OK, how about if instead of providing mileage ratings that car advertisements simply had a URL to a Python program that if you entered information about your driving habits that it would come out with an MPG value for a specific car. Obviously, there would be a completely separate Python program for every single car.
Of course, 99% of the weighting would be handled by the questions "Do you drive with a lead foot?" and "Are jackrabbit starts your normal mode?" But the other 34 questions would be there as specified by the government regulation governing the production of these Python applications.
Having a model and the user gets to make up the assumptions, you are getting a traditional garbage-in, garbage-out algorithym. Any model can conform to any belief system given the "proper" inputs. Isn't this half of what the climate arguments are about? Not the code, but the assumptions being pushed into the model?
I can't imagine that this would provide the average Joe Sixpack any useful information. I would say this isn't "transparent" in any way - unless the inputs to the model were published and required to be adhered to. This would make legally binding assumptions like in 2050 there will be fewer literate people than in 2000. I'd like to see the government come up with a plan for that.
Or worse, if a fundamental assumption of the model is rising interest rates and every investor makes 100% return in five years, great. Does the ability to push out a program that says if you enter the five year interest rates as steadily rising then justify advertising that every investor will make 100% of their money?
This also reeks of the idea that if you can't read a programming language you are a second-class citizen. Richard Stallman would be proud.
The problem is that we didn't just have a vote for the government to take over health care. If we did, there might be some hope.
Instead, what we have now is a government plan that mandates everyone (eventually) buy a government-designed plan from a few government-regulated finance companies. There is no "insurance" here - insurance implies some sort of risk and there is no risk possible in the system that has been set up. It isn't a fund you pay into and eventually get all your money back, either.
We would be far, far better off if everyone just put money into a savings account and used that money to pay medical bills. And hospitals and doctors were required to treat the people that didn't have the savings account and cost-shift it all over to the people that did.
Instead, we have a massive cost-shifting scheme whereby Medicaid and Medicare pays a fraction of what care costs and the "insured" pay cost-plus to make up for it. And the bills have to be whirlled around in a blender three or four times to try to hide the cost shifting that is going on. So they are going to take more money out of Medicare. Do you think the hospitals and doctors will just take less money? Do you think the MRI manufacturers will cut their prices? No? Really, you obviously have no faith in the system.
Evidently, Congress seems to think that if the government is paying less the hospitals will just get less. They seem to have had this idea since the 1960s with the very beginning of Medicare. Instead, the hospitals simply charge everyone else more. Part of it is the way Medicare reimbursement works - they pay some percentage of the real bill. Therefore, raising the bill means getting more realistic reimbursement. Yes, if you raise the price to 130% of what it was you get right about 100% of what you would have gotten if the government is only paying 70% of the bill. The government figured that out and cut the rate some more. The hospitals then raised the prices to counter this.
This has been going on since 1966 or so. And this "new plan" does nothing to change this at all.
All we have is a massive welfare program for finance companies that are underwriting medical care. The government isn't doing much other than making sure these finance companies have lots of customers. SO STOP CALLING IT GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE!
Well, part of the problem is you certainly wouldn't be "buying" software when open source is available.
Then there is the question of services. What percentage of Linux installations where a Red Hat-derived distribution is used and paying Red Hat for support? I'd guess 0.0001% or thereabouts. The question is would it be better to have 10% of the customers but all of them paying? Red Hat seems to think that providing free software is somehow more rewarding than getting paid. Lots of other companies do not agree.
Debit cards can be processed two ways: as a PIN transaction without credit card validation or as a credit card without a PIN. A lot of merchants can only process credit cards and not debit cards so will use the second method exclusively.
There is only one "solution" to this: never, ever use a debit card for anything. Once you use it, the number is out and will be sold. Sold to folks that collect them and pass them out to people. If you work somewhere that accepts cards you can make some money on the side by selling customer's numbers. And plenty of people do exactly that.
With a credit card you are limited to $50 loss and I've never heard of anyone actually having been charged even that. It is just a nuisance. With a debit card they can clean your bank account out and there is no recourse. Nothing. You lose.
Don't use debit cards. The risk is way, way too high.
Mexico's biggest problem has nothing to do with the drug cartels. It has to do with the separation of Castillian (Spain) heritage people from the Mexican Indian heritage people. There are few real "landowners" that are of an Indian heritage. The government is of the Castillian heritage people, and nobody else counts. Period.
As long as the Indian heritage people get bribed and killed it is OK. The real power in the country stays on their nice estates and nobody bothers them.
The only way to "fix" this would be a "regime change" or a civil war. Neither of which would be much fun to watch from up north. Besides, they have already had such a civil war and it didn't take even 100 years for it to go back the way it was before. I'd say a civil war wouldn't solve the problem - it would just make life hell for the Indian heritage people because there would be reprisals.
Until this problem is resolved, nothing that happens in Mexico is going to fix anything.
First off, there are very few software packages of any size that are sold with terms and conditions that would allow anyone to sue the vendor for any reason. The only path I could possibly see is an agreement that bugs will be fixed - but this vendor is disclaiming that this is a bug. So even that probably isn't going to get you anywhere. Suing is almost certainly not an option unless you have money to burn.
There are far too few details in the posting to explain how this software is used and what its function is. It could be something that is on an internal web site and the exposure is from potentially unqualified employees accessing internal information. It could also be a public web site that allows people in Eastern Europe to get enough medical information on celebrities to blackmail them. Who knows?
