Here is problem with over-regulation: there is no right answer.
In the US it has pretty much been said a lot that the FAA was not restricting flights on its own authority but instead advising the airlines about the cloud.
Europe, on the other hand, has a regulations in place that make it the government's responsibility. So if they let the planes fly, then it would have been the government regulator's liability for the crash. Alternatively, if they ground the flights, then the airline bankruptcy is the regulator's fault as well.
If the government is advising, then the liability would be at a much lower level - the airlines, probably where it should be. If the government is regulating and controlling the behavior of the airlines then no matter what they do, it is the wrong thing. If a plane had crashed, it would have been "lax regulation". As it is now, likely as not the airlines aren't going to cease operation but instead be bought up and consolidated, possibly due to overly restrictive policies.
IPV6 is an option for the user, but not for a server. It means XP and earlier Windows users cannot connect.
It would be like a bank saying their web site only works for Linux.
Sure, it will be an option some day in the future, but people are still using Windows 98SE. If you have a computer from 1998 it is probably the only real option for a lot of people. Some folks just don't have the disposable income to drop $500 on a newer computer.
If there is a market for IP addresses, I suspect a lot of people are going to get screwed. My office has four static IP addresses and Cox charges $5 a month for each of them. If you can sell an IPV4 address for $10,000 because there are no more, something tells me Cox will want to sell as many off as they can and make millions doing so.
So the $5 a month charge becomes $1000 a month and having a server connected via Cox will be impossible.
You can now. A place called SolarCity is doing it.
Unfortunately, it seems like a huge scam. They own the panels and they get the tax breaks. You pay for installation and a fixed monthly fee. Sounds good, right?
Except when their investors bail as soon as it stops growing real fast, you will have nothing on your roof.
Sorry, we're stuck in the environmentalist age. Nothing is going to get built here, no matter how nice it might be simply out of fear and a desire for everyone to live more simply and consume less.
So we're going to run out soon. And lots of people will be very, very happy about it.
And you're right - the rest of the world that isn't under the thumb of the Greenies will be fine.
It would make sense if anyone would let the utilities build anything. Not going to happen in Arizona. When I lived in Illinois construction was impossible there as well.
The first step is the environmental impact study which takes years. Then the public comment period, where they get asked about how the mystical fields from their generators are going to affect the health of the people nearby. If the utility hasn't given up by then, lawsuits are filed by people that already have health problems because of power lines and are able to convince the courts that a new plant will just make things worse. So, changes are made and a new environmental impact study is commissioned.
Forget it, no generating plants are going to be built. Period.
Oh, and pretty much the same things happen if they want to enlarge an existing facility.
And the solution is terribly simple, pay more for your elec so that more power facilities can be built. But that is not an option either because all the profits go to shareholder, not into investments for the future.
No, the solution is to kill all the environmentalists that have made it impossible to build more power facilities. There hasn't been a major power plant built in the US since the 1970s and there isn't likely to be one built anytime soon, either.
Similarly, because just about everyone knows that electricity is dangerous and power lines cause cancer, impotentence, autism and warts nobody wants a nice new "smart grid" transmission line anywhere near their house, school or office. So we aren't going to be getting many of those, either.
I do not believe there is any chance of increasing electric generating capacity in the US today. So, what we are going to see is utilities turning more and more to regulation and control to ensure that what they have will work for a growing population. Of course, it can't possibly work for much longer - we have already seen the signs of maxing out the capacity. But they have no choice really, as there are no new facilities going to be built.
I'm sorry, we were barely able to complete the Chunnel project recently. I can't believe that Netherlands can manage public opinion better than in the US - which means that when people find out what a "megaproject" really means they will shut it down.
You see, it is a pretty well known fact that large engineering projects end up costing lives. You can pretty much talk to anyone with experence and they can give you a figure of how many people are going to die. For example, 1 death per mile of tunnel is pretty common.
You don't really think that sort of thing is acceptable, do you? Certainly in the US this has pretty much ended the idea of the "megaproject".
Obviously, the solution is to find a way to make things much safer so nobody dies, right? Well, that may not be wildly impractical, but it is very, very difficult. Things have gotten a lot better - I suspect the building of the pyramids in Egypt cost a lot of lives, far more than building Boulder Dam or the Chunnel. But we aren't talking about "improvement" anymore - the standard seems to be zero or non-zero with non-zero being an abject failure. Possible? Maybe, but first you have to make people mistake-proof because one mistake on projects like this can kill you. And unfortunately, the mistake-proof human in large numbers doesn't exist, and may never.
