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"'After a brief glance at much open source software development, it becomes readily apparent that a number of open source practices directly conflict with best practices associated with protecting intellectual property.'"

Well hey, I am not so much concerned with the best practices associated with protecting "intellectual property" - I am more concerned with the best practices for creating and using and profiting from "intellectual property" - specifically copyrighted works. I think the GPL and other "copyleft" licenses, serve me quite well in these areas.

If these other three are maximised, what do I care if protection is not?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=JohnConst antakisdrewRobertsRainwaterBlues&PHPSESSID=dbb37e7 61c339fb4da8e446132b483b0

I've spoken about distaste for pirating here in the past, but as the manager of an indie rock band, I'll also swear by P2P as a promotion mechanism.

Small bands make virtually nothing from club appearances. The money, at least at the beginning, is in merchandise- t-shirts, stickers, and CDs.

Every last one of them provides free downloads on sites such as Pure Volume or on My Space They still realize CD sales at performances and via web purchase as they chase the holy grail- the record contract.

File trading has, does, and will still work as part of a comprehensive business model. The Grateful Dead certainly did rather well considering that nearly everything they ever did can be downloaded from Archive.org.

P2P becomes dicey when a group's success is predicated on album sales, and not performance money. I don't think a lot of Steely Dan albums would have ever surfaced if P2P was a dominant medium in their period.

Most importantly though, it is still a decision that the artists must make- do they want to sacrifice the financial protection offered by copyright law or open the doors in hopes of atracting an audience. In the first, they've got a business entity whose hands are in the pot- in the latter, they are self-promoting and hoping to realize the success that brings.

If you want to see an example of how indie bands at their best work, check out Monty's Fan Club and see what a small band from Rhode Island can do with P2P and a willingness to get the music out there.

In the meantime, I'm going downstairs to get my kids to turn the damn guitars down.

OGG - theora and vorbis perhaps. Yes, I agree.

"I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate."

Dude, I bremembah you now. Why didn't ya say so sooner?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A %22drew%20Roberts%22

I will second that request. If you are really trying to benefit the public, try a format that is Free please.

all the best,

drew

I was indeed taught that "beggers can't be choosers," but I am not begging, just giving "a word to the wise."

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=JohnConst antakisdrewRobertsRainwaterBlues

Why is Tyro Rex no longer among us?

Let us consult the seasonal Rock Opera:

TYRO REX SUPERSAUR

OVERTURE; BIGNESS FOR OUR SIZE

GORGOS

The air is colder now - at last all too fast
I can see that we all soon will freeze
If you melt away the frost from the ground
It won't help and we still soon will freeze

Tyro! You've started to believe
The things they say of ice
You really do believe
That cold blood will suffice
And all your scaly friends
Will soon get frozen stiff
You're now moving slower than
Continental drift

Listen Tyro I don't like these cold days
All I ask is that we feel the sun's rays
And remember - we have been symbiotic all these years
Now the situation's dire
They think they never will expire
And they don't believe the snow is here

I remember when Cretaceous began
No talk of cold then - we all could get tans
And believe me - it wasn't bad when it was nice and warm
You deny the chance of death
Still we can see your frosty breath
For the glaciers have begun to form

Triassic your favorite fool should have stayed a miniscule
Like his father sucking eggs - and small hind legs
Benedicts and omelettes should be all he ever gets
He'd have left us all alone - he'd have stayed home

Listen Tyro do you care for your class?
Don't you see that this diet can't last?
We are carnosaurs - have you forgotten how hungry we are?
I am sick of eating plants
For they are often filled with ants
And they make digestion very hard

Listen Tyro it's the end of our age
Don't you see they've begun a new page
And it's sad to see our species dwindling with every hour
Now it's time for our demise
Too much bigness for our size
But it was great to be a dinosaur
Yes a dinosaur

---

The complete rock opera is posted for your edification by kind permission of the author here in the way-way-way-back machine

"Or, worded differently, did the govt. help pay to put in their system?"

Yes, normally minimally by giving a monopoly which allowed them to charge HIGHER rates to the customers. (Who are the government in the US right. By the people, for the people and all that.)

I also imagine often by giving access/right of way permissions at less than market value.

