I'd say that you probably have a bunch of technical books, and technical book deals very often assign the copyright to the publisher.
Beginning authors are likely to have to assign copyright to the publisher as well, unless they have an agent and a really hot property. Stephen King might have had to assign the copyright for Carrie (his first book).
I'd bet anything that for Cell (a recent Stephen King book) he did not have to assign copyright, wasn't asked and it just never, ever came up.
I would suggest that if Sun discovers that significant value has left with some people that benefited mightily from the purchase they could be looking at a lawsuit designed to (a) recover whatever portion they received and (b) make sure a solid message is sent to anyone left that leaving isn't an option.
Sure, there are some risks to pursuing a course like that, but we're not talking about chickenfeed here. MySQL wasn't going to earn Sun a billion dollars over the next five years no matter what. But if their purchase has almost no value left, they are going to be looking at it as a really bad transaction. So will all the shareholders. There is also the possibility that a purchasor of Sun could go after the people that left.
Can they do this? Sure, you can sue for any reason. But this has a pretty strong precident with other companies and purchasing stuff that was devalued because of the actions of the founder and/or leaders. Did the people leaving have a contract saying they had to stay? Maybe not, or maybe they stayed for the duration of that contract. Doesn't matter - the point isn't staying but not decreasing the value of the acquisition.
trunc() is not int(), it is more like floor(). It truncates the value to not the nearest but the lower integer value. Therefore, trunc(2.999999999) is 2 (integer), not 2.0. OK, you want to format it with decimal places, the answer is 2.00.
I believe int(2.999999) will result in 3 as it is documented as a rounding operation.
Note: I have no idea what the specifications for Google spreadsheets might be. However, if they are compatible with the implementation of int, trunc and floor in other languages, this is the result I would expect.
The problem is that once you process the credit card, you have run up that cost. The idea of deferring the credit card processing just means that you now allow people to buy stuff using stolen/expired/cancelled/bogus credit card numbers that you can't find out about until after the product is delivered.
Sorry, that doesn't work.
Lots of software merchants work the way that Apple is doing it. If your application isn't good enough for people to keep the developer pays the toll. Someone is going to have to pay for the credit card processing fees and the anti-fraud processes.
There are a number of problems, some of which are obvious like longevity of media. A bigger problem is the hardware to access the media. And even bigger, is the format of the data.
OK, under proper conditions a properly made CD or DVD will last nearly forever. But it requires some really fancy optics and a solid state laser diode to read it. And a DVD requires a microprocessor - can't get away with some simple logic chips like you can with a CD. And the encoding of the data itself is complicated - probably too complicated to consider it for long term storage.
But the biggest problem is data format. People keep crowing about open formats, but that is nearly irrelevent. If I handed you a 10.5 inch tape reel with data from 1955 on it you couldn't read it without having (a) a tape reader mechanism, (b) a knowledge of BCD (the predecessor to EBCDIC) and (c) a knowledge of the format of the data being used. Having a 60-bit binary number spread across 10 characters is pretty useless unless you have some idea what that number represents. And there is the problem.
Open formats are fine, but they are too complicated for archival purposes. Things change, and the changes often make the very definitions of the data obscure. Today in Europe would a set of construction plans from 1920 make any sense at all? Probably not, because all the units have changed. We face a similar problem - only more so. In 100 years it is likely that a PDF document will be utterly unreadable because it uses ASCII to reference glyphs to be rendered on the screen with fonts. None of ASCII, ASCII fonts or anything else will exist any longer.
So it will not matter one tiny little bit that an "open format" was used. The material will still be unusable and unreadable without special conversions. Can open formats be more readily converted as format change? Possibly. I suppose if you have a lot of word processor documents from the Atari 800 today that you might find them difficult to convert, if not impossible. I would offer that even if they were done in an "open format" (like plain text with control words, like WordStar) you would stll find them unreadable and unusable - Atari didn't use ASCII.
And in 100 years the likelyhood that either ASCII or Unicode will survive is very remote.
And yet if you look at other cultures you will discover that there is a prevalence of a "flood myth" that would tend to indicate that a very large catestrophe happened a long time ago. When? Nobody really knows, but it is nearly a dead certanity that there was a big disaster that wiped out a lot of the planet a long time ago.
Of course, the dates proposed by people trying to take it from the Bible are nonsense. But that is nearly irrelevent. The point is there was almost certainly soemthing that was interpreted by humans over most of the planet as "a big flood".
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
Get a few hundred people checking prices and you'll have a fairly accurate database of prices. Then you go home, made a grocery list and have it calculate where the cheapest place to shop is.
The problem with this is this pushes grocery stores to complete solely on price. Selection no longer matters, customer service doesn't matter, just price.
Personally, I see enough of that already. The Internet certainly has the power to transform all purchases into a simple decision based on price while taking all other factors out of it. Then, we will all be shopping at WalMart. Forget about anybody else, they can't compete as effectively on price.
Is that what you really want? Because that is exactly what we are in danger of getting.
Why anyone should have a problem with this is beyond me. These teens can be making plenty of money with nude pictures, or they can benefit all of humankind with their generousity. Because anyone who saw them probably saved them and they are now for sale.