If the vendor is saying it isn't a bug it is doubtful many other customers are going to immediately see that it is a problem. They might after a while - again, depending on how this software is used. So going to other custromers isn't likely to be very useful short term.
Certainly this is a the result of buying packaged software rather than writing everything yourself. You give up a certain amount of control. Open source isn't a solution, because if you aren't familiar with the code it could take a very long time to learn enough about it to do anything like fixing it. I'm sure you could pay a consultant to learn the package and fix it, but then you could also just pay a consultant to write you a system the way you wanted in the first place.
This is the age of the packaged software solution. It started around 1985 or so and continues to this day. Absolutely, a side effect of this is that you need to be on good working terms with your vendor(s) and your vendor(s) need to be competent. I haven't seen anything that says the vendor is incompetent, just that they disagree about the severity of the problem so far.
Sure, as a programmer I would like to think that every single company should be employing programmers and custom-writing all their own stuff. Just like 1975. Except that isn't the way things turned out. Too bad, fewer programmers employed. But it is how things work today and nobody is going back.
Uh, I think the concept starts with the phrase "No man is an island." If your neighbor gambles away all their money, who's house is the most convenient to rob? Yours.
If your neighbor supports a criminal gang that also runs a botnet, you are likely as not impacted as well. Just because your neighbor is stupid doesn't mean that he has to make everyone near him suffer as well.
It used to be that stupidity was its own reward. A significant problem is that the reward gets spread around so we all benefit from a single individual's stupid decisions. When ever there are three stupid people together someone will come and take their money. We all suffer from this. It is a proven fact that you can't educate "stupid" out of a person so all we can do is try to limit the effects of stupid. Banning online gambling (not just poker - try online roulette sometime) is a step towards that.
I think banning state lotteries would be another great move, but unfortunately we seem to really need a stupid tax and state lotteries certainly fulfill that.
The threat from North Korea is not that they would get anywhere sending a weapon to the US. The threat is very simple - they threaten South Korea and/or Japan with being wiped out and that they can fire their weapon before anyone can hurt them.
Better still, they park a ship with a nuke in it, below the waterline so it sprays radioactive water everywhere, in a Japanese harbor. Then come the demands. How quickly do you think that Japan or South Korea are going to be to give in, no matter what the demands are? And the US position in this might be, what? At that point there isn't anything that can really be done about the "threat". It is there, and North Korea gets to dictate terms to their neighbors.
The most important aspect of the threat is that the leader of North Korea demonstratably doesn't give a crap about the civilian population. So threatening him with bombing Pyongyang is meaningless. He. Doesn't. Care. So with one nuke he gets to dictate terms to his historic enemies with almost zero threat against him personally. The only question is how well protected are his generals? If the military perceives that they are personally threatened, they might argue against a plan like that.
How long would a situation like that stand? I seriously doubt either Japan or South Korea sanctioning any sort of attack on North Korea while they are under the threat of annilation. Similarly, there wouldn't be any cooperation (and likely active sabotage) of any attempt to disarm such a nuke.
So why hasn't this happened yet? I don't know. It seems like almost a foolproof plan for getting North Korea out of the slump it is in and back as a major player on the international stage. I do know that this is the sort of threat that North Korea poses to the US. And while the US wouldn't be the one with a nuke in their harbor, this would certainly pose a serious economic threat to the US.
A British chemical company invented (discovered?) VX in 1954. Check out VX here
No, I don't think the US has much in the way of VX and VX-class "weapons" left. And biological stuff is pretty much non-existent, although the facilities to make lots and lots of stuff like smallpox does exist and one would just have to have the will to actually start growing the stuff.
You are kidding, right? The "solution" for eminent domain is to not bother. The way business works is when you introduce enough costs and red tape into the process to make it not worth bothering with any more the investors move along to find a greener pasture.
Sure you could eliminate the right-of-way which is demanded by utility companies as part of every suburban development. But why would the electric company, phone company and cable company contract with the homeowners? They might contract with the developer - maybe. More likely they would just not bother and wait until the homeowners did something sensible.
If you haven't seen that, you haven't lived in a rural area where there are no right-of-way easements. The power company comes in and says they want to cut down a 20 foot wide swath of trees. The home owner says he loves his trees and they can't take them. Power company ways too bad, guess you don't get electricity.
It would go down pretty much the same, only I suspect most suburban homeowners would be demanding that the local government "take" the easement so they could have electricity. And phone. And cable TV.
The eminent domain you are thinking of was already done when the subdivision was divided. Is is in the deed as an easement.
Like it or not, what "net neutrality" is going to bring is a clear separation between content and communications. About the only thing that Verizon and Comcast are going to be able to do is really split off the ISP part of the business into a standalone unit. Why would they do this? Because it gives them a tremendous amount of immunity from people attacking them for not being "neutral".
It also means that the subsidy of Internet providing ends. Instead of Comcast being able to write off a lot of the cost of being an ISP because it improves the cable TV business, the new ISP unit will have to stand on its own. That is going to mean some very large rate increases. Same thing on the DSL side, with the $15 DSL plans going the way of $0.39 a gallon gas.
