Simple answer: there is no way copyright rights holders can enforce copyright restrictions today. Not independently, perhaps not at all without the cooperation of users.
Does that really mean that copyright should be abolished? Does this mean that every business that depends on payment for use of materials should be eliminated?
As it stands today, I believe the answer is yes. Anyone in the business of selling movies, music, books or software should be completely and utterly barred from doing business. Either give it away for free or just stop. It is obvious to me that very few users of such materials would complain.
I am unfortunately forced to put most "believers" in Human-Caused Global Climate Change into the same group that believe in the "not a sparrow shall fall" form of biblical fundamentalism. Beliving that humans are fully in control of the Earth's climate and can change it at will is just as dangerous as those that believe in a personally involved God that oversees every event on Earth.
Right now, we have at our disposal enough information that we can see most of the inputs to the Earth's climate. We do not yet understand all of these inputs and their relative weightings. Nobody has any real knowledge of how much energy is stored in oceans or how much effect solar variance has on oceans.
Sure, we know there is a lot more CO2 than there was 100 years ago. And some fairly obvious conclusions can be drawn from there being more CO2, but we have real information for only an extremely short period for the Earth. We might know some things about the climate 1000 years ago, but the information is very incomplete.
Could the climate be changing? Sure it could. Can we materially change this, given what we know today? Almost certainly not, at least not without huge inputs of energy or removal of what energy we are putting into the climate system. Neither of which is proposed. The Earth's climate engine is something that is measured in gigajoules. So far, the proposals on the table are not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They are like dusting off the tower that held the Trinity device.
It is obvious that nobody in any position of power really believes there is some onrushing global catastrophe. Most of the rather weak carbon emissions reductions that have been proposed will have zero effect on emissions for a decade and even then it is a decrease in growth, not a real decrease in emissions. Of course, the costs for this decrease in growth will affect everyone in US and Europe in some pretty unpleasant ways. But still, regardless of the cost, the net effect is so close to zero as to be meaningless. And there is nobody saying that if these steps were taken immediately there would be any net change.
So what else could be done? Well, for starters we could eliminate passenger air travel. The reduction in emissions might only be 20% of the total but it would be a 20% decrease in emissions rather than a reduction in growth. We could require special permits to enter a large city by car. You can't outlaw cars in the US because of the way cities have been built for the last 70 years or so. By requiring such a permit it could eliminate much of the commutting by car that is happening. Might not cut emissions by more than 5%, but again it would be a 5% decrease rather than a decrease in growth. This might take years to be able to implement, but it could be done.
The problem is, if we did this what would happen? Nobody really knows. There is a theory that it might change the climate, or stop a change that we don't seem to like much. But the ugly truth is that we simply do not know what would happen. Clearly, the leaders of the world today do not believe (as some do) that it would save thousands if not millions of lives.
Instead, in the US we are looking at utterly pointless plans to implement some sort of point trading system that will enrich a few at the cost of all consumer goods going up in price. Oh the price for manufacturing them will stay the same, but transport will cost more. You can't bring manufacturing back to high-labor-cost US from cheap-labor-cost Mexico and China, but the traders can get rich. Net effect of this will be somewhat lower sales and the three or four manufacturers still in the US will be forced to move out. But little else will really change. Except the growth of emissions will slow just from economic changes.
If you believe that humans can change the climate in a few years with minor energy inputs you are almost certainly wrong. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the energies commanded by humans today could do any suc
Almost all the real "progress" that has happened in the US and Western Europe occurred during a time when labor was pretty cheap, when there were few environmental obstacles and when people were interested in "progress".
Today, environmental obstacles are placed in front of everything making it nearly impossible to build a bridge, a large factory or a power plant of any kind. Everything is going to affect the environment in some way, generally negatively for flora and fauna other than humans. We have lost the "mandate" to say that human considerations should trump all. And with that loss, we have pretty much said that if building a bridge will kill some fish, then we better not do it. 100 years ago the attitude was "So what?" That is a big difference. It is political suicide to come out and say something like a project will kill plenty of fish and animals, but that is the price of progress.
Almost nobody is interested in "progress" today. Many people actively distrust anyone in a professional or scientific capacity - the assumption is that they are in it for themselves somehow. So that means that the opinions of an engineer are actively discounted over the opinions of a housewife. We have become anti-intellectual and this has a real effect on everyone's ability to get things done.
Labor has also reached unbelievable proportions of any project. Building anything big has always cost lives, lives that today we cannot accept losing. Construction management knows that to build a large bridge there will be some number of people per mile that are injured and some number per mile killed. These statistics haven't really changed in over 100 years. The cost for building a large building used to be steel, concrete and other materials with labor being a factor but significantly less than the materials. Today the labor cost is probably double that of all other materials combined. This means a lot of projects simply aren't going to get done at all.
In China, India or Singapore there aren't such considerations and buildings are being built, bridges constructed and power plants and factories are going up rapidly. It isn't possible to generate the electricity in China and ship it to the US or Europe, so it is likely we are just going to have to do without. Fortunately, they can make lots of candles in China and ship them elsewhere.
The problem with the "follow the money" is that nobody with any means to do anything cares. Let's say you track the money to some Netherlands bank and find the guys running it. Local law enforcement, acting on your behalf, says "Gee, American sucker lost money. So what?"
UK, Ireland and Australia might care. Most other places you would need to hire a local lawyer and sue them in local court because local law enforcement just isn't interested. And if you get into places like Romania or Bulgaria you find out that ripping off Americans is legal there.
There just isn't any amount of weight someone in the US can bring down internationally to make local law enforcement do anything about this. No amount of diplomatic pressure is going to be enough, because it is going to come down very simply to being too trivial for diplomats to deal with.
Besides, this isn't happening "in the real world" at all - it is happening on the Internet. Even in the US "the Internet" gets lots of special treatment and enforcement of simple things. Stuff that would result in jail time off the Internet results in nothing at all when the same thing is done involving the Internet.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the main attraction for children is that the weirdo in the bushes is actually paying attention to them. Someone is talking to them, actually holding a conversation rather than just telling them to do stuff or to go somewhere else. You aren't going to counter that very easily because in today's society parenting is equal parts of pushing the kids away and trying to convince yourself that you should really say NO when everyone else on the planet seems to be saying YES.
