Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Salon, Privacy, Pricedrops
Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:
"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:
'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"
The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.
Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."
Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."
Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'
$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."
See also the Chilling Effects Weather Report: Bargain Shoppers Chilled by Retailers' DMCA Threats, where we dissect the DMCA safe harbor provision and potential legal claims and responses.
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
They just allow you to get to the premium content if you click through some long Mercedes Benz ad. On a side note, this news is now 4 days old.
While someone has every right to get upset at the sheer volume of political mail received around election time (electronic or otherwise), EFF and the Courts are correct. Political discussion is at the heart of the Constitution and it will be a cold day in hell before there is a successful law to stop it.
As for Elizabeth Dole's decision to use email for communication to her (future) constituents, when there is so much anger over SPAM (eventhough it technically isn't SPAM), is another matter. If I were her political consultant I would have advised against it.
You don't like social Darwinism at all. You've just argued against it.
If a firm manages to get handouts, they have managed to survive somehow, showing that they are adept at something useful for survival (i.e. getting handouts), and that is all that social Darwinism implies.
Darwinism itself is a kind of useless null concept outside the bounds of history (i.e. evolutionary history). It basically states that those things which have survived... did, and those things which haven't... didn't. There is no "deserves to survive" or "doesn't deserve to survive" in natural selection, there is only "those things will survive that have found or adapted a way to survive." It is interested if you want to look backward at a kind of roadmap of development. It is completely uninteresting for predicting what will happen in the future or for explaining what is happening at any given instantaneous observation.
What you've argued is that charity isn't beneficial to society. Whether or not that is true, it has little to do with Darwinism or natural selection.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
What would be next? Deciding that personal speech is less protected than commercial speech? Distinguishing between different kinds of commercial speech, with some more protected than others? I shudder to think of where this could lead.
Any spam law that covers political speech is just as constitutional (or unconstitutional) as it would be if it only covers commercial speech. The right to free speech does NOT include a "right to an audience", nor a "right to be published". You are allowed to speak, but you can't force me to listen. You can mail me a leaflet, but you can't force me to pay the postage. You're not allowed to enter my home to speak to me without my permission; similarly an anti-spam law (if it is properly written) doesn't prevent you from speaking, but only prevents you from making me pay for it.
It might be worth perusing the discussion on OSNews. The argument pro revolves around the question of how much is your time worth, as a non-OS programmer. The argument con hinges on various issues of relevance and desirability (as you point out).
Pepper has a lot for it in that it is an editor that strove from the start to be an outstanding GUI editor. As Hekkelman himself tells in the interview, the architecture has a couple of nice features not really found on other editors (except, perhaps, MPW for Classic Mac OS. Witness the long mourning some regulars to the mpw-dev list go through still to this day): journal-based edit log for unlimited replay (as opposed to merely undo), superior rendering, virtual file editing, programmable syntax highligting, etc. Many Open Source text widgets could benefit enormously from importing/integrating Pepper code.
Then again, maybe not. Editors tend to be a notoriously religious bone of contention.
At least, I just went to the site, and the lead article among many others is marked "Premium only".
It is true that all the non-premium content has huge interstitials as well as inlined ads for non-subscribers, but that's been true for ages now.
At least they don't have popunders. Actually, I am a subscriber, so it matters little to me what advertising they do if I am not exposed to it. I suppose I should note that banner ads and ads down the sides are still there for me, but the really intrusive ones are gone.
- target
This was a major contributing fact in not getting enough warning in advance to stop September 11th.
Now they want everything in the USA, multiplying the effect by an order of magnitude or so. Multipying it in the wrong direction.
Imagine trying to find the one drop of pure water, while drinking with a straw, from a sewer pipe in Manhattan. Not a pretty picture.
This with an agency office with a research budget of a few million dollars. Obviously Poindexter is seeing this as a growth industry.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If I claimed you must accept my collect call because I have a right to speak, most people would tell me to take a hike. Make the same claim for SPAM, however, and a lot of otherwise sensible folks nod their head and point to the First Amendment. Nonsense! Freedom of speech is not absolute. Just like a punch in the nose - your rights end where my nose (and my pocket) begins.
