Let's not forget the importance of the NOS, which enabled ad hoc collaboration in the age of the overbearing mainframe. NOS was and is a force multiplier. The best, most forward looking was probably Banyan Vines, which had a complete and stable directory structure more than a decade before Novell and Microsoft. It suffered for lack of application support, shut out by Microsoft hegemony. That's also what killed Novell in the end.
Cuban has been a top-rated stock picker for decades, since long before broadcast.com. And his Dallas Mavericks won an NBA championship, no mean feat.
Yeah he's a business operator. But his record of success probably compares favorably with that of techie VCs more respected by the geekie/. community. His perspective is not worthless.
That level of piracy can only be sustained by deliberate government inaction. In other words, they're conspiring to steal and under WTO regulations, the government should be fined an amount that exceeds the value of the theft. Treble damages might apply.
Why is it exactly that we in the US don't more aggressively pursue WTO remedies? Could it be that we also violate WTO regs wrt agricultural protectionism? Or are we that afraid of the Chinese?
And yes, breaking software with an upgrade can happen to anyone and even happens to the Mac. My 12" Powerbook DVD player software died last year after a recommended graphics update. Lots of panicked complaining on the Apple's bulletin board, but dead silence from Apple. A fix from them took more than a month, during which VLC was the only workaround.
Reading that analysis in the TFA, it seems that (a) a systemwide crash was inevitable and (b) just about anyone who knew how Skype functions at the network level really, really should have anticipated that exactly this would happen. So the real problem here is the kind of systemic human failure to act in the face of an emergency that we've seen time and time again, from the Deepwater Horizon to 9/11 to the Columbia and the Challenger.
In reality, the "name school" for advanced degrees depends on the field of study. E.g., for certain branches of chemistry, Michigan State and the University of North Carolina stand out. The insiders who will hire you will know which school and which program are which, so don't be seduced the general fame of a particular institution, like MIT.
Getting into those programs at Mich. St. or UNC or wherever can be competitive, more so than undergraduate. So if you're planning to pursue graduate studies, it helps to have cared and worked hard as an undergraduate regardless of where you went, more so than the name.
Pure hypocrisy. The bikini store isn't a corporate behemoth like Time Warner, whose SI Swimsuit app remains on the App Store. If there is an app expressly designed for prurient interest, the SI Swimsuit app is it.
I'm sure that Apple insisted on all-you-can-eat data pricing. And remember, that price went up to $30/month with the release of the iPhone 3G. By that time, AT&T had to know what they were in for wrt data demand. There's no way around it: AT&T has simply mismanaged this product offering. No trivial matter; it's central to their corporate future.
What should frustrate all of us is that Japanese and Korean networks handle several times as much data per user without any of the hassles or failures that are ubiquitous here. Yes, those countries are more densely populated, but even in our cities we have dead spots and overcapacity problems. It's not like this can't be done. Rather, it's that our MO's can't be bothered to do it, and our government refuses to hold them accountable to even a marginally acceptable standard of service.
There's more at stake than our convenience here. Ultimately, for us to be competitive as a nation, we need our networks to be reliable enough for mission critical tasks. Unfortunately, it appears likely that the gap between us on the one hand, and Europe and the Far East on the other, will only get wider. Yet another aspect of our infrastructure that, relatively speaking, is declining to third-world parity. Where's the outrage?
The "Yao Ming" laptop is a top ten invention of the millennium so far. You have an older one. Mine has 2GB RAM. I'm posting with it right now. It's my everything workhorse (I'm a small business network consultant). It has survived more abuse than I can recount, and it bothers me enormously that there's nothing like it available any longer.
I will eventually break down and buy a 13", but it's a lot bigger. I don't imagine that the rumored Mac tablet will be sufficient for what we do.
As for the poster who suggested that thinness is everything, I must respectfully disagree. Thinner = flimsier. How is it you have no extra room in your backpack with a 12" v a 14" machine. What else are you carrying anyway? LPs?
I'm old enough and smart enough to know that every living person over the age of about 4 knows something useful that I don't. Managing one's existence with the handicap of illiteracy requires smarts and resourcefulness that those of us who can read can scarcely imagine.
