Unfortunately, many "responsible" citizens feel that it is their duty to assist law enforcement. If the speed limit is 55 and they are driving 55 then it is their obligation to make sure that nobody can drive at 56 or higher. This is done by blocking the road with their car and other cars nearby.
This insures that people cannot break the law. It also creates more work for the ambulance drivers and tow trucks because it causes accidents, but the mission is to reduce speeding and it works.
Sorry, but if it has the capability of creating electromagnetic radiation, you don't own it.
Most devices now come with a nice little disclaimer that says pretty much "Modifications to this device may revoke your authorization to use it." This situation isn't new. It has existed this way since at least around 1975 or so, probably even earlier.
Obviously, a cell phone radiates in the electromagnetic spectrum, so you don't own the device and cannot do whatever you want with it. At the very least the FCC has licensed you to use the device within very specific limits and those limits may include the software that the phone is supplied with.
The big change that has to happen is making the data charges support the network. Today some carriers assume they can undercharge for data because the voice calls pay for the network. Same thing with SMS. They can then provide "bargain" data plans.
You want parity? I think the phone company has to be non-profit and a government monopoly for that to happen. Call it a utility that isn't allowed to make a profit and the government is the sole shareholder.
You want risk-taking on the part of the carrier? That is what innovation is, risk taking. That is a different story and they better have plenty of money to offset the losses when a risk doesn't pan out. I don't think these two ideas are compatible at all.
The tenant is paying the landlord, and it's part of the landlord's job to fix mold problems.
You might not have lived in a city apartment. What you encounter are people that let trash build up, stacked in the corner of the kitchen until the neighbors complain about the smell. Sure, the lease has a paragraph in it that says you aren't supposed to do that and can be fined by the building management for not disposing of garbage properly.
So there are endless problems with roaches, mice, and mold. And nothing the building management can do about it because without conducting an inspection and cleaning of every apartment every week there is no way to manage it.
Sure you can try to keep up with it. But when the tenant will absolutely not cooperate there is little that can be done about it.
So while there might be mold, exactly who's fault it might be is far from clear. Cleaning apartments is not the job of the management company, and it says so in most leases.
What you are proposing is to eliminate the adversary legal system. You want the lawyers to judge cases. That isn't how it works, isn't how it is supposed to work and not a very good idea.
For example, even if there is mold in the apartment it is the defense lawyer's job to at least mitigate the situation. Perhaps the mold is there because the tenent encouraged its growth through lack of cleaning. Whatever - the point is you are suggesting rather than litigate and go through a legal process that the lawyer should just decide the matter.
Similerly, what is happening today through the Streisand effect is virtually eliminating legal recourse in some cases. The publicity from ill-informed people spouting off about something they know little about can do 10 times the damage that was originally inflicted. And yes, people read uninformed opinions on the Internet all the time.
Someone posts a review of a restaurant claiming they catch and serve alley cat meat and what exactly is the restaurant supposed to do? Sue the poster? Likely as not, the result is the next day the claim about serving cat meat is repeated in every local newspaper and TV news show because it is sensational. Today, the best option is probably to just close the restaurant and open in a different location under a different name.
Yes, but the seldom-reported fact is the "ozone hole" disappeared about 10 times quicker than anyone predicted and eliminating CFCs had almost nothing to do with it. It needs to be stressed that it was a theory that the "ozone hole" was caused by CFCs and the theory was pretty much proven wrong. Nobody knows why there was a hole and nobody knows why it disappeared.
About the only thing known is that it had nothing to do with eliminating the use of CFCs.
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
I would say that recent events in Iran make it pretty clear that the civilian population doesn't matter all that much to the leaders. North Korea is at that level or perhaps worse. If the military leadership in either country could be confident of survival I don't see MAD being a deterrent at all.
So what if 80% of the civilian population is wiped out?
OK, then how about someone does soemthing real that would have an immediate impact on CO2 emissions without making anyone rich through creating a new commodity trading system?
