You still haven't answered the question: How would a normal person find the status of the copyright of anything on the internet? Remember, this is NOT just about the latest movies and songs, your idea makes EVERYTHING illegal, tumblr, flickr, youtube, forwarded cat-mails, The pirated material coming from obviously pirated sources might be the bulk of actual internet traffic, but it's a fringe case in your argument since it is as you say pretty clear-cut. I'm not arguing that. If you go to the piratebay, most people aren't expecting that it's legally obtained copies.

Although I'll add that a surprising number of people actually do believe it's fully legal to download it, even in countries where it isn't, but that's a completely different argument.

Your problem is still trying to defend how Gramma is going to know the copyright status of the pretty cat pictures she's downloaded. Were they professionally taken, or taken by a skilled amateur? Who did it? What country are they from? Did they release it with limited rights, a creative commons license, or did they just "put it up there" without ever specifying anything? On what server in what country did they originally post it? Because that matters when it comes to copyright, if you legally publish something (i.e. you are the creator/copyright holder) without mentioning a license, in some countries it's considered released to the public. How will gramma know the difference? How will gramma know the difference between this and piratebay? How will gramma know the difference between piratebay and using bittorrent to download war of warcraft patches or linux isos?

Those are the BULK cases, the unclear ones, the majority of use of the internet today by average people. Just regular use, facebook, tumblr, youtube, and so on. I repeat: your idea has no merit whatsoever until you can argue that there is a reasonable expectation that these people will be able to tell the origin/license of any random catpicture or quoted blogpost they come across.

As for whether your idea would eliminate piracy, that's also a different argument - I posit it wouldn't make a dent in it. I come to this conclusion because of two things.

First, real data from countries where anti-piracy laws have been introduced shows a temporary drop and then a return to previous levels. Unless you make people actually believe pirating is wrong, they'll just learn how to hide it better, or take their chances. It might make for less cat pictures, since gramma is more worried about shit like that then an actual pirate, but that's striking the "innocent" piracy that you claimed wouldn't be punished rather than the wilful piracy.

Second, since nobody would know HOW to follow the law, and since accidental missteps wouldn't be punished, nobody would have a reason to care. The person that downloaded a knowingly pirated song would know full well that he/she had also downloaded a dozen videos of youtube that day, and that it was likely a few of them were infringing as well. Since everyone is likely a criminal, why would they bother trying to avoid being one? No, they'd just burrow a bit deeper, hide it a bit better perhaps, use some plausible deniability techniques.

So to return to the issue: do you have an argument for how gramma will know, or don't you?

The problem here still being that there would be more "fake currency" than "real currency". Your premise is still based on the idea that people have a reasonable expectation of being right more often than not, and that is just not the case. As it is you stand maybe what, a one in a million chance that the bill you accept is fake. Does it make you check it carefully? No, probably not, unless you have reason to do so. It's a reasonable expectation that people can spot the crudest of fakes easily, and that the ones that are hard to spot are so rare that it's okay to leave it unpunished.

On the other hand when you have say 90% of all bills are fake, or half, or a quarter... Heck, let's say one in ten bills are fake. Considering people typically use hundreds of internet spread media on any given day that still means they would be breaking the law in ten percent of the cases. Anyone who was paranoid enough to careful check every single item before saving/sharing/downloading/using for all national copyrights in the country they are from, in the country the webservice is from, and in the country the copyright holder is from, would simply be so overwhelmed with extra work that all sharing of information would effectively seize.

But it wouldn't be normally punished, right? Fine. So then what's the incentive not to do it? Why is the law there at all? So they can bust just the people who did wrong in a way they didn't agree with? So you mean to say it would be one of those laws that would make everyone a criminal, and allow the people in charge to press charges against only the people they had other reasons to dislike, be it political or personal or whatever.

Unless the vast majority of the lawbreakers are intentional such and can be prosecuted as such, the law is pointless. If most of the people who would be breaking the law had no idea, had valid excuses, and would "normally not be punished", then the law would only be usable arbitrarily, which would be contrary to the concept of justice.

