There are web sites that are specifically known as gay hook-up sites. These web sites were not envisioned as having this purpose originally, but that is what happened. Most of these sites closed down because of this. The messages are generally really raunchy, explicit and vulgar.
I don't blame Microsoft for explicitly not wanting any part of this on XBOX live. This has nothing whatsoever to do with someone being gay and maybe subject to some kind of ostracism by other gamers. In fact, I would believe this is the exact opposite.
The problem is such that once you have this kind of community all you can do is shut down - there is no way to get rid of the problem.
If it can be taken, copied, borrowed, whatever - it will be. It is not physically or technically possible to prevent this from happening.
That means you are left with civil court remedies, which generally take too long to get anywhere and the penalties may be wholly out of line with the benefits. Basically, you can drive your competitors out of a billion-dollary business and get fined a million dollars. Sounds like a great business plan.
Alternatively, civil court remedies can be wholly out of line the other way, where the benefit to the offender is $1000 and they have to pay a $250,000 fine.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
Utter confusion is the first thing. Few average users are going to be able to handle the idea that there is any point to multiple browsers on one computer. Either one works and the other one does not, or there is no point. If one is broken, then it shouldn't be there.
Next, if MS, Dell or any other large OEM is going to be including FireFox, Opera, Safari and others on a computer they are going to require some pretty stringent requirements on release planning and QA. If these aren't present in the organization supporting them the OEM will introduce these. This means there will be a "official" release and a Dell release. That is going to help, isn't it?
Since the HTML rendering engine and a good part of the browser is used for displaying lots of other stuff besides web pages, this is going to make for some interesting times. Some HTML that displays differently between the "source" and the actual rendering.
Excuse me, but how the heck else do you do deal with the student? She said "No" and remained uncooperative. The teachers have no power to do anything else - they can't touch the student and the "school safety officer" is just an extension of the teachers - no authority and no power. They can't detain the student or physically restrain her.
The other alternative is to just let it continue - there are no other options available to schools today.
The problem is what do you do when the student says "No"? In 1950 Midwest the student would be dragged by the ear down to the principal's office. Today the teacher is afraid of interfering with the important growth and development of their charges - things for which they are rated and their job depends. Any sort of physical contact with the student is pretty much forbidden.
The student ends up with pretty much all the power, up until the police are called. Which is why you call the police, because they are the only ones that can effectively deal with the student just saying "No". For other, ruder things.
I don't know if OEMs cannot ship a laptop with XP or if no OEM wants to offer anything except a downgrade option. I suspect Microsoft has strongly encouraged (financially) that nobody sells computers with XP as the original, default operating system. They may be able to subdivide the classification of "computers" in such a way as to have OEM builders put XP on some machines of a particular class. Maybe. Or, the netbook OEMs are able to put XP on the machines because they are paying more for it - the same price that any other OEM could use XP for.
I do not believe anyone (especially the plantiff here) is going to get a court to enforce "I want what I want" no matter what. The essential question is going to be what is the material difference to the customer that causes harm? Is Vista harmful and XP not? Not in the eyes of the court. I don't think this is going to go anywhere at all.
I don't think anyone is actually required to buy XP and for most retail purposes, XP is simply unavailable.
Try to buy the old version of just about anything else. Once the manufacturer drops it, it is gone. There is no more. Try to buy a computer to run OS/2 Warp. Just try. It is gone. The proper attitude is XP is just as gone as OS/2. For some reason, Microsoft got talked into making it partially available through certain OEM channels but not retail. I'd say it is a problem with Lenovo rather than Microsoft because Microsoft isn't selling the product at all. To anyone. At any price.
If you are going to buy pre-made computers with an operating system, what do you expect? The market for computers without an operating system is zero, so nobody sells them that way. You can, however, put your own together for often somewhat less than the cost of the pre-made computer.
Then you get to choose how to put an operating system on it. Usually, for most people, it is very expensive to do this because you end up paying full retail price for the operating system. Whereas the pre-made computer folks are selling you a finished product with an operating system they paid $50 for instead of $200 like you can.
