Try, just try turning off some titilating bit of gossip. Can't be done.
The daughter's picture will keep coming up for years. Eventually it will be forgotten, but not any time soon. And the more they try to suppress it, the longer it will last.
Every parent's nightmare, I'm sure. But welcome to the new Internet world.
Rescind freedom of the press, esp. TV News, until official election results are available.
Make sure that official election results beat the midnight, Eastern time deadline.
What deadline? There seems to be a pretty simple formula here. The TV News folks want to report results. The people want results and watch TV until they have to go to bed. If there wasn't going to be results they wouldn't watch TV and the TV networks would lose millions in advertising - and relevancy. So they need to report results before people turn off their TVs. Really simple.
In 2000 CBS announced that Gore won just before midnight. People went to bed and showed up the next morning thinking that "their candidate won". Well, after they went to be around 2:00 AM or so it turned out that the winner was far less clear than CBS had announced. I'd say in 2008 if anyone had announced Obama as the winner and then it turned out to be McCain when official results were in, we'd be looking at cleaning up from the riots still. Maybe a revolution.
So it is simple. We either have fast results or we have riots. Because the TV News isn't going to lose millions in ad revenue and probably more in relevance. If they don't announce something, nobody will watch anymore. Or they will simply turn to a channel that announces something, anything.
How do we keep this from happening? Fast results. Or block the news programs from announcing anything based on statistics and exit polls. I don't reslly see the 1st Amendment getting rescinded for elections, so we better have fast results.
This might be one of those cases where fast is absolutely necessary and complete accuracy is secondary. Important, but secondary.
I believe the principal problem with the verdict comes down to the following:
Almost everyone pirates. Evaluate the truth of this yourself.
Punishing one pirate is unfair - they must all be punished equally or none at all.
They can't lock up the entire planet - everyone pirates.
The end result is self-referential and self-fulfilling. Once you buy into this it is logical that piracy cannot be punished and cannot be stopped. Therefore, enjoy! It is all free now.
Today, if you do not receive the results you expect from a product - be it medicine or a piece of electronics - there are lawyers that will be glad to help you sue the manufacturer. You aren't happy, so why should anyone else be, right?
One basic problem in the US is the way the health care system is organized when compared to other countries. The US health care system is intended to prevent people from dying. The rest of the world's health care system is not. Until you realize that, you don't understand health care in the US. The rest of the world came to terms a long time ago with the idea that people die and there is little or no point in expending vast resources on them - they are going to die.
The US is one of the most popular health care destinations for elderly people, especially those with lots of money, because of this difference. In most countries a person with serious, chronic medical conditions that will undoubtably lead to death in short order are not given expensive treatments to put off the fact they person is going to die. Often after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars the person's death is delayed by less than a year. Not a good business proposition.
The difference is that in other countries everyone is paying the bill - how do you justify to all the young people that the bulk of their money is going to support someone that is going to die anyway. And all you are doing is putting off that death for a short time. No, in the US the insurance companies are paying and they do not answer to voters or public opinion. They are also well aware of the philosophy of death in the US and that people expect treatement, even when there is little to be gained.
So some elderly person takes a drug and dies. The truth of the matter is they were dying anyway. Did the drug contribute to their death? Or was it their lifestyle, cigarette habit, drinking and everything else that finally did them in? To a doctor the question can be very difficult if not impossible to accurately answer. To a class-action lawyer the answer is obvious. TO a jury that can either "stick it to the Man" or not the question is pretty simple as well. The legal system is a lottery and it feels a lot better to have a winner than a loser.
Does Vioxx cause death? Maybe. If the specific formulation of the drug is to blame then why are other drugs with virtually the same formulation still on the market with warnings? Why didn't those drugs also get removed from the market - with similar numbers of deaths behind them as well?
It's a lottery and there are winners and losers. Merck lost. Too bad, I guess.
People in the US want to live forever and have been convinced by the health care system that it is possible. Until we start denying care to everyone over, say 50 years of age, the US will not be moving to any sort of "universal single-payer health care." The way health care is done in the US is just too expensive and nearly all of the money is spent in the last year of life. If you exclude neonatal care, then the figure is more like 99% of all health care spending is in the last year of life.
If material can be accessed on the Internet, it is free. Free to be used in any way the user desires.
