The point is, for most younger people: I have it, you have it, we all have it. All the time, and for free.
Anything that doesn't encompass that usage model will get bypassed in favor of stuff that will adhere to that model.
The problem is for creative types that this means they get one sale in an efficient market. The first buyer then makes their purchase available to the rest of the world for free. Why would they do that? I don't think anyone is completely sure, but a reputation or status built by sharing is part of it.
The "one sale" idea pretty much pushes things back to a patronage system. Instead of recording a song and selling copies of it, a band is paid by some rich guy to play. The rich guy gets to tell them what he likes and what he doesn't like - and if the band wants to continue living off music they will play that way. They can then distribute their work for free without any worries about compensation.
The problem is, as quite a few creative types found hundreds of years ago, a patronage system quickly ends up where everyone is trying to be just like Elvis because the people with money to spend on the arts really, really liked Elvis. Or whomever was the big favorite. So in 17th Century Europe you had playwrites coming up with pretty much rehashes of the same theme over and over again because that is what the patrons of the arts liked and would pay for.
Sounds sort of like what has happened with music recently. But the problem is while the record labels have (somewhat) learned that an endless series of "Boy Bands" aren't going to cut it any longer with a patronage system it isn't up to the marketplace - it is up to a very small number of patrons. Is that really where we want to go?
And no, I don't see the Internet making much of a difference. If the Internet lead to broad-based financial support it would. But the Internet is a way to distribute stuff for free. There is no "financial support" involved. iTunes is a myth and you might as well get over it. Nobody is making money off iTunes, especially Apple who created it as a music supply for iPods. And as many sales as iTunes has it occupies maybe 3% of music downloads today. No, no money that way.
Most of the problems with the Kindle are closely associated with Amazon's management of the device. Amazon has tried to hide the fact that the device does indeed have a protected Mobipocket PID, but I think this is eventually going to come out no matter what.
There is no hope for "right of first sale" for digital goods. You can resell your iTunes purchases - only if you don't mind the files being watermarked with your personal information. DRM isn't the point - the point is that if you can sell a copy of your purchase there is nothing to prevent you from doing so and keeping the original. This then places you in competition with the publisher and Amazon, in the case of the Kindle. iTunes is a good example of this again - they have maybe 1% of the music downloads and maybe 90% of the paid music downloads.
Used Kindle hardware certainly has a resale market. Used Kindle hardware with a collection of paid-for books on it some problems but not that much. Used Kindle books do not exist in a manner in which you can sell the one-and-only copy you paid for.
Two things Amazon could do would make this situation a lot nicer. One is to make it possible to display the standard Mobipocket PID. Yes, it means other stores than Amazon can sell protected books for the Kindle - but it also enables "borrowing" digital works from a library as that is the only way it is going to work. The other thing they can do is established a "used book" market within Amazon for resale of Kindle books. Some minor loss of revenue, perhaps, but it would be pretty simple to set up and would probably encourage some additional purchases.
I have a Kindle 2 and am quite happy with it. Not all the books on it came from Amaon and anyone that suggests this is not easy and simple to do is simply wrong. Such books can even be downloaded through the wireless connection.
Sounds like he got a court to grant some kind of discovery process for this, but I wonder how far it will go? OK, so he can ask for the information that was collected by the "primary" source - some web logs, probably. This gives you at best an IP address unless there is a specific, confirmed identity required to log in.
With an IP address he is going to need another round of subpoenas to get the identity from the ISP. Likely as not, unless the ISP is very, very friendly towards criminals he will have to sue them to get this information. That is pretty much the normal course for non-law enforcement folks. Is it worth that? And, even after filing suit, would a judge force the ISP to open their books?
Naa, probably not.
Let's assume an accomplice was mouthing off in some online forum. Someone that knows the person looking for this information is innocent and knows who committed the crime. Well, given things to day they are going to be protected by the courts, by the prosecutor, by the media companies and by their ISP. The accused doesn't stand a chance.
Idiot. All cars should be banned. Privately owned transportation has no place in the resource-constrained 21st Century.
If you can't ride a bicycle to work or walk, move somewhere where you can.
Same thing with groceries. If you eat so much that it takes a car to carry it to your home, you eat too much.
On the road to sustainability, there are going to be lots of small casulities. If you are consuming more than you are producing, you are going to be one of them.
If we insist on operating the planet as a closed system without obtaining resources from elsewhere, then "sustainability" really does mean that all there is to use is what is in front of you. Food is going to be come scarce and transporting food over long distances will be impractical. If you aren't living near a farm - close enough to bicycle over to get some food - you better think about moving. The days of shipping an orange 2000 miles to someone are just about over.
And you better think about what you are producing. Is it food for your family, or is it CO2 and pollution? One gets you life in the new world, the other death in the old one.
Of course some folks might look up at the sky and see infinite resources there for the taking. Except as a culture we seem to have decided to stay planet-bound and just try to ignore the cornucopia that is out there. Too bad, really. We might have had a chance. Now it is just a race to the bottom seeing how few resources we can consume.
Sure it is silly, but there are no "standards" in the cell phone business in most of the world.
What does this have to do with Verizon? Well, they do funny things to their cell tower systems as well. Maybe not as unique as IDEN, but they modify the standard software and this requires modifications to the phone software to work on it. So trying to use just any CDMA phone on Verizon doesn't work - specifically switching between Sprint and Verizon requires a new, Verizon capable phone.