Ration gasoline in the US. Eliminate using cars for pleasure trips and cut back on cars used for neighborhood police patrols. Put people back on buses or on foot. Start the long process of reshaping cities back to people living and working in relative proximity. Cut interstate trucking out and replace it with rail transit. This would have an immediate effect. It would impact some companies quite a bit, but it would be far less of an impact when compared to the current cap-and-trade system that is going to change electric rates and possibly the cost of everything in the US.
Another idea is eliminate 90% of passenger air travel. It isn't necessary and it would have a huge impact on CO2 emissions. Yes, it would virtually end tourism to some places, but if we are talking about "saving the planet" or making electricity a luxury why is this not considered?
No, neither of these ideas is going to go anywhere. Instead we are going to see the cost of basic goods and services in the US rise quite a bit soon. And the impact on CO2 emissions will be nil to begin with. But a company that uses electricity to make stuff is going to be paying lots more for it and will have to raise their prices. This will move the remaining manufacturing in the US to China where no such costs exist. It will also mean that it is more effective to build a data center in China than in the US - because the electric rates will be so much different.
It it similar to the arguments used by the Catholic church in the middle ages. You couldn't just let anyone read the Bible, it had to be properly interpreted by a trained member of the clergy.
You can't let just anyone review the research behind climate change, because they wouldn't understand it and would't understand the motives behind the people qualified to interpret it.
This is mostly what the Reformation was all about. Unfortunately, we are stuck with a ecological priesthood and it is doubtful anyone is going to come along and dislodge them anytime soon.
Personally, I have to wonder. I believe that uninformed action - mostly economic but partly physical as well - can have devastating consequences. If we wanted to cut CO2 emissions today, it would be entirely possible. But nobody wants to do anything drastic. But plenty of people want to do fairly ineffective things that will screw up the economic works for a long time. It makes no sense, unless the goal is to make some drastic economic changes without really affecting the level of CO2 emissions.
You mean the Australian site, not the US or European sites.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen a real legal decision on this yet. I suspect a US citizen vistiting the Australian site is a violation of some treaty or law and for the most part is just ignored. Directing lots of people there from the US might get that changed.
What you are asking sounds reasonable. Except nobody does it today. Ebay sells stolen merchandise and fakes. Amazon allows the same thing to be done. I have had web sales with wrong prices changed on the fly because the price was wrong.
None of these things would happen if an actual person reviewed any of this stuff. However, in todays low-margin web sales world, nobody going to spend the money to have someone review online sales. They can't afford it because of the low margins. If someone did it, they would be run out of business because on the Internet low prices trump everything.
Google doesn't have a search for good customer service. They have a search for the lowest price.
Amazon doesn't get extra points for offering some kind of decent customer service, so they don't have it. Instead they have low prices. You can go to a Barnes and Noble store and get much better service and walk out with a book - for a couple of dollars more. Guess what? Fewer and fewer people are spending more and choosing the low-margin bad-service route because it costs less.
So you think they should review what is being listed on their site more carefully?
Problem is, the market is between the retailer and the consumer. Where the DRM decision is important is between the wholesaler/publisher/creator and the retailer. Only if the retailer stands up and says they don't want DRM will this change.
iTunes is a complete distortion. iTunes was never intended to make money, and the fact that it doesn't isn't important. DRM on iTunes was there to mollify the rightsholders. Watermarking has replaced real DRM, so if you give away your iTunes purchases they can still be connected back to you.
The real issue has always been that nobody ever would pay to fill up an iPod through iTunes and anyone under 30 has already been educated in how to fill up an iPod for free. iTunes was always for the people that didn't know how. A very necessary part of selling iPods from the beginning. It also distracts the rightsholders from suing (as they did over the Diamond Rio) because the device is just for playing stolen music.
Amazon has tried to not get in the way of the consumer too much. The problem is that you can't share Amazon-purchased content, or worse, you can't improve your rankings by uploading Amazon-purchased content to trading sites. By preventing sharing and trading they gain favor with publishers that would like to be paid for their content. Without this prevention, it is unlikely many publishers would willingly provide their content for the Kindle. After all, they get paid just as well from the sale of physical books, which are much harder to share and trade across continents.
