Re:Still a step in the right direction
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
You don't understand how insurance companies are regulated. Oh, they are. Quite severely, I might add.
The biggest problem is that 50 years ago health insurance was "insurance". It was risk-based. If you were had poor health, smoked and didn't take care of yourself and wanted health insurance it was expensive. Someone much healthier got lower rates.
This was deemed to be terribly unfair. Instead of addressing the source of the problem - which in a free society isn't really something you can fix - the politicians at the state level decided to really fix the problem. They made it so the rates all had to be pretty much the same. So now the insurance company couldn't adjust rates based on risk. They could adjust them based on some other criteria which substituted for real risk assessment.
Then the states required coverage for special things. Some states said you had to cover psychiatrists. Other states decided that "alternative therapies" had to be covered. The end result was that 50 separate sets of requirements evolved over a fairly short period of time. Of course, this was reflected in the rates. What if you were in a state that mandated coverage for acupuncture and you didn't want it? Too bad, in order to do business in that state acupuncture had to be included.
Then the reasons for denial of coverage were steadily reduced to the point where coverage could only be denied for a few specific reasons.
The end result of this is the sort of back-end management that you see today. An insurance company is saddled with unknown risk and the only way to manage this risk - because insurance is a risk-based investment practice - is to deny claims and drop people when they actually have a claim. The politicians have tried, without any real success, to change health insurance into a prepaid health plan, like prepaid legal service only with doctors and hospitals. The insurance companies haven't gone along with this and have kept the risk-based investment strategy. The end result is that whatever tools are left for managing the risk are being used because otherwise it would just be a prepaid health care fund.
While a prepaid health care fund might be what people are interested in, that isn't what they are getting. No matter how hard the politicians seem to want to push it in that direction.
The principal problem with "overcharging" is two things:
Pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies strike deals with other countries and shift the cost to the US where, supposedly, we can afford it. This cost-shifting permeates the system as well, where if a hospital can only get 40% of their costs reimbursed by Medicare, they make up for it with non-Medicare patients. Managing this cost shifting is a huge problem.
90% of US health care spending is in the last year of life, regardless if the patient is 90 years old or 90 days old. Americans want to "preserve life at all costs" and will find ways to do this. We have moved away from the idea of having 8 or 10 children because some are going to die. We have abandoned construction projects with the idea that some workers will die during them - better not to bother so we can "save lives".
This style of thinking is quite different from much of the rest of the world. Between the cost-shifting and the "at any cost" philosophies we are in a difficult position. Unfortunately, to fund the program that is going to be enacted government folks are going to have to change this, virtually overnight. This means telling the daughter her father is just not worth saving. This means telling the mother that the government can't afford to fix her child's heart problem and the child will die now instead of in 10 years. Americans are not used to getting this kind of news, especially from some government person.
This is going to change things in a big way in the USA. Probably a lot bigger than people in Washington understand.
Anyone believing that the so-called reform of the health insurance industry is going to be positive needs to understand the numbers. My wife read something yesterday from an Arizona politician that said this would give insurance to 33,000 people in Arizona and improve insurance for over 300,000 people in Arizona. Not only that, but it would give $54 million dollars to hospitals that no longer had to treat people that couldn't afford to pay.
Let's see... Today, if you do not have any health insurance you are working but not at a great job - making enough so that you don't qualify for assistance (which would include Medicaid) but not enough to actually pay for insurance. So how are these people going to get insurance? Goverment subsidies.
Since the payout to the hospitals is going to be coming from insurance premiums, that means in one state with mostly a rural population $54 million is going to be coming from the government and going to the hospitals. Because of some administration costs, this is actually likely to be more like $60 or $70 million. Multiply that by 50 (at least - Arizona is a pretty small state population-wise) and you can see on an annual basis this is a huge investment by the government. Probably the biggest single investment ever made by any government anywhere.
Obviously, this is going to pass - even if nobody votes for it, it will pass because of sidestepping the actual voting process for it. So we are going to get this no matter what.
The money for it is going to come from somewhere. Probably cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Today, health care spending in the US is focused on end-of-life treatments to (perhaps) extend the life of people. This is fairly unique in the world. As much as 90% of all health care spending in the US is spent in the last year of life, regardless of the person's age. There are plenty of people that believe this is a horrible way to spend money. I believe with the passage of this reform act we will see this spending end. It will create an extremely large amount of social turmoil because Americans have a different outlook on life and death than most of the rest of the world, which is why the spending is skewed in the first place. I don't think Obama and most of the other politicians understand this at all.
You don't really believe that you can sway anyone in corporate America with the "seven fat years followed by seven lean years" sort of scenario, do you? If they can get five years of low-cost, high-profit benefits out of moving to China it will be someone else's problem after that.
The new CEO will then have inherited a huge mess while the previous one has retired with five years of huge bonuses because the company was hugely profitable. Of course, all those profits are gone and the new guy isn't going to look so good.
The days when someone thought the company was "theirs" and they needed to preserve it into the future are long gone. Consequences are best left to a successor.
The US isn't interested in electric generation right now. If you can't build transmission lines (and you can't), there is no point to building generating capacity. About the only thing built in the US has been natural gas "peaker" plants in suburban locations where they could get permits and tie into existing grid infrastructure.
We are going see a huge contraction in the availability of electric power pretty soon. Growth is off the table because nobody can get through the permit process. The reward of building a plant is just not enough to provide the necessary funds to walk through a 10+ year permit process followed by another 5-10 years to actually build the plant. Besides, there is no assurance that halfway through building there won't be another environmental lawsuit that forces everything to stop.
No, I don't see much growth and people need to think about how they are going to cope with the shrinking power supply.
High-skill people don't have that many immigration problems. There are H1B problems, so if someone wants to come here temporarily that is a different issue entirely. Especially if the company wants some people, and the people are only interested in being sponsored.
The biggest difference however is labor costs. Not that long ago we were working with a Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronic stuff. Our engineers was getting $110K in the Chicago area and they thought that absurd - their top engineers were making $3600 US. I'm sure costs have gone up some in China, but we're not talking about 50% salary differential here, it is more like 20 or 30 times. When you pay the staff 1/20th of what they would have cost in the US there are some serious incentives to move.
If you can also leave all the Prop 65 signs behind that is probably 80% of the deal right there.
In Chicago the firemen have been known to run the big hose to the hydrant through the windows of a car, from the street over to the hydrant. They probably couldn't have pushed the car out of the way without moving a whole line of cars - and from where I've been in Germany the on-street parking is worse (way, way worse) just about everywhere.
