouldn't touch cases like this with a ten foot pole and they would simply be decided on the basis of bias and who got more articles in the Huffington Post.
The problem with cases like this is that they are extremely difficult to work with because the case itself doesn't deal with questions of law at all. It deals with the interpretation of very technical branches of science by laypeople. It isn't the science that is on trial, it is the interpretation of the science. And that means it is going to be a mess.
Well, if it is posted on the Internet then yes, I expect they now work for free. If it is on the Internet then it is available for anyone to use in any manner they see fit.
Lots of professional photographers have figured this out, sometimes from posting samples of their work.
What this article is talking about is the Adobe format that most of the libraries in Arizona seem to be using. It has an expiration date built into the format.
Kindle didn't include the Adobe software and can't deal with this format. Unfortunate in some ways but not others. EPUB would be a good addition to Kindle and is likely to show up at some point, but I don't think we will ever see Adobe's mobile software there.
Is this because if it was infinite nobody would need to buy a book anymore?
The library does not have the right to freely distribute books. It buys a limited number of copies and has the right to lend these out for a limited period of time. Period. Distributing unlimited digital (or physical) copies would essentially be usurping the author and copyright owner's rights to control distribution.
If anyone, anywhere (yes, I specifically am including truely-free.org) distributes digital copies of books in an unrestricted manner they are pretty much making a decision for the author and copyright owner. Some publishers, like TOR, hold the copyright and distribute some books for free. I believe the author has no veto of this as part of the publishing agreement. Fine - they signed up for this when they got the publishing deal. However, for someone like a library or a guy named Bruce to take it upon themselves to decide to distribute materials for free in an unrestricted fashion is clearly theft. They are taking something (rights) that do not belong to them.
You can argue all you want about how nothing material has been taken - except folks seem awfully concerned about rights now and then and I'd say taking right away is certainly theft. It is theft when governments do it, and it is theft when individuals do it.
You can argue all you want about how those rights should not exist and that is a reasonable discussion to have. Arguing that taking rights away isn't theft is not a reasonable discussion as can be seen when most other rights are taken away in one way or another.
The only reason ultra-cheap Chinese clones of Broadcom hardware aren't common today is because the lack of documentation. Anyone can tear the hardware apart and see what chips they are using and even, with an electron microscope, reverse-engineer a custom chip. But without the drivers and/or documentation there is no value in the hardware alone.
Now, with the complete documentation (the drivers are the documentation), there is no reason for anyone to spend more on Broadcom devices when they can just as easily just much cheaper clones. This will be a net win for manufacturers who will reap greater profits while not passing the savings along to customers. It pretty much means the end for Broadcom because they can't possibly compete with the clone makers.
Every time you use a credit card you should assume that someone in the back room is writing it down. Why? Because it is worth as much as $0.50. So if you are a waiter in a restaurant and can grab 100 credit card numbers a week that is like $50 in your pocket.
If you get caught, well, it wasn't that great a job anyway now was it?
One of my cards gets "borrowed" in this way every year. Sometimes the cards are used for purchases in the US, sometimes not. Sometimes they are for easily cancelled items online, sometimes the merchant gives the guy the merchandise and loses out. Most large stores have insurance for this kind of thing so they never lose anything.
Just a cost of doing business to the credit card companies. They will not prosecute because they think it is really bad form to have their customers arrested. Why they think someone committing a criminal act with a stolen credit card number is "their customer" I have no idea, but that seems to be the thinking.
You can't fight it and there is no "winning" in this. Live with it and cancel the purchases. I have never had a problem getting the charges removed. And like I said above, it happens to me a lot.
Right now, you can move to a different country a whole lot easier than you can stop doing business with Google.
If you work for a company that provides you a Blackberry your choice of being able to stop using it is probably zero as well.
I'd suggest moving. Let's see, if everyone moved out of India to somewhere else where would they go?
Not entirely a bad idea, but the concept behind storing the information on the device itself is so that nobody except the owner has possession of it. And, in theory, every authorized agency has immediate access to the information if they have physical access to the device.
The alternative is a massive database that virtually every government agency needs to access with everyone's information in it. Data mining that carries substantial risks but is an opportunity that just couldn't be denied. Also, because of the widely disparate agencies that need access what you end up with is something that is so open that everyone can get at it.
Think of the DMV data in the US. It is centralized by state but the police and DMV agents have access. As well as a few other agencies. Oh, and by the way, just about every private investigator has access. Now in most states because it was so wide open they got trapped into basically selling access subscriptions. So there are a few hundred organizations that pay for access to every state's records.
This is the scenario they are trying to avoid with having the person possess their own information and not having it in some large virtually uncontrollable database. Too many people need access - probably legitimately - but access for short periods of time for well defined purposes that happen to also include having the person in front of them.
The big national database might be a good idea, but the control and access problems have already been seen in way too many situations.
Today you have all kinds of jury selection processing that goes on. Basically, both sides get a little card that the prospective juror fills out with their name, address and other information. From that, if the trial justifies a real jury investigation, more than likely both sides pull a full background report on each and every prospective juror.
So for a murder trial when the defense asks a prospective juror if they know the defendant, they already know the answer. And they know what magazines the prospective juror subscribes to, what organizations they belong to and what their income is. Lying to get on or off a jury is perjury and as they already know the answers to the questions being asked, you will be found out. Whether they actually do anything about it or not is another question, but there is no question of it being known.
So there is no question of knowing the juror's names. The expectation is that all court officials have integrity and if they don't they don't stay court officials long.
