Books require lots of physical space and it is very difficult to find "free" books that you can stuff in your shelves to show off to friends. So books aren't going to work.
Places that loan out media don't cut it for bragging about how much "stuff" you have been able to accumulate. With a decent internet connection a moderate-to-bigtime collector can have thousands of movies and hundreds of thousands of songs. Sure, you can rip everything a library has, but it takes going to the library a lot.
What has apparently evolved is a "library" where you can grab everything that has ever been recorded in digital form. Then you can load up your hard drives with it to show to friends. Looks really cool. Note that none of this stuff is ever actually viewed, just collected. There isn't any time to watch this stuff... too busy collecting.
By your logic it should be legal to photocopy and distribute any book that is available from the public library or record and distribute MP3s of any song that was broadcast on a radio station.
Legal, maybe not. But it happens every day over the entire planet. And there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to stop it, so it is going to continue forever.
Redistribution is the key to the new digital un-economy.
If your position in entering the above motion was that "I'm right, so I should win" and offered nothing else - such as expert witnesses of your own, you are going to war unarmed. Of course you are going to lose.
The adversarial system is based on the idea that you have to defend your position. Ranting that "I'm right" doesn't count for much - presenting facts, witnesses, expert testimony, etc. is what counts. And doing so in the proper format for the court.
You are mostly correct that a lawyer would know these things and how they are done in court. Therefore, yes, almost always a lawyer is required, if for no other reason than to get through the proper procedural format of the court process. You want to do it yourself? You better spend some time learning how it is done, what is required to win and how to get there. Without that education, it is like taking someone that doesn't know computer programming and having them debug a program in an Assembler language.
Don't have the time to learn all this stuff? Well, that is why we have lawyers.
The problem is if the cost of illegally downloading a movie is just what you would pay in a store if you bought it, there is no disincentive to download. Actually, since you might not get caught, it makes even more sense to just download and pay the fine if you get caught.
You are dealing with people that have been brought up since about third grade with the idea that if it is on the Internet it is their right to grab it. And they were taught to share, so anything they get is then "shared" with the rest of the planet. You aren't going to counter that training with a few laws and lawsuits. It is pretty much ingrained in the minds of just about everyone under 30.
So face it, piracy is here to stay and be the general case not the exception. It means that revenue from digital goods has a very limited future and will be zero in the not-too-distant future. It means that anything that can be represented digitally has a value of zero.
If they sell an unencumbered movie for $5 that can be shared, it will be.
That would be the greatest boon to the pirates imaginable. No more ripping of DVDs. It will save the pirates a great amount of time and get the materials out there for free downloading much faster.
Of course the studios wouldn't like it much, because they would get one or two sales and the rest of the planet would have it for free.
You are taking two separate data points: piracy and revenue and combining them in a way that the data does not support.
People downloading movies aren't the one going to the theater and paying $10 a ticket for them. They are also not the people running out to stores to buy the DVD at $29. They are paying nothing.
The fact that the movie is "popular" means there are a lot of people that are not downloading. Downloading is movie isn't exactly simple and can take a lot of time. If you have a 384K DSL connection, it might take you a week to download even a very popular movie with a lot of people serving it up. You also need special software that doesn't come with Windows. For people over 30 this makes it difficult and for some an insurmountable hurdle.
This is getting easier and easier, however. As cable speeds increase, the download time get shorter and shorter all the time. The number of people serving up movies is steadily increasing, further decreasing download time and broadening the selection available. You also have people spreading the word about acquiring P2P software, "How to Pirate" instructions being passed around and the like. What this results in is the broadening of downloading movies and music.
Eventually, the people that can (physically) download movies will do it for free, thus pretty much ending the revenue from movies. Today you have only the people that can and know how to doing it - a seriously smaller group than what is possible. Thus, movies still make money off the somewhat reduced population of moviegoers.
So how long will it be before the revenue stream ends? Probably not long. It has pretty much ended for music already as most music revenue comes from the under-30 crowd and they already know about downloading for free. You will know it has ended when WalMart pulls the CDs off their shelves and "music stores" are all gone. Mostly, music stores are gone today but there are a few hangers-on. They don't have long. Certainly within five years there will be no more music sales of any sort, except maybe for older people and those without high speed Internet connections - the last few iTunes customers. Movies aren't going to be viable as a revenue stream much past that.
So of course they have to try any defensive measures they can against this trend.
Why? If you verbally bully someone today and they finally hit back after endless verbal taunts, they are very often arrested for assault.
Why would it be any different? Besides, what physical act has occurred, other than the victim killing themselves? Are you in favor of arresting people to prevent a crime from occuring?
Sorry, but the guy you are responding to is pretty much right on.
Lori Drew was not made an example of and neither will these nine kids. They will get off. Because today there is pretty much nothing that can be done.
If someone (or someone and their friends) decide to do some serious cyberbullying and you are the target you had better have a pretty thick skin. Running to your parents, the principal or the police will do nothing. If someone decides they are going to trash your life online, they can do this and nothing is going to stop them.
