Lest anyone be tempted to take this seriously, note that the system says every new user starts with a balance of zero miles. So the only way to get miles is to give a ride to an existing user who has a nonzero balance in their account.
As I mentioned in the article, couchsurfing.org got $22 million in VC capital even though it's based not even on barter, but on entirely *donated* services (letting people crash on your couch). These may not be "high-value" users if they're too broke to afford a hotel, but apparently they're worth something.
Maybe it depends on what the taxi regulations say. If there's something in the taxi law that says it only applies to rides in exchange for monetary payment, then that would not apply to the ride-trading system. The fact that the IRS might count ride-trading as "payment" for other purposes (calculating your gross income), would be irrelevant, if the taxi regulations say that they only apply to rides for money.
Well the article says your very first use of the system has to be driving someone else; that's how you earn your initial miles credits, which you can then spend later on.
But that's a good point that people might end up buying miles from each other under the table. Not sure if the system could ever prevent that. One way would be that since both the driver and the passenger are using the app on their GPS-enabled smartphone, only allow the miles to be transferred from one user to another if the app detects that they actually made that trip over the appropriate distance. Even then, you could fool the system by paying someone else to log in to the system as "you" and drive people around to bank miles in your account.
I understand the argument for applying these regulations to regular taxis, but, a couple of things:
1) As, um, "Impy the Impiuos Imp" pointed out, you can maintain training and safety standards while still *increasing* the number of taxis to drive prices down.
2) In Uber-style systems, the "payment" at the end is technically voluntary. But the rider and the driver leave reviews for each other, so if the rider stiffs drivers too many times, they'll keep getting bad reviews until eventually nobody will pick them up. (And if a driver takes people the long way around too many times, they'll get so many bad reviews that nobody will ride with them.) Since all passengers will have GPS-enabled smartphones anyway, it will be much easier to detect if your driver is trying to take you the long way around or drop you off in the wrong place.
3) In my ride-trading system specifically, there will be greatly reduced incentive to rip people off anyway, since all you would get would be extra miles, not actual cash.
Well reading through the comments, it seems like most people think the explanation is something other than price discrimination. (i.e. a lot of people think that the real explanation is first sale doctrine -- Netflix can buy the DVDs from studios and rent them out without asking permission. I think this explanation is probably wrong because Netflix usually buys the DVDs from studios who know what Netflix plans on doing with them, so the argument that "the studios can't stop them" is fallacious -- the studios actually cooperate with Netflix. (This agreement sometimes breaks down, as with the John Carter DVD release, when Disney refused to sell Netflix the DVDs so Netflix just bought them retail and rented them out. This was legal, but it's not how it's usually done.)
But, in short, if most people don't realize that price discrimination is the explanation, then I think that makes it worthwhile to write an article positing that that is the explanation.
I found some posts from intellectual property attorneys and they seem to be saying that you can't just buy a DVD at Walmart and rent it out: http://www.avvo.com/legal-answ...
Interestingly though the answers from the IP lawyers seem to be split.
That's true, but I was really wondering why they don't offer the "virtual DVD" option in addition to physical DVDs. So they would keep all their existing customers who prefer physical DVDs, but then they would presumably also gain some additional customers who would prefer virtual DVDs (people who like watching movies on phones, or tablets or laptops without DVD drives).
But this isn't really an answer because it just begs the question of why they don't make the same arrangement with "virtual DVDs".
Let's say the studio sells Netflix a DVD of Dark Knight for $100. (Netflix can't just buy the DVD at Walmart for $10 and rent it out to their subscribers, they have to pay the special higher price for a DVD that can be rented out.) Netflix charges people to rent that DVD by mail, the studio makes money, Netflix makes money, everybody's happy.
Why doesn't the studio just say to Netflix: "Look, give us $100 and we'll grant you a license for a streamable 'virtual DVD' that can only be checked out to one subscriber at a time, and you can check it out as many times as you want. So users can check out the virtual DVD, or you'll also give them the option of the physical DVDs for users who prefer that. We'll still make all of the sales that we were making before, PLUS we will now be able to serve the additional market of people who watch movies on their tablets and phones and DVD-free laptops, so all parties involved make more money."