Are jury investigations done for minor offenses? Probably not, because the defendant is paying for his side of it and the cost isn't warranted when the penalty isn't a long prison sentance.
I have to believe this goes on in Canada, UK and Australia as well as the US. Probably not so much in North Korea.
Not responding to a summons is pretty much taken as an admission of guilt. If you don't show up in court for your traffic ticket, you get to pay extra for that as well. Same thing goes for civil lawsuits.
Further, by having a "proxy" legal address on WHOIS you pretty much remove any right you might have to even respond to a summons. It is about time people learned that lesson. The requirement for serving someone with papers are very clearly spelled out in every state. Following them is all that is necessary. If that is not sufficient to reach the person or organization being sued, it was generally presumed to be the fault of the plantiff for not getting the right address and such. But now we have such "proxy" and dummy addresses that pretty much make a mockery of trying to serve legal papers. The reward for this is going to be a lot of default judgements.
Trying to hide behind such proxies and putting dummy addresses in WHOIS isn't very effective from a legal standpoint and it is supposedly prohibited according to ICANN rules. But today no registrar wants to follow these rules. So fake addresses (think 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC) and proxy addresses are the norm. This is a clear "buzz off" to the legal system and it will come home to roost.
Yup and trying that will get you 1 point for cleverness and a night in the local lockup.
Computers may require everything to be completely described in infinite detail. To some extent, it is the goal of computer languages to minimize this burden. Ascribing the requirement for computers to human interaction is the mark of ... well, they don't call this place news for nerds for nothing.
Except in a non-traditional publishing environment there are no penalties for publishing libelous or slanderous material. You can publish whatever the heck you want and the target of your attack has virtually no recourse.
Oh they can try to sue you and it comes down to who can afford the more expensive lawyer. But it will never, ever get the material removed or retracted on the Internet. So in some people's eyes there will just be a new set of facts.
Of course if carried to its logical conclusion the 2nd Amendment has some input into this situation. Which is why libelous and slanderous material is best published anonymously.
Freedom of the press with the "press" being anyone that decides to publish something means that anyone can publishing anything at any time, anywhere. Good, right?
Except that means the only defense against libel and slander is to sue people. Unfortunately, once it is published on the Internet there is no such thing as a "retraction". It's there. It is a fact, and it will be quoted by people.
So I can say my neighbor is a child-molesting pig that steals social security checks from his ex-wife's mother. He fuels his car by syphoning gas from other cars in the neighborhood and always has a bunch of candy on the passenger seat for when he drives by schools. And then there is what I could tell you about his dog and his niece - the shows she puts on the in the backyard. The "freedom of the press" extended to the Internet means his only recourse now is to sue me and hope that he can afford a better (more expensive) lawyer than I can. Now, if I post this information anonymously and his employer (and future employers) find it, his life is pretty messed up and there is nothing that can be done at all - assuming my anonyminity holds up.
Sorry, but the Internet is the cheapest and most effective way of implementing any sort of WAN today. The idea of having your own fiber is gone - there is no point to it and the companies that were offering it have stopped. I don't think you can buy a dedicated fiber connection from New York to Chicago today at any price. Packet-switched on existing fiber? Sure, you can get that. It's called the Internet.
Maybe a few do for short-term outages, but do you understand what is required to keep a generator running for more than a couple of hours? There are no gasoline powered generators designed for that application. There are two types - some recent natural gas/propane ones and big diesel ones. There is no way they have diesel generators at each cell tower, nor is there any provision for refueling them.
Natural gas is a possibility, but I doubt it. Cell phones do not have the same requirements for staying functional during power outages so the ones I am familiar with have battery backup for a while and then just shut down.
Until there are mandates for cell phone operation to continue through a several-day power outage nobody is going to put that sort of investement into the system. Your landline CO has battery banks to power the system for days and there is a diesel generator at most of them with a refueling arrangement to keep it going for months if needed.
Sorry, but cell phones aren't supposed to be reliable in emergency situations. There is no requirement for them to be. Maybe someday.
Today, taking down vast portions of the country is pretty simple. Much of it depends on single physical locations to remain up because of the load and load balancing that is done. Remember it was one relay in Niagra Falls that triggered the 1966 outage and not much more than that that did the last one.
I'd say something around five sticks of dynamite could take out the entire East Coast for a couple of days. Hit one site and they might be able to route around it in 12 hours or so, but there is nothing that is going to prevent that 12 hours. And if you hit multiple sites it is going to take a lot longer than 12 hours.
Scary that we are tying our very existance to such a small number of transformers and such isn't it? How many people would die in January if there was a two-day power outage in New England? I'd say two days would be enough for people to seriously apeshit over where their next meal was coming from.
Nice idea, but it only works for those "smartphones" that operate on the Apple model with a tightly controlled, centralized application installation process.
Blackberry and Palm have no such thing - the user can put whatever they want on the phone and nobody can take it away from them.
I suspect most Android implementations allow some sort of distributed application install as well. Then we have all the phones that are carrier-tied for new applications. If you got in with Verizon then every Java-enabled phone could have your application on it. And once installed there isn't a carrier method for removing it - they can stop further distribution, but can't do anything with the phones that have it.
Who says you can't vote? In the US if you have a driver's license every state is required by law to register you to vote upon presentation of your driver's license. Period. No exceptions.
Now are you legally entitled to vote? No. But as you apparently have figured out, there is a reason for letting in as many undocumented workers as possible in the next couple of years. It will be a group that will vote for whomever will give them the most and, for them, there are no other considerations.