First rule of Verizon: the people in the stores know nothing and are not backed up by the home office.
This means the people in the stores will tell you things that are completely wrong. This can result in your being charged extra for things because the people in the stores have no ability to enforce their promises. The 800 number is the only "customer service" that exists for Verizon. Even at a "store manager" level, they have no power, no training and no ability to get anything done. This pretty much means they are there to dial the phone and put the customer on the phone with the 800 number customer service people.
The stores seem to exist to provide an image of local, in person support when none really exists. I have dealt with some good stores and some bad stores, but over all it doesn't make any difference - because the manager can promise you something or interpret some vague statement for you and then you get a bill that says exactly the opposite. Calling the 800 number gets responses like "they shouldn't have told you that" and worse.
End result is very simple. Verizon stores are perhaps a place to pick up a phone. They cannot do anything more than that for you. Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.
But the whole point of the Internet is anonymity. Making uninformed statements about stuff you know nothing about is the hallmark of the Internet.
Of course connecting people's real identity with their comments would cut out most of the real entertainment of the Internet and make it a far more civil place. It is for this very reason that most reasoning people fight so hard for anonymity (real or imagined) on the Internet. We like the inspid, stupid, uninformed comments that pervade every forum.
Sadly, Google isn't a terribly useful place to look for information about things like the Iran election, healthcare nonsense and the Iraq war. What you are going to find there are opinions of uninformed people and opinions of people that think they are informed.
No facts, all opinion. Oh, there might be an occaisional fact buried in there somewhere, but it isn't easy to discern facts from fantasy. And no, I don't believe CNN, Fox or any other "news" organization has a monopoly on facts - they all mix it liberally with fantasy.
So you would trade the advertising market for government control? Why wouldn't the government just revoke the pass from anyone that was critical of current government policy? As long as everyone played nice, by the current administration rules, they would be fine - but step out of line and you are canceled.
No, I don't think more government control is a good idea. I think we have had quite enough of government control - as weak and ineffectual as it has been - for a while.
We are about to cede control over health care economics and availability over to the government to the cheering of the few. We certainly don't need to give up informing people along with that.
We have a military so politically correct that when faced with persons that give presentations to upper echelon staff with phrases like "We love death more than you love life", does nothing. End result: 12 people dead, more injured.
We have the TSA that is so fearful of "profiling" people so they feel they must hassle white grandmothers while letting young Muslim men proceed to test the boundaries of airline security.
We have police that do not wish to be accused of "profiling" in any way, so basically give a pass to illegal immigrants driving without licenses while stopping and ticketing others. This continues even in the face of significant numbers of accidents caused by such illegal immigrants.
While it might be illegal to defraud Americans in America, it clearly isn't when it is being done from places like Bulgaria. So we have US-based registrars setting up domains for people with names like "citibank-online.com" and "ebay-online.com" when the purchasor is in places where law enforcement isn't going to bother them. And then we poor Americans all cry about how bank security is so lax. Unfortunately, all of the protections that work in the real world aren't being applied online, so it is easy to steal from people without fear of any consequences.
Face it, we're due for some trouble. If thousands of people die because someone takes out the power grid for a week it isn't because security is lax - it is because the people that are paid to handle security are looking the other way. Intentionally. And no, unlike the guy on 60 minutes when thousands die it will not be a "wakeup call" and everything is magically fixed. It is going to take a lot more than that.
So what laws do you think are being broken? And how would any government prosecute someone or even collect evidence to be used in a prosecution? They might have an IP address, but we have just spent a few years proving in courts that an IP address cannot be connected to an individual.
In most of the places where the people who are running these things are located it simply isn't against the law to do so. You might be surprised at how many places it is legal to defraud and steal from US citizens when it is not legal to do the same things to their fellow countrymen. End result is, there really isn't any prosecution possible.
The problem is, these days that information is simply not kept by anyone anymore. It isn't reported on effectively. So the information might exist in some form in a police database, but you and I are never going to gain access to it.
The problem is, nobody is paying anyone for the news today. So there will be no "good journalists" in the future because nobody is going to waste their time doing that job for nothing.
If your current career paid you zero dollars, would you keep doing it out of loyalty? I know some teachers might. Except they need to pay the rent, buy food, etc. So no matter how dedicated they are, they are going to spend their hours doing something that pays for rent, food. etc.
The "new media" consists of reading stuff written by people that are driven to write it by their own ego. So you get terrific articles that are written by dedicated people... except they are utterly the product of one person's delusions about the world. This isn't news or journalism, it is like finding someone making a speech in a public park.
As some other folks have said, nobody is every going to pay again. Or at least not in our lifetimes. It is expected to just all be free because it is on the Internet. So instead of news we are going to have blogs and ranting.