I guess mega-engineering projects will just have to wait in the US until you can hire just mistake-proof people. And I still say I can't believe the situation is much better in Europe.
The problem is, you aren't ever going to get that.
Disclosure of the full dataset that is available doesn't get you much, because the model (the programs) is so complicated. So you have something that is unintelligible to anyone that isn't working on it. That is a large part of what the whole "climategate" furor was over. The data wasn't released because it was impenetratable and obtuse, when it was relased it was found to be impenetratable and obtuse - and very, very hard to understand in the "right" way.
Peer review? Ha. Right now there are two sides to this and neither one is being terribly objective and forthright. Each side is pretty much saying that the data either shows something terrible or it doesn't show that at all. Nobody is taking a "scientific" approach to it, mostly because the results from the data aren't really reproducible. Again, this is because the data and the model are very obscure and complicated. There is also a lot of tweaking and processing going on with the data.
Whether or not this tweaking is generating the results or the data stands on its own is something that nobody is really interested in right now. Just about everyone already "knows" the answer and is sure the other side has ulterior motives. Science by conjector, science by concensus and science with irreproducible results isn't really science. But we've known that for a long time.
If things are as bad as some people believe, why aren't they taking action? If every car, every airplane, every factory, every power plant is pushing things further and further into what was quoted recently as a 200 foot rise in sea level, why aren't the believers (and the scientists themselves) stopping every flight they can? Why don't we have guys in coal powerplants taking them over ala China Syndrome at gunpoint to shut them down?
There is either a serious lack of courage of conviction, or the folks saying the sky is falling aren't really all that convinced. When I see action I might be more encouraged to believe that they really know something.
Phones better not be connecting to routers that they aren't specifically set up for. Receiving the SSID is one thing, but connecting is a whole different matter. Same with the neighbor - just because he wants to print his daughter's report on my color laser printer doesn't mean I have to let him.
Just remember that decrypting any signal transmitted was perfectly legal until the Home Satellite Receiver Act of 1984 which made it a crime to decrypt satellite transmissions and mandated the use of a specific device for encrypting them. This was pretty much the creation of Al Gore.
There were attempts before this, such as with radar detector laws and attempts to make over-the-air pay TV protected but until this passed at a federal level it was legal to receive anything that was transmitted.
It is a cruel joke - mostly on the people that think as early adopters they are getting something.
The problem is that the bandwidth required on a per-household level is no problem, but the bandwidth required at a per-neighborhood level is way, way beyond anything that is even remotely possible today. It doesn't really matter if you are on DSL, cable or even fiber. Your bandwidth to your house is shared with the rest of the neighborhood from a node. With DSL this is the DSLAM at the CO. With cable it is a "neighborhood node" box not too far away. I don't know what it is called with fiber, but it is there. All of these boxes are fed by a fiber link from somewhere else that actually has the backbone connection - and the aggregate bandwidth for the neighborhood is limited by the capacity of this link.
Relatively speaking, this link is very fast. So today when you are downloading something on your 70Mbit connection you might actually get 70Mbit a lot of the time. However, that is assuming that only a small fraction of the homes connected to your node are actually very busy.
Say it requires 5Mbit/sec for HD television. You can probably assume that the fiber link to the node is at least 500Mbit/sec. Assuming all of that 500Mbit/sec is available for data (it isn't on cable systems or most fiber implementations, but that is another problem entirely), you can support a maximum of 100 simultaneous HD television streams at one time. When someone tries to start up the 101st stream, they aren't going to have very good performance at all.
The real problem is that should IP TV ever acquire any real market penetration you would likely have 500 homes out of the 1000 connected to that node trying to get a stream. Not going to happen. And the performance would be so incredibly bad that it would be completely unusable.
The infrastructure for even 10% market penetration of IP TV simply doesn't exist. And until someone figures out how to upgrade the fiber link to the node to 100GB/sec for a reasonable cost, it isn't going to be possible. All of the early adopters are simply going to get screwed in the end.
The problem is that the catalog from around 1930 until today will last the average person their lifetime. So even if new stuff stops being made, there will be 80+ years of content that is free forever.
This is the end result of piracy - everything for free but nothing new of any quality. Today, there is no solution except maybe hurrying this end result so people can see what it is like. The thing is, free is so damned attractive that it may be 50 years before people decide it might be nice to have something to pay for once again. I do think it might take that long.
We are teaching children in most schools about how everything on the Internet is there for the taking. Teachers download software for the classroom. Students show other students how and they go home and download Mom's favorite song - she is so happy that she just can't contain herself. And it is FREE!
