So how much do you think it costs to print a book?
How much do you think it costs to ship a book from the warehouse to the book seller?
You would be surprised at how little this is. Book publishing is extremely efficient. If you take a $25 hardcover book, maybe $4 is printing and binding. Shipping is around $0.25 in any sort of quantity at all.
So selling an eBook for $14.99 is $10.01 less than $25 which is about double of the printing and shipping cost.
You can change the NASA budget all you want, but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA. If you can't get a license for a launch, you aren't going anywhere. And between the FAA and EPA it is almost impossible to get a license in the US.
Maybe Mexico would be open to allowing their skies to be used and for the remote possibility of some kind of pollution. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear they have not been open in the past - or we would be doing it.
I am pretty sure that removing a catalytic converter is illegal in every state in the US. Operating any car or truck without one subjects you to a fine. Removing one for someone can get you jail time.
I suspect there are other modifications that will revoke your authorization to operate the car as well. We have come a long way from the "shadetree mechanic" days and cars have multiple systems that are licensed and are required for operation.
Reducing the population is an impossible task today. If you killed 1 million people a day, it would take 20 years to get the population down to a sustainable level. Actually, it would probably take longer than that because even killing a million people a day you would still have significant births.
The solution might be space exploration. Both to collect resources and to move people off planet. It is possible, but not with courageous individuals like our current president. I think this solution is off the table for good now. We have squandered the possibility that was opened up in the 1960s. In 50 years we could be seeing television pictures from a nearby star with everyone saying how nice it would be to go there, but we can't.
A really, really big war might be a solution as well. We could just make a deal with China to start throwing nukes back and forth until enough people died. A difficult point to determine, however - when would "enough" be and could it be stopped at that point? Probably not.
Humans aren't like other creatures and the chances of a real die-off are very, very remote. Worse yet, the good samaritans are likely to squander the resources to feed the survivers on the dying.
Sure it would, except there really isn't much of a solution today.
Most places on the planet where you can grow food have food growing there and people living there as well. And disposing of bodily wastes right there with the food and drinking water. You would like to tell them to walk "over there" to take a dump but wait... there are now people there too. There just isn't anywhere left where someone can just walk off into the woods and take a dump.
So of course, they end up polluting someone's drinking water. How do you fix this? Build a sewage treatment plant in the middle of Bangledesh? There are no sewage pipes. There are no toilets. So you get to start from scratch, except most of the population doesn't understnd and has been doing things the way they are doing them for hundreds of years if not thousands. Why should they change now? Who is going to make them, anyway?
There isn't much of a solution for this today. There are just too many people living in primitive conditions with primitive beliefs to be able to introduce something as simple as plumbing to. They don't think they need it, don't want it and don't understand it.
What worked hundreds of years ago with 1/10th the population doesn't work today. And forcing change on these people isn't going to come easy or cheap.
Vaccines are a nice feel-good move that will do virtually nothing for most of the world.
Clean drinking water is a real problem when most rural third-world people just use the great outdoors as their toilet. I believe it is commonly referred to as open defecation.
Basically, you aren't going to have clean water if you are taking a dump next to the pond where you get your drinking water. There isn't any way to fix this today because there are too many people for them to "properly" manage their wastes. Sanitation is something we take for granted but it doesn't exist in most of the world today. Fix that, and you have fixed the drinking water problem.
Unfortunately, fixing that is going to take a lot more than $10B. And you better start thinking about population reduction as well. The current number of people on the planet just do not have anywhere else to take a dump other than near by someone's water supply.
There are a lot of reasons why we should be focusing on reducing the population - and sick people are one way the population gets smaller. Even better with contagious diseases because the benefits are spread around (literally) by the sick people.
Vaccines are something that are of a benefit when there are too few people and we need to build up the labor pool. Sorry, in the US 20% of the people will never work again in their lives and will need to be supported one way or another by the other 80%. It is worse in Europe.
India has a million people with most of them living in rural areas on poor diets with no sanitation. If Bill Gates spent 10 billion dollars on toilets in India it would begin to make a difference there, but just barely.
