What he looked like is irrelevant - 140 pound meth addicts can be extremely dangerous with a pistol in their belt.
The problem is that he got out of the car. Period. At that point he was refusing to comply with the posted signs. There could be any number of reasons for this behavior, but what trained officers are supposed to do is expect the subject to do the worst possible thing - pull out a gun and start shooting. The moment he exited the vehicle he was a potential lethal threat to the officers and everyone else around.
You do not argue with someone with a gun, especially if that person is unstable. Anyone that is not paying attention to the signs saying not to leave your vehicle is obviously not thinking clearly. Put a gun in that person's belt and you now have a situation where people are going to die.
Sure, in this case it wasn't a methhead too strung out to read but someone that didn't understand the procedure. Rather than following the posted directions, he thought it was OK to get out and ask questions. Evidently when told to get back in the car he refused although this isn't exactly clear. The end result was he wasn't complying with posted instructions and was a potential threat to everyone in the facility. He was treated as a potential threat.
If you haven't been in a situation where a person wants to argue with cops and then for some unknown reason pulls out a gun, you can't understand what was going through the minds of the border agents. I suspect this happens a lot more on the Mexican border than the Canadian border and happens a lot more on the street in Chicago.
Most homeless shelters are horribly underfunded and are full of mentally ill that really need to be in hospitals or group homes and not on the streets.
Sorry, we tried that. In the 1970's it was decided that the hospitals were too cruel to their patients and the hospitals were closed and the patients dumped on the streets. Some found their way to "halfway houses" for a while. Those are mostly gone as well. So now it is just the streets.
There are no more hospitals left for these people.
Everywhere, except some military and government situations, you the employee do not get to decide that your boss is incompetent. Without some very clear policy to the contrary it was Terry's job to keep his boss's boss informed.
While this might not be criminal, to further try to use this to retain his job was working up to being criminal.
The problem is, outside of some government and military establishments, you never find a situation where the boss's boss isn't authorized to instruct subordinates to do something. Anything.
Telling the boss's boss that you will not follow instructions, especially where there is no written policy to the contrary, is just insubordination plain and simple. The employee is never rewarded for insubordination and it is pretty clear that Terry knew what he was getting into.
In giving the wrong password(s) out he was placing himself "in control" over everyone in the city. Sorry, that isn't going to fly no matter what. The fact that he sort of came to his senses after a while and gave the password(s) to the Mayor is further evidence of how wrong he knew his position was. Trying to use his insubordination and knowledge to retain his job was equally stupid.
The right answer for Terry would have been to turn everything over and get an email or something in writing saying he was turning this over and whatever happened was now not his responsibility.
Sorry, but this doesn't meet the requirement of it not being possible/practical to access the hospital network from an unsecured machine.
This requirement is pretty much driven by "what if the machine gets lost or stolen" sort of thing. Anything that is on that machine (data, saved credentials, command script to access something, whatever) falling into the wrong hands means a nightmare for the IT folks and they have been commissioned to make sure that doesn't happen. Sounds like by state law.
Dual boot isn't an option. Neither is a virtual machine. Unsecured machines have no business being near patient data, period.
I suggest that the answer is very simple and non-technical. They ask everyone with access to email externally to sign a piece of paper stating that they have read the security policy and will never violate it, where violating it is doing things like accessing the email system through any unsecured computer.
Violation of the policy is grounds for immediate termination plus criminal penalties for potentially exposing patient data. After the first guy goes to jail for five years or so people will start actually paying attention.
Don't think that this is going to be isolated to MA. It is a logical outgrowth of HIPPA and is pretty much a requirement. It is about time.
Probably something like "because you say it is in a signed statement." Lying is almost certainly grounds for termination plus whatever penalties HIPPA can be used to bring to bear. Lying, therefore would be stupid, the act of a total moron.
This is health care and health care records. We should all hope they get serious, are serious and stay serious.
In general the problem is that once someone comes up as a serious competitor in the tech world the investors flee the "old standard". They may take their money and put it under a mattress or invest in the "new standard" but either way, they have fled the old standard.
These days investors want rapid and significant growth. Nothing else matters. And while they are willing to take a hit for a bad decision, they aren't going to stand around hoping that someone gets their act togther in the face of competition. The only good businesses are those with significant barriers to entry and one strong player that can show huge growth. Once you lose that edge, you lose the investors.
