The first problem is what exactly is meant by "sustainable"? The weakest definition is something like "not using fossil fuels" or some such nonsense. Why is this nonsense? Because unless you want to define the lifespan of the humann race as your own, it is meaningless.
Today, we have "sustainability" problems because of multiple factors and fossil fuels is only a small part. There is the matter of recycling wastes into raw materials, something which happens through natural processes. The only problem is today there are far, far more wastes being produced than can possibly be processed before the raw materials are needed. The only way out of this trap is to either obtain resources off Earth or to reduce the resource consumption to the level where natural recycling can occur. The latter means a big population reduction, on the order of 95% or so.
Well, that isn't going to happen. That pretty much means that use of off-planet resources is an absolute necessity for the human race to survive for more than another couple of generations. Would that be "sustainable" enough?
No. We need to look at a longer term. Where are things going to be in 1,000 years? How about 10,000? We are poised at a cusp where we must make some hard decisions. If we choose to fix problems on Earth first, pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like eliminating poverty, we are going to run out of resources and will to obtain off-planet resources. This effectively dooms us to the first alternative mentioned above of population reduction. Somewhere around 1850 was the last time that Earth recycled wastes through natural processes at a rate equal to or better than the rate the resources were being consumed. What the population back then? Think about that for a while.
Sustainable means it is good until the Sun expires. Currently the only thing that comes close to this is nuclear power with a breeder reactor fuel cycle. This is permanent. Solar power satellites with an orbital and lunar industrial base would be pretty much permanent. Virtually every other proprosal either falls far short of current power requirements (which are just going to grow with the population) or doesn't last for even 100 years.
Personally, I think we can hope for a solution that nobody has dreamed of yet and plan for a big population reduction. We have maybe 10 years before the decision is made for us no matter what we want. After that we will likely be struggling to keep the lights on and not likely doing a real good job of it.
So you want to encourage open-source adoption? OK, a laudable goal. The two things that you are going to have to deal with from an IT perspective are support and version control.
Who, exactly do departments deal with for support? Will the IT department be the front-line resource and then farm things out as needed? Or are individual departments going to be going it alone? More to the point, is the experience if departments such that they would prefer to "go it alone" today? If the departments are your customers and they have been treatd well, then the probably will expect the IT department to be providing first-line support for them - as well you should.
One big reason for providing first-line support is version control. While some open-source packages have well-defined versions (Ubuntu, for example), many others do not. There are patches here and there and different versions being distributed from different web sites. If you are assuming interoperability of software being used by different departments it is going to be up to someone to ensure that this is actually possible. Having departments select their own versions and installing them will not insure this at all. If it then falls upon you to sort this out at some later date, you are going to wish dearly that you had been proactive about it. Yes, this may mean being ratuer draconian about individual users downloading whatever they want, installing it and counting on IT to pick up the pieces.
I have seen this happen, even within a community of software developers.
There is a substantial manpower requirement for this, and it needs to be in IT, not in individual departments. You are proposing something that will save money, but some of that immediate savings in software licenses needs to be shifted over to an IT function for support and version control. Ignoring this is not a viable option because you will end up with everyone being unhappy and upper management putting an end to this "experiment". No matter how happy they were with the initial savings.
Sure, overall costs can be lower. But some of that apparent savings needs to be funneled back into keeping things sane and managed. Things like Office Update and Microsoft Office web sites for templates, add-ons and tools do this for Office users and it all just works. You will be replacing this with IT resources at a great savings but you can't ignore things like updates, version control and support issues.
The issue is privacy. Since they are "borrowing" user's bandwidth this exposes other users potentially personally identifying information to the first user. Now you can track other user's activities (within a fairly narrow scope) by using information that can be gathered on your own computer.
I suspect they had to put this in because of this potential. Would it fly if it was clearly exposed what was happening in EU countries? I doubt it. How about if they said:
By using the CNN service you will be receiving information about other user's online activities as they will be receiving information about your activities. This is an essential part of the service that cannot be disabled. By accepting this agreement you acknowledge that no part of your activities on the CNN web site or other related services may be private, secret, anonymous or in any way protected from every other user of the CNN web site or other related services.
First off, if anyone was really worried about losing marketshare or advertising dollars, it is way, way too late to do anything about that now.
If you recall, they already sold off the spectrum. Sure, they can force new services to delay implementation for a while - but THEY SOLD OFF THE SPECTRUM. Analog television broadcasting is dead, and unless they are going to pay Verizon back their $700 million or so, it is really dead and really soon.