Face it, if people will pay for naked pictures of teen-age girls, teen-age girls are going to get their pictures taken. Trying to stop it is futile, like trying to stop music piracy.
You can call the consumers perverts, but who is to say their lifestyle choice is any less valid than any other? In an age of utter and complete moral relativism, who is there that can really judge anything.
The idea of a "volunteer" news service is interesting, but it is unlikely to work very well. There are a couple of problems, probably the biggest is one of familiarity. If one person is accepted by the police as a reported they are likely to be given access to information that the general public doesn't get. And, in return, they are generally expected to deal professionally with this. Multiple volunteers are unlikely to ever be in this position and aren't going to have their professional reputation on the line.
The result is no access. Sure, they can sit in the town council meeting like any other member of the public. But are they going to be given anything special? Probably not. Can they review public-access police records? Sure, they are there for the public. But they aren't going to get anything else.
Further, we are beginning to discover there is a difference between "public" information and information that is distributed on the Internet. Yes, anyone can take pictures on the street. Google (or anyone else that tries) is probably not going to be able to continue to get away with publishing pictures of people outside their homes. Same thing with police "public access" information - if you are sufficiently motivated to go to the police station, you can look at the records. But many would consider it to be a serious invasion of privacy to permanently publish on the Internet every single entry on supposedly public-access police records.
Sorry, the US (and I suspect much of Western Europe) isn't going to be able to conserve their way out of a power crisis. We haven't built any large power plants in decades - all that has been done is some smaller "peaker" plants designed to start during periods of high load.
Well, the folks running air conditioners haven't gotten the word about electric power being a scarce resource. We can't build power plants because of environmental impact. We will soon not have 100% of the power we would like because of the same reason.
Growth in power usage is inevitable. It has been growing steadily since the first generator was turned on. No matter how many conservative we are, we can't counter the growth of the last 20-30 years.
Sadly for folks in the US, it is too late. It would take at least five years to build a major coal-fired power plant. It would take 10 years or more to build a major nuclear power plant. We don't have five years before rationing is going to be necessary.
So what does Google do when they can only operate for 10 hours a day in California?
A problem on the Internet is that there is to a large extent an absolute right to free speech. Many sites do not keep logs with IP addresses. Those that do can be gotten around with various tools, such as anonymous proxies.
With this in mind, I can clearly say anything I want. Libel, slander, defamation, hate speech, threats, it is all fair game. I can post reviews of businesses that I don't like that are defamatory with the goal of driving them out of business. If Lori Drew had an ounce of sense she could have been utterly unprosecutable for her actions.
For the most part, unless you act with blatent disregard, the Internet is a consequences-free zone. I can write a "documentary" about your daughter or wife that will make her life hell and there isn't anything you can do about it. Anyone can do this, given sufficient motivation. And YouTube makes it even easier with live action and sound.
This is the anonymous, untracable Internet we have today. How are most "Internet crimes" solved? Bragging. Anyone with more sense than to brag about their exploits gets a free pass.
In the US, far more than other countries, there are much bigger problems than simple election fraud. There is a chance that fraud can push the majority of votes to a different candidate. That isn't good.
However, I would contend that it can get much, much worse. Right now people have little faith in any elected official to begin with. One thing that didn't help was the assertion by CBS (and others) in 2000 that Gore won the election before all the votes had been counted. Why would they do such a thing? Because people expect results by midnight Eastern time. They won't watch the televised election results unless a winner is announced, and that would cost the TV news folks millions of dollars.
So a winner was announced. Then, two hours later - after many people went to bed - a different winner was announced. Should this happen again you can expect people to claim that all voting is phony and meaningless. You might see a lot of people in violent protests. I'd say the election turnout would end up the next time at maybe 10%.
So we need fast, fast, fast results. Failure to produce them will cause the TV news programs to simply announce a winner based on trends and exit polls. Do you believe that in the US a law could be passed saying that any announcement before official results was illegal? No, I didn't think you would think that. So we are going to have results by midnight, right or wrong, official or unofficial.
And if ths announcement is wrong that is pretty much the end of voting in the US, paper, plastic or e-voting. It really doesn't matter if nobody votes at all. Actually it is probably worse if 10% of the people vote and get to decide for the rest of the country.
Busted? So what is wrong with passing around digital goods that have been purchased? And what response can their possibly be? Not to sell to me any longer? How would they identify the person doing this? By the credit card used for the purchase? How many people have only one credit card?
Sorry, "retaliation" for piracy isn't really possible. All you can do is try (hopelessly) to prevent it from happening. Once it happens, a few really, really honest people will continue to pay. The rest get it for free. Forever.
Running red lights is real popular. It wasn't so popular in Illinois when I lived there, but in Arizona it seems to be a real sport. As quite a number of the license plates are for the state of Sonora (Mexico), law enforcement is kind of a joke. There is no attempt to give illegals tickets, because it is pointless. Show a cop a Mexican driver's license and you get off.