The level of pollution is a direct result of the population. Pollution wasn't much of a problem in 1200 AD, now was it? There were maybe 2 million people in all of Europe at that time. The theory is that resource utilization is leading to climate change - reduce the population and this will reduce resource utilization.
According to some theories, we have maybe 50 years left of natual resources for 6 billion people on the planet. If tomorrow you woke up and there were 500 million people instead, this would mean that everything would last for 600 years instead of just 50. Since we aren't going to be going offplanet to get anything, we better start thinking about the current crop of children are going to survive in 50 years. If we don't, they maybe they won't and we are looking at the last generation of humans.
You missed a step. All children, dogs, cats, homeless people, bicycles, food carts, and anything else that can possibly end up in a roadway must be fitted with a transponder. Otherwise the automated vehicles will not see it.
This will lead to a virtual slaughter of dogs and cats in suburban areas. Picture a cat with a 3lb transponder with 30day battery. Pretty funny - check for the video on YouTube. Next picture cat and transponder in the street after the batteries die.
Sorry, on some limited access highways some sort of automated driving makes sense, in a limited fashion. Outside of that, forget it. The road is shared with too many non-vehicle objects.
We have a "good samaritian" law, with the force of police, courts and jail behind it.
We have a "stop snitching" movement, with the force of death behind it.
Which do you think will win? I'd say "stop snitching" has it all over anything else, because if you are caught you easily end up dead. Here in the West we love life more.
Restaurants aren't going to want to spend $1000 (or more) on a wireless VPN device that has non-consumer physical connections to other devices. Nope, sorry, the restaurant business doesn't have the margins for something like that.
Besides, with a credit card (not a usless risky debt card), what do you care if the waiter snags your credit card number? He gets to make a few bucks off selling 100 of them at the end of the day and you get a phone call when it is used fraudulently. Even if you don't get the call, you notice that your bill is $500 over what you thought it might be and call up to get the charges taken off. The waiter makes a little money, the guy using the card get some stuff and the merchant's insurance has to pay. Who loses here?
The fraudulent charge game is very, very familar to me as it happens at least once a year. I have never paid a fraudulent charge, ever. Ever single credit card company I have used has not had any problem cancelling the charges and sending me a new card with a different number.
We are living in a high-theft society where people make their entire living by stealing. To try to deny that is to ignore a fact of life in the Western world. Sure, if we were all living as subsistance farmers we wouldn't have this problem because we would have nothing to steal. But if you have a computer, a cell phone and a car you have something people far less fortunate than you want. And they are going to get it because stealing has no penalties anywhere near what living without is like.
So put up with it. Nobody loses on credit card fraud. Would you rather get mugged?
Obvious, really. Post a $1,000,000 bond against potential copyright infringement. If you infringe, the bond is then used to pay off the the judgement and you lose your Internet access until you post another $1,000,000. More probably, the second time it has to be two million.
Using something like BitTorrent for commercial purposes is theft, pure and simple. It is stealing customer's bandwidth so the company doesn't have to provide it. It is a nice idea. It also provides something to point at to say that all use of the BitTorrent protocol isn't for piracy.
But it is still stealing, no matter how you want to look at it. I'm sure it is really nice for WoW users and the like because the company only has to have a piddling T1 for the update service.
Sorry, but you are thinking of something that doesn't exist.
ISPs are currently somewhat sheltered from contributory copyright infringement because of a Safe Harbor clause in a child protection law. It has nothing to do with not examining the data that flows through them.
As desperation increases you can be assured that ISPs who do nothing to block file sharing will certainly start getting named in lawsuits. Much deeper pockets and this will certainly encourage all ISPs to take action of one sort or another.
Face it, the only other option would be for the FCC to say "file sharing is OK". And that certainly isn't going to happen.
The kind of "freedom" that is the hallmark of Richard Stallman, GNU and EFF is very simple -if you have programming skills you are free. Otherwise, you are, well, unfit.
The basic problem is that the "open" computing platform has pretty much failed the consumer. No matter what security features are implemented in software, consumers will circumvent them to obtain what they believe they want: free software, porn, money, etc. The end result is a compromised computer that is no longer completely under the control of the user. And such computers can have a very negative impact on all users everywhere.