If we are at a tipping point where any day now the sea may rise 200 feet, hadn't we better start actually doing something? While I am sure this project will make people feel better about themselves and that some small step has been taken, it doesn't really change anything.
No less coal will be burned to generate electricity.
So how about if we shut down all the coal plants RIGHT NOW and figure out what to replace them with in the next 10 years or so? If the problem is really as bad as some claim it to be, action is needed today not plans to put up some windmills so everyone can see the one "green power" billboard lit up and then go back home to their coal-generated electricity and turn on the TV.
There are really only two alternatives here. Either this is a massive campaign to show the Greenies are "right" somehow and there is no crisis or there is a crisis and the required actions are simply not being taken because of a lack of courage.
So come on, step up and do something. Or step up and admit there isn't any real crisis after all. One or the other. If there is really a crisis then I think people can get behind it but we need to shut off the carbon emissions today, not in 50 years.
One simple fact that a lot of people miss. Industrial and contstruction accidents kill people. Has been a fact of life since the pyramids.
You die just as dead falling off a 400 foot tower as you do from a burning oil rig. In both cases it is highly likely the body is never recovered. You die just as badly buried in the earth in some mine as you do when there is a mishap involving a wind turbine or the power grid it is connected to.
This isn't going to save any lives. They might die differently, but these things are going to require maintenance and they aren't going to shut them down for simple maintenance. So you have humans working in proximity with spinning blades. A moment of distraction and you are dead. Just like in a coal mine or on an oil rig.
This might be the case if you were using large orbital Solar Power Satellites. Once the IR and other wavelengths enter the atmosphere the heat is here. Utilizing non-IR wavelengths to generate electricity (which is what photovoltaic panels do) isn't going to somehow absorb "heat energy".
It is true that if we were able to reduce the number and size of other power plants through somehow using photovoltaic panels would reduce waste heat. The problem is, solar generation doesn't address peak load times at all, so without seriously restructuring electricity usage (like no more air conditioning in homes or no electric stoves, etc.) we aren't going to be able to decrease growth in base load capacity. When everyone comes home in June and turns on the TV, air conditioner and electric stove to cook dinner there is a huge peak in the load. And nowhere in the US has much ability to supply lots of power from solar at 6PM even in June.
So while solar might be an interesting thing for some people, it isn't going to deter or defer power plant requirements for handing the evening peak load situation. Now, if we restructured everyone's working hours so they worked from 3AM to 11AM it might shift the peak load around to noon and we could utilize solar to massively offset this peak load. Unfortunately, I don't think we are going to be able to do that. It would have to be done worldwide or it wouldn't work.
Sorry, but solar isn't really going to help all that much. It can make a big different in some very restrictive ways and it can be a really nice feel-good move for people. But in terms of actually changing the electric generation landscape the only way it does any good is if it is full-time power from part-time solar - batteries that supply power at night. And nobody is doing that today unless they have no other options. And you can't run an electric stove, microwave or air conditioner from a system like that, so for the mainstream homeowner it isn't an option.
I could put solar panels on my Arizona home for around $35,000. With tax credits and rebates it might end up only costing $15,000 to do it. But my home would still have to be connected to the grid and use that power exclusively in the evening and night. So I would probably save around 50-60% of my summertime electric bill paying for the system in around 20 years, at which point it would likely need new panels and a full rebuild. If I was committed to staying in the house for 20 years it might be interesting but somewhat impractical. As I expect to be out of the house in no more than 10 years, it would be wildly impractical to do it.
Right. And you just removed the motivation your boss would have had to "get you" for your insubordination.
Terry Childs biggest problem was that he was trying to protect his former employer's network from improper access. Why he cared, since it was his former employer, is somewhat of a mystery.
Telling your former boss (or former boss's boss) that you can't do something because it would compromise THEIR network is bound to inspire someone to try to take it out on you. Personally and severely. If they have an attorney at their beck and call, you are in deep, deep shit.
Because the drug manufacturers know today that their profits come from the US and everyone else can pay just cost plus a little margin. Which is stupid.
What needs to happen is for the drug companies to charge pretty much the same price everywhere. Which would mean something like a 400% increase outside the US and a 1000% decrease inside the US.
Small problem with that plan is that everyone outside the US would just stop buying from US drug companies. The price in the US would go back to the current level and everyone outside the US would continue paying their cheap prices for stuff made by government-subsidised drug companies.