I went to Australia with a CDMA Treo. No carrier there could make it work, even though a few of them had tried extensively in the past. CDMA is rather customized by each carrier to work with the software they commission on their handsets.
Now GSM is somewhat different, until you start adding 3G and other features to it. Then the carriers start to have their own flavor as well. Good luck getting your 3G phone to work on just any carrier.
Might it be nice if it didn't work this way? Maybe. Verizon I know thinks their modifications give them a coverage edge that is unmatched in the US. So it is unlikely you are going to ever convince the carriers to give it up when there is a competitive advantage to be gained.
Better talk to HR before implementing this strategy. Especially with government contractors, but really any company. You can get the company sued for discrimination because of an approach like this. Good communications skills can be easily viewed as a white-only job requirement in the US. There are quite a few cultures that do not value good communications skills as highly, and many of these cultures do not communicate well with older white people.
As long as an ISP values their customer's privacy and rights to step on other people more than they value the integrity of the Internet, we are going to have problems.
Right now, it is not illegal, wrong, immoral or forbidden to have a computer owned by a botnet. This means that if my computer at home is infected nothing will stop it from doing whatever its little botnet commander wants it to do. And my ISP will not do anything to prevent or deter this computer from stepping on the rights of others in any way possible.
Similarly, if your computer is intruded upon and you find an IP address that has been used to vandalize your computer, good luck. The ISP owning that ISP address will certainly not release any information about their customer without your suing the ISP or involving law enforcement. Law enforcement isn't interested until you have lots and lots of financial damages.
All in all, this absolutely assures that "script kiddies" will get away with anything until they do something really big. Similarly, fraudsters and credit card thieves will get away with it until they do something really, really big. So what if you track them down to an IP address? It doesn't help. Nobody cares because it is just the "Internet" and law enforcement is still caught up with the idea that the only people that lose anything are nerds and geeks or people that have been foolish trying to get rich quick - so they deserve whatever they lost.
1. Impossible. There is no way to both have "computing for everyone" and have educated users. Users are going to be, well, users always.
2. Sorry, not really possible either. If I can convince the user to run a program, grant security authorization to this program and do whatever it takes to take over their computer, the operating system is irrelevent. And yes, we are there today. Windows is plenty secure but it, as Linux does, requires an Administrator. When that is the "user" you no longer have security.
3. The criminals aren't interested in having their code reviewed.
4. I'm glad we have some unrealistic utopian folks here. It is always refreshing to see people that simply do not understand that all human activity since the beginning of time has revolved around "commerce" and "commerce" is, by its nature, marketing.
Dogs are not involved in commerce. Dogs do not experience "marketing". If everyone was more dog-like we wouldn't have problems like this. We would, however, have masters.
Hate speech only comes into play with protected classes, at least in the USA.
You can say people should kill Republicans all day long and this is not considered to be hate speech. However, saying that gays should be killed is considered hate speech because gays, unlike Republicans, are a protected class.
Similarly, you can stand on a street corner and yell insults at white men all day long. They are not a protected class. Insult a black woman who is a member of a protected class and you will be immdiately arrested.
Carrying a sign that says "Down with Christians" will get you nowhere. Carrying a sign that says "Down with Muslims" will get you arrested. In this specific case, Jews are often considered to be a member of a protected class.
Within a protected class, such as a gay slapping around another gay person, the law is not very clear and enforcement is, well, difficult. Examine what happens when a black person refers to another as a Nigger vs. what happens when a white person does it. The white person will, not being a member of the protected class, will always have trouble for saying (or even thinking) that word.
The ways that protected classes can interact, such as a black person insulting a white gay person, is even more confusing. There is no clear indication of what protected class trumps what other protected classes leading to real problems. Basically, law enforcement will stand around and let the situation resolve itself rather than interfering and possibly creating a hate situation because of their intervention. Or, they just wait until both participants clearly break some other laws and arrest both of them.
OK, so you have a cell phone. It communicates with a cell tower based infrastructure where there are a (relatively) fixed number of maximum connections that can be maintained at one time. A cell phone communicating (voice or data) occupies one of these connection ports while communicating.
The cell phone tower also has a physical connection to a data network with a maximum bandwidth inherent in such connections.
It is my understanding that for data connections today a cell phone does not have a constant connection to the network but switches on and off as needed. Thus, the cell tower can accomodate a lot more data connections than voice connections. But still there is an obvious upper limit.
So there are two basic limitations on the use of cell phone data connections: a maximum connection limit per cell site and the maximum bandwidth available to the cell site. These two limits are important for the future because they are not trivial to change. By far, the maximum bandwidth available for data connections can be (somewhat) trivially increased up to the limit of the radio system. Beyond that, you need to either add channels, change frequencies or change the entire infrastructure. Not trivial.
I do not know how far we are away from reaching these limits, but we have already seen what happens when the voice channel limit is reached. It isn't pretty and is rather disruptive. This limit has been sidestepped (with microcells) and worked around by changing to new frequencies with more channels. But there are still hard limits. And sidestepping or working around the current limits may not be practical to do, especially if it so people can listen to music streamed to their phone.
Streaming music to a cell phone is great for early adopters, because the bandwidth is sitting their idle. Changing the entire cell phone infrastructure to accomodate streaming music should it be adopted by the masses seems, well, incredibly idiotic. Why would we want to do something like that?