However, if you have a site license, are paying for MSDN, Action Pack, Empower or any one of a myriad of other programs, you pay zero for the operating system on your nice put-together computer.
Now how many people can actually do this? Oh, maybe 1%. Do you think you are going to get anywhere selling a product that only 1% of the people in the US can actually use?
Wrong. Reverse directories were published and could be found in just about any library. Police stations had them on hand. Phone companies offered services whereby the name and address would be read off to the caller for any phone number, if the number was listed.
Police generally do not need such a warrant. They can get one, everyone knows they can get one, so the actual necessity of getting one is usually waived.
This is pretty much identical to the situation of a cop standing on your doorstep wanting to search your home. They have probably cause, you know they have probable cause, they know they have probable cause. The cop says if you want them to get a warrant it will just be a hassle and if you put them through that extra step it will certainly happen and everyone will just stand around and wait for it.
What do you do? Make them get the warrant? Most businesses are not going to do that. They fork over the information on request with the assumption that the need to maintain good relations with law enforcement and being an obstrctionist isn't the way to make friends.
99% of the time it is irrelevent because they could have easily gotten a warrant within 24 hours.
I see nothing about killing people. What is necessary - for the good of all on the planet - is that everyone is indeed vaccinated. Period. Everyone.
Adults? If the adult has come from some uncivilized place where vaccination is not mandatory they need to be vaccinated before entering a country where everyone is vaccinated. Again, period, no options, no choices. That means there is a nurse at the border. This is indeed the way it was in the early 1900s.
Children? If it is necessary to have someone visit the home to insure the child is vaccinated, this needs to be done. If the parent objects, they can be removed to a different room. There is no need for anything violent or involving any use of force. It is simply necessary that everyone, adults and children be vaccinated. Period.
Let's assume for a moment that you strenously disagree with this policy. Fine, you are free to remove yourself from anywhere this policy is in force. There are plenty of places like that in the world today. What you are not free to do is intermix in any way with people that by the nature of living in a "civilized" society can assume that you and your children are vaccinated when you are not. You are not the one being protected - society at large is protecting itself from you. That is why there are no options in this matter.
Does this mean I am in favor of vaccinations being administered by whatever is necessary to administer them? Absolutely, whatever is required and no further. Just as it is necessary to restrain someone that has come into contact with a rabid animal until they are treated it is necessary to vaccinate all people. There is no difference and it is for exactly the same reasons.
Taxes? Where would that enter into this? I would say that all vaccinations should be free as they are required. Certainly in cases where the recipient can clearly afford to pay some compensation might be in order. But the point is that the vaccination is required by society for its well being. And there are no options. Not wanting to pay is irrelevent becuase it is not being done for the recipient's benefit but for society at large.
And that pretty much wraps up any argument you might have against it.
There is only one way. People must be vaccinated. Period. I'd say if people aren't going to take their children to a doctor (where it will be done) what is needed is home visits. Certainly by entry into school proof of such vaccinations must be provided. And home visits for those that don't comply or decide to exclusively home school their children.
You seem to be arguing from a point of view that there is some kind of "freedom" involved. There isn't. The alternatives mean not just death and disease for the unvaccinated child but potentially the rest of the country. And given the ease of global travel today, the rest of the planet. There are no alternatives.
So does this mean a doctor comes to your house and some burly nurse holds the child down while it is given? Yes, if that is necessary to get the job done. Because you see, there is no other way. This is like a dam with just "a small leak". It is inevitable that once you allow some to be unvaccinated that the number will grow. And the results with the population density we have today are too terrible to contemplate.
So there is no option of "choice" or "freedom". There is getting vaccinated. And I believe the only way with msome parents is to enforce the needs of the population at large on the parents and children. Obviously you don't need to jail the parents - that is silly. But what is needed is clearly to use whatever is necessary to get the children vaccinated.
And there should be no options for persons entering the country, either. This was the policy quite a number of years ago in most of the civilized places in the world - you brought evidence of your vaccinations (and recent updates) with you for Customs. Failure to do so resulted in either getting some shots or entry denied. Again, for very good reasons.