MAP programs (Minimum Advertised Price) isn't illegal. Neither is a reseller agreement that forces "authorized resellers" to hold to a minimum price and not discount below that. You might like to call it "price fixing" but the reasons behind it are accepted by current laws.
The biggest reason for it is customer service. If you are selling something for a 2% margin you can't afford to do much customer service whereas the manufacturer may require resellers to act as their agent for customers to give them in-person local support. So the "authorized" reseller with a 12% margin can afford to do this but the low-margin reseller can't.
Today, the Internet makes it clear what the price is but never any terms beyond that. If the manufacturer's policy is that returns only come through authorized resellers this is a great benefit for customers that go to the store, buy the product and have problems with it or wish to return it - they have a local agent they can go to and not even have to pay return shipping. But a quick Internet search shows that the same item can be had at a lower price somewhere else. Of course, the Internet search doesn't show that the cheaper price means no support, and a much harder return process.
So of course what this results in is generally degrading the service that everyone receives in exchange for some low, low price. Call it the Walmartization of the marketplace. Cheaper goods, zero customer service, know-nothing sales clerks whose function is only to take your money.
One thing that you clearly do not understand about DVDs and movies is distribution is licensed pretty much by country. If the movie does not meet that country's standards, it is not licensed for distribution and cannot be shown or sold.
A movie that is highly critical of the Catholic Church would likely never be licensed in Italy or Ireland, for example. If it further showed priests chasing after small children and raping them there is no question - it would not be distributed in those countries whereas it might be distributed in the US or UK. Region coding is one way this is handled.
Another example is a R-rated movie that showed frontal nudity. Pubic hair is not allowed to be shown in Japan whereas it is perfectly OK in the US. But an airline version of the same movie would have even stricter editing requirements than anywhere else which is why it is a separate region code.
Sure, today there are ways of circumventing these restrictions. You can find online sellers that will ship anything anywhere, regardless of import restrictions and such. But Amazon probably will not ship region 1 DVDs to Japan. Because they would get in a lot of trouble from Japan for doing so.
Now, if you want the UN to control standards for worldwide video distribution and insist that they be 100% harmonized you might find some people willing to go along with that. However, in order to not offend anyone the result would likely be a lot of G-rated movies with nice friendly furry animal animated characters and no naked people, ever. And no controversial topics. Because no matter what the subject might be, you are sure to find someone that would be offended and that wouldn't ever be permitted.
I suggest doing some research on something called Social Credit. It's been tried before and it didn't work out very well.
The problem is that people need competition and incentives. When they do not have them, they pretty much lie down and do nothing. The Soviet Union was an incentive-free environment for most and it pretty much proved that. Social Credit didn't seem to do any better.
For a very, very pro Social Credit rant, I suggest reading We The Living by Robert Heinlein.
Nice, but you do need to consider that not everyone is perfectly dual-talented as you are.
For many, there is a real decision between being a good-enough musician and being a good-enough something else. Good enough means not "making lots of money" but good enough to be satisfied with the results. I would say that for most people to not suck at music it takes a lot of time, time that has to be spent on it rather than doing something else to make money.
Once you have made that committment, you are pretty much locked out of the dual-career path. There just isn't time. So now you need to get some money based on what you are in fact spending all of your time doing - music.
I suppose it is much simpler if you are really, really talented and do not have to spend all your time on music to be happy with the results. Note that I am not saying there is any motivation here other than personal satisfaction - most people that I know of involved with music are either doing it as a part-time hobby and don't really care about the music or are deeply committed to being the best they can be - which then starts taking more and more of their lives.
What we are going to lose with the new "its all free" philosophy is the possibility for deeply committed people to get any money from their efforts. A few can get paid to play in bars, but most of the bar scene doesn't really pay. A very, very few can attract 50,000 screaming fans to a football stadium today, but without serious promotion that just isn't going to happen for anyone anymore.
I guess people will still be paying $200 a ticket to see the Rolling Stones and The Who.
Unfortunately, what you are describing was actively practiced for hundreds of years - patronage.
While it resulted in some really nice music, it also pretty much locked most of Europe into the same artistic expression for those hundreds of years. You didn't write an opera that was too contreversial, because the patron wouldn't like it and that resulted in the artist starving... See Mozart for an example.
