The real scarcity is that of the creator's time and creativity whether it is music, movies or software. The problem is that once that first copy is made the rest are easy.
The idea of pricing it assuming millions will be sold worked before everyone got the idea that they should be able to have it for free because copy number 2 was cheap to make. This would work in a patronage environment where some rich old white male instructed people what to make and paid them to get it the way he wanted it - and then let everyone else have it for free. That's how it worked 400 years ago and it could work again - assuming everyone was OK with whatever the rich old white guy wanted. Because nobody would be paying for music he didn't like. And making a movie he didn't like could result in someone being put in the stocks for a while.
Yup, that is how it used to work. Do we want to go there again? Compare the innovation in music between 1500 and 1800 and the innovation in music from 1900 to 2000 sometime if you are interested. That is the difference between patronage and mass marketing.
I don't see any "artifical scarcity" at all. I see an attempt to misrepresent this scarcity to the masses and them lapping it up.
I like your ideas. I suggest the following to implement them on a wider basis:
Eliminate all corporations and anything larger than a five-employee partership. If it can't be done by five people and some robots, it doesn't need doing.
Eliminate all forms of currency and any sort of "money". If you can't get by with barter, forget it. Money was a mistake when it was invented thousands of years ago and it is time to fix that mistake.
From step 1 a lot of people will have time on their hands for a while - but as a further part of step 1 most farm equipment will no longer be manufactured as it was made by greedy companies with large patent portfolios. So we will have plenty of people for seeding, weeding and harvesting. And they can be paid with what they harvest. Simple.
There will be no time for making movies and music will return to being a local phenomonen with people traveling around and playing music for food and shelter. Barter again, which is good.
I think there might be some holes in this, but it would at least lead to a simpler and healthy lifestyle for everyone. At least the ones left after the food riots and re-orientation that would be necessary. It is doubtful that a strong federal government would be needed any longer as well.
You realize when sharing became obsolete it was because I wasn't sharing with my neighbor or close friend but the rest of the planet, right?
OK, it is possible to build an app that is restricted to a new processor chip and will not work on an older one.
It is not possible (today) with the development tools to build an app that is restricted to a given screen size. If you are going to build an "iPhone app" you can build for the new processor only or the old processor. If you include the old processor you better try it out on the smaller screen size because it will be sold on those devices.
Your idea of problems with nuclear power are interesting.
Three Mile Island really affected nobody - not even plant workers. It is somewhat of a blot on the history of nuclear power, but there are plenty of those anyway.
Chernobyl was caused by a stupid test that was mismanaged - sort of a stupid on top of a stupid. There has certainly been some health considerations for a few thousand people and it is likely the most widespread effect of nuclear power, ever. And it would be nice if it stayed that way. But, there is no accounting for stupid.
Fukushima could have been forseen, but the environmental conditions were a bit extreme. Part of the problem is and continues to be spent fuel storage. We should be reprocessing this but because the fuel rods contain plutonium this is viewed as a way to make bombs and strictly forbidden right now. So we are all waiting around for either a reprocessing plant or two to be built - since the 1950s - or for there to be constructed a disposal site - since the 1960s at least.
Probably 90% of the problems with nuclear power could be solved by having a small number of reprocessing plants for spent fuel rods built. Understand that the fuel rods have been only around 5% "spent" and could be reprocessed into new fuel rods with the 95% of the active materials still present in them. The "no reprocessing" philosophy is like having a car that spews 95% of the gasoline out the tailpipe unburned and leaving this situation for 50 years.
Biofuel production in Japan? You are kidding, right?
What little of Japan that can be farmed is needed desperately for food and still they import food. They "invented" the idea of Kobe beef because while they have cattle they really don't have room for grazing. Kobe beef is where they pamper the steer in a stall and fatten it up on beer rather than letting it graze. Sort of like veal in the US but veal is done with milk instead of beer. You don't invent stuff like this without a compelling need, and their compelling need is no space for grazing.
Not sure what drove the invention of veal.
Biofuel production may be something that we want to rethink anyway, considering the effects on food prices currently. If higher food prices lead to more overthrown governments, we might want to back off of that. Or get instructed by a group of nations whose governments really like the idea of stability.
No, but if 30-40% of your electrical supply is based on the sun shining a tropical storm can kill people dependent on electricity.
There are some people that believe so completely that nuclear power is unsafe that we are going to move from electricity being an always-there reliable energy source to something that is there sometimes and other times not. The biggest thing that comes to mind are home patients that are reliant on some assist device for breathing. Today, such devices plug in the wall because it is assumed that the wall supply is 99.999% reliable. We are going to change that.
In the US the biggest problem with reliability will shortly become simply that we are out of capacity. We haven't built a new major power plant in a long, long time and we aren't likely to do so anytime soon either. We have crippled the electric generation industry with public comment and environmental impact statements to the extent that a small group that is barely organized can block a new generating plant until the plant's sponsor gives up. That is what keeps happening - a plant is proposed, plans are drawn up and goverment approvals and even financing guarantees obtained. Then it is opened to the public and a few people that are fearful of electric power lines can block it. Or it is people that intensely want the US to return to prairie and forest rather than cities and suburbs block it.
