Actually, that is a really great idea. A large part of the cost of such devices is the development of the software, so opening it up would enable other companies to just reuse the software with cloned hardware. Cheaper and it would be available to more people.
We have seen how good the Chinese are at cloning, maybe they should try medical devices to go along with drywall, toys and cat food. Then your doctor could offer the insurance company a cheaper device that they would gladly pay less to get put into the patient.
Software has value, and if you want to destroy that value you are going to get the consequences showing up in very creative ways. Forcing a company to release their software would be destroying the value of it.
The "right" way to do this is to make sure that the software escrow release is conditioned upon filing for bankruptcy or other protection from creditors or non-payment of the escrow fee.
Effectively what this does is destroy any possibility of using the code as an asset in selling the company and ensures that any type of financial problem becomes terminal. This is pretty much equivalent to using cynaide as a cold remedy - see, no more cold or cold symptoms.
I think only a a relatively small, non-profit, or possibly, privately owned, organization can actually engage in such risky journalism, because they have basically nothing to lose (well, some of the staff could lose their personal property and/or go to jail).
Failure to understand how the world works in usually fatal. Jail? Unlikely. Far more likely is a bullet in the head. Inconvenient people are usually not given much in the way of a trial. This guy is making himself more and more inconvenient every day.
The fact that he apparently does not understand this is just a sign as to how out of touch this guy really is.
You wonder why negative information about the war is being kept secret and not publicised? Please remember that the last war that the majority supported (in the US) was WW II. Nothing since then has been supported by the majority of the US population.
Today we have a problem. For various reasons the real involvement of Islamic fighters around the world and in the US is kept from people except in the most egregarious of cases, like the "Underwear Bomber". The general impression is that outside of the US and Western Europe the world is populated by unintelligent boobs that can't put a car bomb together to save their lives. This is also a very carefully crafted situation and certainly plays into a particular worldview.
One thing it does is it makes us feel safe that we aren't really giving anything away by moving IT work and manufacturing to China and India - because it is obvious they are too stupid to actually take anything away from us. We can let them to all the hard work and sit back and reap the profits without any danger at all that we are giving away the tools to eliminate the economy of the West.
Similarly, a few people know that we better not lose when we go up against Islam. Most of the people have no comprehension of the real situation and think it is all some rabid hate-driven propaganda. Obama got a bit of a wakeup call but still seems to believe that if we are nice to people they will like and respect us. Sadly, when a culture is based around the idea of "We're the best and deserve it all." it is very difficult to deal rationally with members of that culture. For example, there is a serious undercurrent of that attitude in Japan and it makes it almost impossible to import US goods into that country. They just know that everything made by non-Japanese is inferior.
Same thing with the Jews. There are a lot of people (but not a majority) that "know" Jews are fit only for extermination and until they are exterminated we will have pests in our midst. It is like living in a house with roaches. One day you get fed up and call the exterminator or start mashing roaches. Well, if you look at the TV coverage Jews get on Palestinian stations you might be in for a rude awakening. Certainly these people are being told that the roaches are loose and it is the responsibility of each and every person to assist the exterminators.
So what is really at stake with Iraq and Afganistan? It is a secret and probably one that is best kept from people because they aren't going to understand. Certainly not with the last 50 years of propaganda that has been absorbed.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US everything is driven by ratings. Both newspapers and TV (cable and broadcast) news are driven to do the things that get them higher ratings. These ratings tell the parent company, say CBS, that the news people are "doing a good job".
It doesn't matter what is covered, what matters is the response of the public. And believe me, the public has spoken. Nobody wants to hear about stuff going on halfway around the world. They want news with sex, scandal and perp walks. Public executions would be right in line with today's TV news. Photographing a politician running away from a half-dressed hooker is where it is at.
Issues? Nobody cares, at least not enough people. TV news is directed at about a 10-year-old level with a lot of interest in dirty jokes, anything to do with sex, and catching people doing things that the majority find wrong. And this attitude pervades every part of life today. It is why People magazine exists. It is how we got "reality TV" with things like Survivor and Big Brother. For the most part, it is a general dumbing-down of society in general.
You can see this with how people in high school relate to each other. Does anyone respect the straight-A student today? Or is it the jocks and druggies that are more popular? The jocks absolutely typify the way TV news allocates time to stories - sports and scandle with nothing left over for issues.
We have seen this coming for 50 years. The movie Idiocracy is loosly based on a 1950s story called "The Marching Morons". I don't think there is a solution for the general society but we better learn how to roll with this.
