A similar question arose during the 1968 riots in Chicago and elsewhere when people were burning their own neighborhoods. Part of the problem is certainly frustration. Same thing happened after the Rodney King trial.
People could not actually do anything, just like the sitution in Haiti now. No matter how much aid is funneled into the country, there is no getting away from the fact that the place has been an ungoverned disaster for the last 40 or 50 years. Today, the areas not destroyed by the earthquake are in no position to assist with relief efforts. So there is going to be a lot of frustration. Which means rioting, burning and random violence.
Just because all the oil makers are in cahoots, doesn't mean we can steal gas because we feel because it is a monopoly their prices are too high.
Huh? You mean you haven't been stealing gas in protest?
I have to compete with people who steal software and sell computers with pirated versions.
Yup. And the goal of piracy is to (a) obviously to get free stuff, but (b) destroying revenue from digital goods is even more important. The idea that popular idea (piracy) can bring large corporations to their knees is extremely attractive. So attractive, in fact, that there is almost no chance of any anti-piracy anything ever winning out.
So sure, there are some selfish pirates out there that are just in it to get free stuff. But don't ignore the fact that these people are also contributing to the freedom of digital goods worldwide. Sounds like a good idea when you put it in those terms. Unless of course you own or work for a company that actually gets money from (gasp!) the sale of software. In that case, your days are probably numbered because unless software is nailed down tight, it will absolutely be stolen and redistributed all over the planet. And any attempt to nail it down will be fought.
Anyone that is hoping to actually make a living selling creative works (software, music, books, anything) is unaware of the pirate movement and the effect it is having on greedy bastards trying to make money off intangible objects.
By the way, I am one of those greedy bastards. Just like Microsoft.
A significant problem with aircraft - even commercial aircraft - is other objects sharing the same space without any sort of proximity information. Things like geese. Other general aviation aircraft without much in the way of equipment you would like to see.
All in all, you can't count on everything in the air cooperating. Absolutely, you can't make powered flight something that is blindly automatic.
Kindle will also read unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi or.prc) files and.html.
The biggest annoyance with the Kindle I would say is that it is based on only formats that the Kindle developers had free access to. They did not purchase the Adobe stuff, which would have enabled the format seemingly to be used by a lot of libraries in Phoenix.
There is nothing to prevent you from putting non-Amazon content on a Kindle already. The device is completely "open" as far as that is concerned.
You can even (gasp!) download books using the Amazon-provided wireless connection from places like manybooks.net for free. At least half of the books on my Kindle have been either downloaded free from non-Amazon sites or placed on the device through the USB connection.
People that think the Kindle is somehow locked down for Amazon only have been reading some conspiracy theory web site rather than getting an uncomfortable dose of reality.
The latest Kindle software now supports some PDF documents (not all of them) but the viewing is so incredibly difficult that nobody is going to want to do it unless they absolutely have to. Not that this is any big surprise. PDF is a page-description language and if you aren't displaying on a screen big enough to hold a page you are pretty much out of luck. The Kindle (rightfully) doesn't scroll around a zoomed page view - they just let you rotate the screen to get a "landscape" width of the page rather than the standard "portrait" view. It works, but it isn't great. And it can't be great with PDF unless the PDF was originally designed for a reader device. Which is what other PDF-displaying Adobe based devices are counting on as well.
No, I do not believe the Kindle supports locked-down Adobe content.
The problem is that newspapers have had a lock on their content for a long time and this content has been of sufficient value to support the entire organization. They deliver readers to advertisers and the advertisers pay.
One problem today is the advertising budget is spread over many different local venues, the newspaper being only one. Also, the value of the ads in a newspaper is much less than is used to be.
The idea that news could be a loss leader for other content is interesting, but the problem is that there isn't much other online digital content that people actually will pay for, especially when that content is often available for free from other sources. The one real moneymaker online has been porn, and almost nothing else reaches the level of value that porn has. But do you really think a newspaper can provide news and porn with a straight face?
I think the idea of a "newspaper" or any other sort of news organization is pretty much doomed. It costs too much and people simply aren't going to pay. The end result is that "news" will be pretty much gossipy chat from uninformed people that think they have something to say online. Think early American Idol auditions, but a little worse. Maybe 4chan as a serious news source is the right way to look at it.
The other "news sources" will be government-run information distributors. The BBC is a very, very good example of what is possible. I would say whatever the North Korean Ministry of Public Misinformation might be called in reality is much more like what you are going to see. I don't see the US Government putting out news that isn't slanted towards whatever party is controlling that part of the bureauracy. Nor do I think there will be any impartial news from any other government, either.
The benefit Google is deriving is that they get the content for free and post it. Now they may not be posting all of the content - although in some cases they do. Even with the limited snippet they show on search pages, this is seeming to satisfy 50% of the potential readers.