It's not obvious why the studios don't make some kind of arrangement like that. Price discrimination, based on the inconvenience of physical DVDs, is one possible explanation. There might be other explanations.
Yes. Netflix can rent physical DVDs without negotiating with studios or distributors. In theory, they could run to Walmart and buy DVDs to mail out. They need nobody''s permission to do this.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. The consensus among lawyers here for example: http://www.avvo.com/legal-answ...
is that it's not legal to buy a DVD from Walmart and rent it out. The movie rental companies that rent out DVDs have to pay a special higher price to buy the DVDs from the studios.
Well yes of course the restriction comes from the content providers.
That's why I didn't write, "Why doesn't Netflix allow every movie to be checked out as a streamable virtual DVD?" because the answer is obviously "Because the content providers won't let them."
The question I actually asked in the 3rd paragraph was: "Why do movie studios allow Netflix to send out DVDs to their subscribers by mail, but not to allow the same option in the form of "virtual DVDs" [where the virtual DVDs include a monthly limit and a delay on "checking them out"?" That answer is not obvious.
(1) As I just said to an Anonymous Coward, U.S. companies helping foreign governments to censor their citizens may not be prohibited under the Bill of Rights, but that doesn't make it right. (2) In my article about the 5th Amendment, I said multiple times that the question was whether you could describe a scenario that had a better outcome with the 5th Amendment than without it, if you hold all other assumptions constant. If you haven't described a scenario then you haven't answered the question. (And I listed several scenarios in the article that were not valid answers, and why.)
For the time being, it is not against U.S. law for a company to sell Internet censoring software to foreign governments, even with the knowledge that the tools are being used to restrict freedom of speech in a manner that would be considered a human rights violation by international standards, so both companies have made it a core part of their business.
It's against the law for the United States to censor its citizens. It's not against the law for citizens to self-censor, or to censor others in a private capacity. From my perspective, helping Saudia Arabia censor its citizens is not tantamount to the United States violating free speech of its own citizens.
Well obviously, the U.S. government permitting American companies to aid foreign governments in censoring their own citizens, is not the same thing as the U.S. government censoring its own citizens -- but that doesn't make it right.
Saying that Bad Thing 1 is not the same as Bad Thing 2, doesn't make Bad Thing 1 into a good thing.
Yes, I mentioned that the problem with helpmatt.org seemed to fix itself before I started doing my methodical experiment. It was the other sites, http://www.021yy.org/ for example, that still don't resolve on 75.75.75.75.
Technically the sample size was several hundred websites, of which I found one to be blocked. Extrapolating to hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet, about a million or more would be blocked.
Possibly it could have been blocked because of a malware infection; I have no idea. But I would think that if Comcast were blocking sites to protect users from malware, they would advertise that feature more widely; that's the kind of thing a lot of users want.
If I were to take this as a serious argument, I would say the analogy to getting a broken cable modem is flawed, because (a) even if I got a broken cable modem, there would be no evidence that the problem is more common on Comcast than on other providers, and (b) more importantly, a user knows if their cable modem is broken, and will get it replaced, so the problem fixes itself. The problem with the blocked websites is that the user doesn't realize it's Comcast's fault and they won't demand for it to get fixed; they'll just think the website is down.
Good point; for the record the http://021yy.org/ website has been inaccessible (and continues to be inaccessible) on my Comcast connection for at least 48 hours now. (Even if it does turn out to be a temporary problem, the evidence still suggests that about a million websites at any given time are affected; if the problem were temporary, that would just mean that the set of affected websites is constantly changing.)
The only argument for doing something, or not doing something, is whether the positives outweigh the negatives.
I am aware the way my articles get posted is not the standard format, but so what? If everyone else drives to work in a blue car and I show up in a green car, who cares?