In the meantime, growth continues and the margin of overcapacity grows thinner and thinner. We massively overbuilt in the 1950s and 1960s to the extent that we have been able to live off this and a bunch of relatively small "peaker" plants that were designed to run for a few hours a day - they are now running 24x7.
We had an opportunity for the federal goverment to change the rules and make it possible to build a new generating plant in the US. This didn't happen and almost certainly we are going to run out of capacity within the next few years - a time period shorter than it would take to build a new plant and get it online if we started right now. And that would have to be a coal plant - it takes about twice as long to get a nuclear plant built and there is no time for that now.
Either Japan or Germany is likely to be one of the first places to experience a change when electricity is no longer an assured resource for the average homeowner. Germany has the buffer of being able to draw on France and their nuclear power generation but Japan really doesn't. A couple of storms with high winds and clouds would wipe out any solar collection and/or wind generation and leave them in the dark - but it isn't being in the dark that is the problem. It is the people that are at home that are reliant in one way or another on electric power to continue living.
We aren't talking about air conditioning - people in Japan lived for thousands of years without air conditioning and central heating. Germany as well and most parts of the US are fine without air conditioning. What will lead to deaths are the people with the home oxygen concentrators, home ventilators and things like that. For the most part if the power is on for even a few hours a day and at night people's refrigerators will be OK and things like insulin will be fine.
And I would assume most businesses will simply have to have their own generating capacity in one form or another.
True, you can contract for that separately. And contract someone for cover art.
The publisher is just a one-stop shop for all of it and you would be amazed how many people think they can bypass the publisher, editor, proofreading and cover art.
There is where you are very, very wrong. Sure, anyone can write something. But if the author bypasses the very necessary role of the publisher they have a piece of crap. Ask any author that has sole more than one book what the publisher does for them and if they would like to go it alone without separately contracting for the same services.
A book without an editor - one of the functions of the publisher - is almost always going to be unreadable drivel. Check out some of the $0.99 ebooks by unknown authors with self-publishing "publisher" listed on Amazon. You will find they are - surprise - unreadable drivel.
Not true at all. I have an Exchange server with a number of iPads and iPhones connected to it with nothing else. This replaced running BES on a virtual server under Windows Server 2008 - because they didn't support the 64 bit server environment.
The Good stuff is an option, but it absolutely isn't required. I believe it allows synchronization of tasks and notes which Exchange Active Sync does not. If you need tasks and notes to be synchronized wirelessly this may be why someone is feeding you this line about needing the Good server stuff.
Contact me through www.infinadyne.com if you need more information.
If a company writes an internal application, you can get a distribution license that allows it to be installed on devices for that company. It is part of the enterprise distribution. You basically need to identify and authorize each device individually, but it isn't that hard a job to do.
Just as a developer you get to install your stuff on 100 devices without doing anything extra. I believe there are few restrictions on the enterprise distribution and that lets you distribute to a lot more than 100 devices. I believe the only restriction is that you cannot put your app on devices without some kind of business relationship. It is intended to prevent bypassing the Apple App Store for generic consumer applications.
The bigger problem in Florida was handling the fragile ballots introduced more hanging chads thus making the problem worse. It was just going to get more and more subjective as the ballots were repeatedly handled. This meant that the recounts had to stop before it got really insane but Florida wasn't going to do it by themselves.
You may imagine that there is no margin of error, but clearly in any mechanical system it is there.
You identify voter error, but neglect to account for mechanical problems in handling ballots. OK, you count the ballots the first time by scanning them in front of the voter so they can correct or re-do damaged ballots - as in a misfeed. What happens in a recount with a misfeed? How about the physical ballots being lost? How about handling errors where a bunch of ballots are believed to be recounted but were not?
The end result is what we had in Minnesota in 2010 where they conduct recount after recount and get a different result every time. Sure, the differences are less than 1%, but for the people there this is a huge deal and nobody is doing an effective job of explaining the problems.
Any mechanical system is going to have this sort of problem. Adding humans into the loop makes it worse. You can try to get the error percentage down below 1% but it will never be zero. And that is a real problem in trying to explain it to people.
The point of the US system is that it is nearly impossible to get complete concensus in two houses of Congress and get the President to agree. So for the most part, nothing gets done.
Laws against black people do not get passed, even in the period following the Civil War.
Laws for paying damages to black people because they were enslaved hundreds of years ago do not get passed.
Laws allowing polygamy do not get passed, even when it is obvious that it is taking place in a couple of states.
I'm sure you can find lots of other examples. This is what the designers of the US system had in mind from the beginning. Making it really hard to pass stuff means fewer regrets later and fewer stupid laws. Note that is isn't perfect and stupid stuff does get passed. But it is a huge filter that we would really miss if it wasn't there.
If you had one or two parties with 80% of the votes needed to do something it really isn't any different from what is in the US today. The minority parties have no power whatsoever because nobody needs them.
If you have no single party over 50% you have chaos where everything is always deal-makiing and brokering. Your point 2 isn't really all that good because you end up with deals being made to get silly stuff done - it is just done by exchanging favors for other equally silly stuff.