The people that speak of "freedom" haven't experienced anything like a pandemic. Read up on 1918 in the US. Read up on polio in the 1940s. And consider that we have nearly twice the population density in most places that we had then. There are no options, there is no choice and there is no freedom in this matter.
I was listening to a radio program on Sunday. Someone with the title "Doctor" was saying that what would help this person was a homeopathic remedy and that it was "science based". Later he said that colon clensing products were not very effective in some cases.
With a doctor like this, it is a clear sign that we have entered a period where science education in the US is pointless because people do not understand how to think. So if you think this decision will somehow deter any of the fruitless lawsuits or somehow encourage mothers to get their children vaccinated, you are wrong.
Music is free for the taking and there is nothing that can stop that. If you don't understand that, you are missing one of the essential points of the 21st Century.
Movies are just about as free. Nobody is going to pay unless they believe the wrapper in the DVD case is work $20. Or they are worried about missing out on all those ads for previously upcoming movies. Download as much as you want, there is no way the tap can be turned off now.
Software? Well, count how many pirated copies of Photoshop and Office there are and then come back and tell mw how it is viable to build a new consumer-oriented software product today. If there are not specific platform prohibitions against "sharing", it is going to be "shared". In the 1980s it was assumed that an Apple product would sell two copies, one on the East coast and one on the West coast. We are pretty much there today except for a relatively few niche products. Some companies try to avoid the avalanche of pirated software and a few get burned by the BSA. But at home sales are pretty low and usage pretty high.
Block BitTorrent? Sure. It will take a week to have a completely new protocol that will sweep across the planet which will once again make everything freely downloadable.
It is a matter of ethics, responsibility and morality. We have taught an entire generation that on the Internet there is no need for quaint concepts like these and we are seeing the results. Things like teenage girls being tricked into assisting with their own rape. Things like lossing in the millions due to scams and cons. Sorry, but this is indeed the result. Actions on the Internet do not have consequences. That is taught to people online every day - I think it is working.
If you aren't using Linux and only free and open software (no proprietary BLOBs), then your resources are already being used without your knowledge and consent.
If you install something without understanding what the code is doing, you do not have sufficient knowledge to understand what "consent" means. You are just a user and a user that is going with the crowd and doing whatever you are told.
With Windows and most Linux software you are given a black box and told is does good things. You get to experience some of the good things and think it is wonderful. Your entire experience is at the hands of others. You might try to install lots of stuff to ensure that your computer is not being used against you. Sadly, you will never know the truth. Anything could be hiding some stealthy information and/or resource stealing code and you and the rest of the users like you will never know.
OK, so you have a firewall3 that is supposed to block outbound connections. How do you know it works? How do you know it works for all types of connections? Have you specifically authorized each and every single outbound connection? No, you probably thought some software was "trustworthy" and assumed it would be OK. How do you know your trust is not being betrayed?
If you aren't reading the code, and I do mean all of it, you don't know. You can either be a user or you can be a god. It is up to you. It is, after all, your computer. All it takes is a lot of hard work and a lot of knowledge.
Now it might be interesting if by some government mandate that all security cameras (homes, businesses, ATMs, etc.) were banned in Cambridge. As any recordings made by any of these cameras can be subject to subpoena, does it really matter if the city itself is sprinkling a few more around?
So unless they want to mandate that all of these cameras have to be removed, it really doesn't mean all that much. In a busy downtown area you are likely to be visible in three or four cameras at the same time from different businesses. Add a street-facing ATM machine or two and we have quite a few cameras. All with recordings able to be seized by law enforcement at any time.
Do I believe the city can successfully pass an ordinance against privately operated cameras? No, I don't think they have a chance of getting that to stick. The material is too important for insurance purposes already.
So what does this really matter? Probably makes less than a 1% difference.
Sex with farm animals? Oh, you mean like the the Mesa deputy fire chief case a while back. Anyone that thinks this is not "believable" is missing a huge chunk of current events. Of course it is believable!
If this is not upheld, I don't see any possibility for audio books in the future. You might be able to sell very specialized such books by having either famous personalities or the author doing the reading but that would be about it.
