So some credit card numbers were stolen. So what? Nobody, except the merchants accepting them, lose anything from this. Certainly not the card holders. It is a minor hassle to get the cards reissued - and maybe the credit card company can actually take some action and do this in advance.
Is this "identity theft"? No. It certainly isn't IDENTITY THEFT!!! It is credit card fraud and it happens every day. I regularly get fraudulent charges on credit cards - using the card creates this risk. There are lots and lots of merchants out there both online and brick-and-mortar that think nothing of selling credit card numbers to thieves. It is obvious, because "stolen" credit card numbers are so incredibly common.
People today, virtually everyone I know, is convinced that "if it is on the Internet, it should be free". This goes for e-books, software, games, music and movies. The more clever people are good at digging out places to get stuff for free. The less clever take links and CDs from the more clever.
How are you going to convince people that they shouldn't have free stuff anymore? I don't think it can be done. Certainly not while the schools are pirating software in the classrooms.
Any comparison to iTunes is a joke. Apple needed a way to get content onto iPods for the less clever. They also wanted a way for it to be legal, citing any number of businesses founded on illegal processes that have been sued out of existance. So iTunes is legal. But it doesn't produce any revenue - between credit card processing costs and what they are paying to the copyright owners, they end up with maybe $0.10 a sale, if that. I suspect $0.01 or $0.00 is fine with them as well. Because iTunes exists to fill up purchased iPod devices and without it people (the less clever majority) wouldn't buy iPods.
So it is somewhat of a necessary evil. Certainly they are going to reduce costs (like eliminating an extra DRM step) whenever possible. But this is not a model to be emulated by anyone without an serious alterior motive. Saying Warner Brothes should take a hint from Apple is pretty much saying it is OK to lose money on every transaction as long as you make up for it in volume.
Electric power in the US is perhaps a year or two from being rationed.
When was the last time a large-scale generating plant was constructed? Oh, maybe 1978. I don't believe there has been anything other than small "peaker plants" built. Why? Becuase of the environmental regulations.
Unfortunately, the US has not gosten the message that electric power growth must stop. So we are now on the edge of running out of capacity. In a year or two you can expect to see major changes in electrical power pricing, distribution and controls. And probably some new laws. Things like it being illegal to use a home air conditioner outside of specific hours.
If we started today to build a nuclear power plant it would take 10 years to bring on line. If we started today to build a coal fired power plant it would take five years. In five years the cities will likely be dark at night and most people on the East Coast will have manditory shut-offs so California can turn on air conditioners in the evening hours.
Different business model? What? iTunes doesn't really make money, for anyone except maybe the credit card companies, so that is pointless. Giving stuff away with unrelated products is just the same - giving stuff away. Music is already free so how does that change anything?
No, Pepsi isn't going to allow music to be bundled with their products unless they got something for it. I suppose the music industry could pay Pepsi for the privilege and free advertising they would get, but this doesn't get them any revenue. Pepsi, or anybody else, isn't going to co-market music without getting something in return. So there isn't a subsidy there to be had.
That's the main problem with it. There just isn't a "bsiness model" that involves giving stuff away for free unless it benefits someone. And since recorded music has pretty much zero value to anyone capable of downloading it (excluding clueless 30-something iPod buyers), you can't convince anyone that music is somehow valuable and will add value to their web site, consumer product, or really anything else.
Let's see, if you took a job that paid you $3 an hour but as part of the contract you got $1 every time someone started up one of your applications you might do it. So you find out later that you are getting about 1/4th of the "application start" money you might be just a tiny bit upset, right?
Should writers have different contracts that do not offer payment for future use of their materials? Maybe. But the fact is, the contract that was negotiated included such things. And it is industry convention for television to not pay everything up front but to pay it out over time.
Sure, it might be simpler for everyone if they were just paid one lump sum. It would make my life a little simpler if instead of being paid for years and years I just got one big payment as well. Unfortunately, the one big payment would probably be a lot less.
Which is why people negotiate contracts where they get royalties over time.
There are problems with jurors doing their own collecting of evidence, which is what you are talking about. You can't limit it to "fact checking" - once you open the door to independent activity materials that may be related are going to be brought to the juror's attention.