The US government is designed to make it difficult to pass any laws at all. It is this way by design and intent. If something is really needed or very popular it gets passed in record time. Otherwise, it stalls and seems to go on forever. Sometimes, something that people think should be enacted stalls and again I say this is a good thing. We would rather have slow government and few laws rather than having one party being able to push through an agenda all by themselves.
There have been a few times - very few - where the President had a majority in both houses of Congress and could get an "agenda" passed without any problems. Generally, this hasn't stood for very long and hasn't been looked upon as a great time in US history.
Yup, this was said aroudn 2,000 years ago and while the overall standard of living of the poor has improved, there are still people considered to be living in poverty. Now poverty in rural India is a lot different than poverty in the US or EU - my understanding of poverty in rural India is that it is nearly a foraging existance, subsisting on whatever is handed out or can be found lying around. Money? Not only is there none at all, but there wouldn't really be anything to spend it on either. So it is not a lot different from poverty 2,000 years ago.
The problem is poverty is caused by a number of things and "lack of opportunity" isn't a big one. From what I have seen, in most cases it is a matter of bad choices and uninformed choices. An abject failure to learn is also part of the scenario, in a big way.
In the US it is easy to see people spending $20 on lottery tickets rather than food for the baby when it is pretty clear to them that food for the baby is what is really needed. The result is often begging, borrowing or stealing trying to get the $20 for food for the baby. A few weeks later, the same thing happens again. Sooner or later the friends and relatives figure out it is just a really good idea to become really scarce when their friend or relative is looking for money.
Just making bad choices - partying instead of studying, for example, is enough to screw up people's lives in ways they can't imagine when they are young. Having made some bad choices some folks are able to pull it together and with a lot of drive, determination and ambition actually get somewhere but this is pretty rare. Mostly, the bad choices end up leading to more bad choices and not learning from them instead.
Absolutely, there are rich people that inherited the money and had someone to rescue them every time they screwed up or made a bad choice. But these people are the exception. For the most part they are the end of the line and their children will not be leading privileged lives. There are people that happened to fall into an opportunity and have managed to not screw things up, but again this is rare. Most people with more money and resources than their neighbors simply made better choices, planned for the future and have more determination and ambition.
What all of this means is there is no "solution" to poverty. Right now the US could rearrange things so as to give every single citizen a million dollars. Not counting what this would do to inflation and the economy as a whole, this would in effect eliminate poverty. Right? Except it is pretty much a dead certainty that within ten years there would be people who would have blown through the money and be "poor" again. Maybe as little as five years there would be significant numbers of these people. This would mean the entire exercise - and whatever side effects it would have - would be a waste of time. Which is why nobody seriously proposes doing something like this, at least not anyone with any sense of history and how these things work.
So there is no decision between space and poverty - there isn't anything to be done for "poverty" in a real sense. Oh, I suppose slavery is a solution - you take all the poor people and make them relatively pampered slaves and don't make catching escapees a priority. I am sure this would result in anyone with much ambition escaping but those that did and didn't like it would just come back to be taken care of. It would be a solution, but I don't think it is one that the West has much stomache for. At least not yet. Keep pushing the "fight against poverty" and that is where we will end up in some form or another because it is the only real "solution".
One DVD would not get you prosecuted in any jurisdiction that I am familiar with, and that is a bigger number than you might think.
One DVD that you made 100 copies of and were selling on Ebay would, though.
It would also be unlikely to result in any prosecution of anyone because of the way such things are handled. Nope, one "found" DVD isn't going to do much unless the little boy in the video looks a lot like your son.
The problem with the idea of people pleasuring themselves with the images is there is a very small distance from silently pleasuring yourself alone to inviting the neighborhood girl in and showing her the pictures with a "doesn't that look like fun?" comment.
How are most people possessing child porn caught? Does someone come and break their door down while they are silently pleasuring themselves at home? Or could it be that someone turns them in? Could it be that the neighborhood girl decides that while it looked like fun, it wasn't so much and tells her mother? Imagine all the cases where the girl doesn't tell anyone.
The problem the guy who wrote the article has is he completely discounts the idea that the observer, without any photographic or video evidence could go to the police and say "I saw a child being raped." Do you honestly believe the police would discount such a report and refuse to investigate without some documentation?
On a secondary note, a video showing a 12 year old girl being raped would be one of the hottest videos around for a while. It wouldn't make it to the mainstream porn sites, but you can believe it would be worth a huge amount of money simply for the ad revenue that it would generate. I'd think anyone with such a video would have a hard time resisting the temptation to sell it.
I work with people involved in investigating child porn cases.
One image is not sufficient in any jurisdiction in the US and probably not in any country on the planet. One hundred images in the browser cache isn't going to result in prosecution in the US, although it may be a while before you get your computer back. However, if you have one hundred images in a directory named KiddyPorn you are going to be prosecuted, probably plead guilty and go to prison for a long while.