The average consumer has no way to utilise the sort of programming freedom that Stallman would like to see people have. They need a checked-out, validated, "App Store" where both useful and useless things can be downloaded and will never, ever compromise their computer. And if an application is found to be bad after it is released it can be "recalled". Period. If we had this today for Windows there would be no spam epidemic, no malware and little or no phishing. Instead what we have is an environment where the Internet is not safe for users with no special knowledge.
We are certainly going to see less and less "freedom" for users in the name of keeping out the bad stuff. Users, not programmers, do not need freedom but they absolutely need safe computing. We aren't going to teach that. With great freedom comes great responsibility and the spammers, thieves and scammers don't seem to be properly exercising responsibility.
When was the last large power plant built in the US? I think it was in the 1970s. NIMBY rules all here and we are going to see major brownouts and electricity rationing before you see a big power plant built. Coal or nuclear are about it, with wind and solar suitable for adding some extra around the edges.
Just about every power plant that has been built in the last 40 years or so is a natural gas fired "peaker" plant designed to operate only in times of extreme load. Of course, they are all running 24x7 today, but that is all we've built.
You are missing the fact that inherently there can only be one transmitter on at a time within a given physical space.
You might be able to expand the physical space beyond the transmitter's range and call that having two transmitters in the same space - but that isn't the point.
There are some tricks with polarization that can be used, but these are not currently being done and are basically incompatible with the omnidirectional nature of most uses of the 2.4Ghz frequency.
Anything beyond one transmitter at a time is just a collision and nobody gets their message through. Current 2.4Ghz uses account for this and accomodate it - by retransmitting. Sooner or later you are going to run into the situation where there are enough "talkers" there are no more open time slots for a new transmitter to move into. Once this happens you get higher and higher percentages of collisions
We do not need spaceflight - there will always be important problems that need solving right here on Earth. The fact that some of the solutions might be off-planet is just wild speculation. The sort of speculation that led to the integrated circuit, for one thing.
The leftist view of things is clearly that we need to treat the Earth as a closed system without any resources available from elsewhere. Fine, but that means we need to be a lot more focused on population control than we are right now. The pollution created by 6 billion people would be only half as much with 3 billion. Sustainable? Forget it - sustainable resource usage that could continue for centuries or millenia would require maybe 200 million people at a maximium. We aren't going to get there without several big wars, and maybe not even then.
We are going to be lucky if the Western leaders aren't telling us in 20 years that we all need to cut back on our lifestyle. Living through subsistance farming, for example. Could the planet support 6 billion that way? Hardly. So there is your population control right there in a easy, non-political package.
Manned exploration - and all the risks that are wrapped up in it - is key. There are two things this does: (a) it presents risks to be knocked down and solved, and (b) a new frontier for exploration. Man is an explorer, and that frontier is needed. Desperately.
What you are talking about was in 1984 and concerned wired phones.
In no way has this been decided to any extent in the US for wireless phones or any other device that uses a wireless network of any kind. What you will find is that around 1974 the FCC managed to push through some regulations that allowed CB radios to be sold to people without requiring them to possess FCC licenses. In order to do this, the radios themselves had to be pretty much sealed by the manufacturer who would be licensed and certify that the radios could not be operated in a manner contrary with their licensing.
This regulation pretty much set the stage for devices that cannot be modified by the end user. Doing so immediately revokes the license to operate the device and it can be seized by the FCC or their appointed agents. I assure you that replacing the firmware in a cell phone with something not produced by a licensed and regulated entity is something that could very well trigger this sort of action - which would likely as not resulted in some court decisions in the US.
My guess is that there is no way any device will be allowed to be operated contrary to its licensing, whether it is a CB radio, cell phone, wireless router, or microwave oven. Any modification to such devices that causes the device to operate in a manner different than its licensing will be ruled as a violation of the law. Hasn't happened yet, but I am pretty sure this decision is coming. What will almost certainly trigger it is some modified firmware that causes either an outage or billing problems.
Once copying became easier than buying, the idea of "cooperation from the public" was out the window.