I would expect cell phone service to be split the same way. Sure, there is no reason not to use Skype on your cell phone with an unlimited data plan and never, ever touch the "phone" side of the service. Of course, you will be paying $100 a month for the data plan from a different business unit. The advantage for the cell carrier will be two business units, two annual reports and two profit centers. You wouldn't really expect that the cell phone side would be able to continue supporting the data plan side when they are competing against each other, would you? It would be like Burger King subsidising McDonalds.
The result of all of this is that costs will be far more transparent. Because there are more profit centers and business units the costs will overall be higher, but you will know that you are paying $35 a month for cable TV and $65 a month for Internet service instead of $90 together.
I don't see any new costs because of network neutrality, other than the plan of instead of soaking their customers forcing content providers to cough up the dough. It might seem nicer to have a low ISP bill, but the whole idea of "network neutrality" is to push the cost back on the ISP customer where some believe it belongs. The end result is pretty much the same, though because if Google was paying they would make the advertisers pay, who in turn would make the customers pay. End result is the same - the customers pay. Imagine that.
A launch vehicle without a license to launch is pretty much like tits on a bull.
Sorry, there are no launch licenses being given out. You need clearance from both FAA and EPA. Without that, there will be an army of government agents making sure nothing gets launched.
Nobody is going anywhere unless the license problem get solved, and there are no solutions on the horizon.
Sure, but unless the FAA and EPA release their hold on licensing of launches, nobody is going anywhere. Right now, NASA and the Air Force have been allowed to launch. Rutan's company managed to get White Knight off the ground because it is an airplane and was apparently licensed as an airplane, not a space launch vehicle.
As far as I know, nobody else has ever been given a license to launch from the US. There have been some test engine firings, mostly tethered, but nothing that would count as a launch.
No licenses. Without a change there, nobody is going anywhere.
When content is available for free, someone will take it and make money with it.
Here we have a bunch of text often with inaccuracies, distortions and lies. But it is a lot of text. That should be worth something, right? So we have a company taking that because it is free to take and making money from it.
This should be the first guidepost for those that would like to remove copyright protection from things. They will be picked up by companies like this and sold. So if your music is free to download and do whatever with. expect to find someone selling CDs of it somewhere. Might just be at a flea market, might be on Amazon or WalMart.
Is it right? Well, the door WAS left open. If you wanted to retain control you wouldn't have used a Creative Commons license now would you? So without that control, someone is going to make money with it. Maybe not a lot of money and maybe not very ethically, but it will happen. And there is nothing that can be done about it.
Think they will make a lot of money from this? I doubt it. But just wait until the blogs of someone that licenses them with Creative Commons start showing up on Amazon as their "Collected Writings". Going to happen sooner or later.
Problem is, open is a synonym for pwned. If 99% of the people in the world used a "web and mail appliance", we wouldn't have spam botnets, we wouldn't have phishing and we wouldn't have malware. Because installing Weather Bug would be impossible on a "web and mail appliance".
Closed, locked-down and controlled means safe and malware free.
seems to have a problem with the iPad not being open enough for him. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed out on a lot of recent history.
Today anything that can accept unrestricted program code from the world at large has the possibility of getting taken over by malevalent forces. It isn't that Windows is insecure, it is that it is a computer without an administrator. Phones have been "taken over" and I assure you, they aren't running Windows somewhere deep within a Blackberry or iPhone.
Cory wants openness and the freedom to introduce new software. Fine, but without controls the iPad becomes just another platform for stealing things from people. Just like PCs are today. The difference right now is that Apple's iPhone and iPad are rather restrictive appliances. You can't take over and trojan an appliance, use it to steal credit card and bank information or send spam with it.
What maybe 10% of the world needs is general-purpose open programmable computing. The other 90% needs an appliance that can't have its functionality taken over or its utility subverted. How long will it be before there is a trojan/phishing application for Android? Not long, I would guess. The rewards for doing this will be considerable, even if it is discovered the first week it exists. If Apple can block 90% of the attempts at this - and I suspect they have blocked 100% of them so far - they will keep the appliance world safe.
Cory seems to want everyone to live in some virus-laden spam-infested world and to have the kind of freedom to program that Richard Stallman values. OK, how many people can really take advantage of this? Well, I guess in that world if you have no programming skills you are a second-class citizen, unfit to do anything except delete the spam that fills your inbox.
Here is the problem - some pedophiles (or perhaps more nicely put "underage sex enthusiasts") have no problem with rather forcibly non-consensual sex often ending with murdering the "witness". Others have no interest in this and would be soely interested in apparently consensual sex. I say apparently because the people in question are considered incapable of consent.
I don't have much information on the "crossover" between the two groups, but I am pretty sure that it happens. So how do you tell the difference between someone that just wants to fuck a 13 year old and someone that has no problem with fucking and then murdering the 13 year old? Don't know. I don't think anyone has this answer.
Consider also that such underage sex enthusiasts have pretty much a 100% recidivism rate. So they are virtually assured of re-offending. Who wants to be the one telling the parent that not only did this guy re-offend but that this time he killed his sex partner. All of which was a known possibility. I believe cities have already been sued and lost because of things like this.
Problem is, we're doing a really bad job separating the folks that "just want to have fun" with the folks that want to rape and murder children. Sometimes there is "crossover" where someone that apparently just wanted to have fun turns around and kills their next conquest.
Since when did we start prosecuting people for thought crimes?