So what is wrong with "having all the facts"? Well, the system we have is based on the idea that there are facts that are not relevent but may be distracting. Heck, these facts might be relevent but their distraction far outweighs their value as facts. This starts to get very combative in the legal system. The other problem is nobody is ever going to be able to say conclusively that "all" the facts have been gathered. There is no certanity, just "beyond a reasonable doubt".
There is also the problem of one juror "discovering" something and perhaps not telling all the other jurors. Maybe they just tell a few. What does this do to the idea of a fair trial?
So how to jurors deal with this in a Internet-connected environment? Well, I would think for starters that Internet connected devices need to be confiscated to prevent this sort of thing. Clearly, juror instructions aren't working and you have people that decide they just know better. How do you deal with jurors that decide to do their own investigating at home? Kick them off the jury and hold them in contempt of court. And make sure it is done very, very publicly so everyone in the country knows about it. Do this 10 times and the problem starts to go away.
I think this comes from both a lack of understanding of the legal system and a general contempt for authoritarian institutions. The right way to fix this is probably a lot of education, ethics and as a last resort making an example of people. Unfortunately, we are doing none of the above.
Problem is, you would lose 50-70% of the existing computer market. Apple tried switching CPUs and in both cases needed massive hand-holding of customers, emulation and dedicated support from vendors. Sorry, but the Windows market doesn't have the same level of vendor committment.
Sure, lots of major software vendors (think Symantec) would help out their customers and would have a new chip architecture supported from day 1. And if there were no other vendors out there, it would be a pain-free transiation. The problem is for Windows that people are running software that was created in 1990. And the vendor may not exist any longer. Microsoft has seen recently how much fun it is to tell these people they have to find a different solution because the world has moved on. It didn't go well.
It would not go well changing hardware architectures, either. What we have is an investment in the billions of dollars in the x86 instruction set. While the source might be somewhat portable (ha!), the object code in user hands is not. Emulation and virtualization could help some, but it isn't the final answer and would not help everyone out. Just as it wasn't the solution for Apple either time.
No, but all of these things you mention are patentable.
Specifically, I believe the issue is with the patents that Intel holds on the newer parts of the instruction set. The original 8086 instruction set patents have expired.
I believe if you created a web page documenting how to disable pollution control devices you may be in violation of a number of federal laws. Serious jail time may result.
I believe posting instructions on removing a catalytic converter has been tried and resulted in consequences for the distributor of said information.
My guess is that the state of California has their own penalties in addition to federal ones.
You see, the thinking goes that after 100 years of television and oh, 500 or 600 years of novels that there simply are no more "original" ideas. Everything that follows from now on will simply be a reashing of what has come before. With being truely original "impossible", mashups are all that is left.
Of course, the next thing you have to buy into with this is that the same applies to patents, trademarks and copyright. If there can no longer be anything truely original, what is the point of a patent? Right?
I'd say people that believe this are just creatively stunted. They aren't going to create anything anyway but really need a good excuse why they can't seem to. And this is the perfect excuse if we all buy into it.
What I want to know is what happens to a truely creative person in this environment? Someone with an original idea. It would seem clear that they have an unfair advantage that cannot be allowed to continue. They need to be hobbled in some way to prevent them from being more creative than their fellow men. Or simply imprisoned. Or killed.
An obvious solution to the "I want" problem. You see, I would really like the world to work the way you think it should. I should be paid, by someone, so that I don't have to charge people for software. Making people pay is like, you know, oppressing them and we shouldn't have to oppress people.
The problem is, I have people oppressing me all around me. The mortgage on the house, the grocery store, the gas station, and endlessly on and on. This is so wrong. A cowardly solution is to say that when people stop oppressing me that I will stop oppressing others. It would be nice to be able to free myself from all this oppression and just live in a nice park somewhere and have people give me food. I have tried to convince my employees of this unilateral solution but they remain unconvinced.
This brings us back to the real problem. People like you want stuff and they do not have infinite amounts of money to pay off people that want to oppress them. One solution is to just take things and sidestep the oppression. This works well for digital things, but less so with food, clothes and other material items. In fact, it works so well fomr digital items that today I can't imagine anyone paying for digital music - it is all there for the taking. For free. And we have been steadily convincing people since around 1980 that if you can take it that there is nothing wrong with just taking it. Most of the people I meet under 30 have been convinced.