So for now, downloading stuff for free is certainly the way to go. Anyone paying doesn't understand the "new digital economy", and some idiots are paying crooks for pseudo-legitimate stuff, like allofmp3.com. I'm sure there are plenty of others as well.
It likely as not isn't available in your country because it is not licensed. A movie or TV show has to be permitted to be shown in most parts of the world. It is because of different standards and requirements.
For example, now Ireland has a law that is being enforced against blasphemy. Anyone with a brain knows this is for the support of Islam and nothing else. So you have a movie or TV show that has a half a second of a picture of Mohammed - that can't be shown in Ireland until that half second is cut. Whereas in the US (right now) it is legal if you have the courage to show it.
The same applies to lots of other things. For example, it is forbidden to show pubic hair in Japan. Anything else is pretty much OK, including full insertion but no pubic hair.
One big problem with any video stuff is the licensing - I suspect it costs a lot to get the license and then you have to make the editorial changes that are required. Nobody is going to do this until they have some reason to expect a big payoff which will more than cover the costs.
Most scientific research today is indeed a competition, although not for profit but for grant money and tenure. Failure to beat the competition results in no grants, no tenure and stuck in a dead-end role somewhere far less exciting.
Check out the AIDS research history. This happens all the time, with just about everything that is in the least ways interesting.
It has nothing to do with business or profit and everything to do with status and funding. If you work for a university, you are nothing without tenure and grants. If you work for a company, you are nothing without status, reputation and either grants or funding. If you aren't ahead of your competition, you are nothing and will be compensated accordingly. Here is your toilet brush, get to work.
Problem is, today only Islam is a force that command crowds of people to riot and kill.
Try getting a bunch of Baptists to do that.
For the last few years France has been living in fear of what gangs of unemployed Muslim youths are going to do. And hoping they stick to just burning some more cars tonight. This has not spread to the US, yet.
Today England, Germany, France, Belgium, and Australia that I know of have laws that recognize the uniqueness of Muslims. They are not subject to ordinary laws in those countries, and some law enforcement is left to Sharia courts outside of the legal system. Certainly in Australia, a man beating his wife will be arressed - unless his is Muslim.
Muslim immigrants to these countries fully acknowledge that they have no allegiance to their new country, only Islam. In the US this means that any Muslim taking a citizenship oath is lying.
Nothing is going to be done about this, but we better be prepared to adopt laws that recognize the supremacy of Islam and the rights of Muslims above those of other religions. Failure to do so will bring riots and death.
An important lesson that the past 10 years or should have taught everyone.
There are no extremist Muslims. They are a figment of George Bush's imagination. They simply do not exist.
That isn't to say that Muslims in general are not offended by blasphemy. They are, and when whipped into a frenzy by the right imam, they are no match for a bunch of cartoonists.
Why do you think blasphemy is illegal in many parts of the world now? Because when it is committed the perpetrators need to be be dealt with harshly. Will the US start beheading blasphemers? Well, when push comes to shove, they might have to. Or face the consequences.
The population of the US is around 330 million, not 6 billion.
Only around 50% of the US has access to high-speed Internet connections in their homes. Pirating at the library doesn't really work so good. You can believe that with 165 million potential pirates that at least 50 million of them are actively pirating media, mostly music.
I don't think I know anyone that would ever pay a dime for music ever again. Movies are on their way out as something to pay for as well, but NetFlix is pretty cheap still.
Every day in schools all across America children are taught that it is wrong to give people money for what can be freely downloaded from the Internet. The teachers pirate software for classes, the students use school computers to download stuff. The children then can go home and show Mom how she can get her favorite songs on her iPod for free. She is of course amazed at the "power of the Internet" and how smart her children are.
Do you really think things can continue this way? The business model of selling a product seems to be completely outmoded today. You wonder why stores no longer have displays outside on the sidewalk? It is because people would just take stuff, just like they have found they can just take stuff on the Internet. I guess this is the "new business model" that people keep talking about.
If you believe the "right to consume" overrules all, then yes, this is a declaration of war.
The fact that it is now possible to make sure that one copy of any work release digitally (software, movie, book, music, etc.) is sold and everyone on the planet with an Internet connection has it for free. No Internet today clearly equals no right to pirate, no right to consume.
Personally, I think the only solution for this to not have ACTA, not have any copyright enforcement and push everyone to the model where it is all free now. We will still have "entertainment" but it will be either ad-driven or user-generated.