This has been the way it has been since the beginning and it continues to be the way of the Internet. A few misguided people think they can impose their outmoded values on Internet users - only to be slapped down. The RIAA is going to lose because they cannot see how the endgame is going to play out. People will continue to take whatever they want because it is available through the Internet. States cannot pass laws controlling the Internet because there is always another State which will ignore, bypass or openly flount laws like this.
So this means that "piracy" and file-sharing will continue forever, can't be stopped, Attempting to persecute students for exercising their "Internet rights" is bound to fail eventually - because as just about everyone under 30 knows you can't stop the march of progress on the Internet. It is all out there for the taking, so we are going to take. And take, and take and take.
Can't be stopped.
By the way, only a few states require computer forensics be conducted by licensed investigators. The effects of laws like this are not good, but it seems like a sensible precaution. Unfortunately, what this does is create a credentialism system where nobody but a "licensed" person can perform certain work on computers. If investigators need licenses, how about people that are potentially exposed to secret information as consultants? Shouldn't they be licensed as well? How about all system administrators? So they can assist with law enforcement investigations of things like child porn and such, right?
Credentialism has other problems as well, in addition to just creeping into things. Today you can't legally teach in a classroom without a "teaching certificate", a type of license. Doesn't mean that you know anything other than being able to pass the certificate test - which is a 5th grade level exam in most states. Introducing this for anything in the area of IT is a generally bad idea.
Like all Internet content, it is user-generated, contributed and blatently stolen.
In the world of the 18-24 year old demographic, nobody pays for anything on the Internet. Movies, music, news, whatever, it is all free for the taking. So you have entire online ventures built on the premise they can just get top-quality content for free from... well, somewhere.
The result of this is that the content is worth precisely what was paid for it.
Sure, some of it is good. And some is bad. Most is either incredibly silly or downright offensively bad. But it is what is offered by people spending their own time to put forth their opinion, views and observations on things. Often things they have utterly no basis for holding such opinions on which nobody will ever know.
So why is Daily Kos more interesting to people than their local newspaper? Primarily, I believe it is because Daily Kos (and thousands of sites just like it) supposedly have "real people" whereas the local newspaper just has "paid flacks". And I am using Daily Kos as an example - Free Republic would serve just as well. It is also that these web sites have people with as strident, or even more so, views on things than the viewers do. So they can step away from the screen thinking that their views are confirmed and there are obviously people even more wacky on the subject than they are.
The newspaper, on the other hand, neiher confirms or denies their worldview. It offers dry, bland facts without embellishments or stridency. It isn't entertaining, certainly not in the way that a Daily Kosser gets s few jollies from reading Free Republic.
We have been moving further and further towards the irrelevancy of facts and the total domination of entertainment. News programs aren't meant to inform, they are meant to entertain and titlate. The difference between the commercials and the news programs becomes less and less. This started with nearly the dawn of the television age and it isn't over yet.
I believe the "cost of capital" is what is being referred to. This means the city can't loan money (capital) to this enterprise at a lower interest rate than is available to private companies.
A common trick with municipal things is to offset the interest rate a lot. The result is it is impossible for anyone else to compete because the municipal-funded operation is getting money at a fraction of the interest rate anyone else has to pay.
Gosh, you mean like a digital signature for every program? You mean like what is implemented in Windows?
There is a security option for Windows that says nothing gets executed that is not signed and valid. Turn it on and you would be a lot safer. Unfortunately, some of Microsoft's own stuff isn't signed.
3. Have the finance investigators work with requisite police agencies world wide.
There you go. Without this last item, the rest is pointless. And there is no agreement that botnets are bad by all the world's governments and police agencies. So, no cooperation and no enforcement.
You do not want Visa and MC deciding who is a good person and who is a bad person on their own.
Net neutrality, by most people's interpretation, means the ISPs cannot do anything about botnets.
Giving ISPs the responsibility but without the authority to really do anything about it just leads to a disaster where, once again, nobody is accountable.
Time to face reality. Botnets are a minor annoyance to properly configured machines and a complete meltdown catestrophe to improperly configured machines. Sorry, but if you want thousands (millions?) of Joe Sixpack's and Grandma's being the "system administrator" for a computer that absolutely requires one, you are going to have this kind of problem. And it isn't going to change, no matter what anyone does.
Without real international agreement, nothing can be done about this. And that agreement isn't going to be coming along anytime soon.
Even better, why would a company want to swap out batteries? The cost of the battery is, in many cases, more than the replacement value of the car.