Sure, there is a substantial chance that a lot of people when faced with the decision to go to cable or satellite will chose "none of the above" because their rural location is underserved by DTV signals. Gosh, someone should have thought of that before. Guess what? I'd say they did and decided it was a small enough portion of the overall viewers that it doesn't matter what they do. If you aren't in a major metro area, chances are you are looking at either a much bigger antenna, cable or satellite. Or YouTube. I think you are going to see a lot of people outside of metro areas just turning the TV off and turning it on to play DVDs.
I don't see how any four-month "delay" that is optional is going to make much difference. This might have been a sap to a few stations trying to say they weren't ready, still. But there is no way this is going to help your average viewer - they are either ready or they are forgotten.
And the stupid coupon program isn't coming back either.
Priced properly? The only acceptable price for many people is zero. If it is available for free, they will not pay. Period.
Without force of law, company policy or something else I believe most people will choose "free" every time. Some people are guilt-ridden and would "feel bad" if they used pirated software. Counting on this for sustaining a company is a bad idea.
Counting on some kind of abstract morality to keep people from pirating software is a joke. The biggest problem is that these guys can get prosecuted in a US court and the parent company made to pay fines.
The problem with Vonage - and all current VOIP implementations - is they fail the basic requirements that the wired telecom providers are required to support. Things like 48 hours without electric power. 911 that actually works with emergency services. And literally a hundred other requirements, all things that are really good for people that need basic voice connectivity.
Sure, VOIP implementations are cheap. But in comparison to what? I can use Yahoo Messenger for free. How is Vonage cheaper than that? Neither Vonage or Yahoo are paying for the infrastructure to connect me to the network. The $30-a-month POTS service is doing exactly that. What would Vonage charge if they had to pay to supply their customers with network connectivity?
Sorry, but this has a lot more to do with tariffs and regulations than patents. Sadly, it takes some serious wakeup calls before people understand the difference between the POTS network in the US and "phone service" supplied by the likes of Vonage. A 24 hour power outage might be a good start. Having a 2 year old dial 911 and not be able to recite the address might be another.
You do understand that very nearly all interesting software patents can be upheld then? All it takes is the building of the "One-Click Interpreter" device that connects as a network front-end before a server which then actually implements the "Amazon One-Click". This can be done without any software, programming or anything else other than just hardwired interconnections between logic devices.
Things like this can be built today and could have been built in the 1970s, although it would have been larger and more difficult. Understand that the revenue differential between having something unique and being a me-too can be considerable. Doesn't matter if you were first to market if you can't protect that edge. Like the atom bomb, once Russia knew that it could be done half the R&D effort was out of the way. Then there is reverse engineering the original solution to duplicate it.
Before software was patentable, trade secret protection was used exclusively. And reverse engineering was a real problem that was addressed and solved - by preventing it. Legally, technically and every other way conceivable.
Today, it might just be simpler for situations where the revenue justifies it to implement algorithms in hardware, without any firmware, if that is what is required for protection. I'm not sure this is the answer people here are hoping for, but it is certainly a realistic solution to the problem for businesses.
I'm scared if Iran as well. I'm not sure it is the "theocracy" part that is the root of my concern. I'd say it is more like the fact their leaders would think nothing of nuking Israel even if it meant the deaths of 3/4ths of their populations.
MAD doesn't apply when the leaders don't give a crap about the people under them. Our entire strategy for keeping leaders with nuclear weapons in check is the utter certainty that their countries would suffer terrible retribution. I don't believe Iran is affected by this at all. I am equally unsure that North Korea's leaders care about the civilian population. It isn't like in either case there is a chance the civilian population is going to rise up in outrage and displace their government.
The fact that the religion behind the Iranian leaders preaches "death to infidels" isn't exactly comforting but without nuclear weapons they don't stand a chance of implementing that plan. And they seem to know it.
Problem is, the UN and other international bodies have been long on the side of reducing the influence of first-world nations in the name of ending discrimination against poorer, third-world nations. Hence things like putting Iran on the Human Rights Commission.
Should any international law come in to play, what you would likely see is the US would opt out of it. EU might go along and all of the Third World would sign on. I'd guess Russia would also not sign on. This pretty much makes a mockery of any such law or treaty.
Today, because of the basic lawlessness of the Internet I can openly advertise for a hitman. Buy illegal drugs and use them to drug unsuspecting partygoers. Use stolen credit card numbers to buy services and some goods online. And there isn't a thing anyone can do to stop me, unless I basically call up the local police and beg to be arrested. Which is what most of the "Internet criminals" have ended up doing if they were caught.
I am wondering exactly how hard it is to purchase handguns and have them imported... I suspect it is a lot easier than places that have attempted to ban them would like.