So when they encounter someone that is interested in their life, their thoughts and just talking with them they are going to gravitate to it. In the background are the busy parents and the teachers trying to meet all the requirements of both parents and administration. No time to actually talk with the kids. So the pedophiles have an advantage over just about everyone else in the kids lives.
And until people understand that, all the dolphin buttons in the world aren't going to make a difference.
This is proof that anything in digital form will find it way into the most undeserving, obnoxious hands possible.
Sure, probably 90% of these messages are pointless and of no value to anyone. The remaining 10% are probably either personal information or are going to cause some people untold grief. Imagine walking into a conversation about a security video that got posted to YouTube only to discover it is the video of your husband or wife being murdered. This isn't much different for some people today.
Bad taste to publish this stuff? Na, this is the Internet. Bad taste is what it is all about. Lowest common denominator sells. If you haven't checked out rotten.com in a while, you are certainly missing something.
Sorry, but that is how it works with or without DNA. If someone sees you with the "person on the street" and they end up dead, you are a suspect simply because someone - or a camera - saw you, or thinks they saw you. Or saw someone that after obfuscation through a sketch artist ends up with a drawing that looks sort of like you. And they fax the picture around enough until someone says "Oh yeah, I know that guy."
The police pretty much have an impossible task today. 80-90% of crimes go without anyone being convicted simply because of the volume and potential number of suspects. If there is something to grab onto - like a picture from a camera or a "eyewitness" - they are going to use this no matter how unlikely it is that this information is really accurate. The police are there to catch people so they can be prosecuted, successfully or unsuccessfully. If the prosecution is unsuccessful, then maybe it was because they were innocent.
How did we get ourselves into this mess? Well, mostly I'd say because today at least 50% of the population of the US just doesn't believe they are going to get caught, so why not commit the crime? 70 years ago the police could count on only a small "criminal element", people that would potentially commit crimes. Today, they can't make that assumption - so the assumption is everyone is potentially a criminal. This is absolutely borne out by retail shoplifting statistics. Today, without extraordinary measures in place 10% of the people coming into a store are there to steal.
So why are they treating people like criminals? Perhaps because they deserve it.
Sure you do. Now, just as a reality check, ask your employer how much they pay in Unemployment Insurance. 4% of payroll? Or more? OK, so maybe the employee isn't paying for all of it.
Now look around a bit more. Arizona got federal funds to extend unemployment because the state fund was running dry. This means the money now isn't coming from either in-state employees or in-state employers but from the Federal Government tax revenue.
Unemployment didn't use to be so much "welfare", but it is moving more and more towards being something that everyone else pays and a few just get. And keep on getting and getting and getting.
Sorry, but DSL doesn't work in rural areas. You can run copper 20-30 miles from a CO to a house but after 2-3 miles DSL craps out. There are some places where they actually have repeaters (amplifiers) on individual phone line circuits because it is so far from the CO to the house.
DSL was designed for urban and suburban locations from the beginning. It doesn't work over long distances and can't be made to. A T1 circuit can work - with amplifiers - over any distance that exists from a CO to a house today. But a T1 circuit isn't cheap and isn't getting any cheaper.
As far as I know today, nobody is thinking about wiring up the really rural parts of the US that are left out today. If you don't have cable TV, you probably aren't going to get it in the near future. If you aren't within 20,000 feet of a CO, you will never, ever have DSL. I have a house that is a little over 17,000 feet from the CO and I had really, really slow DSL - but they finally went digital on the cable TV connection and we have cable Internet now.
But the folks down the road even further out of town have no cable and no possibility of DSL, ever. Nobody is going to run fiber miles through the woods, either. This is in Michigan, 30 miles south of Mackinaw City.
What happened in Illinois was simple. The state decided the lines should be open and decided the lines should cost some fixed amount statewide. Doesn't matter what the cost was, it was way, way below what it cost to maintain the copper wires. But the state "knew" that since the wires were already there, in the ground and on the poles, that there were no more real costs.
This resulted in great "openness" and a real bonanza for DSL startups. Just like you would think it would.
Only problem was, a small dose of reality got injected because the folks maintaining the lines adopted a go-slow policy on actually making this stuff available below cost. I guess they could have decided to go along with the state's wisdom on this matter and ended up either trying to finance the line maintenance some other way or just gone out of business. I guess neither option really appealed to them.
End result is no more "openness" and no more state-mandated access to what is now SBC's copper. It was an interesting period from around 1996 to maybe 2002, but it accomplished nothing and was entirely driven by the state imagining they knew enough to run Ameritech's business. They didn't and it showed. I am not in favor of trying this again because for anyone that really needed services from Ameritech (then, SBC now) it put up huge roadblocks - they couldn't deny services to folks that wanted to resell DSL service if they were servicing other customers quickly. So everything was go-slow for years.
We tried that already in 1996 in some parts of the country. I don't think it ever made it everywhere. The problem was, the State came in and said to the incumbant telco that they would permit other companies to use their lines for some payment (say $1 per line) ignoring what their own information and that of the telco said it cost to maintain the line. Say the real cost was $5 per line.
The result was a bonanza - lots of start-up companies formed to take advantage of this huge disparity in costs. They got plenty of investors because just dealing with the arbitrage between the $1 fee and $5 real cost could result in $4 getting passed around. Just collecting the interest on this money was worthwhile if there was enough of it.
Well, obviously nobody spends $5 on something and sells it for $1, at least not very long. Nearly all of the DSL start-ups failed when the real terms of the deal becaome known to everyone. We still have some folks trying to play at this game of paying less than what the service they are getting costs. Vonage is there because of this play and the bones of the whole Sprint ION fiasco. End result is that there is a real cost and if you separate by force the profit from the cost the cost has to be paid somehow.
Nobody wants that. We have been hiding the cost of physical line maintenance for a long time, probably since around 1960 or so. And the structure of the incumbant phone companies allowed these costs to be very effectively buried. So effectively that today nobody knows where the real cost-sinks are.