Now, if all news sources were to take the action of blocking Google there might be a point to using robots.txt to do so. However if only 99% of news sources were to do so it would be a pointless and futile exercise that would result in all of the news simply being gathered from fewer sources. End result of that would not be anything useful.
I think the problem is similar to someone deciding to have lunch on supermarket sample day by just going from sample stand to sample stand repeating as needed. If one person is doing it nobody really notices and at most they are just being an ass. If 100 people do it there is an economic impact. If half the people in the town do it the grocery store closes down.
We are at the level now of half the people in the town sampling and deciding that is enough.
I believe the point is that Google is making the news available in a fashion which satisfies 50% of the readers without ever having to go further. This pretty much means that Google, with their ads on their pages, is getting considerable revenue from the newspaper's content without giving the newspaper a chance to display an ad.
The clickthrough rate on the ads isn't significant - nobody is paying for ads based on clickthrough.
The causation here isn't significant either. The observation that the content is being snarfed up by Google and is satisfying 50% of the readers by itself is very important.
You can say that the content summed up by Google in their brief summary is good enough because of a general lacking in quality of the content behind the summary. But that is far more of an inference into the observation than is warranted.
When I borrow a book in a library, it is mine for a limited time. When I pirate, it is mine forever.
When I borrow a book in a library, I can't sell it or destroy it. When I pirate, I can sell it (to a silly noob) or do whatever I want with it.
When I borrow a book in a library, I can buy it in a bookstore if I really want to keep it. When I pirate there is no need to ever buy anything because I have it already.
A library is no threat to publishers in any real fashion. There are a limited number of books that can be lent out and the library buys them. Pirating, on the other hand, involves no purchases (other than the first) and there are an unlimited number of copies that can be obtained.
While a library might be useful for some, there is no real revenue threat. Piracy is a complete revenue threat with the object being the destruction of revenue from digital goods. If everyone can download for free, why would anyone buy? Talking about differences in quality or the "experience" of the original vs. the pirated item is silly - the entire operation of "piracy" involves the original item. We aren't talking about the original song vs. a high school band trying to imitate the original. It is the original, it is just free for everyone.
A cell modem is extremely practical in a few limited circumstances. If you travel a bunch and can trade $60 a month for 6 $10 hotel internet fees, it makes sense as anything past those 6 nights is a benefit.
A few people actually need to access a customer database "live" while on the road. Great, this enables that. Even if it costs $150 a month because of overage charges, you are probably coming out ahead in the end.
For the rest of the people on the planet, a cell modem is an utter waste of money.
First big problem is you simply cannot send encrypted email to someone without a prior relationship. They aren't going to "get it" and they aren't going to be bothered to figure out why they can't read your email - just delete it.
The second problem is that if you want to be seen doing something "real", you need to spend some money on a "real" certificate. At a corporate level it might seem to make sense to have a corporate level certificate that then signs individual certificates. But this doesn't seem to be "real" enough.
Finally, most people understand that email is insecure and unreliable. They get a few Viagra ads every day and this reinforces the idea that it is insecure. They call people to make sure their email went through - because email is unreliable. Encryption would be another layer of trouble on top of all that insecurity and unreliability for no apparent benefit.
I have been hearing about how wonderful everything will be when web advertising matures. How it will manage to pay for everything on the web and all us all of have whatever we want without paying for it. Of course, we're just in the early stages of that yet, so it will take some more time. But we are right at the brink and it will be just a little while longer...
Yes, we have all been hearing this for a long long time. It hasn't happened yet. It is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Anyone that waits for it is simply being foolish.
The two examples you mention do have differences, but not the sort you are describing.
The cheap SD card is almost certainly going to be slower and likely has significantly less robust handling of bad cells. So the card takes longer to save a picture and will "wear out" sooner. If you aren't shooting pictures in a demanding environment, it doesn't matter. And by "demanding environment" think of a child's birthday party, not anything fancier.
The DVDs are going to record the same data, but the cheaper ones will likely as not be unreadable sooner because of using cheaper dyes. The dye stability is what optical media is all about, and you don't get that with cheap knockoffs of well-known dyes that are patented, licensed and very protected by their manufacturers.
Burying the feed for a home is one thing. Burying a transmission line running 400KV (or more) is a whole different thing. The insulation you need is unbeliveable - turns out those big towers have the wires actually insulated by air. Take away the air and you need many inches of materials - like 20 or 30.
Burying a transmission line is pretty much digging a trench four feet wide and ten feet deep to put all the stuff in it. Maybe a bit more these days. This isn't going to happen for a line that is 100 miles long.