In a ground interdiction role, you are correct. A fighter attacking ground targets can be vulnerable to all sorts of things, even cables strung up and a unmanned plane is going to be at least as effective and far more replaceable.
However, once you get into a true air superiority role, plane-to-plane the UAV is going to lose out every time. It is a matter of pilot skill and aircraft performance, with WW II proving that good pilots beat good aircraft every time. A couple of piloted aircraft could clear a squadron of UAV's regardless of missles and other armament simply because the UAV pilots cannot use the aircraft to the limit of the pilot's abilities as the manned aircraft can be used.
So for Afganistan with no enemy air force, the UAV is perfect. Should we have a conflict with Iran, North Korea or China, we better have manned fighters.
Today, if a research organization creates something new and exciting, it can generally be duplicated in China in less than a year - often three weeks or so. This eliminates any possibility of the "innovator" reaping any sort of reward for their efforts. What company wants to spend money only to hand a gift over to someone in China?
Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced. The license fee per DVD player is $5, which would translate to around $50 at the retail level. There are plenty of $29.99 DVD players being brought into the US for which no license fee was ever paid. And this is just one example I personally know about. There are thousands more.
So while 50 years ago (or even 30) you could create something new and develop a product based on it. This product would be sold and the developer would get paid. Sometimes, for the right product, it might be "knocked off" in China but the cost differentials were not as they are today. So you could still sell the "original" product for a reasonable price.
Today, between the Internet making it all about lowest price, customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned and labor costs skyrocketing developing a product in the US or Western Europe is pointless - as is the R&D behind it. Why would anyone spend the money on R&D when the fruits of their labor is going to be taken by a foreign operator?
Short answer is, this isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. R&D is dead and buried. We will eventually have some R&D again, but not until the current globalization situation sorts itself out.
It means that once the Internet is involved, the rules have been suspended. Any rules. All rules.
Yes, if I can ruin your life through the Internet, I can get away with it. In most cases, you can try to sue me and you will lose because "it's just the Interent."
There is a complete disconnect in most people's minds between the "real world" and "the Internet", such that people just aren't going to be held accountable for actions on the Internet. Period. Get used to it.
Kinda sucks of your life is the one ruined, but then you shouldn't have offended someone with power. Power on the Internet. What started this whole thing was Megan pissed off Lori Drew's daughter. That seems to have been a mistake.
It is different because there was no physical presence involved. The victim could have turned off the computer but didn't.
This goes to the basic idea that all "crimes" committed through the Internet cannot be prosecuted. There is only a "virtual" presence involved and we can't have people's "virtual" presence being prosecuted, now can we? Nothing is really criminal on the Internet. From fraud to piracy to theft and vandalism, there is an unlimited justification that none of this is really happening in the physical world and therefore none of it can be prosecuted as if it was.
What the entire set of decisions involving Lori Drew really means is that you are free to do anything on the Internet without fear of consequences. No matter what results from your actions in "virtual space", you can't be convicted of anything in "real space". The one exception to this is if you do something incredibily stupid - like purjury or admitting to a non-crime as if it was a crime.
It sucks, but the Internet continues to be a lawless, consequences-free zone. I see little happening that would change this anytime soon.
Today, when you search for a product on the Internet what are you looking for? The best quality or the lowest price? Most people might try to select from a family of products based on quality but then in the end it comes down to buying the product with the lowest price from the merchant with the lowest total price.
What this does is it drives out quality. Anything manufactured in the US or Western Europe is going to be more expensive in direct costs to the consumer than something made in Mexico, China or Indonesia. Sure, there might be support costs later, but the manufacturers have learned to force the consumer to pay for support. So much that is generally cheaper to just buy something else rather than try to fight through the company's support process.
So we are going to see in the future nothing but cheap goods made in low labor cost countries. Stuff that is just barely good enough to use a few times without breaking. Quality implies higher labor costs and higher product costs. These things are very difficult to search for on the Internet, so a low price trumps everything else.
Recycling is a joke. 90% of what consumers pretend they are "recycling" today is dumped as garbage in a landfill - mostly because of cross-contamination and other process problems.
Sure, we could be recycling plastic containers into... ???... well, you see that is the problem. Nobody really has a need for garbage-grade plastic today. And when you combine 17 sorts of plastic formulations into a big hopper that is what you get. There are few, if any, practical uses for the material and nobody is interested in paying what it would really cost to do things like intelligent separation.
Practical recycliing happens for pre-consumer paper and post-consumer glass and aluminum. Post-consumer paper is pretty much just garbage today because of the costs and other problems, contamination being one of them.
For everything else, from electronics to plastic containers, recycling is a hoax put over on people. The materials are taken off to the recycling center where they are carefully examined and then trashed. Nobody wants it, nobody is going to pay extra for recycling and nobody wants to pay for manual labor to really separate the different sorts of materials.
The BBC is essentially an arm of the government. While they can often be commended on not toeing the government line, inescapably they cannot be considered completely independent of it. Of course it is impossible for a private company to compete with the government - the government service is tax funded without any choice by the citizens whereas the private company has to have voluntary customers.
It is much like the Obama healthcare "public" option. Publicly funded services will swamp privately funded ones and eventually the private ones will disappear. Yes, Fox News in the UK is threatened in this way by the BBC as insurance companies will be under Obamacare's public option.