The problem is what Google is doing often is presenting either enough of the content so that I never need to "click here" or the entire content on a Google page, once again never redirecting to the original page.
I do not know what the formula is, but Google just picks up some news stories and resources them on a Google site, while others are merely linked to with a few lines of text. Certainly when the entire article is picked up and linked to on a Google server there is room for complaint.
As to Google hosting enough of the content that I never need the original site, I don't think there is much of a way around that right now. Google is certainly on a path to own online news and it is going to be interesting to see how they squash everyone else out of that business.
In rural and suburban areas, this can work. For 500 people in an apartment building with no heat and nowhere to connect a generator, this means probably 400 people die. Multiply by the number of apartment buildings in Chicago, New York or Boston.
Modern cities do not do well without electricity, as was shown as far back an 1965.
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
We can build all the smaller natural gas "peaker" plants we want, but it will not solve the problem of electric power demand exceeding existing generating capacity. We are rapidly approaching that point. Solar isn't going to help much, even if we paved all of Arizona, Nevada and Southeast California with silicon.
The biggest problem is that if someone got a permit and started building a 4,000 MW coal plant today, it wouldn't be finished for five years. A nuclear plant is more likely to take ten years to go online. So we better hope our base generating capacity - the kind we really need at 6:00 PM when folks have their air conditioners turned on and turn on the electric range to heat up dinner - will meet the need for the next five years until that plant gets online. Only problem is, there are no plants being built right now - maybe we will start soon, but so far nothing.
So we better hope there is a lot of excess capacity in the system so everything can keep growing, like the economy and jobs. Oh wait, there isn't much (if any) excess capacity today. I wonder what will happen?
I see lots of people deciding they don't need a landline any more. Well, for a single person or in the case where everyone in the house has a cell phone, that can work. It works better when your wireless carrier has a WiFi component to their plan - although since they lose money by the fistful on these I would expect either the carrier or the plan to disappear.
But what happens when you have a three-year-old child? Going to get them a cell phone? I don't think so. And while you can teach a three year old to dial 911 calling from a cell phone may not be anywhere near as easy or helpful. In a house the GPS chip isn't going to work so well, so your phone isn't going to know where it is. Meaning that the fire department doesn't know where to go.
Landline phone service is also just plain more reliable. If you live in an area where there are weather-related power outages, which is just about anywhere, you can't assume that the cell tower infrastructure has much battery backup - some have none at all. Contrast this with the landline Central Office which when the batteries start getting low fires up the generator to keep dial tone available. I have had no electricity from the power company for more than 24 hours after an ice storm, before there were cell phones. After a few hours a cell phone would be a paperweight under these circumstances.
Why do you need a land line? Children. Emergencies. Power outages. Maybe you don't care now, but you very well might in the future.
And one thing to consider. If enough people drop land lines, they will disappear entirely. Try, just try to find a pay phone outside of an airport or train station today. Nobody needs them, unless your cell phone dies and you need to call someone like maybe a tow truck. Good luck, because pay phones have been declared obsolete. So now there is no alternative. Land lines might be declared obsolete as well - in which case good luck teaching your young children how to dial out on your Blackberry.
No, the first such laws were for felonies - after the third felony (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc.) you got life in prison.
It should be clear to some what is going on when it takes getting convicted three times of such crimes to put someone away for 20+ years. Because at a state level, "life" isn't until you die in prison. It is a lot closer to 20 years or so.
Even so, some folks really got tired of dealing with revolving door prisons and some guy convicted of a fifth armed robbery.
It will not, as long as both registrars and SSL providers will register ANYTHING. And they will. I got an email recently directing me to something like citibank-online.com. If you can register that and not have anything to do with CitiBank itself, you have pretty much a blank check to defraud people. And there is no part of "common sense" that will help people.
Because citibank-online.com is a perfectly valid domain and could certainly have SSL. I will bet there will be an EV SSL provider that would sell a certificate for this in the not too distant future as well. Might be $50,000 for the certificate, but I can assume someone will do it.
The problem is, it isn't common sense. If I can register a domain like citibank-online.com or similar things using real, trademarked names common sense almost doesn't apply anymore. A web site can get an SSL certificate for citibank-online.com from some places as well.
The folks that should be preventing this have seriously dropped the ball. We have registrars which will register anything and SSL providers which will generate a certificate for anything. We jut recently went through the whole "extended validation" scam which pretends to have certificates which have real validation rather than just "you appear to really own this domain" validation. How long will it be until someone figures out there is a provider which will give out EV SSL certificates if you pay them enough? Not long, I trust.
So we can have a web site that looks completely legitimate, with a legitimate sounding domain name and SSL certificate to match. How does common sense enter into this for most people? Telling them that they will never, ever receive an email from their bank with a link in it? Sorry, a lot of banks are already violating that and sending out email with links.
