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Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
netcetra writes "From a post by on CircleID by Phillip J. Windley: 'Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the Net at Linux Journal. ... if you take the time to read just one essay on the Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one.' Quote from Doc himself: 'This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.' Also see additional background on the piece on Doc Searls blog."
In other media such as television and radio, it takes a great deal of resouces to be able to broadcast your information outward. Anyone can connect to the internet, and unless ISPs suddenly find the motivation and the money to start taking fine tuned control over what every user does, anyone can host their own information and data.
as if millions of bytes of ram screamed in agony, and were suddenly silenced. /.ed before any comments isn't a good sign.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
So if this is so important to read, why is it being posted so late at night in the region where this article should have the most impact.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, he could have made it longer, but probably would have made even less sense than it does now. Searls never seems to be able to write anything that is easily understandable except by the small group of people who think just like he does. Sorry, but one comment in a single article by an SBC flak does not the end of the Internet make.
...still one of my favorite sins.
That and pride are the two things causing the current dark ages of the internet.
And make no mistake, we are in what future scholars will call the dark ages. We have this wonderful tool for communication which would enable vast networks of not just information, but concepts and ideas to be shared globally. And we are letting ( yes, letting ) big companies/governments take control and destroy this wonderful tool. All to satisfy some board of share holders, or some CEO's pride.
Whether they see us as the depth of the dark ages, or the beginning is the question I worry about.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The other option to clean up the internet is teaching people the correct use of THEIR, THERE and THEY'RE.
Not to mention TWO, TOO and TO.
Don't forget about YOU'RE, YOUR and YORE.
Oops, almost forgot ITS and IT'S.
signatures are for fools with hands
Don't forget about boog3r and booger.
and maybe we can keep the net free...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Don't forget the neverending LOSE/LOOSE problem, a personal crusade of mine.
I know all kinds of smart people try really hard to predict things like this, and they give all sorts of explanations that "support" their position. But here is why the Internet won't go away: it is useful, and people like it.
If you look throughout history, in all cultures, if people find something to be useful, no amount of government or corporate intervention or regulation will dissuade those people from doing what they want. Despite most citizens not giving a shit about voting in government elections, very few people will stand by and allow a government or corporation to take away something they want. It just does not happen. This happens all over the world, in all cultures, and when this stand-off becomes a big enough event, it makes the news as a "revolution".
So no, the internet isn't going to be flushed down the tubes by ISPs or whatever, because consumers will not allow it.
What are you, an idiot?
First of all, it's impossible to force everyone to do anything. Second, it's impossible to massively delete every single site on the Internet. Third, even if you got every "web-host" to assist you, you still wouldn't get half the sites because they're hosted directly on the owner's machine. Fourth, web sites are not the Internet. There's IRC, Usenet, email, ftp, and about a million other protocols -- there's even still gopher!
Finally, and most importantly, your entire idea is wrong. It's exactly the opposite of what the Internet is supposed to be, which is unmonitored and Free.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Slashdot: "Commenting now with 50% less guilt!"
Check out Tim Lee's lengthy response. He argues (and I suspect most Slashdotters will agree) that, "The Internet is a massive, chaotic, fiercely competitive ecosystem. No one carrier owns more than a tiny fraction of its capacity. No one company controls more than a tiny fraction of its content. In short, no one company is ever going to control the Internet." The complete rebuttal is available at http://www.techliberation.com/archives/027010.php
widespread.
2.2M represents less than 1% of the population, and the reality is it is a small percentage of repeat offenders.
You want widespread?
Copyright violation is being estimated by the media industries to be occuring on the rate of millions of offenses per day. Millions of users are logged onto P2P networks primarily for copyright infringement purposes (I said primarily, not exclusively).
Minor excess speeding tickets hit a large percentage of the population (upwards of 40% depending on jurisdiction and technologies being applied). That will definitely go up in the UK if/when they roll out those beautiful new speed cams.
Drug crimes hit a large percentage of the population. Sure, lots of people are in jail for violent crimes. But 1 person in 30 in the USA are in jail are because of drug crimes, the majority of those for simple possession. Estimates range, but the low estimates for teenage illicit drug use (one-time or more) is at around 25%.
Those are widespread numbers. Violent crimes (I'm sorry 12,000 murders is not a lot in a population of 280 million) are not. You just hear about the violence a lot whenever you listen to Fox News or whenever the police or government are trying to take your rights away. Even with the drug violence, long term violent crime rates continue to decline.
I usually link people to this quick guide to apostrophe use.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Can someone please post it.
Only commenting on the article post... it's the "bad guys" that made the internet what it is, including raising the bar in bandwidth requirements and security. Balance without "bad guys" in any environment is impossible. If it weren't for RIAA smashing napster, we probably wouldn't have torrents (at least not yet). Balance.
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
By Doc Searls on Wed, 2005-11-16 02:00. Industry News
We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.
-
This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.
Here's a brief outline of the article. If you want to go straight to the solution, skip to the third section:
Scenario I: The Carriers Win
Scenario II: The Public Workaround
Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds
-
Scenario I: The Carriers Win
Be afraid. Be very afraid. --Kevin Werbach.
Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?
Do you believe a free and open market should be "Your choice of walled garden" or "Your choice of silo"? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.
And we're not stopping it.
With the purchase and re-animation of AT&T's remains, the collection of former Baby Bells called SBC will become the largest communications company in the US--the new Ma Bell. Verizon, comprised of the old GTE plus MCI and the Baby Bells SBC didn't grab, is the new Pa Bell. That's one side of the battlefield, called The Regulatory Environment. Across the battlefield from Ma and Pa Bell are the cable and entertainment giants: Comcast, Cox, TimeWarner and so on. Covering the battle are the business and tech media, which love a good fight.
The problem is that all of these battling companies--plus the regulators--hate the Net.
Maybe hate is too strong of a word. The thing is, they're hostile to it, because they don't get it. Worse, they only get it in one very literal way. See, to the carriers and their regulators, the Net isn't a world, a frontier, a marketplace or a commons. To them, the Net is a collection of pipes. Their goal is to beat the other pipe-owners. To do that, they want to sell access and charge for traffic.
There's nothing wrong with being in the bandwidth business, of course. But some of these big boys want to go farther with it. They don't see themselves as a public utility selling a pure base-level service, such as water or electricity (which is what they are, by the way, in respect to the Net). They see themselves as a source of many additional value-adds, inside the pipes. They see opportunities to sell solutions to industries that rely on the Net--especially their natural partner, the content industry.