Huge problem with the idea of site speed... Fox is probably paying Akami for caching all over the planet, or at least all over the US. DailyKos is hosted at Voxel without Akami. Unless that is "fixed" by government giveaways or regulation Fox will always load faster than DailyKos because Fox is spending more money.
So how do you fix this? Put Akami out of business? Force Akami to cache everyone at no cost?
Sorry, I don't think you can fix the site speed problems and trying to involve the government in that is just going to be a disaster.
Recently read a book on this and the facts about what happened should frighten people because whatever new regulations came about, they didn't address what happened at all.
The problem was that places like Credit Suisse and Deutch Bank were packaging up loans into aggregated piles and then selling bonds backing a pile of loans. Most of these "piles" or badly aggregated random assortments of loans of questionable value should have been rated as rather risky - like a BBB bond. Instead, the rating companies were completely irresponsibly rating 80% of the bonds at AAA or "investment grade". Oh, and if the institution packaging the loans took back the lower-rated stuff and repackaged it again 80% of that batch would be rated AAA.
Well, that meant that you could buy insurance against these bonds defaulting for next to nothing, because they were highly rated.
Big problem - lots of pensions and other stuff is required to invest in AAA bonds and only AAA bonds. Now you have the rating companies rating BBB bonds (junk) as AAA so pension funds and other stuff ends up investing in these. Of course they are going to default. And then what happens to the pension fund?
The interesting part of all of this is the very few people that saw what was going on cashed in big (as in billions) on buying up "insurance" (CDS) on supposedly AAA rated bonds backed by mortgage securities. It seems that almost nobody figured out what the perfectly obvious outcome was going to be. Many of these folks were raking in plenty in loan origination fees while all this was going on, so that may have been a contributing factor.
So far, I haven't seen anyone bringing the rating companies (Moody's, etc.) to task on this. Without absolute confidence in AAA bonds, I don't see how the pension fund system can work. The answer here may be more regulation, but certainly not the kind of regulation that has been proposed or enacted so far.
What this would appear to mean is that any use of a dongle by a program for licensing is now null and void. If a "remover" tool is available to eliminate the need for the dongle, then anyone is free to use this.
Now the question becomes, when does a license violation or copyright violation occur? If you purchase one license (one dongle) is there now court-sanctioned approval to use multiple copies of the software through the use of a dongle-remover tool? If the dongle-remover is legal, it would seem now to place the onus on the publisher to figure out if the customer is using more than the licensed number of copies. If, and only if, such a discovery were made, then the issue of a copyright violation could be brought up.
But simply disabling the dongle would appear to be perfectly legal. For expensive software, this pretty much means only a single copy ever need be purchased and the customer can do this with impunity. There is considerable interest in this as today budgets are tight and even the most ethical organization is going to be sorely tempted. They have now been given court approval for modifying their software licensing.
This would not seem to open the door to redistribution outside of a licensed user. But again, once you enshrine the right to disable dongles you have opened the door to unlimited redistribution. Who exactly can determine whether or not a dongle-removal tool will only be used for legal purposes or not?
While you might try to equate this to legal vs. illegal use of a hammer where murder isn't a legal use I would frame this far closer to the idea of someone marketing full-size guillotines for trimming "Really Big Cigars" and attempting to say that the legal vs. murderous use of such a device outweighs any other interest in the matter.
How do you combat or otherwise deal with the fact that most "review" web pages are chock full of negative content from disgruntled customers with no legitimate complaint. Sure, there might be one or two real reviews in most sites, but that hardly counters the complaints from people that feel for one reason or another they weren't treated right.
You also have the "reviews" from interested parties friends and family.
With that, what possible point is there to looking at an online review of anything? You aren't going to get any more information about the item being reviewed. You are going to get bias one way or the other depending on the attitude of the reviewer. And who they are friends with. Or being paid by. Oh, you didn't know there are services to create positive reviews?
You are obviously not an author. As someone that was paid an advance by a publisher I can assure you that copyediting is something the publisher does whether the author wants it or not - this gives them a lot of control over the final product. Without this control, they would be publishing gibberish.
Similarly, for the publisher to talk to Amazon is going to cost them money. For them to talk to Walmart is going to cost money. No, they aren't going to do a full-page ad in the New York Times for most books but there are indeed promotion costs. Advertising costs are going to be things like getting a poster sent to 1,000 bookstores that lists the new books out this month.
Very little of book publishing has to do with printing and distribution. Printing? Maybe $2.50 per book for non-paperback books and $1 or less for paperbacks. Distribution? Oh, you mean shipping... Well we get boxes of 22 of my book for about $10 in shipping costs. UPS is your friend when you ship that much stuff.