This means the average person has no clue if they should be using citibank.com or citibank-online.com. And they get an email from "president@citibank-online.com" saying they should now use the new domain for all their transactions. I don't see how common sense applies any longer at all to this.
Hopefully, someone besides the government could see the absurdity of this and clamp down on the fraud sites. Should be pretty easy to find them and find the registrar that is making this all possible. But, if that isn't going to happen, we can expect some kind of government response. Law enforcement isn't going to work - it is probably legal to defraud Americans in many parts of the world.
The problem is between the backbone and the house you have a "neighborhood node" which (for cable) translates between the fiber connected to the head end and the actual coax for the neighborhood. It would be possible to run fiber from that node to each house - but each house is limited by the total bandwidth of the fiber to the head end, which isn't much more than 10Gb/sec. Say, there are 1000 houses in the neighborhood - that means you divide 10Gb/sec by 1000 and have 1Mb/sec for every house (dedicated) and without any TV channels.
And that is assuming a generous 10Gb/sec for the head end connection fiber. It might be much less than that.
The TV channels I believe run around 1Gb/sec total. So now everyone is fighting over the remaining 9Gb/sec, assuming we started with 10.
Well, that is too low, so we aren't playing the dedicated game. Since most of the users aren't using anywhere near even 900K/sec all the time there is in fact plenty of bandwidth to go around. Except when more than a couple of houses in this 1000 house neighborhood are using 10Mb/sec or more. The system wasn't designed for that, so it starts to fall apart.
You can say the system should be redesigned, and fiber run individually to every house instead of through a neighborhood concentrator. But given the costs of running the fiber to the head end and the fact it has been done already, this is probably not an argument that carries much weight.
The problem that I think a lot of people are missing is quite simple. Distribution of copyright materials - books, movies, music, software, everything - became a source of revenue before 1900 in US and Europe. The "publisher model" where the publisher fronts all the costs and takes the lion's share of the revenue became quite common. This model allowed for considerable growth of book and music publishing over more than 100 years.
Today, for the people on one side of the Digital Divide, the publisher doesn't seem to be all that necessary. There may be smaller role in the area of promotion, but the driver of the promotion was the big revenue that was possible from the combination of mass distribution and mass promotion, usually at significant cost. One problem with the idea of the publisher being obsolete is the people on the "other" side of the Digital Divide. Without publishers, and without broadband Internet, they are going to be left out of all media in the future.
But even without publishers, creative people that are producing copyright materials deserve something for their efforts. Sure, hundreds of years ago their compensation was in the form of patronage. They produced works that their patrons wanted and got a living from it. This produced a particularly stilted kind of works for quite a while. It would be a shame to think that only the likely jaded tastes of the rich and powerful would be represented by future creative works under a reincarnation of a patronage system.
But how else are creative works going to be produced? It is apparent from where I sit that people that grew up with the Internet simply will not pay. If free materials of their liking aren't available, pirated works will be and they will be used. User-generated and most free content has shown it to be worth precisely what is being charged for it. While some is good, most isn't. As are most things that the owner is willing to part with for free.
The answer for the masses isn't going to be that everything is free, because this will leave the masses without much new materials. The "oldies" will always be with us - e.g., 1970s music and Project Gutenberg - but to get new works of "value" something has to be exchanged. And most people find it difficult to live off fame and reputation.
So how do creative people replace the revenue that controlling the distribution of their work gave them? It doesn't matter if this distribution was direct or through a publisher, there was some revenue there. The answer isn't that this revenue just disappears, because if it does just evaporate some (probably large) fraction of these creative people will end up doing something else that does pay. Failing to come up with a real answer for this leaves the whole system in limbo, as it is today - everything is free to the Internet generation leaving the oldsters to pay. This arrangement isn't going to last forever, and may not last very much longer.
The Kindle does not use a Windows application in any way. It also does not display PDF files without conversion, but I am not aware of any Windows application that will convert most PDF files for use on a Kindle. There are some tools that support conversion from various formats on Windows, Linux and OSX to the Mobipocket format. I haven't used any of those.
PDF is a Page Description language. If you want to display a PDF page, you need to either have a display surface that will accomodate the orginally described page or you are going to have to do a lot of scrolling around. Maybe zooming as well. On a computer this isn't that difficult but on a eBook reader it is not very user friendly. The Kindle DX attempts to do this and as its screen is almost letter-size it is possible to display PDF pages - just not very well.