The extreme endpoint of this is that there will no longer be any news service except those which are tax funded. If paying is voluntary, the "Internet generation" is going to say NO!!! rather loudly and private services will simply find something else to do. It is inevitable, inescapable and rather sad.
Try claiming your "natural rights" in Chile. Or China. Or just about anywhere outside of a very small number of places on the planet and you will find these rights aren't considered to be very natural at all. They are a figment of your imagination.
People in stores get treated like criminals because an astonishingly high number of them are, in fact, criminals. 10% "shrinkage" is not uncommon in stores that take no steps to prevent it. This is interpreted to mean that 10% of the people walking through the door are there to steal. Not entirely statistically correct, but close enough for amatures.
With statistics like that, do you really blame store owners from instituting policies that seem to treat everyone like a criminal? And even with the sorts of receipt-checking and package searching policies in place they are still left with at least 3% shrinkage. Some of this is employee theft. Some of it is legitimately damaged and lost merchandise. But there is still theft going on.
So where does that get us? It is simple. No law can protect merchants, so they are determined to protect themselves. Same thing with carrying a gun - laws are there to protect law-abiding people. When such a large percentage of people no longer care about being law-abiding anymore you might want to think about going armed. Because nobody is going to protect you. The police might try to catch and prosecute your killer. Not that you will care much at that point.
OK, so literacy isn't declining according to some. They are clearly out of touch with reality. Literacy has two faces: the ability to read and the ability to write. In both comprehension is key.
If the reader can't understand what has been written previously, communications have failed. Most documents written before 1950 are going to be nearly incomprehensible to young adults today. They aren't going to see the point of trying to read materials like this.
Similarly, when a writer cannot communicate their thoughts in a clear way, communications have failed. Taking the writings of your average 22 year old today and giving them to someone in theor 50's to read will most likely result in utter lack of comprehension. It isn't that the subject being written about is foreign to the reader, it is that the young person is likely to use contractions, abbreviations and slang terms that are only accessible to other people of their generation.
Obviously this leads to situations where a new person in a company can't seem to communicate with the president of the company. It also leads to things like marketing not being able to communicate with accounting. Worse yet, it leads to the son-in-law not being able to make himself understood to the wife's father. This isn't the first time this has happened, and the results aren't pretty.
Schools have done a pretty good job of convincing young people that learning is pointless and that history before 1990 is useless to them. We are supposedly living in some new time completely unlike anything that has come before, so there is no point to looking back. This is so utterly wrong that it is comical. Unfortunately, it is how people are thinking today. This explains many trends in today's society where we are clearly repeating the bad mistakes from earlier times.
Sure, maybe technology has changed how some things are done. But it hasn't changed human nature at all. We're still the same humans no matter how much we wish we were not.
$400 a month rent? Where have you been lately? In just about anything worth being called a city you are going to be spending more like $1000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Utilities are going to add another couple hundred onto that.
Outside of a city, there isn't going to be a bus. So now you have to have a car unless the weather is perfect all the time - and it isn't and no job lets you skip work because of bad weather.
No, trying to live on $20,000 a year in a city is a real challange today.
Serf class? Sorry, but the problem is that people come in all sizes. If you have a low-skill person, where do they go today? 70 years ago, they could get a job in a factory. Today there is a pervasive attitude that a college education is a requirement - so that means anyone that can't hack it in college is permanently unemployable.
Increasing the minimum wage creates more of these people because it just raises the bar. If you aren't worth $12 an hour then trying to get a job in a place with a "living wage" law is impossible. It means the are no entry-level jobs, no jobs for the unskilled and no jobs for the handicapped. If you aren't prepared to hit the ground running, step aside and let the experienced people have the jobs.
Then what do the low-skilled people do? Well, they can collect money from the government because there are no jobs for them. Which means a company that has relocated operations to somewere with lower wages (like another state) now has to pay extra - increasing the incentive to move the jobs further and further away into lower and lower wage locations. Suddenly it isn't enough to move the jobs to Fargo, ND, now they have to be moved to India.
And the taxes are going to go up for everyone unless you convince all employers that it just isn't nice to move the jobs away. How do you get the unskilled jobs? Well, it isn't by pricing them out of the market as we are doing today.
If there are two places where a job can be done and in one of them the costs for labor are less than the other place, the job is going to be done in the low-cost place. Period. There is no stopping it. We have spent the last fifty years or so building international trade so that goods and services are can flow to low-cost places.
If you currently work in a job that can possibly be done in some low-cost country, get used to the idea of doing something else. Because the pace is accelerating. When the worldwide recession is finally over you will see it move even faster.
Manufacturing is dead in the US and Western Europe. Most jobs that can be done in a cheaper place are being done there now. No amount of hand-waving or talking about happy employees is going to change this. No employer can afford not to pay attention to this, because today cost of labor is the number 1 cost of just about anything. And every move by US and Western Europe politicians to do things like introduce "living wage" laws will just push this faster and faster.
What most people do not understand is increasing the costs of labor in the US isn't going to make for a better life for lower-class employees. What it will do is put them out of a job, permanently. Maybe the government can do a better job of supporting them on taxes while their former jobs are done in low-wage countries. Maybe not. We are about to find out.
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The point is, for most younger people: I have it, you have it, we all have it. All the time, and for free.