So if you want to argue that the idea is sound, you'll have to argue that the average user, whether 13 or 65 years old, whether tech savvy or not, whether domestic or foreign, has a reasonable possibility to know whether the item they are looking at is infringing on any copyright, anywhere in the jurisdictions it touches (source, server, recipient). I claim that's not a reasonable expectation due to the anonymity of the internet, the multitude of jurisdictions material can be affected by, and the differences in laws in those jurisdictions.

Do you or do you not have an argument for how you could expect normal users to feasibly find this information about some random picture/video/text that they find on the internet, and have no prior knowledge of source or creator or companies involved? (Which covers most material on the internet).

Well, we're of diametrically opposite opinions here, so there's no chance of finding common ground. I'd say however that our core disagreement stems not from any of the things you dove into, but in the very last paragraph. You claim these are border cases. I respectfully disagree. I think a reasonable view of the internet is that the majority of things you find there can not easily be determined whether it's legally reproduced or not. You speak about bordercases, I consider those cases to be the bulk of the paper, while the clearcut cases are in my cases the fringe and unusual ones.

You also fail your task to determine the copyright status of the conversation. No, I'm not american. You made an assumption, which casts your conclusions in doubt. The only way the proposed system could work was if there was less unclear situations than clear situations, and that is simply not the case. For a video that was not "obviously infringing" you say. Again, subjective measure. While we can probably take a guess that a full length feature film is not legitimately uploaded, it's far from a foregone conclusion. Likewise there are all the minor clips from tv-shows and such, which may or may not fall under fair use depending on the jurisdiction they are judged in and the exact status of the copyright from the start. Same goes for anything with a soundtrack on it, unless you know the exact copyright status of the song you can't go making assumptions. I for one am not a great fan of music and so most of the background music I wouldn't recognize - yet it might be criminal not to by the proposed scheme.

The fact that it wouldn't be "normally punished" is not in any way a defense of the plan. When it comes to money there is a clear expectation that it's hard enough to fake that the number of fake notes are incredibly small, thus making this illegal to get them out of circulation makes sense, and can be done with minimal impact to the general population. Especially since hard to fake also means that most of them are fairly easy to spot. The proposed idea on the other hand targets the majority of material available on the internet, is incredibly difficult if not impossible to follow for anyone. To use your own simile, it would be like allowing people to use any currency from any country in the world seamlessly in any store, yet still expect every person to know if any given bill is fake or not. Since each country have different rules it would also mean you'd have to know which country each store was connected to (not always so easy), because if you paid with a bill that particular country didn't like then they'd just take it from you, with no explanations, even though it would be fully legal in the store down the street.

I'm not going to touch whether piracy is "right or wrong" or anything like that, because it's really irrelevant to this discussion. This is about any random joe surfing the internet and saving a picture from the web. This is about your mother forwarding cat pictures. I'd say the only good thing about your idea is that it would kill all memes since it's 100% copyrighted material.

Well, if you made a bad business decision, to be frank that's your problem: always compare prices.

When I got my android phone a year back I researched it extensively, and found that I'd be paying about the same for the phone if I bought it outright or got it with the contract; basically making my purchase a zero-interest loan if I got it with the contract. Since I would have the exact same contract regardless, that cost isn't a factor.

Perhaps this is unique to the Swedish marketplace, or perhaps it was just a fluke with this particular model at that particular time, but the basic premise holds true... Compare prices. And remember that it might be worth a few percent extra cost for the convenience of not having to shell out money up front in some circumstances.

I also usually "choose alternatives that don't cause a blatant poisoning effect on my body." Like water, soft drinks, and so on.

Unless of course I want the effects of alcohol on my system, relaxing with a beer or a drink, some verbal lubrication and so on.

  Arguing that the only distinguishable difference between a non-alcoholic option and an alcoholic option is alcohol sounds like a pretty solid argument to me. Alcoholic drinks does not TASTE better, they are just more pleasant to drink due to the effects. You can argue differently if you wish,. but since taste is subjective and alcoholic drinks much like coffee and cigarettes and other poisons are an acquired taste, you would be arguing from a pretty weak position.

And feel free to call me an alcoholic - I drink alcohol of any kind maybe twice a year on average, so if that makes an alcoholic I'm quite comfortable being one.