Mostly, if you want the display features of the Kindle, things like dynamic sizing of text, you aren't going to be able to display any of those things with a PDF. A lot of PDFs out in the world are also just a collection of graphics (bitmaps) and no text at all. There are services that will attempt to OCR the graphics and add a "hidden" text layer to the PDF document - and I expect them to work like most OCR does, maybe 98% accuracy. So in a short 100,000 word book there might only be 2,000 words wrong. Not so great.
You want to display PDF documents on eBook reader? Well, the one thing that will make this really good is to license the Adobe DRM stuff so protected PDF documents can be read. Then as long as your eBook reader screen is laid out in a manner corresponding to the original page formatting, you will have a good experience. Public libraries in my area are currently loaning out protected PDF ebooks for the readers that support them - not very many now. Not being able to display protected Adobe PDF documents cuts out a lot of PDF support. Not being able to display Google Books (mostly graphics) cuts out another huge part of potential PDFs that could be displayed.
Yes, the EPUB format would be nice to support, but the Kindle supports Mobipocket which is almost as prevalent as EPUB today. Yes, I can download Gutenberg documents in Mobipocket format and they work fine with the Kindle.
Well, you might look at the incredible penetration of smartcards in everyday use for a hint as to why DirecTV might be going this way. In the US today there have been two credit cards using smartcard technology, and as of yet there is really nowhere to use their smartcard functionality.
Target did pass out free smartcard readers for a while, until they figured out that nobody was interested and it didn't really improve security at all. As far as I know, there is nothing to use the American Express card with at all.
There is some integration with Windows for extended identification, but I have never seen anyone actually using this capability. As I do not believe the cards for this application are in fact writable in any respect, a writer isn't very useful with these cards.
So while read/write smartcards are interesting and all that, in the US they have extremely limited use. In general, I would say the only consumer application of smartcards today is DirecTV. So what would the average consumer use a smartcard writer for? Well, DirecTV of course.
The problem is the Internet mentality that it all should be free.
Of course, people that are getting paid for their text aren't going to continue to be paid forever when nobody is paying to read their output - unless the Government is subsidising journalism and and opinion columnists. So that type of content is just going to disappear. Probably not quietly.
So what can be done about it? Well, I'd guess that in 50 or 70 years people will finally be fed up with "free" and be ready to pay for anything as long as it is better than what they see they can get for free. But it is going to take a while to get "free" out of everyone's system. We are experiencing the result of a generation raised on "free" and they still see what is left lying around from people that get paid.
When that finally disappears, we will be able to judge the quality of free. My guess is there will still be 1970s music being played because it was produced for lots of money. The 2020 music scene (all free, nobody paying for anything) will be stunningly awful.
Let's see, so if you can't spend millions of dollars with video production and an ad agency, you might as well forget advertising on TV?
You didn't think those Apple ads were cheap to do, did you? Sure, the background is pretty simple to do in a studio, but believe me someone had a lot of selling to do to push that format through the creative mill.
Your average car dealer ad probably cost less than $25,000 to produce end-to-end. I guess advertising on TV will be only for multinationals now.
What people have come to expect on the Internet is "free". If it isn't free, there must be someone else offering it, legally or not, for free. And the modern Internet user is going to take it from where it is offered for free.
That pretty much means that newspaper classified ads aren't going to work - people just go to Craigslist. It means that selling music online isn't going to work, because it is all out there for free, unless you need Apple to hold your hand and guide you through the process of filling up your iPod.
It certainly means that news, opinion and commentary aren't going to work if you want people to pay for them.
Unfortunately, if you are someone that was getting paid to produce textual material as news, opinion or commentary, you probably aren't going to get paid to do that any longer. There just isn't any call for someone to get paid to do something that will generate zero revenue. Similarly, with aggregation and Google, nobody needs to know where the original text came from, so you can't count on ad revenue supporting a site that in turn supports the writer. The original site can't control the material any longer. Google might tell you where it came from (not as a link, but just text) but what other sites are also copying the content and not attributing it.
It isn't just the judge. Complex court cases often involve tens of people in associated areas, including law schools. If it is not possible to take the technical aspects out of a case so that people not trained in the technology can understand it, you are setting up for some sort of "high court of tech" that is excluded from review.
What is being attempted is to remove the technology from the issues of law so that everyone can review matters. This is the same thing that happens with medical malpractice - the judge does not have to be a doctor, the prosecutor doesn't have to be a doctor and outside consultants on matters of law do not have to be doctors. Becase in the end the facts of the case and the law can be separated.
The alternative is that there would need to be dozens of specialized courts and the idea of a jury would be thrown out - no jury could possibly be seated that was (a) impartial and (b) knowledgeable about the subject matter.
I thought the whole problem was that there are signature checks in the boot loader and Psystar is circumventing these checks, thus making a derivative copy of the boot loader.
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First rule of Verizon: the people in the stores know nothing and are not backed up by the home office.