We all want to live in a world where advertising is dead and extinct. People would find out about new products by trying them out, since most of them would be free. And we would all use the social media sites where absolutely truthful reviews from real, satisfied customers of these products.
Sadly, sometime around 800AD Thad figured out that while he might have the absolute greatest new oxcart that if he didn't tell people about it nobody would want him to make one for them. This was actually a re-discovery of the same facts know to the early Egyptians but lost when their empire collapsed.
Since then, we have had advertising. We will always have advertising and promotion of products. Products marketed without advertising and promotion will flop. Advertising and promotion cost lots of money. Hence, there will be people putting up money for advertising and promotion in exchange for the lion's share of the profits.
Certainly appropriate for the UK, who has been burned many times by closeted gays that are hooking up on the side. All Russia had to do was get a nice pretty boy to sit next to their target and they had a solid lock on the target. You would be surprised the lengths these folks went to in an effort to try to keep their secret live a secret.
Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
No, what it means is that the politicians are occupied on something harmless when they could instead be passing laws to protect children, search out terrorists and prevent street crime. That this would involve massive censorship, random searches of people for weapons and watching everything on hidden cameras everywhere in the US shouldn't bother you too much.
Personally, I would much, much rather have politicians looking at Google's data collection policies than trying to decide how the technology future of the world should look and what companies are "good" and which need to be taxed into bankruptcy. Or trying to actively prevent crime by ensuring everyone is reporting on anything they see that might be illegal. If you think this is too far fetched to happen in the US you haven't been paying attention.
So please, let's vote for gridlock and have the politicians spend their time on trivial matters. Please.
As someone that is somewhat knowledgeable about in-car navigation systems, sure, go ahead and compare some free web service to TomTom. While you are at it, compare Magellen as well. They are going to be about the same.
You can also compare most of the in-car systems (built-in and aftermarket) and see they are all about the same - mostly crap but often much better than a paper map. The displays aren't terrific and can be hard to see sometimes in direct sun. Also, the routing is debatable and the POI (Point Of Interest) listings are usually out of date, when available at all.
Yes, there may be updates, but it takes the company long enough to build the map database from source materials that it is assured to be out of date by the time the user gets it. This is very, very annoying when trying to use such systems in areas experiencing significant growth.
So now you have a uniformly negative opinion of navigation systems, right? Then compare what you have seen with a Garmin unit. Their processing path for the data gets current data out to the user much, much faster than other companies doing this. The POI database is much more usable and the UI is much better. Yeah, I carry a Garmin around with me.
So please, if you are going to compare systems, compare something real that works for the user. TomTom is cheap and pretty popular, but it doesn't have the UI or the data to really do a good job.
No, I didn't use to work for Garmin - I worked for a US-based map data vendor. And we helped a lot of people build in-car systems and were usually disappointed at some of the choices they made. But we had to remain pretty neutral.
Too bad. Should have gone open source and gotten a bunch of college kids to do the work for free. Then make millions on selling support for a completely unusable, undocumented and incomprehensible piece of software.
Because if it was clear and easy to use, nobody would need that "support".
In the US there is such a thing as a "contingency fee". This is where you convince a lawyer that your case is good enough to take on for 1/3rd of the proceeds. They get nothing if they lose. Lots of attorneys will take on such cases if they believe the client actually has a good chance of winning.
Of course, the problem is that nobody ever knows what is going to happen in a lawsuit. You go into court and you have no idea what might happen. With a jury you have 12 different people to contend with. Even with just a judge you have a person with potentially very different views of the world than you do. So the result can be anything once you get to court.
This is probably the biggest single deterrent to a lawsuit. You have no idea if your supposedly bulletproof case is going to end up as winning or not. Could be that the other side knows something you don't. Could be the judge sees it differently and comes down strongly in favor of the other side. You just don't know.
If they release blueprints and specifications some bright individual will notice there is radiation shielding on the probe. The light goes on and they realize there migth be radiation associated with this probe, perhaps in a more stealthy way than was done with the disaster that was the Cassini probe launch.
Therefore, any public release of this information would likely lead to the launch being cancelled or delayed.
Why do you think they aren't releasing more detailed information about it yet?
If music, movies, software and books are freely distributed they pretty much have zero value. There will be some very talented folks that are also independently wealthy (or have gotten rich from when their music had value) that can afford to work for nothing. The rest of the world is going to do something that pays the rent and the grocery bill.
This will certainly leave the field open to whomever wants to distribute their stuff because they know thiers has value. Most of this will be like Darwin Reedy that can't imagine the world being without her talent.
Fine, if that is where we really want to go.