How are most possessors of child porn found? They show their collection off. Often to their children or neighborhood children. If you believe that simple possession means these people are sitting all alone not harming anyone while looking at their pictures, think about how they are caught. We have not gotten to the point where the police make random sweeps through homes looking for child porn. So if they weren't showing anyone else, how would anyone know they had it?
Today most law enforcement computer forensic examiners spend 80% or more of their time on child porn cases. A huge number of these result from neighbors turning in the person because their collection was being exhibited.
The idea that it is OK to "please" a child sexually is a common one with groups like NAMBLA. It is for the most part utter garbage.
There are two problems with this "pleasing" of a child. The first is the unequal power relationship between a child and any adult, but especially those with some relationship with the child. The teacher tells the child that it is OK if the teacher takes their pants and underwear off, so it must be OK. The babysitter shows the child what fun oral sex is. The problem is that until some point in development the child is incapable of doing anything but following directions from someone that has greater power than they do in the relationship. There is no getting away from that. Pleasing the child is irrelevant because they will say it is OK even if they are very uncomfortable and not enjoying the experience at all.
The second problem is really the development of the child and their relationship with others. Assuming we are dealing with a child that has passed from the completely self-centered level of development (around three or four years of age) they actively want to please other people in their lives. This means they are going to do and say things to encourage abusive relationships even when it isn't something they are enjoying or benefiting from. This means the seven year old boy doesn't know what he is talking about when he says he is having fun with the priest.
The fact is this is what most of the child exploitation is and how it happens. I will say that I think the problem is completely different for older children, say above the age of 12 or so. For the most part these children are far more capable of dealing with their own feelings and dealing with unequal power relationships. There is a significant difference between expoitation of a nine year old and a fourteen year old. Today, this is only partially recognized legally.
It is allowed on YouTube until someone asks for it to be removed. There is no filtering on YouTube for videos that are posted. You would be astonished to see what gets out there for 15 minutes or so. Of course, after 15 minutes someone has seen it and it has been pulled.
We have to do away with the concept of good and evil. There is no good and evil.
Only someone that has never experienced evil could possibly say something like this. Oh, I assure you there is such a thing as evil, although that is perhaps a euphemism for the phrase "conscious intent to do harm". Some people are simply astonished to realize that there are people that wish them ill and do so on a scale that is difficult to imagine. We have a tradition of calling such people "evil".
We aren't talking about people with difficulties relating to others or to the real world. We are talking about fully developed and functioning individuals that simply have an overdeveloped sense of self importance to the extent that if it requires harming others for their own satisfaction or to achieve their goals, then so be it. No, I don't think you can write this off as some brain disorder or disfunction no matter how much you would like to.
You will note that Obama was all about how much he was going to be able to do until December when he got his first real briefing. Things toned down a lot after that. Guantanamo was scheduled for late in January right after taking office. I suspect from the timing that someone took him aside after Jan 20th and told him the real scoop on Guantanamo. Suddenly, it was off the table and no more was said about it.
Sure, there was some noise about taking one guy out for trial somewhere else. That proved not just to be unpopular, but I suspect someone told Mr. Obama that security could not be assured and the guy might escape. Again, silence. Nobody has said anything about taking people out for trial since that came up.
Unfortunately, both of these instances can be seen with other presidents as well. I believe GWB had a similar moment a week or two after taking office, but I forget the circumstances. I think it happened to Clinton as well although he did a better job of hiding it. Briefings bring surprises and reality to these guys and I suspect it is a real slap in the face when they find out the real score - stuff the public and even most Senators aren't privy to.
The problem with jobs is two things. First off, unless the size of the GDP increased by a huge percentage (like 25% or more) the jobs situation isn't going to change - the US and Europe simply do not need as many people working as they used to. Businesses with 10 people doing a particular job laid off five of them and found the same amount of work getting done. Maybe the workers weren't as happy about it and couldn't spend as much time talking about last night's TV shows, but the work got done. The only thing that will get those five people hired back is when there is too much work for the remaining five to do. And that is going to be a huge increase in the economy - which nobody believes is going to happen in the near term.
The second problem is the US and Europe are both importing cheap labor at a fantastic rate. There are still thousands of workers coming into the US every day through legal and illegal means. Nobody has a right to expect a high salary when the government is promoting giving the work to low-wage immigrants. It might be nice when Obama's circumvention of immigration laws allow these people to vote Democrat, but long before then the displaced US workers are going to need government handouts to keep eating.
Face it, we now have an admitted unemployment rate of around 8%. On top of that, we have the real rate of unemployment and underemployment of around 14%. Further up the scale, if you are counting the folks that aren't ever going to get jobs because of prison, drugs, homelessness, etc. you begin to see the real unemployment rate is at least 25%. Probably 30% is realistic because we will never know these real numbers.
What is coming next is the US government is going to have to support these people, by either giving them meaningless make-work jobs (dig this hole, then fill it back in) or just reinstating welfare at a federal level - it has to be federal because the states simply don't have the money to do it now. Between that and the new government-supported healthcare system - when the employers bail out on January 1st 2014, the government will be picking up the tab - we are looking at 3-4 trillion new spending every year.