Anything that doesn't encompass that usage model will get bypassed in favor of stuff that will adhere to that model.
The problem is for creative types that this means they get one sale in an efficient market. The first buyer then makes their purchase available to the rest of the world for free. Why would they do that? I don't think anyone is completely sure, but a reputation or status built by sharing is part of it.
The "one sale" idea pretty much pushes things back to a patronage system. Instead of recording a song and selling copies of it, a band is paid by some rich guy to play. The rich guy gets to tell them what he likes and what he doesn't like - and if the band wants to continue living off music they will play that way. They can then distribute their work for free without any worries about compensation.
The problem is, as quite a few creative types found hundreds of years ago, a patronage system quickly ends up where everyone is trying to be just like Elvis because the people with money to spend on the arts really, really liked Elvis. Or whomever was the big favorite. So in 17th Century Europe you had playwrites coming up with pretty much rehashes of the same theme over and over again because that is what the patrons of the arts liked and would pay for.
Sounds sort of like what has happened with music recently. But the problem is while the record labels have (somewhat) learned that an endless series of "Boy Bands" aren't going to cut it any longer with a patronage system it isn't up to the marketplace - it is up to a very small number of patrons. Is that really where we want to go?
And no, I don't see the Internet making much of a difference. If the Internet lead to broad-based financial support it would. But the Internet is a way to distribute stuff for free. There is no "financial support" involved. iTunes is a myth and you might as well get over it. Nobody is making money off iTunes, especially Apple who created it as a music supply for iPods. And as many sales as iTunes has it occupies maybe 3% of music downloads today. No, no money that way.
Most of the problems with the Kindle are closely associated with Amazon's management of the device. Amazon has tried to hide the fact that the device does indeed have a protected Mobipocket PID, but I think this is eventually going to come out no matter what.
There is no hope for "right of first sale" for digital goods. You can resell your iTunes purchases - only if you don't mind the files being watermarked with your personal information. DRM isn't the point - the point is that if you can sell a copy of your purchase there is nothing to prevent you from doing so and keeping the original. This then places you in competition with the publisher and Amazon, in the case of the Kindle. iTunes is a good example of this again - they have maybe 1% of the music downloads and maybe 90% of the paid music downloads.
Used Kindle hardware certainly has a resale market. Used Kindle hardware with a collection of paid-for books on it some problems but not that much. Used Kindle books do not exist in a manner in which you can sell the one-and-only copy you paid for.
Two things Amazon could do would make this situation a lot nicer. One is to make it possible to display the standard Mobipocket PID. Yes, it means other stores than Amazon can sell protected books for the Kindle - but it also enables "borrowing" digital works from a library as that is the only way it is going to work. The other thing they can do is established a "used book" market within Amazon for resale of Kindle books. Some minor loss of revenue, perhaps, but it would be pretty simple to set up and would probably encourage some additional purchases.
I have a Kindle 2 and am quite happy with it. Not all the books on it came from Amaon and anyone that suggests this is not easy and simple to do is simply wrong. Such books can even be downloaded through the wireless connection.
Sounds like he got a court to grant some kind of discovery process for this, but I wonder how far it will go? OK, so he can ask for the information that was collected by the "primary" source - some web logs, probably. This gives you at best an IP address unless there is a specific, confirmed identity required to log in.
With an IP address he is going to need another round of subpoenas to get the identity from the ISP. Likely as not, unless the ISP is very, very friendly towards criminals he will have to sue them to get this information. That is pretty much the normal course for non-law enforcement folks. Is it worth that? And, even after filing suit, would a judge force the ISP to open their books?
Naa, probably not.
Let's assume an accomplice was mouthing off in some online forum. Someone that knows the person looking for this information is innocent and knows who committed the crime. Well, given things to day they are going to be protected by the courts, by the prosecutor, by the media companies and by their ISP. The accused doesn't stand a chance.
Idiot. All cars should be banned. Privately owned transportation has no place in the resource-constrained 21st Century.
If you can't ride a bicycle to work or walk, move somewhere where you can.
Same thing with groceries. If you eat so much that it takes a car to carry it to your home, you eat too much.
On the road to sustainability, there are going to be lots of small casulities. If you are consuming more than you are producing, you are going to be one of them.
If we insist on operating the planet as a closed system without obtaining resources from elsewhere, then "sustainability" really does mean that all there is to use is what is in front of you. Food is going to be come scarce and transporting food over long distances will be impractical. If you aren't living near a farm - close enough to bicycle over to get some food - you better think about moving. The days of shipping an orange 2000 miles to someone are just about over.
And you better think about what you are producing. Is it food for your family, or is it CO2 and pollution? One gets you life in the new world, the other death in the old one.
Of course some folks might look up at the sky and see infinite resources there for the taking. Except as a culture we seem to have decided to stay planet-bound and just try to ignore the cornucopia that is out there. Too bad, really. We might have had a chance. Now it is just a race to the bottom seeing how few resources we can consume.
Sure it is silly, but there are no "standards" in the cell phone business in most of the world.
What does this have to do with Verizon? Well, they do funny things to their cell tower systems as well. Maybe not as unique as IDEN, but they modify the standard software and this requires modifications to the phone software to work on it. So trying to use just any CDMA phone on Verizon doesn't work - specifically switching between Sprint and Verizon requires a new, Verizon capable phone.