They see a problem with freeloaders. On the tall end of the power curve, those 'loaders are AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other large sources of the container cargo we call "content". Out on the long tail, the freeloaders are you and me. The big 'loaders have been getting a free ride for too long and are going to need to pay. The Information Highway isn't the freaking interstate. It's a system of private roads that needs to start charging tolls. As for the small 'loaders, it hardly matters that they're a boundless source of invention, innovation, vitality and new business. To the carriers, we're all still just "consumers". And we always will be.
"P
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
By Doc Searls on Wed, 2005-11-16 02:00. Industry News
We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.
This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.
Here's a brief outline of the article. If you want to go straight to the solution, skip to the third section:
*
Scenario I: The Carriers Win
*
Scenario II: The Public Workaround
*
Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds
Scenario I: The Carriers Win
Be afraid. Be very afraid. --Kevin Werbach.
Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?
Do you believe a free and open market should be "Your choice of walled garden" or "Your choice of silo"? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.
And we're not stopping it.
With the purchase and re-animation of AT&T's remains, the collection of former Baby Bells called SBC will become the largest communications company in the US--the new Ma Bell. Verizon, comprised of the old GTE plus MCI and the Baby Bells SBC didn't grab, is the new Pa Bell. That's one side of the battlefield, called The Regulatory Environment. Across the battlefield from Ma and Pa Bell are the cable and entertainment giants: Comcast, Cox, TimeWarner and so on. Covering the battle are the business and tech media, which love a good fight.
The problem is that all of these battling companies--plus the regulators--hate the Net.
Maybe hate is too strong of a word. The thing is, they're hostile to it, because they don't get it. Worse, they only get it in one very literal way. See, to the carriers and their regulators, the Net isn't a world, a frontier, a marketplace or a commons. To them, the Net is a collection of pipes. Their goal is to beat the other pipe-owners. To do that, they want to sell access and charge for traffic.
There's nothing wrong with being in the bandwidth business, of course. But some of these big boys want to go farther with it. They don't see themselves as a public utility selling a pure base-level service, such as water or electricity (which is what they are, by the way, in respect to the Net). They see themselves as a source of many additional value-adds, inside the pipes. They see opportunities to sell solutions to industries that rely on the Net--especially their natural partner, the content industry.
They see a problem with freeloaders. On the tall end of the power curve, those 'loaders are AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other large sources of the container cargo we call "content". Out on the long tail, the freeloaders are you and me. The big 'loaders have been getting a free ride for too long and are going to need to pay. The Information Highway isn't the freaking interstate. It's a system of private roads that needs to start char
But that doesn't seem to be happening on the Internet I use. Companies have a bigger presence than every and there is mroe and more commercial Internet, but I find that in no way interferes with any of the rest of it since you just access what you want. I haven't had anyone try to stop me from hosting free sites on the topics I want, I haven't had webservice get scarce, on the contrary, the barrier for entry seems to be lower than ever.
So what's the dark age you are talking about? What is destroying the net? The only thing I've seen receantly is all that stupidity about DNS which was just politicians playing games, nothing was ever going to come of that.
There's a book about this.
:) Go read it yourself.
It's called City Come a Walkin. It was published in 1980. William Gibson had some nice things to say about it.
The problem, in the book, is the problem we're seeing here. Some rich club mob wants to take over the Internet. They want to control the communications system, and they want to be the gatekeepers of what all will go over the wires. And they're using it to leech off of, and eventually control, society.
Cities have a way of becoming self-aware. In the book, we meet San Fransisco: City. And we meet Sacramento, briefly. (She looks like a prostitute, apparently.) Chicago's also got a soul- in a living man. New York. Phoenix. The major cities- They start to take on a life of their own.
And they fight as hard as they can against the network controllers. But... "When the city comes a walkin' we'll all be obsolete."
I don't want to spoil it.
Somehow, Searls extracted some hideous meaning from these comments. He wants to ask Whiteacre a bunch of deep questions about the Net and freedom. I don't think Whiteacre could answer any of them; nor should he.
And know what? It's actually true. There's absolutely no reason that there has to be only one internet and actually you'ld know there are more than one if you had a clue. Or perhaps you have not even the tinyest sliver of knowledge about what the definition of an internet is (no surprise) and instead only rely on a shallow impression of the use of Internet as a noun.
"Well, before we do that, let's look a little deeper. Copyright used to last only 14 years. Now it is 70ish years beyond the death of the creator. It has been extended and expanded well beyond it's useful function, and is a horrid aberration of its original intention."
... then what becomes a murder now? What if all manslaughters were murders? How about hitting a dog on the road? Stepping on bugs?"
... remind yourself again how badly manipulated the copyright law is today. Note also for the record that Congress is not done with their rewriting of copyright law."
Partially true. However we must keep in mind that laws need to change with circumstances. One people overall live longer than they did when copyright was first enacted. Second society overall has grown beyound what the copyright founders could ever imagine. Also it takes far more in resources to bring some IP to fruitation compared to what it use to take when the founders created copyright. I'm not certain why people have no problem with technology growing and changing, but expect the law to be frozen in one moment of time.
"Murder today only applies to the willful killing of a human being. Should this law be extended the way copyright law has been extended
An apples to oranges comparison. Copyright extension per your previous complaint is an extension in time. While the other is an extension of circumstance. Anyway society even back in roman times already extended the willful killing of others to the state.e.g. war, and executions. And let's not mention a citizen protecting others, or self-defense.
"If ALL those things were now considered to be murders, then you would definately have a murder rate comparable to the rate at which copyright infringement occurs."
Well as it stands, everybody is guessing. Much as we guess the propagation of Linux.
"While I will agree that this argument initially sounds ludicrous
Note well those absentee landlords, better known as citizens.
Anyway the OP's argument is basically the majority is no more right by virtue of being the majority, than the minority is wrong because it's the minority. In other words you all are going to have to use something other than numbers to justify your ethics.