Hope you like your job as you will be working for everyone else until October every year. I'm also betting the US enacts some employment regulations to keep them from getting deeper in a hole. If you could quit and get more money from the government than by working, many people would just quit or get fired. The government has to stop that, so new laws making it illegal to quit, illegal to fire people are the only way.
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The real scarcity is that of the creator's time and creativity whether it is music, movies or software. The problem is that once that first copy is made the rest are easy.
The idea of pricing it assuming millions will be sold worked before everyone got the idea that they should be able to have it for free because copy number 2 was cheap to make. This would work in a patronage environment where some rich old white male instructed people what to make and paid them to get it the way he wanted it - and then let everyone else have it for free. That's how it worked 400 years ago and it could work again - assuming everyone was OK with whatever the rich old white guy wanted. Because nobody would be paying for music he didn't like. And making a movie he didn't like could result in someone being put in the stocks for a while.
Yup, that is how it used to work. Do we want to go there again? Compare the innovation in music between 1500 and 1800 and the innovation in music from 1900 to 2000 sometime if you are interested. That is the difference between patronage and mass marketing.
I don't see any "artifical scarcity" at all. I see an attempt to misrepresent this scarcity to the masses and them lapping it up.
I like your ideas. I suggest the following to implement them on a wider basis:
I think there might be some holes in this, but it would at least lead to a simpler and healthy lifestyle for everyone. At least the ones left after the food riots and re-orientation that would be necessary. It is doubtful that a strong federal government would be needed any longer as well.
You realize when sharing became obsolete it was because I wasn't sharing with my neighbor or close friend but the rest of the planet, right?
OK, it is possible to build an app that is restricted to a new processor chip and will not work on an older one.
It is not possible (today) with the development tools to build an app that is restricted to a given screen size. If you are going to build an "iPhone app" you can build for the new processor only or the old processor. If you include the old processor you better try it out on the smaller screen size because it will be sold on those devices.
Your idea of problems with nuclear power are interesting.
Three Mile Island really affected nobody - not even plant workers. It is somewhat of a blot on the history of nuclear power, but there are plenty of those anyway.
Chernobyl was caused by a stupid test that was mismanaged - sort of a stupid on top of a stupid. There has certainly been some health considerations for a few thousand people and it is likely the most widespread effect of nuclear power, ever. And it would be nice if it stayed that way. But, there is no accounting for stupid.
Fukushima could have been forseen, but the environmental conditions were a bit extreme. Part of the problem is and continues to be spent fuel storage. We should be reprocessing this but because the fuel rods contain plutonium this is viewed as a way to make bombs and strictly forbidden right now. So we are all waiting around for either a reprocessing plant or two to be built - since the 1950s - or for there to be constructed a disposal site - since the 1960s at least.
Probably 90% of the problems with nuclear power could be solved by having a small number of reprocessing plants for spent fuel rods built. Understand that the fuel rods have been only around 5% "spent" and could be reprocessed into new fuel rods with the 95% of the active materials still present in them. The "no reprocessing" philosophy is like having a car that spews 95% of the gasoline out the tailpipe unburned and leaving this situation for 50 years.
Biofuel production in Japan? You are kidding, right?
What little of Japan that can be farmed is needed desperately for food and still they import food. They "invented" the idea of Kobe beef because while they have cattle they really don't have room for grazing. Kobe beef is where they pamper the steer in a stall and fatten it up on beer rather than letting it graze. Sort of like veal in the US but veal is done with milk instead of beer. You don't invent stuff like this without a compelling need, and their compelling need is no space for grazing.
Not sure what drove the invention of veal.
Biofuel production may be something that we want to rethink anyway, considering the effects on food prices currently. If higher food prices lead to more overthrown governments, we might want to back off of that. Or get instructed by a group of nations whose governments really like the idea of stability.
No, but if 30-40% of your electrical supply is based on the sun shining a tropical storm can kill people dependent on electricity.
There are some people that believe so completely that nuclear power is unsafe that we are going to move from electricity being an always-there reliable energy source to something that is there sometimes and other times not. The biggest thing that comes to mind are home patients that are reliant on some assist device for breathing. Today, such devices plug in the wall because it is assumed that the wall supply is 99.999% reliable. We are going to change that.
In the US the biggest problem with reliability will shortly become simply that we are out of capacity. We haven't built a new major power plant in a long, long time and we aren't likely to do so anytime soon either. We have crippled the electric generation industry with public comment and environmental impact statements to the extent that a small group that is barely organized can block a new generating plant until the plant's sponsor gives up. That is what keeps happening - a plant is proposed, plans are drawn up and goverment approvals and even financing guarantees obtained. Then it is opened to the public and a few people that are fearful of electric power lines can block it. Or it is people that intensely want the US to return to prairie and forest rather than cities and suburbs block it.
In the meantime, growth continues and the margin of overcapacity grows thinner and thinner. We massively overbuilt in the 1950s and 1960s to the extent that we have been able to live off this and a bunch of relatively small "peaker" plants that were designed to run for a few hours a day - they are now running 24x7.
