Most people that have grown up with the Internet will never, ever pay for content. They will download it for free, legally or illegally. Trying to get them to pay will simply force more illegal downloads.
The older people that are paying - because mostly they don't know how to download for free - will die soon. When they pass on, there will be nobody paying. Period.
Failure to understand this leads to discussions about piracy.
You mention "help people become more than physical laborers". The problem with society today is there are easily two groups of people that can easily be recognized: those that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. This is purely a mental capability - education has no role in it. If a person doesn't have the ability, you might be able to train them sufficiently to put on a pretty good show and fake it but they aren't going to be successful or happy about it.
Today we are quickly reaching the point where working on an assembly line is no longer an option in the Western world. If someone can be a computer programmer, great - but what about all of those people that would have been happy and productive being an assembly line worker ca. 1950? There are few jobs remaining for these people. The educational system doesn't seem to understand this division either - you simply aren't going to be able to manage a classroom of 10 children that can do abstract symbol manipulation and anther 10 that cannot. The result of trying is often the Lowest Common Denominator or some kind of group effort where half the children are helping (or trying to help) the other half. End result is a lot of frustrated kids because they are either being held back or pushed to do things they can't do.
We need to recognize this and deal with it on a societal level, and pretty soon. Building the world so that only people that can do higher math, program computers and other things that involve abstract symbols will fit in is a disaster in the works.
If you bring children up in an environment where adults do not value education, don't be surprised when the children don't value it either. And when they do not value it, they aren't going to learn much.
I am not familiar with an effective rating scale, but I think one adult saying "Eeew, looks like Brain Work to me. No thanks!" within earshot of a child is probably -100 units whereas reading one children's book to the child is +1 unit. Similarly, suggesting that by learning the child is trying to "put on airs" is probably -500.
Today most of the people you meet on the street are suffering with a lifetime score of -50,000. If you are especially lucky the people you work with have only -1000 and somehow, dispite major obstacles managed to learn something.
In most schools getting good grades is utterly unacceptable to the peer social group. So the child can be an outcast with no friends or not - easy to choose, isn't it? This is the culture in the US today. A good part of it comes from the inner city "majorities" that have pretty much taken over there. Because of "white flight" to the suburbs where their children aren't exposed to an anti-education culture.
I recently saw a television program concerning a black educator trying to stir up some interest in children being educated and going on to college. Gasp, they might be successful! Biggest problem seemed to be that they had to pick and choose the children because so many were already infected by a culture that told them being educated was socially unacceptable.
If this problem isn't solved, no matter what technology is put into the classroom the situation is just going to get worse and worse. Cheap Chinese-made toys aren't going to fix anything. Expensive PLATO terminals aren't going to fix anything. Changing the culture is the only way.
The major difference in life expenctancy between the middle ages and today is the control of infections. In oh say 1200 AD, if you got a scratch on your finger and it got infected you were likely doomed. You would die from it.
Warfare was pretty horrible as well, because even a minor slash from a bladed weapon was pretty much a death sentance. It might take a couple of months, but you would almost certainly die.
Simple things that are easily treated today like impetigo could indeed be fatal.
We have had antibiotics of one sort or another since the late 1800s and they have steadily improved. Today you can pretty much be assured that you aren't going to die from a scratch or cut. The problem is that we certainly have gone too far with antibiotic use, especially for trivial things. But do not even think about "living without antibiotics" or some such nonsense. It has been tried and the results are lots of people die from really trivial stuff.
The problem is that it is essentially impossible to prevent someone that is determined to die from bringing down an airplane. There are hundreds, if not thousands of ways of doing it and you cannot prevent people from having access to what few tools are actually needed to do it. What we can easily expect next is some other technique that isn't detected by whatever security measures are in place. This will continue until the real problem - Islamic fundamenalism - is resolved.
(How do you resolve a religion? By making it extinct.)
So in recognizing that you can't stop terrorism what is left is trying to keep the people motivated to terrorism off the airplane. Israel does a very, very good job of this and considering the highly motivated nature of the people they are dealing with, they have been extremely successful. The US uses far less effective techniques and has had equally poor results.
The only reason we aren't losing a plane a day is because it would seem to be difficult to actually find someone above the level of drooling idiot that wants to kill themselves on an airplane. The drooling idiots are fairly easy to prevent from getting on the airplane (mostly I would say because they go to the train station), and the ones that do manage to get on the plane seem to be just barely above the drooling idiot level. The latest guy couldn't bother to step into the locked bathroom to set himself off, for example. Had he, somewhere around 250 people would be dead now.
I just hope they don't get people that can add numbers together or count their toes to start doing stuff. As long as toe-counting is beyond their capabilities, we are pretty safe. We'd be safer having an "Armed and Dangerous" section on the plane instead of a smoking section.
What do you suppose the total use of "raw materials" in the US was in the last couple of years? Likely as not, nearly zero. Manufacturing of anything in the US has nearly ended and what manufacturing there is consists of putting parts together that were made in other countries.
So I guess you could say that Dell "manufactures" computers by taking the parts made in other countries and putting them together. Does Dell make any of these parts? No.
Most of the parts in cars which are assembled in the US come from somewhere else. It is just an assembly job other than metal fabrication.
Face it, US labor has pretty much priced itself out of the global market. It is cheaper to have the stuff made in China, Singapore or Malaysia and shipped here than it is to pay the incredible wages and benefits of US workers. Pretty much the same for Western Europe, except they have a low-wage state right next door in Eastern Europe.