The end result of this is likely another stab at state-mandated fees for line use. And whatever the fee is, it will be too low for reality. My guess is this time around they will really break the system and the lines will simply not be maintained for years.
This was tried in 1996, with the government mandating the cost of service - what part 1 had to pay part 2. Problem was, the mandated payment wasn't really enough to cover it. Works out fine when it is all just different parts of the same company.
Doesn't work at all for third-party company that wants to offer DSL service. Third party company starts out thinking they are getting a great deal and many investors flock to the new company with visions of how profitable it is going to be. DSL service explodes, at least it did in Northern Illinois.
Well, it turns out that with just about anything if you get a price that is too low to actually make anyone want to do the work, they end up not wanting to do the work. End result was that Ameritech (former Illinois Bell company that owned the lines) would get a request to put a different company's DSLAM into their CO and they would sit on it for a while hoping it would just go away. If it did get installed, provisioning the lines to connect to it would be made dead last priority - as you would expect.
Having the State set the price for the service was a disaster. We had $14.95 DSL plans but you could never get connected. There were 10 different companies offering DSL service in some places - except they couldn't get their equipment installed. I believe some sanity returned four or five years ago and the idea of DSL competition at state-mandated fee levels was pretty much discarded.
I believe state-mandated T1 pricing is still in effect, however, and it results in some very odd market distortions. General rule that seems to apply is whenever anyone puts their thumb on the scale, be it the butcher or the governer, it turns out bad for the consumer in the end.
There is an interesting corrallary here that I think you need to think about.
It is taken by some as absolute fact that "not a sparrow shall fall" without God's knowledge and consent. Their view is an active God that is involved in every detail of every moment on the planet.
It is now presented that the Earth's climate is changing in ways that may not be optimal for Man, or at least large numbers of Man. It is taken as an absolute fact that Man can intervene in this process and control it such that these sub-optimal changes do not occur.
That is certainly the point of most of this. We are uncertain about what the "inputs" are into the climate system. We are equally unsure of what the "outputs" are and have no clue as to the process of what drives the climate. However, in spite of this, some folks feel they are qualified to observe the outputs, detect what they believe is a short term trend that if it continued might be harmful.
Based on this, we are supposed to make changes that may (or may not) affect the "inputs" into the system. Without understanding the real inputs, the real outputs or the processing that is going on. Sounds somewhat fishy.
Given our knowledge from the past, it seems apparent that there have been much wider swings in climate than we are talking about happening here now. It is unknown what caused these events, how fast they occurred or even really what happened other than seeing some apparent results hundreds or thousands of years later. By ignoring this we are persuaded that we should make drastic changes in the economy that may change the inputs into the climate - without doing the most basic things that would actually affect these inputs in the most direct way possible and have less of an impact on society as a whole.
Very, very fishy. Almost as if someone wanted to obfuscate the real goal.
It is for your own good, and there are some people that know it. These enlightened ones, often called things like "people looking out for the betterment of the planet" are there with a job to do and they are doing it. We are in the process of discarding the industrial base of the US because of their influence. We haven't built a major power plant in the US since the 1970s because of their influence. Many regulations have been passed - all for our own good - because of their influence.
Besides, who signed off on the US being able to hog most of the planet's resources anyway? I am sure there are many that believe the US needs to be taken down a peg or two so as to preserve the remaining resources for the rest of the planet. Certainly doing so as part of an enviornmental movement can't be all bad. Especially if you aren't going to be affected because you are either too poor or too rich.
The problem is that these folks never seem to be able to explain how this really helps much or what the final end point of this might be. The simple solution - fewer people - is starting to get some favor but not much. Especially when it is pretty obvious that we can't really wait for hundreds or thousands of years for the population to shrink gradually. No, only a major war or global genocide would actually help much, and nobody really wants to come out and admit that would be part of a plan for goodness.
I think you miss the point. If we can conserve on electricity to the point where the coal plants are no longer necessary, then we have won. The end goal is a bit further than you imagine, you just have to stretch out a bit further in your comprehension.
Of course, this is like trying to refill a dry lake by not drinking. But it is clearly the agenda at work.
There have been no new large-scale generating facilities built in the US since sometime in the 1970s. We overbuilt back in the 1950s to support growth and we have skated by on that excess capacity since then. Nobody is building anything today. Asking any environmentalist where it would be good to put a new power plant will get you an answer of "Nowhere." Until we figure out a way around the roadblock put up against construction, we aren't going anywhere.
That is clearly the direction the US is headed in. Another thing you are going to see is that electric power is available for offices and factories OR homes, not both. So during the day your power is off at home while you work.
You know, there is another solution. It doesn't seem to be very popular in California or really anywhere else in the US, but it is a completely viable solution. Someone, somewhere might get it into their heads that building a large-scale power plant is a good idea. You could run it off all sorts of different things - nuclear, geothermal, solar heating, etc. It doesn't have to be coal fired. But it is impossible to get a permit to build such a thing today. So for the last 30-40 years the only generating plants that have been built have been natural-gas fired "peaker" plants that were (ha ha ha) intended to only run during periods of peak load. Of course, they are running at maximum capacity 24x7 now.
And we are about out of capacity. So we can either learn to get along in an environment where electric power is unreliable, inconsistent and unpredictable, OR we can build some new large scale plants.
Personally, I am counting on no new plants being built anytime soon.
Innappropriate appropriation of materials, i.e., copyright infringement or piracy is a pretty significant threat these days. It is easy to take down a company simply by redistributing their products for free. The number of people that will pay when the same product is available for free is shrinking. Really now, why would someone pay when in the bin right next to the one they are looking at is the same thing for free?
The threat of loss of most, if not all, revenue is very real in the software world. It has come home to the music business in China such that recorded music is simply not produced any longer. It will come to the US and Western Europe. Movies are probably not far behind - why pay $20 to visit a noisy theater when you can have equivalent sound and picture in your home for free?