Toyota has apparently side-stepped this problem by just continuing to increase the warranty period of Prius batteries. The problem is, a hybrid car without a battery is worthless. A hybrid car without a battery warranty has virtually no value as a used vehicle. The moment Toyota stops extending the battery warranty, all Prius cars of that age are then worthless. This leads to a lot of cars in the crusher, almost overnight.
Copyright is but one avenue for software. A far better approach is trade secrets. Every company I worked for before 1990 relied primarily on the trade secret status of their code rather than any sort of copyright.
For disclosing trade secrets that you have been given under license the penalties are far worse than copyright violation.
There is very little you can do about reverse engineering, but any non-derivative implementation has roughly the same status with copyright law. How you nail down clean-room implementations is through patents, which got a lot more popular after 1990 or so.
But today there is nothing that prevents the same mechanisms used for software earlier from working today. Trade secret is still trade secret.
If you believe that you can get 3.6Mb/sec on a 3G phone continuously, you are in for a rude surprise. You can get this in short bursts but you can't get anywhere near that for longer period of time. How many phones are competing for the same bandwidth? 100? More like 500. Do you really believe any cell site has a 1.5Tb/sec connection?
No, you get your 3.6Mb/sec for about a second and they you wait for everyone else's phone. Fortunately, you get most things done in under a second and you aren't looking for a continuous high bandwidth connection. Because if you were, you'd be disappointed.
Do you understand how the cable infrastructure works? How about DSL?
What you are talking about might work, if there was a single unbroken fiber link between your home and the connection to the Internet backbone. It doesn't work that way. Instead, your cable connection goes to a network node which has a single fiber link to the cable company distribution point. Which then has one or more links to further on up until you finally reach a backbone point.
DSL is pretty much the same way - there is one shared fiber link between the DSLAM and the backbone.
Sure these links can be pretty hefty, but they aren't infinite in capacity. I seriously doubt they are more than OC3 (48Mbit) and probably less than that in reality. This means they can advertise all they want about getting 100Mbit connections between your house and the network node, but the node can't possibly give you more than its connection. And its connection is shared by the other 999 homes on the same node.
And yes, everything (TV, Internet, phone, etc.) is moving across that fiber link. The good news is the TV part of it is fixed - it doesn't change no matter how many people are watching. Which is why we're unlikely to move away from broadcast media in the near future. If everyone had their own pipe each node would require 100 times (or more) the bandwidth to the head end. No, I seriously doubt you are going to find any 4800Mbit fiber connections anytime soon.
To move beyond this we need to change the way that the Internet is delivered. Instead of network nodes being placed between the head end (any head end, cable, DSL, FIOS or whatever) we need individual unique connections all the way to the backbone. It is the only way that you could drop broadcast media and survive. Either that or continue to work within the confines of using the neighborhood network node as a shared resource with limited bandwidth.
I knew there was a reason I like trips to Australia. Besides the climate, the people, the food, the bars, and, well, just about everything. Except maybe dinner at the RSL club.
There will be a lot more people dying prematurely from starvation and other avoidable causes if global warming isn't checked.
You better hope so. Because about the only real way to "check" global warming is for these untold millions to die. And they need to get about that business (dying) pretty quickly, too.
The problem is that it comes down to most of the Western world living like Bangledeshi farmers (esp. the USA) or having lots and lots fewer people using energy. Failure to implement either of these plans will certainly result in no real change. Which means we will not have affected the climate of the planet in the desired direction.
Usage is not the only cost to an ISP. If you download.001GB per month but spend four hours every month on the phone with their tech support the usage is minimal compared to the support cost.
I'm sure there are plenty more examples of other costs. No way can they charge just by GB - at least not anywhere near their actual GB cost.
YouTube is clearly the future of entertainment. Check out Magibon and the ShayTards for examples of where television (and to some extent, major motion pictures) are going. I figure we will see at least one Magibon rip-off "reality TV show" in the fall.
We have already had folks like the ShayTards on network television, mostly to be snickered at. What we will see is hour-long feature presentations (with commercials) of material like this. Edited together in someone's home, shot with budget cameras and uneven lighting this will be the next big thing appearing on the screens in people's homes.
Another thing you can do with Vista is enable "signed only". Root around in the security policy and you will find it. It will refuse to run any executable that is not signed. Period.
According to Microsoft's malware study 0.06% of malware is signed. Sounds like something that would eliminate most of all threats.