The Question Box inventor, Rose Shuman, is the daughter of a lifelong friend of mine. The invention solves two problems: how to bring information to illiterate villagers who lack even mobile phone access, and how to employ some of the educated daughters of conservative families who won't allow them to work outside the home. Invariably, the answering voice of these Question Boxes is just such a woman. She needs only an Internet-connected computer to perform this service in the privacy of her bedroom a few hundred miles away.
The log of their questions is also useful in two ways: it allows us naive Westerners to appreciate better the native intelligence of these villagers, and it allows a wider audience of people to suggest ways to improve the service and to make more efficient the flow of empowering information to the nearly infinite variety of people who desperately need it.
I decommissioned a document management system at my client, a smallish law firm, because the system was too complicated, insecure, and expensive. Updating it to run w/ the latest version of MS-Office would have cost thousand$ just for the s/w. We replaced it with Google Search, and we defined a file hierarchy and naming convention for all documents created after the switchover. Client is very happy, their file access is more efficient, and they saved a bundle of money on administration, not to mention all the h/w and s/w they never bought.
Obviously documents are the lifeblood of any law firm. These guys only have about 100,000 or so, less than the aerospace company in question, but the lesson applies. It's extremely unlikely the IT admin of the aerospace company has the resources to manage, much less install, a proprietary document management system.
The ONLY reason to have a formal document management system with a database (like Microsoft SQL *ugh*) is to control access. But access control is something that really, really should be done through the directory. So unless you're NASA or another organization with many, many millions of documents and a legally mandated auditing requirement, there's no reason to make this more complicated than necessary. And even then....
Of course, if we're talking about images with no searchable text, that's another story.
5.) Good writing contributes immensely to lucid and efficient thinking...and working. 4.) Real-world problem solving only comes with real-world experience. They have to suffer through it to appreciate it. 3.) Collaborative classroom experience is indeed helpful background for the collaborative environment of the real world. That is unless you're the PHB. 2.) IM can and should be a tool for professional collaboration. 1.) Unless someone gets us out of Iraq, you're going to end up defaulting on your mortgage. Seriously, how well do you think McCain is going to work out for us? He's got dementia. He can't tell Sunni from Shiite or Al-Qaeda from Iran. He graduated second from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. Oh, let's hire HIM.
-- "Never lose your sense of outrage." -- I. F. Stone
Sometimes lack of evidence can BE evidence to the contrary, such as when dealing with extremely large samples and finding no evidence of confirmation.
Such would be the case when assessing the existence of deities. The probability of such existence is infinitesimal, since there is not a scintilla of credible scientific evidence that any deities exist or have ever existed here or anywhere in the universe.
The most vulnerable part of any laptop is the screen, and the screen on the iBook is inferior to and more fragile than that on the 12" PowerBook, which I am using at this moment to compose this entry. It's essentially my only computer (I connect it to a second monitor at home), and I am a contract network integration consultant.
Also, iBook is heavier.
But the earlier comments about altitude are operative in this case. While at Everest base camp, don't power up your PowerBook, ThinkPad, or any other device w/ a disk drive. Use your Treo or some other PDA and store the notes on an SD card until you're safely down. And don't plan on watching movies localized for non-US markets. There are strict limits on the number of times your DVD localization can be modified.
It's not just the ISP's deriving revenue from fixed IPv4 addresses. Aside from all the corporate Class A's mentioned up top, there are hundreds or thousands of Class B's, and many of them list the possession of these address pools as an asset on their balance sheets. They are fought over in bankruptcy court. It's outrageous.
I used to work for Ampex, the inventors of the VCR, once a company with about 20,000 employees, now essentially a patent licensing firm with fewer than a hundred. They have a Class B: 136.185.0.0/16. That's right, more Class C address pools than employees.
There are lots of sunset companies in that situation.
Glad to see the discussion get back on topic. Agree w/ posters that we must protect our data on phones, laptops, et al, with encryption and passwords. We can't leave the custody of our privacy entirely in the hands of the state. That's an invitation to abuse.
But I do need to correct the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment by some posters who believe the leading subordinate clause irrelevant. The framers were classically trained and assumed we would be as well. Anyone familiar with Latin would recognize the phraseology as the ablative absolute. The correct way to read it in modern English would be, "Because a well-regulated militia is necessary...."
They would have worded it this way had it been good form to begin a sentence with a conjunction like "because", but they took their grammar seriously, and we've forgotten it all (at our peril).