Online has no consequences today.
So someone creates a Facebook page that purports to be yours and has nothing but pictures of your head on various butch shemale bodies there... and maybe some really hot diaries about what a great time you had with the gangbang at the gay bar. Do you think there is anything on the planet that will get that taken down? Better have a pretty thick skin, because I know that it would be a really nice day when this gets passed around the office. Wait until someone edits some really gross snuff story to make it in the first person with your name featured as the main character, and puts it on "your" page. Any suitably determined person can take someone with any "online" friends and destroy their life, utterly and completely. For most people under 40 today the idea of being able to ignore this sort of assault is over and done with.
What we have seen so far is very, very mild. A few children have killed themselves. The power of this hasn't been explored yet and in no way is the US legal system ready.
How about one of them was an adult and the other a child?
Children are assumed not to have as much self-control and have a greater need to be protected. Once you are legally classified as an adult, well, you are on your own.
The problem is that there has been no determination as to the reality or severity of the supposed "illness".
You do not have a right to breed anthrax in your home or apartment. Why not? Because it will get out and cause other people harm. If it can be shown that RF is leaking out of your home or apartment and that this is having a negative effect on people... well, then you no longer have any right to radiate RF.
The basic problem is that there isn't any conclusive proof one way or the other. Which means the court could rule either way. Without a very clear scientific conclusion on this it is all up for grabs. Dueling expert witnesses in court and all that. Today, while we all might like to think this is utter crap there is nothing in any case law anywhere or scientific journals that could be considered "proof" one way or the other.
So the court is going to be left to their own devices. If they rule in favor of the plantiff, all hell could break loose. People could begin suing to have cell towers removed, radio stations relocated and power transmission lines removed.
There are plenty of people that would be cheering on such a ruling.
I suspect the view is that all communication between persons in the US and persons outside the US are suspect and are subject to monitoring. Always have been, since the inception of the NSA. They are firmly plugged in to all International traffic, always have been and always will be.
When all governments are open and democratic, you might have a point. How about the ones that aren't. Should the rest of the world force them to change?
I suspect one significant impediment to implementation of IPv6 on the part of most ISPs is that it would take wholesale replacement of significant amounts of hardware.
Sure, the latest model of a router may support IPv6, but the 200 or so that an ISP has may not and there may be no upgrade path for it. Just like there is no Windows Vista driver for some hardware - too old to bother with - there is plenty of hardware out there that will never support IPv6. Until this is replaced, IPv6 isn't going to happen.
I think we have finally reached the point where new hardware supports IPv6, almost universally. So now we are just waiting until the older hardware is replaced. I suspect larger ISPs are somewhat reluctant to move out millions (and possibly tens of millions) of dollars worth of hardware before they have to.
Of course, they could just raise the rates for everyone to cover it.
The problem is, we are talking about people accessing the Internet that do not understand the toxic nature of a nice friendly text article that has (snuff, cannibalism) in the title.
Do you think that pre-teen boys will find this stuff, understand that maybe any story like this is just too utterly gross for them and skip it? No, sorry, they will not skip it. When the parent then is complaining to the school about the nightmares because of this exposure what happens?
There are clearly three levels:
People that should not be accessing the Internet without a guide.
People that can access the Internet, but may need someone to help them from time to time.
Technically competent, scam-aware adults.
Until you get to the last level, you are dealing with people that think because they see an email about getting a free phone if they forward a chain letter. So of course they do it. You have the pre-teen boys that spend weeks grossing each other out reading snuff fantasy stories, and then one budding delinquent thinks it might be fun to enact one of them. We are talking about people that do not have control over their own minds and do not understand what they are letting themselves in for.
It is like the people that believed AOL was asking them for their passwords and then were surprised when people were calling them idiots.
Children, especially in groups (like a school) need to be protected from themselves and what others in their peer group are trying to egg them on to doing.
Sure, a lot of filters can be circumvented pretty easily. This is a problem and the solution isn't to turn every child (and immature, uneducated adult) loose upon the world. And the problem as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with pictures of naked women. It has to do with concepts that will utterly frighten beyond all reason. Movies with live-action rape and snuff enactments. Stories about people deriving pleasure from rape, murder and torture. Worse yet, stories about people that derive pleasure from being tortured. Exposing children (and immature adults) will absolutely result in reenactment, especially when egged on by peers.
When I was a small child there was a cartoon show about Hercules. In this show he would jump off Mt. Olympus while yelling something about how he was coming to some mortal's rescue or something. This cartoon is not shown anymore and one reason is the number of small boys that would jump from various heights while yelling something similar. Broken legs, broken arms and death resulted. You can say all you want about how the children should have known better, but they didn't. You can say all you want about how it was their parent's responsibility to ensure their children did not reenact such actions, but it didn't happen that way. Putting the idea of jumping off a mountain into the child's head was the foundation of the problem and repeating and reinforcing it with multiple viewings per week just made sure it would happen in every community.
