http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1886268&cid=34363612 Marxist much?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1883934&cid=34345704 Cut to the chase
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1877382&cid=34296690 BS income taxes

Well, unfortunately /. does not have an economics section, so I can't post anything there because it does not exist, but I can still have debate threads about what is happening in US economy now and how it will change America in the future.

(compiling some comments together)

Hopefully the end of that thread is shown here.

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If you don't understand that corn and gold aren't the only two things on the market, that is your problem.

  - I presented a much bigger list a few comments ago, if you can't read - that's not my problem. Of-course the things I provided in that list are a tiny subset of the list there is, because all commodities are going up in price, because US dollar is falling, which you probably do not understand even the concept of, but you maybe able to read a number, right?

US dollar index fell 18% since 2006. The only reason it's even as high as it is, is because the other currencies that constitute the index are also being printed in currency wars. Good thing Asia has waken up last week, it looks like Singapore decided it cannot win the currency war and the rest of Asia just may follow suit.

Of-course in this war 'winning' means you destroy your own people's purchasing power, nothing else. Those who 'win' this war, lose their quality of life.

There is a measure for the rate of change in overall price levels, and it is showing historically low rise. You can cherry-pick a few commodities whose prices are going up, but you're not fooling anyone.

  - except of-course that the smart money has left USD and is in other currencies, in Asian equities and in commodities.

So if you are so dumb not to understand the insane levels of inflation presented by the price increases, then you deserve to lose your purchasing power.

You think ALL metals going up is 'cherry picking', you think ALL agriculture going up is 'cherry picking'? You think cotton going up by 17.5% in JUST September of this year is cherry picking? Sugar? Rice? Wheat? Basically futures of all staple foods is cherry picking. Ha, interesting. I must check what happened to the cherries, they must have done better than the DOW and S&P in September just as well, though I do not have that number in front of me right now, I'll find out.

It's amusing how you make up ridiculous strawmen like this. I can tell that even you realize that you're utterly out of your league, and you're flailing around as fast as you can to try to distract yourself from your own incompetence.

  - I see, so I am dealing with a troll. Well I understand I am dealing with a troll, but this thread has gone long enough for me just to stop destroying every single one of your arguments in every comment I make.

You are the one saying deflation hurts the poor by taking away their purchasing power. You amuse me in your ignorance by making such statements, so I am waiting for more and more comes with every new comment of yours.

You are the one saying inflation provides people with more purchasing power, which is bullshit because nobody has wages rising at all except for the bankers and probably politicians taking bribes to help out the bankers.

So you have to decide, which is it? Is deflation hurting people or is it inflation?

I am clearly on the side that inflation hurts people more, all things considered inflation will destroy currency at this point.

You believe that deflation hurts people. So it must really hurt people if commodities, the basic foods, the basic elements go down in price, it must be truly painful to know, that sugar would go down in price rather than going 19.3% UP just in month of September of 2010. Which shows clear inflation because at the same time dollar lost a few percentage points and S&P gained only 8.8% and Dow gained only 7.7%. You do not see the inflation and move into the commodities and foreign markets, but what else is new? nothing.

You know as well as I do that falling wage and price levels are bad for people with debt, and good for people with stockpiles of cash. You know it because it's so simple and obvious that there's no way not to know it, especially after I've spoon-fed the explanation to you over and over.

  - but you are willfully ignoring the simple fact that inflation will not allow people to pay their debt out ever.

Of-course inflation will PREVENT people from actually being able to pay their debt out ever, because inflation forces prices up but wages are stagnating. So people have only one option: get into MORE debt. Your society at the end will have insurmountable amount of debt. Your mind is unable to comprehend the simple truth that those with debt will never get out of debt in inflation. For them to get out of debt would take an extraordinary effort, which they will not be able to achieve, since the gov't is ramping up the inflation levels now.

The idiot at the head of the Fed came out with a statement that he wants to see 'inflation' up to be at 2% level, from the level he 'sees now', which he insists is 1.5%. All of these numbers are cooked. BUT EVEN if he actually was telling the truth (which he is not) then who believes that Bernanke knows exactly what to do to finetune this imaginary levels of inflation by .5%?

So he knows exactly how many treasuries to buy back to achieve this specific levels? He'll overshoot by a landslide. Nixon started price controls when his CPI numbers were at 4% (and at that time they counted inflation differently as well), but at 4% he decided to implement price controls, which are of-course fighting the symptoms of inflation, not the cause of them. And price controls do not work.