Since it became unconfortable telling parents that their child was killed by someone that it was known would re-offend since very nearly 100% do so.
The alternative would be just keeping them all in jail or killing them. Both are pretty expensive - the cheap solution is to find a way to make sure they can't re-offend, or if they start to display offending behavior that their parole is violated. Not anywhere near as certain as keeping them in prison or killing them, but much much cheaper.
First off, there is the pretty much proven idea that people that find children as acceptable sex partners (willingly or unwillingly) aren't going to change. Period. Nothing that we know of today will change this.
The current thinking seems to be that if a child is an acceptable sex partner and they are incapable of providing informed consent that there is no difference between someone that "seduces" a child and one that conks the child over the head, drags them into the bushes and rapes them. Probably kills the child immediately afterword. Whether or not that is true or not doesn't seem to be up for debate right now - it is just assumed as an established fact. This does have some grounding in reality.
The problem with child porn is pretty clear. If it makes children appear as a valid sex partners, well then, they are valid sex partners. Then the above paragraph comes into play - there are no "willing" child sex partners so every act is rape and every rape is violent, potentially leading to murder as well.
The conclusion is that anyone finding children are attractive as sex partners is one small step away from killing the next child they see. This is probably a bit far fetched, but is certainly where current thinking is today, especially in the legal system in a lot of countries.
So what exactly does one do with someone that has been convicted of finding a child an acceptable sex partner? Obviously, they are just one small step away from raping and killing children. While perhaps not a 100% valid conclusion, you can see where the thinking is on this and it is pretty tough to escape the logical progression.
At some point in the future there may be a way to tell the difference between someone that has no problem having sex with a consenting 16-year-old girl and someone that is all set to rape and murder. We aren't there yet. Right now, keeping these people in prison for eternity isn't a realistic solution in most Western countries - why should they be kept at State expense? Releasing them with restrictions on movement, contact with children and other things seems to be pretty logical. Restrictions on using a computer (or at least use of the Internet) seems to make some sense - again, based on the idea that anyone finding a child as an acceptable sex partner is one small step away from raping and murdering children.
The problem with the usual law enforcement methodolgy (you know, commit the crime, do the time, repeat as needed) is the whole part about it being (a) predicable that these people will re-offend and (b) having to tell the parent of the dead child that it was known about. People are pretty sensitive about that - I guess it has to do with the cost of raising a child these days. You know, all that money for nothing when the kid is murdered.
The main problem would seem to be separating the "murdering, raping" offenders from the "teen sex" offenders. We are't doing a good job of that today and there doesn't seem to be a good reliable test for it. And nobody, but nobody, wants to be the one telling the parent that the convicted child sex enthusiast just killed their child.
Geekdom freedom is great, but what you are proposing is a world with two classes of people: those that can exercise their freedom, and those that cannot. If you can't program, you are a second-class citizen.
This is the Stallman Philosophy. It is garbage and leads down a very dark and twisty passage. Why make computers and software user-friendly if the only real users are programmers? If you don't have to worry about non-programmers, then you can throw any sort of crap together and have a user interface like Gimp.
But still at the end of the day publishers and recording studios should fear... It's not the pirates that are the problems, it is artists finding ways to reach their audience directly without needing publishers/record labels. No amount of DRM will fix that either.....
There will always be a need for promotion, which is what the publishers and record labels do. It is all they do, in the end. Without promotion, everything is a flop.
You can try to deny this, but it keeps getting proven over and over. There is "word of mouth", but mostly that is driven by promotion. Popular things get popular because most of the people on the planet are sheep and follow what they perceive as a "leader". Apple keeps coming out with lightweight products that are hyped to the point where the followers think they have to have one to keep up with the leaders.
Post-harmonization, the Dutch laws on child porn are pretty much the same as those in the US. I wouldn't know anything about this, other than getting it from a Dutch child-porn investigator. They are a customer and we talk at trade shows and such.
I don't think even in the US you are going to have much trouble with pictures of a 17-year-old unless you rub their noses in it. Pictures of a nine-year-old will get you a jail term of an obnoxious length and they will trot out all the other pictures just to help everyone along with the verdict.
This "harmonization" was something that I was unaware of until recently. Pretty much everywhere in Europe and most of the world now has the same laws on child porn: ages, illegal to possess, stuff like that. So I don't think the idea that child porn is OK in Holland is still effective. Until recently, it was known that you could get child-porn magazines from Holland - illegal in the US but apparently legal there. From what I have been told, this is no longer the case at all.
Putting up a sign in your front window that says "Drugs for sale" with a big arrow pointing to your neighbor's house will most certainly get you arrested. Assuming it is true, you are facilitating. And that is indeed a crime.
So all isohunt is doing it "facilitating". While it isn't a criminal act, you are certainly leaving yourself open to civil proceedings. And you are going to lose.
iTunes is a sop to over-30 folks that don't understand downloading. It commands maybe 2% of the music downloads. While it is the largest retailer of music where money is collected, it pales in comparison to the free downloads that are going on.
You cannot make a compelling case for paying when the alternative is free. You can make it easy for older folks to pay when the alternative is learning about their computer, learning about P2P software and learning about the Internet. As these folks age-out of the user community, iTunes dies.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, how about if instead of providing mileage ratings that car advertisements simply had a URL to a Python program that if you entered information about your driving habits that it would come out with an MPG value for a specific car. Obviously, there would be a completely separate Python program for every single car.