With 5-10 red light accidents per day, you would think anything that cut down the carnage would be appreciated. No, red light cameras and speed cameras are very unpopular here. All sorts of issues come up about how they are unfairly targeting owners of registered vehicles and drivers with valid Arizona licenses.
On one of the expressways here they turned off the speed cameras but left the radar on. The highest speed recorded was over 140MPH. That should say something.
So how about we just eliminate laws against speeding and running red lights? We could be the first truely progressive state in the country that allows people to express their freedom to speed and drive any damn way they want. That would solve the problem, wouldn't it? Because with the frequency of violations here there is no way there will ever be real enforcement by police officers - there will never be enough of them. Might as well face reality and just repeal the laws.
This would generate far more respect for the remaining laws. It might also reduce the population some, both by traffic carnage and from people just avoiding Arizona when the word got around.
Today in pretty much every American school from Kindergarden through 12th grade there is free training in piracy of anything digital. Want a song? Someone will show you where to download it from for free. Same for software.
After being subjected to 13 years of this sort of training we can move on to college where there is another four years of honing the art. Everyone knows how to do it by then.
Now they enter the business world and you find it odd that your fellow employees can't understand why they just can't have evertything they want? Sorry, but you are seeing the result of a nationwide (if not worldwide) program. If the people in charge at your workplace don't see anything wrong with everyone just having what they want, I think I'd run for the door. There will be consequences, someday. Someone will find out that rewards are paid to people that turn companies that pirate.
Ethics? If there are no ethics preventing people from pirating, there will be no ethics preventing them from trying to get a reward turning people in.
If someone high up at your company can't see the problem, you don't need to be working there. You will find out your bosses will see to it that it is all pinned on your predcessor and you.
Social Security isn't a bank account. It is an inter-generational support system. The money deducted from your paycheck isn't for you later, it is for older people now. When you reach retirement, younger people will be paying for you.
The problem is, the system is predicated on the idea of there always being more young people to pay for fewer old people. As long as there is a high birth rate and the population is increasing, we're fine. Unfortunately, the population isn't growing due to a high birth rate, it is growing because of immigration. Not all of the immigrants are paying into Social Security and they certainly aren't paying a lot in. Also, most of the high paying factory jobs are gone now. Over all, Social Security is bringing in a lot less than it used to.
And there are a lot more old people around now.
A significant challenge for the future is balancing the number of old people against what the government can support. We're going to have to flush some of them out of the system earlier than they might like. That means spending less on Medicare and less on Social Security. Maybe we can just get a law passed that says it is illegal to treat anyone over 60. That would help. Maybe make it illegal to rent to them also. Those old folks won't make it through too many winters out on the streets.
If you had the faintest idea of the network requirements to do that, you would understand why broadcast TV (and radio) are going to be around for a long, long time.
Today, people can pretend that broadcast radio might die because they can stream content to their phone. And as long as they can do this, they think "this must be what the future looks like". It doesn't, it won't and as soon as 10-20 people in their physical area try to do the same thing they will discover the truth.
The bandwidth requirements of feeding individuals their own streams at 1080i (or even 720i) would require pretty much dedicated fiber home-to-provider. No, that doesn't exist. You can get fiber to a local node that is dedicated but then you are competing with your neighbors for bandwidth on a shared resource. And that shared resource does not have anywhere near the aggregate capacity to handle the sum of the fiber coming in to it.
When will it? Probably never. Dreaming that broadcast will end when it does is fine, but keep in mind someone has to justify the costs. A local node may serve 1000 homes. Getting fiber that will support 20MB/sec is no problem but getting a channel from the local node that will support 20Gb/sec is another proposition entirely. And at the head end where 100 of those 20Gb/sec fibers come together to compete with the incoming bandwidth now ups that requirement to 2Tb/sec.
2Tb/sec? And that is merely a small town with 100,000 homes.
Broadcast TV is going to be around for a long, long time. As will broadcast radio. The bandwidth requirements of a broadcast are so incredibly modest compared with individual streams that it is a no-brainer for anyone.
Will the bandwidth exist someday? Maybe. Will it be used to replace broadcasting? Doubtful. There will be some other use for it which will once again mean broadcast content is the only practical way to do it.
And you would suggest something like two votes for women and minorities, because they have been oppressed for so long?
How about poor people getting three votes and anyone with a salary (not hourly) gets only 1/2? Maybe anyone not on welfare (must be rich, right) gets only 3/5ths?
Or maybe something silly like some of the alternative voting schemes where if you don't like the candidates your vote gets distributed around until your least-objectionable candidate gets it?
Or we just move the US to a parlimentary system where every faction has their group in the government. With all of the dealmaking being done hidden away in the government rather than just once every few years for the election.
No, I can't say the current US system is the best, but it sure sounds a lot better than most of the other governments out there. With a system like the UK or Israel has the US would tear itself apart in six months.
Hah, I want government-paid campaigns. You want to run for state Senator? Fine, that costs around 2 million. Upon declaring your candidacy you get a check from the government for the 2 million. Federal Senate seat? OK, that is going to cost around 10 million. President? Well, I think the going rate for that is now around 500 million. Dogatcher for Intercourse, PA? Maybe $500.