Often the government/law forces the power company to allow access to the poles. Yes? No?

all the best,

drew

Money where my mouth is link:

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=druncerta inty

"They prohibit another cable company from laying cable. So no one can compete, even if they wanted to lay their own cable."

Strange thing is, people/companies who have deals like this like to sing the praises of the free market whenever anyone suggests sensible government regulations of their markets.

all the best,

drew

Money where my mouth is link:

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=druncerta inty

"I find this hard to belive. What happened to due process?"

With possible jail time, (loss of right to vote if convicted?) and hugh statutory damages, most cannot afford the risk of fighting.

"As long as they aren't defenceless, as long as these people can use the law (in general) to defend themselves against the law (this particular one), i wouldn't call it "terrorist.""

Not saying terrorist should apply, but why not? They seem to think pirate and thief apply.

However, what is defenceless? Totally defenceless? Who is? Everyone has some means of defence to try, however foolish and ultimately ineffective. If this were a true test, there could be no terrorists ever. Right? Whone?

all the best,

drew

Money where my mouth is link:

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=dragirl

"That is a modern trick."

I don't know how modern it is, I will leave that up to others with knowledge in the area, however, it certainly is a trick and a dirty one at that.

Most often seen around here with the words:

Thief
Stealing
Pirate
Piracy

To fight back, I suggest we start calling the big media companies who have been caught price fixing and/or writing dirty contracts so as to turn copyright law which they claim is to protect the artists to their benefit and to the ruin of many of their "beloved" artists...

Rapists

Does one good dirty trick deserve another?

I would prefer it if someone had a more gentlemanly idea as to how to counteract these memes.

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Copyrigh t_Term_Reform/Meme_development

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Copyrigh t_Term_Reform/Default

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:Cop yright_Term_Reform/Default

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Copyrigh t_Term_Reform/Taxation

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:Cop yright_Term_Reform/Taxation

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=JohnConst antakisdrewRobertsRainwaterBlues&PHPSESSID=c3cb624 17e961e49576b2e5cfdc92b9a

"I bet if government ran the phone companies and telecom, we could get service for pennies on the dollar."

Don't be naive. You would lose your bet. In my country (The Bahamas) the government owns and runs the telco, electric, water & sewerage, airline, tv station, and radio stations. All monopolies for most of my life. Things are easing up a bit lately.

I hear figures that more than 20% of the workforce in the country is government employed. This has large economic effects sure, but also large political effects for a democracy.

Until the last year, the telco rate for a long distance call to Miami (roughly 185 miles from where I live) was 99 cents a minute. The electricity is constantly going out. In the summer, they load shed so you can expect a several hour plus outage on a regular basis. It is illegal (as far as I know) to go off grid and generate your own power if the power company can supply you (however poorly.)

If you have better that this, you don't want what we have.

Don't get me wrong, life is good here anyway. It is just sad that it could easily be so much better.

What I think you should want for a start is for your government to ensure no monopoly or cartel type foolishness. Then to properly oversee any markets where they are not fully free. (This probably covers more markets than most of us realise or think.) As to whether this proper oversite is possible, who knows. Anyone have and actual current or past examples?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=JohnConst antakisdrewRobertsRainwaterBlues

Regarding webmail providers' response to gmail (the 1GB storage in particular), I think mail.com's response is the most laughable. While yahoo and hotmail respond by increasing their quota, mail.com just remove the line 10MB mailbox from their front page.

Besides that, mail.com also joined the crowd and added a link to "Report Message as Spam". However, they don't even have a working spam filter. (They are still using the ancient method that you tell the system a list of sender email addresses that you want to block.)

that would be
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=mo vies&identifier=episode_1051
or
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=mo vies&identifier=episode_1052

that would be
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=mo vies&identifier=episode_1051
or
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=mo vies&identifier=episode_1052

But what's the point? Why expend all that effort on obfuscating code when there are languages with obfuscation already built in?

I thought the psuedo-videos were one of the best parts. The only one I've been able to find still online is the Momentum Morrissey parody, but Archive.org still has a few .wav's of the SOUNDS OF SCIENCE in the Wayback Machine.