The ad-driven stuff will be truely vile. AM radio in the US is pretty much 55 minutes of ads per hour of programming. You can expect corporate sponsors of entertainment media to pretty much go down that road in order to get compensated for production costs. Then "piracy" will be irrelevent - you will actually be doing the corporate masters bidding by downloading, collecting, and redistributing.
User generated seems to be the absurd hope of people. I suggest Darwin (Misha) Reedy as a good example of what user-generated content can be. Search for her on YouTube and you will see a really good example. User generated content is created because the user has a huge ego and likely as not all out of proportion to their talent. But negative reviews never affect people like that - they know they are the greatest gift to humankind ever and to deprive humankind of their talent would be a crime.
I think the concept of "fair use" and its exceptions to copyright law are pretty much a US concept alone. Other countries have things somewhat similar but with different specifics.
This would (of course) be implemented as a treaty which would be considered to override any existing law in the US. Pretty much the same as WTO overrides any "protectionism" that might benefit US workers.
Uhh, wasn't it Terry Child's responsibility to have insured the passwords were available in the proper database rather than being the sole keeper of them when he left?
Wouldn't it have been better to have them written on a piece of paper on his desk as he walked out rather than what he did?
Besides, shouldn't the city have changed them immediately upon his termination?
Well, when someone at a C-level asks the IT admin person for some password there are really three choices:
Give them over after getting it in writing that you are doing this against policy.
Give them over and take your chances nothing bad happens.
Don't give them over, get fired and take whatever other consequences they might throw at you.
Those are pretty much the choices. There is no #4 where you get to "do the right thing" and walk away a free man. The fact that he had already left the organization meant his real responsibility was over. Trying to "save the organization from itself" almost never gets you anywhere and carries huge risks. Terry is about to experience the result of these huge risks.
My guess is the jury takes about 10 minutes to return a guilty verdict.
While just handing over the passwords might not have been the most protective move, it would have avoided any consequences to Terry. Getting an email saying the boss was knowingly circumventing procedures would have absolved Terry of any hint of wrongdoing no matter what happened.
Keeping the password away from the boss would never have turned out well for Terry. It was clear that he was doing this for some self-important reason that his superiors didn't agree with or understand. They never would understand, and Terry should have figured that out in about 2 minutes and just did what he was told.
Unfortunately for him, his ability to shield himself from (non-existent) fallout disappeared the moment he said "No" the first time. Insubordination just pisses off people at high levels. And self-important "I have to protect the city from your bad judgement" just makes things worse.
Just that simple, huh? So let's say the Dean for Admissions demands you give him the organization-wide root or domain admin password. Will you? What if it's the dean for admissions, two members of the board of trustees, the chief of campus police, and a computer lab tech from the biology department, and all want you to give the password to the lab tech?
When either a direct-line supervisor or someone as high up the food chain as you are supposing here asks for something you pretty much give it to them. Or get fired on the spot with good cause. So of course you give it to them and let them take the heat for the consequences. Network down for a week? So what? It isn't the admin's problem to explain this to everyone.
If the policy states you shall not give the password to anybody but the CIO, and all of these "designated agents" come to you and demand the password... are you going to give it to them?
If the "designated agent" is really authorized, heck yes. About the only way out of this that I can see would be if all you had was someone claiming to be "designated" and the CIO was completely unavailable to verify. Again, doing your job means following directions, even if those directions seem utterly stupid. Covering your ass is a well-known tactic, but refusing to cooperate because of some inflated sense of self-importance is stupid and gets you fired.
Let's say you quit your job, and three days afterward they call you asking for the passwords. How do you know if the policy changed? Maybe the CIO was fired. How do you know these are still the "designated agents"?
And if you have quit, why do you care? If the passwords were not changed the moment you left, it is pure and simple negligence. So all you have is obsolete information that is about as secret as yesterday's newspaper.
These are the types of problems that arrise from this prosecution. The law gives organizational policy the force of law, without realizing its limitations. So before you tell us to "shut up", you might want to think about the ramifications of that first
First off, you do what you are told to do through the organization structure. If you aren't doing that, you get fired for cause. Period. Insubordination is never a good idea and it is a lousy career move. If you have to, you get a real nice CYA document from some higher-up so that you can always say you were just doing what you were told to do, no matter how stupid it sounds. In this case, Terry's job wasn't to protect the city from the Mayor and the Mayor's questionable directions. And openly defying in the manner that was done has consequences that Terry is just finding out about.
My guess is that no matter what he is charged with, the jury looks at it and says he is an self-important idiot that was insubordinate. In 10 minutes they will have a "Guilty" verdict.