The idea that we can significantly alter the climate is a bit arrogant. Worse still is the idea that some minimal amount of "conservation" is going to make a difference.
You see, the problem is 6 billion people and the energy they use. This is going to generate heat that is not all radiated into space. The part that is held within the Earth's atmosphere is going to have an effect. If you choose to believe that this is something that Mankind can change, good luck.
We are going to have to make some difficult decisions. One of them is real simple - fewer people. Lots fewer. On the order of maybe 200 million instead of 6 billion with the regulation and enforcement to ensure that it never, ever gets past that point again.
The other option is to limit the energy use of 6 billion people to that of 200 million.
There really are no other options, if you want to treat the Earth as a closed system with only the resources that are here now.
Until Google is returning results that actually download the same sorts of movies that Pirate Bay has listed, there is nothing to worry about. So how come they aren't listing every torrent available when I type in "Wolverine" for Google, anyway? Oh wait - the first result in Google for the search keywords "wolverine torrent" gets you... you guessed it! www.piratebay.org And no, it isn't the torrent file, it is just the page listing the torrent file on Pirate Bay.
So how do you get to the torrent file with Google? Right now, you don't. Maybe that is why Google has nothing to worry about. Should this change and Google starts listing torrent files, then maybe they might have a problem.
Interesting idea, except that today it takes longer by train than it does by car. Much longer, usually.
The train tracks have been torn up for scrap metal so all that is left are freight lines and the freight trains have priority. Where there are sidings, the passenger train has to be sidelined to let the freight pass.
Without a massive buildout, with lots of Japanese and European rails, we're not getting any train service anytime soon. Why import the rails? Because of WTO - it is cheaper to use existing steel mills in Europe than it is to build a new steel mill in the US. Most of the places that made rails from 1850 to 1970 are gone now.
Do you understand how public projects get land other than through eminent domain? Under eminent domain they would have to pay a "fair market" price for the land. Otherwise, the route is determined by who is willing to sell and for how much. Check out some of the highways done this way - I know of a couple in Wisconsin.
If they don't choose a route and buy the land through a eminent domain process it is more than likely it will never get done at all - because the route would be rather pretzel-like.
Do you believe that people will willing sell their land to the government? Generally the answer is no.
Do you believe the government should pay extortionate prices for land becuase speculators buy up key parcels required for any sane route?
I don't know how it is done in other countries, but in the US the only sane way any public works project gets done is by eminent domain. Other ways have been tried, but they don't work because of unwillingness to sell, speculators and generally cussedness.
If you believe the future of YouTube is in the content, I suggest two searches: magibon and shaytard.
No, the future of television entertainment can be encapsulated in the results from these two searches. And quantity will always trump quality on the Internet.
Money? Earnings? No, these people are doing this because of ego and the fact they can. If you are paid for stuff on the Internet check out the future.
Base load demand has increased in the US. It continues to increase. No amount of conservation with energy efficient appliances and such is going to reduce that base load demand. You might shave some of the evening peaks down a bit, but it isn't going to make much difference.
The time has past for building new power plants. It would take at least five years to build a large coal-fired plant and probably more like 10 years to build a nuclear plant. Ten years is probably about right for a coal plant with lots of fancy technology that nobody has working today on a large scale.
Long before the next five years are up we are going to be consistently exceeding the capacity of the electric power system in parts of the US. This means people are just going to have to get used to remote-controlled electric power that is turned off at times by either the utility or a local government. Like in parts of Florida today, already. It is possible we could build our way out of this, but it is very unlikely to happen at a rapid enough pace.
This means that for the first time in over 100 years parts of the US that are heavily populated will start to see electricity being unavailable at times. This is already true of plenty of places in the world today, so it should surprise no one. It will surprise people in California, Texas, Florida, New York and lots of other places as well. It will demand lifestyle changes such as not counting of being able to buy food for two weeks and having the refrigerator keeping it fresh. Plenty of places in the world work like that today already - the US will just be joining them.
I seriously doubt we will be going back to 100% reliable electric power. The lifestyle changes will be accepted, one way or another. And the base capacity of electric generation will not increase.
Solar? Wind? Sure, it might help. If you put $25,000 worth of PV cells on your roof you could keep your refrigerator running. This will certainly be an option for some rich folks. But the average Joe is going to see solar and wind replacing coal plants, not supplmenting them.
Change is going to come up and smack you, whether you believe it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Try, just try turning off some titilating bit of gossip. Can't be done.