I have often looked to MySQL's html documentation as a shining example of what documentation should be like. It has a pretty good API, too. I usually haven't the time to do a really knock-up job of my own documentation, but I do try to look at MySQL's for my general approach, including the format (html). Here's an example of some of my documentation. I borrowed some pointers from the standard UNIX man page format, too, because it's been in use for a long time and developed into something reasonably complete and useful.

Another good example (imo) is the RFC which defines the NNTP protocol, rfc-977.

Know your audience -- the HOWTO I wrote was primarily for nonprogrammers with rudimentary knowledge of UNIX command line use (waybackup's primary expected users), but also for programmers who might be trying to debug or extend my code.

The most important thing with a SDK or any other tool, in my opinion, is use it a lot before publishing it, or even considering its development complete. Don't just come up with artificial examples, but actually use it internally to solve real-world problems. Your developers will unavoidingly find really annoying little problems in need of fixing, and come up with time-saving functions (perhaps just wrappers around already-existing API functions) which might need to be added to the SDK. Perhaps there's a function which seemed reasonable at the time, but in actual practice leads to runaway memory consumption. Maybe there are several functions which often get used together, but require the programmer to keep track of parameters which could get hidden internally instead. A nice long beta test, with the expectation of many programmer hours spent in reaction to user-reported errors/suggestions, is also often a good thing.

In fact, as a programmer I usually tailor my development effort towards getting something minimally useful first, and then actually use it, and let my use define further development. Features that sound good "on paper" are often a waste of time to develop because they don't actually get used. Also, thinking real hard at code does not necessarily make it better than code which has been shaped by real-world usage.

Anyway, I'll shut up now. Good luck with your SDK!

-- TTK

It's slow, but at least it's still up! Archive.Org Mirror

the CNN world link is (I formatted it in a way slashdot ate) http://web.archive.org/web/20010903*/http://cnn.co m/2001/WORLD*

August 2001 sfgate.com
http://web.archive.org/web/200108*/http://sfgate.c om/*

9553 unique pages. The front page they got less often, but they were still getting articles on all these site all along.


CNN 2001/WORLD articles from 9/03/2001 I guess they forgot some, you can pick any date and get articles. They are there and were picked up. What more do you want?

Can this scale exponentially for the next decade? Who knows? But for as far as we can see, the Archive tells us they can handle what we throw at them. They've got the resources and Peta-boxes to spare. If it weren't for the Archive, this couldn't happen. -- jd

I got the hunkering a few years ago to build my own wood computer.

I dubbed it "The Fossil Computer", based on the fish fossil I have as a badge. The buttons and CD cover are hand-made out of brass. The wood was made on a milling machine. It turned out amazingly beautiful.

On the down side, a solid wood case is quite heavy. It's also an excellent insulator so I had to be careful with airflow.

Here's a cache

This page tells how archive.org obtains its funding.

In case of a slashdotting, here's a mirror of OurMedia on the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ourmedia.o rg

/ironic

It appears the design for the kernelthread.com site is a rip-off of an older version of CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's blog site. Compare the site's design to this version pulled out of The Wayback Machine. Time to let Pirated Sites know. And this from somebody who works at IBM? I'm sure somebody at SCO would find this amusing...

It appears the design for the kernelthread.com site is a rip-off of an older version of CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's blog site. Compare the site's design to this version pulled out of The Wayback Machine. Time to let Pirated Sites know. And this from somebody who works at IBM? I'm sure somebody at SCO would find this amusing...

Sorry, but I think in this case Yahoo's presentation is cleaner and more usable than the old geocities site. I know people 'round here like to jizz all over Google, but the fact is that Yahoo has improved the clutter greatly. Google is still my primary search engine, but I visited yahoo the other day and was fairly impressed. Compare their current page with this or this. Their yellow pages/maps served me better than google's offerings for my most recent visit *gasp*.

Say what you want about Yahoo, but I work in a university computer lab and I see people spend oodles of time over at launch (remember when they were a cd mag?) and YahooGames. They've got more eyeballs and spend more on R&D and more profitable than Google. See?

Having said that, it's hard to see how they could possibly integrate Flickr properly but don't discount them offhand because they are not "teh g00gle"

Sorry, but I think in this case Yahoo's presentation is cleaner and more usable than the old geocities site. I know people 'round here like to jizz all over Google, but the fact is that Yahoo has improved the clutter greatly. Google is still my primary search engine, but I visited yahoo the other day and was fairly impressed. Compare their current page with this or this. Their yellow pages/maps served me better than google's offerings for my most recent visit *gasp*.