This means the people in the stores will tell you things that are completely wrong. This can result in your being charged extra for things because the people in the stores have no ability to enforce their promises. The 800 number is the only "customer service" that exists for Verizon. Even at a "store manager" level, they have no power, no training and no ability to get anything done. This pretty much means they are there to dial the phone and put the customer on the phone with the 800 number customer service people.
The stores seem to exist to provide an image of local, in person support when none really exists. I have dealt with some good stores and some bad stores, but over all it doesn't make any difference - because the manager can promise you something or interpret some vague statement for you and then you get a bill that says exactly the opposite. Calling the 800 number gets responses like "they shouldn't have told you that" and worse.
End result is very simple. Verizon stores are perhaps a place to pick up a phone. They cannot do anything more than that for you. Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.
But the whole point of the Internet is anonymity. Making uninformed statements about stuff you know nothing about is the hallmark of the Internet.
Of course connecting people's real identity with their comments would cut out most of the real entertainment of the Internet and make it a far more civil place. It is for this very reason that most reasoning people fight so hard for anonymity (real or imagined) on the Internet. We like the inspid, stupid, uninformed comments that pervade every forum.
Sadly, Google isn't a terribly useful place to look for information about things like the Iran election, healthcare nonsense and the Iraq war. What you are going to find there are opinions of uninformed people and opinions of people that think they are informed.
No facts, all opinion. Oh, there might be an occaisional fact buried in there somewhere, but it isn't easy to discern facts from fantasy. And no, I don't believe CNN, Fox or any other "news" organization has a monopoly on facts - they all mix it liberally with fantasy.
So you would trade the advertising market for government control? Why wouldn't the government just revoke the pass from anyone that was critical of current government policy? As long as everyone played nice, by the current administration rules, they would be fine - but step out of line and you are canceled.
No, I don't think more government control is a good idea. I think we have had quite enough of government control - as weak and ineffectual as it has been - for a while.
We are about to cede control over health care economics and availability over to the government to the cheering of the few. We certainly don't need to give up informing people along with that.
Well, for starters, there is free and not free. Ebay isn't free. Pirated is free.
Free is obviously better.
We have a military so politically correct that when faced with persons that give presentations to upper echelon staff with phrases like "We love death more than you love life", does nothing. End result: 12 people dead, more injured.
We have the TSA that is so fearful of "profiling" people so they feel they must hassle white grandmothers while letting young Muslim men proceed to test the boundaries of airline security.
We have police that do not wish to be accused of "profiling" in any way, so basically give a pass to illegal immigrants driving without licenses while stopping and ticketing others. This continues even in the face of significant numbers of accidents caused by such illegal immigrants.
While it might be illegal to defraud Americans in America, it clearly isn't when it is being done from places like Bulgaria. So we have US-based registrars setting up domains for people with names like "citibank-online.com" and "ebay-online.com" when the purchasor is in places where law enforcement isn't going to bother them. And then we poor Americans all cry about how bank security is so lax. Unfortunately, all of the protections that work in the real world aren't being applied online, so it is easy to steal from people without fear of any consequences.
Face it, we're due for some trouble. If thousands of people die because someone takes out the power grid for a week it isn't because security is lax - it is because the people that are paid to handle security are looking the other way. Intentionally. And no, unlike the guy on 60 minutes when thousands die it will not be a "wakeup call" and everything is magically fixed. It is going to take a lot more than that.
So what laws do you think are being broken? And how would any government prosecute someone or even collect evidence to be used in a prosecution? They might have an IP address, but we have just spent a few years proving in courts that an IP address cannot be connected to an individual.
In most of the places where the people who are running these things are located it simply isn't against the law to do so. You might be surprised at how many places it is legal to defraud and steal from US citizens when it is not legal to do the same things to their fellow countrymen. End result is, there really isn't any prosecution possible.
The problem is, these days that information is simply not kept by anyone anymore. It isn't reported on effectively. So the information might exist in some form in a police database, but you and I are never going to gain access to it.
The problem is, nobody is paying anyone for the news today. So there will be no "good journalists" in the future because nobody is going to waste their time doing that job for nothing.
If your current career paid you zero dollars, would you keep doing it out of loyalty? I know some teachers might. Except they need to pay the rent, buy food, etc. So no matter how dedicated they are, they are going to spend their hours doing something that pays for rent, food. etc.
The "new media" consists of reading stuff written by people that are driven to write it by their own ego. So you get terrific articles that are written by dedicated people... except they are utterly the product of one person's delusions about the world. This isn't news or journalism, it is like finding someone making a speech in a public park.
As some other folks have said, nobody is every going to pay again. Or at least not in our lifetimes. It is expected to just all be free because it is on the Internet. So instead of news we are going to have blogs and ranting.