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Here is problem with over-regulation: there is no right answer.
In the US it has pretty much been said a lot that the FAA was not restricting flights on its own authority but instead advising the airlines about the cloud.
Europe, on the other hand, has a regulations in place that make it the government's responsibility. So if they let the planes fly, then it would have been the government regulator's liability for the crash. Alternatively, if they ground the flights, then the airline bankruptcy is the regulator's fault as well.
If the government is advising, then the liability would be at a much lower level - the airlines, probably where it should be. If the government is regulating and controlling the behavior of the airlines then no matter what they do, it is the wrong thing. If a plane had crashed, it would have been "lax regulation". As it is now, likely as not the airlines aren't going to cease operation but instead be bought up and consolidated, possibly due to overly restrictive policies.
No way to win.
IPV6 is an option for the user, but not for a server. It means XP and earlier Windows users cannot connect.
It would be like a bank saying their web site only works for Linux.
Sure, it will be an option some day in the future, but people are still using Windows 98SE. If you have a computer from 1998 it is probably the only real option for a lot of people. Some folks just don't have the disposable income to drop $500 on a newer computer.
If there is a market for IP addresses, I suspect a lot of people are going to get screwed. My office has four static IP addresses and Cox charges $5 a month for each of them. If you can sell an IPV4 address for $10,000 because there are no more, something tells me Cox will want to sell as many off as they can and make millions doing so.
So the $5 a month charge becomes $1000 a month and having a server connected via Cox will be impossible.
You can now. A place called SolarCity is doing it.
Unfortunately, it seems like a huge scam. They own the panels and they get the tax breaks. You pay for installation and a fixed monthly fee. Sounds good, right?
Except when their investors bail as soon as it stops growing real fast, you will have nothing on your roof.
Sorry, we're stuck in the environmentalist age. Nothing is going to get built here, no matter how nice it might be simply out of fear and a desire for everyone to live more simply and consume less.
So we're going to run out soon. And lots of people will be very, very happy about it.
And you're right - the rest of the world that isn't under the thumb of the Greenies will be fine.
It would make sense if anyone would let the utilities build anything. Not going to happen in Arizona. When I lived in Illinois construction was impossible there as well.
The first step is the environmental impact study which takes years. Then the public comment period, where they get asked about how the mystical fields from their generators are going to affect the health of the people nearby. If the utility hasn't given up by then, lawsuits are filed by people that already have health problems because of power lines and are able to convince the courts that a new plant will just make things worse. So, changes are made and a new environmental impact study is commissioned.
Forget it, no generating plants are going to be built. Period.
Oh, and pretty much the same things happen if they want to enlarge an existing facility.
And the solution is terribly simple, pay more for your elec so that more power facilities can be built. But that is not an option either because all the profits go to shareholder, not into investments for the future.
No, the solution is to kill all the environmentalists that have made it impossible to build more power facilities. There hasn't been a major power plant built in the US since the 1970s and there isn't likely to be one built anytime soon, either.
Similarly, because just about everyone knows that electricity is dangerous and power lines cause cancer, impotentence, autism and warts nobody wants a nice new "smart grid" transmission line anywhere near their house, school or office. So we aren't going to be getting many of those, either.
I do not believe there is any chance of increasing electric generating capacity in the US today. So, what we are going to see is utilities turning more and more to regulation and control to ensure that what they have will work for a growing population. Of course, it can't possibly work for much longer - we have already seen the signs of maxing out the capacity. But they have no choice really, as there are no new facilities going to be built.
I'm sorry, we were barely able to complete the Chunnel project recently. I can't believe that Netherlands can manage public opinion better than in the US - which means that when people find out what a "megaproject" really means they will shut it down.
You see, it is a pretty well known fact that large engineering projects end up costing lives. You can pretty much talk to anyone with experence and they can give you a figure of how many people are going to die. For example, 1 death per mile of tunnel is pretty common.
You don't really think that sort of thing is acceptable, do you? Certainly in the US this has pretty much ended the idea of the "megaproject".
Obviously, the solution is to find a way to make things much safer so nobody dies, right? Well, that may not be wildly impractical, but it is very, very difficult. Things have gotten a lot better - I suspect the building of the pyramids in Egypt cost a lot of lives, far more than building Boulder Dam or the Chunnel. But we aren't talking about "improvement" anymore - the standard seems to be zero or non-zero with non-zero being an abject failure. Possible? Maybe, but first you have to make people mistake-proof because one mistake on projects like this can kill you. And unfortunately, the mistake-proof human in large numbers doesn't exist, and may never.