Of course, 99% of the weighting would be handled by the questions "Do you drive with a lead foot?" and "Are jackrabbit starts your normal mode?" But the other 34 questions would be there as specified by the government regulation governing the production of these Python applications.
Having a model and the user gets to make up the assumptions, you are getting a traditional garbage-in, garbage-out algorithym. Any model can conform to any belief system given the "proper" inputs. Isn't this half of what the climate arguments are about? Not the code, but the assumptions being pushed into the model?
I can't imagine that this would provide the average Joe Sixpack any useful information. I would say this isn't "transparent" in any way - unless the inputs to the model were published and required to be adhered to. This would make legally binding assumptions like in 2050 there will be fewer literate people than in 2000. I'd like to see the government come up with a plan for that.
Or worse, if a fundamental assumption of the model is rising interest rates and every investor makes 100% return in five years, great. Does the ability to push out a program that says if you enter the five year interest rates as steadily rising then justify advertising that every investor will make 100% of their money?
This also reeks of the idea that if you can't read a programming language you are a second-class citizen. Richard Stallman would be proud.
The problem is that we didn't just have a vote for the government to take over health care. If we did, there might be some hope.
Instead, what we have now is a government plan that mandates everyone (eventually) buy a government-designed plan from a few government-regulated finance companies. There is no "insurance" here - insurance implies some sort of risk and there is no risk possible in the system that has been set up. It isn't a fund you pay into and eventually get all your money back, either.
We would be far, far better off if everyone just put money into a savings account and used that money to pay medical bills. And hospitals and doctors were required to treat the people that didn't have the savings account and cost-shift it all over to the people that did.
Instead, we have a massive cost-shifting scheme whereby Medicaid and Medicare pays a fraction of what care costs and the "insured" pay cost-plus to make up for it. And the bills have to be whirlled around in a blender three or four times to try to hide the cost shifting that is going on. So they are going to take more money out of Medicare. Do you think the hospitals and doctors will just take less money? Do you think the MRI manufacturers will cut their prices? No? Really, you obviously have no faith in the system.
Evidently, Congress seems to think that if the government is paying less the hospitals will just get less. They seem to have had this idea since the 1960s with the very beginning of Medicare. Instead, the hospitals simply charge everyone else more. Part of it is the way Medicare reimbursement works - they pay some percentage of the real bill. Therefore, raising the bill means getting more realistic reimbursement. Yes, if you raise the price to 130% of what it was you get right about 100% of what you would have gotten if the government is only paying 70% of the bill. The government figured that out and cut the rate some more. The hospitals then raised the prices to counter this.
This has been going on since 1966 or so. And this "new plan" does nothing to change this at all.
All we have is a massive welfare program for finance companies that are underwriting medical care. The government isn't doing much other than making sure these finance companies have lots of customers. SO STOP CALLING IT GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE!
Well, part of the problem is you certainly wouldn't be "buying" software when open source is available.
Then
there is the question of services. What percentage of Linux installations where a Red Hat-derived distribution is used and paying Red Hat for support? I'd guess 0.0001% or thereabouts. The question is would it be better to have 10% of the customers but all of them paying? Red Hat seems to think that providing free software is somehow more rewarding than getting paid. Lots of other companies do not agree.
Debit cards can be processed two ways: as a PIN transaction without credit card validation or as a credit card without a PIN. A lot of merchants can only process credit cards and not debit cards so will use the second method exclusively.
There is only one "solution" to this: never, ever use a debit card for anything. Once you use it, the number is out and will be sold. Sold to folks that collect them and pass them out to people. If you work somewhere that accepts cards you can make some money on the side by selling customer's numbers. And plenty of people do exactly that.
With a credit card you are limited to $50 loss and I've never heard of anyone actually having been charged even that. It is just a nuisance. With a debit card they can clean your bank account out and there is no recourse. Nothing. You lose.
Don't use debit cards. The risk is way, way too high.
Mexico's biggest problem has nothing to do with the drug cartels. It has to do with the separation of Castillian (Spain) heritage people from the Mexican Indian heritage people. There are few real "landowners" that are of an Indian heritage. The government is of the Castillian heritage people, and nobody else counts. Period.
As long as the Indian heritage people get bribed and killed it is OK. The real power in the country stays on their nice estates and nobody bothers them.
The only way to "fix" this would be a "regime change" or a civil war. Neither of which would be much fun to watch from up north. Besides, they have already had such a civil war and it didn't take even 100 years for it to go back the way it was before. I'd say a civil war wouldn't solve the problem - it would just make life hell for the Indian heritage people because there would be reprisals.
Until this problem is resolved, nothing that happens in Mexico is going to fix anything.
First off, there are very few software packages of any size that are sold with terms and conditions that would allow anyone to sue the vendor for any reason. The only path I could possibly see is an agreement that bugs will be fixed - but this vendor is disclaiming that this is a bug. So even that probably isn't going to get you anywhere. Suing is almost certainly not an option unless you have money to burn.
There are far too few details in the posting to explain how this software is used and what its function is. It could be something that is on an internal web site and the exposure is from potentially unqualified employees accessing internal information. It could also be a public web site that allows people in Eastern Europe to get enough medical information on celebrities to blackmail them. Who knows?