Thanks. I saw the title "Thank you, Bennett Haselton" and I was all revved up to deal with more sarcasm. Oh well I'm sure there will be more after all.
As for "concision", I really do want to spell things out less and repeat them fewer times, but every time I do that, some readers will miss points that I thought were implicit, or miss something because I said it only once. In the Fifth Amendment article, probably my most heavily criticized one to date: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
I said about 185 times that the answer I was looking for should be in the form of a scenario that illustrated why the Fifth Amendment was better than an alternate rule under which the defendant had to answer questions under the same rules as any other witnesses. Out of hundreds of angry comments, I think only three came up with actual scenarios. (And those were interesting cases I hadn't thought of, which led to more thought-provoking discussion.)
I think someone else commented about caching, and my response was that I think most websites that would use Shapeshifter, serve most of their HTML content dynamically, so it wouldn't have been cached anyway, or shouldn't be.
As for re-naming the fields, yes I assume that the Shapeshifter has to do some kind of stateful tracking to remember what the renamed fields correspond to, so it can rename them back on the way in. I don't think shared IP addresses would be a problem. You just have to remember, "I renamed the form field "firstname" to "xsdf9045" and sent it to IP address a.b.c.d., so when a form submission comes back from that IP containing the string "xsdf9045", change it back to "firstname".
Oh, when you said "post it to your journal", I thought you meant, post it on a journal hosted on some third-party site.
But still, the point still stands: you haven't given any kind of reason why it would be better to post it on a Slashdot journal and link to it, instead of running it the way it's running now. Surely it's not hard for anyone to read the one-paragraph summary and then decide whether they want to click through to the rest of the article. So what's the problem?
I don't think the system will work, but I thought they appeared to be using "polymorphism" correctly (rewriting code so that it's harder for a dumb bot to parse it, but so that it does the same thing as the original code when it's executed).
The only argument for doing anything is that the positives outweigh the negatives. On that basis, you haven't provided any reason why to write the content somewhere else and then link to it, instead of posting it on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Lest anyone be tempted to take this seriously, note that the system says every new user starts with a balance of zero miles. So the only way to get miles is to give a ride to an existing user who has a nonzero balance in their account.
They gave me a discount this time since I bought so much space on the front page so far this year.
As I mentioned in the article, couchsurfing.org got $22 million in VC capital even though it's based not even on barter, but on entirely *donated* services (letting people crash on your couch). These may not be "high-value" users if they're too broke to afford a hotel, but apparently they're worth something.
Maybe it depends on what the taxi regulations say. If there's something in the taxi law that says it only applies to rides in exchange for monetary payment, then that would not apply to the ride-trading system. The fact that the IRS might count ride-trading as "payment" for other purposes (calculating your gross income), would be irrelevant, if the taxi regulations say that they only apply to rides for money.
Well the article says your very first use of the system has to be driving someone else; that's how you earn your initial miles credits, which you can then spend later on.
But that's a good point that people might end up buying miles from each other under the table. Not sure if the system could ever prevent that. One way would be that since both the driver and the passenger are using the app on their GPS-enabled smartphone, only allow the miles to be transferred from one user to another if the app detects that they actually made that trip over the appropriate distance. Even then, you could fool the system by paying someone else to log in to the system as "you" and drive people around to bank miles in your account.
I understand the argument for applying these regulations to regular taxis, but, a couple of things:
1) As, um, "Impy the Impiuos Imp" pointed out, you can maintain training and safety standards while still *increasing* the number of taxis to drive prices down.
2) In Uber-style systems, the "payment" at the end is technically voluntary. But the rider and the driver leave reviews for each other, so if the rider stiffs drivers too many times, they'll keep getting bad reviews until eventually nobody will pick them up. (And if a driver takes people the long way around too many times, they'll get so many bad reviews that nobody will ride with them.) Since all passengers will have GPS-enabled smartphones anyway, it will be much easier to detect if your driver is trying to take you the long way around or drop you off in the wrong place.
3) In my ride-trading system specifically, there will be greatly reduced incentive to rip people off anyway, since all you would get would be extra miles, not actual cash.