Probably the biggest single problem is that we have nearly 100 years of highly-compensated, highly-valued works that without copyright protection and enforcement will be grabbed up by the mega-distribution companies. Sure, you want a complete collection of Henry Fonda's movies - $5. The problem is that it cost the distribution company $0 to do this and the only ones making any money from it are the likes of Walmart and Sony. They can afford to out-distribute anyone else on the planet - no matter how many hits your warez/torrent site gets.
Another side effect here is that without copyright protection and enforcement anything that is passed around for free will also get grabbed up by the mega-distributors if is any good. So they get to make money off the artists anyway. Still. Without any hope of compensation. Quite possibly without any attribution unless it helps sales.
No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to get rid of the distribution companies. They will "make" (as in manufacture) pop stars out of whole cloth as needed just to drive sales. They will have the tools (promotion and distribution) to do this. Sure, you can get rid of the RIAA, Warner Brothers, and EMI. But they will simply be replaced by Walmart, Sony and Amazon. With less favorable terms for the artists and less favorable terms for the purchasors.
As long as you don't have to build any of those dangerous, impotence causing, cancer causing transmission lines. When was the last time you heard about one being built, anywhere in the US?
They do indeed stop construction - usually long before the bulldozers appear on the scene. You get through the second environmental impact study and it is ruled that a third is needed to address the concerns of some folks about some lizard that will be disrupted - that the construction company didn't take into account because it was assumed to be unimportant.
At that point the investors pull out and the loans dry up. The project is cancelled. More power plant construction projects are cancelled than you would believe - I believe the ratio is something like 20 to 1 - 20 are proposed and 1 gets built.
If it was just an irrational fear of nuclear power that would be one thing. The problem is you have countless irrational fears all ganging up on each other. Just a few of them:
Fear of electricity itself - just the electrons in the wires
Fear of EMF fields generated by high-tension transmission lines.
Fear of release of nuclear contamination
Fear of nuclear explosions from power plants - after all, each one is just a bomb waiting to go off, right?
Fear of pollution caused by electric power industries. PCBs in transformers, for example.
And well, the list goes on and on.
You can walk down pretty much any suburban street and find someone that is scared of one of these things. So you run an ad in the newspaper asking for all of these people to come to the big scary electric power generating plant public comment session so each and every single one of them can get up and speak to the crowd about their fears. You will get a large percentage walking away saying they hadn't thought about some new thing to be scared of.
I think it took 10 years to get a natural gas generating plant built in Arizona because of the siting near some homes. They were going to use ammonia as a working fluid for spinning the turbines and that was immediately viewed with great suspicion. Just think what the results of an accident at the plant would be? 10 years it took to build about an 850 MW peaker plant that today runs 24x7 because nothing else is going to be built anytime soon.
It would destroy the pristine beauty of unspoiled nature. Before 1890 nobody had electricity, so there is no reason not to think we can't go back to not needing it. At least that is the direction the US is going in.
No question about it, you can talk about it, even hope and plan for it. But no way ever is construction going to start.
The small little thing called the "environmental impact study" is where it all comes to a stop. Sure, the first study says it is practical and has minimal impact. Then the protests and questions start. The second study is called for to address this. Then more protests. The third or forth study is where things begin to really show throught - the government would really like to be behind it, but it wouldn't be "popular" in all the right circles. Hence, the government isn't going to block the protesters from the process.
So no reactor will be built. End of story.
Unless and until the government says to the environmental wackos to sit down, shut up and allow the country to move forward very little in terms of electric power generation is going to change. There will be no large plants built and all you will see is a bunch of small (less than 1,000 MW) "peaker" plants being built - usually with an unbelievably long public comment and environmental impact study period.
Why should a bank pay for fraud by the cardholder? Because it is impossible under current circumstances to actually prove the difference between fraud perpetrated by the card holder or someone else.
A lot of merchants have insurance to cover such losses, so really nobody loses anything at all. Which is why nobody is motivated to fix it at all. Nobody loses and a few ordinary people get some extra spending money by lifting card numbers.
Why would any of this be needed? It has already been established that credit card fraud happens and is just a fact of life. It doesn't cost the cardholder anything. Most large merchants have insurance coverage for this specifically as well. So it really doesn't cost anyone anything.
So why would anyone spend any time at all "combatting credit card fraud"? It is relatively harmless way that some low-level crooks get some extra spending money. As an example, a waiter in a restaurant sees 100 credit card numbers a week. If he takes 50 of them and sends them off to some Russian web site he might get $0.50 each for them or about $25. So what? In comparison to many other things that are real problems, this is about as harmless as dealing drugs or prostitution.