If the vendor is saying it isn't a bug it is doubtful many other customers are going to immediately see that it is a problem. They might after a while - again, depending on how this software is used. So going to other custromers isn't likely to be very useful short term.
Certainly this is a the result of buying packaged software rather than writing everything yourself. You give up a certain amount of control. Open source isn't a solution, because if you aren't familiar with the code it could take a very long time to learn enough about it to do anything like fixing it. I'm sure you could pay a consultant to learn the package and fix it, but then you could also just pay a consultant to write you a system the way you wanted in the first place.
This is the age of the packaged software solution. It started around 1985 or so and continues to this day. Absolutely, a side effect of this is that you need to be on good working terms with your vendor(s) and your vendor(s) need to be competent. I haven't seen anything that says the vendor is incompetent, just that they disagree about the severity of the problem so far.
Sure, as a programmer I would like to think that every single company should be employing programmers and custom-writing all their own stuff. Just like 1975. Except that isn't the way things turned out. Too bad, fewer programmers employed. But it is how things work today and nobody is going back.
Uh, I think the concept starts with the phrase "No man is an island." If your neighbor gambles away all their money, who's house is the most convenient to rob? Yours.
If your neighbor supports a criminal gang that also runs a botnet, you are likely as not impacted as well. Just because your neighbor is stupid doesn't mean that he has to make everyone near him suffer as well.
It used to be that stupidity was its own reward. A significant problem is that the reward gets spread around so we all benefit from a single individual's stupid decisions. When ever there are three stupid people together someone will come and take their money. We all suffer from this. It is a proven fact that you can't educate "stupid" out of a person so all we can do is try to limit the effects of stupid. Banning online gambling (not just poker - try online roulette sometime) is a step towards that.
I think banning state lotteries would be another great move, but unfortunately we seem to really need a stupid tax and state lotteries certainly fulfill that.
The threat from North Korea is not that they would get anywhere sending a weapon to the US. The threat is very simple - they threaten South Korea and/or Japan with being wiped out and that they can fire their weapon before anyone can hurt them.
Better still, they park a ship with a nuke in it, below the waterline so it sprays radioactive water everywhere, in a Japanese harbor. Then come the demands. How quickly do you think that Japan or South Korea are going to be to give in, no matter what the demands are? And the US position in this might be, what? At that point there isn't anything that can really be done about the "threat". It is there, and North Korea gets to dictate terms to their neighbors.
The most important aspect of the threat is that the leader of North Korea demonstratably doesn't give a crap about the civilian population. So threatening him with bombing Pyongyang is meaningless. He. Doesn't. Care. So with one nuke he gets to dictate terms to his historic enemies with almost zero threat against him personally. The only question is how well protected are his generals? If the military perceives that they are personally threatened, they might argue against a plan like that.
How long would a situation like that stand? I seriously doubt either Japan or South Korea sanctioning any sort of attack on North Korea while they are under the threat of annilation. Similarly, there wouldn't be any cooperation (and likely active sabotage) of any attempt to disarm such a nuke.
So why hasn't this happened yet? I don't know. It seems like almost a foolproof plan for getting North Korea out of the slump it is in and back as a major player on the international stage. I do know that this is the sort of threat that North Korea poses to the US. And while the US wouldn't be the one with a nuke in their harbor, this would certainly pose a serious economic threat to the US.
A British chemical company invented (discovered?) VX in 1954. Check out VX here
No, I don't think the US has much in the way of VX and VX-class "weapons" left. And biological stuff is pretty much non-existent, although the facilities to make lots and lots of stuff like smallpox does exist and one would just have to have the will to actually start growing the stuff.
Which I doubt exists today in the US.
You are kidding, right? The "solution" for eminent domain is to not bother. The way business works is when you introduce enough costs and red tape into the process to make it not worth bothering with any more the investors move along to find a greener pasture.
Sure you could eliminate the right-of-way which is demanded by utility companies as part of every suburban development. But why would the electric company, phone company and cable company contract with the homeowners? They might contract with the developer - maybe. More likely they would just not bother and wait until the homeowners did something sensible.
If you haven't seen that, you haven't lived in a rural area where there are no right-of-way easements. The power company comes in and says they want to cut down a 20 foot wide swath of trees. The home owner says he loves his trees and they can't take them. Power company ways too bad, guess you don't get electricity.
It would go down pretty much the same, only I suspect most suburban homeowners would be demanding that the local government "take" the easement so they could have electricity. And phone. And cable TV.
The eminent domain you are thinking of was already done when the subdivision was divided. Is is in the deed as an easement.
Like it or not, what "net neutrality" is going to bring is a clear separation between content and communications. About the only thing that Verizon and Comcast are going to be able to do is really split off the ISP part of the business into a standalone unit. Why would they do this? Because it gives them a tremendous amount of immunity from people attacking them for not being "neutral".
It also means that the subsidy of Internet providing ends. Instead of Comcast being able to write off a lot of the cost of being an ISP because it improves the cable TV business, the new ISP unit will have to stand on its own. That is going to mean some very large rate increases. Same thing on the DSL side, with the $15 DSL plans going the way of $0.39 a gallon gas.