Think about it. If Amazon has the right to sell a book in a format which can be played as an audio book, then they can directly make an "audio book" and sell that. Period. The two are identical. Putting he audio information on a cassette or CD is the same as enabling audio playback through a device which does it. I don't see any possible way to separate the two legally. Thus ends the possibility for audio books, as there is no revenue from them any longer.
Any argument about first sale and control of the product after the sale is silly. Because you buy a book you do not have the right to distribute in any form that book. Including reading it into a recorder and distributing that recording. Under very special conditions you have the right to read the book aloud while others are listening and these have been spelled out for a long time in copyright law. It has nothing to do with making a copy or "public performance" and evertyhing to do with making a derivatve work. The fact that it is my voice and inflection adding to the original content is what makes it a derivative work. Yes, I have added to the content, but as I have no right to the original content, my rights to the derivative content are very limited.
We can either accept the idea of limited rights of derivative works or we can pretty much give up on paying people for individual sales of their creative works. Lots of people seem to think that there are no more original ideas and that everything from now on must, by definition, be a "derivative work" of some original creator. I don't think this is valid and I would say people making that argument lack creativity. There are lots of truely creative people in the world, but not everyone is. To allow them to leech off the works of others because of their lack of creativity isn't right and it isn't a good idea.
One problem in the US is that checks (or cheques) aren't submitted back to the originating bank any longer - they are scanned and just the image is sent to the bank electronically. As far as what account and so on, this is handled completely separately from the image of the check.
Really, the piece of paper is meaningless today in the US. Everything is done electronically.
A lot of these are commissioned studies and reflect the viewpoint of the person or group that is asking for it.
Based on this, I would expect to find reports in this list that argue positions such as the native inferority of African Americans, the desirability of the extermination of Jews and/or Muslims, etc.
Would this sort of thing be beneficial to release? The US government has plenty of documents lying around like this and it would do nobody any good. Even the knowledge that someone was paid to think this way or that about a particular topic can be extremely damaging.
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
You do know that no converter box is made by a US company? This will do wonders for all those Chinese folks, except they are probably made in a mostly-automated factory with 20 employees. It might do some good for Walmart and Best Buy selling them, but not all that much.
We gave up on consumer electronics a long, long time ago. I think the last TV plant in the US closed in the 1980s sometime. And I believe it was in Chicago. All the familiar brands (RCA, Zenith, etc.) are now owned by companies in China and Korea.
If we were making the TVs here it might. Sadly, this stimulates the Chinese economy and they don't buy American products.
Why anyone thought it would be a good idea to dump all our labor onto the Chinese in hopes they would buy American software, movies and music just utterly astonishes me. They won't buy American rice, they will buy American cars that are made in China by Chinese. But we are still left with a 100:1 trade deficit. And that isn't going to change.
Wrong. A good broadband implementation might create jobs. Spending a lot of money delivering broadband to people that aren't interested and are not going to pay for it will not create jobs.
Worse yet, spending a lot of money on environmental impact statements of running new fibre optic lines to suburban and rural areas will not create a lot of new jobs. Spending a lot of money on setting up a fair and equitable bidding process for contracting out the building of new fibre infrastructure for suburban and rural areas will not create jobs.
No, the only thing that will actually create jobs is building network centers and actually delivering broadband service to the people that (a) want it and (b) can pay for it. And most of those jobs are going to be people reading a support script from India to deal with all those new customers.
Unfortunately, what we are likely to get is a lot of spending on environmental impact studies that indicate digging up the sides of roads will have minimal impact of local flora and fauna, a lot of spending on setting up a bidding process for contractors to bid on digging the trench, etc. When it comes right down to it, you are then going to have one new network center with 30,000 customers fed from a single OC3 (48Mb) link. And 90% of the infrastructure in the new network center will be built around the idea that the total aggregate throughput will never, ever exceed 100Gb. Because building out more would cost 10x or 100x as much - and still, most of the people without broadband aren't going to pay for it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is people are easily faced with a clear choice: quality at a price or free crap. History proves free crap wins every time, hands down.
Audio books or free TTS on Kindle and other devices. Period.
Pre-made audio books have to die if there is no revenue and there will be very little with this sort of thing.