So what happens when people don't pay for digital goods? Well, until someone can tell me how to pay employees without getting any money, I am going to keep oppressing... er, I mean charging, people. It would be nice if the government would just give everyone enough money so they didn't need to do anything except consume, smoke pot and drink beer. Mr. Obama is certainly pushing things in that direction and I salute him for it.
(a) Nobody is really prepared to "launch on warning" any longer. The concept was active in the 50s and 60s but has since fallen out of favor. It would clearly lead to a disaster and everyone in the West knows it, which is why nobody is running their military that way any more. So, until there is actually a first strike, nothing is getting launched. At that point if the first strike is overwhelming, we in the US are counting on a sub-launched reprisal.
(b) MAD only works if the opponent fears destruction of their cities and way of life. Most of the current crop of realistic opponents for the US don't think this way. So MAD doesn't work. If, in order to achieve their goals it was necessary to sacrifice 80% of their population that is a decision they could make. Western governments, including the former USSR, don't think this way so MAD was a realistic deterrent. Not any longer.
I don't see any problem with the leaders of North Korea or Iran deciding that 80% of their population had to be sacrificed. I think that is a decision they could easily make. So MAD doesn't work for them at all.
Let's say that I run a company and we are absolutely committed to never, ever hiring an "ex-shop steward". Let's assume there isn't a service on the Internet where I can look up people to determine if they were ever involved in union leadership.
What am I to do? Well, I could just hire people in an uninformed way and hope for the best. Right?
Wrong. I would (obviously) do whatever it takes to make sure that prospective employees are not and never have been union-affiliated. Sure, this might result in some false positives. Who cares? The mission of a hiring manager is to weed out undesirable canadidates as quickly as possible. That means looking for any reason to not hire someone, without ever talking to them.
If you get 100 resumes to look through for a single position, what else do you do? So one more criteria gets added for "union-friendly" and it is just one more filter that resumes have to pass through. And interviews. And background checks. And reference checks.
Does anyone reslly believe that some secret database makes that much difference? I can assure you, if anything it would cut down the false positives. So which would you rather have, getting excluded from a job becaose of something real or getting excluded because of something that just-might-be? Because 99% of the time, you're getting excluded anyway. See, if I get 100 resumes for one position 99 of them must, by definition, be excluded. It is just a matter of how and for what reason.
Wouldn't this be better done by a government agency that was responsible for compensating all creative people? Then there could be a set price for each type of work, such as a song or a novel. As long as the work could be classified as a "song" rather than say a ballad, aria, rap, or chant. There would be a lot of work in determining the classification and the compensation for each clssification, so much so that it would require a huge bureaucracy to deveop these on an annual basis.
This would then ensure that all creative works were compensated fairly.
Sorry, George. This is the Internet age now. If it isn't nailed down nothing in the world will keep people from stealing it. And then making use of it however they see fit. This is part of the new bargain we are striking with people everywhere - creativity is now a "mashup" or a "remix" of older works because it is impossible to create anything new - it has all been done before. Therefore, there are no legal rights to anything.
It also means that if I can take something, I can sell it. If you are stupid enough to buy it from me rather than just taking your own free copy, you are the loser. Trying to involve the courts simply means that you don't understand the Internet. Of course, the courts don't either.
Problem with education is that it isn't really the system's fault. Since the Apollo program ended in the 70s it hasn't been "cool" to try to do well in school, be motivated towards science and math, etc. The education system has for the most part recognized this and is trying to stay relevent to the current generation. Too bad, really.
You see, in their striving for "relevence" they pretty much accepted the idea that the education system is a waste of time for most of the people in it. OK, not every child is going to go on to a PhD in math. But what they have done is decided that if they push too hard the kids will drop out at 12 instead of 16. And there is no support from the parents, who now have grown up with a system with minimal requirements.
So do the schools start down a path of stricter requirements and just locking the kids into such a program? Hard to do with the culture frowns on intellectual achievement and decides it is OK if most people opt out of "brain work". China has a culture of high intellectual expectations among the middle class and parents strongly discipline children so they understand what is expected of them. Are Chinese teenagers as much "fun" as American teenagers? I doubt it. So it goes.
Why would someone make that up? Simple - to damage the business. Or, just to be obnoxious. Or to carry out an agenda to remove all donut shops because they are inheriently unhealthy and people need to eat better.
There are no limits as to why someone would do that. The fact that they can and face no consequences for it means they can. This means it will happen.