Instead, it reverses an already executed transaction because it happens to be able to do so - if you buy something at a shop which turns out to be stolen I'm not sure the shop owner can just barge into your house and take it back, even if he leaves an envelope with the right cash behind.
Evidently you aren't familiar with how recovery of stolen property works. The police come, take the merchandise and do not leave any cash behind. You bought something illegally, you are out the money. Period.
What law are you referring to? Sounds like the EU Database Directive pretty much means that NIST has a copyright on the program code and database in Germany.
Almost nothing from NIST is free. Often what they are selling is virtually unobtainable from any other reputable source. They also charge what it costs them to produce, not as a profit center.
What possible rights a German citizen (not a US taxpayer) might have over NIST products I wouldn't be able to say. But I suspect anyone just taking this and giving it away for free would find out that they are on the wrong side of both German and US law.
You want to be a pirate? Find somewhere else to do it.
Plenty of badly written stuff for Windows 9x requires Administrator rights on XP. In general, these applications do not do very well with Vista and require lots of work to get them running at all. The right answer is the application needs to be updated to make the user's life simpler.
What usually happens is the user becomes convinced that Vista is no good because their 1997 applications don't run well on it. They aren't going to like Windows 7 any better with their Windows 9x applications.
And that was just the beginning. Bars get shut down for serving underage people. It doesn't matter if they check the IDs or not - if they are fooled by a fake ID they can be shut down. It is almost never the underage person's fault, and even when they are charged, it is a fine and little else.
For the bar owner, it can result in the loss of the business.
Datacenter power usage isn't going to double in two years. It can't. There isn't that sort of power capacity in the US today.
Sure, we might build more plants. But even a common nearly-off-the-shelf coal plant is going to require five years to bring online. And as you point out, we don't have five years.
If it is going to be a decision between turning off power to homes at peak times or preventing new businesses from being established, we are probably going to turn off power to homes. At least in the short term. Because any other choice ends up just costing everyone more money - as unemployement grows and the working are taxed more and more to support the non-working.
And conservation isn't going to save us. Turning stuff off might.
Sorry, it is probably too late for that. It would likely take 10 years to build a nuclear plant of any size. We are going to be seeing huge power shortages in the US pretty soon, and conservation isn't going to make a bit of difference. There isn't any point in shaving a couple of megawatts off the load when the shortage is a couple of gigawatts.
Building a coal plant today would require at least five years, if we started construction tomorrow. We aren't. I don't believe there are any new major power plants even through the basic permit process. There is some talk of some nuclear plants that have just started the permitting process. Ten years from now we might see some benefit.
I believe we aren't going to be in much of a position to take advantage of that. If everyone knows that electric power is unstable and unreliable, they will change their behavior to match. Ten years from now we will not be expecting constant reliable power and any changes will not help.
A huge problem today is anything that is from the past and successful is viewed as valuable. New stuff? Not so much.
Part of the problem is that there are actually few books today that are worth much. Authoring a book is hard. Authoring a good book is much, much harder and actually requires skill. So an accepted marketing technique is to reclaim something from the past that has quality and reissue it. Which is what is going on here. It is like a remake of a 1940s classic movie, only without the bad special effects that would be added. Imagine a remake of Casablanca with new digital special effects.
I would certainly agree that it would be nice if these books were available for the Kindle at $1 or less. Yes, scanning and proofing is hard work. But it is nothing compared to actually writing a successful book.
Right now in the US the price for some carriers data plans is pretty much covered by the voice billing. If they lose that, either the data plan pricing will jump a bunch or they will just fold up. My guess is that the only way out for these folks, like T-Mobile, is for them to get sold and the rate plan is converted over. Say Verizon buys them. As T-Mobile contract holders age out of their contracts the prices go up to Verizon's levels.
So instead of $20 a month for a unlimited data plan you get 5MB for %45.