Someone please read this for me and tell me what it means.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
The obvious final outcome here is that people are going to start forming grassroots wireless networks on a metropolitan area level, and interconnecting these networks through encrypted tunnels through standard ISPs. It'll start by people getting access points to access metropolitan area services at high bandwidth, something like Mesh would be used to provide the network infrastructure, and eventually, this will end up as an ad-hoc wireless internet. Obviously, the software is going to have to evolve to be very scalable and have acceptable performance, but what we will be left with is a truly free network by construction (decentralization), even if we can't include everyone in the middle of nowhere. People will first use it for gaming and sharing media, but businesses will jump at the opportunity to get access to a targeted metropolitan network, and TV affiliates might find it an attractive method of reaching local viewers. Even if the connections outside the MAN are poor, most cities and towns would surely find good uses for high speed local networks. As these networks grow, they will become more and more interconnected, and hopefully replace the centralized internet we have today for all but the longest hops. The killer (commercial) application for this is obviously going to be video and local services. To get TV affiliates interested, though, there would need to be a proven audience, and p2p filesharing and low-lag gaming is going to be the driving force for this adoption. Once the infrastructure is in place and companies can get free high-speed access to customers in their area, a huge new market for broadband services will open up, along with the advertising possibilities targeted at local customers. The rest is the hardware; current wireless routers have insufficient range and bandwidth to make starting such a network on a large scale viable. We would need a cheap, high bandwidth, and long(er) range solution to get this party really started. Maybe in 5-10 years that kind of technology will be available, and then this ad-hoc network will almost create itself. I really find it hard to believe that anyone is really capable of preventing this from happening at this point. We have the will, we have the communication capability, we have the ingenious coders and open source community, I'd say it's pretty much a done deal. All we need is the obvious hardware solution to make it all a reality.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Don't ask him what net he's on, ask him what planet he's on lol
Personally I think it's the "whining idiot"-planet.
Blah Blah Blah ... invented by US military ... blah blah blah ... used by other people/organisations ... blah blah blah ... expect it to be free.
It might be cynical, but this was essentially my stance on the 'make the internet free' thing. Yes, I think we should make the internet free, but it's not up to the European Union to decide whether it's free or not, it's up to the US and it's their decision that matters.
And don't take this viewpoint too seriously, because at the moment it's based off my knowledge of current happenings, which may or may not be too correct.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
When I meet a single person over the age of 20 that has gone a decade without commiting copyright violation, I'll let you know.
The problem here is copyright, plain and simple. Instead of a direct market for intellectual labour, copyright gives us a pseudo-market for access to the products of that labour. Now all of a sudden the money's in restricting access to "content". That's right, the financial incentive is to STOP people making use of information. With that counter-productive basis, how is it any surprise that we end up with a market where the sellers have a vested interest in PREVENTING the buyers from getting what they want? This applies to both the publishing houses and the access providers.
I agree exactly with the thesis of the article. The Internet is being divided and debased by people who care only about avoiding knowledge of their own deficiencies, such as some of the leaders in China.
The control freaks often get control. In the past, their power over the Internet has been limited by their extreme technical ignorance. Now, more and more, they are hiring technically knowledgeable people to corrupt and diminish the freedom.
If the healthy people don't assert their authority, the corrupters will debase the Internet as they debase everything else they touch.
The ceaseless activity of those whose only life is money and who want to make one more dollar has already caused limits to VOIP, for example. The communications companies want to protect their easy profits. They use VOIP, but they don't want us to do it without their permission or without their profit.
When so many people break the law, maybe there is something wrong with the law. Maybe there is something wrong with how the problem of intellectual property rights is being approached.
I've seen NO creative thinking about IP rights. There's a lot of talk, but very little serious progress.
Maybe history is a guide. For example, did you notice how libraries made all publishers go bankrupt? Not.
Did you notice that television and video tape recorders utterly destroyed the movie industry? Not.
I don't download music. However, if I did, it is obvious to me that I would get interested and would buy more CDs.
I had several very bad experiences with the music industry and their marketing methods. The industry is extremely adversarial toward its artists and its customers. Over time, that caused me to listen to music less and less. What I'm seeing however, is that music industry leaders want to fix their problems without fixing the problems they create for me.
The world is dominated by people who believe that interacting with other people requires fighting. In fact, the only real solutions to social problems come from thinking.
This isn't really trolling, it is quite relevant too:
Why must the majority of slashdot news revolve around the "Future" ? I see so many news articles that talk about some guy and how his blog has a little essay where he predicts the future.. blah blah, have the comments argue against it,half for it, etc... Why aren't there news of TODAY? I don't care if some should-have-been-a-blowjob posts on his blog that in the future we'll have to pay more fees for internet and be restricted to a small chunk of it. News is supposed to be News, and some asswipe telling his thoughts in a well-structured essay isn't news, it's opinion.
I thought Slashdot's slogan was "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Well, some failure's opinion isn't news, and it doesn't matter.
As for the article itself, he's missing out the fact that such a movement to restrict Internet and make us pay for these "free" services will cause great tension and perhaps if we're lucky start a war between countries -- thats IF we're lucky --. Of course, like any other good soon-to-be-savior-like-Khan he gives us a "solution" from the get-go. Problem is: No one is going to follow through with it until it's too late, that is, if this happens.
Those are my 2 cents,
Jesus out.
Do we actually have people reading slashdot that upon reading a comment that they want to reply to, go back to the top of the page and use that reply button? Or is it that their parent posts have such piss-poor karma that they don't even get to indent replies?
Is this about Microsoft's .Net software? Oh wait ... The Internet.
I would say that one murder in a population of 280 million is still one too many.
This article and the comments on /. are almost exclusively relevant for USA.
1. Nobody else in the world worries about Freedom in the way Americans do - like it was something divine, more important than anything else. What we in the rest of the world think about freedom is simply that we can live our daily lives without too many restrictions and without fear. What I think about the American obsession with Freedom (TM) can be summed up thus: If you're starving, all you can think of is food; if you're thirsting, all you can think of is water - perhaps you guys are really starved of freedom?
2. The internet - it is nice, really useful when it comes to finding information and communicating. I have enjoyed it so far, but I can see more and more reasons why I can't really be bothered with it. It's like TV: initially it was deeply fascinating, then there was things like the news and films; but now it's just wall to wall crap like talk shows, 'reality' TV, films over the same tired, old theme and endless soaps. I have a TV, but I haven't watched it for months. I think the same thing will happen to the internet - those who can get themselves to bother, will use it. Perhaps it will be used for specialised things like VOIP etc.
I think my point here is that laying on restrictions in thick layers will just end up discouraging people from using it; there's no business sense in it. The internet is not something we can't easily live without if that makes more sense.
The internet is TCP/IP. That is, a numbering system for nodes and routing rules so you can send small packets of information from A to B.