If your music is free, then I can redistribute it all I want. Likely as not you will never find out. If you do, you lack sufficient resources to do anything about it.
This is the model of the record company of the future - distributing music that they were able to obtain for free. No artist to pay, very low production costs and cheap distribution channels. For example, selling a CD to Walmart for $1.50 and they sell is for $5. They make lots of money on it and are happy to stock it, I make lots of money because the unit cost is $0.50.
If you believe people are going to respect YOUR copyright when nobody is respecting THEIRS you are sadly mistaken. The business models that can evolve in an environment where copyright is meaningless will astonish you.
Well, one answer to piracy is to address a segment of the market that doesn't believe in piracy or faces consequences should piracy be discovered. Law enforcement, for example.
Products specifically targeted at law enforcement aren't going to be pirated all that much.
Do not forget that every country has its own regulations. What is permitted in a movie in the US can often be utterly forbidden in Japan or France.
Just try showing a US-made movie about the skinhead movement in Germany. Just try.
Airline movies are probably the most heavily edited because they need to be able to be shown in nearly every market. So they have to comply with all of the restrictions in all locations all at once.
Failure to adhere to all of the necessary regulations gets you tossed out of most countries and your imports seized at the border.
Advertising, and especially Google, is why 50% or more of all search results are bogus pages that just contain ads today. And you are suggesting we need more advertising?
Lots and lots of them. Quite a few without any tuner at all, but unless you were spending plenty for a high-end LCD or plasma TV you quite likely got an ordinary cable-ready tuner that doesn't work with digital signals. Until around 2006 that is.
Yup, lots of TVs going to be trashed soon. I wonder if it is cheap way to pick up LCD monitors for computers from all these that don't have digital OTA capabilities?
Maybe. If you live in a big city. I have a vacation home in the northern part of lower Michigan and we are going from 4.5 stations to 1. Maybe if the broadcast power of some of the others is increased on the 17th things might change, but I doubt it. We are already in a "fringe area" and have a rooftop antenna with about a 7 foot mast and a rotator. Yes, we tried a converter box and that is how we know all about the one station that works.
We already have plans to move to cable, because it is likely the only way to get more than one station.
Anyone that believes TV stations can reverse course in less than three weeks and not unplug analog broadcasting is just kidding themselves. This is way, way too late. It might be OK for the station that is run by two guys and a girlfriend. Anyone, even out in rural Michigan, has made enough plans already that it is going to be very tough to cancel them and hold on to analog broadcast.
But it will look nice when Congress can say "they tried".
The problem with this idea is that right now DSL service is pretty much operated at a loss by companies that can make it up in other ways. Hence the requirement for phone service with the DSL line and so on and so forth. There is also the matter of market penetration. Without dominance in a geographic area the money isn't there to support customers.
So, raising rates to make the service pay for itself isn't going to happen. Raising rates would diminish market share. You have now cut out any reason why an independent company would want to offer Internet service without bundling it with other, revenue-producing services.
Quality of service? Ha. The Internet has trained consumers to look at price first and everything else second. Big numbers might help, but comparing "DSL Service: for $14.99 a month with "Fiber Service" at $150 a month isn't going to fly, anywhere, when average-Joe consumers are concerned.
So we have Internet service bundled with cable service and bundled with telephone service. In both cases the limited revenue from Internet service are made up for by fatter revenues from the rest of the bundle.
OK, so you have the government come in an "nationalize" all local telephone and data services. Just take the wires. Now we have a new government agency tasked with maintaining the wires at taxpayer expense. So who would sign up to supply service on these wires? Since you eliminated the bulk of the revenue, the costs would be quite high for just data service - probably right around the business connection rates rather than the heavily discounted market-share grabbing residential rate. Look for DSL at $100-150 month. Who would sign up for it? Almost nobody. Now the government would have to provide service as well because nobody else wants to with the new terms of the deal.
No, I don't see any way to get data services unbundled now.
Having been to Japan, I did see a "virtual girlfriend" game there. Only it was advertised as also being a "virtual daughter" game as well. And this was on 3m high posters in a store, so it wasn't exactly an underground sort of thing.
Bad idea. Would you approve of an openly pro-NAMBLA campaign in the US? One that would include lots of photographs of NAMBlA-sactioned activities showing how decent and wonderful it can be for your son to develop a sexual relationship with an older man? OK, thought not.
How about a church sect that uses the Bible to "prove" the superiority of whites over blacks and wants to use cable public access time to preach their message? With their charitable works getting lots of mainstream coverage about all the good they are doing for the (white) community. Maybe a charity fundraiser where they auction off some black people.