Nobody is going to like this, but what else are they going to do? The Verizon pricing is probably more realistic and self-sustaining whereas the T-Mobile plan assumes lots of voice billing to sustain operations. Of course, T-Mobile is also shooting themselves in the foot with UMA (unmetered access, using WiFi) over the long term. But it gets them lots of customers looking for a bargain. Too bad the bargain can't last.
Let's see. Java isn't approved for critical applications and says so all over the license. I have not read it lately, but the last time I read a Microsoft EULA it specifically called out that Windows was not approved for use with medical devices. Most COTS software is specifically identified as not being suitable for life support or "other critical applications" simply because nobody in their right mind wants to be named in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Pretty much if you aren't in the business of nuclear reactor safety software you want your stuff to be as far away from that sort of environment as possible. When a bug can result in people running down the street yelling "NOOOKLEAR" and "RADIOATION!!!!" the result is blind panic that kills people. And then the jury has a real easy time of assigning blame.
Just as a reminder, how many people died as a result of Three Mile Island? 0. How many people died as a result of Chernobyl? 46 firefighters, all of whom were on the roof of the building.
Most people understand this and have possibly lost friends or family due to cell phone use. They are still allowed to be sold and used because of the utterly corrupt corporations controlling the US government. Do you know this? Do you understand the risks but are continuing to use a cell phone, enriching the corporate overlords?
So how come you are still using a cell phone?
Oh, you think it is worth the risk because of the convenience? Are you sure?
Oh, so your job requires it? Would you work for a company that required you to work with asbestos? How about aluminium pots, pans and cans?
The "codes" on a CD-R that indicate the manufactuer are pretty much meaningless. Why? Because they are often the code assigned to the manufacturer of the stamper.
Stampers are hard to make and require a cleanroom, lots of chemicals and skilled people. After you have a stamper, you put it into a machine and any idiot can turn out CD-Rs. So plenty of manufacturers with the cleanroom facilities and the knowledgeable staff sell stampers. So you have some place like Ritek that will sell anyone stampers. Now Wong's Cheaper Discs buys up some stampers from Ritek and starts turning out discs.
Since Wong's Cheaper Discs are a few cents less than anyone else's that week, Memorex and lots of other folks buy up discs from Wong's. Sadly for Ritek, all the discs from Wong's have the manufacturer code from Ritek. Now someone from Ritek might be able to tell you that these discs were not actually made by Ritek, but it is going to take someone familiar with their processes to tell you that. It is not obvious.
So the manufacturer codes on discs are pretty useless. About the only thing you can do is buy discs from reputable manufacturers where you actually know who the manufacturer is.
Today, if you are one of the folks "in the know" about downloading music, you can grab whatever you want for free. There isn't anything that is going to stop this, really. I believe there is a dividing line between the folks that went to school during a time when such sharing (even floppy trading) was going on and older people. The older people as a general rule do not know about downloading and aren't getting their music for free.
As this demographic changes, fewer and fewer people are going to be paying for music. It is a fact that disturbs the music companies to no end, because their time is limited. In China they have already faced up to this and sales of music is nonexistent. No matter what, the time remaining for there to be a revenue stream associated with recorded music is limited.
As far as copyright is concerned, who cares how much money the record companies are receiving? Even if all the downloading that is going on didn't change their revenue in the slightest, this is still irrelevent to copyright protection and the penalties associated with it. A jury might find, with a symathetic defendent that the statutory penalties are too stiff when compared with the volume of sharing (copyright violation) that is going on in the world today. But still, I don't see this having anything to do with record company revenue. Unless you want to make the argument that the record companies are receiving an adequate amount of compensation and further compensation is undeserved.
What? In 1969 Vietnam had been "won" already. If not for the US Congress deciding to pull the plug the whole fall of Saigon thing wouldn't have happened. But the most important thing is that the money for Vietnam was already spent. The remaining six years until the fall of Saigon was the US pulling out and telling the NVA to come back and be friends with their brothers in the South.
Too bad they didn't get the message amd decided that a brother that disagreed with them about politics was better off dead.
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Unfortunately, many "responsible" citizens feel that it is their duty to assist law enforcement. If the speed limit is 55 and they are driving 55 then it is their obligation to make sure that nobody can drive at 56 or higher. This is done by blocking the road with their car and other cars nearby.