The 21st Century will be marked by decreasing pollution from manufacturing in the West and dumping all of the polluting industries into the third world where wages make it practical to do labor-intensive operations.
Yes, they want the regulated monopoly to go away. Simplest way to do that is run the business into the ground such that there are so few subscribers left that the cost to maintain the CO equipment and lines is astronomical per subscriber. Not many POTS users will be willing to pay $100 a month no matter what the state boards allow.
So when the costs exceed what they can reasonably collect, poof! If the state board doesn't allow the rate increases, again poof!
How can this be allowed to happen? Simple. If AT&T decided to spin off the land line business apart from wireless, cable and whatnot else they have it might be contested but it would be eventually allowed. When that spin-off goes bankrupt it is pretty much over. Nobody is going to build a new business around a POTS system that isn't making money.
So absolutely I see that AT&T and other ILECs are going to get their dream. No more regulation, because no more wired phone network. It is really the only way out for them - because the alternative would be something like everyone paying a "phone tax" like the TV tax in UK. Not going to happen here.
The analog network will be abandoned the minute it is no longer profitable to maintain. That happens when enough subscribers drop off. This will clearly happen, either dropping off to join Vonage and their ilk or dropping off to go wireless only.
The government doesn't really have the power to force a carrier to maintain wires that are no longer profitable. They might try forcing companies that own both wireless licenses and are tariffed phone carriers to maintain their phone network, but a simple divestiture of the loss-ridden part of the business ends that threat in one simple move. If there isn't any money in it, there isn't anyone that will want to do it. And what AT&T is clearly trying to do is get government on the side of the abandonment.
Every person that says they dropped land line service for wireless adds fuel to the fire in support of abandonment. It's coming, and probably coming within the next five years or so. The network is hugely expensive to maintain and without millions of stay-at-home suburban housewives paying for landline service it is almost guaranteed to disappear.
The biggest reason why this will happen is the current PSTN is tariffed with toothy regulations behind it. Wireless and VOIP aren't and there are few, if any, regulations. So if the service goes out for an hour nobody has to pay penalties. So the level of maintenance required and on-call technicians is much lower. You can operate a VOIP phone company - off someone else's data network - on a shoestring and oursource the customer service to India. This means the level of profit is much, much higher.
Supplying DC to each house over a pair of wires? Why? Why not just make it someone else's problem like Vonage does. No regulations, no requirements, just profits.
Yup, I'd be planning on what to do after the shut the phones off.
Let's start with a simple concept. When you discover you have ants crawling all over your food in a cabinet, do you start out looking to negotiate? How about mice? Wolves?
Our position here in the West with regard to Islam is that we are somewhere between ants and mice in their view. We deserve nothing better than death because we are taking up space on their planet, given to them to rule over by Allah. There is no negotiation possible when one side views the other as mindless vermin to be exterminated.
Besides, any "negotiation" is going to be on the grounds of it being OK to lie to non-believers to achieve your objectives according to the Koran. Religion trumps all in this situation, and we are on the losing side. Period.
I believe that a substantial fraction of the US is beginning to be prepared to accept things like "Eat some bacon or don't fly" rules. Religious tolerance is fine, but there are limits and we are beginning to reach them.
The end of the IRA was negotiated because fundamentally both sides could trust the other and it was a matter of finding some acceptable terms. Neither side was solely interested in the extermination of the other. This is not the case with Islam vs. the West and right now, Islam is winning. There is no reason why they would discard their winning hand, no matter how hopeless the end game might seem.
Glad to see you are offended. You might check out some early feminist literature - I refer specifically to a book called "The Woman Who Did". After reading this you will understand why nobody is interested in feminist literature before about 1960 or so. Depressing and whacked-out come to mind to describe this early version of the genre.
One thing that people do not seem to understand is that if works were entering public domain this does not mean that there would be huge numbers of things suddenly available for free. What it likely means is that some mega-distributor (think WalMart or Sony) would snap up materials that no longer had an "owner" and they would publish and distribute them.
Now some people might laugh at a book on the shelf at WalMart that was simply a reprint of something that had entered public domain. Alternatively, there are many that would buy it. Printing books is cheap, promoting them is not. If WalMart had zero cost other than simply putting the book on the shelf, would they print lots of books?
Would Sony make them available "exclusively" for the Sony Reader? Wouldn't it be fun to see Amazon and Sony both declaring that they exclusively were making Gone With the Wind available to for their devices? And then Barnes and Nobel coming along with "their" version for their device.
Free stuff isn't interesting to people with large distribution channels. Stuff you can charge for, even just 1% over the cost of production, is much more interesting. Stuff you can charge 200% over the cost of production is even more interesting. As long as most of the world doesn't have access to high-speed Internet connections or have the knowledge to make use of them distribution is going to be where the big bucks are.
is not having to pay for it. Once someone has it in digital form, without some restrictive DRM, it can be shared freely with the planet. That means I can get it for free, without paying. No money.
If Cory sees his financial future in people having his written works without paying for them, good luck. Freedom is nice, but eating is nicer. Freedom can be enjoyed a lot better with a full belly.
Now there is no reason a copy-limited work cannot be resold. There are ways to manage this that do not prevent resale or other transfers. The problem is that if you allow "loaning", "backing up", "format shifting" or anything else that allows multiple copies to exist at the same time you will also have "sharing". And once you have sharing, you will have redistribution. And redistribution means nobody has to pay.