Face it, your credit card is going to get stolen. It isn't going to cost you anything but it will be a minor hassle. The folks that stole it probably won't get much from the credit card which is why they are worth so little.
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Actually, that is a really great idea. A large part of the cost of such devices is the development of the software, so opening it up would enable other companies to just reuse the software with cloned hardware. Cheaper and it would be available to more people.
We have seen how good the Chinese are at cloning, maybe they should try medical devices to go along with drywall, toys and cat food. Then your doctor could offer the insurance company a cheaper device that they would gladly pay less to get put into the patient.
Software has value, and if you want to destroy that value you are going to get the consequences showing up in very creative ways. Forcing a company to release their software would be destroying the value of it.
The "right" way to do this is to make sure that the software escrow release is conditioned upon filing for bankruptcy or other protection from creditors or non-payment of the escrow fee.
Effectively what this does is destroy any possibility of using the code as an asset in selling the company and ensures that any type of financial problem becomes terminal. This is pretty much equivalent to using cynaide as a cold remedy - see, no more cold or cold symptoms.
I think only a a relatively small, non-profit, or possibly, privately owned, organization can actually engage in such risky journalism, because they have basically nothing to lose (well, some of the staff could lose their personal property and/or go to jail).
Failure to understand how the world works in usually fatal. Jail? Unlikely. Far more likely is a bullet in the head. Inconvenient people are usually not given much in the way of a trial. This guy is making himself more and more inconvenient every day.
The fact that he apparently does not understand this is just a sign as to how out of touch this guy really is.
You wonder why negative information about the war is being kept secret and not publicised? Please remember that the last war that the majority supported (in the US) was WW II. Nothing since then has been supported by the majority of the US population.
Today we have a problem. For various reasons the real involvement of Islamic fighters around the world and in the US is kept from people except in the most egregarious of cases, like the "Underwear Bomber". The general impression is that outside of the US and Western Europe the world is populated by unintelligent boobs that can't put a car bomb together to save their lives. This is also a very carefully crafted situation and certainly plays into a particular worldview.
One thing it does is it makes us feel safe that we aren't really giving anything away by moving IT work and manufacturing to China and India - because it is obvious they are too stupid to actually take anything away from us. We can let them to all the hard work and sit back and reap the profits without any danger at all that we are giving away the tools to eliminate the economy of the West.
Similarly, a few people know that we better not lose when we go up against Islam. Most of the people have no comprehension of the real situation and think it is all some rabid hate-driven propaganda. Obama got a bit of a wakeup call but still seems to believe that if we are nice to people they will like and respect us. Sadly, when a culture is based around the idea of "We're the best and deserve it all." it is very difficult to deal rationally with members of that culture. For example, there is a serious undercurrent of that attitude in Japan and it makes it almost impossible to import US goods into that country. They just know that everything made by non-Japanese is inferior.
Same thing with the Jews. There are a lot of people (but not a majority) that "know" Jews are fit only for extermination and until they are exterminated we will have pests in our midst. It is like living in a house with roaches. One day you get fed up and call the exterminator or start mashing roaches. Well, if you look at the TV coverage Jews get on Palestinian stations you might be in for a rude awakening. Certainly these people are being told that the roaches are loose and it is the responsibility of each and every person to assist the exterminators.
So what is really at stake with Iraq and Afganistan? It is a secret and probably one that is best kept from people because they aren't going to understand. Certainly not with the last 50 years of propaganda that has been absorbed.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US everything is driven by ratings. Both newspapers and TV (cable and broadcast) news are driven to do the things that get them higher ratings. These ratings tell the parent company, say CBS, that the news people are "doing a good job".
It doesn't matter what is covered, what matters is the response of the public. And believe me, the public has spoken. Nobody wants to hear about stuff going on halfway around the world. They want news with sex, scandal and perp walks. Public executions would be right in line with today's TV news. Photographing a politician running away from a half-dressed hooker is where it is at.
Issues? Nobody cares, at least not enough people. TV news is directed at about a 10-year-old level with a lot of interest in dirty jokes, anything to do with sex, and catching people doing things that the majority find wrong. And this attitude pervades every part of life today. It is why People magazine exists. It is how we got "reality TV" with things like Survivor and Big Brother. For the most part, it is a general dumbing-down of society in general.
You can see this with how people in high school relate to each other. Does anyone respect the straight-A student today? Or is it the jocks and druggies that are more popular? The jocks absolutely typify the way TV news allocates time to stories - sports and scandle with nothing left over for issues.
We have seen this coming for 50 years. The movie Idiocracy is loosly based on a 1950s story called "The Marching Morons". I don't think there is a solution for the general society but we better learn how to roll with this.