"Meanwhile, both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck."
Well, they could just start giving away everything for free. That would work, right?
The problem is, from the average user's perspective, there are two ways to get a movie today: pay for it, or download it. Paying for it gets you a variety of different things, like a physical product, streaming from Netflix, or maybe just a rental from Blockbuster. Downloading it, if they know how, results in the movie being delivered almost as quickly for free.
So, let's see. I can pay or I can download.... checks wallet... I guess today I'll just download.
To the user the experience is pretty much the same as long as they know to stay away from files identified with "CAM". Maybe the download is better, because there are no previews, no ads and no warnings.
We have pretty much educated everyone under 30 that there is no ethical problem in doing this - the studios are making plenty of money (too much, in some opinions) and therefore it is all OK. It isn't like you are actually "stealing" anything anyway. And what is one or two people downloading compared to all the people that are actually paying, right? Problem with that today is the ratio of paying to downloading is getting smaller and smaller every day.
Absolutely, those jobs will get taken by Americans - often high school students and people going to college part time. Problem is today in most cities you can't get a job as a burger-flipper as a high school student. They simply aren't available.
Similarly, if you don't manage to get a college degree and want to get a job you will find that minimum wage jobs pretty much require speaking Spanish, because all your co-workers speak nothing but Spanish. If you are bilingual and have even a little bit of experience you can be the "foreman" but of course there are only a few of those jobs available.
The work that can't be outsourced is now going to low-wage workers right here in the US. Because these people are earning 10x what they could get back home, they are willing to put up with anything to get and keep minimum-wage jobs. This isn't going to change when they become legal, voting citizens. We are building our very own slave underclass right under our noses and most people just don't care. Somehow, we are doing this to "help" the poor in Mexico. Which isn't helping at all because it just allows the upper class there to ignore the situation.
There is no way to "create jobs" in Mexico without first staging a revolution. The problem is that the upper class owns just about everything and isn't interested in employing people and is very interested in keeping prices for things like food down. So the farmers get nothing for their crops and end up living as subsistance farmers. Understand that it is completely divided across racial lines in Mexico - the Mexican Indians are poor, the Castillians are the upper class. Why we in the US should help perpetuate this system is beyond me.
How do you fix that? Well, building foreign-owned factories doesn't do it. Sure, it makes a slight difference in an area around Juarez, but nothing else. And because there is no foundation to build on, the people with jobs at the factory have no idea what to do with their different life.
Today, if someone crosses the border from north to south into Mexico they will be met by the Mexican Army, arrested and likely confined, possibly for a long time. There is no possibility that someone is going to stay there unmolested - the people will turn the "invader" in if they manage to elude the Army and the police. This is the complete opposite of what happens to a border crosser going from south to north - which means pretty much we deserve exactly what we are getting.
The only way that this will end is when the standard of living is equal between the two countries. Since raising the standard in Mexico is impossible because of the culture and financial system, it means that the US has to have the same standard of living as Mexico does today. With 25% real unemployment, very tight credit and a collapsed housing market we are well on our way there. When the amnesty is passed later this year we will likely see that there are 20-30 million people from Mexico in the US in a few years. This will pretty much put the finishing touches on the labor market.
A strong border is simply not a priority with most people. Either they don't see the effects or they somehow believe that we "owe" it to Mexico to help the poor people so the upper class can continue to ignore them. Of course many businesses welcome the minimum-wage labor force that is supplied from Mexico. The work that cannot be outsourced can be done in the US by people to whom minimum wage for a week is 10 times what they could make in a year back home.
Sure, we could have built a strong border - but without support of the citizens of the US it would never work. And we clearly do not have support of the citizens. Napolitano wanted to throw open the border when she was governer in Arizona, probably mostly for the benefit of the businesses here. The fact that it makes getting a entry-level low-skill job impossible meant nothing to her.
We better build a really strong social safety net, because when we are at 30-40% unemployment we are all going to need it.
100Mbps to the home is one thing and a lot of cable systems with DOCSIS 3.0 are providing it or nearly so.
The problem is that this is "burst" only, not dedicated bandwidth. And I am sure we're not going to be seeing anything like 100Mbps dedicated bandwidth to homes in the near future. Why? Well, it has to do with the network topology, for one thing. The other is just the raw capacity of major backbones. But let's look at network topology for a moment...
My house in a relatively new development is connected via coax to a local drop of hardline which is then connected to a neighborhood node. From the node to the head end is fiber. This fiber might be 256Mbps, but let's say it is 10Gbps just for laughs. How does that work out? Well, that means for the 1000 homes in my neighborhood that there is a maximum of.01Gbps or 10Mbps per home dedicated bandwidth. Subtracting some for the TV channels, you are probably left with more like 1Mbps per home - dedicated bandwidth.
Nobody gets dedicated bandwidth in today's system. You get "burst" and you are sharing capacity with everyone else in the neighborhood. This isn't likely to improve anytime soon because to change it would require increasing the neighborhood node bandwidth by as much as 100 times. I don't know of any 1000Gbps fiber connections, and even if you had one, what would you connect it to?
Another huge motivation for building the Interstate highway system was military. If you needed to get troops from an Army base to a major city to fight off insurrection or the Russkies it was virtually impossible to do this in any reasonable period of time prior to the Interstate highway system.
The Army learned this in Europe during WWII. They had miles long traffic jams of trucks and tanks trying to move supplies around and to get tanks where they were needed. It couldn't be done in anything like an efficient manner because the roads weren't up to the job. So they came back to the US in '45 and looked around and saw exactly the same problems in the US. And the fact the continental US is around, oh 40 times as big as any country they were in over in Europe made somewhat of an impression as well.
I'd say the idea of having to fight a land war in the US scared the crap out of people at the time, given the infrastructure at the time.
Most real organizations with Blackberry phones run the server on their own equipment. The communication between the server and the phone is heavily encrypted - AES at a minimum with some even more stringent options available.
Yes, you can have a Blackberry set up to connect to a provider-hosted server where it will fetch your email from Gmail and route it to your phone. This isn't secure in any way, which is why nobody using this technology for real does it this way.
iPhone? I am pretty sure that all communication between the phone and the server is unencrypted. I do not believe the phone connects to the mail server but uses some intermediary. Not sure how this works but it isn't very secure.
Blackberry - very, very secure. Optionally secure enough for CIA folks.