Well reading through the comments, it seems like most people think the explanation is something other than price discrimination. (i.e. a lot of people think that the real explanation is first sale doctrine -- Netflix can buy the DVDs from studios and rent them out without asking permission. I think this explanation is probably wrong because Netflix usually buys the DVDs from studios who know what Netflix plans on doing with them, so the argument that "the studios can't stop them" is fallacious -- the studios actually cooperate with Netflix. (This agreement sometimes breaks down, as with the John Carter DVD release, when Disney refused to sell Netflix the DVDs so Netflix just bought them retail and rented them out. This was legal, but it's not how it's usually done.)
But, in short, if most people don't realize that price discrimination is the explanation, then I think that makes it worthwhile to write an article positing that that is the explanation.
I found some posts from intellectual property attorneys and they seem to be saying that you can't just buy a DVD at Walmart and rent it out:
http://www.avvo.com/legal-answ...
Interestingly though the answers from the IP lawyers seem to be split.
That's true, but I was really wondering why they don't offer the "virtual DVD" option in addition to physical DVDs. So they would keep all their existing customers who prefer physical DVDs, but then they would presumably also gain some additional customers who would prefer virtual DVDs (people who like watching movies on phones, or tablets or laptops without DVD drives).
But this isn't really an answer because it just begs the question of why they don't make the same arrangement with "virtual DVDs".
Let's say the studio sells Netflix a DVD of Dark Knight for $100. (Netflix can't just buy the DVD at Walmart for $10 and rent it out to their subscribers, they have to pay the special higher price for a DVD that can be rented out.) Netflix charges people to rent that DVD by mail, the studio makes money, Netflix makes money, everybody's happy.
Why doesn't the studio just say to Netflix: "Look, give us $100 and we'll grant you a license for a streamable 'virtual DVD' that can only be checked out to one subscriber at a time, and you can check it out as many times as you want. So users can check out the virtual DVD, or you'll also give them the option of the physical DVDs for users who prefer that. We'll still make all of the sales that we were making before, PLUS we will now be able to serve the additional market of people who watch movies on their tablets and phones and DVD-free laptops, so all parties involved make more money."
It's not obvious why the studios don't make some kind of arrangement like that. Price discrimination, based on the inconvenience of physical DVDs, is one possible explanation. There might be other explanations.
Yes. Netflix can rent physical DVDs without negotiating with studios or distributors. In theory, they could run to Walmart and buy DVDs to mail out. They need nobody''s permission to do this.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. The consensus among lawyers here for example:
http://www.avvo.com/legal-answ...
is that it's not legal to buy a DVD from Walmart and rent it out. The movie rental companies that rent out DVDs have to pay a special higher price to buy the DVDs from the studios.
Well yes of course the restriction comes from the content providers.
That's why I didn't write, "Why doesn't Netflix allow every movie to be checked out as a streamable virtual DVD?" because the answer is obviously "Because the content providers won't let them."
The question I actually asked in the 3rd paragraph was: "Why do movie studios allow Netflix to send out DVDs to their subscribers by mail, but not to allow the same option in the form of "virtual DVDs" [where the virtual DVDs include a monthly limit and a delay on "checking them out"?" That answer is not obvious.
(1) As I just said to an Anonymous Coward, U.S. companies helping foreign governments to censor their citizens may not be prohibited under the Bill of Rights, but that doesn't make it right. (2) In my article about the 5th Amendment, I said multiple times that the question was whether you could describe a scenario that had a better outcome with the 5th Amendment than without it, if you hold all other assumptions constant. If you haven't described a scenario then you haven't answered the question. (And I listed several scenarios in the article that were not valid answers, and why.)
For the time being, it is not against U.S. law for a company to sell Internet censoring software to foreign governments, even with the knowledge that the tools are being used to restrict freedom of speech in a manner that would be considered a human rights violation by international standards, so both companies have made it a core part of their business.