Further, a huge problem is there are people that will believe one typed-in biased review over three friends. The fact that it is posted anonymously does not mean to everyone that it is meaningless and could easily be some misguided fool. Far too much credibility is given to silly posts on the Internet, but until that changes the truth is that you can destroy a business with anonymous comments.
Be happy with a few windmills and a few KWH of solar. No large power plants are being built in the US. No coal fired plants, no nuclear, nothing.
Population in the US is increasing. Demand for electricity has to remain level, because there are no new major plants being built.
What does that mean? Well, probably it means we are screwed. How long does it take to build a state-of-the-art coal fired plant? At least five years. Figure 10 for nuclear. Better hope the electric demand is level for the next five years or so. If Mr. Obama has his way, better hope it stays level for at least the next 13.
I don't think that is going to happen. We are screwed.
As a Kindle 2 owner, I can say it is completely unusable by blind people. There is no way you could ever use the keyboard without seeing the keys. And the navigation switches on the sides are not discernable by touch.
Now, the TTS on it is very, very good. Much better than whatever you tried. So good that there is in fact something to worry about.
The Kindle is virtually unusable by blind people. There is a little tiny keyboard with no tactile feedback and nothing raised to indicate where you are on it. The buttons on the sides are very difficult to discern by touch.
You wouldn't buy a Kindle if you were blind, you would get something else that would probably be free. And all the books would be free also.
This has nothing to do with people with real disabilities. And the TTS reading is very good with the male voice. The female isn't as good but. I would say it is 75% of the quality of a "professionally made" audio book from Audible that I bought and downloaded. This has (had?) all of the earmarks of utterly wiping out a chunk of the audio book market, completely and overnight.
I can see Kindle recordings being passed around as audio books. Somewhat time consuming to make, but very easy and it is difficult to sue the Kindle.
As a recently cancelled subscriber to Audible and a new Kindle owner, I can say that their TTS is 75% to 80% of the quality of the Audible books that I downloaded.
So, yes, it has improved enough to pretty much put audio books out of business. Completely.
First off, most of the text in a EULA is some defense against liability claims, or at least letting the user know that they are disclaiming any liability. Have you heard of large companies suing each other because of defective products? Absolutely. Does it go anywhere? No, but it is very expensive.
I don't want to get sued because a user believes their computer was destroyed by a software bug. Sure, more technically oriented folks "know" that it is difficult, if not impossible to cause physical damage to a computer through software errors. However, lawyers aren't always that clever and anyone can sue anyone for anything. A well-crafted EULA can get things like this nonsense thrown out of court the first day.
The second problem is simple - we in the Western world have been training a new crop of humans that copyright law is meaningless and is unenforcible. So people download all the music they can. And all the movies, books, software and whatever. If it is physically possible to violate copyright law, it will be done and will be done on a massive scale. Saying "please don't" is the same as saying we would like it if you didn't but have no options if you do. True? I suppose, but shouting it out doesn't help.
We are clearly at the cusp with copyright law. We can choose to allow it to continue to be meaningless and train schoolchildren that it is OK to copy software, download music in violation of copyright, whatever. The rewards to the end users will be considerable, as would the utter waste of time some folks are attempting by suing offenders under the current scheme. Of course, there is no compensation for "creative" people other than a good hearty pat on the back. Hard to pay rent with that, so most people will be forced to be "creative" in their spare time, if any.
The other option is we stop pretending we live in a universe where everything digital should be free. Sure, it costs nothing to copy it. It costs almost nothing to print a book, so why are they so expensive? It costs almost nothing to make many things today, so why are we paying lots of money for them? Could it be the cost of copying isn't the only cost?
Either we stand by the idea of copyright or we discard it - and this decision needs to be made with full disclosure. And we start enforcing international agreements to keep pirate, counterfit and unlicensed products out of Western countries.
Yes, but let's assume there are 100,000 people involved in the paper industry that would be out of work. If those 100,000 people were moved to an island somewhere, Antartica or a really deep coal mine we would then save that load on the environment.
We need to be thinking in more self-sustaining terms. Making do with less, starting with less people.
Legalize all drugs, especially crack cocaine and heroin. Stop all government support of addicts - if you are addicted you are on your own. We will breed the addict gene out of the race before long.
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So some credit card numbers were stolen. So what? Nobody, except the merchants accepting them, lose anything from this. Certainly not the card holders. It is a minor hassle to get the cards reissued - and maybe the credit card company can actually take some action and do this in advance.