A little closer to what is going on in Egypt would be if new political party came out with an clearly religious platform that included banning all religions that did not include homosexuals. With the message that by not including homosexuals these other religons were "bad for the country and must be eradicated". Burn down a few Catholic churches and Islamic mosques as a symbol of the "new order". Start a movement to teach the benefits of homosexual relations (no pregnancy!!!) in high schools. Start a movement to criminalize anything that could be called "homophobic" with mandatory psych hospitalizations until the offender was "cured".
The latter isn't that far off of what the moderate leadership in Egypt is fighting against. If they lose to the extremists, they lose the country to the 12th century. Non-Muslims will be tortured, expelled or killed. And so-called moderate Muslims will quickly find that they can either go along to get along or join the non-believers.
I would go further and say that while the people and leaders of Israel are not above reproach, it is difficult to criticize the actions of the Israelis when faced with an enemy on their doorstep that openly calls for their extermination. If you had a neigobor you didn't like you could learn to get along, but when your neighbor starts every day by putting up a sign calling for your death it is difficult to imagine how you can "just get along".
Regardless of leadership, the people on the street in Gaza and West Bank have been exposed to an unending stream of propaganda since 1948. Why are rocket launchers in schools, hospitals and mosques? Because the average person on the street allows it. What do they really believe? Who knows? What is important is by allowing war and violence in their midst they are dooming their children to a short, brutal life.
I would say the Hamas leader is correct - violence and warfare isn't going to get the Palestinian people anywhere but if this course is not pursued the people will find a leader that will pursue it. For 60 years they have been giving guns and bombs to children and teaching them to kill Jews. I cannot imagine a solution that does not involve supervision and containment.
Stem cells are genotype specific. That means in order for stem cells to be available for YOU that YOUR stem cells (or at least those that are genetically identical to yours) must be available.
For most of the population, any reliance on embryonic stem cells requires a cloned embryo be produced.
This pretty much opens the door to human cloning, so Bill Gates can live on through a series of clones. There is no way this technology could ever be contained to just producing stem cells and make sure the embryo was destroyed after harvesting of cells.
Look, it might seem overreaching but the problem in the US is that virtually zero generating capacity has been built since the 1970s. The environmental impact studies, the endless public debates, the studies of how downstream heat might affect the enfironment and so on have pretty much meant that nobody is willing to build new large generating plants.
We have built lots of "peaker" plants designed to get us through periods where loads are very high in small areas. This doesn't solve the problem.
The problem is we're just out of capacity in the US. This is going to mean in a short period of time that walking into a room and turning on a light is going to be a completely foreign experience to the next generation. Too many people, too much consumption and zero build-out for environmental reasons. The end of this is that electric power is something the rich have and the poor do not. The impact on computers in the home will be significant, as wile the impact to data-oriented businesses. It may indeed be cheaper and more reliable to employ someone to use an abacus by hand than to pay for the electricity to operate even a small calculator.
Sounds wonderful for employment in the future. Lots of low-cost labor once again instead of technology eliminating all low-pay jobs.
I don't believe it is possible to conserve our way out of this mess. When it reaches the point where California turns off the lights people will probably wake up. Unfortunately, even without all the environmental studies it would take at least five years to build a modern large generating plant. We don't have five years.
EU might be different. They might be able to "conserve" their way to the future. I doubt it, but it might make then feel good about it for a while. In the US no amount of switching to CFL bulbs while running the air conditioner is going to help. Turning off the TV isn't going to help. Buying "green" appliances isn't going to help. Turning off everything and living with candles will soon be the norm.
Notice that it is rather strange that the computers shown in this commercial are Macs. Since the product is for Windows not OS X I wonder what they are doing?
Why a Mac for the commercial? Did they think nobody would notice?
I would be, if it was true. It isn't. Autoplay, something completely different that was introduced in XP is there for USB devices but not Autorun. Autoplay requires user interaction to do anything, which is why the whole folder icon fooling people is a big deal.
If I get you to click on a link that says you get $1000 for clicking on the link but it really installs software (requiring more clicks to approve) and you do it anyway - and keep confirming it, over and over, I'd say it is your own fault.
Microsoft introduced this when the only autorun capable device was a CD-ROM player and the only CD-ROMs where those manufactured. The idea of a "malware CD" was preposterous.
Any CD-based game for Windows was required to make use of Autorun/Autoplay in order to receive the Windows logo. It was designed to make inserting the disc with zero or minimal install operate like putting a cartridge or CD into a game console.
I am not familiar with any autorun capability on USB drives, but they have Autoplay. Autoplay requires the user's cooperation to do anything.