With this firmly in mind, why wouldn't the copyright holders be pushing for all the legal enforcement they can get? Since the government's position is pretty much that this is (a) a violation of the law and (b) loss of tax revenues so they are likely to be on the side of the copyright holder, not the citizen violators in every case. So of course there are going to be draconian laws that have little or no effect because, like speeding laws, they catch 1% of the people violating the law and can't ever do better than that.
You might consider this the last gasp of copyright enforcement, but it is likely to last a very long time. In the US it is generally known that almost everyone speeds and have for 80 years or so. Law enforcement has been "cracking down" and imposing draconian penalties on speeders since the beginning of the automobile era. So don't expect copyright enforcement to just fade away anytime soon.
The problem is not identifying the tax rates. That is relatively simple. The problem is translating the customer address to a geolocation that corresponds with a local taxing body.
The first step to trying to understand the problem is to figure out what city, county and township a given address is. Take your home address and try to figure this out from accessible sources on the Internet. Good luck.
There is no simple way to do this, and nobody is publishing information that makes it even reasonably possible.
Sorry, but it isn't done at the state level. Once you have to pay taxes in a state, you need to calculate the rate based on where in the state the customer is usually. This means, for example, in Ohio where taxes are calculated on a township level that you have a separate tax rate for every township in the state.
Other states, like Illinois, change the tax rates based on city and county rather than township.
There is no 1-to-1 mapping of townships to cities or vice versa. This means you need to have multiple ways of mapping where customers are located based on the state. And these boundaries are by no means static. Some previously unclaimed land ends up annexed by a city and it changes the tax rate.
OK, so you just reduce it down to a single tax rate. Except that doesn't solve the paying problem: you still have thousands of different taxing bodies that collect the tax. So if you make a sale in Sharon township in Ohio, you would need to pay Sharon township. At that point, you may as well just have a different tax rate because you need to identify the customer down to the city, county, township and a couple of other boundaries as well.
No, I do not think you could ever get this done at a state level only.
Your mistake is believing that either Wall Street or the government has to deliver. They aren't, they can't and people are beginning to figure it out. And it isn't that there is a choice between the two - the government doesn't have the ability to back up their promises to people working today.
Social Security is based on the idea of a growing labor pool. It works because the factories got larger and employed more and more people. The office buildings got taller and taller and more and more people were employed. Today, the US in a shrinking labor pool. There are almost no factories left in the US and the workers that are left are tending to the machines that replaced the thousands of workers there were in the 1950s.
Once the labor pool starts to shrink, Social Security is doomed. There are more people collecting than paying in eventually and the system has to collapse. The time to fix this was in 1980 when the factories started to disappear - if the government allowed that trend to continue - and they did - the future was written in stone. There is nothing that can be done about it today.
Maybe the only reasonable way is for the people to finance the government. Your savings go into bonds that the government pays interest on. Because of compounding interest, your deposits grow so they money you put into this in your 20s is enough to support you in your 80s. Unfortunately, that wouldn't have helped the old people in 1935 and everyone knew that factories and the labor pool would continue to grow forever.
Today about the only thing that will bring manufacturing back to the US would be a trade war or maybe a shooting war with China. We cut off their ability to send us cheaply made stuff and suddendly our government realizes they have outsourced the military supply chain to China. So rebuilding a factory to make bullets gets really, really important when China stops sending them over to shoot at Chinese people.
Without something like that, the US will have a permanent 10-20% unemployment rate and Social Security will be gone.
If you didn't understand that ACORN was a scam when you first heard about it, you don't understand people. Same with BlueHippo.
There are times in everyone's life when you look at someone poor unfortunate soul and decide you should do something to help them or lift them up somehow. But to make a business out of doing this? No, sorry, it doesn't work that way. Neither financially or psychologically. What this means is that when you encounter any organization, group or company that seems like they are doing only good, altruistic work 100% of the time there is something wrong. Say, like when you hear about a company that takes people with no credit history or bad credit history and helps them get a computer by financing them. You can bet there is a substantial amount of fleecing going on.
Now, could Dell give 1 computer to poor people for every 1,000 they sell? Sure. Or the equivalent in some form more useful to poor people than a computer. And maybe they do with far less publicity.
So do you think an organization that is dedicated to getting housing for poor people, people with limited means, bad credit history and unstable work history might have some sort of alterior motive? Absolutely. And everything I have read about ACORN since the 1970s indicates that they have been playing games since their very inception. Games that have to do with power, control and influence that have nothing to do with their supposed mission.
What you are likely to find, even in your country, is that the laws need to be accessible to everyone but they do not have to be comprehensible. Pretty much on a planetary scale laws are in the relm of the Bible in 1300AD - a layperson might be able to read it, but it requires a priest to actually interpret it for the masses.
So yes, it might be required to present the written laws for everyone to read, but only a lawyer can actually interpret what this means. And judges are then free to make their own interpretation (within limits) from that. In the US any interpretation is subject to reversal by higher courts.
An average person being able to read the law is pretty much meaningless. The laws weren't written for people to understand them, they were written to be interpreted by the priesthood, er, lawyers and judges. This leads to the insane situation we have in the US today and the rest of the planet isn't much saner either.
Manufactured discs are read by a detecting a phase change in the reflection. This is done with a manufactured disc by casting the polycarbonate at different depths from the outer surface of the disc and the distance between a "pit" and a "land" can be detected easily with the optics.
Recordable discs today work by decreasing the amount of light being reflected from a fixed reflector. I suspect these discs work a lot more like a manufactured disc than recordable discs work today, but I haven't really read up on the physics of it. I understand the laser used is way, way more powerful than what is used to change the dye in current write-once recordable discs.
One user for this will almost certainly be the National Archives. Various state level archives will also probably be interested.
Unfortunately, that is about as far as it is likely to go because it is expensive and inconvenient. When the media is no longer being made, that is pretty much the end of this except for the discs that get produced between now and then.
This is the sort of thing that would require lots and lots of users - more than 51. I don't even think they will get all 51 in the US. And I don't see other countries paying to have this technology from an American company when they are so dependent on significant adoption.
Yes, come back in five years and this will not exist any longer.