This will immediately do several things. First off, it will empty the welfare roles of anyone with any sense or motivation whatseoever. They can get paid lots more by running for some public office. It will seriously increase the number of candidates and eliminate most of the silly press stories - there will be way too many candidates to bother with finding out they secretly have a girlfriend. Maybe their real beliefs and attitudes on core issues will be what gets reported on.
It also means that probably 10% of the country can permanently be employed as either candidates or campaign workers.
Sounds like a wonderful system to me. It would eliminate all of the bother about financing a campaign and get lots more people interested in political offices.
How can anyone say it is the real thing? Why would you try selling the real thing, anyway? Wouldn't it be cheaper to make up something of your own and sell it with their name on it? And, nobody (but you) would know any different. Maybe after they tried it, but it would be a little late.
That is why they are restrictive of who their resellers are. If you don't understand, you need to figure how how easy it is to sell fake stuff. Cheaper. Get more sales. See how easy it is?
Now if they knew you were selling their product, for real, you might have a point. But they don't unless you have a relationship with them as a reseller. Since there is no relationship, they can assume whatever they want - such as you are selling fake stuff.
Most buyers can't tell the difference. For the most part, they are getting a bargain because they think it is a Rolex or Louis Vutton, but it isn't really. They aren't paying for the real thing.
In a few cases, they buyer ends up feeling like a sucker because they try to sell their "bargain" to someone that knows the difference. So instead of making 10x their original investment, they learn their watch isn't "real". Well, it tells time, right?
Because of the price difference, the overpriced only-for-the-rich names are going to disappear. So in 10 years when you can't buy a new (real) Rolex anymore for $8,000 but you can buy all the fake ones you want for $80. Who is the loser here? Maybe the rich folks, but I can't see anyone on Slashdot giving a rat's ass about that.
With the Internet you make the distribution of these goods almost untracable, so there is no risk to the seller from the police. The police being used to enforce the only-for-the-rich prices for brand names. So you get a Rolex for $80 and it will last just as long as any other $80 watch - but it says Rolex on it. If your ego requires you to have brand names, this lets you do it without paying vastly inflated prices for useless names. The name doesn't make it any better, after all.
The problem is that people are still trying (and for the most part, failing) to make money from digital works. There are considerable forces in the world that want to make this impossible. And they are winning.
If you spend money for a movie, you are their sworn enemy. If you pay for music, in any form, you are part of the problem and they think they are part of the solution.
The problem is, right now they can win. For the most part "crime" on the Internet can't be effectively punished. Which is why just about anyone with a static IP address is assulted on a daily basis with break-in attempts. It is why your children can't be allowed to use the Internet without supervision - someone will approach them with some unsavory proposal. Anyone doing this "in real life" would either be beaten to death or arrested, depending on who caught up with them first (a parent or the police). On the Internet, I can seduce your children, I can commit fraud, libel and anything else I choose and you can do nothing about it.
This means I can buy movies and post them on the Internet with the specific intent of making sure not another dime is spent on that movie, ever again. Will my purchase be the last? Right now it is changing from a silly question to approaching a 50/50 proposition, depending on where I post information about "my" movie.
You can figure this is going to happen with books, software, music, movies and anything else in digital form. Anything is fair game.
So why is free bad? It sounds really nice, just having everything for free. More money for everything else. Doesn't this just make us all richer? Sure, everyone except the creator. Somehow they got the idea that they were going to be paid. Well, payday is almost over. And when it is over for real they better like the new "everything for free" situation because there is no way you are going to convince people to go back to the old way.
So, yes, paying for movies and music is a political statement. A rabidly antisocial and greedy political statement.
AIG was in the reinsurance business for very large capital projects. So you want to build a 100 million dollar bridge. The state wants a completion bond - very logical. So you get one from your insurance company for 100 million dollars. The insurance company doesn't want that risk all to themselves, so they get reinsurance to cover them.
Such reinsurance deals were, until very recently, almost zero risk. And they made a fair profit for the reinsurer.
Unfortunately, what has happened is the risk has become real and nobody wants into that game now. AIG is pretty much the only place to go. For reinsurance of large capital projects there is virtually nobody else that wants to play. Sure, AIG is in other financial markets and such as well. But without the reinsurance business everything in the US, Western Europe and I would suspect a good part of Central America, South America and Asia just stops. Stops dead because without insurance nobody is going to be allowed to do anything at all. And the primary insurers need a reinsurer to manage the risk.
100 years ago this was unheard of. Nobody insured the building of a building, so there was no role for a reinsurer. Somehow, we have gotten off track on this and ended up in this situation where nobody wants any risk at all and wants to have everything insured. Hence we have three and four layers of insurers behind everything from building a barn to servicing an airplane. Large or small, evertything is insured.
Heck, for a trade show in a convention center we had to show that we had a million dollar insurance policy in order to set up a booth.
If AIG went under with the current risk situation, nobody would have replaced them anytime soon and everything would just stop. Everything. And it wasn't that hard for some folks to figure that out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that you probably have a bunch of technical books, and technical book deals very often assign the copyright to the publisher.