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The first problem is what exactly is meant by "sustainable"? The weakest definition is something like "not using fossil fuels" or some such nonsense. Why is this nonsense? Because unless you want to define the lifespan of the humann race as your own, it is meaningless.
Today, we have "sustainability" problems because of multiple factors and fossil fuels is only a small part. There is the matter of recycling wastes into raw materials, something which happens through natural processes. The only problem is today there are far, far more wastes being produced than can possibly be processed before the raw materials are needed. The only way out of this trap is to either obtain resources off Earth or to reduce the resource consumption to the level where natural recycling can occur. The latter means a big population reduction, on the order of 95% or so.
Well, that isn't going to happen. That pretty much means that use of off-planet resources is an absolute necessity for the human race to survive for more than another couple of generations. Would that be "sustainable" enough?
No. We need to look at a longer term. Where are things going to be in 1,000 years? How about 10,000? We are poised at a cusp where we must make some hard decisions. If we choose to fix problems on Earth first, pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like eliminating poverty, we are going to run out of resources and will to obtain off-planet resources. This effectively dooms us to the first alternative mentioned above of population reduction. Somewhere around 1850 was the last time that Earth recycled wastes through natural processes at a rate equal to or better than the rate the resources were being consumed. What the population back then? Think about that for a while.
Sustainable means it is good until the Sun expires. Currently the only thing that comes close to this is nuclear power with a breeder reactor fuel cycle. This is permanent. Solar power satellites with an orbital and lunar industrial base would be pretty much permanent. Virtually every other proprosal either falls far short of current power requirements (which are just going to grow with the population) or doesn't last for even 100 years.
Personally, I think we can hope for a solution that nobody has dreamed of yet and plan for a big population reduction. We have maybe 10 years before the decision is made for us no matter what we want. After that we will likely be struggling to keep the lights on and not likely doing a real good job of it.
So you want to encourage open-source adoption? OK, a laudable goal. The two things that you are going to have to deal with from an IT perspective are support and version control.
Who, exactly do departments deal with for support? Will the IT department be the front-line resource and then farm things out as needed? Or are individual departments going to be going it alone? More to the point, is the experience if departments such that they would prefer to "go it alone" today? If the departments are your customers and they have been treatd well, then the probably will expect the IT department to be providing first-line support for them - as well you should.
One big reason for providing first-line support is version control. While some open-source packages have well-defined versions (Ubuntu, for example), many others do not. There are patches here and there and different versions being distributed from different web sites. If you are assuming interoperability of software being used by different departments it is going to be up to someone to ensure that this is actually possible. Having departments select their own versions and installing them will not insure this at all. If it then falls upon you to sort this out at some later date, you are going to wish dearly that you had been proactive about it. Yes, this may mean being ratuer draconian about individual users downloading whatever they want, installing it and counting on IT to pick up the pieces.
I have seen this happen, even within a community of software developers.
There is a substantial manpower requirement for this, and it needs to be in IT, not in individual departments. You are proposing something that will save money, but some of that immediate savings in software licenses needs to be shifted over to an IT function for support and version control. Ignoring this is not a viable option because you will end up with everyone being unhappy and upper management putting an end to this "experiment". No matter how happy they were with the initial savings.
Sure, overall costs can be lower. But some of that apparent savings needs to be funneled back into keeping things sane and managed. Things like Office Update and Microsoft Office web sites for templates, add-ons and tools do this for Office users and it all just works. You will be replacing this with IT resources at a great savings but you can't ignore things like updates, version control and support issues.
The issue is privacy. Since they are "borrowing" user's bandwidth this exposes other users potentially personally identifying information to the first user. Now you can track other user's activities (within a fairly narrow scope) by using information that can be gathered on your own computer.
I suspect they had to put this in because of this potential. Would it fly if it was clearly exposed what was happening in EU countries? I doubt it. How about if they said:
By using the CNN service you will be receiving information about other user's online activities as they will be receiving information about your activities. This is an essential part of the service that cannot be disabled. By accepting this agreement you acknowledge that no part of your activities on the CNN web site or other related services may be private, secret, anonymous or in any way protected from every other user of the CNN web site or other related services.
Would that be better?
First off, if anyone was really worried about losing marketshare or advertising dollars, it is way, way too late to do anything about that now.
If you recall, they already sold off the spectrum. Sure, they can force new services to delay implementation for a while - but THEY SOLD OFF THE SPECTRUM. Analog television broadcasting is dead, and unless they are going to pay Verizon back their $700 million or so, it is really dead and really soon.