A huge problem is cultural. If my culture has taught me from birth that your cultural group is filled with evil domineering people that want to enslave the world can you really blame me for hating every person from your cultural group? What happens when I don't have as much money as you do and I see you every day with material items that I can't afford? Simple - I'm gonna rob you and take what you have stolen from me and my people for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
How about if I have been taught from birth that because I believe in a special, personal God and you do not that you are inferior and are injustly taking up space on my planet, deeded over to me by my personal God? How about if I just kill you and rid the planet of one more space-taker that doesn't belong here because you do not believe in the correct God? My God will praise me for this act, I am told.
Better people? Ha. How about fixing some of the cultural problems first? As this seems to be a nearly insurmountable problem, I would say we have a long, long way to go before we see any better people.
Sorry, but the (I think 2006) credit card rules revisions do not allow the credit card company to cancel subscription billing. Nor can they cancel the card to stop the charges. The only way out is to get the company that is making them terminate the subscription billing.
Subscription billing was introduced fairly recently and is an incredible revenue producer for companies. Many people will utterly ignore the charge month after month and keep getting whatever it is they subscribed to get. And there is nothing you can do about it other than following the cancellation procedure for the company making the charges. The new rules absolutely guarantee that.
If you aren't paying for your entertainment media, then you aren't paying taxes. Similarly, the rightholders aren't paying income taxes on the money they are getting.
Therefore, piracy reduces tax revenues. Obama would really like to have a health care system that didn't just skyrocket the deficit out of control, while maintaining the idea that everyone (even the illegal immigrants) are getting health care coverage with government subsidies. Well, obviously he can't do that with shrinking tax revenues, now can he?
Has your income gone up this year from last year? Do you expect to be paying more or less in income taxes next year? Well, big media companies are looking at exactly the same situation and the government is getting nervous. Smaller tax revenues mean more deficit spending and maybe (gasp!) some programs getting cut and pork projects not getting done.
This will result in congresscritters not being reelected because they failed to "deliver" for their constituents. Yup, I'd say everyone in the US is worried about that.
Sorry, decreasing the birth rate, even to zero, isn't going to help. And in non-Western countries trying convince rural people to not have children to work the farm is pointless and stupid.
War isn't really going to do it. If we are going to treat the Earth as a closed system (no outside resources) then we better get down to 200 million people or so within the next 30-50 years. That requires a loss of about a million people per day for twenty years. Not going to happen, even with a nuclear war. You might lose 50% of the population in a really long drawn out nuclear exchange. That is nowhere near enough. You need a biological attack to do that, and the worst diseases imaginable have a fatality of around 80 or 85 percent. Still not enough - we need to get rid of around 97% of the population on the planet in order to make it "sustainable".
I think the only real solution is to educate people that it is there duty to Gaia to not have children and die as soon as possible. Now there will probably be some that just don't get it - just like today there are people that object to the wholesale destruction of the Western standard of living and economy in favor of the health of Gaia - i.e., trying to minimize climate change. So it will be necessary to "educate" these people about their duty to die quickly, quietly and without much fuss. This would be so much neater than a war or plague.
Unfortunately, most people advocating this are considered to be "wacko nutjobs" today. The reality of what "sustainable" really means hasn't sunk in yet. People haven't figured out that if you can't plan for the future you really don't get to live there. The choice is ours today - massive die-off or space exploration and gathering of resources.
In 30 years of continued government safety nets, handouts and aid packages that do more harm than good we will no longer have the economic wherewithall to make this choice, it will have been made for us. The West won't be shivering in the dark because of trying to preserve the climate, they will be shivering in the dark because there is no electricity, no fuels, no nuclear power and no hope of anything like that in the future.
Private launching is pretty much a non-starter in the US. Today there are three companies that are trying to do this and the Virgin Galactic method is to sidestep most of the process. They are also the only ones to have actually launched anything at all. Why is this you might ask? Well, the whole White Knight/SpaceShipOne was a trick to get around the licensing and it worked.
You see, you can't launch anything without a license from the FAA. And, because possibly polluting chemicals are used, you need another license from the EPA. These organizations are not in the habit of licensing much, so at this time NASA has a license and the US Air Force has a license. Nobody else, not even Virgin Galactic. Sure, there are a few other companies that have attempted to get licenses but none have been issued. And there are no plans to issue any anytime in the future.
So while it is really nice to talk about the wonderful achievements that have been made in static testing and hovering, nobody is going to launch anything from US soil anytime soon. And I suspect should someone come up with the bright idea of trying to launch from Mexico there would be an immediate denial of export on the grounds of an arms export license being needed.
So nobody is going anywhere anytime soon - except for NASA and the Air Force.
By the way, the next time Virgin Galactic tries a launch I would expect there to be an army of FAA and EPA guys on hand to tell them why exactly they cannot do so. That a space launch license is needed for their airplane. And they can't have one.
The problem is the separation between user and administrator. If you want any kind of security you need the situation where the user asks the administrator "Can I install WeatherBug?" and the administrator says "No!".
If you do not have this separation and ability to deny, you have a home computer. A home computer that when Mommy wants to install WeatherBug she will do it, following whatever instructions are given to her. This means if she was installing it on Linux and it required her to enter an sudo command, she would do it. Period. Without question. Because to do otherwise would not get the desired software installed.
As long as you have that kind of environment, there is no security. Windows isn't important. The lack of real administration and the ability for users to install anything is the only thing that is important.
Let's see - there is a fundamental disconnect between the "leaders" and the "common people". This disconnect pretty much means that it is OK for the leaders to shoot, imprison and internally exile the common people. That is a pretty wide gulf to bridge.
Most of the governments on the planet work this way. There are leaders and there are other people. The leaders know what is right and the common people just have to live with it. A big exception to this was Soviet Russia - they didn't really like the common people, but they knew they couldn't do without them. China seems to go through periods where it appears that they would really like to try it without the common people. This is extremely dangerous for the rest of the planet because while you can threaten a whole country it is very, very difficult to make good on threats to a few leaders. As has been seen innumerable times - Khmer Rouge, Taliban, Saddam Hussein, etc.
By the way, anyone that hasn't noticed that the leaders in Iran seems to consider the common people expendable hasn't been keeping up. It might have been a suspicion before the last election but now it is a dead certanity.
China seems to be OK with the idea of executing leaders that step out of line, as long as the leader steps way, way out of line. Having to sacrifice one of their own is probably a tough decision but sometimes you have to keep up appearances or people will stop buying your cat food.