I went to Australia with a CDMA Treo. No carrier there could make it work, even though a few of them had tried extensively in the past. CDMA is rather customized by each carrier to work with the software they commission on their handsets.
Now GSM is somewhat different, until you start adding 3G and other features to it. Then the carriers start to have their own flavor as well. Good luck getting your 3G phone to work on just any carrier.
Might it be nice if it didn't work this way? Maybe. Verizon I know thinks their modifications give them a coverage edge that is unmatched in the US. So it is unlikely you are going to ever convince the carriers to give it up when there is a competitive advantage to be gained.
Better talk to HR before implementing this strategy. Especially with government contractors, but really any company. You can get the company sued for discrimination because of an approach like this. Good communications skills can be easily viewed as a white-only job requirement in the US. There are quite a few cultures that do not value good communications skills as highly, and many of these cultures do not communicate well with older white people.
As long as an ISP values their customer's privacy and rights to step on other people more than they value the integrity of the Internet, we are going to have problems.
Right now, it is not illegal, wrong, immoral or forbidden to have a computer owned by a botnet. This means that if my computer at home is infected nothing will stop it from doing whatever its little botnet commander wants it to do. And my ISP will not do anything to prevent or deter this computer from stepping on the rights of others in any way possible.
Similarly, if your computer is intruded upon and you find an IP address that has been used to vandalize your computer, good luck. The ISP owning that ISP address will certainly not release any information about their customer without your suing the ISP or involving law enforcement. Law enforcement isn't interested until you have lots and lots of financial damages.
All in all, this absolutely assures that "script kiddies" will get away with anything until they do something really big. Similarly, fraudsters and credit card thieves will get away with it until they do something really, really big. So what if you track them down to an IP address? It doesn't help. Nobody cares because it is just the "Internet" and law enforcement is still caught up with the idea that the only people that lose anything are nerds and geeks or people that have been foolish trying to get rich quick - so they deserve whatever they lost.
1. Impossible. There is no way to both have "computing for everyone" and have educated users. Users are going to be, well, users always.
2. Sorry, not really possible either. If I can convince the user to run a program, grant security authorization to this program and do whatever it takes to take over their computer, the operating system is irrelevent. And yes, we are there today. Windows is plenty secure but it, as Linux does, requires an Administrator. When that is the "user" you no longer have security.
3. The criminals aren't interested in having their code reviewed.
4. I'm glad we have some unrealistic utopian folks here. It is always refreshing to see people that simply do not understand that all human activity since the beginning of time has revolved around "commerce" and "commerce" is, by its nature, marketing.
Dogs are not involved in commerce. Dogs do not experience "marketing". If everyone was more dog-like we wouldn't have problems like this. We would, however, have masters.
Hate speech only comes into play with protected classes, at least in the USA.
You can say people should kill Republicans all day long and this is not considered to be hate speech. However, saying that gays should be killed is considered hate speech because gays, unlike Republicans, are a protected class.
Similarly, you can stand on a street corner and yell insults at white men all day long. They are not a protected class. Insult a black woman who is a member of a protected class and you will be immdiately arrested.
Carrying a sign that says "Down with Christians" will get you nowhere. Carrying a sign that says "Down with Muslims" will get you arrested. In this specific case, Jews are often considered to be a member of a protected class.
Within a protected class, such as a gay slapping around another gay person, the law is not very clear and enforcement is, well, difficult. Examine what happens when a black person refers to another as a Nigger vs. what happens when a white person does it. The white person will, not being a member of the protected class, will always have trouble for saying (or even thinking) that word.
The ways that protected classes can interact, such as a black person insulting a white gay person, is even more confusing. There is no clear indication of what protected class trumps what other protected classes leading to real problems. Basically, law enforcement will stand around and let the situation resolve itself rather than interfering and possibly creating a hate situation because of their intervention. Or, they just wait until both participants clearly break some other laws and arrest both of them.
OK, so you have a cell phone. It communicates with a cell tower based infrastructure where there are a (relatively) fixed number of maximum connections that can be maintained at one time. A cell phone communicating (voice or data) occupies one of these connection ports while communicating.
The cell phone tower also has a physical connection to a data network with a maximum bandwidth inherent in such connections.
It is my understanding that for data connections today a cell phone does not have a constant connection to the network but switches on and off as needed. Thus, the cell tower can accomodate a lot more data connections than voice connections. But still there is an obvious upper limit.
So there are two basic limitations on the use of cell phone data connections: a maximum connection limit per cell site and the maximum bandwidth available to the cell site. These two limits are important for the future because they are not trivial to change. By far, the maximum bandwidth available for data connections can be (somewhat) trivially increased up to the limit of the radio system. Beyond that, you need to either add channels, change frequencies or change the entire infrastructure. Not trivial.
I do not know how far we are away from reaching these limits, but we have already seen what happens when the voice channel limit is reached. It isn't pretty and is rather disruptive. This limit has been sidestepped (with microcells) and worked around by changing to new frequencies with more channels. But there are still hard limits. And sidestepping or working around the current limits may not be practical to do, especially if it so people can listen to music streamed to their phone.
Streaming music to a cell phone is great for early adopters, because the bandwidth is sitting their idle. Changing the entire cell phone infrastructure to accomodate streaming music should it be adopted by the masses seems, well, incredibly idiotic. Why would we want to do something like that?