Say what you want about Yahoo, but I work in a university computer lab and I see people spend oodles of time over at launch (remember when they were a cd mag?) and YahooGames. They've got more eyeballs and spend more on R&D and more profitable than Google. See?

Having said that, it's hard to see how they could possibly integrate Flickr properly but don't discount them offhand because they are not "teh g00gle"

It's free, damn good, and legal:

http://bt.etree.org/
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

Berkeley Groks can be interesting science program. They've had some top notch guests for interview too. Their xylophone linking music is classic :)

Can be got either here:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/
or
http://www.archive.org/audio/collection.php?collec tion=groks

The audio section of the archive.org has great live music sets freely available too. There are also famous speeches available.

I remember stumbling across a free audio book site some time ago. Not sure of the quality. You might want to check it out.
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp

The Flickr guys say that they'll remain separate. I fail to see how much say Ludicorp have left seeing as this appears to be a total buyout.

Yahoo! will do what they have always done, and subsume the functionality into their own, and slap it's own design on to boot. Unfortunately, unlike the Borg, Yahoo! does not look cool. The design of Yahoo! is as poor (both in ugliness and usability) today as it has always been. One of Flickr's many strengths (apart from the obvious technological ones) is that the designers always seemed to recognise the importance of *white space*. Flickr makes my photos look good. It looks professional, but it doesn't take the focus away from the photo. If Yahoo! forces the its unique brand of boring, cluttered onto the site, the usability and visual appeal is going to go down the drain. And isn't visual appeal part of why we take photos?

Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.

Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking.

The Flickr guys say that they'll remain separate. I fail to see how much say Ludicorp have left seeing as this appears to be a total buyout.

Yahoo! will do what they have always done, and subsume the functionality into their own, and slap it's own design on to boot. Unfortunately, unlike the Borg, Yahoo! does not look cool. The design of Yahoo! is as poor (both in ugliness and usability) today as it has always been. One of Flickr's many strengths (apart from the obvious technological ones) is that the designers always seemed to recognise the importance of *white space*. Flickr makes my photos look good. It looks professional, but it doesn't take the focus away from the photo. If Yahoo! forces the its unique brand of boring, cluttered onto the site, the usability and visual appeal is going to go down the drain. And isn't visual appeal part of why we take photos?

Geocities was no looker that's for sure, but at least it looked like it had some creativity left in its soul.

Yahoo! stopped that cadaver kicking.

Berkeley Groks Science Radio
Tse Chen Ling Buddhist Lectures
Conference Proceedings
and of course: Live Music Archive

Berkeley Groks Science Radio
Tse Chen Ling Buddhist Lectures
Conference Proceedings
and of course: Live Music Archive

Berkeley Groks Science Radio
Tse Chen Ling Buddhist Lectures
Conference Proceedings
and of course: Live Music Archive

Berkeley Groks Science Radio
Tse Chen Ling Buddhist Lectures
Conference Proceedings
and of course: Live Music Archive

I listen to NPR almost exclusively as far as radio goes. Usually BBC World news in the morning, by the drive home they always have interesting interviews with people from the world of arts or politics. Sometimes they have the bad habit of going into one topic too heavily (tsunami) and you get sick and tired of hearing about it 3 hours a day, every day.

Otherwise, you can find some stuff on Internet Archive's Audio section. They have some interesting bits, namely:

Berkeley Groks Science Radio - a weekly radio science program broadcasting on KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley, CA. Each week, your hosts, Charles Lee and Frank Ling, take an in depth look at recent events in the world of science and technology, and examine the effects of recent discoveries on our daily lives.

Conference Proceedings - This audio collection features a selection of spoken-word speeches and lectures from (often tech-oriented) conferences, stored for posterity here in a wide range of audio formats. The Internet Archive is indebted to O'Reilly & Associates for their permission to archive the ETCON 2004 and Digital Democracy 2004 recordings, the Zap Your PRAM 2003 conference organizers for uploading their recordings, the Wizards Of OS 3 organizers and uploaders, the speakers themselves for their excellent talks, and Doug Kaye at IT Conversations for his O'Reilly-related excellent recording, uploading, and metadata work.