Next question: Can I record the output of Windows or a Kindle and sell that to people to play in their cars? If copyright means nothing, why not?
There are web sites that are specifically known as gay hook-up sites. These web sites were not envisioned as having this purpose originally, but that is what happened. Most of these sites closed down because of this. The messages are generally really raunchy, explicit and vulgar.
I don't blame Microsoft for explicitly not wanting any part of this on XBOX live. This has nothing whatsoever to do with someone being gay and maybe subject to some kind of ostracism by other gamers. In fact, I would believe this is the exact opposite.
The problem is such that once you have this kind of community all you can do is shut down - there is no way to get rid of the problem.
If it can be taken, copied, borrowed, whatever - it will be. It is not physically or technically possible to prevent this from happening.
That means you are left with civil court remedies, which generally take too long to get anywhere and the penalties may be wholly out of line with the benefits. Basically, you can drive your competitors out of a billion-dollary business and get fined a million dollars. Sounds like a great business plan.
Alternatively, civil court remedies can be wholly out of line the other way, where the benefit to the offender is $1000 and they have to pay a $250,000 fine.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
Plagiarism? Sure. But people buy term papers on the Internet all the time, so don't expect they will feel any shame about this sort of activity either.
Utter confusion is the first thing. Few average users are going to be able to handle the idea that there is any point to multiple browsers on one computer. Either one works and the other one does not, or there is no point. If one is broken, then it shouldn't be there.
Next, if MS, Dell or any other large OEM is going to be including FireFox, Opera, Safari and others on a computer they are going to require some pretty stringent requirements on release planning and QA. If these aren't present in the organization supporting them the OEM will introduce these. This means there will be a "official" release and a Dell release. That is going to help, isn't it?
Since the HTML rendering engine and a good part of the browser is used for displaying lots of other stuff besides web pages, this is going to make for some interesting times. Some HTML that displays differently between the "source" and the actual rendering.
Certainly going to be interesting.
Excuse me, but how the heck else do you do deal with the student? She said "No" and remained uncooperative. The teachers have no power to do anything else - they can't touch the student and the "school safety officer" is just an extension of the teachers - no authority and no power. They can't detain the student or physically restrain her.
The other alternative is to just let it continue - there are no other options available to schools today.
The problem is what do you do when the student says "No"? In 1950 Midwest the student would be dragged by the ear down to the principal's office. Today the teacher is afraid of interfering with the important growth and development of their charges - things for which they are rated and their job depends. Any sort of physical contact with the student is pretty much forbidden.
The student ends up with pretty much all the power, up until the police are called. Which is why you call the police, because they are the only ones that can effectively deal with the student just saying "No". For other, ruder things.
I don't know if OEMs cannot ship a laptop with XP or if no OEM wants to offer anything except a downgrade option. I suspect Microsoft has strongly encouraged (financially) that nobody sells computers with XP as the original, default operating system. They may be able to subdivide the classification of "computers" in such a way as to have OEM builders put XP on some machines of a particular class. Maybe. Or, the netbook OEMs are able to put XP on the machines because they are paying more for it - the same price that any other OEM could use XP for.
I do not believe anyone (especially the plantiff here) is going to get a court to enforce "I want what I want" no matter what. The essential question is going to be what is the material difference to the customer that causes harm? Is Vista harmful and XP not? Not in the eyes of the court. I don't think this is going to go anywhere at all.
I don't think anyone is actually required to buy XP and for most retail purposes, XP is simply unavailable.
Try to buy the old version of just about anything else. Once the manufacturer drops it, it is gone. There is no more. Try to buy a computer to run OS/2 Warp. Just try. It is gone. The proper attitude is XP is just as gone as OS/2. For some reason, Microsoft got talked into making it partially available through certain OEM channels but not retail. I'd say it is a problem with Lenovo rather than Microsoft because Microsoft isn't selling the product at all. To anyone. At any price.
If you are going to buy pre-made computers with an operating system, what do you expect? The market for computers without an operating system is zero, so nobody sells them that way. You can, however, put your own together for often somewhat less than the cost of the pre-made computer.