Bernanke will create more massive inflation than exists now, which is going to be amazing. Corn up by 60% in 3 months? HA! He'll push it up by 600% in 3 months, that's what he is going to achieve, yet you are still going to sit here and yup about not having any inflation.

You'll be sitting one of these days, in a cold apartment with no heating and no electricity and no running water, eating cat food out of a can that you heated up on a piece of wood you found outside, and you'll be saying how great inflation is. You'd have all that money and nothing to buy with it. Keep an eye on that wheelbarrow that you'll be dragging your piles of money around in, because if you leave it unattended, somebody will dump the cash and steal the wheelbarrow.

--

Tell me this: why on earth would you talk about "rampant inflation" when you know perfectly well that "inflation" means something else in the minds of everyone who will read your comment? Are you trying to deceive them, or do you just not care whether they understand what you're saying?

  - I answered this ridiculous thing in every comment, you are just too stupid to understand it.

Whatever your definition of inflation in your head is, it does not change the fact that money is being printed, that USD index is going down, that commodities are going up. It does not matter that you do not believe in something that is clearly happening around you.

Nobody will ever pay out their debt in inflation, especially in hyper inflation, nobody sees their wages rising. Bernanke specifically stated he wants purchasing power of all Americans to fall faster, because in his mind that's how you make Americans more competitive. This obviously relies on Americans NOT HAVING WAGE INCREASES THAT CORRESPOND TO INFLATION.

So nobody will be paying out their debt. Eventually people will be borrowing money to buy food (and some do now, the food-stamp program is basically IT now, but the borrower/printer is the gov't instead of separate people). Eventually you will be eating that cat food, I hope you remember this conversation thread then.
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1816458&cid=33858844
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1816458&cid=33858884
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1816458&cid=33851828

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1572678&cid=31373804
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1202461&cid=27611089
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1732618&cid=33032912
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1753446&cid=33238424
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1669644&cid=32398828
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1653504&cid=32221932
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1653504&cid=32222264
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1669644&cid=32400300
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=286207&cid=20442175
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1617578&cid=31842686
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1275927&cid=28401389
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1685718&cid=32567534
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142920&cid=11975285
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1592308&cid=31585612

tired of repeating the same things....

Context

(As usual, not to lose the post.)

The market is not irrational in having business cycles, there is nothing irrational about eating and then taking a dump, is it?

Business cycles are exactly what is needed to keep economy healthy, the boom becomes a problem, just like overeating, and a bust is the solution of the problem - taking a dump and detoxing.

Boom ends up producing too much, creating jobs that should not have been there. As an example I will use the Internet dot com bubble. Would you argue that it was good for economy to have all those HTML 'coders' create websites with loaned money to buy pencils at a dollar and then sell them at 50% loss on the Internet? Of-course they would 'make it up on volume'.

If you don't understand how that is a boom, which leads to market being saturated with unneeded jobs (fat) and it is in a need of a correction, then I can't argue with you. The people MUST lose jobs, some companies MUST fail and some lenders MUST go under and prices on consumer items MUST deflate. This keeps the lenders and companies honest and gives the consumers time to think over their expenses as well.

Do you call that irrational? Calling it that is irrational from my perspective.

You are also wrong on the Keynes. It is all Keynes ideas of keeping the Bust out of the economy that is happening and is leading to over-consumption, and it is precisely for the Keynes ideas that government must keep the boom going and must not allow bust to happen.

Why would government want a bust? Government is a disease of the society comparative to hypertension and obesity and diabetes, that's how society gets sick and dies. It is also an economic burden, it is not a productive force. Government hates the bust portion of healthy economic cycle because it forces government to shrink.

To avoid the bust, the government prints money and borrows and in fact if it actually was able to take 100% of all personal incomes, it could not cover its expenses at this point - that is not just a chronic, that is a disease in acute form.

It's like trying to prevent someone, who overate from relieving themselves, the consequences could be very bad - intoxication and death (maybe an explosion even, ouch).

Just because so many governments of the world have adopted this Keynesian idea does not make it right, it is wrong, just like slavery was wrong even though accepted by a majority.

I've just now discovered that I've got fans.