Failing that, just wget en.wikipedia.org and have BonziBuddy read it to you.

However, y'all never tire of telling us how you live in the greatest democracy on earth, so, why do you all vote republicrat? or not vote at all?

The people here who object to these kinds of stupid laws probably aren't the same people who claim the US is the greatest democracy on earth; a substantial number would even point out that we don't live in a democracy at all.

I don't know about the congressional elections but in the last two presidential elections the public has NOT elected the Bush regime. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote by 543987 votes, not even counting vote tampering, yet won the electoral vote. In the 2004 election, there is considerable evidence of tampering and exit polls show that kerry was the real winner of the election.

As much as I would prefer to vote for an independent candidate, such votes are unfortunately entirely thrown away except in elections that are not remotely close. In the 2000 election, Gore would probably have had enough electoral votes to win if those people who voted for Nader (all of who would have prefered Gore over Bush) had not wasted their votes on Nader or if we had a statistically valid method of voting such as instant runoff voting . Our existing method of counting votes (even when the votes are actually counted in compliance with the law and without the electoral college fiasco) is inherently inaccurate when there are more than two parties.

Before I knew about instant runoff elections, I had a different proposal that was better than the current system but not as good as instant runoff. Instead of giving each person a single vote for a candidate, give them one vote for or against. I.E. Instead of voting for Kerry, you could vote against Bush. Which far more accurately reflects what many people are trying to do in the voting booths - we vote against the most evil candidate not for the best one. This system, however, does have the possibility of electing spurious independent candidates. Imagine Dubya getting negative ten million votes, Kerry getting negative 5 million votes, the green party getting negative 1 million votes, and write in candidate Bob Nobody winning the election with positive 3 votes. The book Archimedes' Revenge has an interesting chapter on game theory and voting as well as the Alabama Paradox .

What we need in this country for the presidential elections is

• Instant runoff elections
• It most be provable whether or not votes are counted correctly. Electronic voting machines that give a receipt for every vote. Each receipt would have a unique (but not sequential or tied to voter identity) serial number. When the election results are tallied, the serial numbers of every vote counted would be listed in a file availible for public download. Watchdog organizations would let people log into their websites and check that their vote was counted. Ideally, the receipt would be printed in triplicate (with the ability to identify which copy was which) in human and machine readable form. The first copy stays on a roll inside the voting machine for recounts. The voter takes home the second copy. And the voter takes the third copy and drops it anonymously in the box maintained outside the polling place by the Watchdog group of their choice. If voters are worried about being accosted by thugs outside the poling place, they can discard both of their receipts into the trash or watchdog bins. David Chaum's cryptographically obfuscated receipt system provides more security against people seeing your receipt but is more confusing overall.
• Eliminate the electoral college.

As for co

"Of course I understand it - I read it very carefully before choosing it for my own work."

Great, so did I. (This is an honest compliment, not a sarcastic statement. I like to give credit where credit is due.)

I have also been using CC BY-SA for my "artistic" work:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A %22drew%20Roberts%22

"Given the opportunity and means to do so, do you honestly believe that they wouldn't? I don't."

Seems thay have the means and the opportunity and choose to follow a different path.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 3/18/0315241&tid=117

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/15/14 39219&tid=117

I do notice that you chose not to address some of the points I made such as this one:

"So, why should it be odd that people who like the gpl should not like using copyright to take away freedom?"

or this one:

"Generally, there is a reaction when people use copyright as an instrument of greed, or ignore copyright to further their greed. Yes? No?"

Please note, I am not trying to justify these points of view, just explain or discuss them. Would you care to?

all the best,

drew

"Without it, anyone could steal your code and use it how they wish. Microsoft could make a proprietary Linux and sell it and market it to take over."

No they couldn't, there would be no law to allow them to do so... Think about it.

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drthedeep end&PHPSESSID=5a45ea245d366a6482b5cb2688c62720

It was, leaves open the question if this is normal indexing, but google does seem to disregard robots.txt for indexing news.

"News agencies sell their raw-stories to news sites. Google can easily remove a news site from their news index, but excluding some articles from a news agency appearing on various news sites is difficult..."