A good outcome? Wow. I have heard of situations exactly the opposite - where it is not the community directly being served and the utility company pretty much gives up on the idea of the line instead of fighting endlessly in court.
Absolutely, the only thing that will convince people is to turn off their electricity and make that the only other option to building the transmission line.
Such a large part of the US and Western Europe economy is today based on sales of intagible goods that it should be obvious that some sort of international agreement would be nice to limit the economic loss that is occurring based on piracy and other copyright violations.
The problem is that since around 1980 or so people have grown up with the idea that if you physically can transfer information digitally it ought to be free. Whether it is by trading floppies or using BitTorrent, anyone that has go to school since 1980 or so has had access to free digital stuff that someone else thought you should be paying for. At it height, the BBS movement pretty much doomed Apple ][ games with common knowledge that any game produced would sell two copies - one on the west coast and one on the east. And that was around 1984.
One huge problem for governments is that if I buy a DVD in a store they get tax revenue on it. If I buy it in Europe, they get tax revenue from it several times over through VAT. However, if it download it nobody get anything. Now you can argue all you want about pirates not ever paying so these aren't really "lost sales", but the government is certainly looking at this as "lost tax revenue". And it is certainly millions, if not billions of dollars in the US today.
iTunes is maybe 1% of the music download market. If the government was collecting their 10% cut on the remaining 99% of the music download market there might not be such a concern about paying for executive bonuses and shifting union health plan costs.
So really, can you blame them?
Of course, from where I sit nobody is ever going to actually be able to enforce any restrictions. Piracy is here to stay and nobody that has gone to school since 1980 or so is exactly in the dark about how to download stuff for free. And they aren't going to be paying anytime in the future. It is free for the taking today and likely to be free forever. Tax consequences or not.
But given the staggering amounts of money the governments of the world think are being left on the table, can you really blame them for not trying to collect "their fair share"? Just be glad nobody has actually proposed a policeman stationed at every Internet connection just to make sure that the taxes are being paid.
This limits the construction of any EMF emitting source including things like cell phone towers and power lines. There is enough belief in the idea that EMF causes medical problems that companies are pretty much unable to push construction projects ahead in the face of opposition.
The result of this is that building a new transmission line in a new area is pretty much off limits unless it winds around to avoid existing structures by miles and miles. If someone can see it, they can use this as an argument to prevent (or at least delay) construction. I have seen this happen in Illinois.
Anyone thinking that we are going to get all sorts of new "green" superconducting transmission lines for wind and solar power needs to understand the seriously wacked out nature of these protesters. Until these issues are really put to rest, they will prevent progress on many fronts.
Think the cell phone brain cancer rumors are over? This is the same people, and it keeps coming up every few years.
This was done in the 19th century because of the threat of rampant diseases such as smallpox that there was virtually no cure for. If you looked like you might have smallpox, you were indeed quarantined until it was proven one way or the other. Obviously, if you died they had their proof.
Today the belief is much more like (a) there are no diseases that American Medicine cannot conquer and (b) nobody with any severe disease that might spread would ever travel to the US. Obviously neither of these is true.
The problem is that most of the diseases that can be spread and are incurable are currently spread via sexual contact. This introduces a whole new set of politics into the equation. We can certainly assume (incorrectly, I might add) that nobody with a communicable sexually transmitted disease that is incurable would ever, ever have unprotected sex with someone. Sorry, but this happens all the time knowingly or unknowingly.
I absolutely would have no problem with screening immigrants. Visitors are another problem entirely, but given the current immigration enforcement problem a large percentage of "visitors" seem to be sticking around and we are unable to do anything about it.
What should happen with people attempting to enter a country when they are carrying a serious, communicable disease? Like, say, bubonic plague? Forget HIV - too many politics involved with that. Today, in a rather silly head-in-the-sand approach, the US says "Come on in!!!" while given the same situation in many other countries they would be stopped at the border and denied entry.
Just as an example of immigration policies, think about what percentage of the US population is here illegally and compare that to the percentage of illegal immigrants in someplace like Netherlands or Germany. Also, if you overstay your visa in Germany what happens? In the US overstaying your visa has no consequences whatsoever - there is no enforcement.
Anti-spam activism is its own goal - if someone (e.g., Microsoft) is blocking mail as spam, well that is just too bad. Maybe it is spam and maybe it isn't - there is no accountability involved. Email is intended to be unreliable, so there can never be an assumption that your mail isn't going to be blocked as spam for any of a number of reasons.
Further, why Microsoft doesn't "fix" these accounts is very simple - it isn't their problem. It might be their user's problem but again spam has it own rewards. Nobody gets paid any more or less because of such attacks, so their dedication of limited resources to stopping it isn't going to happen. As to how effective it might be to try to curb this activity, well, they probably aren't going to succeed. The attackers have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal, whereas Microsoft has only a small staff that has better things to do than "fixing" compromised user accounts.