I would expect cell phone service to be split the same way. Sure, there is no reason not to use Skype on your cell phone with an unlimited data plan and never, ever touch the "phone" side of the service. Of course, you will be paying $100 a month for the data plan from a different business unit. The advantage for the cell carrier will be two business units, two annual reports and two profit centers. You wouldn't really expect that the cell phone side would be able to continue supporting the data plan side when they are competing against each other, would you? It would be like Burger King subsidising McDonalds.
The result of all of this is that costs will be far more transparent. Because there are more profit centers and business units the costs will overall be higher, but you will know that you are paying $35 a month for cable TV and $65 a month for Internet service instead of $90 together.
I don't see any new costs because of network neutrality, other than the plan of instead of soaking their customers forcing content providers to cough up the dough. It might seem nicer to have a low ISP bill, but the whole idea of "network neutrality" is to push the cost back on the ISP customer where some believe it belongs.
The end result is pretty much the same, though because if Google was paying they would make the advertisers pay, who in turn would make the customers pay. End result is the same - the customers pay. Imagine that.
A launch vehicle without a license to launch is pretty much like tits on a bull.
Sorry, there are no launch licenses being given out. You need clearance from both FAA and EPA. Without that, there will be an army of government agents making sure nothing gets launched.
Nobody is going anywhere unless the license problem get solved, and there are no solutions on the horizon.
Sure, but unless the FAA and EPA release their hold on licensing of launches, nobody is going anywhere. Right now, NASA and the Air Force have been allowed to launch. Rutan's company managed to get White Knight off the ground because it is an airplane and was apparently licensed as an airplane, not a space launch vehicle.
As far as I know, nobody else has ever been given a license to launch from the US. There have been some test engine firings, mostly tethered, but nothing that would count as a launch.
No licenses. Without a change there, nobody is going anywhere.
When content is available for free, someone will take it and make money with it.
Here we have a bunch of text often with inaccuracies, distortions and lies. But it is a lot of text. That should be worth something, right? So we have a company taking that because it is free to take and making money from it.
This should be the first guidepost for those that would like to remove copyright protection from things. They will be picked up by companies like this and sold. So if your music is free to download and do whatever with. expect to find someone selling CDs of it somewhere. Might just be at a flea market, might be on Amazon or WalMart.
Is it right? Well, the door WAS left open. If you wanted to retain control you wouldn't have used a Creative Commons license now would you? So without that control, someone is going to make money with it. Maybe not a lot of money and maybe not very ethically, but it will happen. And there is nothing that can be done about it.
Think they will make a lot of money from this? I doubt it. But just wait until the blogs of someone that licenses them with Creative Commons start showing up on Amazon as their "Collected Writings". Going to happen sooner or later.
Problem is, open is a synonym for pwned. If 99% of the people in the world used a "web and mail appliance", we wouldn't have spam botnets, we wouldn't have phishing and we wouldn't have malware. Because installing Weather Bug would be impossible on a "web and mail appliance".
Closed, locked-down and controlled means safe and malware free.
seems to have a problem with the iPad not being open enough for him. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed out on a lot of recent history.
Today anything that can accept unrestricted program code from the world at large has the possibility of getting taken over by malevalent forces. It isn't that Windows is insecure, it is that it is a computer without an administrator. Phones have been "taken over" and I assure you, they aren't running Windows somewhere deep within a Blackberry or iPhone.
Cory wants openness and the freedom to introduce new software. Fine, but without controls the iPad becomes just another platform for stealing things from people. Just like PCs are today. The difference right now is that Apple's iPhone and iPad are rather restrictive appliances. You can't take over and trojan an appliance, use it to steal credit card and bank information or send spam with it.
What maybe 10% of the world needs is general-purpose open programmable computing. The other 90% needs an appliance that can't have its functionality taken over or its utility subverted. How long will it be before there is a trojan/phishing application for Android? Not long, I would guess. The rewards for doing this will be considerable, even if it is discovered the first week it exists. If Apple can block 90% of the attempts at this - and I suspect they have blocked 100% of them so far - they will keep the appliance world safe.
Cory seems to want everyone to live in some virus-laden spam-infested world and to have the kind of freedom to program that Richard Stallman values. OK, how many people can really take advantage of this? Well, I guess in that world if you have no programming skills you are a second-class citizen, unfit to do anything except delete the spam that fills your inbox.
Here is the problem - some pedophiles (or perhaps more nicely put "underage sex enthusiasts") have no problem with rather forcibly non-consensual sex often ending with murdering the "witness". Others have no interest in this and would be soely interested in apparently consensual sex. I say apparently because the people in question are considered incapable of consent.
I don't have much information on the "crossover" between the two groups, but I am pretty sure that it happens. So how do you tell the difference between someone that just wants to fuck a 13 year old and someone that has no problem with fucking and then murdering the 13 year old? Don't know. I don't think anyone has this answer.
Consider also that such underage sex enthusiasts have pretty much a 100% recidivism rate. So they are virtually assured of re-offending. Who wants to be the one telling the parent that not only did this guy re-offend but that this time he killed his sex partner. All of which was a known possibility. I believe cities have already been sued and lost because of things like this.
Problem is, we're doing a really bad job separating the folks that "just want to have fun" with the folks that want to rape and murder children. Sometimes there is "crossover" where someone that apparently just wanted to have fun turns around and kills their next conquest.
Since when did we start prosecuting people for thought crimes?
Since it became unconfortable telling parents that their child was killed by someone that it was known would re-offend since very nearly 100% do so.