Sure, there is a substantial chance that a lot of people when faced with the decision to go to cable or satellite will chose "none of the above" because their rural location is underserved by DTV signals. Gosh, someone should have thought of that before. Guess what? I'd say they did and decided it was a small enough portion of the overall viewers that it doesn't matter what they do. If you aren't in a major metro area, chances are you are looking at either a much bigger antenna, cable or satellite. Or YouTube. I think you are going to see a lot of people outside of metro areas just turning the TV off and turning it on to play DVDs.
I don't see how any four-month "delay" that is optional is going to make much difference. This might have been a sap to a few stations trying to say they weren't ready, still. But there is no way this is going to help your average viewer - they are either ready or they are forgotten.
And the stupid coupon program isn't coming back either.
Priced properly? The only acceptable price for many people is zero. If it is available for free, they will not pay. Period.
Without force of law, company policy or something else I believe most people will choose "free" every time. Some people are guilt-ridden and would "feel bad" if they used pirated software. Counting on this for sustaining a company is a bad idea.
Counting on some kind of abstract morality to keep people from pirating software is a joke. The biggest problem is that these guys can get prosecuted in a US court and the parent company made to pay fines.
The problem with Vonage - and all current VOIP implementations - is they fail the basic requirements that the wired telecom providers are required to support. Things like 48 hours without electric power. 911 that actually works with emergency services. And literally a hundred other requirements, all things that are really good for people that need basic voice connectivity.
Sure, VOIP implementations are cheap. But in comparison to what? I can use Yahoo Messenger for free. How is Vonage cheaper than that? Neither Vonage or Yahoo are paying for the infrastructure to connect me to the network. The $30-a-month POTS service is doing exactly that. What would Vonage charge if they had to pay to supply their customers with network connectivity?
Sorry, but this has a lot more to do with tariffs and regulations than patents. Sadly, it takes some serious wakeup calls before people understand the difference between the POTS network in the US and "phone service" supplied by the likes of Vonage. A 24 hour power outage might be a good start. Having a 2 year old dial 911 and not be able to recite the address might be another.
You do understand that very nearly all interesting software patents can be upheld then? All it takes is the building of the "One-Click Interpreter" device that connects as a network front-end before a server which then actually implements the "Amazon One-Click". This can be done without any software, programming or anything else other than just hardwired interconnections between logic devices.
Things like this can be built today and could have been built in the 1970s, although it would have been larger and more difficult. Understand that the revenue differential between having something unique and being a me-too can be considerable. Doesn't matter if you were first to market if you can't protect that edge. Like the atom bomb, once Russia knew that it could be done half the R&D effort was out of the way. Then there is reverse engineering the original solution to duplicate it.
Before software was patentable, trade secret protection was used exclusively. And reverse engineering was a real problem that was addressed and solved - by preventing it. Legally, technically and every other way conceivable.
Today, it might just be simpler for situations where the revenue justifies it to implement algorithms in hardware, without any firmware, if that is what is required for protection. I'm not sure this is the answer people here are hoping for, but it is certainly a realistic solution to the problem for businesses.
I'm scared if Iran as well. I'm not sure it is the "theocracy" part that is the root of my concern. I'd say it is more like the fact their leaders would think nothing of nuking Israel even if it meant the deaths of 3/4ths of their populations.
MAD doesn't apply when the leaders don't give a crap about the people under them. Our entire strategy for keeping leaders with nuclear weapons in check is the utter certainty that their countries would suffer terrible retribution. I don't believe Iran is affected by this at all. I am equally unsure that North Korea's leaders care about the civilian population. It isn't like in either case there is a chance the civilian population is going to rise up in outrage and displace their government.
The fact that the religion behind the Iranian leaders preaches "death to infidels" isn't exactly comforting but without nuclear weapons they don't stand a chance of implementing that plan. And they seem to know it.
Problem is, the UN and other international bodies have been long on the side of reducing the influence of first-world nations in the name of ending discrimination against poorer, third-world nations. Hence things like putting Iran on the Human Rights Commission.
Should any international law come in to play, what you would likely see is the US would opt out of it. EU might go along and all of the Third World would sign on. I'd guess Russia would also not sign on. This pretty much makes a mockery of any such law or treaty.
Today, because of the basic lawlessness of the Internet I can openly advertise for a hitman. Buy illegal drugs and use them to drug unsuspecting partygoers. Use stolen credit card numbers to buy services and some goods online. And there isn't a thing anyone can do to stop me, unless I basically call up the local police and beg to be arrested. Which is what most of the "Internet criminals" have ended up doing if they were caught.
I am wondering exactly how hard it is to purchase handguns and have them imported... I suspect it is a lot easier than places that have attempted to ban them would like.
If your music is free, then I can redistribute it all I want. Likely as not you will never find out. If you do, you lack sufficient resources to do anything about it.