Contact info:

niroz (dot) 9 (dot) okianwarrior (at) spamgourmet.com

I was wrong on Greece

In my previous comment I said this:

The difference between US and Greece is this: Greece is in Euro and cannot print, so it either quits Euro and goes back to Drachma and prints the money into oblivion causing a crash of its bonds/treasuries/currency OR Greece bites the bullet. Greek's Government for some reason decided to go the High Road and to be Honest for some reason, I need to figure it out.

well, I was wrong about EU and Greece altogether. The so called High Road of paying the creditors is not really coming out of the pockets of Greeks. Now it is obvious that EU IS going to print Euros.

So Germany committed to printing a trillion euros to save Greece now, whatever Greeks are going to be doing in terms of taxes and cutting spending is purely a token move. Of-course for some Greeks this token move will still be painful enough, why, they may have to cut from 16 to 12 monthly salaries in a year for some people, outrageous I tell you.

However the main point is this: EU just like US decided to monetize the debt. They decided that the creditors will get their money back 100 cents on an Euro. This is basically a move by the heads o the EU States to save the ASSES of their banker friends, who made all of these outrageous loans to the Greeks when they should have known better and should have seen that Greeks could NEVER pay back, just like US can NEVER pay back.

But apparently the banker friends of EU Governments were right!!! They are right!!! They can lend any money to any EU State and they will never be called on a bad bet. All of their bets are good, they are covered.

Do you understand what is happening? The harm that should have been carried out, the lost debt that must have hurt the bankers that loaned the Greeks the money is now socialized between all citizens of the European Union. It is the same thing that is happening and will continue in US, the bad debt that should have been defaulted on is socialized by all of the citizens of the US.

These bankers have it all figured out, it is amazing! They can lend money to any government of US or EU States and they will NEVER lose the bet and will not even lose the interest, in fact their interest is guaranteed! It is amazing!

So the truth is that Euro is going to be just as worthless as the USD only somewhat later in time because US is much ahead of Europe on this road to hyper-inflation.

So I admit it, I was wrong. I was wrong that there is a government that is willing to take the High Road and be honest and do what really needs to be done: Default. They have to default so that the debt is paid not 100cents on a dollar but at the rate at which they can do. So that the lenders are not rewarded for their stupid behavior and lending practices but are punished and learn to be diligent and to care about where the money is going.

Who will suffer now? Not only the Greeks, who SHOULD be suffering for this, but the rest of the EU citizens will suffer, all of them are poorer now and will continue being poorer in the future with these governments.

Who will come out as a winner? The bankers. They now have assurances of 2 major states: US and EU that their bets will not go bad, that they do not need to be careful who they lend the money to. This is how moral hazard is created.

Another winner: Gold, Silver and other various commodities.

Get rid of your dollars and euros, buy and hold gold and silver. The fiat currency is dead.

I want to put this into the journal not to lose it, my own comment, took too long to write, it's about the governments being pyramid schemes and going bust.

original comments on the story about the market sell off.

original comments on the story about the market sell off.

Going to sleep in a moment, it is past 1am, I always stay too late and my head hurts, but no worries, lets look at this step by step.

You'll have to define what you claim to be a pyramid scheme, then. From what I've heard for definitions, SS doesn't fit (nor the government as a whole).

A pyramid scheme is a way to organize an enterprise, which relies on attracting more and more participation into itself, where participation means giving something, giving money for example to the enterprise, which then allows the earlier entrants to take out more of what they gave and relies on the later entrants to finance the earlier ones. If there was an infinite number of entrants, this enterprise could in theory continue indefinitely, paying out more than what was supplied to the people in the ever thickening chain. The progression is algorithmic, it could be geometric or cubic, but is is certainly more than linear. It is not possible to have a real pyramid if the number of entrants on the bottom is equal to the number of those who exit at the top, otherwise it would be a pipe and it would not be possible to give out much more than was given in to any of the participants. What is not important here is how exactly the people are convinced to enter the enterprise and to provide the money while they are at the bottom.

Social Security is a pyramid and any Government that regulates money supply is a pyramid.