Beginning authors are likely to have to assign copyright to the publisher as well, unless they have an agent and a really hot property. Stephen King might have had to assign the copyright for Carrie (his first book).
I'd bet anything that for Cell (a recent Stephen King book) he did not have to assign copyright, wasn't asked and it just never, ever came up.
I would suggest that if Sun discovers that significant value has left with some people that benefited mightily from the purchase they could be looking at a lawsuit designed to (a) recover whatever portion they received and (b) make sure a solid message is sent to anyone left that leaving isn't an option.
Sure, there are some risks to pursuing a course like that, but we're not talking about chickenfeed here. MySQL wasn't going to earn Sun a billion dollars over the next five years no matter what. But if their purchase has almost no value left, they are going to be looking at it as a really bad transaction. So will all the shareholders. There is also the possibility that a purchasor of Sun could go after the people that left.
Can they do this? Sure, you can sue for any reason. But this has a pretty strong precident with other companies and purchasing stuff that was devalued because of the actions of the founder and/or leaders. Did the people leaving have a contract saying they had to stay? Maybe not, or maybe they stayed for the duration of that contract. Doesn't matter - the point isn't staying but not decreasing the value of the acquisition.
I believe the answer of 2.0 is correct.
trunc() is not int(), it is more like floor(). It truncates the value to not the nearest but the lower integer value. Therefore, trunc(2.999999999) is 2 (integer), not 2.0. OK, you want to format it with decimal places, the answer is 2.00.
I believe int(2.999999) will result in 3 as it is documented as a rounding operation.
Note: I have no idea what the specifications for Google spreadsheets might be. However, if they are compatible with the implementation of int, trunc and floor in other languages, this is the result I would expect.
The problem is that once you process the credit card, you have run up that cost. The idea of deferring the credit card processing just means that you now allow people to buy stuff using stolen/expired/cancelled/bogus credit card numbers that you can't find out about until after the product is delivered.
Sorry, that doesn't work.
Lots of software merchants work the way that Apple is doing it. If your application isn't good enough for people to keep the developer pays the toll. Someone is going to have to pay for the credit card processing fees and the anti-fraud processes.
There are a number of problems, some of which are obvious like longevity of media. A bigger problem is the hardware to access the media. And even bigger, is the format of the data.
OK, under proper conditions a properly made CD or DVD will last nearly forever. But it requires some really fancy optics and a solid state laser diode to read it. And a DVD requires a microprocessor - can't get away with some simple logic chips like you can with a CD. And the encoding of the data itself is complicated - probably too complicated to consider it for long term storage.
But the biggest problem is data format. People keep crowing about open formats, but that is nearly irrelevent. If I handed you a 10.5 inch tape reel with data from 1955 on it you couldn't read it without having (a) a tape reader mechanism, (b) a knowledge of BCD (the predecessor to EBCDIC) and (c) a knowledge of the format of the data being used. Having a 60-bit binary number spread across 10 characters is pretty useless unless you have some idea what that number represents. And there is the problem.
Open formats are fine, but they are too complicated for archival purposes. Things change, and the changes often make the very definitions of the data obscure. Today in Europe would a set of construction plans from 1920 make any sense at all? Probably not, because all the units have changed. We face a similar problem - only more so. In 100 years it is likely that a PDF document will be utterly unreadable because it uses ASCII to reference glyphs to be rendered on the screen with fonts. None of ASCII, ASCII fonts or anything else will exist any longer.
So it will not matter one tiny little bit that an "open format" was used. The material will still be unusable and unreadable without special conversions. Can open formats be more readily converted as format change? Possibly. I suppose if you have a lot of word processor documents from the Atari 800 today that you might find them difficult to convert, if not impossible. I would offer that even if they were done in an "open format" (like plain text with control words, like WordStar) you would stll find them unreadable and unusable - Atari didn't use ASCII.
And in 100 years the likelyhood that either ASCII or Unicode will survive is very remote.
And yet if you look at other cultures you will discover that there is a prevalence of a "flood myth" that would tend to indicate that a very large catestrophe happened a long time ago. When? Nobody really knows, but it is nearly a dead certanity that there was a big disaster that wiped out a lot of the planet a long time ago.
Of course, the dates proposed by people trying to take it from the Bible are nonsense. But that is nearly irrelevent. The point is there was almost certainly soemthing that was interpreted by humans over most of the planet as "a big flood".
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
Get a few hundred people checking prices and you'll have a fairly accurate database of prices. Then you go home, made a grocery list and have it calculate where the cheapest place to shop is.
The problem with this is this pushes grocery stores to complete solely on price. Selection no longer matters, customer service doesn't matter, just price.
Personally, I see enough of that already. The Internet certainly has the power to transform all purchases into a simple decision based on price while taking all other factors out of it. Then, we will all be shopping at WalMart. Forget about anybody else, they can't compete as effectively on price.
Is that what you really want? Because that is exactly what we are in danger of getting.
Why anyone should have a problem with this is beyond me. These teens can be making plenty of money with nude pictures, or they can benefit all of humankind with their generousity. Because anyone who saw them probably saved them and they are now for sale.