Right now, any ebook that is pretty popular can be found on various sharing web sites. And do not for a moment think that my Kindle is somehow immune to displaying these "shared" ebooks because of something Amazon did. Nope, I can read these shared books on my Kindle.
The problem is one of market share and costs. At some point, the costs of maintaining POTS will exceed the revenue produced by it. When that happens, or maybe a little before, POTS is dead. It really doesn't matter if not everyone has switched over or not, it will just be terminated.
That is the reason they want an announced-by-the-government date, as it would eliminate the carrier from being the bad guy.
The problem is today end-user vVOIP has no tariffs that require reliability. If Vonage service goes out, so what? Because of the number of hands it has to go through, it is unlikely we are going to see much mandated reliability for VOIP service anytime soon. This means that your "landline" phone is not going to have anywhere near the reliability that POTS service has today, and there will be no regulation that says it has to be.
All in all, this sounds like an interesting, but utterly useless idea. But unless something is done about pseudo-carriers like Vonage and Magic Jack POTS service is doomed.
OK, let's assume that as a group American society can decide the risk of aircraft terrorism is so low that we can just ignore it.
The one niggling little problem is when one of these events does happen, how much does the insurance pay out and how much do we make the airline suffer? After all, everyone knows up front that this risk exists. In the face of such known risks we have wiped out companies and required payments of billions of dollars - think about the tobacco settlements.
I do not believe we can just tell people they are taking a risk and can't sue anyone. That isn't how things work. And if this went to a jury you can believe the fact that the risk was known would weigh heavily on a big judgement coming back. This would probably put the airline out of business with one incident.
Does anyone believe that airlines would operate under those conditions? I don't think so. This would effectively end privately owned airlines in the US - the government would be forced to take over an airline just to continue any type of passenger service.
The problem is that everyone thinks that digital works should be cheaper because there is no printing or distribution cost. Only problem is, printing and distributing books is very, very cheap. Altogether it might cost $4 to print, bind and ship a book today. Maybe $5 for some fancy hardcover books.
The primary cost of books is the editing and other content-management functions. The author doesn't get that much of it - but without the editing, formatting, marketing, and so on and so forth books simply do not sell. Ask any self-published author what they are getting.
Sure, it might be a good idea to have everything digitized - but don't start with scanning books. Start with getting publishers to deposit the text with someone like the Library of Congress. Primary problem with scanning books is that you have to OCR them, and OCR without intensive proofreading just isn't accuate enough. Think about the recipe where 1 tsp is mis-read as 1 tbsp - in some cases the results can be fatal.
Google's project would be fine if they didn't want to cram it down the content owner's throats. Their objective has been to grab this and potentially hold the content hostage in the future. Because they can. Libraries have let them in the door because their motives sound good, at first. In no way is Google doing this because they are nice guys - there is money in it for them. And if some other people's money gets lost in the process, it isn't going to bother them in the least little bit. This isn't even close to something that I would want to get behind.
Sorry, but watermarking assumes there are consequences to piracy. If I, as the theater projectionist, make a copy of a movie and give it to someone in, say, Russia, the movie is then "out". If I move on to a different job it is highly unlikely there will ever be any consequences - piracy doesn't leave fingerprints.
A digital copy of a movie is potentially a loss of millions of dollars. I know that most people aren't going to download a movie, watch it and then rush out to the theater to watch it again. Especially with modern theater etiquette. And given the choice between a $20 DVD with ads and non-skippable previews for movies I am not interested in and a free download with no ads, no previews, nothing but the movie, I'd say I'd take the download every time.
Suing the theater is pretty much a non-starter - they don't have any money. Finding the employee is probably impossible, even if they do work there still. So I don't see how being able to track down pirated copies buys the movie company anything at all.
Besides, given the current climate, the pirates are winning big time. You can find just about any movie that has been released - and some before they are released - available for high-speed download. All for free. They keep shutting down services for this, but new ones keep popping up much faster than they can shut them down. Often these are hosted in places that think nothing of thumbing their nose at US companies and US laws.
Not sure how it worked elsewhere, but in Illinois it was very simple. The state mandated the prices that could be charged for lines. Didn't matter that the cost of maintaining the equipment and lines was several times the rate mandated by the state.
Ameritech, before being bought by SBC had a very simple policy. Since they could not afford to have the lines used at that rate, there were no possibilities of installing third-party equipment. None. Therefore the lines were never utilized at below-oost rates.
I believe this was the situation in most states. The CLECs could either get a below-cost rate or nothing, so mostly they got nothing. The various regulations that enabled this nonsense were finally repealed and everyone got on with business.
I am sure we can return to an environment where the ILEC has to provide services to other companies below cost. What is needed is sufficient regulation to ensure that there is no cost-shifting, that there is a minimum number of customers that must be served through this and there are no fees that can be charged to offset the loss. This will force the ILECs out of business pretty quickly. And under those terms, nobody is going to want to pick it up.
Interestingly enough, Windows doesn't halt the CPU. So, regardless of what is happening on the computer, the processor is running.
So the ads do not really consume CPU cycles - they simply make pretty graphics move rather than counting unused numbers to infinity.
If you are really concerned about battery life, you need to be running an operating system that uses halting to stop the CPU. Not sure if Linux still does, but Windows does not. OS X? Solaris?