We had an opportunity for the federal goverment to change the rules and make it possible to build a new generating plant in the US. This didn't happen and almost certainly we are going to run out of capacity within the next few years - a time period shorter than it would take to build a new plant and get it online if we started right now. And that would have to be a coal plant - it takes about twice as long to get a nuclear plant built and there is no time for that now.
Either Japan or Germany is likely to be one of the first places to experience a change when electricity is no longer an assured resource for the average homeowner. Germany has the buffer of being able to draw on France and their nuclear power generation but Japan really doesn't. A couple of storms with high winds and clouds would wipe out any solar collection and/or wind generation and leave them in the dark - but it isn't being in the dark that is the problem. It is the people that are at home that are reliant in one way or another on electric power to continue living.
We aren't talking about air conditioning - people in Japan lived for thousands of years without air conditioning and central heating. Germany as well and most parts of the US are fine without air conditioning. What will lead to deaths are the people with the home oxygen concentrators, home ventilators and things like that. For the most part if the power is on for even a few hours a day and at night people's refrigerators will be OK and things like insulin will be fine.
And I would assume most businesses will simply have to have their own generating capacity in one form or another.
True, you can contract for that separately. And contract someone for cover art.
The publisher is just a one-stop shop for all of it and you would be amazed how many people think they can bypass the publisher, editor, proofreading and cover art.
There is where you are very, very wrong. Sure, anyone can write something. But if the author bypasses the very necessary role of the publisher they have a piece of crap. Ask any author that has sole more than one book what the publisher does for them and if they would like to go it alone without separately contracting for the same services.
A book without an editor - one of the functions of the publisher - is almost always going to be unreadable drivel. Check out some of the $0.99 ebooks by unknown authors with self-publishing "publisher" listed on Amazon. You will find they are - surprise - unreadable drivel.
Not true at all. I have an Exchange server with a number of iPads and iPhones connected to it with nothing else. This replaced running BES on a virtual server under Windows Server 2008 - because they didn't support the 64 bit server environment.
The Good stuff is an option, but it absolutely isn't required. I believe it allows synchronization of tasks and notes which Exchange Active Sync does not. If you need tasks and notes to be synchronized wirelessly this may be why someone is feeding you this line about needing the Good server stuff.
Contact me through www.infinadyne.com if you need more information.
You are doing it wrong then. It would be much simpler to set up for enterprise distribution and not have the devices jailbroken.
If a company writes an internal application, you can get a distribution license that allows it to be installed on devices for that company. It is part of the enterprise distribution. You basically need to identify and authorize each device individually, but it isn't that hard a job to do.
Just as a developer you get to install your stuff on 100 devices without doing anything extra. I believe there are few restrictions on the enterprise distribution and that lets you distribute to a lot more than 100 devices. I believe the only restriction is that you cannot put your app on devices without some kind of business relationship. It is intended to prevent bypassing the Apple App Store for generic consumer applications.
The bigger problem in Florida was handling the fragile ballots introduced more hanging chads thus making the problem worse. It was just going to get more and more subjective as the ballots were repeatedly handled. This meant that the recounts had to stop before it got really insane but Florida wasn't going to do it by themselves.
You may imagine that there is no margin of error, but clearly in any mechanical system it is there.
You identify voter error, but neglect to account for mechanical problems in handling ballots. OK, you count the ballots the first time by scanning them in front of the voter so they can correct or re-do damaged ballots - as in a misfeed. What happens in a recount with a misfeed? How about the physical ballots being lost? How about handling errors where a bunch of ballots are believed to be recounted but were not?
The end result is what we had in Minnesota in 2010 where they conduct recount after recount and get a different result every time. Sure, the differences are less than 1%, but for the people there this is a huge deal and nobody is doing an effective job of explaining the problems.
Any mechanical system is going to have this sort of problem. Adding humans into the loop makes it worse. You can try to get the error percentage down below 1% but it will never be zero. And that is a real problem in trying to explain it to people.
The point of the US system is that it is nearly impossible to get complete concensus in two houses of Congress and get the President to agree. So for the most part, nothing gets done.
Laws against black people do not get passed, even in the period following the Civil War.
Laws for paying damages to black people because they were enslaved hundreds of years ago do not get passed.
Laws allowing polygamy do not get passed, even when it is obvious that it is taking place in a couple of states.
I'm sure you can find lots of other examples. This is what the designers of the US system had in mind from the beginning. Making it really hard to pass stuff means fewer regrets later and fewer stupid laws. Note that is isn't perfect and stupid stuff does get passed. But it is a huge filter that we would really miss if it wasn't there.
If you had one or two parties with 80% of the votes needed to do something it really isn't any different from what is in the US today. The minority parties have no power whatsoever because nobody needs them.
If you have no single party over 50% you have chaos where everything is always deal-makiing and brokering. Your point 2 isn't really all that good because you end up with deals being made to get silly stuff done - it is just done by exchanging favors for other equally silly stuff.
The US government is designed to make it difficult to pass any laws at all. It is this way by design and intent. If something is really needed or very popular it gets passed in record time. Otherwise, it stalls and seems to go on forever. Sometimes, something that people think should be enacted stalls and again I say this is a good thing. We would rather have slow government and few laws rather than having one party being able to push through an agenda all by themselves.