The daughter's picture will keep coming up for years. Eventually it will be forgotten, but not any time soon. And the more they try to suppress it, the longer it will last.
Every parent's nightmare, I'm sure. But welcome to the new Internet world.
We have two pretty clear choices:
What deadline? There seems to be a pretty simple formula here. The TV News folks want to report results. The people want results and watch TV until they have to go to bed. If there wasn't going to be results they wouldn't watch TV and the TV networks would lose millions in advertising - and relevancy. So they need to report results before people turn off their TVs. Really simple.
In 2000 CBS announced that Gore won just before midnight. People went to bed and showed up the next morning thinking that "their candidate won". Well, after they went to be around 2:00 AM or so it turned out that the winner was far less clear than CBS had announced. I'd say in 2008 if anyone had announced Obama as the winner and then it turned out to be McCain when official results were in, we'd be looking at cleaning up from the riots still. Maybe a revolution.
So it is simple. We either have fast results or we have riots. Because the TV News isn't going to lose millions in ad revenue and probably more in relevance. If they don't announce something, nobody will watch anymore. Or they will simply turn to a channel that announces something, anything.
How do we keep this from happening? Fast results. Or block the news programs from announcing anything based on statistics and exit polls. I don't reslly see the 1st Amendment getting rescinded for elections, so we better have fast results.
This might be one of those cases where fast is absolutely necessary and complete accuracy is secondary. Important, but secondary.
I believe the principal problem with the verdict comes down to the following:
The end result is self-referential and self-fulfilling. Once you buy into this it is logical that piracy cannot be punished and cannot be stopped. Therefore, enjoy! It is all free now.
Today, if you do not receive the results you expect from a product - be it medicine or a piece of electronics - there are lawyers that will be glad to help you sue the manufacturer. You aren't happy, so why should anyone else be, right?
One basic problem in the US is the way the health care system is organized when compared to other countries. The US health care system is intended to prevent people from dying. The rest of the world's health care system is not. Until you realize that, you don't understand health care in the US. The rest of the world came to terms a long time ago with the idea that people die and there is little or no point in expending vast resources on them - they are going to die.
The US is one of the most popular health care destinations for elderly people, especially those with lots of money, because of this difference. In most countries a person with serious, chronic medical conditions that will undoubtably lead to death in short order are not given expensive treatments to put off the fact they person is going to die. Often after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars the person's death is delayed by less than a year. Not a good business proposition.
The difference is that in other countries everyone is paying the bill - how do you justify to all the young people that the bulk of their money is going to support someone that is going to die anyway. And all you are doing is putting off that death for a short time. No, in the US the insurance companies are paying and they do not answer to voters or public opinion. They are also well aware of the philosophy of death in the US and that people expect treatement, even when there is little to be gained.
So some elderly person takes a drug and dies. The truth of the matter is they were dying anyway. Did the drug contribute to their death? Or was it their lifestyle, cigarette habit, drinking and everything else that finally did them in? To a doctor the question can be very difficult if not impossible to accurately answer. To a class-action lawyer the answer is obvious. TO a jury that can either "stick it to the Man" or not the question is pretty simple as well. The legal system is a lottery and it feels a lot better to have a winner than a loser.
Does Vioxx cause death? Maybe. If the specific formulation of the drug is to blame then why are other drugs with virtually the same formulation still on the market with warnings? Why didn't those drugs also get removed from the market - with similar numbers of deaths behind them as well?
It's a lottery and there are winners and losers. Merck lost. Too bad, I guess.
People in the US want to live forever and have been convinced by the health care system that it is possible. Until we start denying care to everyone over, say 50 years of age, the US will not be moving to any sort of "universal single-payer health care." The way health care is done in the US is just too expensive and nearly all of the money is spent in the last year of life. If you exclude neonatal care, then the figure is more like 99% of all health care spending is in the last year of life.
If material can be accessed on the Internet, it is free. Free to be used in any way the user desires.
This has been the way it has been since the beginning and it continues to be the way of the Internet. A few misguided people think they can impose their outmoded values on Internet users - only to be slapped down. The RIAA is going to lose because they cannot see how the endgame is going to play out. People will continue to take whatever they want because it is available through the Internet. States cannot pass laws controlling the Internet because there is always another State which will ignore, bypass or openly flount laws like this.