Probably a lot of the accounts compromised have been abandoned anyway.
Today, spam has its own culture and trying to get in the way of the spam will often cause much more grief than just blocking it or rolling with it.
Most all the hijackers wre here on EXPIRED VISAS. Where the hell was ICE on enforcing this?
ICE does not enforce visa violations. If they did, half the illegal immigrants would be gone tomorrow. Local law enforcement is prevented in most cases from enforcing immgration laws, like kicking people out that have expired visas. Phoenix just when through a period where they were trying to enforce such laws and now that experiment is over.
A new amendment attached to the health care reform eliminates all such enforcement and the E-Verify program as well.
There is no immigration enforcement in the US. If you walk across the border into Mexico you stand a pretty good chance of being arrested by the Mexican Army. Doing the same thing into the US gets you congratulated for making it through the desert, a welfare card and a job with a landscaping company.
You can stop worrying when people stop suing. If it can be generally agreed upon that it is OK if an airplane blows up, then great. But if the families of he dead passengers are going to sue someone, it stops being OK.
Today, the way it works is the government says nothing bad is going to happen. When something does, it isn't the airline's fault - the government said so - so the insurance company has to pay. If the government were to stop saying nothing bad can happen, well then it has to be someone's fault. If it is the airline, then no insurance and one less airline is flying.
You see, they can't say it is the terrorist's fault - he is (a) dead, and (b) has no money. Someone must be found with enough money to pay off the families. As it stands today, it is the airline insurance company. Take that way, and maybe no more airlines at all. Most businesses would pretty much just shut down if they were faced with that kind of potential liability and no way to do anything about the risk.
There is no way to "reduce their numbers" or to "understand what makes them terrorists" without confronting the basic idea that Islam is a religion that at its core sees domination of every facet of life as its goal. As long as some incredibly primative tribesmen were isolated in far-off parts of the world it was fine - 700 years later they are no longer isolated and any religion or sect that makes out the afterlife better than life on Earth is a real danger.
Our friendly Ft. Hood shooter said it best "We love death more than you love life." This is 180 degrees out of phase with Western thinking and is completely foreign to the Western world. Without understanding what this means, we are going to be following their script. And their script is to blow stuff up.
Of course, one "solution" would be to just accept the losses. The biggest problem would be convincing people's families not to sue, and I think that would be an insurmountable problem. If people are going to sue, then someone is going to be held accountable - and right now nobody except maybe the governments can afford that. I don't see the US Government stepping up and saying they will cover lawsuits from dead passenger families.
The alternatives are eternal vigilance until the radical imam's give up. Only problem with that is that it has been 1100 years or so since the dawn of Islam and they have been rabidly killing non-belivers in their way ever since. For most of the 1100 years people have been out of their way, but how with gobal travel just about everyone is in their way or within reach. With their intent to establsh Sharia law in the West, we had better start thinking about different solutions than just vigilance. Because it isn't working.
Once DRM-free content is out in the wild, that means that Sam pays and posts and nobody ever pays again. The content creator gets one sale. Period.
That is the pirate goal, the destruction of the digital media as a revenue source. And they are winning. I certainly don't know anyone that pays when downloading is just as easy and much, much cheaper.
The pirate argument is very simple - get stuff for free, no restrictions. The biggest thing that a lot of people do not realize is the pirate philosophy (if you can call it that) is the destruction of digital media as a revenue source. Very few people are willing to pay when it is just as easy and convenient to download for free. This pretty much means that anything pirated on a large scale is next to impossible to sell.
Today, you can download a currently popular movie in 2 hours via BitTorrent. You might be able to download a lower quality version or stream it in less time than that, but you are going to end up with something of lesser quality than the pirated DVD rip. Or with streaming, end up with nothing at all. It is certainly going to take 30 minutes to go to the neighborhood Blockbuster to rent the same DVD so you have to be in a huge hurry to do that.
Music? What would anyone with an Internet connection have to do with paying for recorded music? It is all out there, through streaming sources or downloads, and it is all for free. Today, WalMart sells CDs to people that do not have the Internet at home or are older and have no children. That revenue is declining and will soon be gone. Recorded music sales on the Internet is maybe 2% of the total number of downloads, so we can all see where that is going.
Making a copy of a music file, by contrast, does not cause any direct damage to someone selling copies of that file, since they still have the undiminished ability to continue selling copies.
Wrong. The presence of free goods will always displace higher cost goods. What that means is if I can download it for free, why would I (or anyone for that matter) pay for it.
So one pirate can eliminate the revenue for a work completely.