Huge problem with the idea of site speed... Fox is probably paying Akami for caching all over the planet, or at least all over the US. DailyKos is hosted at Voxel without Akami. Unless that is "fixed" by government giveaways or regulation Fox will always load faster than DailyKos because Fox is spending more money.
So how do you fix this? Put Akami out of business? Force Akami to cache everyone at no cost?
Sorry, I don't think you can fix the site speed problems and trying to involve the government in that is just going to be a disaster.
Recently read a book on this and the facts about what happened should frighten people because whatever new regulations came about, they didn't address what happened at all.
The problem was that places like Credit Suisse and Deutch Bank were packaging up loans into aggregated piles and then selling bonds backing a pile of loans. Most of these "piles" or badly aggregated random assortments of loans of questionable value should have been rated as rather risky - like a BBB bond. Instead, the rating companies were completely irresponsibly rating 80% of the bonds at AAA or "investment grade". Oh, and if the institution packaging the loans took back the lower-rated stuff and repackaged it again 80% of that batch would be rated AAA.
Well, that meant that you could buy insurance against these bonds defaulting for next to nothing, because they were highly rated.
Big problem - lots of pensions and other stuff is required to invest in AAA bonds and only AAA bonds. Now you have the rating companies rating BBB bonds (junk) as AAA so pension funds and other stuff ends up investing in these. Of course they are going to default. And then what happens to the pension fund?
The interesting part of all of this is the very few people that saw what was going on cashed in big (as in billions) on buying up "insurance" (CDS) on supposedly AAA rated bonds backed by mortgage securities. It seems that almost nobody figured out what the perfectly obvious outcome was going to be. Many of these folks were raking in plenty in loan origination fees while all this was going on, so that may have been a contributing factor.
So far, I haven't seen anyone bringing the rating companies (Moody's, etc.) to task on this. Without absolute confidence in AAA bonds, I don't see how the pension fund system can work. The answer here may be more regulation, but certainly not the kind of regulation that has been proposed or enacted so far.
What this would appear to mean is that any use of a dongle by a program for licensing is now null and void. If a "remover" tool is available to eliminate the need for the dongle, then anyone is free to use this.
Now the question becomes, when does a license violation or copyright violation occur? If you purchase one license (one dongle) is there now court-sanctioned approval to use multiple copies of the software through the use of a dongle-remover tool? If the dongle-remover is legal, it would seem now to place the onus on the publisher to figure out if the customer is using more than the licensed number of copies. If, and only if, such a discovery were made, then the issue of a copyright violation could be brought up.
But simply disabling the dongle would appear to be perfectly legal. For expensive software, this pretty much means only a single copy ever need be purchased and the customer can do this with impunity. There is considerable interest in this as today budgets are tight and even the most ethical organization is going to be sorely tempted. They have now been given court approval for modifying their software licensing.
This would not seem to open the door to redistribution outside of a licensed user. But again, once you enshrine the right to disable dongles you have opened the door to unlimited redistribution. Who exactly can determine whether or not a dongle-removal tool will only be used for legal purposes or not?
While you might try to equate this to legal vs. illegal use of a hammer where murder isn't a legal use I would frame this far closer to the idea of someone marketing full-size guillotines for trimming "Really Big Cigars" and attempting to say that the legal vs. murderous use of such a device outweighs any other interest in the matter.
How do you combat or otherwise deal with the fact that most "review" web pages are chock full of negative content from disgruntled customers with no legitimate complaint. Sure, there might be one or two real reviews in most sites, but that hardly counters the complaints from people that feel for one reason or another they weren't treated right.
You also have the "reviews" from interested parties friends and family.
With that, what possible point is there to looking at an online review of anything? You aren't going to get any more information about the item being reviewed. You are going to get bias one way or the other depending on the attitude of the reviewer. And who they are friends with. Or being paid by. Oh, you didn't know there are services to create positive reviews?
You are obviously not an author. As someone that was paid an advance by a publisher I can assure you that copyediting is something the publisher does whether the author wants it or not - this gives them a lot of control over the final product. Without this control, they would be publishing gibberish.
Similarly, for the publisher to talk to Amazon is going to cost them money. For them to talk to Walmart is going to cost money. No, they aren't going to do a full-page ad in the New York Times for most books but there are indeed promotion costs. Advertising costs are going to be things like getting a poster sent to 1,000 bookstores that lists the new books out this month.
Very little of book publishing has to do with printing and distribution. Printing? Maybe $2.50 per book for non-paperback books and $1 or less for paperbacks. Distribution? Oh, you mean shipping... Well we get boxes of 22 of my book for about $10 in shipping costs. UPS is your friend when you ship that much stuff.