Patronage is the surest way to kill off creativity and lock us into rereleases of 1970s music forever. Like many things, first you need to look at all the other times something has been tried before you can hold a valid opinion on why it might or might not be a good thing. Sure, just because something has failed 100 times does not necessarily mean that the 101st time it might not work - as long as you change the conditions. With art you are talking about changing the fundamental characteristics of what it means to be human, and we haven't changed that in a long, long time. So expecting patronage to work this time is somewhere between disingenuous and simply uninformed.
How do you do this when the gambling site is run from China or Nigeria? What possible laws would they be subject to? I assume that in China ripping of Western people is OK and in Nigeria you can bribe the local officials cheaply to leave you alone.
There are a few other places like this as well.
There is no "law" on the Internet and right now there is no possibility of enforcement outside of a very few locations. Try to enforce any sort of law against a botnet operator in Russia. Just try. Unless they made a lot of enemies in Russia nobody is going to do anything. Same stuff will apply to Internet gaming.
50-60 years ago gambling was outlawed because it was very clear who exactly was profiting from gambling - organized crime. At the time, organized crime moved to Nevada and rigged the state elections to approve making gambling legal in the state. This was done and has worked out very well for Nevada. Not so well for the people actually living there, but they weren't really asked about it anyway.
Until fairly recently (1980 or so, maybe later) Nevada gaming was pretty much run by organized crime. They managed to convince people to open up gaming in Atlantic City to compete with Las Vegas and see how well that has worked out for the people there - but they did vote for it.
There are very good reasons why gambling is illegal in the US and it has nothing to do with ensuring corporate profits. It has everything to do with not having a city operate under the rules expounded in the movie Casino and not having dead bodies popping up every do often.
Think you could have gaming legalized and not have it controlled by organized crime? So far, every attempt in the US has failed. The last 25-30 years in Nevada has been the closest anyone has come yet, but it is very questionable how long this grace period will last. Gaming in other countries has also had substantial ties to crime as well, so the US is not the only place where this happens.
Atlantic City and Nevada are the only land areas in the US where gambling is legal.
Indian reservations, which are not part of the US and not under US control, can allow gambling. All of the casinos which are technically outside of the normal borders of a reservation are actually land swaps for other reservation land, so they are technically disjoint reservation land.
Riverboats are granted an exception in some places - I know about Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi. Probably a few others as well but it is strictly controlled that the gambling occurs on a boat and not on land.
There are boats that take people outside the territory of the US for gambling as well. I believe this is most popular in Florida but again, this is outside of the US.
Horse and dog tracks allow pari mutuel betting which is different enough to not really be called gambling. Off-track betting is tightly controlled as well.
State lotteries have more or less replaced illegal "numbers games" run by organized crime. You have to be approved as a lottery agent in most places and get a special license in order to sell tickets.
You forgot to make this anonymous. It is therefore connected (somewhat loosely) to you personally.
Hate speech is indeed a crime in the US and while you are unlikely to be arrested for hate speech alone, when they decide to finally arrest you for other stuff hate speech can turn your other crimes into "aggravated" giving you some more years at the State's expense.
I would offer that the SEC folks that did nothing all day but watch porn were actually doing us a favor. Government employees "doing things" often creates more harm than good, so if more of them would sit and just watch porn we might be a lot better off.
Think how many laws we might be missing if most government officials simply sat and watched porn all day. Do not begrudge them their salary while doing this. It is probably money well spent to keep them from passing more laws and interfering with people more than they are already doing so.
A truely efficient government would be extremely destructive to the idea of "freedom" because it is so inefficient. We should be thankful it is as inefficient and wasteful as it is.
Would anyone really be so incredibly lame as to buy a game they could have for free in a couple of weeks? This might work for the second game, but once that pattern is established I would think people would be able to just wait.
Nobody that pirates is a "potential customer". The end goal of the piracy movement is that it is all free or it isn't even made, and we are about 50% along the way towards that now.
DRM is a pointless hiccup along the way to utter destruction of revenue from digital goods. Now, whether you think that is good or bad is perhaps interesting. But it is undeniable that this is the goal and where we are going very, very quickly.
China gave up on selling music already. The US isn't far behind. Europe might be there before the US. Asia, Africa and South America never paid for anything anyway.