Slavery was economically dead from the moment the cotton gin was introduced. Instead of requiring hundreds of workers to pick cotton a machine was used which did it better, faster, and cheaper. There might have been some cultural reasons for slavery, but the handwriting was on the wall. Pretty much the era of the slave ended by 1825 in the South. Sure there were slaves after that, but it wasn't economical to use them for picking cotton or much of anything else.
The sacrifices being talked about today in the name of "preserving the climate" will pretty much put the finishing touches on the end of the middle class in the US and Western Europe. Instead of addressing real problems, the idea of "saving the planet" will simply place most goods and services out of the reach of the middle class because of increased costs and simple abandonment. It is awfully hard to purchase stuff when the maker(s) have decided it is no longer economically viable to produce them.
Sure, a cap and trade scheme might reduce carbon emissions. But it is far more likely that the emissions will simply continue at a higher cost. In the US there is no vast network of non-polluting transit. We have quite intentionally built cities around the idea of personal transportation and we are a long, long way from being able to transition to personal transportation that doesn't run on gasoline. So while the rich can buy Tesla Roadsters, the middle class will simply be paying $10 a gallon for gasoline for commuting.
Same thing with electricity. Nobody is going to build the nuclear plants that would be required to eliminate coal-fired generation. Solar and wind are interesting, but it doesn't work to power the electric range at 7:00 PM or the TV at 8:00 PM. So we are going to just pay more for coal-fired generation.
Same thing with virtually every product and service you see today. Everything will just cost more and some things will be priced out of their market. This will be a sharp economic contraction because the workers making and selling products that have no market will be unemployed.
It has nothing to do with polluting. If leaders of the world wanted to reduce emissions we would stop the emissions at the source rather than playing economic games. You want to cut 30% of the carbon emissions made globally in 10 minutes? End passenger air travel. You want to cut some more? Make it illegal to drive gasoline powered private vehicles within the city limits of the larger cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. None of these things are going to be done because it would not change the distribution of wealth and power. So instead we are being controlled and scammed.
I have nothing against reducing pollution, but let's get real. Nothing being discussed today is in any way "real". It is all about the politics, power and wealth. The current goal is to push the US and Western Europe down while lifting India and China up. The result will be huge numbers of people unemployed and increased costs for everything. The result will be that multinational companies with operations in India and China are doing really, really well. But small companies in the US will be broke.
I am going to assume you are really serious in your comment. Simple answer - someone sees it while browsing around and mentions, haphazardly to an instructor "Gosh, Suzie says she want to kill you on her Facebook page." In case you haven't been paying attention, some folks actually do then go out and kill people.
How do you know? Well, there is the 1950s, June Cleaver approach of "Oh well, they probably were just having a bad day." Unfortunately, this has resulted in people actually getting killed. A whole bunch of them. Columbine wouldn't have happened if people that saw the web pages had actually done something about it. Do not think this lesson has been wasted on school administrators everywhere.
So they aren't going to ignore it. In 6th grade they might send the kid to the principal's office. In college they probably just call the police. And until everyone feels safe and secure that student isn't coming on campus. Would you really want it any other way?
You might want to read the front matter of just about every book published to see that they specifically address feeding the book into a computer in any way possible and say it is a violation of the copyright if done without permission.
Of course, nobody gives a rat's ass about copyright any longer. So torrenting the books from somewhere like Romainia should be just fine.
It might be nice if you understood digital photography before opining on something you clearly know nothing about.
The Mars Rover camera is a very special instrument. How consumer digital cameras work is with something called a Bayer matrix of red, green and blue filters. The end result is that you get RGB values by interpolation - in reality you have about 1/4th the resolution of the sensor. You can get pretty fancy with the interpolation, but there is still a huge loss of detail. When the output is a JPEG - fuzzy by design to begin with - there isn't that much lost, really.
The Mars Rover camera uses three separate filters which are placed over the sensor in turn, so in reality three separate pictures are taken and the pixels combined. As long as nothing moves there is no problem with an aggregate exposure time in seconds. This would be a huge problem for consumer cameras which is why it isn't done. So right off, the Mars Rover has 4x the resolution of a consumer 1MP camera. Then they use real glass lenses rather than cheap plastic. So the image quality is several times as good as that consumer camera. Then the output is not JPEG but almost certainly some lossless compression technique - I do not know what they are using. This again raises the bar.
I'd say the Mars Rover camera is probably equivalent to Canon's 1D weighing in at $6,999 with a decent lens. Total package, probably a little under $8,000.
The problem with trying to use a Bayer camera for scanning is the interpolation of pixels. You just aren't going to get much better than 1/4th the resolution of the sensor, and you really want high frequency response, so you need to save the images in raw mode, not JPEG. Since I gather this is being done in JPEG mode, OCR better be really good because you are going to get real soft edges on the characters.
Not quite. Google gets revenue from displaying ads on sites they direct people to through their searches. You might see some ads on the search page, but the real kicker is getting you into a site where there are 10 more ads and every time you click something in that site there are 10 more. I'd say there is at least a five-to-one ratio between search ads and web site ads in terms of revenue.
Not use AdSense? Why not? AdSense gives you an anonymous, protected way to separate the advertiser from the placement of ads. How many people would willingly call up a porn link site or warez site to advertise there? Right, nobody. AdSense gives the porn linker and warez site an easy way to display ads that the advertiser never knows anything about. And, more importantly, cannot exert any control over specifically what sites their ads appear on. In exchange, they get a cheaper rate and this pretty much drives other advertising channels out of the market. As has pretty much happened.
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Most people that have grown up with the Internet will never, ever pay for content. They will download it for free, legally or illegally. Trying to get them to pay will simply force more illegal downloads.