SS is a pyramid because when it was originally set up, most people who had to pay into it only had to pay for a very short amount of time but they were guaranteed a very nice outcome. This is easy to observe, the first person to get a monthly check from that system, Ida May Fuller paid around 24 dollars into it. She paid the payroll taxes for 3 years to pay that 24 dollars. She got about 23 THOUSAND dollars out of it before she died. Corrected for inflation over the years, the payments made to the recipients have decreased but the payments that were required to be made into the SS were always raised, never decreased while the age of retirement has consistently moved higher up (there are tricks there, if you were born between such and such date, your retirement age starts at 62, for other dates it's 65, 67 and then at 70).

Most important thing to understand is that the earliest of the entrants got the biggest gain, with each subsequent generation paying more into the system and getting less and less out of it and in money that is much more inflated.

The entire Government runs like a pyramid when it prints bonds and t-bills and then prints more to finance paying out the interest payments needed to cover the cost of the earlier sold bonds and t-bills. Same principles apply as to the clients of Bernie Madoff, he could easily take the place of Bernanke, Greenspan or Geithner, no reason for the guy to rot in jail, he was, after all, doing what the Governments are doing. But of-course, just like with printing money itself, like with a powerful military and taxes, governments do not want citizens to have the right to do any of the thing it does everyday.

The bonds and t-bills work the same way as the mortgage financing. There are people with capital (be it countries, banks, independent brokers and even private retail customers) who want a stable, guaranteed return, even though it is only supposed to cover cost of inflation really. What actually happens is that the Government does not increase taxes enough to cover its rising costs. Governments don't shrink, remember, they only grow, so the costs rise.

Governments do not want to be honest, so they do not raise the taxes to the levels that are really needed to cover the costs of their spending, so they print money (inflation) and print and sell papers instead (credit bubble). As long as the economy is strong, this can continue, because the people in this pyramid really believe that this can go on as long as the country stands, and who will believe that US can fall as an Economic empire?

But they are as wrong as the people who believed that the houses can go up in prices indefinitely. Think about the fact, that the housing bubble was blown up by the ideas pushed by the mortgage brokers, who got paid per sold mortgage, who had incentives to falsify people's credit information, to falsify appraisal reports to make it look like the mortgages were secured, that there was enough equity and assets, that the houses could be just taken and resold at always higher values even if the mortgage payments were not made any longer. Of-course the government lending standards lead to this, that's what Free Money does and Free Market prevents. Free Money lent to banks at no cost are easy to gamble with while in a Free Market a bank that would operate this recklessly would be destroyed because of all the bad debt. Also Free Money allows people to trade SIVs without caring about their real values ESPECIALLY when Government GUARANTEES the mortgages, that's where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack come into play. US Government did not bother to regulate the monsters they have set up themselves, which eventually caused the brutal SIV trading, which never had a chance of being paid back.

The same thing is happening with the bonds and t-bills. Those are Government Guaranteed after all, who'd think that they could ever go bad, right? Except, as I said, the Government never gets in any of the taxes the amounts that it needs to cover its expenses, it pays for its expenses by printing and by borrowing through these papers. But they never have any other income.

Understand this: Government does not produce value to back up the money, the bonds, the t-bills it prints. Governments have no way to produce value at all, they have no money, they really are a burden on economy and are supposed to be paid through some form of taxes only. But they overstep that because the politicians want to be reelected, they want the Government jobs for life, so they sell the favors to the Corporations for regulations that remove competition, they do not raise taxes because that can cause their reelection, they instead simply vote to raise the spending/borrowing ceiling every time that issue comes up.

This is true of most if not all governments in the world. But while a country that has production and manufacturing and has a good trading balance and can really feed itself and cloth itself and put a roof over its own head and do all of that itself, that country can afford the burden of a government, a country that lost that capacity cannot.

Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Iceland, Ireland, Finland, really most of the EU countries save for Germany behave this way. Even UK and France are in this trouble. But so is USA and the US has a different problem. US Dollar is the reserve currency, so it is more difficult for the world just to drop it. And that is the only reason

That is the ONLY reason that USA is not bankrupt at this very second, right now.

This is inertia. Inertia by China, Japan, Germany and other countries and banks and funds that hold US bonds and t-bills. This is going to come to an end quite soon now, I do not expect it to last past Obama's first term, I think maybe even this year it will start to unravel.

I see that you believe that USA being able to print the USD is the thing that will save the country from bankruptcy and everything will be OK, that is not how it will go down.