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What he looked like is irrelevant - 140 pound meth addicts can be extremely dangerous with a pistol in their belt.
The problem is that he got out of the car. Period. At that point he was refusing to comply with the posted signs. There could be any number of reasons for this behavior, but what trained officers are supposed to do is expect the subject to do the worst possible thing - pull out a gun and start shooting. The moment he exited the vehicle he was a potential lethal threat to the officers and everyone else around.
You do not argue with someone with a gun, especially if that person is unstable. Anyone that is not paying attention to the signs saying not to leave your vehicle is obviously not thinking clearly. Put a gun in that person's belt and you now have a situation where people are going to die.
Sure, in this case it wasn't a methhead too strung out to read but someone that didn't understand the procedure. Rather than following the posted directions, he thought it was OK to get out and ask questions. Evidently when told to get back in the car he refused although this isn't exactly clear. The end result was he wasn't complying with posted instructions and was a potential threat to everyone in the facility. He was treated as a potential threat.
If you haven't been in a situation where a person wants to argue with cops and then for some unknown reason pulls out a gun, you can't understand what was going through the minds of the border agents. I suspect this happens a lot more on the Mexican border than the Canadian border and happens a lot more on the street in Chicago.
Most homeless shelters are horribly underfunded and are full of mentally ill that really need to be in hospitals or group homes and not on the streets.
Sorry, we tried that. In the 1970's it was decided that the hospitals were too cruel to their patients and the hospitals were closed and the patients dumped on the streets. Some found their way to "halfway houses" for a while. Those are mostly gone as well. So now it is just the streets.
There are no more hospitals left for these people.
Everywhere, except some military and government situations, you the employee do not get to decide that your boss is incompetent. Without some very clear policy to the contrary it was Terry's job to keep his boss's boss informed.
While this might not be criminal, to further try to use this to retain his job was working up to being criminal.
The problem is, outside of some government and military establishments, you never find a situation where the boss's boss isn't authorized to instruct subordinates to do something. Anything.
Telling the boss's boss that you will not follow instructions, especially where there is no written policy to the contrary, is just insubordination plain and simple. The employee is never rewarded for insubordination and it is pretty clear that Terry knew what he was getting into.
In giving the wrong password(s) out he was placing himself "in control" over everyone in the city. Sorry, that isn't going to fly no matter what. The fact that he sort of came to his senses after a while and gave the password(s) to the Mayor is further evidence of how wrong he knew his position was. Trying to use his insubordination and knowledge to retain his job was equally stupid.
The right answer for Terry would have been to turn everything over and get an email or something in writing saying he was turning this over and whatever happened was now not his responsibility.
Sorry, but this doesn't meet the requirement of it not being possible/practical to access the hospital network from an unsecured machine.
This requirement is pretty much driven by "what if the machine gets lost or stolen" sort of thing. Anything that is on that machine (data, saved credentials, command script to access something, whatever) falling into the wrong hands means a nightmare for the IT folks and they have been commissioned to make sure that doesn't happen. Sounds like by state law.
Dual boot isn't an option. Neither is a virtual machine. Unsecured machines have no business being near patient data, period.
I suggest that the answer is very simple and non-technical. They ask everyone with access to email externally to sign a piece of paper stating that they have read the security policy and will never violate it, where violating it is doing things like accessing the email system through any unsecured computer.
Violation of the policy is grounds for immediate termination plus criminal penalties for potentially exposing patient data. After the first guy goes to jail for five years or so people will start actually paying attention.
Don't think that this is going to be isolated to MA. It is a logical outgrowth of HIPPA and is pretty much a requirement. It is about time.
Probably something like "because you say it is in a signed statement." Lying is almost certainly grounds for termination plus whatever penalties HIPPA can be used to bring to bear. Lying, therefore would be stupid, the act of a total moron.
This is health care and health care records. We should all hope they get serious, are serious and stay serious.
In general the problem is that once someone comes up as a serious competitor in the tech world the investors flee the "old standard". They may take their money and put it under a mattress or invest in the "new standard" but either way, they have fled the old standard.
These days investors want rapid and significant growth. Nothing else matters. And while they are willing to take a hit for a bad decision, they aren't going to stand around hoping that someone gets their act togther in the face of competition. The only good businesses are those with significant barriers to entry and one strong player that can show huge growth. Once you lose that edge, you lose the investors.