The problem is what Google is doing often is presenting either enough of the content so that I never need to "click here" or the entire content on a Google page, once again never redirecting to the original page.
I do not know what the formula is, but Google just picks up some news stories and resources them on a Google site, while others are merely linked to with a few lines of text. Certainly when the entire article is picked up and linked to on a Google server there is room for complaint.
As to Google hosting enough of the content that I never need the original site, I don't think there is much of a way around that right now. Google is certainly on a path to own online news and it is going to be interesting to see how they squash everyone else out of that business.
In rural and suburban areas, this can work. For 500 people in an apartment building with no heat and nowhere to connect a generator, this means probably 400 people die. Multiply by the number of apartment buildings in Chicago, New York or Boston.
Modern cities do not do well without electricity, as was shown as far back an 1965.
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
We can build all the smaller natural gas "peaker" plants we want, but it will not solve the problem of electric power demand exceeding existing generating capacity. We are rapidly approaching that point. Solar isn't going to help much, even if we paved all of Arizona, Nevada and Southeast California with silicon.
The biggest problem is that if someone got a permit and started building a 4,000 MW coal plant today, it wouldn't be finished for five years. A nuclear plant is more likely to take ten years to go online. So we better hope our base generating capacity - the kind we really need at 6:00 PM when folks have their air conditioners turned on and turn on the electric range to heat up dinner - will meet the need for the next five years until that plant gets online. Only problem is, there are no plants being built right now - maybe we will start soon, but so far nothing.
So we better hope there is a lot of excess capacity in the system so everything can keep growing, like the economy and jobs. Oh wait, there isn't much (if any) excess capacity today. I wonder what will happen?
I see lots of people deciding they don't need a landline any more. Well, for a single person or in the case where everyone in the house has a cell phone, that can work. It works better when your wireless carrier has a WiFi component to their plan - although since they lose money by the fistful on these I would expect either the carrier or the plan to disappear.
But what happens when you have a three-year-old child? Going to get them a cell phone? I don't think so. And while you can teach a three year old to dial 911 calling from a cell phone may not be anywhere near as easy or helpful. In a house the GPS chip isn't going to work so well, so your phone isn't going to know where it is. Meaning that the fire department doesn't know where to go.
Landline phone service is also just plain more reliable. If you live in an area where there are weather-related power outages, which is just about anywhere, you can't assume that the cell tower infrastructure has much battery backup - some have none at all. Contrast this with the landline Central Office which when the batteries start getting low fires up the generator to keep dial tone available. I have had no electricity from the power company for more than 24 hours after an ice storm, before there were cell phones. After a few hours a cell phone would be a paperweight under these circumstances.
Why do you need a land line? Children. Emergencies. Power outages. Maybe you don't care now, but you very well might in the future.
And one thing to consider. If enough people drop land lines, they will disappear entirely. Try, just try to find a pay phone outside of an airport or train station today. Nobody needs them, unless your cell phone dies and you need to call someone like maybe a tow truck. Good luck, because pay phones have been declared obsolete. So now there is no alternative. Land lines might be declared obsolete as well - in which case good luck teaching your young children how to dial out on your Blackberry.
No, the first such laws were for felonies - after the third felony (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc.) you got life in prison.
It should be clear to some what is going on when it takes getting convicted three times of such crimes to put someone away for 20+ years. Because at a state level, "life" isn't until you die in prison. It is a lot closer to 20 years or so.
Even so, some folks really got tired of dealing with revolving door prisons and some guy convicted of a fifth armed robbery.
It will not, as long as both registrars and SSL providers will register ANYTHING. And they will. I got an email recently directing me to something like citibank-online.com. If you can register that and not have anything to do with CitiBank itself, you have pretty much a blank check to defraud people. And there is no part of "common sense" that will help people.
Because citibank-online.com is a perfectly valid domain and could certainly have SSL. I will bet there will be an EV SSL provider that would sell a certificate for this in the not too distant future as well. Might be $50,000 for the certificate, but I can assume someone will do it.
The problem is, it isn't common sense. If I can register a domain like citibank-online.com or similar things using real, trademarked names common sense almost doesn't apply anymore. A web site can get an SSL certificate for citibank-online.com from some places as well.
The folks that should be preventing this have seriously dropped the ball. We have registrars which will register anything and SSL providers which will generate a certificate for anything. We jut recently went through the whole "extended validation" scam which pretends to have certificates which have real validation rather than just "you appear to really own this domain" validation. How long will it be until someone figures out there is a provider which will give out EV SSL certificates if you pay them enough? Not long, I trust.