Slashdot Mirror
A similar question arose during the 1968 riots in Chicago and elsewhere when people were burning their own neighborhoods. Part of the problem is certainly frustration. Same thing happened after the Rodney King trial.
People could not actually do anything, just like the sitution in Haiti now. No matter how much aid is funneled into the country, there is no getting away from the fact that the place has been an ungoverned disaster for the last 40 or 50 years. Today, the areas not destroyed by the earthquake are in no position to assist with relief efforts. So there is going to be a lot of frustration. Which means rioting, burning and random violence.
Just because all the oil makers are in cahoots, doesn't mean we can steal gas because we feel because it is a monopoly their prices are too high.
Huh? You mean you haven't been stealing gas in protest?
I have to compete with people who steal software and sell computers with pirated versions.
Yup. And the goal of piracy is to (a) obviously to get free stuff, but (b) destroying revenue from digital goods is even more important. The idea that popular idea (piracy) can bring large corporations to their knees is extremely attractive. So attractive, in fact, that there is almost no chance of any anti-piracy anything ever winning out.
So sure, there are some selfish pirates out there that are just in it to get free stuff. But don't ignore the fact that these people are also contributing to the freedom of digital goods worldwide. Sounds like a good idea when you put it in those terms. Unless of course you own or work for a company that actually gets money from (gasp!) the sale of software. In that case, your days are probably numbered because unless software is nailed down tight, it will absolutely be stolen and redistributed all over the planet. And any attempt to nail it down will be fought.
Anyone that is hoping to actually make a living selling creative works (software, music, books, anything) is unaware of the pirate movement and the effect it is having on greedy bastards trying to make money off intangible objects.
By the way, I am one of those greedy bastards. Just like Microsoft.
A significant problem with aircraft - even commercial aircraft - is other objects sharing the same space without any sort of proximity information. Things like geese. Other general aviation aircraft without much in the way of equipment you would like to see.
All in all, you can't count on everything in the air cooperating. Absolutely, you can't make powered flight something that is blindly automatic.
Kindle will also read unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi or .prc) files and .html.
The biggest annoyance with the Kindle I would say is that it is based on only formats that the Kindle developers had free access to. They did not purchase the Adobe stuff, which would have enabled the format seemingly to be used by a lot of libraries in Phoenix.
There is nothing to prevent you from putting non-Amazon content on a Kindle already. The device is completely "open" as far as that is concerned.
You can even (gasp!) download books using the Amazon-provided wireless connection from places like manybooks.net for free. At least half of the books on my Kindle have been either downloaded free from non-Amazon sites or placed on the device through the USB connection.
People that think the Kindle is somehow locked down for Amazon only have been reading some conspiracy theory web site rather than getting an uncomfortable dose of reality.
The latest Kindle software now supports some PDF documents (not all of them) but the viewing is so incredibly difficult that nobody is going to want to do it unless they absolutely have to. Not that this is any big surprise. PDF is a page-description language and if you aren't displaying on a screen big enough to hold a page you are pretty much out of luck. The Kindle (rightfully) doesn't scroll around a zoomed page view - they just let you rotate the screen to get a "landscape" width of the page rather than the standard "portrait" view. It works, but it isn't great. And it can't be great with PDF unless the PDF was originally designed for a reader device. Which is what other PDF-displaying Adobe based devices are counting on as well.
No, I do not believe the Kindle supports locked-down Adobe content.
The problem is that newspapers have had a lock on their content for a long time and this content has been of sufficient value to support the entire organization. They deliver readers to advertisers and the advertisers pay.
One problem today is the advertising budget is spread over many different local venues, the newspaper being only one. Also, the value of the ads in a newspaper is much less than is used to be.
The idea that news could be a loss leader for other content is interesting, but the problem is that there isn't much other online digital content that people actually will pay for, especially when that content is often available for free from other sources. The one real moneymaker online has been porn, and almost nothing else reaches the level of value that porn has. But do you really think a newspaper can provide news and porn with a straight face?
I think the idea of a "newspaper" or any other sort of news organization is pretty much doomed. It costs too much and people simply aren't going to pay. The end result is that "news" will be pretty much gossipy chat from uninformed people that think they have something to say online. Think early American Idol auditions, but a little worse. Maybe 4chan as a serious news source is the right way to look at it.
The other "news sources" will be government-run information distributors. The BBC is a very, very good example of what is possible. I would say whatever the North Korean Ministry of Public Misinformation might be called in reality is much more like what you are going to see. I don't see the US Government putting out news that isn't slanted towards whatever party is controlling that part of the bureauracy. Nor do I think there will be any impartial news from any other government, either.