This insures that people cannot break the law. It also creates more work for the ambulance drivers and tow trucks because it causes accidents, but the mission is to reduce speeding and it works.
Sorry, but if it has the capability of creating electromagnetic radiation, you don't own it.
Most devices now come with a nice little disclaimer that says pretty much "Modifications to this device may revoke your authorization to use it." This situation isn't new. It has existed this way since at least around 1975 or so, probably even earlier.
Obviously, a cell phone radiates in the electromagnetic spectrum, so you don't own the device and cannot do whatever you want with it. At the very least the FCC has licensed you to use the device within very specific limits and those limits may include the software that the phone is supplied with.
The big change that has to happen is making the data charges support the network. Today some carriers assume they can undercharge for data because the voice calls pay for the network. Same thing with SMS. They can then provide "bargain" data plans.
You want parity? I think the phone company has to be non-profit and a government monopoly for that to happen. Call it a utility that isn't allowed to make a profit and the government is the sole shareholder.
You want risk-taking on the part of the carrier? That is what innovation is, risk taking. That is a different story and they better have plenty of money to offset the losses when a risk doesn't pan out. I don't think these two ideas are compatible at all.
The tenant is paying the landlord, and it's part of the landlord's job to fix mold problems.
You might not have lived in a city apartment. What you encounter are people that let trash build up, stacked in the corner of the kitchen until the neighbors complain about the smell. Sure, the lease has a paragraph in it that says you aren't supposed to do that and can be fined by the building management for not disposing of garbage properly.
So there are endless problems with roaches, mice, and mold. And nothing the building management can do about it because without conducting an inspection and cleaning of every apartment every week there is no way to manage it.
Sure you can try to keep up with it. But when the tenant will absolutely not cooperate there is little that can be done about it.
So while there might be mold, exactly who's fault it might be is far from clear. Cleaning apartments is not the job of the management company, and it says so in most leases.
What you are proposing is to eliminate the adversary legal system. You want the lawyers to judge cases. That isn't how it works, isn't how it is supposed to work and not a very good idea.
For example, even if there is mold in the apartment it is the defense lawyer's job to at least mitigate the situation. Perhaps the mold is there because the tenent encouraged its growth through lack of cleaning. Whatever - the point is you are suggesting rather than litigate and go through a legal process that the lawyer should just decide the matter.
Similerly, what is happening today through the Streisand effect is virtually eliminating legal recourse in some cases. The publicity from ill-informed people spouting off about something they know little about can do 10 times the damage that was originally inflicted. And yes, people read uninformed opinions on the Internet all the time.
Someone posts a review of a restaurant claiming they catch and serve alley cat meat and what exactly is the restaurant supposed to do? Sue the poster? Likely as not, the result is the next day the claim about serving cat meat is repeated in every local newspaper and TV news show because it is sensational. Today, the best option is probably to just close the restaurant and open in a different location under a different name.
Yes, but the seldom-reported fact is the "ozone hole" disappeared about 10 times quicker than anyone predicted and eliminating CFCs had almost nothing to do with it. It needs to be stressed that it was a theory that the "ozone hole" was caused by CFCs and the theory was pretty much proven wrong. Nobody knows why there was a hole and nobody knows why it disappeared.
About the only thing known is that it had nothing to do with eliminating the use of CFCs.
Where MAD falls apart is when the leaders don't give a rat's ass about the civilian population.
I would say that recent events in Iran make it pretty clear that the civilian population doesn't matter all that much to the leaders. North Korea is at that level or perhaps worse. If the military leadership in either country could be confident of survival I don't see MAD being a deterrent at all.
So what if 80% of the civilian population is wiped out?
OK, then how about someone does soemthing real that would have an immediate impact on CO2 emissions without making anyone rich through creating a new commodity trading system?
Ration gasoline in the US. Eliminate using cars for pleasure trips and cut back on cars used for neighborhood police patrols. Put people back on buses or on foot. Start the long process of reshaping cities back to people living and working in relative proximity.