We all want to live in a world where advertising is dead and extinct. People would find out about new products by trying them out, since most of them would be free. And we would all use the social media sites where absolutely truthful reviews from real, satisfied customers of these products.
Sadly, sometime around 800AD Thad figured out that while he might have the absolute greatest new oxcart that if he didn't tell people about it nobody would want him to make one for them. This was actually a re-discovery of the same facts know to the early Egyptians but lost when their empire collapsed.
Since then, we have had advertising. We will always have advertising and promotion of products. Products marketed without advertising and promotion will flop. Advertising and promotion cost lots of money. Hence, there will be people putting up money for advertising and promotion in exchange for the lion's share of the profits.
Certainly appropriate for the UK, who has been burned many times by closeted gays that are hooking up on the side. All Russia had to do was get a nice pretty boy to sit next to their target and they had a solid lock on the target. You would be surprised the lengths these folks went to in an effort to try to keep their secret live a secret.
Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
No, what it means is that the politicians are occupied on something harmless when they could instead be passing laws to protect children, search out terrorists and prevent street crime. That this would involve massive censorship, random searches of people for weapons and watching everything on hidden cameras everywhere in the US shouldn't bother you too much.
Personally, I would much, much rather have politicians looking at Google's data collection policies than trying to decide how the technology future of the world should look and what companies are "good" and which need to be taxed into bankruptcy. Or trying to actively prevent crime by ensuring everyone is reporting on anything they see that might be illegal. If you think this is too far fetched to happen in the US you haven't been paying attention.
So please, let's vote for gridlock and have the politicians spend their time on trivial matters. Please.
As someone that is somewhat knowledgeable about in-car navigation systems, sure, go ahead and compare some free web service to TomTom. While you are at it, compare Magellen as well. They are going to be about the same.
You can also compare most of the in-car systems (built-in and aftermarket) and see they are all about the same - mostly crap but often much better than a paper map. The displays aren't terrific and can be hard to see sometimes in direct sun. Also, the routing is debatable and the POI (Point Of Interest) listings are usually out of date, when available at all.
Yes, there may be updates, but it takes the company long enough to build the map database from source materials that it is assured to be out of date by the time the user gets it. This is very, very annoying when trying to use such systems in areas experiencing significant growth.
So now you have a uniformly negative opinion of navigation systems, right? Then compare what you have seen with a Garmin unit. Their processing path for the data gets current data out to the user much, much faster than other companies doing this. The POI database is much more usable and the UI is much better. Yeah, I carry a Garmin around with me.
So please, if you are going to compare systems, compare something real that works for the user. TomTom is cheap and pretty popular, but it doesn't have the UI or the data to really do a good job.
No, I didn't use to work for Garmin - I worked for a US-based map data vendor. And we helped a lot of people build in-car systems and were usually disappointed at some of the choices they made. But we had to remain pretty neutral.
Too bad. Should have gone open source and gotten a bunch of college kids to do the work for free. Then make millions on selling support for a completely unusable, undocumented and incomprehensible piece of software.
Because if it was clear and easy to use, nobody would need that "support".
In the US there is such a thing as a "contingency fee". This is where you convince a lawyer that your case is good enough to take on for 1/3rd of the proceeds. They get nothing if they lose. Lots of attorneys will take on such cases if they believe the client actually has a good chance of winning.
Of course, the problem is that nobody ever knows what is going to happen in a lawsuit. You go into court and you have no idea what might happen. With a jury you have 12 different people to contend with. Even with just a judge you have a person with potentially very different views of the world than you do. So the result can be anything once you get to court.
This is probably the biggest single deterrent to a lawsuit. You have no idea if your supposedly bulletproof case is going to end up as winning or not. Could be that the other side knows something you don't. Could be the judge sees it differently and comes down strongly in favor of the other side. You just don't know.
If they release blueprints and specifications some bright individual will notice there is radiation shielding on the probe. The light goes on and they realize there migth be radiation associated with this probe, perhaps in a more stealthy way than was done with the disaster that was the Cassini probe launch.
Therefore, any public release of this information would likely lead to the launch being cancelled or delayed.
Why do you think they aren't releasing more detailed information about it yet?
If music, movies, software and books are freely distributed they pretty much have zero value. There will be some very talented folks that are also independently wealthy (or have gotten rich from when their music had value) that can afford to work for nothing. The rest of the world is going to do something that pays the rent and the grocery bill.
This will certainly leave the field open to whomever wants to distribute their stuff because they know thiers has value. Most of this will be like Darwin Reedy that can't imagine the world being without her talent.