Is this "identity theft"? No. It certainly isn't IDENTITY THEFT!!! It is credit card fraud and it happens every day. I regularly get fraudulent charges on credit cards - using the card creates this risk. There are lots and lots of merchants out there both online and brick-and-mortar that think nothing of selling credit card numbers to thieves. It is obvious, because "stolen" credit card numbers are so incredibly common.
Sorry, but I don't buy it.
People today, virtually everyone I know, is convinced that "if it is on the Internet, it should be free". This goes for e-books, software, games, music and movies. The more clever people are good at digging out places to get stuff for free. The less clever take links and CDs from the more clever.
How are you going to convince people that they shouldn't have free stuff anymore? I don't think it can be done. Certainly not while the schools are pirating software in the classrooms.
Any comparison to iTunes is a joke. Apple needed a way to get content onto iPods for the less clever. They also wanted a way for it to be legal, citing any number of businesses founded on illegal processes that have been sued out of existance. So iTunes is legal. But it doesn't produce any revenue - between credit card processing costs and what they are paying to the copyright owners, they end up with maybe $0.10 a sale, if that. I suspect $0.01 or $0.00 is fine with them as well. Because iTunes exists to fill up purchased iPod devices and without it people (the less clever majority) wouldn't buy iPods.
So it is somewhat of a necessary evil. Certainly they are going to reduce costs (like eliminating an extra DRM step) whenever possible. But this is not a model to be emulated by anyone without an serious alterior motive. Saying Warner Brothes should take a hint from Apple is pretty much saying it is OK to lose money on every transaction as long as you make up for it in volume.
Electric power in the US is perhaps a year or two from being rationed.
When was the last time a large-scale generating plant was constructed? Oh, maybe 1978. I don't believe there has been anything other than small "peaker plants" built. Why? Becuase of the environmental regulations.
Unfortunately, the US has not gosten the message that electric power growth must stop. So we are now on the edge of running out of capacity. In a year or two you can expect to see major changes in electrical power pricing, distribution and controls. And probably some new laws. Things like it being illegal to use a home air conditioner outside of specific hours.
If we started today to build a nuclear power plant it would take 10 years to bring on line. If we started today to build a coal fired power plant it would take five years. In five years the cities will likely be dark at night and most people on the East Coast will have manditory shut-offs so California can turn on air conditioners in the evening hours.
Different business model? What? iTunes doesn't really make money, for anyone except maybe the credit card companies, so that is pointless. Giving stuff away with unrelated products is just the same - giving stuff away. Music is already free so how does that change anything?
No, Pepsi isn't going to allow music to be bundled with their products unless they got something for it. I suppose the music industry could pay Pepsi for the privilege and free advertising they would get, but this doesn't get them any revenue. Pepsi, or anybody else, isn't going to co-market music without getting something in return. So there isn't a subsidy there to be had.
That's the main problem with it. There just isn't a "bsiness model" that involves giving stuff away for free unless it benefits someone. And since recorded music has pretty much zero value to anyone capable of downloading it (excluding clueless 30-something iPod buyers), you can't convince anyone that music is somehow valuable and will add value to their web site, consumer product, or really anything else.
Well, mostly because that is the deal.
Let's see, if you took a job that paid you $3 an hour but as part of the contract you got $1 every time someone started up one of your applications you might do it. So you find out later that you are getting about 1/4th of the "application start" money you might be just a tiny bit upset, right?
Should writers have different contracts that do not offer payment for future use of their materials? Maybe. But the fact is, the contract that was negotiated included such things. And it is industry convention for television to not pay everything up front but to pay it out over time.
Sure, it might be simpler for everyone if they were just paid one lump sum. It would make my life a little simpler if instead of being paid for years and years I just got one big payment as well. Unfortunately, the one big payment would probably be a lot less.
Which is why people negotiate contracts where they get royalties over time.
There are problems with jurors doing their own collecting of evidence, which is what you are talking about. You can't limit it to "fact checking" - once you open the door to independent activity materials that may be related are going to be brought to the juror's attention.
So what is wrong with "having all the facts"? Well, the system we have is based on the idea that there are facts that are not relevent but may be distracting. Heck, these facts might be relevent but their distraction far outweighs their value as facts. This starts to get very combative in the legal system. The other problem is nobody is ever going to be able to say conclusively that "all" the facts have been gathered. There is no certanity, just "beyond a reasonable doubt".