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Simple answer: there is no way copyright rights holders can enforce copyright restrictions today. Not independently, perhaps not at all without the cooperation of users.
Does that really mean that copyright should be abolished? Does this mean that every business that depends on payment for use of materials should be eliminated?
As it stands today, I believe the answer is yes. Anyone in the business of selling movies, music, books or software should be completely and utterly barred from doing business. Either give it away for free or just stop. It is obvious to me that very few users of such materials would complain.
And let's see where things end up.
I am unfortunately forced to put most "believers" in Human-Caused Global Climate Change into the same group that believe in the "not a sparrow shall fall" form of biblical fundamentalism. Beliving that humans are fully in control of the Earth's climate and can change it at will is just as dangerous as those that believe in a personally involved God that oversees every event on Earth.
Right now, we have at our disposal enough information that we can see most of the inputs to the Earth's climate. We do not yet understand all of these inputs and their relative weightings. Nobody has any real knowledge of how much energy is stored in oceans or how much effect solar variance has on oceans.
Sure, we know there is a lot more CO2 than there was 100 years ago. And some fairly obvious conclusions can be drawn from there being more CO2, but we have real information for only an extremely short period for the Earth. We might know some things about the climate 1000 years ago, but the information is very incomplete.
Could the climate be changing? Sure it could. Can we materially change this, given what we know today? Almost certainly not, at least not without huge inputs of energy or removal of what energy we are putting into the climate system. Neither of which is proposed. The Earth's climate engine is something that is measured in gigajoules. So far, the proposals on the table are not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They are like dusting off the tower that held the Trinity device.
It is obvious that nobody in any position of power really believes there is some onrushing global catastrophe. Most of the rather weak carbon emissions reductions that have been proposed will have zero effect on emissions for a decade and even then it is a decrease in growth, not a real decrease in emissions. Of course, the costs for this decrease in growth will affect everyone in US and Europe in some pretty unpleasant ways. But still, regardless of the cost, the net effect is so close to zero as to be meaningless. And there is nobody saying that if these steps were taken immediately there would be any net change.
So what else could be done? Well, for starters we could eliminate passenger air travel. The reduction in emissions might only be 20% of the total but it would be a 20% decrease in emissions rather than a reduction in growth. We could require special permits to enter a large city by car. You can't outlaw cars in the US because of the way cities have been built for the last 70 years or so. By requiring such a permit it could eliminate much of the commutting by car that is happening. Might not cut emissions by more than 5%, but again it would be a 5% decrease rather than a decrease in growth. This might take years to be able to implement, but it could be done.
The problem is, if we did this what would happen? Nobody really knows. There is a theory that it might change the climate, or stop a change that we don't seem to like much. But the ugly truth is that we simply do not know what would happen. Clearly, the leaders of the world today do not believe (as some do) that it would save thousands if not millions of lives.
Instead, in the US we are looking at utterly pointless plans to implement some sort of point trading system that will enrich a few at the cost of all consumer goods going up in price. Oh the price for manufacturing them will stay the same, but transport will cost more. You can't bring manufacturing back to high-labor-cost US from cheap-labor-cost Mexico and China, but the traders can get rich. Net effect of this will be somewhat lower sales and the three or four manufacturers still in the US will be forced to move out. But little else will really change. Except the growth of emissions will slow just from economic changes.
If you believe that humans can change the climate in a few years with minor energy inputs you are almost certainly wrong. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the energies commanded by humans today could do any suc
Almost all the real "progress" that has happened in the US and Western Europe occurred during a time when labor was pretty cheap, when there were few environmental obstacles and when people were interested in "progress".
Today, environmental obstacles are placed in front of everything making it nearly impossible to build a bridge, a large factory or a power plant of any kind. Everything is going to affect the environment in some way, generally negatively for flora and fauna other than humans. We have lost the "mandate" to say that human considerations should trump all. And with that loss, we have pretty much said that if building a bridge will kill some fish, then we better not do it. 100 years ago the attitude was "So what?" That is a big difference. It is political suicide to come out and say something like a project will kill plenty of fish and animals, but that is the price of progress.
Almost nobody is interested in "progress" today. Many people actively distrust anyone in a professional or scientific capacity - the assumption is that they are in it for themselves somehow. So that means that the opinions of an engineer are actively discounted over the opinions of a housewife. We have become anti-intellectual and this has a real effect on everyone's ability to get things done.
Labor has also reached unbelievable proportions of any project. Building anything big has always cost lives, lives that today we cannot accept losing. Construction management knows that to build a large bridge there will be some number of people per mile that are injured and some number per mile killed. These statistics haven't really changed in over 100 years. The cost for building a large building used to be steel, concrete and other materials with labor being a factor but significantly less than the materials. Today the labor cost is probably double that of all other materials combined. This means a lot of projects simply aren't going to get done at all.
In China, India or Singapore there aren't such considerations and buildings are being built, bridges constructed and power plants and factories are going up rapidly. It isn't possible to generate the electricity in China and ship it to the US or Europe, so it is likely we are just going to have to do without. Fortunately, they can make lots of candles in China and ship them elsewhere.
The problem with the "follow the money" is that nobody with any means to do anything cares. Let's say you track the money to some Netherlands bank and find the guys running it. Local law enforcement, acting on your behalf, says "Gee, American sucker lost money. So what?"
UK, Ireland and Australia might care. Most other places you would need to hire a local lawyer and sue them in local court because local law enforcement just isn't interested. And if you get into places like Romania or Bulgaria you find out that ripping off Americans is legal there.
There just isn't any amount of weight someone in the US can bring down internationally to make local law enforcement do anything about this. No amount of diplomatic pressure is going to be enough, because it is going to come down very simply to being too trivial for diplomats to deal with.
Besides, this isn't happening "in the real world" at all - it is happening on the Internet. Even in the US "the Internet" gets lots of special treatment and enforcement of simple things. Stuff that would result in jail time off the Internet results in nothing at all when the same thing is done involving the Internet.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the main attraction for children is that the weirdo in the bushes is actually paying attention to them. Someone is talking to them, actually holding a conversation rather than just telling them to do stuff or to go somewhere else. You aren't going to counter that very easily because in today's society parenting is equal parts of pushing the kids away and trying to convince yourself that you should really say NO when everyone else on the planet seems to be saying YES.