Cut interstate trucking out and replace it with rail transit.
This would have an immediate effect. It would impact some companies quite a bit, but it would be far less of an impact when compared to the current cap-and-trade system that is going to change electric rates and possibly the cost of everything in the US.
Another idea is eliminate 90% of passenger air travel. It isn't necessary and it would have a huge impact on CO2 emissions. Yes, it would virtually end tourism to some places, but if we are talking about "saving the planet" or making electricity a luxury why is this not considered?
No, neither of these ideas is going to go anywhere. Instead we are going to see the cost of basic goods and services in the US rise quite a bit soon. And the impact on CO2 emissions will be nil to begin with. But a company that uses electricity to make stuff is going to be paying lots more for it and will have to raise their prices. This will move the remaining manufacturing in the US to China where no such costs exist. It will also mean that it is more effective to build a data center in China than in the US - because the electric rates will be so much different.
It it similar to the arguments used by the Catholic church in the middle ages. You couldn't just let anyone read the Bible, it had to be properly interpreted by a trained member of the clergy.
You can't let just anyone review the research behind climate change, because they wouldn't understand it and would't understand the motives behind the people qualified to interpret it.
This is mostly what the Reformation was all about. Unfortunately, we are stuck with a ecological priesthood and it is doubtful anyone is going to come along and dislodge them anytime soon.
Personally, I have to wonder. I believe that uninformed action - mostly economic but partly physical as well - can have devastating consequences. If we wanted to cut CO2 emissions today, it would be entirely possible. But nobody wants to do anything drastic. But plenty of people want to do fairly ineffective things that will screw up the economic works for a long time. It makes no sense, unless the goal is to make some drastic economic changes without really affecting the level of CO2 emissions.
You mean the Australian site, not the US or European sites.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen a real legal decision on this yet. I suspect a US citizen vistiting the Australian site is a violation of some treaty or law and for the most part is just ignored. Directing lots of people there from the US might get that changed.
What you are asking sounds reasonable. Except nobody does it today. Ebay sells stolen merchandise and fakes. Amazon allows the same thing to be done. I have had web sales with wrong prices changed on the fly because the price was wrong.
None of these things would happen if an actual person reviewed any of this stuff. However, in todays low-margin web sales world, nobody going to spend the money to have someone review online sales. They can't afford it because of the low margins. If someone did it, they would be run out of business because on the Internet low prices trump everything.
Google doesn't have a search for good customer service. They have a search for the lowest price.
Amazon doesn't get extra points for offering some kind of decent customer service, so they don't have it. Instead they have low prices. You can go to a Barnes and Noble store and get much better service and walk out with a book - for a couple of dollars more. Guess what? Fewer and fewer people are spending more and choosing the low-margin bad-service route because it costs less.
So you think they should review what is being listed on their site more carefully?
Problem is, the market is between the retailer and the consumer. Where the DRM decision is important is between the wholesaler/publisher/creator and the retailer. Only if the retailer stands up and says they don't want DRM will this change.
iTunes is a complete distortion. iTunes was never intended to make money, and the fact that it doesn't isn't important. DRM on iTunes was there to mollify the rightsholders. Watermarking has replaced real DRM, so if you give away your iTunes purchases they can still be connected back to you.
The real issue has always been that nobody ever would pay to fill up an iPod through iTunes and anyone under 30 has already been educated in how to fill up an iPod for free. iTunes was always for the people that didn't know how. A very necessary part of selling iPods from the beginning. It also distracts the rightsholders from suing (as they did over the Diamond Rio) because the device is just for playing stolen music.
Amazon has tried to not get in the way of the consumer too much. The problem is that you can't share Amazon-purchased content, or worse, you can't improve your rankings by uploading Amazon-purchased content to trading sites. By preventing sharing and trading they gain favor with publishers that would like to be paid for their content. Without this prevention, it is unlikely many publishers would willingly provide their content for the Kindle. After all, they get paid just as well from the sale of physical books, which are much harder to share and trade across continents.