Then you get to choose how to put an operating system on it. Usually, for most people, it is very expensive to do this because you end up paying full retail price for the operating system. Whereas the pre-made computer folks are selling you a finished product with an operating system they paid $50 for instead of $200 like you can.
However, if you have a site license, are paying for MSDN, Action Pack, Empower or any one of a myriad of other programs, you pay zero for the operating system on your nice put-together computer.
Now how many people can actually do this? Oh, maybe 1%. Do you think you are going to get anywhere selling a product that only 1% of the people in the US can actually use?
Wrong. Reverse directories were published and could be found in just about any library. Police stations had them on hand. Phone companies offered services whereby the name and address would be read off to the caller for any phone number, if the number was listed.
Police generally do not need such a warrant. They can get one, everyone knows they can get one, so the actual necessity of getting one is usually waived.
This is pretty much identical to the situation of a cop standing on your doorstep wanting to search your home. They have probably cause, you know they have probable cause, they know they have probable cause. The cop says if you want them to get a warrant it will just be a hassle and if you put them through that extra step it will certainly happen and everyone will just stand around and wait for it.
What do you do? Make them get the warrant? Most businesses are not going to do that. They fork over the information on request with the assumption that the need to maintain good relations with law enforcement and being an obstrctionist isn't the way to make friends.
99% of the time it is irrelevent because they could have easily gotten a warrant within 24 hours.
I see nothing about killing people. What is necessary - for the good of all on the planet - is that everyone is indeed vaccinated. Period. Everyone.
Adults? If the adult has come from some uncivilized place where vaccination is not mandatory they need to be vaccinated before entering a country where everyone is vaccinated. Again, period, no options, no choices. That means there is a nurse at the border. This is indeed the way it was in the early 1900s.
Children? If it is necessary to have someone visit the home to insure the child is vaccinated, this needs to be done. If the parent objects, they can be removed to a different room. There is no need for anything violent or involving any use of force. It is simply necessary that everyone, adults and children be vaccinated. Period.
Let's assume for a moment that you strenously disagree with this policy. Fine, you are free to remove yourself from anywhere this policy is in force. There are plenty of places like that in the world today. What you are not free to do is intermix in any way with people that by the nature of living in a "civilized" society can assume that you and your children are vaccinated when you are not. You are not the one being protected - society at large is protecting itself from you. That is why there are no options in this matter.
Does this mean I am in favor of vaccinations being administered by whatever is necessary to administer them? Absolutely, whatever is required and no further. Just as it is necessary to restrain someone that has come into contact with a rabid animal until they are treated it is necessary to vaccinate all people. There is no difference and it is for exactly the same reasons.
Taxes? Where would that enter into this? I would say that all vaccinations should be free as they are required. Certainly in cases where the recipient can clearly afford to pay some compensation might be in order. But the point is that the vaccination is required by society for its well being. And there are no options. Not wanting to pay is irrelevent becuase it is not being done for the recipient's benefit but for society at large.
And that pretty much wraps up any argument you might have against it.
There is only one way. People must be vaccinated. Period. I'd say if people aren't going to take their children to a doctor (where it will be done) what is needed is home visits. Certainly by entry into school proof of such vaccinations must be provided. And home visits for those that don't comply or decide to exclusively home school their children.
You seem to be arguing from a point of view that there is some kind of "freedom" involved. There isn't. The alternatives mean not just death and disease for the unvaccinated child but potentially the rest of the country. And given the ease of global travel today, the rest of the planet. There are no alternatives.
So does this mean a doctor comes to your house and some burly nurse holds the child down while it is given? Yes, if that is necessary to get the job done. Because you see, there is no other way. This is like a dam with just "a small leak". It is inevitable that once you allow some to be unvaccinated that the number will grow. And the results with the population density we have today are too terrible to contemplate.
So there is no option of "choice" or "freedom". There is getting vaccinated. And I believe the only way with msome parents is to enforce the needs of the population at large on the parents and children. Obviously you don't need to jail the parents - that is silly. But what is needed is clearly to use whatever is necessary to get the children vaccinated.