I'd say China's leaders are operating on the idea that they will do whatever is required to stay in power and in control. If this means keeping control on the Internet, no problem. If it means pretending to listen to complaints, no problem - maybe even doing something every now and then. But do not be deceived. The concept that there are important, vital leaders and a bunch of expendable, unimportant common people is what is controlling decision making there.
You have to be pretty poor to not be able to tell the difference between living in the US and living in, say, Haiti. If it were not this way, there would be no illegal immigration problem. Right now, a person's standard of living increases about 100 times when the cross the border from Mexico to the US. Even if all they do is sit on a street corner with a cup they will make more money in a day than the could make in rural Mexico in a month. If they get a job as a undocumented worker paid less than minimum wage off the books they make in a day what they could get in a year in Mexico.
This is why the US has to be destroyed, utterly. It is an offense to the entire world that their populations want to come here so badly that they will risk death, torture and slavery just to be in the US. And between offshoring, WTO and unchecked immigration we are about 50% of the way towards utter destruction.
The target is a "user". Anyone that doesn't understand system administration and security that is left alone with a computer can defeat anything that the OS does. If your grandma wants to install something like WeatherBug on Linux and the software to do this exists, she will succeed. If it requires root access and she has it, she will provide it in copious amounts for the malware application. Whatever is needed will be provided. Because she knows she wants to install this, for some utterly unknown reason.
Now, if you have a computer that it is impossible for the user to install stuff on, well then you have a much more secure platform. Unfortunately, this requires an administrator for those cases where something is really needed and actually should be installed. Once the user and the administrator are the same person, you have just lost any semblance of security.
99% of the Windows machines in homes out there do not have an administrator other than the user themselves. If these were magically replaced by Linux machines with the same administrator, this wouldn't solve anything. Sure, the user would need to do sudo or su in order to really screw things up, but if the application they thought they wanted to install asked for it, they would do it.
The only way to truely combat cybercrime is to just cut the connection.
When you have a country that willingly harbors criminals - just because they are attacking someone else - the problem ceases to be one of law enforcement or diplomacy. Sure, you can try to send some cops over there and see what can be accomplished. For the most part, not much.
The key is that if Russia, Bulgaria, Romania or whereever wants to have "Internet freedom" for their citizens where they can do whatever they heck they want without any consequences, the only possible response is for everyone else on the planet to just agree to pull the plug.
Now, so far it has been impossible to make this happen. Nobody has cared enough because "well, it is just some virtual land called cyberspace." For the most part, law enforcement doesn't care if people are robbed in cyberspace - it isn't really their jurisdiction. There is no global cop that can go anywhere to track down cybercriminals, and in most of the world a request to please go down and arrest someone because they committed a crime somewhere else is met with guffaws and snickers. So as long as your local law enforcement was willing to turn a blind eye to your activities, you could pretty much get away with anything.
And believe me, in most of the world today, law enforcement has a lot better things to do than deal with any sort of computer crime. So there are zero consequences. Something a lot of people have learned over the last 15 years or so. Of course a few Unix geeks knew that since 1980 or so.
Now, if this sticks and if it can be repeated - both of which are highly doubtful - we might actually get somewhere in having some real consequences for bad actions on the Internet. But I suspect this will all be put back together next week (if not sooner) and there will continue to be zero consequences. Keep this in mind, because if you annoy someone enough on the Internet there is a chance they already know there are no consequences in most of the world. Lori Drew is a case in point. They really wanted to nail her for something, anything. But the rule of cyberspace wins out in the end. The physical world has real consequences, the virtual world has only virtual consequences.
Trying to get something usable with GPS coordinates, you will fail. If all you want is a digital representation of the map - like, say a JPEG image - this can be done but it will be difficult.
Some insight into the process is useful. I used to work for a company involved in digital map databases. They started out digitizing maps from aerial photographs. These photographs were very high accuracy taken with large format cameras from relatively low flying aircraft. They spent years developing software to assist in the task of converting the photographs into usable digital map data. It would take considerable manual effort even at the end (after years of working on the software) to get something usable. One of the larger problems was the difference in angles between an object in the center of a photo and an object at the edge. This introduced enough inaccuracy to really screw up the maps that were produced without more manual adjustment.
Around 1999 they changed the process from using aerial photos to recording from DGPS while driving around on the streets. Overall, this greatly reduced the time required even considering the amount of time that would need to be spent driving around on the streets.
(I know what you are thinking - just use satellite photos. Sorry, they thought of that and it doesn't work. Nowhere near enough accuracy for just providing driving directions.)
While you aren't going to have the exact problem at the edges of aerial photos, you have a similar problem with the angles being different if you are stitching together multiple photographs. Mathematically, it is similar to the parallax problems in other fields. A really large format scanner would be the only way to eliminate that and it will have to be something special to avoid destroying your source material. Just about anything else will not give you anything useful.
Even after you have a scan with a large-format scanner, the problems are going to be pretty much insurmountable. The maps you are talking about are not very accurate. Sure, their error may be within a few percent, but that is going to cause things to never, ever line up against GPS coordinates. So you now have a significant task for each map adjusting the position of each and every node (intersection) and points along any curve. Old maps don't have a lot of straight lines, so there will be almost nothing but curves and every single point will need to be moved slightly.
Today, the US economy "manufactures" IP. The vast factories that employ thousands of people have all moved to Mexico or China and they aren't coming back no matter what happens. The WTO is going to see to that.
Do you really believe that anything the EU does is going to prevent the US from rather forcibly letting the world know that the IP manuactured in the US isn't going to be passed around for free? Dream on. You are talking about a huge economy that is responsible for the well-being of nearly a half a billion people.
The goal of the pirate community is simple - nobody pays, ever. A admirable goal and one that most people don't really see any problem with. Which leads to sillyness like a software developer whose salary depends on the company's revenue from software sales freely downloading and redistributing movies. Sure, it is easy and convenient, but best of all it is really cheap. But when the software is passed around for free as well will the company survive? I guess they could come up with a "new business model" that supports giving it all away for free. But they probably aren't going to need as many developers...
Probably the biggest thing that people are missing is the US is poised to take on a huge new madate to pretty much supply health care to everyone. This is going to cost a lot more money, money the government gets from taxes. Pirates don't pay taxes on what they "try before buying". So regardless of how the media companies figure out a new business model that can just give everything away, the government's share of the sales taxes and income taxes goes away. The US government is no longer in a position to ignore this loss of tax revenue.