The benefit Google is deriving is that they get the content for free and post it. Now they may not be posting all of the content - although in some cases they do. Even with the limited snippet they show on search pages, this is seeming to satisfy 50% of the potential readers.
Now, if all news sources were to take the action of blocking Google there might be a point to using robots.txt to do so. However if only 99% of news sources were to do so it would be a pointless and futile exercise that would result in all of the news simply being gathered from fewer sources. End result of that would not be anything useful.
I think the problem is similar to someone deciding to have lunch on supermarket sample day by just going from sample stand to sample stand repeating as needed. If one person is doing it nobody really notices and at most they are just being an ass. If 100 people do it there is an economic impact. If half the people in the town do it the grocery store closes down.
We are at the level now of half the people in the town sampling and deciding that is enough.
I believe the point is that Google is making the news available in a fashion which satisfies 50% of the readers without ever having to go further. This pretty much means that Google, with their ads on their pages, is getting considerable revenue from the newspaper's content without giving the newspaper a chance to display an ad.
The clickthrough rate on the ads isn't significant - nobody is paying for ads based on clickthrough.
The causation here isn't significant either. The observation that the content is being snarfed up by Google and is satisfying 50% of the readers by itself is very important.
You can say that the content summed up by Google in their brief summary is good enough because of a general lacking in quality of the content behind the summary. But that is far more of an inference into the observation than is warranted.
When I borrow a book in a library, it is mine for a limited time. When I pirate, it is mine forever.
When I borrow a book in a library, I can't sell it or destroy it. When I pirate, I can sell it (to a silly noob) or do whatever I want with it.
When I borrow a book in a library, I can buy it in a bookstore if I really want to keep it. When I pirate there is no need to ever buy anything because I have it already.
A library is no threat to publishers in any real fashion. There are a limited number of books that can be lent out and the library buys them. Pirating, on the other hand, involves no purchases (other than the first) and there are an unlimited number of copies that can be obtained.
While a library might be useful for some, there is no real revenue threat. Piracy is a complete revenue threat with the object being the destruction of revenue from digital goods. If everyone can download for free, why would anyone buy? Talking about differences in quality or the "experience" of the original vs. the pirated item is silly - the entire operation of "piracy" involves the original item. We aren't talking about the original song vs. a high school band trying to imitate the original. It is the original, it is just free for everyone.
A cell modem is extremely practical in a few limited circumstances. If you travel a bunch and can trade $60 a month for 6 $10 hotel internet fees, it makes sense as anything past those 6 nights is a benefit.
A few people actually need to access a customer database "live" while on the road. Great, this enables that. Even if it costs $150 a month because of overage charges, you are probably coming out ahead in the end.
For the rest of the people on the planet, a cell modem is an utter waste of money.
First big problem is you simply cannot send encrypted email to someone without a prior relationship. They aren't going to "get it" and they aren't going to be bothered to figure out why they can't read your email - just delete it.
The second problem is that if you want to be seen doing something "real", you need to spend some money on a "real" certificate. At a corporate level it might seem to make sense to have a corporate level certificate that then signs individual certificates. But this doesn't seem to be "real" enough.
Finally, most people understand that email is insecure and unreliable. They get a few Viagra ads every day and this reinforces the idea that it is insecure. They call people to make sure their email went through - because email is unreliable. Encryption would be another layer of trouble on top of all that insecurity and unreliability for no apparent benefit.
I have been hearing about how wonderful everything will be when web advertising matures. How it will manage to pay for everything on the web and all us all of have whatever we want without paying for it. Of course, we're just in the early stages of that yet, so it will take some more time. But we are right at the brink and it will be just a little while longer...
Yes, we have all been hearing this for a long long time. It hasn't happened yet. It is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Anyone that waits for it is simply being foolish.
The two examples you mention do have differences, but not the sort you are describing.
The cheap SD card is almost certainly going to be slower and likely has significantly less robust handling of bad cells. So the card takes longer to save a picture and will "wear out" sooner. If you aren't shooting pictures in a demanding environment, it doesn't matter. And by "demanding environment" think of a child's birthday party, not anything fancier.
The DVDs are going to record the same data, but the cheaper ones will likely as not be unreadable sooner because of using cheaper dyes. The dye stability is what optical media is all about, and you don't get that with cheap knockoffs of well-known dyes that are patented, licensed and very protected by their manufacturers.
Burying the feed for a home is one thing. Burying a transmission line running 400KV (or more) is a whole different thing. The insulation you need is unbeliveable - turns out those big towers have the wires actually insulated by air. Take away the air and you need many inches of materials - like 20 or 30.
Burying a transmission line is pretty much digging a trench four feet wide and ten feet deep to put all the stuff in it. Maybe a bit more these days. This isn't going to happen for a line that is 100 miles long.