Face it, if people will pay for naked pictures of teen-age girls, teen-age girls are going to get their pictures taken. Trying to stop it is futile, like trying to stop music piracy.
You can call the consumers perverts, but who is to say their lifestyle choice is any less valid than any other? In an age of utter and complete moral relativism, who is there that can really judge anything.
The idea of a "volunteer" news service is interesting, but it is unlikely to work very well. There are a couple of problems, probably the biggest is one of familiarity. If one person is accepted by the police as a reported they are likely to be given access to information that the general public doesn't get. And, in return, they are generally expected to deal professionally with this. Multiple volunteers are unlikely to ever be in this position and aren't going to have their professional reputation on the line.
The result is no access. Sure, they can sit in the town council meeting like any other member of the public. But are they going to be given anything special? Probably not. Can they review public-access police records? Sure, they are there for the public. But they aren't going to get anything else.
Further, we are beginning to discover there is a difference between "public" information and information that is distributed on the Internet. Yes, anyone can take pictures on the street. Google (or anyone else that tries) is probably not going to be able to continue to get away with publishing pictures of people outside their homes. Same thing with police "public access" information - if you are sufficiently motivated to go to the police station, you can look at the records. But many would consider it to be a serious invasion of privacy to permanently publish on the Internet every single entry on supposedly public-access police records.
Sorry, the US (and I suspect much of Western Europe) isn't going to be able to conserve their way out of a power crisis. We haven't built any large power plants in decades - all that has been done is some smaller "peaker" plants designed to start during periods of high load.
Well, the folks running air conditioners haven't gotten the word about electric power being a scarce resource. We can't build power plants because of environmental impact. We will soon not have 100% of the power we would like because of the same reason.
Growth in power usage is inevitable. It has been growing steadily since the first generator was turned on. No matter how many conservative we are, we can't counter the growth of the last 20-30 years.
Sadly for folks in the US, it is too late. It would take at least five years to build a major coal-fired power plant. It would take 10 years or more to build a major nuclear power plant. We don't have five years before rationing is going to be necessary.
So what does Google do when they can only operate for 10 hours a day in California?
A problem on the Internet is that there is to a large extent an absolute right to free speech. Many sites do not keep logs with IP addresses. Those that do can be gotten around with various tools, such as anonymous proxies.
With this in mind, I can clearly say anything I want. Libel, slander, defamation, hate speech, threats, it is all fair game. I can post reviews of businesses that I don't like that are defamatory with the goal of driving them out of business. If Lori Drew had an ounce of sense she could have been utterly unprosecutable for her actions.
For the most part, unless you act with blatent disregard, the Internet is a consequences-free zone. I can write a "documentary" about your daughter or wife that will make her life hell and there isn't anything you can do about it. Anyone can do this, given sufficient motivation. And YouTube makes it even easier with live action and sound.
This is the anonymous, untracable Internet we have today. How are most "Internet crimes" solved? Bragging. Anyone with more sense than to brag about their exploits gets a free pass.
In the US, far more than other countries, there are much bigger problems than simple election fraud. There is a chance that fraud can push the majority of votes to a different candidate. That isn't good.
However, I would contend that it can get much, much worse. Right now people have little faith in any elected official to begin with. One thing that didn't help was the assertion by CBS (and others) in 2000 that Gore won the election before all the votes had been counted. Why would they do such a thing? Because people expect results by midnight Eastern time. They won't watch the televised election results unless a winner is announced, and that would cost the TV news folks millions of dollars.
So a winner was announced. Then, two hours later - after many people went to bed - a different winner was announced. Should this happen again you can expect people to claim that all voting is phony and meaningless. You might see a lot of people in violent protests. I'd say the election turnout would end up the next time at maybe 10%.
So we need fast, fast, fast results. Failure to produce them will cause the TV news programs to simply announce a winner based on trends and exit polls. Do you believe that in the US a law could be passed saying that any announcement before official results was illegal? No, I didn't think you would think that. So we are going to have results by midnight, right or wrong, official or unofficial.
And if ths announcement is wrong that is pretty much the end of voting in the US, paper, plastic or e-voting. It really doesn't matter if nobody votes at all. Actually it is probably worse if 10% of the people vote and get to decide for the rest of the country.
Busted? So what is wrong with passing around digital goods that have been purchased? And what response can their possibly be? Not to sell to me any longer? How would they identify the person doing this? By the credit card used for the purchase? How many people have only one credit card?
Sorry, "retaliation" for piracy isn't really possible. All you can do is try (hopelessly) to prevent it from happening. Once it happens, a few really, really honest people will continue to pay. The rest get it for free. Forever.
This was outright irresponsible.
Yes, but this is the Internet. All irresponsible things come here, eventually.
Fair use portion? I think the most anyone has ever considered to be fair use was 5%. This is 13%.
Running red lights is real popular. It wasn't so popular in Illinois when I lived there, but in Arizona it seems to be a real sport. As quite a number of the license plates are for the state of Sonora (Mexico), law enforcement is kind of a joke. There is no attempt to give illegals tickets, because it is pointless. Show a cop a Mexican driver's license and you get off.