So instead of saying filters don't work, scrap them how about thinking how we can protect the Internet from people that think they want to get the latest botnet infection? How about thinking how we can have children not exposed to snuff fantasy until they understand that some people write this sort of stuff without any intention that people will actually do it? Sure, as a parent I know enough to have a chat with a child that responds to a rape video with "Cool!", but what happens when it is four boys in the school library?
I find it humorous that somehow people think the publisher of a game should support a resale market in any fashion whatsoever.
OK, last night while walking past a Denny's someone came by and asked if I would like to buy a "used" dinner. I was very upset that it didn't include a napkin, knife and fork like the first purchasor got and I think Denny's is very unfair in not supporting the resale market. Does this make any more sense?
There are things that simply cannot be resold. The idea of first sale doctrine is that you can't make it illegal to resell products that can be resold. I don't think it addresses in any manner the conversion of resaleable products to non-resaleable products by the original manufacturer. Because if there was any sort of law or principal at work here car manufacturers would have been sued out of existance a long, long time ago. Why is it exactly that a car loses 50% of its value within the first 24 hours after a sale?
And why doesn't Denny's support the resale market? While the knife and fork might not have been that handy, I assure you the napkin would have been helpful indeed.
Well, it is sort of like the Moon. Its orbit is getting smaller all the time because of the drag of Earth's gravity. Increased human population is increasing the mass of the Earth, as do metorites. This increases the drag on the Moon further reducing its orbit.
If nothing is done about this, the Moon will crash into the Earth, just like if nothing is done about Earth's climate some land will be submerged in the ocean. Believe me, the Moon impacting the Earth will likely destroy all life on the planet within a few seconds. This is potentially as huge a catestrophe as climate change and will have even further reaching effects. It is true that the Moon isn't likely to crash into the Earth next week, but neither will New York disappear into the Atlantic next week.
I believe we can "solve" any possible climate problem by immediately stopping all burning of fossil fuels. This would make all current non-nuclear power plants, all production automobiles, all aircraft obsolete and unusable. We need to reduce the population to under 500 million, probably really under 250 million, although without powered farm equipment no ability to transport crops we will likely see a big population reduction anyway making any real action on the population front unnecessary. Overnight, the face of the planet would change and much of it would return to a verdant paradise that has only been written about in fantasies.
So why aren't we doing this if there is a critical climate problem that we can solve? Perhaps because (a) it isn't that critical and (b) we can't solve it no matter what humans do.
Best Buy bought a license from the city to fleece people, the guy on the corner didn't. In most jurisdictions that alone is enough to get you some time in a courtroom. Nobody is going to jail, but there is likely a fine.
Oh, and the city doesn't offer business licenses to people that stand on street corners.
Somehow, some rather strange people seem to think that with increased used of technology (as compared to, say, 1950) and a growing population that some sort of "conservation" is going to allow the US to keep going without building new base-load generating plants. We haven't built a major plant in decades and there are some plans but nothing being built now. Most of the plans have a huge gap of years in them already for "environment". So we aren't going to be getting anything new for a while.
Florida has had little gadgets on people's homes for a long time now. What they do is allow the power company to turn off the air conditioner and other heavy loads when they are running out of capacity. So people learn pretty quickly that the air conditioner (in 90F with 90% humidity) isn't something you can rely on. I would expect we will start seeing this everywhere soon.
Sure wind and solar are fun, but the biggest residential loads occur 5-8PM. Not much sun then, anywhere. Wind? Well, in most places it comes and it goes, so you can't rely on it. And there is this little problem with transmission lines. If you can't build a power plant in one place and make big hills around it so people can't see it, how do you think people react to the idea of a toxic, poisonous, cancer-causing power line? Of course, we have lots of scientists that can prove there are no harmful effects of power lines - except the very same news services then trot out some eviro-wacko to show how people within miles of some transmission line suddenly all got cancer, autism, impotence or some other dread disease.
So you can forget about building new transmission lines whether they are "smart" or not. It isn't happening until the enviro-wackery has passed.
We aren't going to "conserve" our way out of this mess. We can try passing the load off somewhere else by moving factories to China. But increasing population through immigration will eventually mean that we aren't going to be able to rely on a continuous supply of electricity in the US. No amount of "conservation" is going to change that.
First off, anyone under 30 that has ever downloaded music or a movie is never going to accept anything that forces them to pay for crap. This is pretty much everyone under 30 with a computer. Call is 1/10th the population of the planet. And most people under 30 believe that all music, movies, books - media in general - today is crap. So they aren't going to pay.
Governments, on the other hand, look at two things: taxes and GDP. On a tax basis if everyone universally stops paying for media, there will be a huge hit in revenue collected by governments. I don't care if you are paying sales tax, GST or VAT. The tax hit would be huge.
The US and a lot of other Western countries don't make much physical stuff anymore - a lot of the GDP is intangible goods and media.