So this means that "piracy" and file-sharing will continue forever, can't be stopped, Attempting to persecute students for exercising their "Internet rights" is bound to fail eventually - because as just about everyone under 30 knows you can't stop the march of progress on the Internet. It is all out there for the taking, so we are going to take. And take, and take and take.
Can't be stopped.
By the way, only a few states require computer forensics be conducted by licensed investigators. The effects of laws like this are not good, but it seems like a sensible precaution. Unfortunately, what this does is create a credentialism system where nobody but a "licensed" person can perform certain work on computers. If investigators need licenses, how about people that are potentially exposed to secret information as consultants? Shouldn't they be licensed as well? How about all system administrators? So they can assist with law enforcement investigations of things like child porn and such, right?
Credentialism has other problems as well, in addition to just creeping into things. Today you can't legally teach in a classroom without a "teaching certificate", a type of license. Doesn't mean that you know anything other than being able to pass the certificate test - which is a 5th grade level exam in most states. Introducing this for anything in the area of IT is a generally bad idea.
Like all Internet content, it is user-generated, contributed and blatently stolen.
In the world of the 18-24 year old demographic, nobody pays for anything on the Internet. Movies, music, news, whatever, it is all free for the taking. So you have entire online ventures built on the premise they can just get top-quality content for free from ... well, somewhere.
The result of this is that the content is worth precisely what was paid for it.
Sure, some of it is good. And some is bad. Most is either incredibly silly or downright offensively bad. But it is what is offered by people spending their own time to put forth their opinion, views and observations on things. Often things they have utterly no basis for holding such opinions on which nobody will ever know.
So why is Daily Kos more interesting to people than their local newspaper? Primarily, I believe it is because Daily Kos (and thousands of sites just like it) supposedly have "real people" whereas the local newspaper just has "paid flacks". And I am using Daily Kos as an example - Free Republic would serve just as well. It is also that these web sites have people with as strident, or even more so, views on things than the viewers do. So they can step away from the screen thinking that their views are confirmed and there are obviously people even more wacky on the subject than they are.
The newspaper, on the other hand, neiher confirms or denies their worldview. It offers dry, bland facts without embellishments or stridency. It isn't entertaining, certainly not in the way that a Daily Kosser gets s few jollies from reading Free Republic.
We have been moving further and further towards the irrelevancy of facts and the total domination of entertainment. News programs aren't meant to inform, they are meant to entertain and titlate. The difference between the commercials and the news programs becomes less and less. This started with nearly the dawn of the television age and it isn't over yet.
I believe the "cost of capital" is what is being referred to. This means the city can't loan money (capital) to this enterprise at a lower interest rate than is available to private companies.
A common trick with municipal things is to offset the interest rate a lot. The result is it is impossible for anyone else to compete because the municipal-funded operation is getting money at a fraction of the interest rate anyone else has to pay.
Gosh, you mean like a digital signature for every program? You mean like what is implemented in Windows?
There is a security option for Windows that says nothing gets executed that is not signed and valid. Turn it on and you would be a lot safer. Unfortunately, some of Microsoft's own stuff isn't signed.
Stupid.
3. Have the finance investigators work with requisite police agencies world wide.
There you go. Without this last item, the rest is pointless. And there is no agreement that botnets are bad by all the world's governments and police agencies. So, no cooperation and no enforcement.
You do not want Visa and MC deciding who is a good person and who is a bad person on their own.
Net neutrality, by most people's interpretation, means the ISPs cannot do anything about botnets.
Giving ISPs the responsibility but without the authority to really do anything about it just leads to a disaster where, once again, nobody is accountable.
Time to face reality. Botnets are a minor annoyance to properly configured machines and a complete meltdown catestrophe to improperly configured machines. Sorry, but if you want thousands (millions?) of Joe Sixpack's and Grandma's being the "system administrator" for a computer that absolutely requires one, you are going to have this kind of problem. And it isn't going to change, no matter what anyone does.
Without real international agreement, nothing can be done about this. And that agreement isn't going to be coming along anytime soon.
Even better, why would a company want to swap out batteries? The cost of the battery is, in many cases, more than the replacement value of the car.
Toyota has apparently side-stepped this problem by just continuing to increase the warranty period of Prius batteries. The problem is, a hybrid car without a battery is worthless. A hybrid car without a battery warranty has virtually no value as a used vehicle. The moment Toyota stops extending the battery warranty, all Prius cars of that age are then worthless. This leads to a lot of cars in the crusher, almost overnight.