Back around 1985 at the dawn of the floppy trading era, copyright was pretty much doomed without some serious work. What happened instead was schools became the environment where copying and pirating was trained rather than instilling any sort of respect. Sometimes it was the teacher that told the students that they were just copying something because the school (and the teacher) couldn't afford the price for everyone having a legitimate copy. This pretty much made it clear that if you didn't have the money, you could just copy.
Well, this is where things are today. Digital goods in all forms are pretty much just free. Why buy when you can just download?
I understand the author position with respect to Google Books. It is pretty simple - they see something that is currently unused and Google has the resources to make money off it. Contacting each and every author and getting permission would be cost-prohibitive, but their end-run around copyright is something they seem to think they can jam through the courts.
Isn't that a lot like telling someone their spouse is under-utilized and besides, monogamy is so last-century anyway. They can have their exclusivity back if they opt-out, otherwise it is party time!
Nobody knows what the future will bring from Google Books. In theory, they are positioned to become the exclusive dealer of all books in digital form, certainly all those that are not current. The problem isn't what they are doing with the rights they seek today, it is what could happen later. And from my understanding of the proposed settlement, there are basically no limits on what they could do because the rights are pretty mucn unlimited.
First off, the "dissemination" in a library is indeed tightly controlled. A library cannot lend out more copies then they purchase, and the lending is according to some rules. Libraries do not allow copying and redistribution, for example.
The second point is what Google is proposing today is one thing, and what happens in the future, should their forced opt-out agreement hold, is quite another. They may use their control over the content in ways that are unforeseen today and extremely unfavorable to authors. No part of their proposed agreement says what they can and cannot do in the future.
WHOIS is pretty meaningless. Most of the registrars will now allow semi-anonymous entries, like:
Mr. Nona YourDamBisness Somewhere Mt. Everest, Tibet
As long as they are doing that, well, WHOIS only has "nice" people in it. Anyone doing something real on the Internet can set their WHOIS information to point to nobody, their attorney, their grandmother, or someone they would like other people to spam.
Think about it. You pay $50 a year for some tax software - you are also going to pay 10% of that as taxes. If you go to a tax preparer, they are going to pay taxes on an even greater amount. The result is that the IRS gets more money, period. The states get their cut of this as well, and they are massively overspending now, so they desperately need it.
Do you really believe the IRS is going to (a) reduce the amount of money they get and (b) cut off a source of revenue to the states? No way.
Most other countries do not have any sort of problem taxing the heck out of citizens, so they are already paying 60-70% to the government. I'd say those governments do not need the extra hit, but in the US it is certainly welcome.
Would the IRS do a better job if they told people what they owed? Maybe. The problem is the IRS doesn't trust their sources any more than they trust the average taxpayer. Today, it is a secret battle between people reporting what other people should be reporting and paying on. Anyone that comes out on the short end gets audited if they are blatent enough. If the IRS told people what they owed, they would be removing this check.
Now, I was under the assumption in the United Stated that you could not blacklist a person from your business unless there was a dam good legal reason. And why won't they tell me what in the world I did to violate their user agreement? Its like being tried, convicted, and sentenced without as much as a ray of hope to prove your not guilty.
Excuse me, but where in the world did you get an idea like that? There is no "criminal" penalties associated with this so the formal concept of "guilt" doesn't apply.
A business can simply choose not to do business with you at any time for any reason, even a secret one. Under some circumstances, and in some businesses it may not be legal to not do business with an individual because of race. In even rarer circumstances it may not be legal to not do business with someone because of gender or other miscellaneous reasons that have been ruled as discrimination against a protected class. Note that you are always safe denying business to a white male under the age of 40.
PayPal is a business and they can choose who they want as a customer. Evidently they don't like you. There is no legal recourse in the US and there probably isn't in Europe either. When the government can dictate who a business has to serve, it is time to find another business to be in quickly.
Your photo of necklacing hardly does justice. The part you are missing is the pouring of gasoline on the tire and setting it alight. The result is rather dramatic, especially for the victim.
It is one way of recycling old tires, but hardly an environmentally sound one.
I believe the usual answer is to burn down the neighbor's house so they are equal. And then to proceed making as many other people "equal" as possible.
It is best if this is not captured by TV News, but the armed response attempting to stop the destruction is as evidence of the imperialist oppression being suffered by the population.