So when they encounter someone that is interested in their life, their thoughts and just talking with them they are going to gravitate to it. In the background are the busy parents and the teachers trying to meet all the requirements of both parents and administration. No time to actually talk with the kids. So the pedophiles have an advantage over just about everyone else in the kids lives.
And until people understand that, all the dolphin buttons in the world aren't going to make a difference.
This is proof that anything in digital form will find it way into the most undeserving, obnoxious hands possible.
Sure, probably 90% of these messages are pointless and of no value to anyone. The remaining 10% are probably either personal information or are going to cause some people untold grief. Imagine walking into a conversation about a security video that got posted to YouTube only to discover it is the video of your husband or wife being murdered. This isn't much different for some people today.
Bad taste to publish this stuff? Na, this is the Internet. Bad taste is what it is all about. Lowest common denominator sells. If you haven't checked out rotten.com in a while, you are certainly missing something.
Sorry, but that is how it works with or without DNA. If someone sees you with the "person on the street" and they end up dead, you are a suspect simply because someone - or a camera - saw you, or thinks they saw you. Or saw someone that after obfuscation through a sketch artist ends up with a drawing that looks sort of like you. And they fax the picture around enough until someone says "Oh yeah, I know that guy."
The police pretty much have an impossible task today. 80-90% of crimes go without anyone being convicted simply because of the volume and potential number of suspects. If there is something to grab onto - like a picture from a camera or a "eyewitness" - they are going to use this no matter how unlikely it is that this information is really accurate. The police are there to catch people so they can be prosecuted, successfully or unsuccessfully. If the prosecution is unsuccessful, then maybe it was because they were innocent.
How did we get ourselves into this mess? Well, mostly I'd say because today at least 50% of the population of the US just doesn't believe they are going to get caught, so why not commit the crime? 70 years ago the police could count on only a small "criminal element", people that would potentially commit crimes. Today, they can't make that assumption - so the assumption is everyone is potentially a criminal. This is absolutely borne out by retail shoplifting statistics. Today, without extraordinary measures in place 10% of the people coming into a store are there to steal.
So why are they treating people like criminals? Perhaps because they deserve it.
Sure you do. Now, just as a reality check, ask your employer how much they pay in Unemployment Insurance. 4% of payroll? Or more? OK, so maybe the employee isn't paying for all of it.
Now look around a bit more. Arizona got federal funds to extend unemployment because the state fund was running dry. This means the money now isn't coming from either in-state employees or in-state employers but from the Federal Government tax revenue.
Unemployment didn't use to be so much "welfare", but it is moving more and more towards being something that everyone else pays and a few just get. And keep on getting and getting and getting.
Sorry, but DSL doesn't work in rural areas. You can run copper 20-30 miles from a CO to a house but after 2-3 miles DSL craps out. There are some places where they actually have repeaters (amplifiers) on individual phone line circuits because it is so far from the CO to the house.
DSL was designed for urban and suburban locations from the beginning. It doesn't work over long distances and can't be made to. A T1 circuit can work - with amplifiers - over any distance that exists from a CO to a house today. But a T1 circuit isn't cheap and isn't getting any cheaper.
As far as I know today, nobody is thinking about wiring up the really rural parts of the US that are left out today. If you don't have cable TV, you probably aren't going to get it in the near future. If you aren't within 20,000 feet of a CO, you will never, ever have DSL. I have a house that is a little over 17,000 feet from the CO and I had really, really slow DSL - but they finally went digital on the cable TV connection and we have cable Internet now.
But the folks down the road even further out of town have no cable and no possibility of DSL, ever. Nobody is going to run fiber miles through the woods, either. This is in Michigan, 30 miles south of Mackinaw City.
What happened in Illinois was simple. The state decided the lines should be open and decided the lines should cost some fixed amount statewide. Doesn't matter what the cost was, it was way, way below what it cost to maintain the copper wires. But the state "knew" that since the wires were already there, in the ground and on the poles, that there were no more real costs.
This resulted in great "openness" and a real bonanza for DSL startups. Just like you would think it would.
Only problem was, a small dose of reality got injected because the folks maintaining the lines adopted a go-slow policy on actually making this stuff available below cost. I guess they could have decided to go along with the state's wisdom on this matter and ended up either trying to finance the line maintenance some other way or just gone out of business. I guess neither option really appealed to them.
End result is no more "openness" and no more state-mandated access to what is now SBC's copper. It was an interesting period from around 1996 to maybe 2002, but it accomplished nothing and was entirely driven by the state imagining they knew enough to run Ameritech's business. They didn't and it showed. I am not in favor of trying this again because for anyone that really needed services from Ameritech (then, SBC now) it put up huge roadblocks - they couldn't deny services to folks that wanted to resell DSL service if they were servicing other customers quickly. So everything was go-slow for years.
We tried that already in 1996 in some parts of the country. I don't think it ever made it everywhere. The problem was, the State came in and said to the incumbant telco that they would permit other companies to use their lines for some payment (say $1 per line) ignoring what their own information and that of the telco said it cost to maintain the line. Say the real cost was $5 per line.
The result was a bonanza - lots of start-up companies formed to take advantage of this huge disparity in costs. They got plenty of investors because just dealing with the arbitrage between the $1 fee and $5 real cost could result in $4 getting passed around. Just collecting the interest on this money was worthwhile if there was enough of it.
Well, obviously nobody spends $5 on something and sells it for $1, at least not very long. Nearly all of the DSL start-ups failed when the real terms of the deal becaome known to everyone. We still have some folks trying to play at this game of paying less than what the service they are getting costs. Vonage is there because of this play and the bones of the whole Sprint ION fiasco. End result is that there is a real cost and if you separate by force the profit from the cost the cost has to be paid somehow.
Nobody wants that. We have been hiding the cost of physical line maintenance for a long time, probably since around 1960 or so. And the structure of the incumbant phone companies allowed these costs to be very effectively buried. So effectively that today nobody knows where the real cost-sinks are.