My philosophy is to make the users own their laptops. The company can finance them, but the user must own them. Otherwise, the laptops are treated like rented cars: badly.
It's amazing how much more respectfully the machines and their data are treated by people who own them. And it's amazing how much more willing they are to learn how to care for them properly. Many of the solutions here work well, but all of the best ones require the diligence of the users. That only happens when they own.
My other recommendation is always, always encrypt.
Microsoft has done this to Novell before. Novell used to dominate the market for network operating systems, to the point where the FTC wouldn't let them acquire directory services technology from Banyan for antitrust reasons! Novell killed themselves creating directory on their own while Microsoft bided their time becoming the application server of choice. Then after Novell had crowded out all the other players, Micro$oft ate Novell's lunch and dinner.
Micro$oft is hoping Novell can do this again, and they're setting them up with this patent FUD.
Re:Homework isn't the problem, US curricula are!
on
Schools Banning Homework?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
*In 9th grade geometry, they basically made me repeat the math I learned in 4th grade.*
In America, most kids don't get to geometry until TENTH GRADE! It is absolutely learnable six years earlier. Most kids should be at calculus by 10th grade. The American math curriculum is a punch line, treading water from 3rd grade until high school when, for some, a modicum of teaching resumes. A lot of essential math is NEVER taught: logic? non-Euclidean geometry? probability and statistics? linear algebra? These are basic building blocks of rational thought.
But if you're qualified in math, why on Earth would you pursue a career as a math teacher? Making a quarter what you would in the private sector? Enduring unrelenting intellectual abuse from a school administration? And teaching a curriculum six years too late to students who have had every iota of motivation and curiosity programmed out of them?
I think we can both agree to draw the line at MySpace. Only trolling pedophiles should legally be able to use that site anywhere, never mind public libraries.
But many social networking sites have actual, literate, valuable content, or links to same. As in pornography, who gets to decide what is and what isn't? Not some pandering state legislator, I hope. And not some creationist Dixie librarian either. Ooh, not PC. But you get the idea.
Public library computers are supposed to be for research, not socializing. Why do we need an incredibly badly written law to try ever so lamely to make that point? So that a cheap politician can score points with clueless parents?
"If our society has reached the point where schoolchildren can't do their schoolwork without help from their peers on social networking sites, I'd be in favor of outlawing the use of the internet by anyone under the age of 18. But I'd like to think that our kids aren't quite that dumb yet."
Don't be stuck in the '60's man. (That's when I grew up, BTW). High school students who get homework in AP physics or what not ought to be able to collaborate. And these are the very people most likely to use networking sites to do just that.
And how should we differentiate between Facebook and college Web sites that post homework (for the express and endorsed purpose of collaboration)?
The paradigm of individual self-reliance died along with our privacy. RIP
But social networking sites are demonstrably and materially vital to the objective of helping schoolchildren with their schoolwork. Kids collaborate. They help each other, and that is the central paradigm of our world today. That's how everything worth doing gets done.
We can't for this purpose or almost any other distinguish between social networking and any other kind, and the Internet is after all a network, no?
So it's not just our rights of Assembly that the bill seeks to abridge, it is the functionality of the Internet itself. Clueless.
(A) I'm not at all comfortable this will be overturned on appeal (and what a waste of legal fees!). (B) There is a long, illustrious, and exceedingly valuable tradition of nude photography as art, including (perhaps especially) of persons under the age of 18.
So this isn't merely a travesty of the American justice system. It is a First Amendment violation, because constitutionally the crime CAN'T be the transmission of these photographs or, as the judges implied, the existence of the photos themselves. It can only be how they are used.
The average age of first sexual encounter in the US is 17 (might even be true for Slashdotters), so by the standards of our legal system, we are a nation of rapists. It's not just the politicians and corporations.
More than the ISP, the real problem is Microsoft. What proportion of that 25% is Windows machines? >99%? And what proportion of OS-X, Linux, and other Unix flavors are part of a botnet? Far less than 1%.
It should be a criminal offense to connect a Windows machine older than Win2K to a broadband Internet connection. Nothing less than the viability of the Internet is at stake. That's both an economic and national security issue.
Just compare to what happened in the music space. The rent-your-music scene is a negligible, money-losing business. Only iTunes allows some semblance of perpetual possession. What's their market share? 90%?