Slashdot Mirror
So how much do you think it costs to print a book?
How much do you think it costs to ship a book from the warehouse to the book seller?
You would be surprised at how little this is. Book publishing is extremely efficient. If you take a $25 hardcover book, maybe $4 is printing and binding. Shipping is around $0.25 in any sort of quantity at all.
So selling an eBook for $14.99 is $10.01 less than $25 which is about double of the printing and shipping cost.
You can change the NASA budget all you want, but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA. If you can't get a license for a launch, you aren't going anywhere. And between the FAA and EPA it is almost impossible to get a license in the US.
Maybe Mexico would be open to allowing their skies to be used and for the remote possibility of some kind of pollution. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear they have not been open in the past - or we would be doing it.
I am pretty sure that removing a catalytic converter is illegal in every state in the US. Operating any car or truck without one subjects you to a fine. Removing one for someone can get you jail time.
I suspect there are other modifications that will revoke your authorization to operate the car as well. We have come a long way from the "shadetree mechanic" days and cars have multiple systems that are licensed and are required for operation.
Reducing the population is an impossible task today. If you killed 1 million people a day, it would take 20 years to get the population down to a sustainable level. Actually, it would probably take longer than that because even killing a million people a day you would still have significant births.
The solution might be space exploration. Both to collect resources and to move people off planet. It is possible, but not with courageous individuals like our current president. I think this solution is off the table for good now. We have squandered the possibility that was opened up in the 1960s. In 50 years we could be seeing television pictures from a nearby star with everyone saying how nice it would be to go there, but we can't.
A really, really big war might be a solution as well. We could just make a deal with China to start throwing nukes back and forth until enough people died. A difficult point to determine, however - when would "enough" be and could it be stopped at that point? Probably not.
Humans aren't like other creatures and the chances of a real die-off are very, very remote. Worse yet, the good samaritans are likely to squander the resources to feed the survivers on the dying.
Sure it would, except there really isn't much of a solution today.
Most places on the planet where you can grow food have food growing there and people living there as well. And disposing of bodily wastes right there with the food and drinking water. You would like to tell them to walk "over there" to take a dump but wait ... there are now people there too. There just isn't anywhere left where someone can just walk off into the woods and take a dump.
So of course, they end up polluting someone's drinking water. How do you fix this? Build a sewage treatment plant in the middle of Bangledesh? There are no sewage pipes. There are no toilets. So you get to start from scratch, except most of the population doesn't understnd and has been doing things the way they are doing them for hundreds of years if not thousands. Why should they change now? Who is going to make them, anyway?
There isn't much of a solution for this today. There are just too many people living in primitive conditions with primitive beliefs to be able to introduce something as simple as plumbing to. They don't think they need it, don't want it and don't understand it.
What worked hundreds of years ago with 1/10th the population doesn't work today. And forcing change on these people isn't going to come easy or cheap.
Vaccines are a nice feel-good move that will do virtually nothing for most of the world.
Clean drinking water is a real problem when most rural third-world people just use the great outdoors as their toilet. I believe it is commonly referred to as open defecation.
Basically, you aren't going to have clean water if you are taking a dump next to the pond where you get your drinking water. There isn't any way to fix this today because there are too many people for them to "properly" manage their wastes. Sanitation is something we take for granted but it doesn't exist in most of the world today. Fix that, and you have fixed the drinking water problem.
Unfortunately, fixing that is going to take a lot more than $10B. And you better start thinking about population reduction as well. The current number of people on the planet just do not have anywhere else to take a dump other than near by someone's water supply.
There are a lot of reasons why we should be focusing on reducing the population - and sick people are one way the population gets smaller. Even better with contagious diseases because the benefits are spread around (literally) by the sick people.
Vaccines are something that are of a benefit when there are too few people and we need to build up the labor pool. Sorry, in the US 20% of the people will never work again in their lives and will need to be supported one way or another by the other 80%. It is worse in Europe.
India has a million people with most of them living in rural areas on poor diets with no sanitation. If Bill Gates spent 10 billion dollars on toilets in India it would begin to make a difference there, but just barely.