A good outcome? Wow. I have heard of situations exactly the opposite - where it is not the community directly being served and the utility company pretty much gives up on the idea of the line instead of fighting endlessly in court.
Absolutely, the only thing that will convince people is to turn off their electricity and make that the only other option to building the transmission line.
Such a large part of the US and Western Europe economy is today based on sales of intagible goods that it should be obvious that some sort of international agreement would be nice to limit the economic loss that is occurring based on piracy and other copyright violations.
The problem is that since around 1980 or so people have grown up with the idea that if you physically can transfer information digitally it ought to be free. Whether it is by trading floppies or using BitTorrent, anyone that has go to school since 1980 or so has had access to free digital stuff that someone else thought you should be paying for. At it height, the BBS movement pretty much doomed Apple ][ games with common knowledge that any game produced would sell two copies - one on the west coast and one on the east. And that was around 1984.
One huge problem for governments is that if I buy a DVD in a store they get tax revenue on it. If I buy it in Europe, they get tax revenue from it several times over through VAT. However, if it download it nobody get anything. Now you can argue all you want about pirates not ever paying so these aren't really "lost sales", but the government is certainly looking at this as "lost tax revenue". And it is certainly millions, if not billions of dollars in the US today.
iTunes is maybe 1% of the music download market. If the government was collecting their 10% cut on the remaining 99% of the music download market there might not be such a concern about paying for executive bonuses and shifting union health plan costs.
So really, can you blame them?
Of course, from where I sit nobody is ever going to actually be able to enforce any restrictions. Piracy is here to stay and nobody that has gone to school since 1980 or so is exactly in the dark about how to download stuff for free. And they aren't going to be paying anytime in the future. It is free for the taking today and likely to be free forever. Tax consequences or not.
But given the staggering amounts of money the governments of the world think are being left on the table, can you really blame them for not trying to collect "their fair share"? Just be glad nobody has actually proposed a policeman stationed at every Internet connection just to make sure that the taxes are being paid.
This limits the construction of any EMF emitting source including things like cell phone towers and power lines. There is enough belief in the idea that EMF causes medical problems that companies are pretty much unable to push construction projects ahead in the face of opposition.
The result of this is that building a new transmission line in a new area is pretty much off limits unless it winds around to avoid existing structures by miles and miles. If someone can see it, they can use this as an argument to prevent (or at least delay) construction. I have seen this happen in Illinois.
Anyone thinking that we are going to get all sorts of new "green" superconducting transmission lines for wind and solar power needs to understand the seriously wacked out nature of these protesters. Until these issues are really put to rest, they will prevent progress on many fronts.
Think the cell phone brain cancer rumors are over? This is the same people, and it keeps coming up every few years.
This was done in the 19th century because of the threat of rampant diseases such as smallpox that there was virtually no cure for. If you looked like you might have smallpox, you were indeed quarantined until it was proven one way or the other. Obviously, if you died they had their proof.
Today the belief is much more like (a) there are no diseases that American Medicine cannot conquer and (b) nobody with any severe disease that might spread would ever travel to the US. Obviously neither of these is true.
The problem is that most of the diseases that can be spread and are incurable are currently spread via sexual contact. This introduces a whole new set of politics into the equation. We can certainly assume (incorrectly, I might add) that nobody with a communicable sexually transmitted disease that is incurable would ever, ever have unprotected sex with someone. Sorry, but this happens all the time knowingly or unknowingly.
I absolutely would have no problem with screening immigrants. Visitors are another problem entirely, but given the current immigration enforcement problem a large percentage of "visitors" seem to be sticking around and we are unable to do anything about it.
What should happen with people attempting to enter a country when they are carrying a serious, communicable disease? Like, say, bubonic plague? Forget HIV - too many politics involved with that. Today, in a rather silly head-in-the-sand approach, the US says "Come on in!!!" while given the same situation in many other countries they would be stopped at the border and denied entry.
Just as an example of immigration policies, think about what percentage of the US population is here illegally and compare that to the percentage of illegal immigrants in someplace like Netherlands or Germany. Also, if you overstay your visa in Germany what happens? In the US overstaying your visa has no consequences whatsoever - there is no enforcement.
Anti-spam activism is its own goal - if someone (e.g., Microsoft) is blocking mail as spam, well that is just too bad. Maybe it is spam and maybe it isn't - there is no accountability involved. Email is intended to be unreliable, so there can never be an assumption that your mail isn't going to be blocked as spam for any of a number of reasons.
Further, why Microsoft doesn't "fix" these accounts is very simple - it isn't their problem. It might be their user's problem but again spam has it own rewards. Nobody gets paid any more or less because of such attacks, so their dedication of limited resources to stopping it isn't going to happen. As to how effective it might be to try to curb this activity, well, they probably aren't going to succeed. The attackers have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal, whereas Microsoft has only a small staff that has better things to do than "fixing" compromised user accounts.