The problem with USA is exactly that it is printing the dollar and it will print the dollar to buy back the bonds and t-bills instead of honestly declaring a bankruptcy and allowing the creditors to get not the full nominal value of their useless paper in more useless paper, instead of dealing with the investors fairly and saying: we will pay back in real money, we will not cause a hyper inflation, but you are NOT getting 100 cents on the dollar, you are getting something like 10-15 cents, deal with it, you should not have behaved so stupidly by giving us all that money.

Instead the USA will print itself out of this. But there is a problem with this FOR the USA. China will shrug it off, so it will lose a Trillion, OK. So will Japan and Germany and the rest. But the problem with USA is that there is a huge trade imbalance. USA has very limited manufacturing and production at this point and the countries that will lose money on US will not want to sell anything to US for dollars ever again. USA will have the issue of not having production to feed/cloth itself, it will not have enough energy to have the standard of living that US is used to. Eventually it will restructure, but as they say 'in the long term we are all dead'. Eventually does not bode well with people, who are faced with devalued money, faced with their retirement money being wiped out. Who are faced with shortages and inability to buy food.

Yes, the devalued USD will cause a collapse in the internal trade as well, as the US farmers will not want to sell food, US oil refineries will not want to sell gas for USD just as the Chinese will not want to sell anything for that paper.

This problem is only but an opportunity for a Government to become even bigger though, isn't it? Total price controls.
Total exchange controls (you won't be allowed to own foreign currencies or gold)
Martial Law - due to increased fighting for resources, the crime will skyrocket, people will be forced to behave, how will they be forced? Well, I believe Nixon did not have a problem killing a few students sometime back, when they protested against conscription and fighting in Cambodia, this will happen again.
Total controls over the means of production, I am talking about collectivization of the farmers, in the best traditions of the former USSR.
Closing of the border, not to allow young people to escape, not to allow the remaining capital to escape.
Arresting people's bank accounts abroad and at home.

Basically I expect the US to become what USSR was only not through any ideology based on some political agenda, but simply through a very natural process of the politicians doing what they do daily and people behaving how they do always.

You are asking - If the Governments are so bad, how come we have them?

It's a great question, but understand that MOST Governments in the world are not based on any ideological principles of the people, who they govern. In the UK it is a traditional democratic dictatorship that was born out Monarchy and during the Kings and Tsars nobody asked your permission to govern them, it was the strongest, the most canning etc.

Today it is very similar just in different clothing. People need JUDGES, there is a NEED for a well established, fair and balanced ('blind') Justice system. That's where Governments really are needed. That and protecting the countries against military invasions.

Everything else that Governments end up doing leads to the destruction of the society at some point. Understand this: In the history of humans there was never a single time yet that a country that was once an Empire did NOT fall down. It is history it is true, it is inevitable, it is people.

That's how we are, the Governments do what they do because they consist of people and the people who they govern are not educated, not interested to keep the Government only where it belongs and nowhere else.

I compare this to a Boom/Bust cycle of sound Market: Governments Boom and then they Bust and so it goes in circles.

I support the notion of copyright, and I advocate paying for legitimate versions of a product instead of resorting to finding it from some source that may be illegally distributing it, in spite of how easy the latter can easily be done today. I find the concept of unauthorized file sharing to be nothing short of utter disrespect for the notion of copyright, and do not abide by it or tolerate it in my own household.

In an effort to try to take back some of their business model. recording associations have lobbied governments for stronger laws with regards to copyright infringement, and one of the things that strikes me in particular, and what I wish to talk about here, is the concept of anti-circumvention provisions in such laws.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, anti-circumvention provisions as it applies to copyright law refer to extensions to copyright that forbid the importation or distribution of any technology that could potentially be used to circumvent copyright.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that this would seem to mean that computers that are programmable by the end user might also become illegal, there's something even more serious at stake:

Human thought.

You see, when you remember something, you are, in a sense, creating a copy of that experience for your own private use... if the work happened to be protected by some sort of copy protection, that simple mental act would render one technically, albeit utterly unenforceably, guilty of infringing on copyright if there were no exemptions for private use copying.

Copyright *NEEDS* exemptions for private use copying.

In case anyone wants to take a look: http://www.lawrenceperson.com/.

If you've known /. for a while, you've certainly noticed all the recent changes. The front page articles auto-load-extend (presumably through AJAX code), the link to get to your own page has moved twice, and now there are two (that both look alike - your username - but work differently), and checking if anyone has replied to your comments has been a two-click journey instead of the old one-click for a while now.