I guess mega-engineering projects will just have to wait in the US until you can hire just mistake-proof people. And I still say I can't believe the situation is much better in Europe.
The problem is, you aren't ever going to get that.
Disclosure of the full dataset that is available doesn't get you much, because the model (the programs) is so complicated. So you have something that is unintelligible to anyone that isn't working on it. That is a large part of what the whole "climategate" furor was over. The data wasn't released because it was impenetratable and obtuse, when it was relased it was found to be impenetratable and obtuse - and very, very hard to understand in the "right" way.
Peer review? Ha. Right now there are two sides to this and neither one is being terribly objective and forthright. Each side is pretty much saying that the data either shows something terrible or it doesn't show that at all. Nobody is taking a "scientific" approach to it, mostly because the results from the data aren't really reproducible. Again, this is because the data and the model are very obscure and complicated. There is also a lot of tweaking and processing going on with the data.
Whether or not this tweaking is generating the results or the data stands on its own is something that nobody is really interested in right now. Just about everyone already "knows" the answer and is sure the other side has ulterior motives. Science by conjector, science by concensus and science with irreproducible results isn't really science. But we've known that for a long time.
If things are as bad as some people believe, why aren't they taking action? If every car, every airplane, every factory, every power plant is pushing things further and further into what was quoted recently as a 200 foot rise in sea level, why aren't the believers (and the scientists themselves) stopping every flight they can? Why don't we have guys in coal powerplants taking them over ala China Syndrome at gunpoint to shut them down?
There is either a serious lack of courage of conviction, or the folks saying the sky is falling aren't really all that convinced. When I see action I might be more encouraged to believe that they really know something.
Phones better not be connecting to routers that they aren't specifically set up for. Receiving the SSID is one thing, but connecting is a whole different matter. Same with the neighbor - just because he wants to print his daughter's report on my color laser printer doesn't mean I have to let him.
Just remember that decrypting any signal transmitted was perfectly legal until the Home Satellite Receiver Act of 1984 which made it a crime to decrypt satellite transmissions and mandated the use of a specific device for encrypting them. This was pretty much the creation of Al Gore.
There were attempts before this, such as with radar detector laws and attempts to make over-the-air pay TV protected but until this passed at a federal level it was legal to receive anything that was transmitted.
It is a cruel joke - mostly on the people that think as early adopters they are getting something.
The problem is that the bandwidth required on a per-household level is no problem, but the bandwidth required at a per-neighborhood level is way, way beyond anything that is even remotely possible today. It doesn't really matter if you are on DSL, cable or even fiber. Your bandwidth to your house is shared with the rest of the neighborhood from a node. With DSL this is the DSLAM at the CO. With cable it is a "neighborhood node" box not too far away. I don't know what it is called with fiber, but it is there. All of these boxes are fed by a fiber link from somewhere else that actually has the backbone connection - and the aggregate bandwidth for the neighborhood is limited by the capacity of this link.
Relatively speaking, this link is very fast. So today when you are downloading something on your 70Mbit connection you might actually get 70Mbit a lot of the time. However, that is assuming that only a small fraction of the homes connected to your node are actually very busy.
Say it requires 5Mbit/sec for HD television. You can probably assume that the fiber link to the node is at least 500Mbit/sec. Assuming all of that 500Mbit/sec is available for data (it isn't on cable systems or most fiber implementations, but that is another problem entirely), you can support a maximum of 100 simultaneous HD television streams at one time. When someone tries to start up the 101st stream, they aren't going to have very good performance at all.
The real problem is that should IP TV ever acquire any real market penetration you would likely have 500 homes out of the 1000 connected to that node trying to get a stream. Not going to happen. And the performance would be so incredibly bad that it would be completely unusable.
The infrastructure for even 10% market penetration of IP TV simply doesn't exist. And until someone figures out how to upgrade the fiber link to the node to 100GB/sec for a reasonable cost, it isn't going to be possible. All of the early adopters are simply going to get screwed in the end.
The problem is that the catalog from around 1930 until today will last the average person their lifetime. So even if new stuff stops being made, there will be 80+ years of content that is free forever.
This is the end result of piracy - everything for free but nothing new of any quality. Today, there is no solution except maybe hurrying this end result so people can see what it is like. The thing is, free is so damned attractive that it may be 50 years before people decide it might be nice to have something to pay for once again. I do think it might take that long.
We are teaching children in most schools about how everything on the Internet is there for the taking. Teachers download software for the classroom. Students show other students how and they go home and download Mom's favorite song - she is so happy that she just can't contain herself. And it is FREE!