Because it is so simple and basic, it is very close to the very definition of communication, and in order to stop it from working it would be neccesary to stop communication at all. I mean, you can inplement TCP/IP over pigeon transport or whatever means of communication is available to you (telephone , radio, messengers, snail mail, etc)
At the minimum, this days bussiness need to be able to communicate _encrypted_ information with eachother and with foreign bussiness, even in dictatorships, in order to be able to run even a basic economy, so I don't think anybody would be able to stop you from communicating. You just have to register as a bussiness.
I think people is mistaking the web for the internet.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
well...when you consider that most victims of murder knew their killers, (%92 percent among women ) and once the victim has been murdered, they can't be murdered again, and no one wants to hang out/befriend a murder.... ...it seems to me that the supply of victims would diminish to a point that a particular killer would have no one left to kill,
Conversely, copyright infringement doesn't limit the supply. In fact the opposite is true, the more infringement the greater the supply. Sure i might not want to commit the same infringement twice, but others still can. Try that with murder. You can only pass the same bloody corpse around so much before it ceases to be interesting.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
What tubes? Where do these tubes lead, and why do things tend to go down these so-called tubes? I'm sorry but this just doesn't sit well with me.
``But 1 person in 30 in the USA are in jail are because of drug crimes''
I sure hope that's 1 in 30 inmates, not 1 in 30 Americans. Where did you get that data?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
...but it is obvious that even the large readership of the slashdot community is either ill informed, indifferent, or uncertain about this issue. Even the article posted at 230am has more activity! This should frighten you!
Make no mistake...the governance of the Internet and the fight for its control is the most important issue currently at stake. Period. Wars will subside, politicians will be replaced, the world will keep turning. However, if the core principles driving the Internet are not preserved, we as diverse citizens of all nations will forever have lost something magnificent.
I have been on the Internet for a long, long time. I remember BBSes at pathetic baudrates, when emails didn't travel between ISPs, when there weren't any advertisements online whatsoever. Those of you that remember these changes and are able to see the Internet --- not as it is nor for what it has become, but for what it must be --- please educate the masses. It must exist as a free, uninhibited enity and REMAIN independent of the infrastructure through which it is accessed. Should the day come when borders and binding structure is imposed upon the Internet, we will all have truly lost the most important medium for communcation, commerce, and culture ever created.
I started reading TFA, but it contains too much sensationalism and hyperboles for me to put up with. Could someone condense it a bit; summarize the actual arguments and reasoning?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Of course we can delete the internet. Kris Kristofferson could do it. There's that device to delete the internet inside the president's desk.
Wrong. Block port 80. boom - most of the sites on the internet are gone.
And that is exactly the sort of thing TFA is talking about. Pay us, or your site goes bye-bye.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Just my two cents but I found this article poorly written and hard to follow. So many quotes and right-on allusions: is the writer worried we'll think he hasn't got much to say? And a pervasive sense that drama and crisis are being manufactured from materials that aren't really up to it. Other writers around, notably Robert X. Cringely, cover this territory with more style (and without an obsessive interest in hyperlinks).
Maybe this guy should leave computers alone and go far away and do something completely different for a year. Great way of clearing the head. Perhaps he'd get some new perspectives on life and find he'd gotten a better writing style too.
Bob Young, who recently stepped down at Red Hat, made a very important point the other day. The present generation of lawmakers may be clueless about IT, but they are reaching retirement age now. The next generation is a lot more knowledgeable about IT having grown up with it for most of their adult lives. Over the next 5-10 years, expect lawmakers to show a more sophisticated approach to IT legislation and a lot less indulgence towards big corporations and cartels trying to pull a fast one. If this is true - a big if but not unlikely - then Searl's dire predictions are not going to happen.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
We are not starved of it... we are addicted to it. We really like it. We think that freedom and the free flow of information is a pretty good thing. Quite frankly, we are curious why others like their dictatorships and cencorship. Here's a secret, they DON'T! They just get shot if they say so. Are you a communist?
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
I mean, he loses credibility in the first sentence.. "This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it.". Of course there is a limit!
We all know that the number of computer bits that man could ever possibly compute is 1.35x(10^20), so his essay could *never* be more than that long, or else it would neve rbe completed.
Foolish!
Sorry but this is just a load of bullocks...
The internet is a self configuring network, designed to withstand nuclear strikes. I think it can survive anything big business tries to throw at it. It doesn't rely on any particular means of transport, it'll go over optic fibre, down telephone and power lines, over satellite, wireless radio frequencies and probably quantum wahwah's within a few years. These blow hard's refered to in this article are living in the 90's if they really believe they're sitting on a gold mine with their network of cables.
Even if they could put pressure on the "Free Loaders", it wouldn't work, it's already been tried several times where a free internet service has built up a huge subscriber base only to be taken over and turned into a paid service.... guess what happens, everyone leaves and goes somewhere else. The technology is out there, the horse has already bolted, it can't be undone. I think the smart business men out there have already come to terms with this. Google's success is proof of it, it has constructed business model's that assume that the information services it offers to the public will never generate revenue for them directly, they rely on indirect means of earning income.
``If it weren't for RIAA smashing napster, we probably wouldn't have torrents (at least not yet).''
Not true. Bittorrent was created to solve the problem of serving a single file to many users, without overloading the server the file resides on. It was used for perfectly legitimate purposes long before it started getting popular as a means to illegally distribute media. The RIAA had nothing to do with its creation.
Your point is right, though. If it wasn't for the bad guys, we wouldn't have a lot of the good technology we have now, or at least it wouldn't be so widespread and high quality (due to lack of interest). See also my essay Why We Should be Grateful for Viruses.
On the other hand, if it wasn't for the bad guys, maybe all the effort that went in countering them could have been used to make improvements in other, more productive directions. However, that's purely hypothetical, because there will always be bad guys, unless the human psyche changes radically, and then all bets are off.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Does TFA have anything deeper to say? You are right; most of us are NOT going to read a really, really long article... unless we find some irresistable tidbits herein.
Stupid it isn't about separate networks!!
So what if hte internet is free ?
Informaiton only counts to the extent people hear it. If WalMart can spend 100 MM dollars telling people how happy employees are, and mistreated employees can spend 0.01, whoose message gets heard
I know that this a long post, but everyone should read this essay.
ZNet Commentary
Not Everyone Felt That Way September 12, 2005
By Tim Wise
When I was a kid, I remember my maternal grandmother defending Richard Nixon for the crimes of Watergate, because, as she put it: "He didn't do anything any worse than what every other President did." Knowing, even at six, that this was hardly a morally compelling justification for one's actions, even if true, I recall how it infuriated me to hear it over and over again, whenever politics were discussed in my grandparent's home.