With 5-10 red light accidents per day, you would think anything that cut down the carnage would be appreciated. No, red light cameras and speed cameras are very unpopular here. All sorts of issues come up about how they are unfairly targeting owners of registered vehicles and drivers with valid Arizona licenses.
On one of the expressways here they turned off the speed cameras but left the radar on. The highest speed recorded was over 140MPH. That should say something.
So how about we just eliminate laws against speeding and running red lights? We could be the first truely progressive state in the country that allows people to express their freedom to speed and drive any damn way they want. That would solve the problem, wouldn't it? Because with the frequency of violations here there is no way there will ever be real enforcement by police officers - there will never be enough of them. Might as well face reality and just repeal the laws.
This would generate far more respect for the remaining laws. It might also reduce the population some, both by traffic carnage and from people just avoiding Arizona when the word got around.
Today in pretty much every American school from Kindergarden through 12th grade there is free training in piracy of anything digital. Want a song? Someone will show you where to download it from for free. Same for software.
After being subjected to 13 years of this sort of training we can move on to college where there is another four years of honing the art. Everyone knows how to do it by then.
Now they enter the business world and you find it odd that your fellow employees can't understand why they just can't have evertything they want? Sorry, but you are seeing the result of a nationwide (if not worldwide) program. If the people in charge at your workplace don't see anything wrong with everyone just having what they want, I think I'd run for the door. There will be consequences, someday. Someone will find out that rewards are paid to people that turn companies that pirate.
Ethics? If there are no ethics preventing people from pirating, there will be no ethics preventing them from trying to get a reward turning people in.
If someone high up at your company can't see the problem, you don't need to be working there. You will find out your bosses will see to it that it is all pinned on your predcessor and you.
Social Security isn't a bank account. It is an inter-generational support system. The money deducted from your paycheck isn't for you later, it is for older people now. When you reach retirement, younger people will be paying for you.
The problem is, the system is predicated on the idea of there always being more young people to pay for fewer old people. As long as there is a high birth rate and the population is increasing, we're fine. Unfortunately, the population isn't growing due to a high birth rate, it is growing because of immigration. Not all of the immigrants are paying into Social Security and they certainly aren't paying a lot in. Also, most of the high paying factory jobs are gone now. Over all, Social Security is bringing in a lot less than it used to.
And there are a lot more old people around now.
A significant challenge for the future is balancing the number of old people against what the government can support. We're going to have to flush some of them out of the system earlier than they might like. That means spending less on Medicare and less on Social Security. Maybe we can just get a law passed that says it is illegal to treat anyone over 60. That would help. Maybe make it illegal to rent to them also. Those old folks won't make it through too many winters out on the streets.
Problem solved.
If you had the faintest idea of the network requirements to do that, you would understand why broadcast TV (and radio) are going to be around for a long, long time.
Today, people can pretend that broadcast radio might die because they can stream content to their phone. And as long as they can do this, they think "this must be what the future looks like". It doesn't, it won't and as soon as 10-20 people in their physical area try to do the same thing they will discover the truth.
The bandwidth requirements of feeding individuals their own streams at 1080i (or even 720i) would require pretty much dedicated fiber home-to-provider. No, that doesn't exist. You can get fiber to a local node that is dedicated but then you are competing with your neighbors for bandwidth on a shared resource. And that shared resource does not have anywhere near the aggregate capacity to handle the sum of the fiber coming in to it.
When will it? Probably never. Dreaming that broadcast will end when it does is fine, but keep in mind someone has to justify the costs. A local node may serve 1000 homes. Getting fiber that will support 20MB/sec is no problem but getting a channel from the local node that will support 20Gb/sec is another proposition entirely. And at the head end where 100 of those 20Gb/sec fibers come together to compete with the incoming bandwidth now ups that requirement to 2Tb/sec.
2Tb/sec? And that is merely a small town with 100,000 homes.
Broadcast TV is going to be around for a long, long time. As will broadcast radio. The bandwidth requirements of a broadcast are so incredibly modest compared with individual streams that it is a no-brainer for anyone.
Will the bandwidth exist someday? Maybe. Will it be used to replace broadcasting? Doubtful. There will be some other use for it which will once again mean broadcast content is the only practical way to do it.
And you would suggest something like two votes for women and minorities, because they have been oppressed for so long?
How about poor people getting three votes and anyone with a salary (not hourly) gets only 1/2? Maybe anyone not on welfare (must be rich, right) gets only 3/5ths?
Or maybe something silly like some of the alternative voting schemes where if you don't like the candidates your vote gets distributed around until your least-objectionable candidate gets it?
Or we just move the US to a parlimentary system where every faction has their group in the government. With all of the dealmaking being done hidden away in the government rather than just once every few years for the election.
No, I can't say the current US system is the best, but it sure sounds a lot better than most of the other governments out there. With a system like the UK or Israel has the US would tear itself apart in six months.
Hah, I want government-paid campaigns. You want to run for state Senator? Fine, that costs around 2 million. Upon declaring your candidacy you get a check from the government for the 2 million. Federal Senate seat? OK, that is going to cost around 10 million. President? Well, I think the going rate for that is now around 500 million. Dogatcher for Intercourse, PA? Maybe $500.