So, the news agency should be suing the news site for not having robots.txt set up properly, not google. Yes? No?

But to short circuit the whole thing, how about the equivalent of robots.txt be developed for comment fields for all binary files and as a simple code to include in all text files?

Is this doable? Would it help?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drthedeep end&PHPSESSID=895ce88a62b1eac346df2cd64a8a2a7b

Time to go back. How far back? Wayback. http://web.archive.org/web/20010418183951/http://w ww.afp.com/robots.txt

"Assume the total amount of VOIP traffic that wants to move across a telco's network is some number. Let's call that number 11"

I am right there with you, but have you asked Nigel for his opinion?

When is someone going to 12 though?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drtheonly one

"But the solution is not to restrict what business Service Providers go into, it's to make sure they clearly label what business they are in."

This would probably be a fine plan (I really mean that) if there were no monopolies involved anywhere in the chain. Once we have government granted monopolies or government regulated entities in the chain, all bets are off and we need sensible regulation, or we need to totally free the market.

Can anyone actually point to any large scale, totally free market?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drthedeep end

Would it be fair to say:

"A Free Market is necessary but not sufficient."

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drnippers

"If I am a public company, it is my job to maximize profits for my shareholders."

Do we need to rethink this basic proposition with respect to corporations?

"I am not defending monopolies, and agree they stifle competition, which in turn limits societal progress, but to just say "forbid monopolies" is somewhat ridiculous."

You have monopolies which form and those which the government grants.

How about if a government grants a monopoly to a corporation, the shares of that corporation can only be owned by people (human beings) living in the area to which the monopoly applies AND that corporation can participate in no other markets - period!

Now as to those which form. Investigate if there was any hanky panky in the formation and monitor closely for misuse of the power held. If so, deal with it.

Problems with these thoughts?

"On a side note, if you want to look at what is really screwing things up, look at the history of corporate innovation."

Is this really a side note or a direct consequence of the first thing I quoted at the top of this post?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=dragirl

"I still say utilities should be government run and regulated. Let's see what's happened with deregulation:"

Hmmm, run I don't know. And regulated? When have they actually done a good job.

Now, in my country the government owns the electrical monopoly (you are not allowed by law to generate your own power even if the government power is substandard and not meeting your needs so long as it is there,) they own the telephone monopoly (actually one competitor just started up,) they own the water monopoly (you have to hook up to them and pay a minimum fede even if you do not use their water becuase you use your own well or rain water tank,) they own the national airline which had a local monopoly on scheduled flights until the last five years or so, and I could go on. I have heard figures that above 20% of the workforce is government employeed.

Do not go thinking this is a recipe for joy and hapiness.

If someone gives me a company that say, provides people with phone service and I'm the ONLY company providing that to those people"

Is it possible that the problem is that you are the ONLY company providing the service and not that it is a company providing the service?

How about if all governments were prohibited from purchasing products or services from less than three suppliers/providers. With no less that three suppliers from top to bottom in the chain.

I will agree though that since deregulation the airline service in the US is worse that I remember. Is this because there is still government regulation in the market? I think the FM airwaves are worse than they used to be as well. Some of these issues are very tough to wrap your head around if you care about honest results above your pet theories.

"Capitalism shot itself in the foot with deregulation and (as above posters have pointed out) allowing monopolies to run unchecked."

I will comment again that we need to be carefule with mixing the ideas of capitalism and free markets and if we mean both, somehow indicate that.

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drgoingno where

"Am I missing something..."

You are missing something which is the fact that the ISP business rides on top of another business for which they do have the monopoly. No?

How can this issue be corrected? Do we need a law that says if a company has a government granted monopoly in a market, they cannot participate in any other markets?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drmidlife rev

"And just how does this disprove capitalism? Are you saying that since some (not all) of the ISPs are tagging in order to give better throughput to their own products, that that is anti-capitalistic?"

And do these ISPs that will supposedly be doing the tagging all have no monopoly positions granted by some government entity somewhere?

I have not lived in the states since the 80s and before that the 70s but back then I seem to recall the local cable companies had monopolies. Is the market for cable and phone totally free and unregulated these days?

If not, you already have government regulation and you are arguing against someone who want's sensible regulation. I take it you want all regulation removed, not non-sensical regulation.

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drbeauty