Little did I realize that such obfuscation was hardly unique to certain members of my family. Indeed, throughout the years, it seemed like whenever Watergate came up in conversation (as it would for a long time after 1974, and Iran/Contra after that), someone would pull out this same canard, repeating with the precision of an atomic clock, that "so-and-so didn't do anything that every other President/Senator/Congressman, or whatever, didn't also do." And invariably, those who would say these things were always staunch supporters of whatever asshole was being criticized: whether it was Nixon, Reagan, or Bill Clinton.
It's almost as if stupid arguments spread by osmosis, or some such thing. So we end up with people who have never met each other, nonetheless miraculously spewing the same apologetics, as if they had gotten some kind of memo instructing them on what to say whenever one of their personal heroes stepped in it.
So too, the oft-heard argument that one shouldn't be too harsh on this nation's founders, or other early USAmerican Presidents, when it comes to slaveholding, or involvement in Indian genocide, because, after all, they were "products of their time," and shouldn't be judged by the moral standards of the modern world.
I heard this one again recently, after an article of mine hit the Internet, in which I discussed, among other things, the depredations of Andrew Jackson: one of this nation's premier Indian killers.
The person who wrote to attack me as a "PC liberal" who "hates America," insisted that Jackson, and others like Thomas Jefferson shouldn't be evaluated on the basis of today's moral "underpinnings." And as with every other instance in which something like this has been said to me, in this case too, the comment was made absent any awareness on the part of its author, as to the position's utter absurdity.
The most infuriating thing about the "men of their times" defense, is that by insisting Jackson, Jefferson and the rest were in line with the standards accepted by all in their day, apologists ignore, in a blatantly racist fashion, that to the blacks being enslaved, or the Indians being killed, slavery and genocide were hardly acceptable.
In other words, the "everybody back then felt that way" argument assumes that the feelings of non-whites don't count. Some folks always knew mass murder and land theft were wrong: namely, the victims of either. That lots of white folks didn't, hardly acquits them in this instance. It's not as if the human brain was incapable of recognizing the illegitimacy of killing and enslavement.
Secondly, beliefs that killing and stealing are wrong hardly emerged in the 20th or 21st centuries. Indeed, the very people who suggest we should cut the founders slack because of the standards of their day, are overwhelmingly the kind of Bible-thumping conservatives who insist morality is timeless, and who clamor for the posting of the Ten Commandments in the public square for this very reason. Yet they appear to have forgotten that among those Commandments (which were not, after all, handed down to Billy Graham in the 1950s, but rather to someone else a wee bit earlier) are prohibitions against murder and theft.
In other words, the founders don't merely offend by today's moral standards; they offended by the moral standards set in place at least by the time of Moses.
But there's something else troubling about this kind of argument:
The Internet is wonderful and useful, because it is free. It's freedom is a fragile thing. Forces of ignorance and outright evil are attempting to gain control so they can profit, at public expense of course. If they succeed, freedom will be a collateral casualty. The war is fought at the most elementary level, human language. Those who convincingly define the issues can frame the debate in a manner that assures victory. The other side has won victories by defining the Internet experience in terms of content = property = scarce resource. We have content providers, content carriers, and consumers. And this is the wrong way to view the Internet. The Internet is a commons, where everyone can have their place and publish anything they want. We have to change the debate now! Stop letting these forces define the issues by getting there first and defining them the way WE want, or we'll lose the Internet! Write your congressperson! Join the EFF today!!!
That's how the article sounded to me. Very black and white. I think some of this is justified, but I object to several things here. First off, the tone of the thing: the article makes up a category with two pigoenholes, stuffs everyone into one or the other, declares one to be right and the other to be wrong, and exhorts the "right" side to go to war to defend us. It's as if the forces on the "wrong" side know very well they are in the wrong, but have made a conscious decision to be evil because evil is profitable. Except they don't know they're wrong, or evil. They are convinced they are right. The response is good intentions lead to hell, and they ought to know better, and therefore they are still evil. But we don't know all that. What seems dangerous to me is this "if you're not with the Internet, then you're against it" attitude that could push a lot of neutrals to the "wrong" side. Worse is singling out some and tarring them as evil-- could anger multifaceted entities with genuinely sympathetic views if this is done in error.
Second is the presumption that the freedoms and Internet are fragile. The implication is that it wouldn't be so fragile if we weren't so dumb, and I don't buy that. There are simply too many people with too much at stake to allow the Internet to fail, or to be given over to a narrow consortium of interests, or turned into a morass of censorship and patronizing guidance of consumers to products. Many people are too smart to be hoodwinked into going along with such dastardly schemes, and too smart to swallow those lines about it being "for own own good". This illustrates a basic problem with liberals and democrats. They evidently don't see that most people can see these dangers too, and go way out trying to "educate", not realizing that they are actually insulting our intelligence. Most everyone who has experienced DRM quickly perceives what a bad deal it is, and if they don't, need only hear what would be possible if not for DRM and what used to be possible to conclude on their own that they've been had. Ironic that well meant but snobby and elitist efforts to save us from being turned into cattle and suckers talks down to us as if we already are. And ironic that their efforts to strengthen the freedoms and Internet through "better" govt regulation may actually be the greatest danger facing the Internet.
So what should we be doing? Fighting evil, or educating, or inventing and debating? Or just relax because it'll all turn out all right in the end? Do no harm....
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Let them take their pipes and err... put them in their pipes and smoke them. We'll just use peer to peer wireless...
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
I've read Doc Searls for a few years in Linux Journal and occasional web articles and I always come away asking myself "what is he talking about?" His articles refer to other articles or weblogs and to converstaions with other people (who have always been friends of his for years) and he writes about the conversations they have, or some address he has given at some conference that I have never heard of, and they all seem to know what the everyone else one is talking about. But to me it might as well be two people talking in Klingon to each other.
Do they all really know what they are on about or are all these clued up people afraid to admit to each other that they don't understand what's going on.
I hear a couple of phrases like "Markets are conversations" which I can can parse but not comprehend, lots of "hip" phrases like "The Cluetrain Manifesto" but what does it all have to do with the price of sliced bread, to use a British idiom, or put it another way what does it have to do with me doing things like wasting time on Slashdot or buying books on Amazon.
Can anyone please translate what he says into normal english?
No but, yeah but, no but...