And there should be no options for persons entering the country, either. This was the policy quite a number of years ago in most of the civilized places in the world - you brought evidence of your vaccinations (and recent updates) with you for Customs. Failure to do so resulted in either getting some shots or entry denied. Again, for very good reasons.
The people that speak of "freedom" haven't experienced anything like a pandemic. Read up on 1918 in the US. Read up on polio in the 1940s. And consider that we have nearly twice the population density in most places that we had then. There are no options, there is no choice and there is no freedom in this matter.
I was listening to a radio program on Sunday. Someone with the title "Doctor" was saying that what would help this person was a homeopathic remedy and that it was "science based". Later he said that colon clensing products were not very effective in some cases.
With a doctor like this, it is a clear sign that we have entered a period where science education in the US is pointless because people do not understand how to think. So if you think this decision will somehow deter any of the fruitless lawsuits or somehow encourage mothers to get their children vaccinated, you are wrong.
Music is free for the taking and there is nothing that can stop that. If you don't understand that, you are missing one of the essential points of the 21st Century.
Movies are just about as free. Nobody is going to pay unless they believe the wrapper in the DVD case is work $20. Or they are worried about missing out on all those ads for previously upcoming movies. Download as much as you want, there is no way the tap can be turned off now.
Software? Well, count how many pirated copies of Photoshop and Office there are and then come back and tell mw how it is viable to build a new consumer-oriented software product today. If there are not specific platform prohibitions against "sharing", it is going to be "shared". In the 1980s it was assumed that an Apple product would sell two copies, one on the East coast and one on the West coast. We are pretty much there today except for a relatively few niche products. Some companies try to avoid the avalanche of pirated software and a few get burned by the BSA. But at home sales are pretty low and usage pretty high.
Block BitTorrent? Sure. It will take a week to have a completely new protocol that will sweep across the planet which will once again make everything freely downloadable.
It is a matter of ethics, responsibility and morality. We have taught an entire generation that on the Internet there is no need for quaint concepts like these and we are seeing the results. Things like teenage girls being tricked into assisting with their own rape. Things like lossing in the millions due to scams and cons. Sorry, but this is indeed the result. Actions on the Internet do not have consequences. That is taught to people online every day - I think it is working.
If you aren't using Linux and only free and open software (no proprietary BLOBs), then your resources are already being used without your knowledge and consent.
If you install something without understanding what the code is doing, you do not have sufficient knowledge to understand what "consent" means. You are just a user and a user that is going with the crowd and doing whatever you are told.
With Windows and most Linux software you are given a black box and told is does good things. You get to experience some of the good things and think it is wonderful. Your entire experience is at the hands of others. You might try to install lots of stuff to ensure that your computer is not being used against you. Sadly, you will never know the truth. Anything could be hiding some stealthy information and/or resource stealing code and you and the rest of the users like you will never know.
OK, so you have a firewall3 that is supposed to block outbound connections. How do you know it works? How do you know it works for all types of connections? Have you specifically authorized each and every single outbound connection? No, you probably thought some software was "trustworthy" and assumed it would be OK. How do you know your trust is not being betrayed?
If you aren't reading the code, and I do mean all of it, you don't know. You can either be a user or you can be a god. It is up to you. It is, after all, your computer. All it takes is a lot of hard work and a lot of knowledge.
Now it might be interesting if by some government mandate that all security cameras (homes, businesses, ATMs, etc.) were banned in Cambridge. As any recordings made by any of these cameras can be subject to subpoena, does it really matter if the city itself is sprinkling a few more around?
So unless they want to mandate that all of these cameras have to be removed, it really doesn't mean all that much. In a busy downtown area you are likely to be visible in three or four cameras at the same time from different businesses. Add a street-facing ATM machine or two and we have quite a few cameras. All with recordings able to be seized by law enforcement at any time.
Do I believe the city can successfully pass an ordinance against privately operated cameras? No, I don't think they have a chance of getting that to stick. The material is too important for insurance purposes already.
So what does this really matter? Probably makes less than a 1% difference.
Sex with farm animals? Oh, you mean like the the Mesa deputy fire chief case a while back. Anyone that thinks this is not "believable" is missing a huge chunk of current events. Of course it is believable!