Directly or indirectly, SPAM is taking my time and my money without my permission. The fact that each individual message costs most people only a small amount is immaterial. The fact that the cost of each SPAM is not itemized, but is buried in a monthly ISP or circuit cost is immaterial. Collectively, SPAM costs very real money. SPAM now accounts for roughtly 40% of all e-email. That's a tremendous expense, and it's growing. I wonder if the apologists would be so sanguine if they got a separate $8 bill for their helping of SPAM every month.
IMHO, it's pretty simple. Yes, you have the right to speak. No, I do NOT have to pay for your desire to do so. Period.
First Amendment law is tough, largely because it deals with fuzzy questions framed in an endless variety of fact patterns. There is a lot of balancing going on, and few hard rules.
The distinction between commercial and political speech is one such compromise. (Remember there is also plain old expressive speech that covers expressive activity such as books and movies and nude dancing. And there's also speech that's unprotected, such as obscenity, criminal conspiracy, fighting words, libel, copyright violations....) Some conservative would have only political speech protected, leaving a hot debate over what kind of speech is political. If you want to get really strict, go back to WWI or earlier, when sedition laws were broadly interpreted and war protesters jailed for criticizing the government. Others would take the all-or-nothing approach you suggest, such as some left-wingers or libertarians. Then there an infinite number of shadings between the extremes.
Here is an overview of the legal doctrine of commercial speech, including a timeline -- I simply googled this journalist-oriented site and can't vouch for its accuracy, although my skim of it suggests it is quite objective. It has a general 1st A. resource as well, very readable. The ACLU and EFF certainly have a lot to say about speech, but are more partisan.
I won't defend the state of the law nor reject it wholesale, but I acknowledge is it complicated. I'm fairly confident that the commercial speech distinction is not going away, and that it is a useful accommodation in dealing with a difficult problem -- peruse the case law and see, and perhaps you'll agree.
Enjoy! HTH.
P.S. Ah yes, one more thing -- the thing that the 1st A. doesn't entitle you to a printing press, i.e., subsidies, is true but not perfect. The fact is that unsolicited political email costs us very little (yes, I realize we pay for it through ISP fees -- pennies), what a court might label "de minimis." And even if it collectively amounts to a lot, that doesn't matter for 1st A. analysis because you can only blame a given politician for the 8 emails she sent personally, not for the cumulative effect of 1000 politicians and political groups, and not at all for typical commericial spam which is an entirely separate analytical Q.
If you still think of political UBE as an unbearable invasion, or complain about the waste of your time, consider that it is 100% legal for that same politician to call you on the phone or come to your door. (No, they don't have a right to drive you crazy if you tell them to go away, nor to keep sending emails after you ask them to stop.) Personally, I would prefer the email.
Practically, political email is likely self-limiting because the last thing a politician or political group wants to do is alienate voters.
I, obviously, am not the sniper (of course, two excellent suspects are in custody now)
.223-caliber, not .220. How's that for hair-splitting, and why are there two such similar calibers? Never mind.
You haven't heard they're looking for a third sniper? What was your name again?
Actually, the ammunition used was
Knowing who is buying ammunition might be constructive for the same reason as knowing who is buying guns. Yes, I know the whole gun control song and dance -- I'm not on either side -- but after we had one of those sniper attacks just down the road I have to wonder about it, and ballistic fingerprinting and so on. Like anything in investigatory law enforcement, there is a difficult balancing of privacy and gov't intrusion.
Anyway, I don't want my purchases, movements, thoughts tracked in the slightest. I have nothing to hide, so go away. I'm terribly curious where all this is headed.
Oh, as for traveling with anonymity, have you noticed all those surveillance cameras going up? It's only a matter of time before they can read license plates and recognize faces. Technology.