A very spirited piece of writing, I have to admit. It actually sounds more like a speech held in front of a crowd than an essay, and it shows:
* lack of structure: half the time I don't know why he suddenly starts talking about something
* biased semantics: calling us the chosen ones, the underdogs and the other guys sharks and goliaths is very florid, but when somebody aims for my ego, I usually assume that he doesn't have the arguments to aim for my mind
* supposition: he talks a lot about what companies (very complex entities) "think," but gives very little indication how he learnt this
However, there is one key point that completely destroys the article, in my opinion: He only talks about the States! The internet is generally accepted to be a global thing, and while US IT companies (Google, Microsoft) may have global reach, US carriers do not. I don't know a single person whose internet is delivered through Comcast, TimeWarner or any other company he named. And to think that the US carriers could use any stranglehold on the states market to gain global dominance... well, that's pretty ludicrous. Because all the european, asian or other carriers will just be happy to roll over and die. Right.
As a location reference: I am currently in Norway, but usually live in Germany.
Divide et impera!
What happens when a few rouges from one culture enter another culture against their will... War.
I personally believe the internet is worth fighting for, perhaps not physically, but logically.
Today there is freedom of expression on Internet because everyone who connect to the Internet through ISP's pays!
If media is subsidized by advertisement then advertisers will control the media. We know this from past experience with other media like print, radio, TV etc.
Many companies already tried running free advertisement supported ISP's and failed. If they had succeeded WWW already would have flushed down the tubes....
We can see the effect of Google advertisements on the WWW! 1000's of made for google adsense scrapper sites with poor content has started appearing! Current success of adsense is temporary since lots of new net users coming on the net think adsense ads are site navigation links and click on them! Soon advertisers will understand this and start bidding lower for google ads and hype and adnonsense will die natural death like earlier web 1.0 banner ad models!
Internet will retain freedom of expression only until advertisement models fail.... the moment WWW becomes truly ads subsidized, freedom of expression will get flushed down the tubes.....
I never heard of mirrordot before... Cool!
MirrorDot mirror of the Slashdotted LinuxJournal page.
Can someone please let me know what content my ISP, RCN Cable is blocking me from seeing? I can view all the porn I want, view all the innacurate independent news sites that I want..... I don't see what I'm missing out on here.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I think China is a great example. Even when a government gets hellbent on destroying the people's ability to use the internet, people find a way around it. No matter how bad it gets in America, it can never be as bad as it is now in China. And yet the internet is still working the way it was intended in China, and people are able to circumvent whatever controls the government puts in place.
Here's another example: Spam. No matter what we have tried to stop spam, nothing has worked, not even close. Spam is unstoppable. We have switched our efforts from outrunning the bear to outrunning those around us. Spam represents the capability of individuals to do things on the interent despite what those around them allow.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Note that before slavery grew from popular to an industry, it was the norm to sacrifice your enemies to your god. Slavery was certainly a big step forward in ethical behavior then, just as abandoning it is another now.
It's not because others in the world die of hunger that we shouldn't feed our poors. Everything is relative.
I am sure in another century or two, people will find some of our behavior barbaric.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
** my feelings gathered in the two years I was a paralegal in a DA's office, and in the nine/ten years my wife (who is a DA) spent in prosecuting cases ::
The great majority (90%+) of violence is assault.
The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate, press charges, or otherwise go away from their assailants.
Violence IS a repeat crime. Murder is when a violent person makes a mistake and goes overboard.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Copyright infringement is a criminal offense. It shouldn't be. Period.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Looks like Linux Journal is Slashdotted. Here's what I get in H1 font when visiting the page:
"Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack"
Some people already find the actions of our politicians and corporations barbaric.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This guy "Doc" Searls comes across as a bit hysterical. His essay is filled with hyperbole, half-truths and misinterpretations.
First, as others have pointed out, this is a very America-centric story. He starts off with a dumb question:
"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top?"
In the US the Net is largely in private hands already: SBC, Level Three, inter alia.
Here's a bigger problem I have with the essay:
Searls misinterprets or simply ignores one aspect of SBC CEO Edward Whitacre's argument. Whitacre is a douchebag but he does have one legitimate beef. Here in the states cable companies have been granted monopolies in most cities in which they operate in return for a cut of the take going to the cities in which they operate. Now, in addition to carrying TV shows they're offering telephone service (and by the nature of broadband, providing the means for others to offer it) over their pipes.
Telephone companies have long been heavily regulated. They now have the opportunity to lay down fiber optic lines to customers' homes and businesses. As they do it, it will become natural for them to offer television programming. But they can't do it in many cases because of the cable monopoly. Here in New Jersey they're running radio ads arguing for ending those monopolies so they can compete with cable.
So although Whitacre might aspire to charge tolls above and beyond the fees he already gets from his customers (insane) he does have a (reasonable) point. In a nutshell: If the cable companies can offer telephone service without needing any further regulatory approval then the phone companies should be able to offer television without any further regulatory approval.
If they do, consumers will benefit.
Insert witty sig here.
"Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack"
Oh come on, that's a little harsh on Slashdot, no?
DYWYPI?
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Haha
Second, conspiracy theorists assume motivations to fit their worldview. In most cases, their adversaries have no interest in them (assuming it is the egotism). In this case, it assumes telcos are competant and visionary. Neither has been much in evidence. Telcos shovel bits, and do that reasonably well. None has the slightest clue about content. Telcos will push their bit shovelling any way they can. Proprietary content is a dead-end -- look at AOL.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Those are widespread numbers. Violent crimes (I'm sorry 12,000 murders is not a lot in a population of 280 million) are not. You just hear about the violence a lot whenever you listen to Fox News or whenever the police or government are trying to take your rights away.
A jab at Fox News. How original, inspired, and insightful; especially among the independent free-thinkers here at Slashdot.
Because no other media outlet sensationalizes violence.
Perceptions are important.
I suggest we start substituting the expression "Intellectual Monopoly" every time They use "Intellectual Property".
Not only does this sound better to a pro-liberty public but, more significantly, it restores the original meaning of the copyright notion.
It can also act as a much needed slogan that express most concisely what we mean.
Maybe the real statistic is that over their lifetimes 1 in 30 US citizens (or perhaps residents) will be put on probation or incarcerated for drug-related offenses. IIRC, slightly less than 1% of US residents are currently in prison and as of the mid to late-90's crudely half of those were in jail for drug-related offenses. So that would be around 1 in 200 jailed for drug related offenses.