The older people that are paying - because mostly they don't know how to download for free - will die soon. When they pass on, there will be nobody paying. Period.
Failure to understand this leads to discussions about piracy.
You mention "help people become more than physical laborers". The problem with society today is there are easily two groups of people that can easily be recognized: those that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. This is purely a mental capability - education has no role in it. If a person doesn't have the ability, you might be able to train them sufficiently to put on a pretty good show and fake it but they aren't going to be successful or happy about it.
Today we are quickly reaching the point where working on an assembly line is no longer an option in the Western world. If someone can be a computer programmer, great - but what about all of those people that would have been happy and productive being an assembly line worker ca. 1950? There are few jobs remaining for these people. The educational system doesn't seem to understand this division either - you simply aren't going to be able to manage a classroom of 10 children that can do abstract symbol manipulation and anther 10 that cannot. The result of trying is often the Lowest Common Denominator or some kind of group effort where half the children are helping (or trying to help) the other half. End result is a lot of frustrated kids because they are either being held back or pushed to do things they can't do.
We need to recognize this and deal with it on a societal level, and pretty soon. Building the world so that only people that can do higher math, program computers and other things that involve abstract symbols will fit in is a disaster in the works.
If you bring children up in an environment where adults do not value education, don't be surprised when the children don't value it either. And when they do not value it, they aren't going to learn much.
I am not familiar with an effective rating scale, but I think one adult saying "Eeew, looks like Brain Work to me. No thanks!" within earshot of a child is probably -100 units whereas reading one children's book to the child is +1 unit. Similarly, suggesting that by learning the child is trying to "put on airs" is probably -500.
Today most of the people you meet on the street are suffering with a lifetime score of -50,000. If you are especially lucky the people you work with have only -1000 and somehow, dispite major obstacles managed to learn something.
In most schools getting good grades is utterly unacceptable to the peer social group. So the child can be an outcast with no friends or not - easy to choose, isn't it? This is the culture in the US today. A good part of it comes from the inner city "majorities" that have pretty much taken over there. Because of "white flight" to the suburbs where their children aren't exposed to an anti-education culture.
I recently saw a television program concerning a black educator trying to stir up some interest in children being educated and going on to college. Gasp, they might be successful! Biggest problem seemed to be that they had to pick and choose the children because so many were already infected by a culture that told them being educated was socially unacceptable.
If this problem isn't solved, no matter what technology is put into the classroom the situation is just going to get worse and worse. Cheap Chinese-made toys aren't going to fix anything. Expensive PLATO terminals aren't going to fix anything. Changing the culture is the only way.
The major difference in life expenctancy between the middle ages and today is the control of infections. In oh say 1200 AD, if you got a scratch on your finger and it got infected you were likely doomed. You would die from it.
Warfare was pretty horrible as well, because even a minor slash from a bladed weapon was pretty much a death sentance. It might take a couple of months, but you would almost certainly die.
Simple things that are easily treated today like impetigo could indeed be fatal.
We have had antibiotics of one sort or another since the late 1800s and they have steadily improved. Today you can pretty much be assured that you aren't going to die from a scratch or cut. The problem is that we certainly have gone too far with antibiotic use, especially for trivial things. But do not even think about "living without antibiotics" or some such nonsense. It has been tried and the results are lots of people die from really trivial stuff.
The problem is that it is essentially impossible to prevent someone that is determined to die from bringing down an airplane. There are hundreds, if not thousands of ways of doing it and you cannot prevent people from having access to what few tools are actually needed to do it. What we can easily expect next is some other technique that isn't detected by whatever security measures are in place. This will continue until the real problem - Islamic fundamenalism - is resolved.
(How do you resolve a religion? By making it extinct.)
So in recognizing that you can't stop terrorism what is left is trying to keep the people motivated to terrorism off the airplane. Israel does a very, very good job of this and considering the highly motivated nature of the people they are dealing with, they have been extremely successful. The US uses far less effective techniques and has had equally poor results.
The only reason we aren't losing a plane a day is because it would seem to be difficult to actually find someone above the level of drooling idiot that wants to kill themselves on an airplane. The drooling idiots are fairly easy to prevent from getting on the airplane (mostly I would say because they go to the train station), and the ones that do manage to get on the plane seem to be just barely above the drooling idiot level. The latest guy couldn't bother to step into the locked bathroom to set himself off, for example. Had he, somewhere around 250 people would be dead now.
I just hope they don't get people that can add numbers together or count their toes to start doing stuff. As long as toe-counting is beyond their capabilities, we are pretty safe. We'd be safer having an "Armed and Dangerous" section on the plane instead of a smoking section.
What do you suppose the total use of "raw materials" in the US was in the last couple of years? Likely as not, nearly zero. Manufacturing of anything in the US has nearly ended and what manufacturing there is consists of putting parts together that were made in other countries.
So I guess you could say that Dell "manufactures" computers by taking the parts made in other countries and putting them together. Does Dell make any of these parts? No.
Most of the parts in cars which are assembled in the US come from somewhere else. It is just an assembly job other than metal fabrication.
Face it, US labor has pretty much priced itself out of the global market. It is cheaper to have the stuff made in China, Singapore or Malaysia and shipped here than it is to pay the incredible wages and benefits of US workers. Pretty much the same for Western Europe, except they have a low-wage state right next door in Eastern Europe.