Because of the above, governments have no choice. They must prevent piracy of media at all costs. Failure to do so will mean loss of GDP and tax revenue, neither of which would government today be terribly fond of. The US just signed up to spend more than 1 billion dollars a year out of the government coffers. Where exactly do you think that is coming from? Donations?
Sadly, I think the governments are likely to lose. We have trained a generation that they shouldn't have to pay, it is all free for the taking on the Internet. The lessons took and today I know only a few people that pay for music, movies, etc. Often, paying it seen as "cheaper" than the effort required because piracy is inconvenient. That is changing with the real pirates making downloads faster and more efficient all the time.
If you have been shown from the first day of school that it is OK to "borrow" software, music, movies and anything else not nailed down and DRM-secured why would anyone pay for anything if they didn't have to? You can't stop it, no matter how much effort is put into it.
Why should the US be different than everywhere else on the planet? Try, just try, getting a job in any European country without proper paperwork. Can't be done. Show up in Mexico and apply for a job somewhere - you aren't going anywhere without whatever they consider to be proper documentation.
In the US it is today entirely different and we are getting our asses handed to us because of this difference. There are millions (around 25 from what I hear) of people out of work in the US and we are still importing cheap labor from Mexico, Central and South America to work. This means we have people literal starving on the streets and still people are coming here in and getting work.
You can say the border should be completely open and there should be no obstructions to free movement of people, goods and services. Fine - let's see some other places implement that strategy and the US can follow along after a while. Turns out that there is no place where it is as easy to just show up and get a job as in the US today. Documented or not, it doesn't really matter all that much for low-wage labor.
England has pretty much opened up to bringing in lots more people - except they are not able to get jobs and nobody will hire them, so they are squatting in people's garden sheds. Still, I guess this is a better life than in some parts of Eastern Europe.
Anyone that seriously believes that we can get out of the current situation through "energy efficiency" is seriously deluded. If there was a way to effectively (not even efficiently) store energy so that wind and solar could be used 24x7x365 we could have a chance at doing that. But there isn't an effective way to store energy today and so with much of the load coming after 5PM in the US there is no way that wind or solar are going to really help all that much.
After 5PM is when people get home from work, turn on the cooking appliances, turn down the air conditioner (in the summer) and turn on the TV. There is a huge load increase and it is way past the peak time for solar. Wind? Maybe, but the problem is that it is always "maybe".
The simple answer is to just turn it off. If there isn't wind power available, no TV. No computers, no Internet. No air conditioning. The US lived like that in the 1930s and the standard of living was a lot lower then so we could certainly get along. Use ice instead of refrigeration. Use batteries. Use whatever there is as long as it doesn't depend on a steady supply of electricity.
This would certainly be a "conservation" choice. If it deterred some growth, some additional resource usage this too would be welcomed by folks that think we can conserve our way out of needing more electricity.
Just remember that and keep saying it over and over. Google is our friend. Google is our friend. Google is our friend.
I don't think people's opinion of Google would change if they installed an application that uploaded to their servers anything that contained the word "copyright" in it and they then sold access to these gathered files. Better yet, just made the files available with embedded advertising. Imagine getting access to movie scripts as works-in-progress with some topically relevent ads sprinkled in. How about design documents for new consumer electronics gear, a year or so before it hit the market. You could market this under the moniker "Open Google".
The problem with Google is they got so incredibly big so incredibly fast without ever having to learn anything about growth or ethics. A lot of the senior staff are very young and have little experience other than Google. If it can be monetized, there is no reason not to do so in their eyes, especially if it doesn't seem "evil" at first glance.
The software is the key, and the software for reference and text books is just not there.
I have a Kindle 2 and it is nice for fiction books. Trying to get it to display multiple fonts (computer reference book), mathematical formulas (other reference books), tables of tiny little numbers (chemistry and physical science reference books) or just about anything else in the "reference" book field would be pointless - it isn't suitable for that at all.
Making the screen bigger might help, but not all the way. The problem is that today there is no "reader" application that does a good job in locating information using anything other than a string search. If the book has an index, it isn't being used effectively and it is not displayed in a good way. Until this is fixed, the reference book market is pretty much closed for any sort of computer-based display.
Text books are going to suffer from the same problems. Worse, because there aren't convenient ways to handle things like tabbing, trying to "flip" through a book isn't possible.
It is a chicken-and-egg problem - nobody is going to come up with great textbooks for an e-book reader until there is an e-book reader with software to deal with it well. And nobody is going to bother with the software until there is a market - which there can't be without the books.
Amazon and Sony decided to address the problem by making the reader and bludgening the publishers. At least Amazon was able to get some publishers attention and there are a lot of new books being released for the Kindle. The textbook market is much, much smaller and the revenues are certainly a lot lower. So it is doubtful that a textbook publisher is going to sponsor an e-book reader with a new book format designed specifically for textbooks. And without that, it is doomed to fail - PDF is an awful format for textbooks and reference books.