The end result of this is likely another stab at state-mandated fees for line use. And whatever the fee is, it will be too low for reality. My guess is this time around they will really break the system and the lines will simply not be maintained for years.
This was tried in 1996, with the government mandating the cost of service - what part 1 had to pay part 2. Problem was, the mandated payment wasn't really enough to cover it. Works out fine when it is all just different parts of the same company.
Doesn't work at all for third-party company that wants to offer DSL service. Third party company starts out thinking they are getting a great deal and many investors flock to the new company with visions of how profitable it is going to be. DSL service explodes, at least it did in Northern Illinois.
Well, it turns out that with just about anything if you get a price that is too low to actually make anyone want to do the work, they end up not wanting to do the work. End result was that Ameritech (former Illinois Bell company that owned the lines) would get a request to put a different company's DSLAM into their CO and they would sit on it for a while hoping it would just go away. If it did get installed, provisioning the lines to connect to it would be made dead last priority - as you would expect.
Having the State set the price for the service was a disaster. We had $14.95 DSL plans but you could never get connected. There were 10 different companies offering DSL service in some places - except they couldn't get their equipment installed. I believe some sanity returned four or five years ago and the idea of DSL competition at state-mandated fee levels was pretty much discarded.
I believe state-mandated T1 pricing is still in effect, however, and it results in some very odd market distortions. General rule that seems to apply is whenever anyone puts their thumb on the scale, be it the butcher or the governer, it turns out bad for the consumer in the end.
There is an interesting corrallary here that I think you need to think about.
It is taken by some as absolute fact that "not a sparrow shall fall" without God's knowledge and consent. Their view is an active God that is involved in every detail of every moment on the planet.
It is now presented that the Earth's climate is changing in ways that may not be optimal for Man, or at least large numbers of Man. It is taken as an absolute fact that Man can intervene in this process and control it such that these sub-optimal changes do not occur.
See the corrallary?
Ah, but we can try, can't we?
That is certainly the point of most of this. We are uncertain about what the "inputs" are into the climate system. We are equally unsure of what the "outputs" are and have no clue as to the process of what drives the climate. However, in spite of this, some folks feel they are qualified to observe the outputs, detect what they believe is a short term trend that if it continued might be harmful.
Based on this, we are supposed to make changes that may (or may not) affect the "inputs" into the system. Without understanding the real inputs, the real outputs or the processing that is going on. Sounds somewhat fishy.
Given our knowledge from the past, it seems apparent that there have been much wider swings in climate than we are talking about happening here now. It is unknown what caused these events, how fast they occurred or even really what happened other than seeing some apparent results hundreds or thousands of years later. By ignoring this we are persuaded that we should make drastic changes in the economy that may change the inputs into the climate - without doing the most basic things that would actually affect these inputs in the most direct way possible and have less of an impact on society as a whole.
Very, very fishy. Almost as if someone wanted to obfuscate the real goal.
It is for your own good, and there are some people that know it. These enlightened ones, often called things like "people looking out for the betterment of the planet" are there with a job to do and they are doing it. We are in the process of discarding the industrial base of the US because of their influence. We haven't built a major power plant in the US since the 1970s because of their influence. Many regulations have been passed - all for our own good - because of their influence.
Besides, who signed off on the US being able to hog most of the planet's resources anyway? I am sure there are many that believe the US needs to be taken down a peg or two so as to preserve the remaining resources for the rest of the planet. Certainly doing so as part of an enviornmental movement can't be all bad. Especially if you aren't going to be affected because you are either too poor or too rich.
The problem is that these folks never seem to be able to explain how this really helps much or what the final end point of this might be. The simple solution - fewer people - is starting to get some favor but not much. Especially when it is pretty obvious that we can't really wait for hundreds or thousands of years for the population to shrink gradually. No, only a major war or global genocide would actually help much, and nobody really wants to come out and admit that would be part of a plan for goodness.
I think you miss the point. If we can conserve on electricity to the point where the coal plants are no longer necessary, then we have won. The end goal is a bit further than you imagine, you just have to stretch out a bit further in your comprehension.
Of course, this is like trying to refill a dry lake by not drinking. But it is clearly the agenda at work.
There have been no new large-scale generating facilities built in the US since sometime in the 1970s. We overbuilt back in the 1950s to support growth and we have skated by on that excess capacity since then. Nobody is building anything today. Asking any environmentalist where it would be good to put a new power plant will get you an answer of "Nowhere." Until we figure out a way around the roadblock put up against construction, we aren't going anywhere.
And anything that uses electricity is evil.
That is clearly the direction the US is headed in. Another thing you are going to see is that electric power is available for offices and factories OR homes, not both. So during the day your power is off at home while you work.
You know, there is another solution. It doesn't seem to be very popular in California or really anywhere else in the US, but it is a completely viable solution. Someone, somewhere might get it into their heads that building a large-scale power plant is a good idea. You could run it off all sorts of different things - nuclear, geothermal, solar heating, etc. It doesn't have to be coal fired. But it is impossible to get a permit to build such a thing today. So for the last 30-40 years the only generating plants that have been built have been natural-gas fired "peaker" plants that were (ha ha ha) intended to only run during periods of peak load. Of course, they are running at maximum capacity 24x7 now.
And we are about out of capacity. So we can either learn to get along in an environment where electric power is unreliable, inconsistent and unpredictable, OR we can build some new large scale plants.
Personally, I am counting on no new plants being built anytime soon.
Innappropriate appropriation of materials, i.e., copyright infringement or piracy is a pretty significant threat these days. It is easy to take down a company simply by redistributing their products for free. The number of people that will pay when the same product is available for free is shrinking. Really now, why would someone pay when in the bin right next to the one they are looking at is the same thing for free?
The threat of loss of most, if not all, revenue is very real in the software world. It has come home to the music business in China such that recorded music is simply not produced any longer. It will come to the US and Western Europe. Movies are probably not far behind - why pay $20 to visit a noisy theater when you can have equivalent sound and picture in your home for free?