And with no money, well, the company is doomed.
If we are at a tipping point where any day now the sea may rise 200 feet, hadn't we better start actually doing something? While I am sure this project will make people feel better about themselves and that some small step has been taken, it doesn't really change anything.
No less coal will be burned to generate electricity.
So how about if we shut down all the coal plants RIGHT NOW and figure out what to replace them with in the next 10 years or so? If the problem is really as bad as some claim it to be, action is needed today not plans to put up some windmills so everyone can see the one "green power" billboard lit up and then go back home to their coal-generated electricity and turn on the TV.
There are really only two alternatives here. Either this is a massive campaign to show the Greenies are "right" somehow and there is no crisis or there is a crisis and the required actions are simply not being taken because of a lack of courage.
So come on, step up and do something. Or step up and admit there isn't any real crisis after all. One or the other. If there is really a crisis then I think people can get behind it but we need to shut off the carbon emissions today, not in 50 years.
One simple fact that a lot of people miss. Industrial and contstruction accidents kill people. Has been a fact of life since the pyramids.
You die just as dead falling off a 400 foot tower as you do from a burning oil rig. In both cases it is highly likely the body is never recovered. You die just as badly buried in the earth in some mine as you do when there is a mishap involving a wind turbine or the power grid it is connected to.
This isn't going to save any lives. They might die differently, but these things are going to require maintenance and they aren't going to shut them down for simple maintenance. So you have humans working in proximity with spinning blades. A moment of distraction and you are dead. Just like in a coal mine or on an oil rig.
This might be the case if you were using large orbital Solar Power Satellites. Once the IR and other wavelengths enter the atmosphere the heat is here. Utilizing non-IR wavelengths to generate electricity (which is what photovoltaic panels do) isn't going to somehow absorb "heat energy".
It is true that if we were able to reduce the number and size of other power plants through somehow using photovoltaic panels would reduce waste heat. The problem is, solar generation doesn't address peak load times at all, so without seriously restructuring electricity usage (like no more air conditioning in homes or no electric stoves, etc.) we aren't going to be able to decrease growth in base load capacity. When everyone comes home in June and turns on the TV, air conditioner and electric stove to cook dinner there is a huge peak in the load. And nowhere in the US has much ability to supply lots of power from solar at 6PM even in June.
So while solar might be an interesting thing for some people, it isn't going to deter or defer power plant requirements for handing the evening peak load situation. Now, if we restructured everyone's working hours so they worked from 3AM to 11AM it might shift the peak load around to noon and we could utilize solar to massively offset this peak load. Unfortunately, I don't think we are going to be able to do that. It would have to be done worldwide or it wouldn't work.
Sorry, but solar isn't really going to help all that much. It can make a big different in some very restrictive ways and it can be a really nice feel-good move for people. But in terms of actually changing the electric generation landscape the only way it does any good is if it is full-time power from part-time solar - batteries that supply power at night. And nobody is doing that today unless they have no other options. And you can't run an electric stove, microwave or air conditioner from a system like that, so for the mainstream homeowner it isn't an option.
I could put solar panels on my Arizona home for around $35,000. With tax credits and rebates it might end up only costing $15,000 to do it. But my home would still have to be connected to the grid and use that power exclusively in the evening and night. So I would probably save around 50-60% of my summertime electric bill paying for the system in around 20 years, at which point it would likely need new panels and a full rebuild. If I was committed to staying in the house for 20 years it might be interesting but somewhat impractical. As I expect to be out of the house in no more than 10 years, it would be wildly impractical to do it.
Right. And you just removed the motivation your boss would have had to "get you" for your insubordination.
Terry Childs biggest problem was that he was trying to protect his former employer's network from improper access. Why he cared, since it was his former employer, is somewhat of a mystery.
Telling your former boss (or former boss's boss) that you can't do something because it would compromise THEIR network is bound to inspire someone to try to take it out on you. Personally and severely. If they have an attorney at their beck and call, you are in deep, deep shit.
Because the drug manufacturers know today that their profits come from the US and everyone else can pay just cost plus a little margin. Which is stupid.
What needs to happen is for the drug companies to charge pretty much the same price everywhere. Which would mean something like a 400% increase outside the US and a 1000% decrease inside the US.
Small problem with that plan is that everyone outside the US would just stop buying from US drug companies. The price in the US would go back to the current level and everyone outside the US would continue paying their cheap prices for stuff made by government-subsidised drug companies.