So what is going to happen? Well, I would start figuring out how the US government is going to continue to get the same tax revenue in the face of a massive piracy movement. They could tax Internet connections. They could crack down on piracy in all sorts of ways. They could do both. But no matter what, they aren't going to take the revenue loss lying down and are going to do something. Probably something big because the appetite for tax revenue is just going to get a lot bigger over the next few years.
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You don't understand how insurance companies are regulated. Oh, they are. Quite severely, I might add.
The biggest problem is that 50 years ago health insurance was "insurance". It was risk-based. If you were had poor health, smoked and didn't take care of yourself and wanted health insurance it was expensive. Someone much healthier got lower rates.
This was deemed to be terribly unfair. Instead of addressing the source of the problem - which in a free society isn't really something you can fix - the politicians at the state level decided to really fix the problem. They made it so the rates all had to be pretty much the same. So now the insurance company couldn't adjust rates based on risk. They could adjust them based on some other criteria which substituted for real risk assessment.
Then the states required coverage for special things. Some states said you had to cover psychiatrists. Other states decided that "alternative therapies" had to be covered. The end result was that 50 separate sets of requirements evolved over a fairly short period of time. Of course, this was reflected in the rates. What if you were in a state that mandated coverage for acupuncture and you didn't want it? Too bad, in order to do business in that state acupuncture had to be included.
Then the reasons for denial of coverage were steadily reduced to the point where coverage could only be denied for a few specific reasons.
The end result of this is the sort of back-end management that you see today. An insurance company is saddled with unknown risk and the only way to manage this risk - because insurance is a risk-based investment practice - is to deny claims and drop people when they actually have a claim. The politicians have tried, without any real success, to change health insurance into a prepaid health plan, like prepaid legal service only with doctors and hospitals. The insurance companies haven't gone along with this and have kept the risk-based investment strategy. The end result is that whatever tools are left for managing the risk are being used because otherwise it would just be a prepaid health care fund.
While a prepaid health care fund might be what people are interested in, that isn't what they are getting. No matter how hard the politicians seem to want to push it in that direction.
The principal problem with "overcharging" is two things:
This style of thinking is quite different from much of the rest of the world. Between the cost-shifting and the "at any cost" philosophies we are in a difficult position. Unfortunately, to fund the program that is going to be enacted government folks are going to have to change this, virtually overnight. This means telling the daughter her father is just not worth saving. This means telling the mother that the government can't afford to fix her child's heart problem and the child will die now instead of in 10 years. Americans are not used to getting this kind of news, especially from some government person.
This is going to change things in a big way in the USA. Probably a lot bigger than people in Washington understand.
Anyone believing that the so-called reform of the health insurance industry is going to be positive needs to understand the numbers. My wife read something yesterday from an Arizona politician that said this would give insurance to 33,000 people in Arizona and improve insurance for over 300,000 people in Arizona. Not only that, but it would give $54 million dollars to hospitals that no longer had to treat people that couldn't afford to pay.
Let's see... Today, if you do not have any health insurance you are working but not at a great job - making enough so that you don't qualify for assistance (which would include Medicaid) but not enough to actually pay for insurance. So how are these people going to get insurance? Goverment subsidies.
Since the payout to the hospitals is going to be coming from insurance premiums, that means in one state with mostly a rural population $54 million is going to be coming from the government and going to the hospitals. Because of some administration costs, this is actually likely to be more like $60 or $70 million. Multiply that by 50 (at least - Arizona is a pretty small state population-wise) and you can see on an annual basis this is a huge investment by the government. Probably the biggest single investment ever made by any government anywhere.
Obviously, this is going to pass - even if nobody votes for it, it will pass because of sidestepping the actual voting process for it. So we are going to get this no matter what.
The money for it is going to come from somewhere. Probably cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Today, health care spending in the US is focused on end-of-life treatments to (perhaps) extend the life of people. This is fairly unique in the world. As much as 90% of all health care spending in the US is spent in the last year of life, regardless of the person's age. There are plenty of people that believe this is a horrible way to spend money. I believe with the passage of this reform act we will see this spending end. It will create an extremely large amount of social turmoil because Americans have a different outlook on life and death than most of the rest of the world, which is why the spending is skewed in the first place. I don't think Obama and most of the other politicians understand this at all.
You don't really believe that you can sway anyone in corporate America with the "seven fat years followed by seven lean years" sort of scenario, do you? If they can get five years of low-cost, high-profit benefits out of moving to China it will be someone else's problem after that.
The new CEO will then have inherited a huge mess while the previous one has retired with five years of huge bonuses because the company was hugely profitable. Of course, all those profits are gone and the new guy isn't going to look so good.
The days when someone thought the company was "theirs" and they needed to preserve it into the future are long gone. Consequences are best left to a successor.
The US isn't interested in electric generation right now. If you can't build transmission lines (and you can't), there is no point to building generating capacity. About the only thing built in the US has been natural gas "peaker" plants in suburban locations where they could get permits and tie into existing grid infrastructure.
We are going see a huge contraction in the availability of electric power pretty soon. Growth is off the table because nobody can get through the permit process. The reward of building a plant is just not enough to provide the necessary funds to walk through a 10+ year permit process followed by another 5-10 years to actually build the plant. Besides, there is no assurance that halfway through building there won't be another environmental lawsuit that forces everything to stop.
No, I don't see much growth and people need to think about how they are going to cope with the shrinking power supply.
High-skill people don't have that many immigration problems. There are H1B problems, so if someone wants to come here temporarily that is a different issue entirely. Especially if the company wants some people, and the people are only interested in being sponsored.
The biggest difference however is labor costs. Not that long ago we were working with a Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronic stuff. Our engineers was getting $110K in the Chicago area and they thought that absurd - their top engineers were making $3600 US. I'm sure costs have gone up some in China, but we're not talking about 50% salary differential here, it is more like 20 or 30 times. When you pay the staff 1/20th of what they would have cost in the US there are some serious incentives to move.
If you can also leave all the Prop 65 signs behind that is probably 80% of the deal right there.
In Chicago the firemen have been known to run the big hose to the hydrant through the windows of a car, from the street over to the hydrant. They probably couldn't have pushed the car out of the way without moving a whole line of cars - and from where I've been in Germany the on-street parking is worse (way, way worse) just about everywhere.
"Meanwhile, both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck."
Well, they could just start giving away everything for free. That would work, right?
The problem is, from the average user's perspective, there are two ways to get a movie today: pay for it, or download it. Paying for it gets you a variety of different things, like a physical product, streaming from Netflix, or maybe just a rental from Blockbuster. Downloading it, if they know how, results in the movie being delivered almost as quickly for free.