The alternative would be just keeping them all in jail or killing them. Both are pretty expensive - the cheap solution is to find a way to make sure they can't re-offend, or if they start to display offending behavior that their parole is violated. Not anywhere near as certain as keeping them in prison or killing them, but much much cheaper.
First off, there is the pretty much proven idea that people that find children as acceptable sex partners (willingly or unwillingly) aren't going to change. Period. Nothing that we know of today will change this.
The current thinking seems to be that if a child is an acceptable sex partner and they are incapable of providing informed consent that there is no difference between someone that "seduces" a child and one that conks the child over the head, drags them into the bushes and rapes them. Probably kills the child immediately afterword. Whether or not that is true or not doesn't seem to be up for debate right now - it is just assumed as an established fact. This does have some grounding in reality.
The problem with child porn is pretty clear. If it makes children appear as a valid sex partners, well then, they are valid sex partners. Then the above paragraph comes into play - there are no "willing" child sex partners so every act is rape and every rape is violent, potentially leading to murder as well.
The conclusion is that anyone finding children are attractive as sex partners is one small step away from killing the next child they see. This is probably a bit far fetched, but is certainly where current thinking is today, especially in the legal system in a lot of countries.
So what exactly does one do with someone that has been convicted of finding a child an acceptable sex partner? Obviously, they are just one small step away from raping and killing children. While perhaps not a 100% valid conclusion, you can see where the thinking is on this and it is pretty tough to escape the logical progression.
At some point in the future there may be a way to tell the difference between someone that has no problem having sex with a consenting 16-year-old girl and someone that is all set to rape and murder. We aren't there yet. Right now, keeping these people in prison for eternity isn't a realistic solution in most Western countries - why should they be kept at State expense? Releasing them with restrictions on movement, contact with children and other things seems to be pretty logical. Restrictions on using a computer (or at least use of the Internet) seems to make some sense - again, based on the idea that anyone finding a child as an acceptable sex partner is one small step away from raping and murdering children.
The problem with the usual law enforcement methodolgy (you know, commit the crime, do the time, repeat as needed) is the whole part about it being (a) predicable that these people will re-offend and (b) having to tell the parent of the dead child that it was known about. People are pretty sensitive about that - I guess it has to do with the cost of raising a child these days. You know, all that money for nothing when the kid is murdered.
The main problem would seem to be separating the "murdering, raping" offenders from the "teen sex" offenders. We are't doing a good job of that today and there doesn't seem to be a good reliable test for it. And nobody, but nobody, wants to be the one telling the parent that the convicted child sex enthusiast just killed their child.
Geekdom freedom is great, but what you are proposing is a world with two classes of people: those that can exercise their freedom, and those that cannot. If you can't program, you are a second-class citizen.
This is the Stallman Philosophy. It is garbage and leads down a very dark and twisty passage. Why make computers and software user-friendly if the only real users are programmers? If you don't have to worry about non-programmers, then you can throw any sort of crap together and have a user interface like Gimp.
This isn't any future that I want a part of.
But still at the end of the day publishers and recording studios should fear... It's not the pirates that are the problems, it is artists finding ways to reach their audience directly without needing publishers/record labels. No amount of DRM will fix that either.....
There will always be a need for promotion, which is what the publishers and record labels do. It is all they do, in the end. Without promotion, everything is a flop.
You can try to deny this, but it keeps getting proven over and over. There is "word of mouth", but mostly that is driven by promotion. Popular things get popular because most of the people on the planet are sheep and follow what they perceive as a "leader". Apple keeps coming out with lightweight products that are hyped to the point where the followers think they have to have one to keep up with the leaders.
Post-harmonization, the Dutch laws on child porn are pretty much the same as those in the US. I wouldn't know anything about this, other than getting it from a Dutch child-porn investigator. They are a customer and we talk at trade shows and such.
I don't think even in the US you are going to have much trouble with pictures of a 17-year-old unless you rub their noses in it. Pictures of a nine-year-old will get you a jail term of an obnoxious length and they will trot out all the other pictures just to help everyone along with the verdict.
This "harmonization" was something that I was unaware of until recently. Pretty much everywhere in Europe and most of the world now has the same laws on child porn: ages, illegal to possess, stuff like that. So I don't think the idea that child porn is OK in Holland is still effective. Until recently, it was known that you could get child-porn magazines from Holland - illegal in the US but apparently legal there. From what I have been told, this is no longer the case at all.
Putting up a sign in your front window that says "Drugs for sale" with a big arrow pointing to your neighbor's house will most certainly get you arrested. Assuming it is true, you are facilitating. And that is indeed a crime.
So all isohunt is doing it "facilitating". While it isn't a criminal act, you are certainly leaving yourself open to civil proceedings. And you are going to lose.
Piracy is getting more and more user-friendly all the time, and sites like isohunt are helping.
I would say the "compelling" part of this is pretty clear - it will soon be much more compelling to pirate than purchase anything digital.
iTunes is a sop to over-30 folks that don't understand downloading. It commands maybe 2% of the music downloads. While it is the largest retailer of music where money is collected, it pales in comparison to the free downloads that are going on.
You cannot make a compelling case for paying when the alternative is free. You can make it easy for older folks to pay when the alternative is learning about their computer, learning about P2P software and learning about the Internet. As these folks age-out of the user community, iTunes dies.