If this is not upheld, I don't see any possibility for audio books in the future. You might be able to sell very specialized such books by having either famous personalities or the author doing the reading but that would be about it.
Think about it. If Amazon has the right to sell a book in a format which can be played as an audio book, then they can directly make an "audio book" and sell that. Period. The two are identical. Putting he audio information on a cassette or CD is the same as enabling audio playback through a device which does it. I don't see any possible way to separate the two legally. Thus ends the possibility for audio books, as there is no revenue from them any longer.
Any argument about first sale and control of the product after the sale is silly. Because you buy a book you do not have the right to distribute in any form that book. Including reading it into a recorder and distributing that recording. Under very special conditions you have the right to read the book aloud while others are listening and these have been spelled out for a long time in copyright law. It has nothing to do with making a copy or "public performance" and evertyhing to do with making a derivatve work. The fact that it is my voice and inflection adding to the original content is what makes it a derivative work. Yes, I have added to the content, but as I have no right to the original content, my rights to the derivative content are very limited.
We can either accept the idea of limited rights of derivative works or we can pretty much give up on paying people for individual sales of their creative works. Lots of people seem to think that there are no more original ideas and that everything from now on must, by definition, be a "derivative work" of some original creator. I don't think this is valid and I would say people making that argument lack creativity. There are lots of truely creative people in the world, but not everyone is. To allow them to leech off the works of others because of their lack of creativity isn't right and it isn't a good idea.
One problem in the US is that checks (or cheques) aren't submitted back to the originating bank any longer - they are scanned and just the image is sent to the bank electronically. As far as what account and so on, this is handled completely separately from the image of the check.
Really, the piece of paper is meaningless today in the US. Everything is done electronically.
A lot of these are commissioned studies and reflect the viewpoint of the person or group that is asking for it.
Based on this, I would expect to find reports in this list that argue positions such as the native inferority of African Americans, the desirability of the extermination of Jews and/or Muslims, etc.
Would this sort of thing be beneficial to release? The US government has plenty of documents lying around like this and it would do nobody any good. Even the knowledge that someone was paid to think this way or that about a particular topic can be extremely damaging.
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
You do know that no converter box is made by a US company? This will do wonders for all those Chinese folks, except they are probably made in a mostly-automated factory with 20 employees. It might do some good for Walmart and Best Buy selling them, but not all that much.
We gave up on consumer electronics a long, long time ago. I think the last TV plant in the US closed in the 1980s sometime. And I believe it was in Chicago. All the familiar brands (RCA, Zenith, etc.) are now owned by companies in China and Korea.
If we were making the TVs here it might. Sadly, this stimulates the Chinese economy and they don't buy American products.
Why anyone thought it would be a good idea to dump all our labor onto the Chinese in hopes they would buy American software, movies and music just utterly astonishes me. They won't buy American rice, they will buy American cars that are made in China by Chinese. But we are still left with a 100:1 trade deficit. And that isn't going to change.
Wrong. A good broadband implementation might create jobs. Spending a lot of money delivering broadband to people that aren't interested and are not going to pay for it will not create jobs.
Worse yet, spending a lot of money on environmental impact statements of running new fibre optic lines to suburban and rural areas will not create a lot of new jobs. Spending a lot of money on setting up a fair and equitable bidding process for contracting out the building of new fibre infrastructure for suburban and rural areas will not create jobs.
No, the only thing that will actually create jobs is building network centers and actually delivering broadband service to the people that (a) want it and (b) can pay for it. And most of those jobs are going to be people reading a support script from India to deal with all those new customers.
Unfortunately, what we are likely to get is a lot of spending on environmental impact studies that indicate digging up the sides of roads will have minimal impact of local flora and fauna, a lot of spending on setting up a bidding process for contractors to bid on digging the trench, etc. When it comes right down to it, you are then going to have one new network center with 30,000 customers fed from a single OC3 (48Mb) link. And 90% of the infrastructure in the new network center will be built around the idea that the total aggregate throughput will never, ever exceed 100Gb. Because building out more would cost 10x or 100x as much - and still, most of the people without broadband aren't going to pay for it anyway.