So, let's see. I can pay or I can download. ... checks wallet ... I guess today I'll just download.
To the user the experience is pretty much the same as long as they know to stay away from files identified with "CAM". Maybe the download is better, because there are no previews, no ads and no warnings.
We have pretty much educated everyone under 30 that there is no ethical problem in doing this - the studios are making plenty of money (too much, in some opinions) and therefore it is all OK. It isn't like you are actually "stealing" anything anyway. And what is one or two people downloading compared to all the people that are actually paying, right? Problem with that today is the ratio of paying to downloading is getting smaller and smaller every day.
Absolutely, those jobs will get taken by Americans - often high school students and people going to college part time. Problem is today in most cities you can't get a job as a burger-flipper as a high school student. They simply aren't available.
Similarly, if you don't manage to get a college degree and want to get a job you will find that minimum wage jobs pretty much require speaking Spanish, because all your co-workers speak nothing but Spanish. If you are bilingual and have even a little bit of experience you can be the "foreman" but of course there are only a few of those jobs available.
The work that can't be outsourced is now going to low-wage workers right here in the US. Because these people are earning 10x what they could get back home, they are willing to put up with anything to get and keep minimum-wage jobs. This isn't going to change when they become legal, voting citizens. We are building our very own slave underclass right under our noses and most people just don't care. Somehow, we are doing this to "help" the poor in Mexico. Which isn't helping at all because it just allows the upper class there to ignore the situation.
There is no way to "create jobs" in Mexico without first staging a revolution. The problem is that the upper class owns just about everything and isn't interested in employing people and is very interested in keeping prices for things like food down. So the farmers get nothing for their crops and end up living as subsistance farmers. Understand that it is completely divided across racial lines in Mexico - the Mexican Indians are poor, the Castillians are the upper class. Why we in the US should help perpetuate this system is beyond me.
How do you fix that? Well, building foreign-owned factories doesn't do it. Sure, it makes a slight difference in an area around Juarez, but nothing else. And because there is no foundation to build on, the people with jobs at the factory have no idea what to do with their different life.
Today, if someone crosses the border from north to south into Mexico they will be met by the Mexican Army, arrested and likely confined, possibly for a long time. There is no possibility that someone is going to stay there unmolested - the people will turn the "invader" in if they manage to elude the Army and the police. This is the complete opposite of what happens to a border crosser going from south to north - which means pretty much we deserve exactly what we are getting.
The only way that this will end is when the standard of living is equal between the two countries. Since raising the standard in Mexico is impossible because of the culture and financial system, it means that the US has to have the same standard of living as Mexico does today. With 25% real unemployment, very tight credit and a collapsed housing market we are well on our way there. When the amnesty is passed later this year we will likely see that there are 20-30 million people from Mexico in the US in a few years. This will pretty much put the finishing touches on the labor market.
A strong border is simply not a priority with most people. Either they don't see the effects or they somehow believe that we "owe" it to Mexico to help the poor people so the upper class can continue to ignore them. Of course many businesses welcome the minimum-wage labor force that is supplied from Mexico. The work that cannot be outsourced can be done in the US by people to whom minimum wage for a week is 10 times what they could make in a year back home.
Sure, we could have built a strong border - but without support of the citizens of the US it would never work. And we clearly do not have support of the citizens. Napolitano wanted to throw open the border when she was governer in Arizona, probably mostly for the benefit of the businesses here. The fact that it makes getting a entry-level low-skill job impossible meant nothing to her.
We better build a really strong social safety net, because when we are at 30-40% unemployment we are all going to need it.
100Mbps to the home is one thing and a lot of cable systems with DOCSIS 3.0 are providing it or nearly so.
The problem is that this is "burst" only, not dedicated bandwidth. And I am sure we're not going to be seeing anything like 100Mbps dedicated bandwidth to homes in the near future. Why? Well, it has to do with the network topology, for one thing. The other is just the raw capacity of major backbones. But let's look at network topology for a moment...
My house in a relatively new development is connected via coax to a local drop of hardline which is then connected to a neighborhood node. From the node to the head end is fiber. This fiber might be 256Mbps, but let's say it is 10Gbps just for laughs. How does that work out? Well, that means for the 1000 homes in my neighborhood that there is a maximum of .01Gbps or 10Mbps per home dedicated bandwidth. Subtracting some for the TV channels, you are probably left with more like 1Mbps per home - dedicated bandwidth.
Nobody gets dedicated bandwidth in today's system. You get "burst" and you are sharing capacity with everyone else in the neighborhood. This isn't likely to improve anytime soon because to change it would require increasing the neighborhood node bandwidth by as much as 100 times. I don't know of any 1000Gbps fiber connections, and even if you had one, what would you connect it to?
Another huge motivation for building the Interstate highway system was military. If you needed to get troops from an Army base to a major city to fight off insurrection or the Russkies it was virtually impossible to do this in any reasonable period of time prior to the Interstate highway system.
The Army learned this in Europe during WWII. They had miles long traffic jams of trucks and tanks trying to move supplies around and to get tanks where they were needed. It couldn't be done in anything like an efficient manner because the roads weren't up to the job. So they came back to the US in '45 and looked around and saw exactly the same problems in the US. And the fact the continental US is around, oh 40 times as big as any country they were in over in Europe made somewhat of an impression as well.
I'd say the idea of having to fight a land war in the US scared the crap out of people at the time, given the infrastructure at the time.
Most real organizations with Blackberry phones run the server on their own equipment. The communication between the server and the phone is heavily encrypted - AES at a minimum with some even more stringent options available.
Yes, you can have a Blackberry set up to connect to a provider-hosted server where it will fetch your email from Gmail and route it to your phone. This isn't secure in any way, which is why nobody using this technology for real does it this way.
iPhone? I am pretty sure that all communication between the phone and the server is unencrypted. I do not believe the phone connects to the mail server but uses some intermediary. Not sure how this works but it isn't very secure.
Blackberry - very, very secure. Optionally secure enough for CIA folks.
iPhone - not secure.
Yes, but...
A huge problem is cultural. If my culture has taught me from birth that your cultural group is filled with evil domineering people that want to enslave the world can you really blame me for hating every person from your cultural group? What happens when I don't have as much money as you do and I see you every day with material items that I can't afford? Simple - I'm gonna rob you and take what you have stolen from me and my people for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
How about if I have been taught from birth that because I believe in a special, personal God and you do not that you are inferior and are injustly taking up space on my planet, deeded over to me by my personal God? How about if I just kill you and rid the planet of one more space-taker that doesn't belong here because you do not believe in the correct God? My God will praise me for this act, I am told.