There have been a few times - very few - where the President had a majority in both houses of Congress and could get an "agenda" passed without any problems. Generally, this hasn't stood for very long and hasn't been looked upon as a great time in US history.
Yup, this was said aroudn 2,000 years ago and while the overall standard of living of the poor has improved, there are still people considered to be living in poverty. Now poverty in rural India is a lot different than poverty in the US or EU - my understanding of poverty in rural India is that it is nearly a foraging existance, subsisting on whatever is handed out or can be found lying around. Money? Not only is there none at all, but there wouldn't really be anything to spend it on either. So it is not a lot different from poverty 2,000 years ago.
The problem is poverty is caused by a number of things and "lack of opportunity" isn't a big one. From what I have seen, in most cases it is a matter of bad choices and uninformed choices. An abject failure to learn is also part of the scenario, in a big way.
In the US it is easy to see people spending $20 on lottery tickets rather than food for the baby when it is pretty clear to them that food for the baby is what is really needed. The result is often begging, borrowing or stealing trying to get the $20 for food for the baby. A few weeks later, the same thing happens again. Sooner or later the friends and relatives figure out it is just a really good idea to become really scarce when their friend or relative is looking for money.
Just making bad choices - partying instead of studying, for example, is enough to screw up people's lives in ways they can't imagine when they are young. Having made some bad choices some folks are able to pull it together and with a lot of drive, determination and ambition actually get somewhere but this is pretty rare. Mostly, the bad choices end up leading to more bad choices and not learning from them instead.
Absolutely, there are rich people that inherited the money and had someone to rescue them every time they screwed up or made a bad choice. But these people are the exception. For the most part they are the end of the line and their children will not be leading privileged lives. There are people that happened to fall into an opportunity and have managed to not screw things up, but again this is rare. Most people with more money and resources than their neighbors simply made better choices, planned for the future and have more determination and ambition.
What all of this means is there is no "solution" to poverty. Right now the US could rearrange things so as to give every single citizen a million dollars. Not counting what this would do to inflation and the economy as a whole, this would in effect eliminate poverty. Right? Except it is pretty much a dead certainty that within ten years there would be people who would have blown through the money and be "poor" again. Maybe as little as five years there would be significant numbers of these people. This would mean the entire exercise - and whatever side effects it would have - would be a waste of time. Which is why nobody seriously proposes doing something like this, at least not anyone with any sense of history and how these things work.
So there is no decision between space and poverty - there isn't anything to be done for "poverty" in a real sense. Oh, I suppose slavery is a solution - you take all the poor people and make them relatively pampered slaves and don't make catching escapees a priority. I am sure this would result in anyone with much ambition escaping but those that did and didn't like it would just come back to be taken care of. It would be a solution, but I don't think it is one that the West has much stomache for. At least not yet. Keep pushing the "fight against poverty" and that is where we will end up in some form or another because it is the only real "solution".
One DVD would not get you prosecuted in any jurisdiction that I am familiar with, and that is a bigger number than you might think.
One DVD that you made 100 copies of and were selling on Ebay would, though.
It would also be unlikely to result in any prosecution of anyone because of the way such things are handled. Nope, one "found" DVD isn't going to do much unless the little boy in the video looks a lot like your son.
The problem with the idea of people pleasuring themselves with the images is there is a very small distance from silently pleasuring yourself alone to inviting the neighborhood girl in and showing her the pictures with a "doesn't that look like fun?" comment.
How are most people possessing child porn caught? Does someone come and break their door down while they are silently pleasuring themselves at home? Or could it be that someone turns them in? Could it be that the neighborhood girl decides that while it looked like fun, it wasn't so much and tells her mother? Imagine all the cases where the girl doesn't tell anyone.
If you think this doesn't happen, you are wrong.
The problem the guy who wrote the article has is he completely discounts the idea that the observer, without any photographic or video evidence could go to the police and say "I saw a child being raped." Do you honestly believe the police would discount such a report and refuse to investigate without some documentation?
On a secondary note, a video showing a 12 year old girl being raped would be one of the hottest videos around for a while. It wouldn't make it to the mainstream porn sites, but you can believe it would be worth a huge amount of money simply for the ad revenue that it would generate. I'd think anyone with such a video would have a hard time resisting the temptation to sell it.
I work with people involved in investigating child porn cases.
One image is not sufficient in any jurisdiction in the US and probably not in any country on the planet. One hundred images in the browser cache isn't going to result in prosecution in the US, although it may be a while before you get your computer back. However, if you have one hundred images in a directory named KiddyPorn you are going to be prosecuted, probably plead guilty and go to prison for a long while.
How are most possessors of child porn found? They show their collection off. Often to their children or neighborhood children. If you believe that simple possession means these people are sitting all alone not harming anyone while looking at their pictures, think about how they are caught. We have not gotten to the point where the police make random sweeps through homes looking for child porn. So if they weren't showing anyone else, how would anyone know they had it?