So we can have a web site that looks completely legitimate, with a legitimate sounding domain name and SSL certificate to match. How does common sense enter into this for most people? Telling them that they will never, ever receive an email from their bank with a link in it? Sorry, a lot of banks are already violating that and sending out email with links.
This means the average person has no clue if they should be using citibank.com or citibank-online.com. And they get an email from "president@citibank-online.com" saying they should now use the new domain for all their transactions. I don't see how common sense applies any longer at all to this.
Hopefully, someone besides the government could see the absurdity of this and clamp down on the fraud sites. Should be pretty easy to find them and find the registrar that is making this all possible. But, if that isn't going to happen, we can expect some kind of government response. Law enforcement isn't going to work - it is probably legal to defraud Americans in many parts of the world.
The problem is between the backbone and the house you have a "neighborhood node" which (for cable) translates between the fiber connected to the head end and the actual coax for the neighborhood. It would be possible to run fiber from that node to each house - but each house is limited by the total bandwidth of the fiber to the head end, which isn't much more than 10Gb/sec. Say, there are 1000 houses in the neighborhood - that means you divide 10Gb/sec by 1000 and have 1Mb/sec for every house (dedicated) and without any TV channels.
And that is assuming a generous 10Gb/sec for the head end connection fiber. It might be much less than that.
The TV channels I believe run around 1Gb/sec total. So now everyone is fighting over the remaining 9Gb/sec, assuming we started with 10.
Well, that is too low, so we aren't playing the dedicated game. Since most of the users aren't using anywhere near even 900K/sec all the time there is in fact plenty of bandwidth to go around. Except when more than a couple of houses in this 1000 house neighborhood are using 10Mb/sec or more. The system wasn't designed for that, so it starts to fall apart.
You can say the system should be redesigned, and fiber run individually to every house instead of through a neighborhood concentrator. But given the costs of running the fiber to the head end and the fact it has been done already, this is probably not an argument that carries much weight.
The problem that I think a lot of people are missing is quite simple. Distribution of copyright materials - books, movies, music, software, everything - became a source of revenue before 1900 in US and Europe. The "publisher model" where the publisher fronts all the costs and takes the lion's share of the revenue became quite common. This model allowed for considerable growth of book and music publishing over more than 100 years.
Today, for the people on one side of the Digital Divide, the publisher doesn't seem to be all that necessary. There may be smaller role in the area of promotion, but the driver of the promotion was the big revenue that was possible from the combination of mass distribution and mass promotion, usually at significant cost. One problem with the idea of the publisher being obsolete is the people on the "other" side of the Digital Divide. Without publishers, and without broadband Internet, they are going to be left out of all media in the future.
But even without publishers, creative people that are producing copyright materials deserve something for their efforts. Sure, hundreds of years ago their compensation was in the form of patronage. They produced works that their patrons wanted and got a living from it. This produced a particularly stilted kind of works for quite a while. It would be a shame to think that only the likely jaded tastes of the rich and powerful would be represented by future creative works under a reincarnation of a patronage system.
But how else are creative works going to be produced? It is apparent from where I sit that people that grew up with the Internet simply will not pay. If free materials of their liking aren't available, pirated works will be and they will be used. User-generated and most free content has shown it to be worth precisely what is being charged for it. While some is good, most isn't. As are most things that the owner is willing to part with for free.
The answer for the masses isn't going to be that everything is free, because this will leave the masses without much new materials. The "oldies" will always be with us - e.g., 1970s music and Project Gutenberg - but to get new works of "value" something has to be exchanged. And most people find it difficult to live off fame and reputation.
So how do creative people replace the revenue that controlling the distribution of their work gave them? It doesn't matter if this distribution was direct or through a publisher, there was some revenue there. The answer isn't that this revenue just disappears, because if it does just evaporate some (probably large) fraction of these creative people will end up doing something else that does pay. Failing to come up with a real answer for this leaves the whole system in limbo, as it is today - everything is free to the Internet generation leaving the oldsters to pay. This arrangement isn't going to last forever, and may not last very much longer.
So what is a reasonable answer?
The Kindle does not use a Windows application in any way. It also does not display PDF files without conversion, but I am not aware of any Windows application that will convert most PDF files for use on a Kindle. There are some tools that support conversion from various formats on Windows, Linux and OSX to the Mobipocket format. I haven't used any of those.
PDF is a Page Description language. If you want to display a PDF page, you need to either have a display surface that will accomodate the orginally described page or you are going to have to do a lot of scrolling around. Maybe zooming as well. On a computer this isn't that difficult but on a eBook reader it is not very user friendly. The Kindle DX attempts to do this and as its screen is almost letter-size it is possible to display PDF pages - just not very well.