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Books require lots of physical space and it is very difficult to find "free" books that you can stuff in your shelves to show off to friends. So books aren't going to work.
Places that loan out media don't cut it for bragging about how much "stuff" you have been able to accumulate. With a decent internet connection a moderate-to-bigtime collector can have thousands of movies and hundreds of thousands of songs. Sure, you can rip everything a library has, but it takes going to the library a lot.
What has apparently evolved is a "library" where you can grab everything that has ever been recorded in digital form. Then you can load up your hard drives with it to show to friends. Looks really cool. Note that none of this stuff is ever actually viewed, just collected. There isn't any time to watch this stuff... too busy collecting.
By your logic it should be legal to photocopy and distribute any book that is available from the public library or record and distribute MP3s of any song that was broadcast on a radio station.
Legal, maybe not. But it happens every day over the entire planet. And there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way to stop it, so it is going to continue forever.
Redistribution is the key to the new digital un-economy.
If your position in entering the above motion was that "I'm right, so I should win" and offered nothing else - such as expert witnesses of your own, you are going to war unarmed. Of course you are going to lose.
The adversarial system is based on the idea that you have to defend your position. Ranting that "I'm right" doesn't count for much - presenting facts, witnesses, expert testimony, etc. is what counts. And doing so in the proper format for the court.
You are mostly correct that a lawyer would know these things and how they are done in court. Therefore, yes, almost always a lawyer is required, if for no other reason than to get through the proper procedural format of the court process. You want to do it yourself? You better spend some time learning how it is done, what is required to win and how to get there. Without that education, it is like taking someone that doesn't know computer programming and having them debug a program in an Assembler language.
Don't have the time to learn all this stuff? Well, that is why we have lawyers.
The problem is if the cost of illegally downloading a movie is just what you would pay in a store if you bought it, there is no disincentive to download. Actually, since you might not get caught, it makes even more sense to just download and pay the fine if you get caught.
You are dealing with people that have been brought up since about third grade with the idea that if it is on the Internet it is their right to grab it. And they were taught to share, so anything they get is then "shared" with the rest of the planet. You aren't going to counter that training with a few laws and lawsuits. It is pretty much ingrained in the minds of just about everyone under 30.
So face it, piracy is here to stay and be the general case not the exception. It means that revenue from digital goods has a very limited future and will be zero in the not-too-distant future. It means that anything that can be represented digitally has a value of zero.
If they sell an unencumbered movie for $5 that can be shared, it will be.
That would be the greatest boon to the pirates imaginable. No more ripping of DVDs. It will save the pirates a great amount of time and get the materials out there for free downloading much faster.
Of course the studios wouldn't like it much, because they would get one or two sales and the rest of the planet would have it for free.
You are taking two separate data points: piracy and revenue and combining them in a way that the data does not support.
People downloading movies aren't the one going to the theater and paying $10 a ticket for them. They are also not the people running out to stores to buy the DVD at $29. They are paying nothing.
The fact that the movie is "popular" means there are a lot of people that are not downloading. Downloading is movie isn't exactly simple and can take a lot of time. If you have a 384K DSL connection, it might take you a week to download even a very popular movie with a lot of people serving it up. You also need special software that doesn't come with Windows. For people over 30 this makes it difficult and for some an insurmountable hurdle.
This is getting easier and easier, however. As cable speeds increase, the download time get shorter and shorter all the time. The number of people serving up movies is steadily increasing, further decreasing download time and broadening the selection available. You also have people spreading the word about acquiring P2P software, "How to Pirate" instructions being passed around and the like. What this results in is the broadening of downloading movies and music.
Eventually, the people that can (physically) download movies will do it for free, thus pretty much ending the revenue from movies. Today you have only the people that can and know how to doing it - a seriously smaller group than what is possible. Thus, movies still make money off the somewhat reduced population of moviegoers.
So how long will it be before the revenue stream ends? Probably not long. It has pretty much ended for music already as most music revenue comes from the under-30 crowd and they already know about downloading for free. You will know it has ended when WalMart pulls the CDs off their shelves and "music stores" are all gone. Mostly, music stores are gone today but there are a few hangers-on. They don't have long. Certainly within five years there will be no more music sales of any sort, except maybe for older people and those without high speed Internet connections - the last few iTunes customers. Movies aren't going to be viable as a revenue stream much past that.
So of course they have to try any defensive measures they can against this trend.
Why? If you verbally bully someone today and they finally hit back after endless verbal taunts, they are very often arrested for assault.
Why would it be any different? Besides, what physical act has occurred, other than the victim killing themselves? Are you in favor of arresting people to prevent a crime from occuring?
Sorry, but the guy you are responding to is pretty much right on.
Lori Drew was not made an example of and neither will these nine kids. They will get off. Because today there is pretty much nothing that can be done.
If someone (or someone and their friends) decide to do some serious cyberbullying and you are the target you had better have a pretty thick skin. Running to your parents, the principal or the police will do nothing. If someone decides they are going to trash your life online, they can do this and nothing is going to stop them.