Probably a lot of the accounts compromised have been abandoned anyway.
Today, spam has its own culture and trying to get in the way of the spam will often cause much more grief than just blocking it or rolling with it.
Most all the hijackers wre here on EXPIRED VISAS. Where the hell was ICE on enforcing this?
ICE does not enforce visa violations. If they did, half the illegal immigrants would be gone tomorrow. Local law enforcement is prevented in most cases from enforcing immgration laws, like kicking people out that have expired visas. Phoenix just when through a period where they were trying to enforce such laws and now that experiment is over.
A new amendment attached to the health care reform eliminates all such enforcement and the E-Verify program as well.
There is no immigration enforcement in the US. If you walk across the border into Mexico you stand a pretty good chance of being arrested by the Mexican Army. Doing the same thing into the US gets you congratulated for making it through the desert, a welfare card and a job with a landscaping company.
You can stop worrying when people stop suing. If it can be generally agreed upon that it is OK if an airplane blows up, then great. But if the families of he dead passengers are going to sue someone, it stops being OK.
Today, the way it works is the government says nothing bad is going to happen. When something does, it isn't the airline's fault - the government said so - so the insurance company has to pay. If the government were to stop saying nothing bad can happen, well then it has to be someone's fault. If it is the airline, then no insurance and one less airline is flying.
You see, they can't say it is the terrorist's fault - he is (a) dead, and (b) has no money. Someone must be found with enough money to pay off the families. As it stands today, it is the airline insurance company. Take that way, and maybe no more airlines at all. Most businesses would pretty much just shut down if they were faced with that kind of potential liability and no way to do anything about the risk.
There is no way to "reduce their numbers" or to "understand what makes them terrorists" without confronting the basic idea that Islam is a religion that at its core sees domination of every facet of life as its goal. As long as some incredibly primative tribesmen were isolated in far-off parts of the world it was fine - 700 years later they are no longer isolated and any religion or sect that makes out the afterlife better than life on Earth is a real danger.
Our friendly Ft. Hood shooter said it best "We love death more than you love life." This is 180 degrees out of phase with Western thinking and is completely foreign to the Western world. Without understanding what this means, we are going to be following their script. And their script is to blow stuff up.
Of course, one "solution" would be to just accept the losses. The biggest problem would be convincing people's families not to sue, and I think that would be an insurmountable problem. If people are going to sue, then someone is going to be held accountable - and right now nobody except maybe the governments can afford that. I don't see the US Government stepping up and saying they will cover lawsuits from dead passenger families.
The alternatives are eternal vigilance until the radical imam's give up. Only problem with that is that it has been 1100 years or so since the dawn of Islam and they have been rabidly killing non-belivers in their way ever since. For most of the 1100 years people have been out of their way, but how with gobal travel just about everyone is in their way or within reach. With their intent to establsh Sharia law in the West, we had better start thinking about different solutions than just vigilance. Because it isn't working.
Once DRM-free content is out in the wild, that means that Sam pays and posts and nobody ever pays again. The content creator gets one sale. Period.
That is the pirate goal, the destruction of the digital media as a revenue source. And they are winning. I certainly don't know anyone that pays when downloading is just as easy and much, much cheaper.
The pirate argument is very simple - get stuff for free, no restrictions. The biggest thing that a lot of people do not realize is the pirate philosophy (if you can call it that) is the destruction of digital media as a revenue source. Very few people are willing to pay when it is just as easy and convenient to download for free. This pretty much means that anything pirated on a large scale is next to impossible to sell.
Today, you can download a currently popular movie in 2 hours via BitTorrent. You might be able to download a lower quality version or stream it in less time than that, but you are going to end up with something of lesser quality than the pirated DVD rip. Or with streaming, end up with nothing at all. It is certainly going to take 30 minutes to go to the neighborhood Blockbuster to rent the same DVD so you have to be in a huge hurry to do that.
Music? What would anyone with an Internet connection have to do with paying for recorded music? It is all out there, through streaming sources or downloads, and it is all for free. Today, WalMart sells CDs to people that do not have the Internet at home or are older and have no children. That revenue is declining and will soon be gone. Recorded music sales on the Internet is maybe 2% of the total number of downloads, so we can all see where that is going.
Making a copy of a music file, by contrast, does not cause any direct damage to someone selling copies of that file, since they still have the undiminished ability to continue selling copies.
Wrong. The presence of free goods will always displace higher cost goods. What that means is if I can download it for free, why would I (or anyone for that matter) pay for it.
So one pirate can eliminate the revenue for a work completely.