Instead, it reverses an already executed transaction because it happens to be able to do so - if you buy something at a shop which turns out to be stolen I'm not sure the shop owner can just barge into your house and take it back, even if he leaves an envelope with the right cash behind.
Evidently you aren't familiar with how recovery of stolen property works. The police come, take the merchandise and do not leave any cash behind. You bought something illegally, you are out the money. Period.
What law are you referring to? Sounds like the EU Database Directive pretty much means that NIST has a copyright on the program code and database in Germany.
Almost nothing from NIST is free. Often what they are selling is virtually unobtainable from any other reputable source. They also charge what it costs them to produce, not as a profit center.
What possible rights a German citizen (not a US taxpayer) might have over NIST products I wouldn't be able to say. But I suspect anyone just taking this and giving it away for free would find out that they are on the wrong side of both German and US law.
You want to be a pirate? Find somewhere else to do it.
Plenty of badly written stuff for Windows 9x requires Administrator rights on XP. In general, these applications do not do very well with Vista and require lots of work to get them running at all. The right answer is the application needs to be updated to make the user's life simpler.
What usually happens is the user becomes convinced that Vista is no good because their 1997 applications don't run well on it. They aren't going to like Windows 7 any better with their Windows 9x applications.
Just use Google:
http://www.dailyillini.com/news/campus/2009/06/02/bars-pay-price-for-underage-drinking
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20282532,00.html
http://hawkonomics.blogspot.com/2009/05/iowa-city-bar-restrictions.html
And that was just the beginning. Bars get shut down for serving underage people. It doesn't matter if they check the IDs or not - if they are fooled by a fake ID they can be shut down. It is almost never the underage person's fault, and even when they are charged, it is a fine and little else.
For the bar owner, it can result in the loss of the business.
Datacenter power usage isn't going to double in two years. It can't. There isn't that sort of power capacity in the US today.
Sure, we might build more plants. But even a common nearly-off-the-shelf coal plant is going to require five years to bring online. And as you point out, we don't have five years.
If it is going to be a decision between turning off power to homes at peak times or preventing new businesses from being established, we are probably going to turn off power to homes. At least in the short term. Because any other choice ends up just costing everyone more money - as unemployement grows and the working are taxed more and more to support the non-working.
And conservation isn't going to save us. Turning stuff off might.
Sorry, it is probably too late for that. It would likely take 10 years to build a nuclear plant of any size. We are going to be seeing huge power shortages in the US pretty soon, and conservation isn't going to make a bit of difference. There isn't any point in shaving a couple of megawatts off the load when the shortage is a couple of gigawatts.
Building a coal plant today would require at least five years, if we started construction tomorrow. We aren't. I don't believe there are any new major power plants even through the basic permit process. There is some talk of some nuclear plants that have just started the permitting process. Ten years from now we might see some benefit.
I believe we aren't going to be in much of a position to take advantage of that. If everyone knows that electric power is unstable and unreliable, they will change their behavior to match. Ten years from now we will not be expecting constant reliable power and any changes will not help.
A huge problem today is anything that is from the past and successful is viewed as valuable. New stuff? Not so much.
Part of the problem is that there are actually few books today that are worth much. Authoring a book is hard. Authoring a good book is much, much harder and actually requires skill. So an accepted marketing technique is to reclaim something from the past that has quality and reissue it. Which is what is going on here. It is like a remake of a 1940s classic movie, only without the bad special effects that would be added. Imagine a remake of Casablanca with new digital special effects.
I would certainly agree that it would be nice if these books were available for the Kindle at $1 or less. Yes, scanning and proofing is hard work. But it is nothing compared to actually writing a successful book.
Right now in the US the price for some carriers data plans is pretty much covered by the voice billing. If they lose that, either the data plan pricing will jump a bunch or they will just fold up. My guess is that the only way out for these folks, like T-Mobile, is for them to get sold and the rate plan is converted over. Say Verizon buys them. As T-Mobile contract holders age out of their contracts the prices go up to Verizon's levels.
So instead of $20 a month for a unlimited data plan you get 5MB for %45.