But 1 person in 30 in the USA are in jail are because of drug crimes
According to the DOJ, 1 in 31 people in the US are on probation, parole, or in jail or prison. That would certainly contradict your statistic. Although, if you meant 1 in 30 people in the prison population is in on drug crimes, that would be much too low. From stopthedrugwar.org:
"the Justice Department number-crunchers found that people sentenced for drug crimes accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of all federal prisoners."
"an earlier BJS report put the percentage of jail inmates doing time for drug crime at 24.7% in 2002"
"the total number of people doing time for drugs in the United States last year exceeded 530,000."
Enigma
Someone finally calls Slashdot on their "Slashdot Effect" for what it really is: a DDoS. Whoohoo!!! Let the flamewar begin!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Sure, I can vote, but my vote means nothing when those voting machines can be tapped into from some back room and manipulated without any paper trail to ensure my vote is counted and counted fairly. Where ever Diebold machines were used, there were statistically anomalous results, most of which are impossible to explain through sheer chance. I never thought I would live to see the day of rigged elections, secret prisons and government accepted torture in the US ... but they are here, nonetheless.
Sure, I have an Internet connection, but my broadband provider is telling me which services available on the Internet I can use to their potential and which they will hobble because they disagree with them. I could go to another provider, but they are all considering something similar in my area. I pay twice as much as a Frenchman for 1/4 the speed and I'm supposed to think this is a good deal.
Yes, I can post angrily on Slashdot, but only under a pseudonym. If someone discovers who I am, then the flood of angry "take it or leave it" emails start pouring in, along with the death threats, badly spelled insults and racial slurs that seem to pop up when you disagree with the religious right. My neighbours will start to slander me for being unpatriotic because some jacknut on Fox News told them that the only way to be patriotic is to goose-step like good little soldiers and they can't see it any other way.
Yes, I'm not starving, but plenty of people in the States are every day and that number is growing all the time. Every company that ships their operations overseas to the cheap labour is another nail in the coffin of the middle class and when that is successfully killed off by the elite here in the west, we'll have nothing but low paying service jobs to cling to. Most Wal-Mart employees have to use food stamps to get by if they have a family. That's our future as a nation.
I like what I have now and it is better than any time in history, but the powerful always want more and that will come at my expense unless I defend what I already have. I don't like the slide I'm seeing at all.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
Of course, the government stepped in to create some kind of order and started regulating the radio spectrum. On the one hand, we have solved the "problem" of the anarchy and the rule of the airwaves by whomever had the money to afford the strongest transmitter, but what do we have left? Endless stations broadcasting Brittney Spiers's latest new single?
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Look at China and the middle east. The tech was supplied by US companies. The FBI has recently retasked it's priorities from terrorism to porn. The internet is /the/ porn distribution network in the world. Re-read your post. Now who looks like an idiot?
"It's exactly the opposite of what the Internet is supposed to be, which is unmonitored and Free."
Yeah...I agree...but it's a cute theory which is rapidly turning into myth; reality is much different, and China et all point in the direction we don't want it to go, but which is all to probable.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
"No. Prices have gone down. It's easier NOW than THEN to create IP because the technology is more available."
Not quite. For some IP technology has made it easier, but that's not a universal position.* Second one needs to remember that technology has affected distribution far more than it has affected the creative aspect.
*The creation of new drugs takes longer and costs more than it did "back in the day". Second due to various conditions, including economic, at well as cultural, the required technology may not be available (more or otherwise).
guy.renault@univ-poitiers.fr
anthony.aubree@univ-poitiers.fr
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
Sorry for any inconvenience.
HA HA.
:wq
Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack /. will no doubt be under investigation by the FBI for this DoS attack...Cmdr Taco is said to be heading for the Mexican border at this hour...
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/08/24/ 010824hnfreewireless.html
Maybe I'm being paranoid but is Sony using their rootkit to launch a DoS against Linux Journal?
Rush Limbaugh likes to reference the metaphor of Buggy Whip makers in a world of Automobiles. I think this is a good metaphor to use here. The broadcast TV, Telephone and Cellular companies are very much like the Buggy Whip makers. If they are unable to adapt to the new fast world of Automobiles they will fail. The carriage makers made the transition just fine. They turned into the car manufactures. The current Telecommunications bill seems to seek to prop up the Buggy Whip makers (Telephone companies). But also remember other laws makes it very difficult for the Buggy Whip makers to make Automobiles. The 911 service is one of those things holding them back.
If the law demands certain content from some (911) and not from others then the Net is not a level playing field. The Net must be preserved as a level playing field. The Telcos can not be forced to provide services that others don't.
If you can reference Limbaugh to support the Ideas Doc puts forth you will go a long way with so-called conservatives.
The article in question has been reprinted here (and probably in a bunch of other places on the web):
0 .html
http://lists.cait.org/wws/arc/gio/2005-11/msg0009
Dang, I had mod points yesterday but foolishly spent them.
Malor is so right it hurts. I'll be sure to read the article linked in TFA, but in the meantime I recommend re-reading the parent.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
Sorry for any inconvenience.
All that blather, just to be told in the end to write my Congressman and give to the EFF. Well gee, thanks.
Save your frigging breath (and my time) next time.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Obviously the west isn't in a dark ages. You can make a fairly good case the Arab is in one that started around the 16th century and is getting much worse. However I think you are being too material in your definition of "best of all possible worlds".
Let's take rome in the 2nd century
1) An intellectual culture that is widespread and well read
2) Strong public morality on issues like corruption, bravery, etc... And thus a leadership which were "great men" in a meaningful sense
3) The christian cult hadn't gotten out of hand yet and ethics was an intellectual matter regarding public good not a question of faith based on virtually no knowledge of history and a poor understanding of their own holy books.
4) A government that is genuinely interested in the public welfare
And yes they had big problems like massive slavery but famine and plague were a thing of the past "never to return".
While detractors say there's only so much that murder can do to work towards the greater good, we must at least try. Those involved in this anti-citizen power shift should be murdered in cold blood. That'll send the right message down the spines of those greedy bastards grappling for control of the net.
"A drive by shooting claimed the life of yet another internet carrier lobbyist in Washington today. That brings the total death count of those associated with internet privitization up to seventy-eight... for this month."
Then those of us that are caught can just blame it on something we saw through the net. Are we beginning to see the possibilities?
I'm amused - this goes to show, still further, how much people are in denial with respect to the real problem and the real solution. That's usually the case with addictive behaviors.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why are all the college stations down at the low end of the FM dial?