Copyright is but one avenue for software. A far better approach is trade secrets. Every company I worked for before 1990 relied primarily on the trade secret status of their code rather than any sort of copyright.
For disclosing trade secrets that you have been given under license the penalties are far worse than copyright violation.
There is very little you can do about reverse engineering, but any non-derivative implementation has roughly the same status with copyright law. How you nail down clean-room implementations is through patents, which got a lot more popular after 1990 or so.
But today there is nothing that prevents the same mechanisms used for software earlier from working today. Trade secret is still trade secret.
If you believe that you can get 3.6Mb/sec on a 3G phone continuously, you are in for a rude surprise. You can get this in short bursts but you can't get anywhere near that for longer period of time. How many phones are competing for the same bandwidth? 100? More like 500. Do you really believe any cell site has a 1.5Tb/sec connection?
No, you get your 3.6Mb/sec for about a second and they you wait for everyone else's phone. Fortunately, you get most things done in under a second and you aren't looking for a continuous high bandwidth connection. Because if you were, you'd be disappointed.
Do you understand how the cable infrastructure works? How about DSL?
What you are talking about might work, if there was a single unbroken fiber link between your home and the connection to the Internet backbone. It doesn't work that way. Instead, your cable connection goes to a network node which has a single fiber link to the cable company distribution point. Which then has one or more links to further on up until you finally reach a backbone point.
DSL is pretty much the same way - there is one shared fiber link between the DSLAM and the backbone.
Sure these links can be pretty hefty, but they aren't infinite in capacity. I seriously doubt they are more than OC3 (48Mbit) and probably less than that in reality. This means they can advertise all they want about getting 100Mbit connections between your house and the network node, but the node can't possibly give you more than its connection. And its connection is shared by the other 999 homes on the same node.
And yes, everything (TV, Internet, phone, etc.) is moving across that fiber link. The good news is the TV part of it is fixed - it doesn't change no matter how many people are watching. Which is why we're unlikely to move away from broadcast media in the near future. If everyone had their own pipe each node would require 100 times (or more) the bandwidth to the head end. No, I seriously doubt you are going to find any 4800Mbit fiber connections anytime soon.
To move beyond this we need to change the way that the Internet is delivered. Instead of network nodes being placed between the head end (any head end, cable, DSL, FIOS or whatever) we need individual unique connections all the way to the backbone. It is the only way that you could drop broadcast media and survive. Either that or continue to work within the confines of using the neighborhood network node as a shared resource with limited bandwidth.
I knew there was a reason I like trips to Australia. Besides the climate, the people, the food, the bars, and, well, just about everything. Except maybe dinner at the RSL club.
2%... I am going to have to remember that figure.
There will be a lot more people dying prematurely from starvation and other avoidable causes if global warming isn't checked.
You better hope so. Because about the only real way to "check" global warming is for these untold millions to die. And they need to get about that business (dying) pretty quickly, too.
The problem is that it comes down to most of the Western world living like Bangledeshi farmers (esp. the USA) or having lots and lots fewer people using energy. Failure to implement either of these plans will certainly result in no real change. Which means we will not have affected the climate of the planet in the desired direction.
Usage is not the only cost to an ISP. If you download .001GB per month but spend four hours every month on the phone with their tech support the usage is minimal compared to the support cost.
I'm sure there are plenty more examples of other costs. No way can they charge just by GB - at least not anywhere near their actual GB cost.
YouTube is clearly the future of entertainment. Check out Magibon and the ShayTards for examples of where television (and to some extent, major motion pictures) are going. I figure we will see at least one Magibon rip-off "reality TV show" in the fall.
We have already had folks like the ShayTards on network television, mostly to be snickered at. What we will see is hour-long feature presentations (with commercials) of material like this. Edited together in someone's home, shot with budget cameras and uneven lighting this will be the next big thing appearing on the screens in people's homes.
Another thing you can do with Vista is enable "signed only". Root around in the security policy and you will find it. It will refuse to run any executable that is not signed. Period.
According to Microsoft's malware study 0.06% of malware is signed. Sounds like something that would eliminate most of all threats.
The idea that we can significantly alter the climate is a bit arrogant. Worse still is the idea that some minimal amount of "conservation" is going to make a difference.
You see, the problem is 6 billion people and the energy they use. This is going to generate heat that is not all radiated into space. The part that is held within the Earth's atmosphere is going to have an effect. If you choose to believe that this is something that Mankind can change, good luck.