Nobody is going to like this, but what else are they going to do? The Verizon pricing is probably more realistic and self-sustaining whereas the T-Mobile plan assumes lots of voice billing to sustain operations. Of course, T-Mobile is also shooting themselves in the foot with UMA (unmetered access, using WiFi) over the long term. But it gets them lots of customers looking for a bargain. Too bad the bargain can't last.
Let's see. Java isn't approved for critical applications and says so all over the license. I have not read it lately, but the last time I read a Microsoft EULA it specifically called out that Windows was not approved for use with medical devices. Most COTS software is specifically identified as not being suitable for life support or "other critical applications" simply because nobody in their right mind wants to be named in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Pretty much if you aren't in the business of nuclear reactor safety software you want your stuff to be as far away from that sort of environment as possible. When a bug can result in people running down the street yelling "NOOOKLEAR" and "RADIOATION!!!!" the result is blind panic that kills people. And then the jury has a real easy time of assigning blame.
Just as a reminder, how many people died as a result of Three Mile Island? 0. How many people died as a result of Chernobyl? 46 firefighters, all of whom were on the roof of the building.
Their use leads to death.
Most people understand this and have possibly lost friends or family due to cell phone use. They are still allowed to be sold and used because of the utterly corrupt corporations controlling the US government. Do you know this? Do you understand the risks but are continuing to use a cell phone, enriching the corporate overlords?
So how come you are still using a cell phone?
Oh, you think it is worth the risk because of the convenience? Are you sure?
Oh, so your job requires it? Would you work for a company that required you to work with asbestos? How about aluminium pots, pans and cans?
The "codes" on a CD-R that indicate the manufactuer are pretty much meaningless. Why? Because they are often the code assigned to the manufacturer of the stamper.
Stampers are hard to make and require a cleanroom, lots of chemicals and skilled people. After you have a stamper, you put it into a machine and any idiot can turn out CD-Rs. So plenty of manufacturers with the cleanroom facilities and the knowledgeable staff sell stampers. So you have some place like Ritek that will sell anyone stampers. Now Wong's Cheaper Discs buys up some stampers from Ritek and starts turning out discs.
Since Wong's Cheaper Discs are a few cents less than anyone else's that week, Memorex and lots of other folks buy up discs from Wong's. Sadly for Ritek, all the discs from Wong's have the manufacturer code from Ritek. Now someone from Ritek might be able to tell you that these discs were not actually made by Ritek, but it is going to take someone familiar with their processes to tell you that. It is not obvious.
So the manufacturer codes on discs are pretty useless. About the only thing you can do is buy discs from reputable manufacturers where you actually know who the manufacturer is.
Today, if you are one of the folks "in the know" about downloading music, you can grab whatever you want for free. There isn't anything that is going to stop this, really. I believe there is a dividing line between the folks that went to school during a time when such sharing (even floppy trading) was going on and older people. The older people as a general rule do not know about downloading and aren't getting their music for free.
As this demographic changes, fewer and fewer people are going to be paying for music. It is a fact that disturbs the music companies to no end, because their time is limited. In China they have already faced up to this and sales of music is nonexistent. No matter what, the time remaining for there to be a revenue stream associated with recorded music is limited.
As far as copyright is concerned, who cares how much money the record companies are receiving? Even if all the downloading that is going on didn't change their revenue in the slightest, this is still irrelevent to copyright protection and the penalties associated with it. A jury might find, with a symathetic defendent that the statutory penalties are too stiff when compared with the volume of sharing (copyright violation) that is going on in the world today. But still, I don't see this having anything to do with record company revenue. Unless you want to make the argument that the record companies are receiving an adequate amount of compensation and further compensation is undeserved.
What? In 1969 Vietnam had been "won" already. If not for the US Congress deciding to pull the plug the whole fall of Saigon thing wouldn't have happened. But the most important thing is that the money for Vietnam was already spent. The remaining six years until the fall of Saigon was the US pulling out and telling the NVA to come back and be friends with their brothers in the South.
Too bad they didn't get the message amd decided that a brother that disagreed with them about politics was better off dead.