Because it was the universities that did all the heavy lifting in creating what we know as "radio broadcasting." And, originally, just like the Net, it was non-commercial. The legal framework at the time said that the airwaves belong to the public and must be used to serve the public interest.
Then the commercial interests came in and hijacked radio.
Congress handed over the lion's share of spectrum commercial interests and tossed the universities a wee slice of spectrum that would be reserved for educational broadcasting.
The FCC's job was originally _supposed_ to be preserving the airwaves for the public and policing frequencies to prevent interference, not worrying about exposed nipples in prime time.
And, yes, there was a giant stockmarket bubble in which investors frantic to get in on the land rush bid up the stock of any company that had "radio" in its name...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If I understood it correctly, then the point of the essay was to change the way we talk about the Internet. We have to explain it to the courts and others as though it was a commons or a marketplace rather than a collection of pipes viewed as property of SBC and Verizon.
The scenario described is possible and could have a bad effect on innovation and the economy in the US. Just look at how screwed up non-voice services are on cellular networks. It might not be as bad as Doc makes it out to be. Services that would have to pay too much would probably move offshore. Consumers outside of the US might pay less for these services. Innovation and GDP just shift away. The tech industry, including VCs would fight the innovation tax. Technologists would work around the existing pipes.
A better analogy for the Internet is the interstate highway system. It was built by the government and can be used by anybody for carrying just about anything. It separates us from other potential super powers (ex. USSR, current China) in that we can make things anyplace and sell them anywhere else in the country. The contractors that built the interstates got paid, up front. They do not get to say what goods travels on them now or tax the value of those goods.
This analogy may spoil some of the magic of the commons for some readers, but it shouldn't. Those readers are still free to be as creative as they like as long as nothing is blocking them.
"The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
- sydneys-domestic-violence/2005/10/27/1130367990858 .html
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate"
I like how you state all these statistics, did you pull them out of your ass? In any event the issue is assuming that domestic violence is against women and women only:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sharp-rise-in
>A surprising number of incidents involve male victims - outnumbering female >victims in cases were the victim is under 15 or over 39.
The rates of physical violence against both sexes by either sex are closer to being approximately the same than not in many cases. Here is a a few quick links, you may want to look at the biblography provided to cross check the stats as one should do with any statistics:
http://www.mensactivism.org/dv_flyers.shtml
http://www.mensactivism.org/search.pl?topic=dv
The creation of new drugs takes longer and costs more than it did "back in the day".
That doesn't explain why patents are file+20 years but copyrights are pub+95 years. Your argument would make sense only in the case of a significant patent term extension.
Well as a Christian you're aware of the phrase "reap what you sow'. Now all we need for society to do is make the connections between reaping and sowing, even those spans that are centuries in breadth. And pray we don't hit any "tipping points" in the process.
* were women
* were battered by boyfriend/hubby
* and would not press charges (necessary in this jurisdiction for the DA to prosecute the case).
You can believe me or not. Your problem.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
In most jurisdictions (and, IIRC, in the US too) copyright law defines criminal penalties for copyright infringiment.
In Brasil, copyright infringiment of computer programs (in particular) can land you in jail for six months to four years.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
No charges pressed, no statistics.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The best way to counter tyranny is to provide more openness. Continue developing more open information solutions, invent new ways to connect people, generate more tools that future hackers will use to create their own new connections. As the cycle grows and progresses, the corporate suit's ability to take that all away shrinks. That is how a market works. On the other hand, if the mega corps provide everything the consumer needs, if they notice no difference in the sinister new net, they are free to take it all away from us.
I know some others have touched upon how slavery used to be (although "used to be" really is misleading since there are still people being bought and sold as slaves even today - see some of the various articles about women being bought and sold as slaves in America as well as other countries. And yes, they do get shut down but these trades do also seem to pop back up after a few years.).
My take though is that copyright is more akin to slavery than monopoly. Not that it didn't use to be more like a monopoly - only that now it is more like slavery. In the article, it is talked about how Larry Lessig and John Ashcroft talked about copyright in terms of ownership versus rights. I believe that if Mr. Lessig had approached the entire copyright issue as slavery of the America people versus the needs of the copyright owners that, just as "rights" and "ownership" have certain connotations, the connotations of slavery would have thrown copyright into the evil aspect that the founding fathers saw it as and might have swayed the justices more in Mr. Lessig's favor.
Ok, so why would anyone say copyright is like slavery? Well, it shackles us in that it restricts our usage of a given item. It forces rules and regulations upon us that otherwise would not exist. It impedes our ability to do as we please. And it punishes us even if we were unaware that we were doing something wrong in the first place. It can even force us to do things we would otherwise not want to do. It takes away our freedom. Can be used to destroy our ability to invent and create new items. (All of which is collectively known as the "Chill Factor".) Copyright, therefore, has come to mean evil, unscrupulousness, hoarding, bullying, and other evil things because we have let it become evil. What used to be a law to help protect the copyright owner has become a law used to inflict pain and suffering on others.
The founding fathers set the number of years to be fourteen with a single extension of fourteen years. They set it to be that way because (as their writings say) copyright is an unbearable condition to the very foundations of American society. A form of slavery not to be kept in place but allowed to fall from the shoulders like a heavy burden is released after having to carry it for a long while. They knew that people detested having to give up any kind of freedom. Especially after having fought for it for so long and so hard. So they made it so the people of the United States would not have to carry this burden with them all of their lives. Only for a limited time. It wasn't until the founding fathers were all dead and gone that the merchants, like in biblical times, began to gnaw away at these foundations. Lesser people who came into offices of importance decided that money was worth more than the very people they had been voted into office to protect and help. Protecting, they said, meant increasing the duration of copyright. But protection for whom? Not the masses since copyright has nothing to do with the masses and everything to do with individuals. So for whom were the extensions for? That is right. Greedy merchants and greedy individuals who, once granted a copyright, fight tooth and nail to retain that copyright so they may inflict their wants and needs onto others. (Look at the recent Lego versus Mega Bloc court case where Lego, who's patents had all expired by 1988, attempted to force the Mega Bloc company to stop selling toys which looked like Legos.) This all or nothing attitude is the stumbling block to our society and like J.R.R Tolkien's poem about the One Ring. You could say:
Eternity for copyrights.
Eternity for patents.
Eternity for all things mine.
And nothing for the masses.
In the land where the laws are made.
One rule to gather it all, One rule to hoard it.
One rule to covet it all, and make the laws that bind it.
In the land where the laws are made.
Our government is mandated against the creation of monopolies, kingdoms, and other forms of total control ye
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048