Online has no consequences today.
So someone creates a Facebook page that purports to be yours and has nothing but pictures of your head on various butch shemale bodies there... and maybe some really hot diaries about what a great time you had with the gangbang at the gay bar. Do you think there is anything on the planet that will get that taken down? Better have a pretty thick skin, because I know that it would be a really nice day when this gets passed around the office. Wait until someone edits some really gross snuff story to make it in the first person with your name featured as the main character, and puts it on "your" page. Any suitably determined person can take someone with any "online" friends and destroy their life, utterly and completely. For most people under 40 today the idea of being able to ignore this sort of assault is over and done with.
What we have seen so far is very, very mild. A few children have killed themselves. The power of this hasn't been explored yet and in no way is the US legal system ready.
How about one of them was an adult and the other a child?
Children are assumed not to have as much self-control and have a greater need to be protected. Once you are legally classified as an adult, well, you are on your own.
The problem is that there has been no determination as to the reality or severity of the supposed "illness".
You do not have a right to breed anthrax in your home or apartment. Why not? Because it will get out and cause other people harm. If it can be shown that RF is leaking out of your home or apartment and that this is having a negative effect on people... well, then you no longer have any right to radiate RF.
The basic problem is that there isn't any conclusive proof one way or the other. Which means the court could rule either way. Without a very clear scientific conclusion on this it is all up for grabs. Dueling expert witnesses in court and all that. Today, while we all might like to think this is utter crap there is nothing in any case law anywhere or scientific journals that could be considered "proof" one way or the other.
So the court is going to be left to their own devices. If they rule in favor of the plantiff, all hell could break loose. People could begin suing to have cell towers removed, radio stations relocated and power transmission lines removed.
There are plenty of people that would be cheering on such a ruling.
Government policy decisions made based on inaccurate or misleading data? Surely you have heard of the Iraq war, right?
Be happy that in this case it is not complete fabrication.
I suspect the view is that all communication between persons in the US and persons outside the US are suspect and are subject to monitoring. Always have been, since the inception of the NSA. They are firmly plugged in to all International traffic, always have been and always will be.
When all governments are open and democratic, you might have a point. How about the ones that aren't. Should the rest of the world force them to change?
I suspect one significant impediment to implementation of IPv6 on the part of most ISPs is that it would take wholesale replacement of significant amounts of hardware.
Sure, the latest model of a router may support IPv6, but the 200 or so that an ISP has may not and there may be no upgrade path for it. Just like there is no Windows Vista driver for some hardware - too old to bother with - there is plenty of hardware out there that will never support IPv6. Until this is replaced, IPv6 isn't going to happen.
I think we have finally reached the point where new hardware supports IPv6, almost universally. So now we are just waiting until the older hardware is replaced. I suspect larger ISPs are somewhat reluctant to move out millions (and possibly tens of millions) of dollars worth of hardware before they have to.
Of course, they could just raise the rates for everyone to cover it.
The problem is, we are talking about people accessing the Internet that do not understand the toxic nature of a nice friendly text article that has (snuff, cannibalism) in the title.
Do you think that pre-teen boys will find this stuff, understand that maybe any story like this is just too utterly gross for them and skip it? No, sorry, they will not skip it. When the parent then is complaining to the school about the nightmares because of this exposure what happens?
There are clearly three levels:
Until you get to the last level, you are dealing with people that think because they see an email about getting a free phone if they forward a chain letter. So of course they do it. You have the pre-teen boys that spend weeks grossing each other out reading snuff fantasy stories, and then one budding delinquent thinks it might be fun to enact one of them. We are talking about people that do not have control over their own minds and do not understand what they are letting themselves in for.
It is like the people that believed AOL was asking them for their passwords and then were surprised when people were calling them idiots.
Children, especially in groups (like a school) need to be protected from themselves and what others in their peer group are trying to egg them on to doing.
Sure, a lot of filters can be circumvented pretty easily. This is a problem and the solution isn't to turn every child (and immature, uneducated adult) loose upon the world. And the problem as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with pictures of naked women. It has to do with concepts that will utterly frighten beyond all reason. Movies with live-action rape and snuff enactments. Stories about people deriving pleasure from rape, murder and torture. Worse yet, stories about people that derive pleasure from being tortured. Exposing children (and immature adults) will absolutely result in reenactment, especially when egged on by peers.
When I was a small child there was a cartoon show about Hercules. In this show he would jump off Mt. Olympus while yelling something about how he was coming to some mortal's rescue or something. This cartoon is not shown anymore and one reason is the number of small boys that would jump from various heights while yelling something similar. Broken legs, broken arms and death resulted. You can say all you want about how the children should have known better, but they didn't. You can say all you want about how it was their parent's responsibility to ensure their children did not reenact such actions, but it didn't happen that way. Putting the idea of jumping off a mountain into the child's head was the foundation of the problem and repeating and reinforcing it with multiple viewings per week just made sure it would happen in every community.