There is also the problem of one juror "discovering" something and perhaps not telling all the other jurors. Maybe they just tell a few. What does this do to the idea of a fair trial?
So how to jurors deal with this in a Internet-connected environment? Well, I would think for starters that Internet connected devices need to be confiscated to prevent this sort of thing. Clearly, juror instructions aren't working and you have people that decide they just know better. How do you deal with jurors that decide to do their own investigating at home? Kick them off the jury and hold them in contempt of court. And make sure it is done very, very publicly so everyone in the country knows about it. Do this 10 times and the problem starts to go away.
I think this comes from both a lack of understanding of the legal system and a general contempt for authoritarian institutions. The right way to fix this is probably a lot of education, ethics and as a last resort making an example of people. Unfortunately, we are doing none of the above.
Problem is, you would lose 50-70% of the existing computer market. Apple tried switching CPUs and in both cases needed massive hand-holding of customers, emulation and dedicated support from vendors. Sorry, but the Windows market doesn't have the same level of vendor committment.
Sure, lots of major software vendors (think Symantec) would help out their customers and would have a new chip architecture supported from day 1. And if there were no other vendors out there, it would be a pain-free transiation. The problem is for Windows that people are running software that was created in 1990. And the vendor may not exist any longer. Microsoft has seen recently how much fun it is to tell these people they have to find a different solution because the world has moved on. It didn't go well.
It would not go well changing hardware architectures, either. What we have is an investment in the billions of dollars in the x86 instruction set. While the source might be somewhat portable (ha!), the object code in user hands is not. Emulation and virtualization could help some, but it isn't the final answer and would not help everyone out. Just as it wasn't the solution for Apple either time.
No, but all of these things you mention are patentable.
Specifically, I believe the issue is with the patents that Intel holds on the newer parts of the instruction set. The original 8086 instruction set patents have expired.
I believe if you created a web page documenting how to disable pollution control devices you may be in violation of a number of federal laws. Serious jail time may result.
I believe posting instructions on removing a catalytic converter has been tried and resulted in consequences for the distributor of said information.
My guess is that the state of California has their own penalties in addition to federal ones.
Terribly pedestrian..,
You see, the thinking goes that after 100 years of television and oh, 500 or 600 years of novels that there simply are no more "original" ideas. Everything that follows from now on will simply be a reashing of what has come before. With being truely original "impossible", mashups are all that is left.
Of course, the next thing you have to buy into with this is that the same applies to patents, trademarks and copyright. If there can no longer be anything truely original, what is the point of a patent? Right?
I'd say people that believe this are just creatively stunted. They aren't going to create anything anyway but really need a good excuse why they can't seem to. And this is the perfect excuse if we all buy into it.
What I want to know is what happens to a truely creative person in this environment? Someone with an original idea. It would seem clear that they have an unfair advantage that cannot be allowed to continue. They need to be hobbled in some way to prevent them from being more creative than their fellow men. Or simply imprisoned. Or killed.
In most EU countries there is a 17% VAT tax on electronic downloads. Has been that way for a couple of years.
Why shouldn't it be taxed in the US?
An obvious solution to the "I want" problem. You see, I would really like the world to work the way you think it should. I should be paid, by someone, so that I don't have to charge people for software. Making people pay is like, you know, oppressing them and we shouldn't have to oppress people.
The problem is, I have people oppressing me all around me. The mortgage on the house, the grocery store, the gas station, and endlessly on and on. This is so wrong. A cowardly solution is to say that when people stop oppressing me that I will stop oppressing others. It would be nice to be able to free myself from all this oppression and just live in a nice park somewhere and have people give me food. I have tried to convince my employees of this unilateral solution but they remain unconvinced.
This brings us back to the real problem. People like you want stuff and they do not have infinite amounts of money to pay off people that want to oppress them. One solution is to just take things and sidestep the oppression. This works well for digital things, but less so with food, clothes and other material items. In fact, it works so well fomr digital items that today I can't imagine anyone paying for digital music - it is all there for the taking. For free. And we have been steadily convincing people since around 1980 that if you can take it that there is nothing wrong with just taking it. Most of the people I meet under 30 have been convinced.