MAP programs (Minimum Advertised Price) isn't illegal. Neither is a reseller agreement that forces "authorized resellers" to hold to a minimum price and not discount below that. You might like to call it "price fixing" but the reasons behind it are accepted by current laws.
The biggest reason for it is customer service. If you are selling something for a 2% margin you can't afford to do much customer service whereas the manufacturer may require resellers to act as their agent for customers to give them in-person local support. So the "authorized" reseller with a 12% margin can afford to do this but the low-margin reseller can't.
Today, the Internet makes it clear what the price is but never any terms beyond that. If the manufacturer's policy is that returns only come through authorized resellers this is a great benefit for customers that go to the store, buy the product and have problems with it or wish to return it - they have a local agent they can go to and not even have to pay return shipping. But a quick Internet search shows that the same item can be had at a lower price somewhere else. Of course, the Internet search doesn't show that the cheaper price means no support, and a much harder return process.
So of course what this results in is generally degrading the service that everyone receives in exchange for some low, low price. Call it the Walmartization of the marketplace. Cheaper goods, zero customer service, know-nothing sales clerks whose function is only to take your money.
One thing that you clearly do not understand about DVDs and movies is distribution is licensed pretty much by country. If the movie does not meet that country's standards, it is not licensed for distribution and cannot be shown or sold.
A movie that is highly critical of the Catholic Church would likely never be licensed in Italy or Ireland, for example. If it further showed priests chasing after small children and raping them there is no question - it would not be distributed in those countries whereas it might be distributed in the US or UK. Region coding is one way this is handled.
Another example is a R-rated movie that showed frontal nudity. Pubic hair is not allowed to be shown in Japan whereas it is perfectly OK in the US. But an airline version of the same movie would have even stricter editing requirements than anywhere else which is why it is a separate region code.
Sure, today there are ways of circumventing these restrictions. You can find online sellers that will ship anything anywhere, regardless of import restrictions and such. But Amazon probably will not ship region 1 DVDs to Japan. Because they would get in a lot of trouble from Japan for doing so.
Now, if you want the UN to control standards for worldwide video distribution and insist that they be 100% harmonized you might find some people willing to go along with that. However, in order to not offend anyone the result would likely be a lot of G-rated movies with nice friendly furry animal animated characters and no naked people, ever. And no controversial topics. Because no matter what the subject might be, you are sure to find someone that would be offended and that wouldn't ever be permitted.
I suggest doing some research on something called Social Credit. It's been tried before and it didn't work out very well.
The problem is that people need competition and incentives. When they do not have them, they pretty much lie down and do nothing. The Soviet Union was an incentive-free environment for most and it pretty much proved that. Social Credit didn't seem to do any better.
For a very, very pro Social Credit rant, I suggest reading We The Living by Robert Heinlein.
Nice, but you do need to consider that not everyone is perfectly dual-talented as you are.
For many, there is a real decision between being a good-enough musician and being a good-enough something else. Good enough means not "making lots of money" but good enough to be satisfied with the results. I would say that for most people to not suck at music it takes a lot of time, time that has to be spent on it rather than doing something else to make money.
Once you have made that committment, you are pretty much locked out of the dual-career path. There just isn't time. So now you need to get some money based on what you are in fact spending all of your time doing - music.
I suppose it is much simpler if you are really, really talented and do not have to spend all your time on music to be happy with the results. Note that I am not saying there is any motivation here other than personal satisfaction - most people that I know of involved with music are either doing it as a part-time hobby and don't really care about the music or are deeply committed to being the best they can be - which then starts taking more and more of their lives.
What we are going to lose with the new "its all free" philosophy is the possibility for deeply committed people to get any money from their efforts. A few can get paid to play in bars, but most of the bar scene doesn't really pay. A very, very few can attract 50,000 screaming fans to a football stadium today, but without serious promotion that just isn't going to happen for anyone anymore.
I guess people will still be paying $200 a ticket to see the Rolling Stones and The Who.
Unfortunately, what you are describing was actively practiced for hundreds of years - patronage.
While it resulted in some really nice music, it also pretty much locked most of Europe into the same artistic expression for those hundreds of years. You didn't write an opera that was too contreversial, because the patron wouldn't like it and that resulted in the artist starving... See Mozart for an example.