On the other hand say places like youtube, where there is plenty of infringing material and plenty of non-infringing material and no way for the regular person to tell them apart, would make your idea hugely problematic, and would lead to a vast amount of "accidental criminals". For example I regularly check out music videos on youtube. Some of them are put up by the artists, some by their labels, some by aggregating services like vevo or whatever their role is, and some by fans. Some of these aren't legally uploaded, other's are. It's not my place as a viewer to know the difference, because that would require me to actually read the contracts between each artist and their label and their distributor and so on...

This example extends to most things. I can't possibly know the exact copyright status of each individual thing I see on the internet. Some books are in the public domain in some countries, yet not in others. How am I as a reader supposed to know the difference? The site can even correctly claim that it's in the public domain, and yet it wouldn't be a legal copy in my country, or some other country, thus by following your proposition making me a criminal.

To put it to the test, all you have to do is understand that if the end viewer is supposed to be guilty of copyright infringement for simply possessing a copy of an infringing work, then there has to be a reasonable expectation that the person can find out if it's infringing. Now tell us how you'd go about finding out if any part of this discussion is copyrighted, and who exactly owns that copyright, and if their copyright agreement allows you to make a local copy of it. Then do the same for something more realistic, like a random video on youtube, a random search result in google, a random picture on flickr.

It bears noting that depending on how far that 3-4 hour round trip actually is, it should be within the range of several modern EV's, which would mean that even you are not driving past EV range. However, there's a large cultural difference as well, some parts of the world has ridiculously low gas prices (such as the US) and large areas, which leads to longer trips. I would offer studies to support my claim for the international market, but I don't have them at hand. I can just match your anecdotal evidence with my own anecdotes - those of my friends who have cars use them to commute with - and if they do anything else it's usually a lot shorter than the commute. Only a few times a year do they go for longer distances, and even of those I can only remember one that would be out of range for an electric vehicle.

As for the volt, yeah, that's a good start. It needs more all-electrical range however... But I'm sure that's being worked on. On the other hand a hybrid is hard to get right. It's hard to get just the benefits of both systems... usually you end up with drawbacks from both of them as well.

The usual arguments are range, economics, and speed. People are worried about the limited range of the vehicles, they feel they are too expensive to buy as well as to own in the long run, and they are not as fast as "regular" cars. All of this is bullshit today.

While range is still limited, the vast majority of vehicles are never driven further than the range of a modern EV. Most people commute a fairly set distance, and the only times they go for longer trips they could easily rent a gas-guzzler and still save money overall... and that's assuming they don't run a hybrid of course, or live in an area where charge stations are put up.

While the economics are an issue, they are getting within range of pretty much everyone. If you can get a loan for a new car you can probably get one for an electric one. Running costs will generally be lower right up until something happens, batteries need to be replaced or some such... but you've hopefully got good insurance/savings for car-related costs anyway.

And speed... Well, given the car mentioned in this article I think we can all agree that's a moot point these days. Production EV's can hold a reasonable speed with ease, and the acceleration will make any speed freak happy.

So why do people not buy electric?

Well, because people don't want a car that can do the speed limit and get them to their job and back. They want a car that can go faster than is legally allowed, looks like a status symbol, has more room than they will ever need, and can do crazy shit that they won't ever actually do, like "off road" or "go to a track day".

Cars are theoretically transportation.. but practically they are toys and fashion. If the electric cars want to make an impact they need to target those markets. Not the practical and usable markets. Otherwise people will always see them as a step down from other options.

Well, unless you can get your browser in a VM to run at the same resource requirements or lower as the standalone browser, there's a usability impact for anyone that ever opens enough tabs or uses enough addons or have a slow enough computer that they bump into the resource ceiling on regular use. That's strike one - while a lot of people run vastly overpowered hardware for regular browsing, even a lot of those have a secondary machine, say a travel laptop, that is not overpowered enough to manage this without stuttering.

Strike two is how long it takes to boot up. The increased system requirements means that on any but the most powerful machines it becomes unrealistic to have the browser "just open" all the time, unless of course you constantly use it - at which point you'll probably bump into strike one again. So booting the program comes into play, and I've yet to see a vm that can fire up from cold as fast as my browser, even if my browser on some of my older machines does indeed take a while - a vm still takes longer. Oh, but you can let the virtual machine suspend, right? Yeah, then you put your content of virtual ram on the harddrive, which is a resource hog.