We are going to have to make some difficult decisions. One of them is real simple - fewer people. Lots fewer. On the order of maybe 200 million instead of 6 billion with the regulation and enforcement to ensure that it never, ever gets past that point again.
The other option is to limit the energy use of 6 billion people to that of 200 million.
There really are no other options, if you want to treat the Earth as a closed system with only the resources that are here now.
When the search http://www.google.com/search?q=free+movie+download results in lots of sites really offering free movie downloads, then maybe Google has something to worry about. And I don't mean movies like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1WeU3mmzps, I mean like the Wolverine movie. Or Star Trek (coming soon to Pirate Bay, I'm sure)
Until Google is returning results that actually download the same sorts of movies that Pirate Bay has listed, there is nothing to worry about. So how come they aren't listing every torrent available when I type in "Wolverine" for Google, anyway? Oh wait - the first result in Google for the search keywords "wolverine torrent" gets you ... you guessed it! www.piratebay.org And no, it isn't the torrent file, it is just the page listing the torrent file on Pirate Bay.
So how do you get to the torrent file with Google? Right now, you don't. Maybe that is why Google has nothing to worry about. Should this change and Google starts listing torrent files, then maybe they might have a problem.
Interesting idea, except that today it takes longer by train than it does by car. Much longer, usually.
The train tracks have been torn up for scrap metal so all that is left are freight lines and the freight trains have priority. Where there are sidings, the passenger train has to be sidelined to let the freight pass.
Without a massive buildout, with lots of Japanese and European rails, we're not getting any train service anytime soon. Why import the rails? Because of WTO - it is cheaper to use existing steel mills in Europe than it is to build a new steel mill in the US. Most of the places that made rails from 1850 to 1970 are gone now.
Do you understand how public projects get land other than through eminent domain? Under eminent domain they would have to pay a "fair market" price for the land. Otherwise, the route is determined by who is willing to sell and for how much. Check out some of the highways done this way - I know of a couple in Wisconsin.
If they don't choose a route and buy the land through a eminent domain process it is more than likely it will never get done at all - because the route would be rather pretzel-like.
Do you believe that people will willing sell their land to the government? Generally the answer is no.
Do you believe the government should pay extortionate prices for land becuase speculators buy up key parcels required for any sane route?
I don't know how it is done in other countries, but in the US the only sane way any public works project gets done is by eminent domain. Other ways have been tried, but they don't work because of unwillingness to sell, speculators and generally cussedness.
If you believe the future of YouTube is in the content, I suggest two searches: magibon and shaytard.
No, the future of television entertainment can be encapsulated in the results from these two searches. And quantity will always trump quality on the Internet.
Money? Earnings? No, these people are doing this because of ego and the fact they can. If you are paid for stuff on the Internet check out the future.
Base load demand has increased in the US. It continues to increase. No amount of conservation with energy efficient appliances and such is going to reduce that base load demand. You might shave some of the evening peaks down a bit, but it isn't going to make much difference.
The time has past for building new power plants. It would take at least five years to build a large coal-fired plant and probably more like 10 years to build a nuclear plant. Ten years is probably about right for a coal plant with lots of fancy technology that nobody has working today on a large scale.
Long before the next five years are up we are going to be consistently exceeding the capacity of the electric power system in parts of the US. This means people are just going to have to get used to remote-controlled electric power that is turned off at times by either the utility or a local government. Like in parts of Florida today, already. It is possible we could build our way out of this, but it is very unlikely to happen at a rapid enough pace.
This means that for the first time in over 100 years parts of the US that are heavily populated will start to see electricity being unavailable at times. This is already true of plenty of places in the world today, so it should surprise no one. It will surprise people in California, Texas, Florida, New York and lots of other places as well. It will demand lifestyle changes such as not counting of being able to buy food for two weeks and having the refrigerator keeping it fresh. Plenty of places in the world work like that today already - the US will just be joining them.
I seriously doubt we will be going back to 100% reliable electric power. The lifestyle changes will be accepted, one way or another. And the base capacity of electric generation will not increase.
Solar? Wind? Sure, it might help. If you put $25,000 worth of PV cells on your roof you could keep your refrigerator running. This will certainly be an option for some rich folks. But the average Joe is going to see solar and wind replacing coal plants, not supplmenting them.
Change is going to come up and smack you, whether you believe it or not.