Mostly, if you want the display features of the Kindle, things like dynamic sizing of text, you aren't going to be able to display any of those things with a PDF. A lot of PDFs out in the world are also just a collection of graphics (bitmaps) and no text at all. There are services that will attempt to OCR the graphics and add a "hidden" text layer to the PDF document - and I expect them to work like most OCR does, maybe 98% accuracy. So in a short 100,000 word book there might only be 2,000 words wrong. Not so great.
You want to display PDF documents on eBook reader? Well, the one thing that will make this really good is to license the Adobe DRM stuff so protected PDF documents can be read. Then as long as your eBook reader screen is laid out in a manner corresponding to the original page formatting, you will have a good experience. Public libraries in my area are currently loaning out protected PDF ebooks for the readers that support them - not very many now. Not being able to display protected Adobe PDF documents cuts out a lot of PDF support. Not being able to display Google Books (mostly graphics) cuts out another huge part of potential PDFs that could be displayed.
Yes, the EPUB format would be nice to support, but the Kindle supports Mobipocket which is almost as prevalent as EPUB today. Yes, I can download Gutenberg documents in Mobipocket format and they work fine with the Kindle.
Well, you might look at the incredible penetration of smartcards in everyday use for a hint as to why DirecTV might be going this way. In the US today there have been two credit cards using smartcard technology, and as of yet there is really nowhere to use their smartcard functionality.
Target did pass out free smartcard readers for a while, until they figured out that nobody was interested and it didn't really improve security at all. As far as I know, there is nothing to use the American Express card with at all.
There is some integration with Windows for extended identification, but I have never seen anyone actually using this capability. As I do not believe the cards for this application are in fact writable in any respect, a writer isn't very useful with these cards.
So while read/write smartcards are interesting and all that, in the US they have extremely limited use. In general, I would say the only consumer application of smartcards today is DirecTV. So what would the average consumer use a smartcard writer for? Well, DirecTV of course.
The problem is the Internet mentality that it all should be free.
Of course, people that are getting paid for their text aren't going to continue to be paid forever when nobody is paying to read their output - unless the Government is subsidising journalism and and opinion columnists. So that type of content is just going to disappear. Probably not quietly.
So what can be done about it? Well, I'd guess that in 50 or 70 years people will finally be fed up with "free" and be ready to pay for anything as long as it is better than what they see they can get for free. But it is going to take a while to get "free" out of everyone's system. We are experiencing the result of a generation raised on "free" and they still see what is left lying around from people that get paid.
When that finally disappears, we will be able to judge the quality of free. My guess is there will still be 1970s music being played because it was produced for lots of money. The 2020 music scene (all free, nobody paying for anything) will be stunningly awful.
Let's see, so if you can't spend millions of dollars with video production and an ad agency, you might as well forget advertising on TV?
You didn't think those Apple ads were cheap to do, did you? Sure, the background is pretty simple to do in a studio, but believe me someone had a lot of selling to do to push that format through the creative mill.
Your average car dealer ad probably cost less than $25,000 to produce end-to-end. I guess advertising on TV will be only for multinationals now.
What people have come to expect on the Internet is "free". If it isn't free, there must be someone else offering it, legally or not, for free. And the modern Internet user is going to take it from where it is offered for free.
That pretty much means that newspaper classified ads aren't going to work - people just go to Craigslist. It means that selling music online isn't going to work, because it is all out there for free, unless you need Apple to hold your hand and guide you through the process of filling up your iPod.
It certainly means that news, opinion and commentary aren't going to work if you want people to pay for them.
Unfortunately, if you are someone that was getting paid to produce textual material as news, opinion or commentary, you probably aren't going to get paid to do that any longer. There just isn't any call for someone to get paid to do something that will generate zero revenue. Similarly, with aggregation and Google, nobody needs to know where the original text came from, so you can't count on ad revenue supporting a site that in turn supports the writer. The original site can't control the material any longer. Google might tell you where it came from (not as a link, but just text) but what other sites are also copying the content and not attributing it.
It isn't just the judge. Complex court cases often involve tens of people in associated areas, including law schools. If it is not possible to take the technical aspects out of a case so that people not trained in the technology can understand it, you are setting up for some sort of "high court of tech" that is excluded from review.
What is being attempted is to remove the technology from the issues of law so that everyone can review matters. This is the same thing that happens with medical malpractice - the judge does not have to be a doctor, the prosecutor doesn't have to be a doctor and outside consultants on matters of law do not have to be doctors. Becase in the end the facts of the case and the law can be separated.
The alternative is that there would need to be dozens of specialized courts and the idea of a jury would be thrown out - no jury could possibly be seated that was (a) impartial and (b) knowledgeable about the subject matter.
I thought the whole problem was that there are signature checks in the boot loader and Psystar is circumventing these checks, thus making a derivative copy of the boot loader.