So what happens when people don't pay for digital goods? Well, until someone can tell me how to pay employees without getting any money, I am going to keep oppressing ... er, I mean charging, people. It would be nice if the government would just give everyone enough money so they didn't need to do anything except consume, smoke pot and drink beer. Mr. Obama is certainly pushing things in that direction and I salute him for it.
Two problems with your nice posting....
(a) Nobody is really prepared to "launch on warning" any longer. The concept was active in the 50s and 60s but has since fallen out of favor. It would clearly lead to a disaster and everyone in the West knows it, which is why nobody is running their military that way any more. So, until there is actually a first strike, nothing is getting launched. At that point if the first strike is overwhelming, we in the US are counting on a sub-launched reprisal.
(b) MAD only works if the opponent fears destruction of their cities and way of life. Most of the current crop of realistic opponents for the US don't think this way. So MAD doesn't work. If, in order to achieve their goals it was necessary to sacrifice 80% of their population that is a decision they could make. Western governments, including the former USSR, don't think this way so MAD was a realistic deterrent. Not any longer.
I don't see any problem with the leaders of North Korea or Iran deciding that 80% of their population had to be sacrificed. I think that is a decision they could easily make. So MAD doesn't work for them at all.
Let's say that I run a company and we are absolutely committed to never, ever hiring an "ex-shop steward". Let's assume there isn't a service on the Internet where I can look up people to determine if they were ever involved in union leadership.
What am I to do? Well, I could just hire people in an uninformed way and hope for the best. Right?
Wrong. I would (obviously) do whatever it takes to make sure that prospective employees are not and never have been union-affiliated. Sure, this might result in some false positives. Who cares? The mission of a hiring manager is to weed out undesirable canadidates as quickly as possible. That means looking for any reason to not hire someone, without ever talking to them.
If you get 100 resumes to look through for a single position, what else do you do? So one more criteria gets added for "union-friendly" and it is just one more filter that resumes have to pass through. And interviews. And background checks. And reference checks.
Does anyone reslly believe that some secret database makes that much difference? I can assure you, if anything it would cut down the false positives. So which would you rather have, getting excluded from a job becaose of something real or getting excluded because of something that just-might-be? Because 99% of the time, you're getting excluded anyway. See, if I get 100 resumes for one position 99 of them must, by definition, be excluded. It is just a matter of how and for what reason.
Wouldn't this be better done by a government agency that was responsible for compensating all creative people? Then there could be a set price for each type of work, such as a song or a novel. As long as the work could be classified as a "song" rather than say a ballad, aria, rap, or chant. There would be a lot of work in determining the classification and the compensation for each clssification, so much so that it would require a huge bureaucracy to deveop these on an annual basis.
This would then ensure that all creative works were compensated fairly.
Sorry, George. This is the Internet age now. If it isn't nailed down nothing in the world will keep people from stealing it. And then making use of it however they see fit. This is part of the new bargain we are striking with people everywhere - creativity is now a "mashup" or a "remix" of older works because it is impossible to create anything new - it has all been done before. Therefore, there are no legal rights to anything.
It also means that if I can take something, I can sell it. If you are stupid enough to buy it from me rather than just taking your own free copy, you are the loser. Trying to involve the courts simply means that you don't understand the Internet. Of course, the courts don't either.
Problem with education is that it isn't really the system's fault. Since the Apollo program ended in the 70s it hasn't been "cool" to try to do well in school, be motivated towards science and math, etc. The education system has for the most part recognized this and is trying to stay relevent to the current generation. Too bad, really.
You see, in their striving for "relevence" they pretty much accepted the idea that the education system is a waste of time for most of the people in it. OK, not every child is going to go on to a PhD in math. But what they have done is decided that if they push too hard the kids will drop out at 12 instead of 16. And there is no support from the parents, who now have grown up with a system with minimal requirements.
So do the schools start down a path of stricter requirements and just locking the kids into such a program? Hard to do with the culture frowns on intellectual achievement and decides it is OK if most people opt out of "brain work". China has a culture of high intellectual expectations among the middle class and parents strongly discipline children so they understand what is expected of them. Are Chinese teenagers as much "fun" as American teenagers? I doubt it. So it goes.
Why would someone make that up? Simple - to damage the business. Or, just to be obnoxious. Or to carry out an agenda to remove all donut shops because they are inheriently unhealthy and people need to eat better.