So for now, downloading stuff for free is certainly the way to go. Anyone paying doesn't understand the "new digital economy", and some idiots are paying crooks for pseudo-legitimate stuff, like allofmp3.com. I'm sure there are plenty of others as well.
It likely as not isn't available in your country because it is not licensed. A movie or TV show has to be permitted to be shown in most parts of the world. It is because of different standards and requirements.
For example, now Ireland has a law that is being enforced against blasphemy. Anyone with a brain knows this is for the support of Islam and nothing else. So you have a movie or TV show that has a half a second of a picture of Mohammed - that can't be shown in Ireland until that half second is cut. Whereas in the US (right now) it is legal if you have the courage to show it.
The same applies to lots of other things. For example, it is forbidden to show pubic hair in Japan. Anything else is pretty much OK, including full insertion but no pubic hair.
One big problem with any video stuff is the licensing - I suspect it costs a lot to get the license and then you have to make the editorial changes that are required. Nobody is going to do this until they have some reason to expect a big payoff which will more than cover the costs.
Most scientific research today is indeed a competition, although not for profit but for grant money and tenure. Failure to beat the competition results in no grants, no tenure and stuck in a dead-end role somewhere far less exciting.
Check out the AIDS research history. This happens all the time, with just about everything that is in the least ways interesting.
It has nothing to do with business or profit and everything to do with status and funding. If you work for a university, you are nothing without tenure and grants. If you work for a company, you are nothing without status, reputation and either grants or funding. If you aren't ahead of your competition, you are nothing and will be compensated accordingly. Here is your toilet brush, get to work.
Problem is, today only Islam is a force that command crowds of people to riot and kill.
Try getting a bunch of Baptists to do that.
For the last few years France has been living in fear of what gangs of unemployed Muslim youths are going to do. And hoping they stick to just burning some more cars tonight. This has not spread to the US, yet.
Today England, Germany, France, Belgium, and Australia that I know of have laws that recognize the uniqueness of Muslims. They are not subject to ordinary laws in those countries, and some law enforcement is left to Sharia courts outside of the legal system. Certainly in Australia, a man beating his wife will be arressed - unless his is Muslim.
Muslim immigrants to these countries fully acknowledge that they have no allegiance to their new country, only Islam. In the US this means that any Muslim taking a citizenship oath is lying.
Nothing is going to be done about this, but we better be prepared to adopt laws that recognize the supremacy of Islam and the rights of Muslims above those of other religions. Failure to do so will bring riots and death.
An important lesson that the past 10 years or should have taught everyone.
There are no extremist Muslims. They are a figment of George Bush's imagination. They simply do not exist.
That isn't to say that Muslims in general are not offended by blasphemy. They are, and when whipped into a frenzy by the right imam, they are no match for a bunch of cartoonists.
Why do you think blasphemy is illegal in many parts of the world now? Because when it is committed the perpetrators need to be be dealt with harshly. Will the US start beheading blasphemers? Well, when push comes to shove, they might have to. Or face the consequences.
The population of the US is around 330 million, not 6 billion.
Only around 50% of the US has access to high-speed Internet connections in their homes. Pirating at the library doesn't really work so good. You can believe that with 165 million potential pirates that at least 50 million of them are actively pirating media, mostly music.
I don't think I know anyone that would ever pay a dime for music ever again. Movies are on their way out as something to pay for as well, but NetFlix is pretty cheap still.
Every day in schools all across America children are taught that it is wrong to give people money for what can be freely downloaded from the Internet. The teachers pirate software for classes, the students use school computers to download stuff. The children then can go home and show Mom how she can get her favorite songs on her iPod for free. She is of course amazed at the "power of the Internet" and how smart her children are.
Do you really think things can continue this way? The business model of selling a product seems to be completely outmoded today. You wonder why stores no longer have displays outside on the sidewalk? It is because people would just take stuff, just like they have found they can just take stuff on the Internet. I guess this is the "new business model" that people keep talking about.
If you believe the "right to consume" overrules all, then yes, this is a declaration of war.
The fact that it is now possible to make sure that one copy of any work release digitally (software, movie, book, music, etc.) is sold and everyone on the planet with an Internet connection has it for free. No Internet today clearly equals no right to pirate, no right to consume.
Personally, I think the only solution for this to not have ACTA, not have any copyright enforcement and push everyone to the model where it is all free now. We will still have "entertainment" but it will be either ad-driven or user-generated.