In a ground interdiction role, you are correct. A fighter attacking ground targets can be vulnerable to all sorts of things, even cables strung up and a unmanned plane is going to be at least as effective and far more replaceable.
However, once you get into a true air superiority role, plane-to-plane the UAV is going to lose out every time. It is a matter of pilot skill and aircraft performance, with WW II proving that good pilots beat good aircraft every time. A couple of piloted aircraft could clear a squadron of UAV's regardless of missles and other armament simply because the UAV pilots cannot use the aircraft to the limit of the pilot's abilities as the manned aircraft can be used.
So for Afganistan with no enemy air force, the UAV is perfect. Should we have a conflict with Iran, North Korea or China, we better have manned fighters.
Today, if a research organization creates something new and exciting, it can generally be duplicated in China in less than a year - often three weeks or so. This eliminates any possibility of the "innovator" reaping any sort of reward for their efforts. What company wants to spend money only to hand a gift over to someone in China?
Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced. The license fee per DVD player is $5, which would translate to around $50 at the retail level. There are plenty of $29.99 DVD players being brought into the US for which no license fee was ever paid. And this is just one example I personally know about. There are thousands more.
So while 50 years ago (or even 30) you could create something new and develop a product based on it. This product would be sold and the developer would get paid. Sometimes, for the right product, it might be "knocked off" in China but the cost differentials were not as they are today. So you could still sell the "original" product for a reasonable price.
Today, between the Internet making it all about lowest price, customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned and labor costs skyrocketing developing a product in the US or Western Europe is pointless - as is the R&D behind it. Why would anyone spend the money on R&D when the fruits of their labor is going to be taken by a foreign operator?
Short answer is, this isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. R&D is dead and buried. We will eventually have some R&D again, but not until the current globalization situation sorts itself out.
Correct in that the freedom of speech does not absolve you of responsibility for your words.
The use of the Internet absolves you of responsibility.
It means that once the Internet is involved, the rules have been suspended. Any rules. All rules.
Yes, if I can ruin your life through the Internet, I can get away with it. In most cases, you can try to sue me and you will lose because "it's just the Interent."
There is a complete disconnect in most people's minds between the "real world" and "the Internet", such that people just aren't going to be held accountable for actions on the Internet. Period. Get used to it.
Kinda sucks of your life is the one ruined, but then you shouldn't have offended someone with power. Power on the Internet. What started this whole thing was Megan pissed off Lori Drew's daughter. That seems to have been a mistake.
It is different because there was no physical presence involved. The victim could have turned off the computer but didn't.
This goes to the basic idea that all "crimes" committed through the Internet cannot be prosecuted. There is only a "virtual" presence involved and we can't have people's "virtual" presence being prosecuted, now can we? Nothing is really criminal on the Internet. From fraud to piracy to theft and vandalism, there is an unlimited justification that none of this is really happening in the physical world and therefore none of it can be prosecuted as if it was.
What the entire set of decisions involving Lori Drew really means is that you are free to do anything on the Internet without fear of consequences. No matter what results from your actions in "virtual space", you can't be convicted of anything in "real space". The one exception to this is if you do something incredibily stupid - like purjury or admitting to a non-crime as if it was a crime.
It sucks, but the Internet continues to be a lawless, consequences-free zone. I see little happening that would change this anytime soon.
Half would be a big cut in Csnsda.
It isn't going to get any better.
Today, when you search for a product on the Internet what are you looking for? The best quality or the lowest price? Most people might try to select from a family of products based on quality but then in the end it comes down to buying the product with the lowest price from the merchant with the lowest total price.
What this does is it drives out quality. Anything manufactured in the US or Western Europe is going to be more expensive in direct costs to the consumer than something made in Mexico, China or Indonesia. Sure, there might be support costs later, but the manufacturers have learned to force the consumer to pay for support. So much that is generally cheaper to just buy something else rather than try to fight through the company's support process.
So we are going to see in the future nothing but cheap goods made in low labor cost countries. Stuff that is just barely good enough to use a few times without breaking. Quality implies higher labor costs and higher product costs. These things are very difficult to search for on the Internet, so a low price trumps everything else.
Recycling is a joke. 90% of what consumers pretend they are "recycling" today is dumped as garbage in a landfill - mostly because of cross-contamination and other process problems.
Sure, we could be recycling plastic containers into ... ??? ... well, you see that is the problem. Nobody really has a need for garbage-grade plastic today. And when you combine 17 sorts of plastic formulations into a big hopper that is what you get. There are few, if any, practical uses for the material and nobody is interested in paying what it would really cost to do things like intelligent separation.
Practical recycliing happens for pre-consumer paper and post-consumer glass and aluminum. Post-consumer paper is pretty much just garbage today because of the costs and other problems, contamination being one of them.
For everything else, from electronics to plastic containers, recycling is a hoax put over on people. The materials are taken off to the recycling center where they are carefully examined and then trashed. Nobody wants it, nobody is going to pay extra for recycling and nobody wants to pay for manual labor to really separate the different sorts of materials.
The BBC is essentially an arm of the government. While they can often be commended on not toeing the government line, inescapably they cannot be considered completely independent of it. Of course it is impossible for a private company to compete with the government - the government service is tax funded without any choice by the citizens whereas the private company has to have voluntary customers.