Strike three is that it's not actually solving the problem the guy asked for. He wanted an anti-virus, and as you so clearly express this has to be used in conjunction with an antivirus product anyway. Not to mention that like I said adblock/noscript/flashblock would protect you just as well from some random adobe flash 0-day exploit, and even if they are not as 100% effective, they catch the vast majority of what is already a very rare occurrence if you don't surf the seedy backalley parts of the net.

Also, copying and pasting is NOT seamless, it requires the extra step of saving to virtual disk, then copying the file out. I'm aware it can be solved with a shared network drive and so on, but this does open a potential attack vector. So you still have to make the tradeoff - make the system more usable, or keep it safe. Which points back to the usability impact, that is as I've put it wasted given the small benefit on safety compared to simpler tools.

Now if you want privacy, a vm is a better choice; running a torified system of some sort, tails or liberté linux for instance. But for virus protection it's just way too much effort for too little good.

I download a few dozen files a day from the internet via my browser, which opens an attack vector since I need to get those files to my host system as seamlessly as possible. This means I need to run an AV, which in turn means the whole VM is pretty much a waste of resources. A simple antivirus paired with adblock and if you can stand it flashblock and noscript will be pretty much as safe as a VM, with none of the huge usability impact.

Yeah, that is nice. Problem is usability goes down. I use adblock, but noscript and flashblock gets pretty bothersome after a while - and the one in a billion sites they protect against that adblock doesn't already block seems to be well within the capabilities of my anti-virus.

The solution is never being perfectly safe, it's being as safe as you can without unduly compromising usability.

That's quite a non sequitur there. Whether the device is mobile or not is irrelevant, as is whether you are home or not. What matters is whether people can see you type in your password. Someone shouldersurfing in your living room is just as bad as someone doing it at the office, or in the subway, or in a library.

We all know you shouldn't log in to a sensitive site from an internet café or similar due to the risk of unfriendly intercepts, and mobile devices have their own security risk (low physical security - they can snatch it while you're logged in and bypass your security all together). This means that if you DO have to log in to a sensitive site from a mobile device it's a security risk to do so around people anyway; totally unrelated to the length of your password.

I'd recommend excusing yourself and heading to the restroom and doing it there, if you can't just find a gap between people and put yourself with your back to a wall. If you can't deal with this then that's your problem, but a longer password does nothing to protect you from the REAL dangers of logging in at a physically insecure location.

Is the way the US act on a global scale a valid concern for personal freedom as a concept? Definitely. Is it an actual problem for MY personal freedom? Not really - at the pace things move it's fairly sure I'll be long dead and buried by the time it could theoretically come to that.

And that's assuming that a country that can't even keep themselves stable right now would somehow manage to get every other major power on the planet to agree with them and do as they want.

To summarize:
Are they trying to influence the world? Sure. In many ways.
Are they succeeding? In a few ways.
Problem? Not really.

Which isn't ever likely to be an issue for your hotmail password. While there are some leaks of password hashes now and then out there on the net, they are pretty rare compared to how many sites that require you to authorize. Saying that your hotmail password has to protect against offline cracking is a bit like saying your car should protect you from meteor strikes.

I'd compare it to learning English if you're (like me) not a native English speaker. It simply opens up opportunities, gives you a chance to interact with a global community without having to learn a hundred different local languages (or use a thousand different smaller sites, in the facebook case), and generally is a tool that can be incredibly useful if you decide to leverage it.

While I am less than thrilled with the way they run their business the fact that one in seven people globally are on there makes it indispensable to have a facebook account, even though I personally barely use it. There have been people I've met that have given me their facebook url for me to contact them with simply because they don't use e-mail or IM systems much, and these days even phones aren't all that popular around here. Getting cut off from that would mean being cut off from a significant subset of human interaction in the modern age.

Having said that, I do hope some better service comes along and overtakes them with a more secure and better functioning system, but given that the average user couldn't care less as long as farmville works it's not very likely. Diaspora for instance sounds great, but it won't go viral any time soon. There's no incentive to make the change for people who don't care about the security aspect.