So instead of saying filters don't work, scrap them how about thinking how we can protect the Internet from people that think they want to get the latest botnet infection? How about thinking how we can have children not exposed to snuff fantasy until they understand that some people write this sort of stuff without any intention that people will actually do it? Sure, as a parent I know enough to have a chat with a child that responds to a rape video with "Cool!", but what happens when it is four boys in the school library?
I find it humorous that somehow people think the publisher of a game should support a resale market in any fashion whatsoever.
OK, last night while walking past a Denny's someone came by and asked if I would like to buy a "used" dinner. I was very upset that it didn't include a napkin, knife and fork like the first purchasor got and I think Denny's is very unfair in not supporting the resale market. Does this make any more sense?
There are things that simply cannot be resold. The idea of first sale doctrine is that you can't make it illegal to resell products that can be resold. I don't think it addresses in any manner the conversion of resaleable products to non-resaleable products by the original manufacturer. Because if there was any sort of law or principal at work here car manufacturers would have been sued out of existance a long, long time ago. Why is it exactly that a car loses 50% of its value within the first 24 hours after a sale?
And why doesn't Denny's support the resale market? While the knife and fork might not have been that handy, I assure you the napkin would have been helpful indeed.
Well, it is sort of like the Moon. Its orbit is getting smaller all the time because of the drag of Earth's gravity. Increased human population is increasing the mass of the Earth, as do metorites. This increases the drag on the Moon further reducing its orbit.
If nothing is done about this, the Moon will crash into the Earth, just like if nothing is done about Earth's climate some land will be submerged in the ocean. Believe me, the Moon impacting the Earth will likely destroy all life on the planet within a few seconds. This is potentially as huge a catestrophe as climate change and will have even further reaching effects. It is true that the Moon isn't likely to crash into the Earth next week, but neither will New York disappear into the Atlantic next week.
I believe we can "solve" any possible climate problem by immediately stopping all burning of fossil fuels. This would make all current non-nuclear power plants, all production automobiles, all aircraft obsolete and unusable. We need to reduce the population to under 500 million, probably really under 250 million, although without powered farm equipment no ability to transport crops we will likely see a big population reduction anyway making any real action on the population front unnecessary. Overnight, the face of the planet would change and much of it would return to a verdant paradise that has only been written about in fantasies.
So why aren't we doing this if there is a critical climate problem that we can solve? Perhaps because (a) it isn't that critical and (b) we can't solve it no matter what humans do.
Best Buy bought a license from the city to fleece people, the guy on the corner didn't. In most jurisdictions that alone is enough to get you some time in a courtroom. Nobody is going to jail, but there is likely a fine.
Oh, and the city doesn't offer business licenses to people that stand on street corners.
Somehow, some rather strange people seem to think that with increased used of technology (as compared to, say, 1950) and a growing population that some sort of "conservation" is going to allow the US to keep going without building new base-load generating plants. We haven't built a major plant in decades and there are some plans but nothing being built now. Most of the plans have a huge gap of years in them already for "environment". So we aren't going to be getting anything new for a while.
Florida has had little gadgets on people's homes for a long time now. What they do is allow the power company to turn off the air conditioner and other heavy loads when they are running out of capacity. So people learn pretty quickly that the air conditioner (in 90F with 90% humidity) isn't something you can rely on. I would expect we will start seeing this everywhere soon.
Sure wind and solar are fun, but the biggest residential loads occur 5-8PM. Not much sun then, anywhere. Wind? Well, in most places it comes and it goes, so you can't rely on it. And there is this little problem with transmission lines. If you can't build a power plant in one place and make big hills around it so people can't see it, how do you think people react to the idea of a toxic, poisonous, cancer-causing power line? Of course, we have lots of scientists that can prove there are no harmful effects of power lines - except the very same news services then trot out some eviro-wacko to show how people within miles of some transmission line suddenly all got cancer, autism, impotence or some other dread disease.
So you can forget about building new transmission lines whether they are "smart" or not. It isn't happening until the enviro-wackery has passed.
We aren't going to "conserve" our way out of this mess. We can try passing the load off somewhere else by moving factories to China. But increasing population through immigration will eventually mean that we aren't going to be able to rely on a continuous supply of electricity in the US. No amount of "conservation" is going to change that.
First off, anyone under 30 that has ever downloaded music or a movie is never going to accept anything that forces them to pay for crap. This is pretty much everyone under 30 with a computer. Call is 1/10th the population of the planet. And most people under 30 believe that all music, movies, books - media in general - today is crap. So they aren't going to pay.
Governments, on the other hand, look at two things: taxes and GDP. On a tax basis if everyone universally stops paying for media, there will be a huge hit in revenue collected by governments. I don't care if you are paying sales tax, GST or VAT. The tax hit would be huge.
The US and a lot of other Western countries don't make much physical stuff anymore - a lot of the GDP is intangible goods and media.