This will immediately do several things. First off, it will empty the welfare roles of anyone with any sense or motivation whatseoever. They can get paid lots more by running for some public office. It will seriously increase the number of candidates and eliminate most of the silly press stories - there will be way too many candidates to bother with finding out they secretly have a girlfriend. Maybe their real beliefs and attitudes on core issues will be what gets reported on.
It also means that probably 10% of the country can permanently be employed as either candidates or campaign workers.
Sounds like a wonderful system to me. It would eliminate all of the bother about financing a campaign and get lots more people interested in political offices.
How can anyone say it is the real thing? Why would you try selling the real thing, anyway? Wouldn't it be cheaper to make up something of your own and sell it with their name on it? And, nobody (but you) would know any different. Maybe after they tried it, but it would be a little late.
That is why they are restrictive of who their resellers are. If you don't understand, you need to figure how how easy it is to sell fake stuff. Cheaper. Get more sales. See how easy it is?
Now if they knew you were selling their product, for real, you might have a point. But they don't unless you have a relationship with them as a reseller. Since there is no relationship, they can assume whatever they want - such as you are selling fake stuff.
Most buyers can't tell the difference. For the most part, they are getting a bargain because they think it is a Rolex or Louis Vutton, but it isn't really. They aren't paying for the real thing.
In a few cases, they buyer ends up feeling like a sucker because they try to sell their "bargain" to someone that knows the difference. So instead of making 10x their original investment, they learn their watch isn't "real". Well, it tells time, right?
Because of the price difference, the overpriced only-for-the-rich names are going to disappear. So in 10 years when you can't buy a new (real) Rolex anymore for $8,000 but you can buy all the fake ones you want for $80. Who is the loser here? Maybe the rich folks, but I can't see anyone on Slashdot giving a rat's ass about that.
With the Internet you make the distribution of these goods almost untracable, so there is no risk to the seller from the police. The police being used to enforce the only-for-the-rich prices for brand names. So you get a Rolex for $80 and it will last just as long as any other $80 watch - but it says Rolex on it. If your ego requires you to have brand names, this lets you do it without paying vastly inflated prices for useless names. The name doesn't make it any better, after all.
The problem is that people are still trying (and for the most part, failing) to make money from digital works. There are considerable forces in the world that want to make this impossible. And they are winning.
If you spend money for a movie, you are their sworn enemy. If you pay for music, in any form, you are part of the problem and they think they are part of the solution.
The problem is, right now they can win. For the most part "crime" on the Internet can't be effectively punished. Which is why just about anyone with a static IP address is assulted on a daily basis with break-in attempts. It is why your children can't be allowed to use the Internet without supervision - someone will approach them with some unsavory proposal. Anyone doing this "in real life" would either be beaten to death or arrested, depending on who caught up with them first (a parent or the police). On the Internet, I can seduce your children, I can commit fraud, libel and anything else I choose and you can do nothing about it.
This means I can buy movies and post them on the Internet with the specific intent of making sure not another dime is spent on that movie, ever again. Will my purchase be the last? Right now it is changing from a silly question to approaching a 50/50 proposition, depending on where I post information about "my" movie.
You can figure this is going to happen with books, software, music, movies and anything else in digital form. Anything is fair game.
So why is free bad? It sounds really nice, just having everything for free. More money for everything else. Doesn't this just make us all richer? Sure, everyone except the creator. Somehow they got the idea that they were going to be paid. Well, payday is almost over. And when it is over for real they better like the new "everything for free" situation because there is no way you are going to convince people to go back to the old way.
So, yes, paying for movies and music is a political statement. A rabidly antisocial and greedy political statement.
Do you understand what AIG did? Evidently not.
AIG was in the reinsurance business for very large capital projects. So you want to build a 100 million dollar bridge. The state wants a completion bond - very logical. So you get one from your insurance company for 100 million dollars. The insurance company doesn't want that risk all to themselves, so they get reinsurance to cover them.
Such reinsurance deals were, until very recently, almost zero risk. And they made a fair profit for the reinsurer.
Unfortunately, what has happened is the risk has become real and nobody wants into that game now. AIG is pretty much the only place to go. For reinsurance of large capital projects there is virtually nobody else that wants to play. Sure, AIG is in other financial markets and such as well. But without the reinsurance business everything in the US, Western Europe and I would suspect a good part of Central America, South America and Asia just stops. Stops dead because without insurance nobody is going to be allowed to do anything at all. And the primary insurers need a reinsurer to manage the risk.
100 years ago this was unheard of. Nobody insured the building of a building, so there was no role for a reinsurer. Somehow, we have gotten off track on this and ended up in this situation where nobody wants any risk at all and wants to have everything insured. Hence we have three and four layers of insurers behind everything from building a barn to servicing an airplane. Large or small, evertything is insured.
Heck, for a trade show in a convention center we had to show that we had a million dollar insurance policy in order to set up a booth.
If AIG went under with the current risk situation, nobody would have replaced them anytime soon and everything would just stop. Everything. And it wasn't that hard for some folks to figure that out.