Better people? Ha. How about fixing some of the cultural problems first? As this seems to be a nearly insurmountable problem, I would say we have a long, long way to go before we see any better people.
Sorry, but the (I think 2006) credit card rules revisions do not allow the credit card company to cancel subscription billing. Nor can they cancel the card to stop the charges. The only way out is to get the company that is making them terminate the subscription billing.
Subscription billing was introduced fairly recently and is an incredible revenue producer for companies. Many people will utterly ignore the charge month after month and keep getting whatever it is they subscribed to get. And there is nothing you can do about it other than following the cancellation procedure for the company making the charges. The new rules absolutely guarantee that.
If you aren't paying for your entertainment media, then you aren't paying taxes. Similarly, the rightholders aren't paying income taxes on the money they are getting.
Therefore, piracy reduces tax revenues. Obama would really like to have a health care system that didn't just skyrocket the deficit out of control, while maintaining the idea that everyone (even the illegal immigrants) are getting health care coverage with government subsidies. Well, obviously he can't do that with shrinking tax revenues, now can he?
Has your income gone up this year from last year? Do you expect to be paying more or less in income taxes next year? Well, big media companies are looking at exactly the same situation and the government is getting nervous. Smaller tax revenues mean more deficit spending and maybe (gasp!) some programs getting cut and pork projects not getting done.
This will result in congresscritters not being reelected because they failed to "deliver" for their constituents. Yup, I'd say everyone in the US is worried about that.
Sorry, decreasing the birth rate, even to zero, isn't going to help. And in non-Western countries trying convince rural people to not have children to work the farm is pointless and stupid.
War isn't really going to do it. If we are going to treat the Earth as a closed system (no outside resources) then we better get down to 200 million people or so within the next 30-50 years. That requires a loss of about a million people per day for twenty years. Not going to happen, even with a nuclear war. You might lose 50% of the population in a really long drawn out nuclear exchange. That is nowhere near enough. You need a biological attack to do that, and the worst diseases imaginable have a fatality of around 80 or 85 percent. Still not enough - we need to get rid of around 97% of the population on the planet in order to make it "sustainable".
I think the only real solution is to educate people that it is there duty to Gaia to not have children and die as soon as possible. Now there will probably be some that just don't get it - just like today there are people that object to the wholesale destruction of the Western standard of living and economy in favor of the health of Gaia - i.e., trying to minimize climate change. So it will be necessary to "educate" these people about their duty to die quickly, quietly and without much fuss. This would be so much neater than a war or plague.
Unfortunately, most people advocating this are considered to be "wacko nutjobs" today. The reality of what "sustainable" really means hasn't sunk in yet. People haven't figured out that if you can't plan for the future you really don't get to live there. The choice is ours today - massive die-off or space exploration and gathering of resources.
In 30 years of continued government safety nets, handouts and aid packages that do more harm than good we will no longer have the economic wherewithall to make this choice, it will have been made for us. The West won't be shivering in the dark because of trying to preserve the climate, they will be shivering in the dark because there is no electricity, no fuels, no nuclear power and no hope of anything like that in the future.
Private launching is pretty much a non-starter in the US. Today there are three companies that are trying to do this and the Virgin Galactic method is to sidestep most of the process. They are also the only ones to have actually launched anything at all. Why is this you might ask? Well, the whole White Knight/SpaceShipOne was a trick to get around the licensing and it worked.
You see, you can't launch anything without a license from the FAA. And, because possibly polluting chemicals are used, you need another license from the EPA. These organizations are not in the habit of licensing much, so at this time NASA has a license and the US Air Force has a license. Nobody else, not even Virgin Galactic. Sure, there are a few other companies that have attempted to get licenses but none have been issued. And there are no plans to issue any anytime in the future.
So while it is really nice to talk about the wonderful achievements that have been made in static testing and hovering, nobody is going to launch anything from US soil anytime soon. And I suspect should someone come up with the bright idea of trying to launch from Mexico there would be an immediate denial of export on the grounds of an arms export license being needed.
So nobody is going anywhere anytime soon - except for NASA and the Air Force.
By the way, the next time Virgin Galactic tries a launch I would expect there to be an army of FAA and EPA guys on hand to tell them why exactly they cannot do so. That a space launch license is needed for their airplane. And they can't have one.
The problem is the separation between user and administrator. If you want any kind of security you need the situation where the user asks the administrator "Can I install WeatherBug?" and the administrator says "No!".
If you do not have this separation and ability to deny, you have a home computer. A home computer that when Mommy wants to install WeatherBug she will do it, following whatever instructions are given to her. This means if she was installing it on Linux and it required her to enter an sudo command, she would do it. Period. Without question. Because to do otherwise would not get the desired software installed.
As long as you have that kind of environment, there is no security. Windows isn't important. The lack of real administration and the ability for users to install anything is the only thing that is important.
Let's see - there is a fundamental disconnect between the "leaders" and the "common people". This disconnect pretty much means that it is OK for the leaders to shoot, imprison and internally exile the common people. That is a pretty wide gulf to bridge.
Most of the governments on the planet work this way. There are leaders and there are other people. The leaders know what is right and the common people just have to live with it. A big exception to this was Soviet Russia - they didn't really like the common people, but they knew they couldn't do without them. China seems to go through periods where it appears that they would really like to try it without the common people. This is extremely dangerous for the rest of the planet because while you can threaten a whole country it is very, very difficult to make good on threats to a few leaders. As has been seen innumerable times - Khmer Rouge, Taliban, Saddam Hussein, etc.
By the way, anyone that hasn't noticed that the leaders in Iran seems to consider the common people expendable hasn't been keeping up. It might have been a suspicion before the last election but now it is a dead certanity.
China seems to be OK with the idea of executing leaders that step out of line, as long as the leader steps way, way out of line. Having to sacrifice one of their own is probably a tough decision but sometimes you have to keep up appearances or people will stop buying your cat food.
I'd say China's leaders are operating on the idea that they will do whatever is required to stay in power and in control. If this means keeping control on the Internet, no problem. If it means pretending to listen to complaints, no problem - maybe even doing something every now and then. But do not be deceived. The concept that there are important, vital leaders and a bunch of expendable, unimportant common people is what is controlling decision making there.