With this firmly in mind, why wouldn't the copyright holders be pushing for all the legal enforcement they can get? Since the government's position is pretty much that this is (a) a violation of the law and (b) loss of tax revenues so they are likely to be on the side of the copyright holder, not the citizen violators in every case. So of course there are going to be draconian laws that have little or no effect because, like speeding laws, they catch 1% of the people violating the law and can't ever do better than that.
You might consider this the last gasp of copyright enforcement, but it is likely to last a very long time. In the US it is generally known that almost everyone speeds and have for 80 years or so. Law enforcement has been "cracking down" and imposing draconian penalties on speeders since the beginning of the automobile era. So don't expect copyright enforcement to just fade away anytime soon.
The problem is not identifying the tax rates. That is relatively simple. The problem is translating the customer address to a geolocation that corresponds with a local taxing body.
The first step to trying to understand the problem is to figure out what city, county and township a given address is. Take your home address and try to figure this out from accessible sources on the Internet. Good luck.
There is no simple way to do this, and nobody is publishing information that makes it even reasonably possible.
Sorry, but it isn't done at the state level. Once you have to pay taxes in a state, you need to calculate the rate based on where in the state the customer is usually. This means, for example, in Ohio where taxes are calculated on a township level that you have a separate tax rate for every township in the state.
Other states, like Illinois, change the tax rates based on city and county rather than township.
There is no 1-to-1 mapping of townships to cities or vice versa. This means you need to have multiple ways of mapping where customers are located based on the state. And these boundaries are by no means static. Some previously unclaimed land ends up annexed by a city and it changes the tax rate.
OK, so you just reduce it down to a single tax rate. Except that doesn't solve the paying problem: you still have thousands of different taxing bodies that collect the tax. So if you make a sale in Sharon township in Ohio, you would need to pay Sharon township. At that point, you may as well just have a different tax rate because you need to identify the customer down to the city, county, township and a couple of other boundaries as well.
No, I do not think you could ever get this done at a state level only.
Your mistake is believing that either Wall Street or the government has to deliver. They aren't, they can't and people are beginning to figure it out. And it isn't that there is a choice between the two - the government doesn't have the ability to back up their promises to people working today.
Social Security is based on the idea of a growing labor pool. It works because the factories got larger and employed more and more people. The office buildings got taller and taller and more and more people were employed. Today, the US in a shrinking labor pool. There are almost no factories left in the US and the workers that are left are tending to the machines that replaced the thousands of workers there were in the 1950s.
Once the labor pool starts to shrink, Social Security is doomed. There are more people collecting than paying in eventually and the system has to collapse. The time to fix this was in 1980 when the factories started to disappear - if the government allowed that trend to continue - and they did - the future was written in stone. There is nothing that can be done about it today.
Maybe the only reasonable way is for the people to finance the government. Your savings go into bonds that the government pays interest on. Because of compounding interest, your deposits grow so they money you put into this in your 20s is enough to support you in your 80s. Unfortunately, that wouldn't have helped the old people in 1935 and everyone knew that factories and the labor pool would continue to grow forever.
Today about the only thing that will bring manufacturing back to the US would be a trade war or maybe a shooting war with China. We cut off their ability to send us cheaply made stuff and suddendly our government realizes they have outsourced the military supply chain to China. So rebuilding a factory to make bullets gets really, really important when China stops sending them over to shoot at Chinese people.
Without something like that, the US will have a permanent 10-20% unemployment rate and Social Security will be gone.
If you didn't understand that ACORN was a scam when you first heard about it, you don't understand people. Same with BlueHippo.
There are times in everyone's life when you look at someone poor unfortunate soul and decide you should do something to help them or lift them up somehow. But to make a business out of doing this? No, sorry, it doesn't work that way. Neither financially or psychologically. What this means is that when you encounter any organization, group or company that seems like they are doing only good, altruistic work 100% of the time there is something wrong. Say, like when you hear about a company that takes people with no credit history or bad credit history and helps them get a computer by financing them. You can bet there is a substantial amount of fleecing going on.
Now, could Dell give 1 computer to poor people for every 1,000 they sell? Sure. Or the equivalent in some form more useful to poor people than a computer. And maybe they do with far less publicity.
So do you think an organization that is dedicated to getting housing for poor people, people with limited means, bad credit history and unstable work history might have some sort of alterior motive? Absolutely. And everything I have read about ACORN since the 1970s indicates that they have been playing games since their very inception. Games that have to do with power, control and influence that have nothing to do with their supposed mission.
What you are likely to find, even in your country, is that the laws need to be accessible to everyone but they do not have to be comprehensible. Pretty much on a planetary scale laws are in the relm of the Bible in 1300AD - a layperson might be able to read it, but it requires a priest to actually interpret it for the masses.
So yes, it might be required to present the written laws for everyone to read, but only a lawyer can actually interpret what this means. And judges are then free to make their own interpretation (within limits) from that. In the US any interpretation is subject to reversal by higher courts.
An average person being able to read the law is pretty much meaningless. The laws weren't written for people to understand them, they were written to be interpreted by the priesthood, er, lawyers and judges. This leads to the insane situation we have in the US today and the rest of the planet isn't much saner either.
Manufactured discs are read by a detecting a phase change in the reflection. This is done with a manufactured disc by casting the polycarbonate at different depths from the outer surface of the disc and the distance between a "pit" and a "land" can be detected easily with the optics.
Recordable discs today work by decreasing the amount of light being reflected from a fixed reflector. I suspect these discs work a lot more like a manufactured disc than recordable discs work today, but I haven't really read up on the physics of it. I understand the laser used is way, way more powerful than what is used to change the dye in current write-once recordable discs.
One user for this will almost certainly be the National Archives. Various state level archives will also probably be interested.
Unfortunately, that is about as far as it is likely to go because it is expensive and inconvenient. When the media is no longer being made, that is pretty much the end of this except for the discs that get produced between now and then.
This is the sort of thing that would require lots and lots of users - more than 51. I don't even think they will get all 51 in the US. And I don't see other countries paying to have this technology from an American company when they are so dependent on significant adoption.
Yes, come back in five years and this will not exist any longer.