This is the model of the record company of the future - distributing music that they were able to obtain for free. No artist to pay, very low production costs and cheap distribution channels. For example, selling a CD to Walmart for $1.50 and they sell is for $5. They make lots of money on it and are happy to stock it, I make lots of money because the unit cost is $0.50.
If you believe people are going to respect YOUR copyright when nobody is respecting THEIRS you are sadly mistaken. The business models that can evolve in an environment where copyright is meaningless will astonish you.
Well, one answer to piracy is to address a segment of the market that doesn't believe in piracy or faces consequences should piracy be discovered. Law enforcement, for example.
Products specifically targeted at law enforcement aren't going to be pirated all that much.
Do not forget that every country has its own regulations. What is permitted in a movie in the US can often be utterly forbidden in Japan or France.
Just try showing a US-made movie about the skinhead movement in Germany. Just try.
Airline movies are probably the most heavily edited because they need to be able to be shown in nearly every market. So they have to comply with all of the restrictions in all locations all at once.
Failure to adhere to all of the necessary regulations gets you tossed out of most countries and your imports seized at the border.
Advertising, and especially Google, is why 50% or more of all search results are bogus pages that just contain ads today. And you are suggesting we need more advertising?
Lots and lots of them. Quite a few without any tuner at all, but unless you were spending plenty for a high-end LCD or plasma TV you quite likely got an ordinary cable-ready tuner that doesn't work with digital signals. Until around 2006 that is.
Yup, lots of TVs going to be trashed soon. I wonder if it is cheap way to pick up LCD monitors for computers from all these that don't have digital OTA capabilities?
Maybe. If you live in a big city. I have a vacation home in the northern part of lower Michigan and we are going from 4.5 stations to 1. Maybe if the broadcast power of some of the others is increased on the 17th things might change, but I doubt it. We are already in a "fringe area" and have a rooftop antenna with about a 7 foot mast and a rotator. Yes, we tried a converter box and that is how we know all about the one station that works.
We already have plans to move to cable, because it is likely the only way to get more than one station.
Anyone that believes TV stations can reverse course in less than three weeks and not unplug analog broadcasting is just kidding themselves. This is way, way too late. It might be OK for the station that is run by two guys and a girlfriend. Anyone, even out in rural Michigan, has made enough plans already that it is going to be very tough to cancel them and hold on to analog broadcast.
But it will look nice when Congress can say "they tried".
The problem with this idea is that right now DSL service is pretty much operated at a loss by companies that can make it up in other ways. Hence the requirement for phone service with the DSL line and so on and so forth. There is also the matter of market penetration. Without dominance in a geographic area the money isn't there to support customers.
So, raising rates to make the service pay for itself isn't going to happen. Raising rates would diminish market share. You have now cut out any reason why an independent company would want to offer Internet service without bundling it with other, revenue-producing services.
Quality of service? Ha. The Internet has trained consumers to look at price first and everything else second. Big numbers might help, but comparing "DSL Service: for $14.99 a month with "Fiber Service" at $150 a month isn't going to fly, anywhere, when average-Joe consumers are concerned.
So we have Internet service bundled with cable service and bundled with telephone service. In both cases the limited revenue from Internet service are made up for by fatter revenues from the rest of the bundle.
OK, so you have the government come in an "nationalize" all local telephone and data services. Just take the wires. Now we have a new government agency tasked with maintaining the wires at taxpayer expense. So who would sign up to supply service on these wires? Since you eliminated the bulk of the revenue, the costs would be quite high for just data service - probably right around the business connection rates rather than the heavily discounted market-share grabbing residential rate. Look for DSL at $100-150 month. Who would sign up for it? Almost nobody. Now the government would have to provide service as well because nobody else wants to with the new terms of the deal.
No, I don't see any way to get data services unbundled now.
Having been to Japan, I did see a "virtual girlfriend" game there. Only it was advertised as also being a "virtual daughter" game as well. And this was on 3m high posters in a store, so it wasn't exactly an underground sort of thing.
Bad idea. Would you approve of an openly pro-NAMBLA campaign in the US? One that would include lots of photographs of NAMBlA-sactioned activities showing how decent and wonderful it can be for your son to develop a sexual relationship with an older man? OK, thought not.
How about a church sect that uses the Bible to "prove" the superiority of whites over blacks and wants to use cable public access time to preach their message? With their charitable works getting lots of mainstream coverage about all the good they are doing for the (white) community. Maybe a charity fundraiser where they auction off some black people.