Fine, if that is where we really want to go.
Probably the biggest single problem is that we have nearly 100 years of highly-compensated, highly-valued works that without copyright protection and enforcement will be grabbed up by the mega-distribution companies. Sure, you want a complete collection of Henry Fonda's movies - $5. The problem is that it cost the distribution company $0 to do this and the only ones making any money from it are the likes of Walmart and Sony. They can afford to out-distribute anyone else on the planet - no matter how many hits your warez/torrent site gets.
Another side effect here is that without copyright protection and enforcement anything that is passed around for free will also get grabbed up by the mega-distributors if is any good. So they get to make money off the artists anyway. Still. Without any hope of compensation. Quite possibly without any attribution unless it helps sales.
No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to get rid of the distribution companies. They will "make" (as in manufacture) pop stars out of whole cloth as needed just to drive sales. They will have the tools (promotion and distribution) to do this. Sure, you can get rid of the RIAA, Warner Brothers, and EMI. But they will simply be replaced by Walmart, Sony and Amazon. With less favorable terms for the artists and less favorable terms for the purchasors.
As long as you don't have to build any of those dangerous, impotence causing, cancer causing transmission lines. When was the last time you heard about one being built, anywhere in the US?
1980? 1975 maybe?
Maybe if everyone just moved to the desert.
They do indeed stop construction - usually long before the bulldozers appear on the scene. You get through the second environmental impact study and it is ruled that a third is needed to address the concerns of some folks about some lizard that will be disrupted - that the construction company didn't take into account because it was assumed to be unimportant.
At that point the investors pull out and the loans dry up. The project is cancelled. More power plant construction projects are cancelled than you would believe - I believe the ratio is something like 20 to 1 - 20 are proposed and 1 gets built.
If it was just an irrational fear of nuclear power that would be one thing. The problem is you have countless irrational fears all ganging up on each other. Just a few of them:
You can walk down pretty much any suburban street and find someone that is scared of one of these things. So you run an ad in the newspaper asking for all of these people to come to the big scary electric power generating plant public comment session so each and every single one of them can get up and speak to the crowd about their fears. You will get a large percentage walking away saying they hadn't thought about some new thing to be scared of.
I think it took 10 years to get a natural gas generating plant built in Arizona because of the siting near some homes. They were going to use ammonia as a working fluid for spinning the turbines and that was immediately viewed with great suspicion. Just think what the results of an accident at the plant would be? 10 years it took to build about an 850 MW peaker plant that today runs 24x7 because nothing else is going to be built anytime soon.
It would destroy the pristine beauty of unspoiled nature. Before 1890 nobody had electricity, so there is no reason not to think we can't go back to not needing it. At least that is the direction the US is going in.
No question about it, you can talk about it, even hope and plan for it. But no way ever is construction going to start.
The small little thing called the "environmental impact study" is where it all comes to a stop. Sure, the first study says it is practical and has minimal impact. Then the protests and questions start. The second study is called for to address this. Then more protests. The third or forth study is where things begin to really show throught - the government would really like to be behind it, but it wouldn't be "popular" in all the right circles. Hence, the government isn't going to block the protesters from the process.
So no reactor will be built. End of story.
Unless and until the government says to the environmental wackos to sit down, shut up and allow the country to move forward very little in terms of electric power generation is going to change. There will be no large plants built and all you will see is a bunch of small (less than 1,000 MW) "peaker" plants being built - usually with an unbelievably long public comment and environmental impact study period.
Why should a bank pay for fraud by the cardholder? Because it is impossible under current circumstances to actually prove the difference between fraud perpetrated by the card holder or someone else.
A lot of merchants have insurance to cover such losses, so really nobody loses anything at all. Which is why nobody is motivated to fix it at all. Nobody loses and a few ordinary people get some extra spending money by lifting card numbers.
Why would any of this be needed? It has already been established that credit card fraud happens and is just a fact of life. It doesn't cost the cardholder anything. Most large merchants have insurance coverage for this specifically as well. So it really doesn't cost anyone anything.
So why would anyone spend any time at all "combatting credit card fraud"? It is relatively harmless way that some low-level crooks get some extra spending money. As an example, a waiter in a restaurant sees 100 credit card numbers a week. If he takes 50 of them and sends them off to some Russian web site he might get $0.50 each for them or about $25. So what? In comparison to many other things that are real problems, this is about as harmless as dealing drugs or prostitution.
Face it, your credit card is going to get stolen. It isn't going to cost you anything but it will be a minor hassle. The folks that stole it probably won't get much from the credit card which is why they are worth so little.