It's against the law for the United States to censor its citizens. It's not against the law for citizens to self-censor, or to censor others in a private capacity. From my perspective, helping Saudia Arabia censor its citizens is not tantamount to the United States violating free speech of its own citizens.
Well obviously, the U.S. government permitting American companies to aid foreign governments in censoring their own citizens, is not the same thing as the U.S. government censoring its own citizens -- but that doesn't make it right.
Saying that Bad Thing 1 is not the same as Bad Thing 2, doesn't make Bad Thing 1 into a good thing.
Yes, I mentioned that the problem with helpmatt.org seemed to fix itself before I started doing my methodical experiment. It was the other sites, http://www.021yy.org/ for example, that still don't resolve on 75.75.75.75.
Technically the sample size was several hundred websites, of which I found one to be blocked. Extrapolating to hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet, about a million or more would be blocked.
Possibly it could have been blocked because of a malware infection; I have no idea. But I would think that if Comcast were blocking sites to protect users from malware, they would advertise that feature more widely; that's the kind of thing a lot of users want.
If I were to take this as a serious argument, I would say the analogy to getting a broken cable modem is flawed, because (a) even if I got a broken cable modem, there would be no evidence that the problem is more common on Comcast than on other providers, and (b) more importantly, a user knows if their cable modem is broken, and will get it replaced, so the problem fixes itself. The problem with the blocked websites is that the user doesn't realize it's Comcast's fault and they won't demand for it to get fixed; they'll just think the website is down.
Good point; for the record the http://021yy.org/ website has been inaccessible (and continues to be inaccessible) on my Comcast connection for at least 48 hours now. (Even if it does turn out to be a temporary problem, the evidence still suggests that about a million websites at any given time are affected; if the problem were temporary, that would just mean that the set of affected websites is constantly changing.)
Can you hear me now? (tm)
The only argument for doing something, or not doing something, is whether the positives outweigh the negatives.
I am aware the way my articles get posted is not the standard format, but so what? If everyone else drives to work in a blue car and I show up in a green car, who cares?
Thanks. I saw the title "Thank you, Bennett Haselton" and I was all revved up to deal with more sarcasm. Oh well I'm sure there will be more after all.
As for "concision", I really do want to spell things out less and repeat them fewer times, but every time I do that, some readers will miss points that I thought were implicit, or miss something because I said it only once. In the Fifth Amendment article, probably my most heavily criticized one to date:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
I said about 185 times that the answer I was looking for should be in the form of a scenario that illustrated why the Fifth Amendment was better than an alternate rule under which the defendant had to answer questions under the same rules as any other witnesses. Out of hundreds of angry comments, I think only three came up with actual scenarios. (And those were interesting cases I hadn't thought of, which led to more thought-provoking discussion.)
I think someone else commented about caching, and my response was that I think most websites that would use Shapeshifter, serve most of their HTML content dynamically, so it wouldn't have been cached anyway, or shouldn't be.
As for re-naming the fields, yes I assume that the Shapeshifter has to do some kind of stateful tracking to remember what the renamed fields correspond to, so it can rename them back on the way in. I don't think shared IP addresses would be a problem. You just have to remember, "I renamed the form field "firstname" to "xsdf9045" and sent it to IP address a.b.c.d., so when a form submission comes back from that IP containing the string "xsdf9045", change it back to "firstname".
Oh, when you said "post it to your journal", I thought you meant, post it on a journal hosted on some third-party site.
But still, the point still stands: you haven't given any kind of reason why it would be better to post it on a Slashdot journal and link to it, instead of running it the way it's running now. Surely it's not hard for anyone to read the one-paragraph summary and then decide whether they want to click through to the rest of the article. So what's the problem?
I don't think the system will work, but I thought they appeared to be using "polymorphism" correctly (rewriting code so that it's harder for a dumb bot to parse it, but so that it does the same thing as the original code when it's executed).
The only argument for doing anything is that the positives outweigh the negatives. On that basis, you haven't provided any reason why to write the content somewhere else and then link to it, instead of posting it on Slashdot.