There are no limits as to why someone would do that. The fact that they can and face no consequences for it means they can. This means it will happen.
Further, a huge problem is there are people that will believe one typed-in biased review over three friends. The fact that it is posted anonymously does not mean to everyone that it is meaningless and could easily be some misguided fool. Far too much credibility is given to silly posts on the Internet, but until that changes the truth is that you can destroy a business with anonymous comments.
Be happy with a few windmills and a few KWH of solar. No large power plants are being built in the US. No coal fired plants, no nuclear, nothing.
Population in the US is increasing. Demand for electricity has to remain level, because there are no new major plants being built.
What does that mean? Well, probably it means we are screwed. How long does it take to build a state-of-the-art coal fired plant? At least five years. Figure 10 for nuclear. Better hope the electric demand is level for the next five years or so. If Mr. Obama has his way, better hope it stays level for at least the next 13.
I don't think that is going to happen. We are screwed.
As a Kindle 2 owner, I can say it is completely unusable by blind people. There is no way you could ever use the keyboard without seeing the keys. And the navigation switches on the sides are not discernable by touch.
Now, the TTS on it is very, very good. Much better than whatever you tried. So good that there is in fact something to worry about.
The Kindle is virtually unusable by blind people. There is a little tiny keyboard with no tactile feedback and nothing raised to indicate where you are on it. The buttons on the sides are very difficult to discern by touch.
You wouldn't buy a Kindle if you were blind, you would get something else that would probably be free. And all the books would be free also.
This has nothing to do with people with real disabilities. And the TTS reading is very good with the male voice. The female isn't as good but. I would say it is 75% of the quality of a "professionally made" audio book from Audible that I bought and downloaded. This has (had?) all of the earmarks of utterly wiping out a chunk of the audio book market, completely and overnight.
I can see Kindle recordings being passed around as audio books. Somewhat time consuming to make, but very easy and it is difficult to sue the Kindle.
As a recently cancelled subscriber to Audible and a new Kindle owner, I can say that their TTS is 75% to 80% of the quality of the Audible books that I downloaded.
So, yes, it has improved enough to pretty much put audio books out of business. Completely.
First off, most of the text in a EULA is some defense against liability claims, or at least letting the user know that they are disclaiming any liability. Have you heard of large companies suing each other because of defective products? Absolutely. Does it go anywhere? No, but it is very expensive.
I don't want to get sued because a user believes their computer was destroyed by a software bug. Sure, more technically oriented folks "know" that it is difficult, if not impossible to cause physical damage to a computer through software errors. However, lawyers aren't always that clever and anyone can sue anyone for anything. A well-crafted EULA can get things like this nonsense thrown out of court the first day.
The second problem is simple - we in the Western world have been training a new crop of humans that copyright law is meaningless and is unenforcible. So people download all the music they can. And all the movies, books, software and whatever. If it is physically possible to violate copyright law, it will be done and will be done on a massive scale. Saying "please don't" is the same as saying we would like it if you didn't but have no options if you do. True? I suppose, but shouting it out doesn't help.
We are clearly at the cusp with copyright law. We can choose to allow it to continue to be meaningless and train schoolchildren that it is OK to copy software, download music in violation of copyright, whatever. The rewards to the end users will be considerable, as would the utter waste of time some folks are attempting by suing offenders under the current scheme. Of course, there is no compensation for "creative" people other than a good hearty pat on the back. Hard to pay rent with that, so most people will be forced to be "creative" in their spare time, if any.
The other option is we stop pretending we live in a universe where everything digital should be free. Sure, it costs nothing to copy it. It costs almost nothing to print a book, so why are they so expensive? It costs almost nothing to make many things today, so why are we paying lots of money for them? Could it be the cost of copying isn't the only cost?
Either we stand by the idea of copyright or we discard it - and this decision needs to be made with full disclosure. And we start enforcing international agreements to keep pirate, counterfit and unlicensed products out of Western countries.
Yes, but let's assume there are 100,000 people involved in the paper industry that would be out of work. If those 100,000 people were moved to an island somewhere, Antartica or a really deep coal mine we would then save that load on the environment.
We need to be thinking in more self-sustaining terms. Making do with less, starting with less people.
Legalize all drugs, especially crack cocaine and heroin. Stop all government support of addicts - if you are addicted you are on your own. We will breed the addict gene out of the race before long.