You have to be pretty poor to not be able to tell the difference between living in the US and living in, say, Haiti. If it were not this way, there would be no illegal immigration problem. Right now, a person's standard of living increases about 100 times when the cross the border from Mexico to the US. Even if all they do is sit on a street corner with a cup they will make more money in a day than the could make in rural Mexico in a month. If they get a job as a undocumented worker paid less than minimum wage off the books they make in a day what they could get in a year in Mexico.
This is why the US has to be destroyed, utterly. It is an offense to the entire world that their populations want to come here so badly that they will risk death, torture and slavery just to be in the US. And between offshoring, WTO and unchecked immigration we are about 50% of the way towards utter destruction.
The target is a "user". Anyone that doesn't understand system administration and security that is left alone with a computer can defeat anything that the OS does. If your grandma wants to install something like WeatherBug on Linux and the software to do this exists, she will succeed. If it requires root access and she has it, she will provide it in copious amounts for the malware application. Whatever is needed will be provided. Because she knows she wants to install this, for some utterly unknown reason.
Now, if you have a computer that it is impossible for the user to install stuff on, well then you have a much more secure platform. Unfortunately, this requires an administrator for those cases where something is really needed and actually should be installed. Once the user and the administrator are the same person, you have just lost any semblance of security.
99% of the Windows machines in homes out there do not have an administrator other than the user themselves. If these were magically replaced by Linux machines with the same administrator, this wouldn't solve anything. Sure, the user would need to do sudo or su in order to really screw things up, but if the application they thought they wanted to install asked for it, they would do it.
The only way to truely combat cybercrime is to just cut the connection.
When you have a country that willingly harbors criminals - just because they are attacking someone else - the problem ceases to be one of law enforcement or diplomacy. Sure, you can try to send some cops over there and see what can be accomplished. For the most part, not much.
The key is that if Russia, Bulgaria, Romania or whereever wants to have "Internet freedom" for their citizens where they can do whatever they heck they want without any consequences, the only possible response is for everyone else on the planet to just agree to pull the plug.
Now, so far it has been impossible to make this happen. Nobody has cared enough because "well, it is just some virtual land called cyberspace." For the most part, law enforcement doesn't care if people are robbed in cyberspace - it isn't really their jurisdiction. There is no global cop that can go anywhere to track down cybercriminals, and in most of the world a request to please go down and arrest someone because they committed a crime somewhere else is met with guffaws and snickers. So as long as your local law enforcement was willing to turn a blind eye to your activities, you could pretty much get away with anything.
And believe me, in most of the world today, law enforcement has a lot better things to do than deal with any sort of computer crime. So there are zero consequences. Something a lot of people have learned over the last 15 years or so. Of course a few Unix geeks knew that since 1980 or so.
Now, if this sticks and if it can be repeated - both of which are highly doubtful - we might actually get somewhere in having some real consequences for bad actions on the Internet. But I suspect this will all be put back together next week (if not sooner) and there will continue to be zero consequences. Keep this in mind, because if you annoy someone enough on the Internet there is a chance they already know there are no consequences in most of the world. Lori Drew is a case in point. They really wanted to nail her for something, anything. But the rule of cyberspace wins out in the end. The physical world has real consequences, the virtual world has only virtual consequences.
Trying to get something usable with GPS coordinates, you will fail. If all you want is a digital representation of the map - like, say a JPEG image - this can be done but it will be difficult.
Some insight into the process is useful. I used to work for a company involved in digital map databases. They started out digitizing maps from aerial photographs. These photographs were very high accuracy taken with large format cameras from relatively low flying aircraft. They spent years developing software to assist in the task of converting the photographs into usable digital map data. It would take considerable manual effort even at the end (after years of working on the software) to get something usable. One of the larger problems was the difference in angles between an object in the center of a photo and an object at the edge. This introduced enough inaccuracy to really screw up the maps that were produced without more manual adjustment.
Around 1999 they changed the process from using aerial photos to recording from DGPS while driving around on the streets. Overall, this greatly reduced the time required even considering the amount of time that would need to be spent driving around on the streets.
(I know what you are thinking - just use satellite photos. Sorry, they thought of that and it doesn't work. Nowhere near enough accuracy for just providing driving directions.)
While you aren't going to have the exact problem at the edges of aerial photos, you have a similar problem with the angles being different if you are stitching together multiple photographs. Mathematically, it is similar to the parallax problems in other fields. A really large format scanner would be the only way to eliminate that and it will have to be something special to avoid destroying your source material. Just about anything else will not give you anything useful.
Even after you have a scan with a large-format scanner, the problems are going to be pretty much insurmountable. The maps you are talking about are not very accurate. Sure, their error may be within a few percent, but that is going to cause things to never, ever line up against GPS coordinates. So you now have a significant task for each map adjusting the position of each and every node (intersection) and points along any curve. Old maps don't have a lot of straight lines, so there will be almost nothing but curves and every single point will need to be moved slightly.
It will take you years.
Today, the US economy "manufactures" IP. The vast factories that employ thousands of people have all moved to Mexico or China and they aren't coming back no matter what happens. The WTO is going to see to that.
Do you really believe that anything the EU does is going to prevent the US from rather forcibly letting the world know that the IP manuactured in the US isn't going to be passed around for free? Dream on. You are talking about a huge economy that is responsible for the well-being of nearly a half a billion people.
The goal of the pirate community is simple - nobody pays, ever. A admirable goal and one that most people don't really see any problem with. Which leads to sillyness like a software developer whose salary depends on the company's revenue from software sales freely downloading and redistributing movies. Sure, it is easy and convenient, but best of all it is really cheap. But when the software is passed around for free as well will the company survive? I guess they could come up with a "new business model" that supports giving it all away for free. But they probably aren't going to need as many developers...
Probably the biggest thing that people are missing is the US is poised to take on a huge new madate to pretty much supply health care to everyone. This is going to cost a lot more money, money the government gets from taxes. Pirates don't pay taxes on what they "try before buying". So regardless of how the media companies figure out a new business model that can just give everything away, the government's share of the sales taxes and income taxes goes away. The US government is no longer in a position to ignore this loss of tax revenue.
So what is going to happen? Well, I would start figuring out how the US government is going to continue to get the same tax revenue in the face of a massive piracy movement. They could tax Internet connections. They could crack down on piracy in all sorts of ways. They could do both. But no matter what, they aren't going to take the revenue loss lying down and are going to do something. Probably something big because the appetite for tax revenue is just going to get a lot bigger over the next few years.