Patronage is the surest way to kill off creativity and lock us into rereleases of 1970s music forever. Like many things, first you need to look at all the other times something has been tried before you can hold a valid opinion on why it might or might not be a good thing. Sure, just because something has failed 100 times does not necessarily mean that the 101st time it might not work - as long as you change the conditions. With art you are talking about changing the fundamental characteristics of what it means to be human, and we haven't changed that in a long, long time. So expecting patronage to work this time is somewhere between disingenuous and simply uninformed.
How do you do this when the gambling site is run from China or Nigeria? What possible laws would they be subject to? I assume that in China ripping of Western people is OK and in Nigeria you can bribe the local officials cheaply to leave you alone.
There are a few other places like this as well.
There is no "law" on the Internet and right now there is no possibility of enforcement outside of a very few locations. Try to enforce any sort of law against a botnet operator in Russia. Just try. Unless they made a lot of enemies in Russia nobody is going to do anything. Same stuff will apply to Internet gaming.
50-60 years ago gambling was outlawed because it was very clear who exactly was profiting from gambling - organized crime. At the time, organized crime moved to Nevada and rigged the state elections to approve making gambling legal in the state. This was done and has worked out very well for Nevada. Not so well for the people actually living there, but they weren't really asked about it anyway.
Until fairly recently (1980 or so, maybe later) Nevada gaming was pretty much run by organized crime. They managed to convince people to open up gaming in Atlantic City to compete with Las Vegas and see how well that has worked out for the people there - but they did vote for it.
There are very good reasons why gambling is illegal in the US and it has nothing to do with ensuring corporate profits. It has everything to do with not having a city operate under the rules expounded in the movie Casino and not having dead bodies popping up every do often.
Think you could have gaming legalized and not have it controlled by organized crime? So far, every attempt in the US has failed. The last 25-30 years in Nevada has been the closest anyone has come yet, but it is very questionable how long this grace period will last. Gaming in other countries has also had substantial ties to crime as well, so the US is not the only place where this happens.
Atlantic City and Nevada are the only land areas in the US where gambling is legal.
Indian reservations, which are not part of the US and not under US control, can allow gambling. All of the casinos which are technically outside of the normal borders of a reservation are actually land swaps for other reservation land, so they are technically disjoint reservation land.
Riverboats are granted an exception in some places - I know about Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi. Probably a few others as well but it is strictly controlled that the gambling occurs on a boat and not on land.
There are boats that take people outside the territory of the US for gambling as well. I believe this is most popular in Florida but again, this is outside of the US.
Horse and dog tracks allow pari mutuel betting which is different enough to not really be called gambling. Off-track betting is tightly controlled as well.
State lotteries have more or less replaced illegal "numbers games" run by organized crime. You have to be approved as a lottery agent in most places and get a special license in order to sell tickets.
Everywhere else in the US, gambling is illegal.
You forgot to make this anonymous. It is therefore connected (somewhat loosely) to you personally.
Hate speech is indeed a crime in the US and while you are unlikely to be arrested for hate speech alone, when they decide to finally arrest you for other stuff hate speech can turn your other crimes into "aggravated" giving you some more years at the State's expense.
I would offer that the SEC folks that did nothing all day but watch porn were actually doing us a favor. Government employees "doing things" often creates more harm than good, so if more of them would sit and just watch porn we might be a lot better off.
Think how many laws we might be missing if most government officials simply sat and watched porn all day. Do not begrudge them their salary while doing this. It is probably money well spent to keep them from passing more laws and interfering with people more than they are already doing so.
A truely efficient government would be extremely destructive to the idea of "freedom" because it is so inefficient. We should be thankful it is as inefficient and wasteful as it is.
Would anyone really be so incredibly lame as to buy a game they could have for free in a couple of weeks? This might work for the second game, but once that pattern is established I would think people would be able to just wait.
Nobody that pirates is a "potential customer". The end goal of the piracy movement is that it is all free or it isn't even made, and we are about 50% along the way towards that now.
DRM is a pointless hiccup along the way to utter destruction of revenue from digital goods. Now, whether you think that is good or bad is perhaps interesting. But it is undeniable that this is the goal and where we are going very, very quickly.
China gave up on selling music already. The US isn't far behind. Europe might be there before the US. Asia, Africa and South America never paid for anything anyway.