Then there's the annoying inline popup (so it's not caught by popup blockers) that tells you that "Firehose is paused due to inactivity". Whatever that means, it doesn't seem nearly important enough to interrupt my reading.

Quite frankly, from a user interface design standpoint, the "new" slashdot sucks. Badly. Maybe I'll try disabling all javascript for slashdot.org and check if that improves the experience.

bah.

Here is a summary of what I would like to see in copyright.

• It is useful to break up copyright infringement into two categories. The first is state of a copy, and the second is the actual act of infringement. The latter is defined in terms of the former.
• A copy of copyrighted content is an infringing copy when it was made without permission of the copyright holder and the copy is currently not otherwise exempt from infringement. Note that exemption from infringement applies to particular copies, not to the individuals creating them.
• The act of copyright infringement is the creation of an infringing copy.
• The concept of fair dealings currently part of Canadian copyright law should remain and copies which meet those criteria remain exempt from infringement.
• A copy made for the personal and private use of the person making the copy should be exempt from infringement. This exemption should apply to all copyrighted works, not just music. Optionally, a levy may be charged on blank media to compensate artists for this exemption.
• The aforementioned exemptions to infringement should only apply as long as the copy from which a copy is made is not itself an infringing copy, or, if the copy from which it is made happens to be in another country, would not be an infringing copy if it were located in Canada (but still only remotely accessible to the person making the copy).
• An exemption from infringement should last for as long as the criteria that allow the copy to be exempt from infringement holds to be true. If it changes during its lifetime, the exemption may cease to apply, and the copy becomes an infringing copy. The creator of that copy should in that case also be guilty of copyright infringement. This does not affect the status of any copies that may have been made from the copy of the work before it became infringing. Once the criteria for an exemption is lost from a copy, it cannot qualify for that exemption again later, even if it should once again meet the criteria for the exemption.
• Transmitting, sharing, lending, selling, renting, leasing, or in any other way distributing a copy of a copyrighted work to anyone else, or merely offering to do any of these, irrevocably voids any notion of personal and private use that might otherwise have applied to that copy, and the corresponding exemption to infringement along with it. If the copy is then found to be infringing, the creator of it shall be guilty of copyright infringement. If infringing, the recipient shall also be considered to be party to the infringement if the recipient could reasonably know that that the content they are receiving is infringing.

  What this point means is that downloading copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer service that has not received any authorization to distribute it is illegal, since the copy that the service is providing does not qualify for a personal use exemption on account that it is being transmitted, that copy is infringing. And since one is making a copy of an infringing copy, the new copy is also infringing. It also means that lending your original CD's to your friends is legal. Although the personal use exemption won't apply to the CD's, the creators of those CD's had permission to create them in the first place and so they don't require a personal use exemption to not be infringing on copyright.

• Knowingly possessing infringing copies of copyrighted content should be considered as being a party to the infringement, and may carry similar penalties. If one does not know that copies they possess are infringing, they shall not be considered guilty of this crime, but once such knowledge is gained, any infringing copies must be surrendered to the authorities upon request, and at their own expense, but without any further penalty. Copies so surrendered are to be summarily destroyed, just as counterfeit currency would be. If one discovers that they possess infringing copies that they did not formerly know were infringing, not surrendering such copies to law enforcement for destruction upon request, for any reason, shall be considered equivalent to the crime of knowingly possessing the infringing copies.
• If a person creates a personal use copy of a work and this copy is misappropriated from him or her without their consent, explicit or implied, they shall not be considered to have committed copyright infringement, although the misappropriated copy shall be considered infringing. Anyone found to be possessing such a misappropriated copy, will be guilty of knowingly possessing an infringing copy of a copyrighted work and may be guilty of other laws as well (such as theft, unauthorized computer access, etc). A person who does not cooperate with law enforcement upon request in finding the person or persons who had evidently misappropriated the copyrighted content will be considered to have implicitly consented to these actions and the personal-use exemption to infringement will not apply.
• The act of copyright infringement must be deliberate. If a person is found to be committing copyright infringement without intent, they must surrender all copies of infringing copyrighted works to the authorities, at their own expense, but without any further penalty, and shall be expected to immediately cease and desist from the activity that was causing the infringement. If they are later found to have not complied, they should then be considered guilty of copyright infringement. Neither ignorance of the copyrighted status of a work nor of copyright law itself should be considered acceptable reasons to be ignorant of copyright infringement.
• Copyright holders may, if they desire, create mechanisms that make it more difficult or inconvenient for the end user to create copies that may be exempt from infringement. No legal framework should exist for preventing anyone from bypassing such mechanisms, however, unless the person can also be found to be guilty of infringing on copyright by creating an otherwise infringing copy.
• Copyright needs to be of finite scope. The duration of a copyright ought to depend on the nature of the work, but no copyright duration should ever be greater than 50 years. Once a copyright expires, the work transits into the public domain.
• Copyright law will not assist anybody in protecting any interests that they have in formerly copyrighted works that have gone into public domain. They may be freely copied by anybody. A publisher is not under any obligation to continue to provide access to public domain content, however... the onus for distribution, if any is desired, falls on the shoulders of those who desire it.