The level of pollution is a direct result of the population. Pollution wasn't much of a problem in 1200 AD, now was it? There were maybe 2 million people in all of Europe at that time. The theory is that resource utilization is leading to climate change - reduce the population and this will reduce resource utilization.
According to some theories, we have maybe 50 years left of natual resources for 6 billion people on the planet. If tomorrow you woke up and there were 500 million people instead, this would mean that everything would last for 600 years instead of just 50. Since we aren't going to be going offplanet to get anything, we better start thinking about the current crop of children are going to survive in 50 years. If we don't, they maybe they won't and we are looking at the last generation of humans.
You missed a step. All children, dogs, cats, homeless people, bicycles, food carts, and anything else that can possibly end up in a roadway must be fitted with a transponder. Otherwise the automated vehicles will not see it.
This will lead to a virtual slaughter of dogs and cats in suburban areas. Picture a cat with a 3lb transponder with 30day battery. Pretty funny - check for the video on YouTube. Next picture cat and transponder in the street after the batteries die.
Sorry, on some limited access highways some sort of automated driving makes sense, in a limited fashion. Outside of that, forget it. The road is shared with too many non-vehicle objects.
We have a "good samaritian" law, with the force of police, courts and jail behind it.
We have a "stop snitching" movement, with the force of death behind it.
Which do you think will win? I'd say "stop snitching" has it all over anything else, because if you are caught you easily end up dead. Here in the West we love life more.
Restaurants aren't going to want to spend $1000 (or more) on a wireless VPN device that has non-consumer physical connections to other devices. Nope, sorry, the restaurant business doesn't have the margins for something like that.
Besides, with a credit card (not a usless risky debt card), what do you care if the waiter snags your credit card number? He gets to make a few bucks off selling 100 of them at the end of the day and you get a phone call when it is used fraudulently. Even if you don't get the call, you notice that your bill is $500 over what you thought it might be and call up to get the charges taken off. The waiter makes a little money, the guy using the card get some stuff and the merchant's insurance has to pay. Who loses here?
The fraudulent charge game is very, very familar to me as it happens at least once a year. I have never paid a fraudulent charge, ever. Ever single credit card company I have used has not had any problem cancelling the charges and sending me a new card with a different number.
We are living in a high-theft society where people make their entire living by stealing. To try to deny that is to ignore a fact of life in the Western world. Sure, if we were all living as subsistance farmers we wouldn't have this problem because we would have nothing to steal. But if you have a computer, a cell phone and a car you have something people far less fortunate than you want. And they are going to get it because stealing has no penalties anywhere near what living without is like.
So put up with it. Nobody loses on credit card fraud. Would you rather get mugged?
Obvious, really. Post a $1,000,000 bond against potential copyright infringement. If you infringe, the bond is then used to pay off the the judgement and you lose your Internet access until you post another $1,000,000. More probably, the second time it has to be two million.
Using something like BitTorrent for commercial purposes is theft, pure and simple. It is stealing customer's bandwidth so the company doesn't have to provide it. It is a nice idea. It also provides something to point at to say that all use of the BitTorrent protocol isn't for piracy.
But it is still stealing, no matter how you want to look at it. I'm sure it is really nice for WoW users and the like because the company only has to have a piddling T1 for the update service.
Sorry, but you are thinking of something that doesn't exist.
ISPs are currently somewhat sheltered from contributory copyright infringement because of a Safe Harbor clause in a child protection law. It has nothing to do with not examining the data that flows through them.
As desperation increases you can be assured that ISPs who do nothing to block file sharing will certainly start getting named in lawsuits. Much deeper pockets and this will certainly encourage all ISPs to take action of one sort or another.
Face it, the only other option would be for the FCC to say "file sharing is OK". And that certainly isn't going to happen.
The kind of "freedom" that is the hallmark of Richard Stallman, GNU and EFF is very simple -if you have programming skills you are free. Otherwise, you are, well, unfit.
The basic problem is that the "open" computing platform has pretty much failed the consumer. No matter what security features are implemented in software, consumers will circumvent them to obtain what they believe they want: free software, porn, money, etc. The end result is a compromised computer that is no longer completely under the control of the user. And such computers can have a very negative impact on all users everywhere.