The 21st Century will be marked by decreasing pollution from manufacturing in the West and dumping all of the polluting industries into the third world where wages make it practical to do labor-intensive operations.
Yes, they want the regulated monopoly to go away. Simplest way to do that is run the business into the ground such that there are so few subscribers left that the cost to maintain the CO equipment and lines is astronomical per subscriber. Not many POTS users will be willing to pay $100 a month no matter what the state boards allow.
So when the costs exceed what they can reasonably collect, poof! If the state board doesn't allow the rate increases, again poof!
How can this be allowed to happen? Simple. If AT&T decided to spin off the land line business apart from wireless, cable and whatnot else they have it might be contested but it would be eventually allowed. When that spin-off goes bankrupt it is pretty much over. Nobody is going to build a new business around a POTS system that isn't making money.
So absolutely I see that AT&T and other ILECs are going to get their dream. No more regulation, because no more wired phone network. It is really the only way out for them - because the alternative would be something like everyone paying a "phone tax" like the TV tax in UK. Not going to happen here.
The analog network will be abandoned the minute it is no longer profitable to maintain. That happens when enough subscribers drop off. This will clearly happen, either dropping off to join Vonage and their ilk or dropping off to go wireless only.
The government doesn't really have the power to force a carrier to maintain wires that are no longer profitable. They might try forcing companies that own both wireless licenses and are tariffed phone carriers to maintain their phone network, but a simple divestiture of the loss-ridden part of the business ends that threat in one simple move. If there isn't any money in it, there isn't anyone that will want to do it. And what AT&T is clearly trying to do is get government on the side of the abandonment.
Every person that says they dropped land line service for wireless adds fuel to the fire in support of abandonment. It's coming, and probably coming within the next five years or so. The network is hugely expensive to maintain and without millions of stay-at-home suburban housewives paying for landline service it is almost guaranteed to disappear.
The biggest reason why this will happen is the current PSTN is tariffed with toothy regulations behind it. Wireless and VOIP aren't and there are few, if any, regulations. So if the service goes out for an hour nobody has to pay penalties. So the level of maintenance required and on-call technicians is much lower. You can operate a VOIP phone company - off someone else's data network - on a shoestring and oursource the customer service to India. This means the level of profit is much, much higher.
Supplying DC to each house over a pair of wires? Why? Why not just make it someone else's problem like Vonage does. No regulations, no requirements, just profits.
Yup, I'd be planning on what to do after the shut the phones off.
Let's start with a simple concept. When you discover you have ants crawling all over your food in a cabinet, do you start out looking to negotiate? How about mice? Wolves?
Our position here in the West with regard to Islam is that we are somewhere between ants and mice in their view. We deserve nothing better than death because we are taking up space on their planet, given to them to rule over by Allah. There is no negotiation possible when one side views the other as mindless vermin to be exterminated.
Besides, any "negotiation" is going to be on the grounds of it being OK to lie to non-believers to achieve your objectives according to the Koran. Religion trumps all in this situation, and we are on the losing side. Period.
I believe that a substantial fraction of the US is beginning to be prepared to accept things like "Eat some bacon or don't fly" rules. Religious tolerance is fine, but there are limits and we are beginning to reach them.
The end of the IRA was negotiated because fundamentally both sides could trust the other and it was a matter of finding some acceptable terms. Neither side was solely interested in the extermination of the other. This is not the case with Islam vs. the West and right now, Islam is winning. There is no reason why they would discard their winning hand, no matter how hopeless the end game might seem.
Glad to see you are offended. You might check out some early feminist literature - I refer specifically to a book called "The Woman Who Did". After reading this you will understand why nobody is interested in feminist literature before about 1960 or so. Depressing and whacked-out come to mind to describe this early version of the genre.
One thing that people do not seem to understand is that if works were entering public domain this does not mean that there would be huge numbers of things suddenly available for free. What it likely means is that some mega-distributor (think WalMart or Sony) would snap up materials that no longer had an "owner" and they would publish and distribute them.
Now some people might laugh at a book on the shelf at WalMart that was simply a reprint of something that had entered public domain. Alternatively, there are many that would buy it. Printing books is cheap, promoting them is not. If WalMart had zero cost other than simply putting the book on the shelf, would they print lots of books?
Would Sony make them available "exclusively" for the Sony Reader? Wouldn't it be fun to see Amazon and Sony both declaring that they exclusively were making Gone With the Wind available to for their devices? And then Barnes and Nobel coming along with "their" version for their device.
Free stuff isn't interesting to people with large distribution channels. Stuff you can charge for, even just 1% over the cost of production, is much more interesting. Stuff you can charge 200% over the cost of production is even more interesting. As long as most of the world doesn't have access to high-speed Internet connections or have the knowledge to make use of them distribution is going to be where the big bucks are.
is not having to pay for it. Once someone has it in digital form, without some restrictive DRM, it can be shared freely with the planet. That means I can get it for free, without paying. No money.
If Cory sees his financial future in people having his written works without paying for them, good luck. Freedom is nice, but eating is nicer. Freedom can be enjoyed a lot better with a full belly.
Now there is no reason a copy-limited work cannot be resold. There are ways to manage this that do not prevent resale or other transfers. The problem is that if you allow "loaning", "backing up", "format shifting" or anything else that allows multiple copies to exist at the same time you will also have "sharing". And once you have sharing, you will have redistribution. And redistribution means nobody has to pay.