It is much like the Obama healthcare "public" option. Publicly funded services will swamp privately funded ones and eventually the private ones will disappear. Yes, Fox News in the UK is threatened in this way by the BBC as insurance companies will be under Obamacare's public option.
The extreme endpoint of this is that there will no longer be any news service except those which are tax funded. If paying is voluntary, the "Internet generation" is going to say NO!!! rather loudly and private services will simply find something else to do. It is inevitable, inescapable and rather sad.
Try claiming your "natural rights" in Chile. Or China. Or just about anywhere outside of a very small number of places on the planet and you will find these rights aren't considered to be very natural at all. They are a figment of your imagination.
People in stores get treated like criminals because an astonishingly high number of them are, in fact, criminals. 10% "shrinkage" is not uncommon in stores that take no steps to prevent it. This is interpreted to mean that 10% of the people walking through the door are there to steal. Not entirely statistically correct, but close enough for amatures.
With statistics like that, do you really blame store owners from instituting policies that seem to treat everyone like a criminal? And even with the sorts of receipt-checking and package searching policies in place they are still left with at least 3% shrinkage. Some of this is employee theft. Some of it is legitimately damaged and lost merchandise. But there is still theft going on.
So where does that get us? It is simple. No law can protect merchants, so they are determined to protect themselves. Same thing with carrying a gun - laws are there to protect law-abiding people. When such a large percentage of people no longer care about being law-abiding anymore you might want to think about going armed. Because nobody is going to protect you. The police might try to catch and prosecute your killer. Not that you will care much at that point.
OK, so literacy isn't declining according to some. They are clearly out of touch with reality. Literacy has two faces: the ability to read and the ability to write. In both comprehension is key.
If the reader can't understand what has been written previously, communications have failed. Most documents written before 1950 are going to be nearly incomprehensible to young adults today. They aren't going to see the point of trying to read materials like this.
Similarly, when a writer cannot communicate their thoughts in a clear way, communications have failed. Taking the writings of your average 22 year old today and giving them to someone in theor 50's to read will most likely result in utter lack of comprehension. It isn't that the subject being written about is foreign to the reader, it is that the young person is likely to use contractions, abbreviations and slang terms that are only accessible to other people of their generation.
Obviously this leads to situations where a new person in a company can't seem to communicate with the president of the company. It also leads to things like marketing not being able to communicate with accounting. Worse yet, it leads to the son-in-law not being able to make himself understood to the wife's father. This isn't the first time this has happened, and the results aren't pretty.
Schools have done a pretty good job of convincing young people that learning is pointless and that history before 1990 is useless to them. We are supposedly living in some new time completely unlike anything that has come before, so there is no point to looking back. This is so utterly wrong that it is comical. Unfortunately, it is how people are thinking today. This explains many trends in today's society where we are clearly repeating the bad mistakes from earlier times.
Sure, maybe technology has changed how some things are done. But it hasn't changed human nature at all. We're still the same humans no matter how much we wish we were not.
$400 a month rent? Where have you been lately? In just about anything worth being called a city you are going to be spending more like $1000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Utilities are going to add another couple hundred onto that.
Outside of a city, there isn't going to be a bus. So now you have to have a car unless the weather is perfect all the time - and it isn't and no job lets you skip work because of bad weather.
No, trying to live on $20,000 a year in a city is a real challange today.
Serf class? Sorry, but the problem is that people come in all sizes. If you have a low-skill person, where do they go today? 70 years ago, they could get a job in a factory. Today there is a pervasive attitude that a college education is a requirement - so that means anyone that can't hack it in college is permanently unemployable.
Increasing the minimum wage creates more of these people because it just raises the bar. If you aren't worth $12 an hour then trying to get a job in a place with a "living wage" law is impossible. It means the are no entry-level jobs, no jobs for the unskilled and no jobs for the handicapped. If you aren't prepared to hit the ground running, step aside and let the experienced people have the jobs.
Then what do the low-skilled people do? Well, they can collect money from the government because there are no jobs for them. Which means a company that has relocated operations to somewere with lower wages (like another state) now has to pay extra - increasing the incentive to move the jobs further and further away into lower and lower wage locations. Suddenly it isn't enough to move the jobs to Fargo, ND, now they have to be moved to India.
And the taxes are going to go up for everyone unless you convince all employers that it just isn't nice to move the jobs away. How do you get the unskilled jobs? Well, it isn't by pricing them out of the market as we are doing today.
If there are two places where a job can be done and in one of them the costs for labor are less than the other place, the job is going to be done in the low-cost place. Period. There is no stopping it. We have spent the last fifty years or so building international trade so that goods and services are can flow to low-cost places.
If you currently work in a job that can possibly be done in some low-cost country, get used to the idea of doing something else. Because the pace is accelerating. When the worldwide recession is finally over you will see it move even faster.
Manufacturing is dead in the US and Western Europe. Most jobs that can be done in a cheaper place are being done there now. No amount of hand-waving or talking about happy employees is going to change this. No employer can afford not to pay attention to this, because today cost of labor is the number 1 cost of just about anything. And every move by US and Western Europe politicians to do things like introduce "living wage" laws will just push this faster and faster.
What most people do not understand is increasing the costs of labor in the US isn't going to make for a better life for lower-class employees. What it will do is put them out of a job, permanently. Maybe the government can do a better job of supporting them on taxes while their former jobs are done in low-wage countries. Maybe not. We are about to find out.