The ad-driven stuff will be truely vile. AM radio in the US is pretty much 55 minutes of ads per hour of programming. You can expect corporate sponsors of entertainment media to pretty much go down that road in order to get compensated for production costs. Then "piracy" will be irrelevent - you will actually be doing the corporate masters bidding by downloading, collecting, and redistributing.
User generated seems to be the absurd hope of people. I suggest Darwin (Misha) Reedy as a good example of what user-generated content can be. Search for her on YouTube and you will see a really good example. User generated content is created because the user has a huge ego and likely as not all out of proportion to their talent. But negative reviews never affect people like that - they know they are the greatest gift to humankind ever and to deprive humankind of their talent would be a crime.
I think the concept of "fair use" and its exceptions to copyright law are pretty much a US concept alone. Other countries have things somewhat similar but with different specifics.
This would (of course) be implemented as a treaty which would be considered to override any existing law in the US. Pretty much the same as WTO overrides any "protectionism" that might benefit US workers.
Uhh, wasn't it Terry Child's responsibility to have insured the passwords were available in the proper database rather than being the sole keeper of them when he left?
Wouldn't it have been better to have them written on a piece of paper on his desk as he walked out rather than what he did?
Besides, shouldn't the city have changed them immediately upon his termination?
Well, when someone at a C-level asks the IT admin person for some password there are really three choices:
Those are pretty much the choices. There is no #4 where you get to "do the right thing" and walk away a free man. The fact that he had already left the organization meant his real responsibility was over. Trying to "save the organization from itself" almost never gets you anywhere and carries huge risks. Terry is about to experience the result of these huge risks.
My guess is the jury takes about 10 minutes to return a guilty verdict.
Nobody gets anything like an employment contract anymore, certainly not anything that could even be interpreted as a contract.
Insubordination is never justified.
While just handing over the passwords might not have been the most protective move, it would have avoided any consequences to Terry. Getting an email saying the boss was knowingly circumventing procedures would have absolved Terry of any hint of wrongdoing no matter what happened.
Keeping the password away from the boss would never have turned out well for Terry. It was clear that he was doing this for some self-important reason that his superiors didn't agree with or understand. They never would understand, and Terry should have figured that out in about 2 minutes and just did what he was told.
Unfortunately for him, his ability to shield himself from (non-existent) fallout disappeared the moment he said "No" the first time. Insubordination just pisses off people at high levels. And self-important "I have to protect the city from your bad judgement" just makes things worse.
Your view of this is rather strange.
Just that simple, huh? So let's say the Dean for Admissions demands you give him the organization-wide root or domain admin password. Will you? What if it's the dean for admissions, two members of the board of trustees, the chief of campus police, and a computer lab tech from the biology department, and all want you to give the password to the lab tech?
When either a direct-line supervisor or someone as high up the food chain as you are supposing here asks for something you pretty much give it to them. Or get fired on the spot with good cause. So of course you give it to them and let them take the heat for the consequences. Network down for a week? So what? It isn't the admin's problem to explain this to everyone.
If the policy states you shall not give the password to anybody but the CIO, and all of these "designated agents" come to you and demand the password... are you going to give it to them?
If the "designated agent" is really authorized, heck yes. About the only way out of this that I can see would be if all you had was someone claiming to be "designated" and the CIO was completely unavailable to verify. Again, doing your job means following directions, even if those directions seem utterly stupid. Covering your ass is a well-known tactic, but refusing to cooperate because of some inflated sense of self-importance is stupid and gets you fired.
Let's say you quit your job, and three days afterward they call you asking for the passwords. How do you know if the policy changed? Maybe the CIO was fired. How do you know these are still the "designated agents"?
And if you have quit, why do you care? If the passwords were not changed the moment you left, it is pure and simple negligence. So all you have is obsolete information that is about as secret as yesterday's newspaper.
These are the types of problems that arrise from this prosecution. The law gives organizational policy the force of law, without realizing its limitations. So before you tell us to "shut up", you might want to think about the ramifications of that first
First off, you do what you are told to do through the organization structure. If you aren't doing that, you get fired for cause. Period. Insubordination is never a good idea and it is a lousy career move. If you have to, you get a real nice CYA document from some higher-up so that you can always say you were just doing what you were told to do, no matter how stupid it sounds. In this case, Terry's job wasn't to protect the city from the Mayor and the Mayor's questionable directions. And openly defying in the manner that was done has consequences that Terry is just finding out about.
My guess is that no matter what he is charged with, the jury looks at it and says he is an self-important idiot that was insubordinate. In 10 minutes they will have a "Guilty" verdict.