Here's a set of requirements I have for an ebook reader that I would find useful:

• E-ink, e-paper, or some other passive reflective display. This makes not only for a device that is more legible in bright light than any computer monitor, but also means that battery life is determined by how often one turns pages, not by how long the unit is left on. In fact, such a unit would have no real need for an "off" switch at all.
• Has a full 8.5 x 11" display. Not merely the form factor for the device, but the visible display must be capable of showing a full letter-sized page at one time without shrinking it at all
• Utilizes a mini or micro-USB connector to charge the device and also to transfer content to it. The USB connection should appear like a removable storage device with a common filesystem to any operating system that supports usb-based drives.
• Able to contain user content and display PDF's. I have many books and articles already in PDF form and can view them on my computer, but the ability to view them on a screen that's as easy to read as paper would be far preferable.
• Able to use standard SD cards for content. Removable, replaceable, and an already highly recognized standard, SD cards would allow one to be able to expand their collection of electronic books beyond what might be contained within the device itself.
• Replaceable battery. When the rechargeable battery finally does die, it's important to be able to replace it without having to go and buy a whole new unit
• Touch-screen. Whether this is touched with a finger or pen is irrelevant, but a touch screen could eliminate the need for lots of controls on the margins and could enable the device to have an only marginally larger form-factor than its display area. A virtual qwerty keyboard could even be put on the display for user text input.
• Priced at a level that is commensurate with consumer electronics. I don't want such a device priced at $1500 or so... for that price, I might as well just use a laptop. The above features must be packed into a device that can retail for under about $500USD.

The above items are all must-haves, and I will not even consider purchasing a unit that does not have all of these features. Although some (I suspect most heavily the last one) may seem far-fetched right now, I am inclined to believe that advances will eventually be made that could make all of the above quite achievable in the very near future. The first company to accomplish this in a reliable device will be getting my business and I have little doubt that such a feature set would grab the attention of a lot of other people as well.

And in order of preference, here is a wish-list of items that I would like in the reader. They will not affect whether or not I get one, but a device with these features is more likely to get my attention. I would also be willing to pay a bit more for a device with these features.

1. Rugged. Able to withstand being dropped or possibly even stepped on without damaging the unit or affecting its usability.
2. Waterproof. Able to be utilized outdoors even in inclement weather or possibly even while one is in the shower without damaging the device or its electronics. It should even be possible to accidentally drop in a bathtub, for example, and retrieve it and it continues to work normally. Obviously with this requirement, things like the aforementioned USB connection and SD card slots would have to be sealable inside a watertight compartment within the device.
3. Color. Should be self-explanatory

The above requirements have been on my wish-list for an electronic reader for some time now, and I had actually originally expected to see such devices on the market in or around 2009, but in light of all the new readers have come out recently without one of them even sporting a real 14" diagonal screen, I'm suspecting it might still be another couple of years yet.

Not all that long ago, the governing party in my country (Canada) has reraised the subject of making copyright control circumvention on digital works illegal. Now while I do not for a moment abide copyright infringement, I find myself compelled to point out that this proposed law that would make virtually all copyright control circumvention illegal is an inherently bad thing, not only for consumers, but possibly even for the copyright holder. It even raises a question of the integrity of a governing body that would choose to bring such a law into existence.