Today most law enforcement computer forensic examiners spend 80% or more of their time on child porn cases. A huge number of these result from neighbors turning in the person because their collection was being exhibited.
The idea that it is OK to "please" a child sexually is a common one with groups like NAMBLA. It is for the most part utter garbage.
There are two problems with this "pleasing" of a child. The first is the unequal power relationship between a child and any adult, but especially those with some relationship with the child. The teacher tells the child that it is OK if the teacher takes their pants and underwear off, so it must be OK. The babysitter shows the child what fun oral sex is. The problem is that until some point in development the child is incapable of doing anything but following directions from someone that has greater power than they do in the relationship. There is no getting away from that. Pleasing the child is irrelevant because they will say it is OK even if they are very uncomfortable and not enjoying the experience at all.
The second problem is really the development of the child and their relationship with others. Assuming we are dealing with a child that has passed from the completely self-centered level of development (around three or four years of age) they actively want to please other people in their lives. This means they are going to do and say things to encourage abusive relationships even when it isn't something they are enjoying or benefiting from. This means the seven year old boy doesn't know what he is talking about when he says he is having fun with the priest.
The fact is this is what most of the child exploitation is and how it happens. I will say that I think the problem is completely different for older children, say above the age of 12 or so. For the most part these children are far more capable of dealing with their own feelings and dealing with unequal power relationships. There is a significant difference between expoitation of a nine year old and a fourteen year old. Today, this is only partially recognized legally.
It is allowed on YouTube until someone asks for it to be removed. There is no filtering on YouTube for videos that are posted. You would be astonished to see what gets out there for 15 minutes or so. Of course, after 15 minutes someone has seen it and it has been pulled.
We have to do away with the concept of good and evil. There is no good and evil.
Only someone that has never experienced evil could possibly say something like this. Oh, I assure you there is such a thing as evil, although that is perhaps a euphemism for the phrase "conscious intent to do harm". Some people are simply astonished to realize that there are people that wish them ill and do so on a scale that is difficult to imagine. We have a tradition of calling such people "evil".
We aren't talking about people with difficulties relating to others or to the real world. We are talking about fully developed and functioning individuals that simply have an overdeveloped sense of self importance to the extent that if it requires harming others for their own satisfaction or to achieve their goals, then so be it. No, I don't think you can write this off as some brain disorder or disfunction no matter how much you would like to.
You will note that Obama was all about how much he was going to be able to do until December when he got his first real briefing. Things toned down a lot after that. Guantanamo was scheduled for late in January right after taking office. I suspect from the timing that someone took him aside after Jan 20th and told him the real scoop on Guantanamo. Suddenly, it was off the table and no more was said about it.
Sure, there was some noise about taking one guy out for trial somewhere else. That proved not just to be unpopular, but I suspect someone told Mr. Obama that security could not be assured and the guy might escape. Again, silence. Nobody has said anything about taking people out for trial since that came up.
Unfortunately, both of these instances can be seen with other presidents as well. I believe GWB had a similar moment a week or two after taking office, but I forget the circumstances. I think it happened to Clinton as well although he did a better job of hiding it. Briefings bring surprises and reality to these guys and I suspect it is a real slap in the face when they find out the real score - stuff the public and even most Senators aren't privy to.
The problem with jobs is two things. First off, unless the size of the GDP increased by a huge percentage (like 25% or more) the jobs situation isn't going to change - the US and Europe simply do not need as many people working as they used to. Businesses with 10 people doing a particular job laid off five of them and found the same amount of work getting done. Maybe the workers weren't as happy about it and couldn't spend as much time talking about last night's TV shows, but the work got done. The only thing that will get those five people hired back is when there is too much work for the remaining five to do. And that is going to be a huge increase in the economy - which nobody believes is going to happen in the near term.
The second problem is the US and Europe are both importing cheap labor at a fantastic rate. There are still thousands of workers coming into the US every day through legal and illegal means. Nobody has a right to expect a high salary when the government is promoting giving the work to low-wage immigrants. It might be nice when Obama's circumvention of immigration laws allow these people to vote Democrat, but long before then the displaced US workers are going to need government handouts to keep eating.
Face it, we now have an admitted unemployment rate of around 8%. On top of that, we have the real rate of unemployment and underemployment of around 14%. Further up the scale, if you are counting the folks that aren't ever going to get jobs because of prison, drugs, homelessness, etc. you begin to see the real unemployment rate is at least 25%. Probably 30% is realistic because we will never know these real numbers.
What is coming next is the US government is going to have to support these people, by either giving them meaningless make-work jobs (dig this hole, then fill it back in) or just reinstating welfare at a federal level - it has to be federal because the states simply don't have the money to do it now. Between that and the new government-supported healthcare system - when the employers bail out on January 1st 2014, the government will be picking up the tab - we are looking at 3-4 trillion new spending every year.
Hope you like your job as you will be working for everyone else until October every year. I'm also betting the US enacts some employment regulations to keep them from getting deeper in a hole. If you could quit and get more money from the government than by working, many people would just quit or get fired. The government has to stop that, so new laws making it illegal to quit, illegal to fire people are the only way.