Because of the above, governments have no choice. They must prevent piracy of media at all costs. Failure to do so will mean loss of GDP and tax revenue, neither of which would government today be terribly fond of. The US just signed up to spend more than 1 billion dollars a year out of the government coffers. Where exactly do you think that is coming from? Donations?
Sadly, I think the governments are likely to lose. We have trained a generation that they shouldn't have to pay, it is all free for the taking on the Internet. The lessons took and today I know only a few people that pay for music, movies, etc. Often, paying it seen as "cheaper" than the effort required because piracy is inconvenient. That is changing with the real pirates making downloads faster and more efficient all the time.
If you have been shown from the first day of school that it is OK to "borrow" software, music, movies and anything else not nailed down and DRM-secured why would anyone pay for anything if they didn't have to? You can't stop it, no matter how much effort is put into it.
Why should the US be different than everywhere else on the planet? Try, just try, getting a job in any European country without proper paperwork. Can't be done. Show up in Mexico and apply for a job somewhere - you aren't going anywhere without whatever they consider to be proper documentation.
In the US it is today entirely different and we are getting our asses handed to us because of this difference. There are millions (around 25 from what I hear) of people out of work in the US and we are still importing cheap labor from Mexico, Central and South America to work. This means we have people literal starving on the streets and still people are coming here in and getting work.
You can say the border should be completely open and there should be no obstructions to free movement of people, goods and services. Fine - let's see some other places implement that strategy and the US can follow along after a while. Turns out that there is no place where it is as easy to just show up and get a job as in the US today. Documented or not, it doesn't really matter all that much for low-wage labor.
England has pretty much opened up to bringing in lots more people - except they are not able to get jobs and nobody will hire them, so they are squatting in people's garden sheds. Still, I guess this is a better life than in some parts of Eastern Europe.
Because the next best thing would be employing all the unemployed to pedal stationary bicycles to generate electricity?
Anyone that seriously believes that we can get out of the current situation through "energy efficiency" is seriously deluded. If there was a way to effectively (not even efficiently) store energy so that wind and solar could be used 24x7x365 we could have a chance at doing that. But there isn't an effective way to store energy today and so with much of the load coming after 5PM in the US there is no way that wind or solar are going to really help all that much.
After 5PM is when people get home from work, turn on the cooking appliances, turn down the air conditioner (in the summer) and turn on the TV. There is a huge load increase and it is way past the peak time for solar. Wind? Maybe, but the problem is that it is always "maybe".
The simple answer is to just turn it off. If there isn't wind power available, no TV. No computers, no Internet. No air conditioning. The US lived like that in the 1930s and the standard of living was a lot lower then so we could certainly get along. Use ice instead of refrigeration. Use batteries. Use whatever there is as long as it doesn't depend on a steady supply of electricity.
This would certainly be a "conservation" choice. If it deterred some growth, some additional resource usage this too would be welcomed by folks that think we can conserve our way out of needing more electricity.
Just remember that and keep saying it over and over. Google is our friend. Google is our friend. Google is our friend.
I don't think people's opinion of Google would change if they installed an application that uploaded to their servers anything that contained the word "copyright" in it and they then sold access to these gathered files. Better yet, just made the files available with embedded advertising. Imagine getting access to movie scripts as works-in-progress with some topically relevent ads sprinkled in. How about design documents for new consumer electronics gear, a year or so before it hit the market. You could market this under the moniker "Open Google".
The problem with Google is they got so incredibly big so incredibly fast without ever having to learn anything about growth or ethics. A lot of the senior staff are very young and have little experience other than Google. If it can be monetized, there is no reason not to do so in their eyes, especially if it doesn't seem "evil" at first glance.
The software is the key, and the software for reference and text books is just not there.
I have a Kindle 2 and it is nice for fiction books. Trying to get it to display multiple fonts (computer reference book), mathematical formulas (other reference books), tables of tiny little numbers (chemistry and physical science reference books) or just about anything else in the "reference" book field would be pointless - it isn't suitable for that at all.
Making the screen bigger might help, but not all the way. The problem is that today there is no "reader" application that does a good job in locating information using anything other than a string search. If the book has an index, it isn't being used effectively and it is not displayed in a good way. Until this is fixed, the reference book market is pretty much closed for any sort of computer-based display.
Text books are going to suffer from the same problems. Worse, because there aren't convenient ways to handle things like tabbing, trying to "flip" through a book isn't possible.
It is a chicken-and-egg problem - nobody is going to come up with great textbooks for an e-book reader until there is an e-book reader with software to deal with it well. And nobody is going to bother with the software until there is a market - which there can't be without the books.
Amazon and Sony decided to address the problem by making the reader and bludgening the publishers. At least Amazon was able to get some publishers attention and there are a lot of new books being released for the Kindle. The textbook market is much, much smaller and the revenues are certainly a lot lower. So it is doubtful that a textbook publisher is going to sponsor an e-book reader with a new book format designed specifically for textbooks. And without that, it is doomed to fail - PDF is an awful format for textbooks and reference books.