The average consumer has no way to utilise the sort of programming freedom that Stallman would like to see people have. They need a checked-out, validated, "App Store" where both useful and useless things can be downloaded and will never, ever compromise their computer. And if an application is found to be bad after it is released it can be "recalled". Period. If we had this today for Windows there would be no spam epidemic, no malware and little or no phishing. Instead what we have is an environment where the Internet is not safe for users with no special knowledge.
We are certainly going to see less and less "freedom" for users in the name of keeping out the bad stuff. Users, not programmers, do not need freedom but they absolutely need safe computing. We aren't going to teach that. With great freedom comes great responsibility and the spammers, thieves and scammers don't seem to be properly exercising responsibility.
When was the last large power plant built in the US? I think it was in the 1970s. NIMBY rules all here and we are going to see major brownouts and electricity rationing before you see a big power plant built. Coal or nuclear are about it, with wind and solar suitable for adding some extra around the edges.
Just about every power plant that has been built in the last 40 years or so is a natural gas fired "peaker" plant designed to operate only in times of extreme load. Of course, they are all running 24x7 today, but that is all we've built.
You are missing the fact that inherently there can only be one transmitter on at a time within a given physical space.
You might be able to expand the physical space beyond the transmitter's range and call that having two transmitters in the same space - but that isn't the point.
There are some tricks with polarization that can be used, but these are not currently being done and are basically incompatible with the omnidirectional nature of most uses of the 2.4Ghz frequency.
Anything beyond one transmitter at a time is just a collision and nobody gets their message through. Current 2.4Ghz uses account for this and accomodate it - by retransmitting. Sooner or later you are going to run into the situation where there are enough "talkers" there are no more open time slots for a new transmitter to move into. Once this happens you get higher and higher percentages of collisions
We do not need spaceflight - there will always be important problems that need solving right here on Earth. The fact that some of the solutions might be off-planet is just wild speculation. The sort of speculation that led to the integrated circuit, for one thing.
The leftist view of things is clearly that we need to treat the Earth as a closed system without any resources available from elsewhere. Fine, but that means we need to be a lot more focused on population control than we are right now. The pollution created by 6 billion people would be only half as much with 3 billion. Sustainable? Forget it - sustainable resource usage that could continue for centuries or millenia would require maybe 200 million people at a maximium. We aren't going to get there without several big wars, and maybe not even then.
We are going to be lucky if the Western leaders aren't telling us in 20 years that we all need to cut back on our lifestyle. Living through subsistance farming, for example. Could the planet support 6 billion that way? Hardly. So there is your population control right there in a easy, non-political package.
Manned exploration - and all the risks that are wrapped up in it - is key. There are two things this does: (a) it presents risks to be knocked down and solved, and (b) a new frontier for exploration. Man is an explorer, and that frontier is needed. Desperately.
What you are talking about was in 1984 and concerned wired phones.
In no way has this been decided to any extent in the US for wireless phones or any other device that uses a wireless network of any kind. What you will find is that around 1974 the FCC managed to push through some regulations that allowed CB radios to be sold to people without requiring them to possess FCC licenses. In order to do this, the radios themselves had to be pretty much sealed by the manufacturer who would be licensed and certify that the radios could not be operated in a manner contrary with their licensing.
This regulation pretty much set the stage for devices that cannot be modified by the end user. Doing so immediately revokes the license to operate the device and it can be seized by the FCC or their appointed agents. I assure you that replacing the firmware in a cell phone with something not produced by a licensed and regulated entity is something that could very well trigger this sort of action - which would likely as not resulted in some court decisions in the US.
My guess is that there is no way any device will be allowed to be operated contrary to its licensing, whether it is a CB radio, cell phone, wireless router, or microwave oven. Any modification to such devices that causes the device to operate in a manner different than its licensing will be ruled as a violation of the law. Hasn't happened yet, but I am pretty sure this decision is coming. What will almost certainly trigger it is some modified firmware that causes either an outage or billing problems.
Once copying became easier than buying, the idea of "cooperation from the public" was out the window.