A key problem with this sort of law is that if a blanket law is utilized making copy control circumvention on digital works illegal (even making certain exceptions, such as for security or law enforcement purposes), then one cannot legally obtain any tools to bypass such protection unless one is employed in industries that are associated with the exceptions, and from that it is almost inevitable that digital content producers will start putting digital rights management on all produced works from that point forward to lock down their works.

An advocate of the proposed law might wonder how this could be a bad thing, so I am compelled to point out that this sort of thing would mean that a user would not even be able to copy a song to his ipod, for example, unless the publisher of the work had specifically allowed it. Worse, the publisher might allow it to be copied to an ipod, for example, but not happen to allow it to some competing technological device. This is vendor lock-in at its finest and the only way it can be resolved is to not disallow any end-user the privilege of copying a work for their own private use at all. Making circumvention illegal would limit the availability of circumventing technologies, which would in turn deprive the consumer of the very ability to excercise what might have otherwise even been perfectly allowable by the copyright holder but the copyright holder did not have the ability or forsight to support.

Additionally, there is the issue of public domain. Although efforts in the U.S.A. have created a means of extending the duration of copyrights indefinitely, fortunately such mechanisms have not found their way into Canada. When a digitally encrypted work has its copyright expire after the requisite amount of time, if laws prohibiting circumvention were passed, then there would remain no legal means to access tools to decode the encrypted work at all, even though it no longer is protected by copyright! After all, if removing digital encryption on copyrighted works is to really be illegal, then any tools that one might use to defeat such encryption must also be illegal, even if the use of that tool would not in any way infringe on copyright in a particular circumstance.

Another problem with this sort of law is that it will, in the end, not be heeded by a lot of people. Just as certainly as people willfully and quite frequently speed in spite of laws against it, there will be a segment of people who will likewise disregard this law as well. Rather than controlling piracy, the people who are committing copyright infringement on a large scale will go on unhindered, while the private home consumer is metaphorically handcuffed, being legally prohibited from being able to copy any copyrighted works even for their own private use.

In a hypothetical scenario that can only be described as ironic, there is also the problem of a copyright holder who might have chosen to use encryption initially but then later changes his mind. The exact same laws which would keep the end user from copying such a work for themselves could potentially even prevent the copyright holder himself from removing the encryption! Not only do consumers face vendor lock-in, but copyright holders might as well, locking people into a decision that they have absolutely no legal means to back out of. Although admittedly, a copyright holder being locked out of being able to copy his or her own works as he chooses seems unlikely, it's still quite within the realm of possibility.

Of course, a supporter of such copyright control legistlation being in place might want to argue that if copying for private use is made exempt so that tools to bypass encryption are still legally available, then people will abuse that privilege to commit copyright infringement. I would put it to such a person that such infringement will occur regardless of laws put into place. While it may have the potential to create a perceived lull in the amount of piracy that appears to go on, in reality the people who would be committing the most copyright infringement would simply have to move their activities further below the radar to continue their practices. In the meantime, the average consumer is immensely affected, having absolutely no legal means whatsoever at his or her disposal to make a copy even for their own private use, which I might point out even has an explicit exemption to copyright infringement for music in the Copyright Act of Canada (as an aside, it is my own personal view that personal and private use should be an exemption to copyright infringement for all types of copyrighted works, not merely music).

Finally, and probably the biggest issue with this law is that it is largely unenforceable, except when a person may happen to have done something that makes their actions known to law enforcement. The law should, of course, apply equally to everybody, so it would seem strange for any governing body to want to pass a law that they not only know they cannot fairly and justly enforce, but actually cannot possibly even have the *intent* to do so, as the only way to fully enforce it would be to spy on people while even in their own homes. If there is no intention to go after the private consumer who is merely copying a work for their own private use, even if they are breaking copyright controls to do it, then why on earth should there be a proposed law that implies they would do exactly that? The only answer that I can think of that makes any sense is that the law is only some sort of hand-waving exercise to present the facade of the government trying to do something about what I do realize is a very serious problem in our political and social climate today. I would sincerely hope that our country would consider its integrity a higher priority than that.

I do not, as I said before, abide any form of copyright infringement. I fully maintain the position that people who commit copyright infringement of any work should face not only a civil suit by the copyright holder in cases where damages are applicable, but legal consequences as well (on the order of ever-increasing fines for repeat offenders). However, I cannot for any period of time abide our government wanting to enforce new laws whose ineffectiveness will only create far more problems than it attempts to solve.