A little closer to what is going on in Egypt would be if new political party came out with an clearly religious platform that included banning all religions that did not include homosexuals. With the message that by not including homosexuals these other religons were "bad for the country and must be eradicated". Burn down a few Catholic churches and Islamic mosques as a symbol of the "new order". Start a movement to teach the benefits of homosexual relations (no pregnancy!!!) in high schools. Start a movement to criminalize anything that could be called "homophobic" with mandatory psych hospitalizations until the offender was "cured".
The latter isn't that far off of what the moderate leadership in Egypt is fighting against. If they lose to the extremists, they lose the country to the 12th century. Non-Muslims will be tortured, expelled or killed. And so-called moderate Muslims will quickly find that they can either go along to get along or join the non-believers.
Yes.
I would go further and say that while the people and leaders of Israel are not above reproach, it is difficult to criticize the actions of the Israelis when faced with an enemy on their doorstep that openly calls for their extermination. If you had a neigobor you didn't like you could learn to get along, but when your neighbor starts every day by putting up a sign calling for your death it is difficult to imagine how you can "just get along".
Regardless of leadership, the people on the street in Gaza and West Bank have been exposed to an unending stream of propaganda since 1948. Why are rocket launchers in schools, hospitals and mosques? Because the average person on the street allows it. What do they really believe? Who knows? What is important is by allowing war and violence in their midst they are dooming their children to a short, brutal life.
I would say the Hamas leader is correct - violence and warfare isn't going to get the Palestinian people anywhere but if this course is not pursued the people will find a leader that will pursue it. For 60 years they have been giving guns and bombs to children and teaching them to kill Jews. I cannot imagine a solution that does not involve supervision and containment.
Stem cells are genotype specific. That means in order for stem cells to be available for
YOU that YOUR stem cells (or at least those that are genetically identical to yours) must be
available.
For most of the population, any reliance on embryonic stem cells requires a cloned embryo be produced.
This pretty much opens the door to human cloning, so Bill Gates can live on through a series of
clones. There is no way this technology could ever be contained to just producing stem cells
and make sure the embryo was destroyed after harvesting of cells.
Look, it might seem overreaching but the problem in the US is that virtually zero generating capacity has been built since the 1970s. The environmental impact studies, the endless public debates, the studies of how downstream heat might affect the enfironment and so on have pretty much meant that nobody is willing to build new large generating plants.
We have built lots of "peaker" plants designed to get us through periods where loads are very high in small areas. This doesn't solve the problem.
The problem is we're just out of capacity in the US. This is going to mean in a short period of time that walking into a room and turning on a light is going to be a completely foreign experience to the next generation. Too many people, too much consumption and zero build-out for environmental reasons. The end of this is that electric power is something the rich have and the poor do not. The impact on computers in the home will be significant, as wile the impact to data-oriented businesses. It may indeed be cheaper and more reliable to employ someone to use an abacus by hand than to pay for the electricity to operate even a small calculator.
Sounds wonderful for employment in the future. Lots of low-cost labor once again instead of technology eliminating all low-pay jobs.
I don't believe it is possible to conserve our way out of this mess. When it reaches the point where California turns off the lights people will probably wake up. Unfortunately, even without all the environmental studies it would take at least five years to build a modern large generating plant. We don't have five years.
EU might be different. They might be able to "conserve" their way to the future. I doubt it, but it might make then feel good about it for a while. In the US no amount of switching to CFL bulbs while running the air conditioner is going to help. Turning off the TV isn't going to help. Buying "green" appliances isn't going to help. Turning off everything and living with candles will soon be the norm.
Notice that it is rather strange that the computers shown in this commercial are Macs. Since the product is for Windows not OS X I wonder what they are doing?
Why a Mac for the commercial? Did they think nobody would notice?
Sadly, Autoplay doesn't rely on autorun.inf. The folder icon executable can still pop up on XP and Vista.
I would be, if it was true. It isn't. Autoplay, something completely different that was introduced in XP is there for USB devices but not Autorun. Autoplay requires user interaction to do anything, which is why the whole folder icon fooling people is a big deal.
If I get you to click on a link that says you get $1000 for clicking on the link but it really installs software (requiring more clicks to approve) and you do it anyway - and keep confirming it, over and over, I'd say it is your own fault.
Microsoft introduced this when the only autorun capable device was a CD-ROM player and the only CD-ROMs where those manufactured. The idea of a "malware CD" was preposterous.
Any CD-based game for Windows was required to make use of Autorun/Autoplay in order to receive the Windows logo. It was designed to make inserting the disc with zero or minimal install operate like putting a cartridge or CD into a game console.
I am not familiar with any autorun capability on USB drives, but they have Autoplay. Autoplay requires the user's cooperation to do anything.