Right now, any ebook that is pretty popular can be found on various sharing web sites. And do not for a moment think that my Kindle is somehow immune to displaying these "shared" ebooks because of something Amazon did. Nope, I can read these shared books on my Kindle.
Hope you like working for free Cory.
The problem is one of market share and costs. At some point, the costs of maintaining POTS will exceed the revenue produced by it. When that happens, or maybe a little before, POTS is dead. It really doesn't matter if not everyone has switched over or not, it will just be terminated.
That is the reason they want an announced-by-the-government date, as it would eliminate the carrier from being the bad guy.
The problem is today end-user vVOIP has no tariffs that require reliability. If Vonage service goes out, so what? Because of the number of hands it has to go through, it is unlikely we are going to see much mandated reliability for VOIP service anytime soon. This means that your "landline" phone is not going to have anywhere near the reliability that POTS service has today, and there will be no regulation that says it has to be.
All in all, this sounds like an interesting, but utterly useless idea. But unless something is done about pseudo-carriers like Vonage and Magic Jack POTS service is doomed.
OK, let's assume that as a group American society can decide the risk of aircraft terrorism is so low that we can just ignore it.
The one niggling little problem is when one of these events does happen, how much does the insurance pay out and how much do we make the airline suffer? After all, everyone knows up front that this risk exists. In the face of such known risks we have wiped out companies and required payments of billions of dollars - think about the tobacco settlements.
I do not believe we can just tell people they are taking a risk and can't sue anyone. That isn't how things work. And if this went to a jury you can believe the fact that the risk was known would weigh heavily on a big judgement coming back. This would probably put the airline out of business with one incident.
Does anyone believe that airlines would operate under those conditions? I don't think so. This would effectively end privately owned airlines in the US - the government would be forced to take over an airline just to continue any type of passenger service.
The problem is that everyone thinks that digital works should be cheaper because there is no printing or distribution cost. Only problem is, printing and distributing books is very, very cheap. Altogether it might cost $4 to print, bind and ship a book today. Maybe $5 for some fancy hardcover books.
The primary cost of books is the editing and other content-management functions. The author doesn't get that much of it - but without the editing, formatting, marketing, and so on and so forth books simply do not sell. Ask any self-published author what they are getting.
Sure, it might be a good idea to have everything digitized - but don't start with scanning books. Start with getting publishers to deposit the text with someone like the Library of Congress. Primary problem with scanning books is that you have to OCR them, and OCR without intensive proofreading just isn't accuate enough. Think about the recipe where 1 tsp is mis-read as 1 tbsp - in some cases the results can be fatal.
Google's project would be fine if they didn't want to cram it down the content owner's throats. Their objective has been to grab this and potentially hold the content hostage in the future. Because they can. Libraries have let them in the door because their motives sound good, at first. In no way is Google doing this because they are nice guys - there is money in it for them. And if some other people's money gets lost in the process, it isn't going to bother them in the least little bit. This isn't even close to something that I would want to get behind.
Sorry, but watermarking assumes there are consequences to piracy. If I, as the theater projectionist, make a copy of a movie and give it to someone in, say, Russia, the movie is then "out". If I move on to a different job it is highly unlikely there will ever be any consequences - piracy doesn't leave fingerprints.
A digital copy of a movie is potentially a loss of millions of dollars. I know that most people aren't going to download a movie, watch it and then rush out to the theater to watch it again. Especially with modern theater etiquette. And given the choice between a $20 DVD with ads and non-skippable previews for movies I am not interested in and a free download with no ads, no previews, nothing but the movie, I'd say I'd take the download every time.
Suing the theater is pretty much a non-starter - they don't have any money. Finding the employee is probably impossible, even if they do work there still. So I don't see how being able to track down pirated copies buys the movie company anything at all.
Besides, given the current climate, the pirates are winning big time. You can find just about any movie that has been released - and some before they are released - available for high-speed download. All for free. They keep shutting down services for this, but new ones keep popping up much faster than they can shut them down. Often these are hosted in places that think nothing of thumbing their nose at US companies and US laws.
Not sure how it worked elsewhere, but in Illinois it was very simple. The state mandated the prices that could be charged for lines. Didn't matter that the cost of maintaining the equipment and lines was several times the rate mandated by the state.
Ameritech, before being bought by SBC had a very simple policy. Since they could not afford to have the lines used at that rate, there were no possibilities of installing third-party equipment. None. Therefore the lines were never utilized at below-oost rates.
I believe this was the situation in most states. The CLECs could either get a below-cost rate or nothing, so mostly they got nothing. The various regulations that enabled this nonsense were finally repealed and everyone got on with business.
I am sure we can return to an environment where the ILEC has to provide services to other companies below cost. What is needed is sufficient regulation to ensure that there is no cost-shifting, that there is a minimum number of customers that must be served through this and there are no fees that can be charged to offset the loss. This will force the ILECs out of business pretty quickly. And under those terms, nobody is going to want to pick it up.
Interestingly enough, Windows doesn't halt the CPU. So, regardless of what is happening on the computer, the processor is running.
So the ads do not really consume CPU cycles - they simply make pretty graphics move rather than counting unused numbers to infinity.
If you are really concerned about battery life, you need to be running an operating system that uses halting to stop the CPU. Not sure if Linux still does, but Windows does not. OS X? Solaris?
Interesting. Uninformed, but interesting.
Slavery was economically dead from the moment the cotton gin was introduced. Instead of requiring hundreds of workers to pick cotton a machine was used which did it better, faster, and cheaper. There might have been some cultural reasons for slavery, but the handwriting was on the wall. Pretty much the era of the slave ended by 1825 in the South. Sure there were slaves after that, but it wasn't economical to use them for picking cotton or much of anything else.