Back around 1985 at the dawn of the floppy trading era, copyright was pretty much doomed without some serious work. What happened instead was schools became the environment where copying and pirating was trained rather than instilling any sort of respect. Sometimes it was the teacher that told the students that they were just copying something because the school (and the teacher) couldn't afford the price for everyone having a legitimate copy. This pretty much made it clear that if you didn't have the money, you could just copy.
Well, this is where things are today. Digital goods in all forms are pretty much just free. Why buy when you can just download?
I understand the author position with respect to Google Books. It is pretty simple - they see something that is currently unused and Google has the resources to make money off it. Contacting each and every author and getting permission would be cost-prohibitive, but their end-run around copyright is something they seem to think they can jam through the courts.
Isn't that a lot like telling someone their spouse is under-utilized and besides, monogamy is so last-century anyway. They can have their exclusivity back if they opt-out, otherwise it is party time!
Nobody knows what the future will bring from Google Books. In theory, they are positioned to become the exclusive dealer of all books in digital form, certainly all those that are not current. The problem isn't what they are doing with the rights they seek today, it is what could happen later. And from my understanding of the proposed settlement, there are basically no limits on what they could do because the rights are pretty mucn unlimited.
First off, the "dissemination" in a library is indeed tightly controlled. A library cannot lend out more copies then they purchase, and the lending is according to some rules. Libraries do not allow copying and redistribution, for example.
The second point is what Google is proposing today is one thing, and what happens in the future, should their forced opt-out agreement hold, is quite another. They may use their control over the content in ways that are unforeseen today and extremely unfavorable to authors. No part of their proposed agreement says what they can and cannot do in the future.
WHOIS is pretty meaningless. Most of the registrars will now allow semi-anonymous entries, like:
As long as they are doing that, well, WHOIS only has "nice" people in it. Anyone doing something real on the Internet can set their WHOIS information to point to nobody, their attorney, their grandmother, or someone they would like other people to spam.
Think about it. You pay $50 a year for some tax software - you are also going to pay 10% of that as taxes. If you go to a tax preparer, they are going to pay taxes on an even greater amount. The result is that the IRS gets more money, period. The states get their cut of this as well, and they are massively overspending now, so they desperately need it.
Do you really believe the IRS is going to (a) reduce the amount of money they get and (b) cut off a source of revenue to the states? No way.
Most other countries do not have any sort of problem taxing the heck out of citizens, so they are already paying 60-70% to the government. I'd say those governments do not need the extra hit, but in the US it is certainly welcome.
Would the IRS do a better job if they told people what they owed? Maybe. The problem is the IRS doesn't trust their sources any more than they trust the average taxpayer. Today, it is a secret battle between people reporting what other people should be reporting and paying on. Anyone that comes out on the short end gets audited if they are blatent enough. If the IRS told people what they owed, they would be removing this check.
Now, I was under the assumption in the United Stated that you could not blacklist a person from your business unless there was a dam good legal reason. And why won't they tell me what in the world I did to violate their user agreement? Its like being tried, convicted, and sentenced without as much as a ray of hope to prove your not guilty.
Excuse me, but where in the world did you get an idea like that? There is no "criminal" penalties associated with this so the formal concept of "guilt" doesn't apply.
A business can simply choose not to do business with you at any time for any reason, even a secret one. Under some circumstances, and in some businesses it may not be legal to not do business with an individual because of race. In even rarer circumstances it may not be legal to not do business with someone because of gender or other miscellaneous reasons that have been ruled as discrimination against a protected class. Note that you are always safe denying business to a white male under the age of 40.
PayPal is a business and they can choose who they want as a customer. Evidently they don't like you. There is no legal recourse in the US and there probably isn't in Europe either. When the government can dictate who a business has to serve, it is time to find another business to be in quickly.
Your photo of necklacing hardly does justice. The part you are missing is the pouring of gasoline on the tire and setting it alight. The result is rather dramatic, especially for the victim.
It is one way of recycling old tires, but hardly an environmentally sound one.
I believe the usual answer is to burn down the neighbor's house so they are equal. And then to proceed making as many other people "equal" as possible.
It is best if this is not captured by TV News, but the armed response attempting to stop the destruction is as evidence of the imperialist oppression being suffered by the population.