The sacrifices being talked about today in the name of "preserving the climate" will pretty much put the finishing touches on the end of the middle class in the US and Western Europe. Instead of addressing real problems, the idea of "saving the planet" will simply place most goods and services out of the reach of the middle class because of increased costs and simple abandonment. It is awfully hard to purchase stuff when the maker(s) have decided it is no longer economically viable to produce them.
Sure, a cap and trade scheme might reduce carbon emissions. But it is far more likely that the emissions will simply continue at a higher cost. In the US there is no vast network of non-polluting transit. We have quite intentionally built cities around the idea of personal transportation and we are a long, long way from being able to transition to personal transportation that doesn't run on gasoline. So while the rich can buy Tesla Roadsters, the middle class will simply be paying $10 a gallon for gasoline for commuting.
Same thing with electricity. Nobody is going to build the nuclear plants that would be required to eliminate coal-fired generation. Solar and wind are interesting, but it doesn't work to power the electric range at 7:00 PM or the TV at 8:00 PM. So we are going to just pay more for coal-fired generation.
Same thing with virtually every product and service you see today. Everything will just cost more and some things will be priced out of their market. This will be a sharp economic contraction because the workers making and selling products that have no market will be unemployed.
It has nothing to do with polluting. If leaders of the world wanted to reduce emissions we would stop the emissions at the source rather than playing economic games. You want to cut 30% of the carbon emissions made globally in 10 minutes? End passenger air travel. You want to cut some more? Make it illegal to drive gasoline powered private vehicles within the city limits of the larger cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. None of these things are going to be done because it would not change the distribution of wealth and power. So instead we are being controlled and scammed.
I have nothing against reducing pollution, but let's get real. Nothing being discussed today is in any way "real". It is all about the politics, power and wealth. The current goal is to push the US and Western Europe down while lifting India and China up. The result will be huge numbers of people unemployed and increased costs for everything. The result will be that multinational companies with operations in India and China are doing really, really well. But small companies in the US will be broke.
I am going to assume you are really serious in your comment. Simple answer - someone sees it while browsing around and mentions, haphazardly to an instructor "Gosh, Suzie says she want to kill you on her Facebook page." In case you haven't been paying attention, some folks actually do then go out and kill people.
How do you know? Well, there is the 1950s, June Cleaver approach of "Oh well, they probably were just having a bad day." Unfortunately, this has resulted in people actually getting killed. A whole bunch of them. Columbine wouldn't have happened if people that saw the web pages had actually done something about it. Do not think this lesson has been wasted on school administrators everywhere.
So they aren't going to ignore it. In 6th grade they might send the kid to the principal's office. In college they probably just call the police. And until everyone feels safe and secure that student isn't coming on campus. Would you really want it any other way?
You might want to read the front matter of just about every book published to see that they specifically address feeding the book into a computer in any way possible and say it is a violation of the copyright if done without permission.
Of course, nobody gives a rat's ass about copyright any longer. So torrenting the books from somewhere like Romainia should be just fine.
It might be nice if you understood digital photography before opining on something you clearly know nothing about.
The Mars Rover camera is a very special instrument. How consumer digital cameras work is with something called a Bayer matrix of red, green and blue filters. The end result is that you get RGB values by interpolation - in reality you have about 1/4th the resolution of the sensor. You can get pretty fancy with the interpolation, but there is still a huge loss of detail. When the output is a JPEG - fuzzy by design to begin with - there isn't that much lost, really.
The Mars Rover camera uses three separate filters which are placed over the sensor in turn, so in reality three separate pictures are taken and the pixels combined. As long as nothing moves there is no problem with an aggregate exposure time in seconds. This would be a huge problem for consumer cameras which is why it isn't done. So right off, the Mars Rover has 4x the resolution of a consumer 1MP camera. Then they use real glass lenses rather than cheap plastic. So the image quality is several times as good as that consumer camera. Then the output is not JPEG but almost certainly some lossless compression technique - I do not know what they are using. This again raises the bar.
I'd say the Mars Rover camera is probably equivalent to Canon's 1D weighing in at $6,999 with a decent lens. Total package, probably a little under $8,000.
The problem with trying to use a Bayer camera for scanning is the interpolation of pixels. You just aren't going to get much better than 1/4th the resolution of the sensor, and you really want high frequency response, so you need to save the images in raw mode, not JPEG. Since I gather this is being done in JPEG mode, OCR better be really good because you are going to get real soft edges on the characters.
Not quite. Google gets revenue from displaying ads on sites they direct people to through their searches. You might see some ads on the search page, but the real kicker is getting you into a site where there are 10 more ads and every time you click something in that site there are 10 more. I'd say there is at least a five-to-one ratio between search ads and web site ads in terms of revenue.
Not use AdSense? Why not? AdSense gives you an anonymous, protected way to separate the advertiser from the placement of ads. How many people would willingly call up a porn link site or warez site to advertise there? Right, nobody. AdSense gives the porn linker and warez site an easy way to display ads that the advertiser never knows anything about. And, more importantly, cannot exert any control over specifically what sites their ads appear on. In exchange, they get a cheaper rate and this pretty much drives other advertising channels out of the market. As has pretty much happened.
Maybe document stolen from England need enforcement action from England rather than promoting the US as the World Police Force(tm).