The movie download market will face similar consumer resistance. There are an awful lot of good movies out there that aren't on cable. And a few dozen HD movies will fill up most hard drives, even terabyte hard drives, so the need for archival offline media like DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray will persist for a long time. That's completely aside from their utility in moving around large data files.
Which brings us to the ongoing American bandwidth joke. Sorry, but most consumers are unwilling to wait 3 hours or more for a movie to download, especially if they can't own it. This is America. Want-It-Now Consumer-Nation. And we're stuck with the lamest Internet bandwidth in the industrialized world. For this application, it's hurting commerce. Didn't we invent the Internet? Until the Democrats and the FCC break some legs over at the telecom boardrooms, that situation won't improve. A major upgrade of America's Internet access is probably more than ten years off. Our loss is Sony's gain. Go long.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget the importance of the NOS, which enabled ad hoc collaboration in the age of the overbearing mainframe. NOS was and is a force multiplier. The best, most forward looking was probably Banyan Vines, which had a complete and stable directory structure more than a decade before Novell and Microsoft. It suffered for lack of application support, shut out by Microsoft hegemony. That's also what killed Novell in the end.
Cuban has been a top-rated stock picker for decades, since long before broadcast.com. And his Dallas Mavericks won an NBA championship, no mean feat.
Yeah he's a business operator. But his record of success probably compares favorably with that of techie VCs more respected by the geekie /. community. His perspective is not worthless.
Answer to sig:
How do Liberals define Evil? Sociopathy.
That level of piracy can only be sustained by deliberate government inaction. In other words, they're conspiring to steal and under WTO regulations, the government should be fined an amount that exceeds the value of the theft. Treble damages might apply.
Why is it exactly that we in the US don't more aggressively pursue WTO remedies? Could it be that we also violate WTO regs wrt agricultural protectionism? Or are we that afraid of the Chinese?
And yes, breaking software with an upgrade can happen to anyone and even happens to the Mac. My 12" Powerbook DVD player software died last year after a recommended graphics update. Lots of panicked complaining on the Apple's bulletin board, but dead silence from Apple. A fix from them took more than a month, during which VLC was the only workaround.
Reading that analysis in the TFA, it seems that (a) a systemwide crash was inevitable and (b) just about anyone who knew how Skype functions at the network level really, really should have anticipated that exactly this would happen. So the real problem here is the kind of systemic human failure to act in the face of an emergency that we've seen time and time again, from the Deepwater Horizon to 9/11 to the Columbia and the Challenger.
In reality, the "name school" for advanced degrees depends on the field of study. E.g., for certain branches of chemistry, Michigan State and the University of North Carolina stand out. The insiders who will hire you will know which school and which program are which, so don't be seduced the general fame of a particular institution, like MIT.
Getting into those programs at Mich. St. or UNC or wherever can be competitive, more so than undergraduate. So if you're planning to pursue graduate studies, it helps to have cared and worked hard as an undergraduate regardless of where you went, more so than the name.
A merchant app that sold bikinis was dropped too, for showing girls in bikinis. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/23/swimwear_seller_hit_by_apples_removal_of_sexual_apps.html
Pure hypocrisy. The bikini store isn't a corporate behemoth like Time Warner, whose SI Swimsuit app remains on the App Store. If there is an app expressly designed for prurient interest, the SI Swimsuit app is it.
I'm sure that Apple insisted on all-you-can-eat data pricing. And remember, that price went up to $30/month with the release of the iPhone 3G. By that time, AT&T had to know what they were in for wrt data demand. There's no way around it: AT&T has simply mismanaged this product offering. No trivial matter; it's central to their corporate future.
What should frustrate all of us is that Japanese and Korean networks handle several times as much data per user without any of the hassles or failures that are ubiquitous here. Yes, those countries are more densely populated, but even in our cities we have dead spots and overcapacity problems. It's not like this can't be done. Rather, it's that our MO's can't be bothered to do it, and our government refuses to hold them accountable to even a marginally acceptable standard of service.
There's more at stake than our convenience here. Ultimately, for us to be competitive as a nation, we need our networks to be reliable enough for mission critical tasks. Unfortunately, it appears likely that the gap between us on the one hand, and Europe and the Far East on the other, will only get wider. Yet another aspect of our infrastructure that, relatively speaking, is declining to third-world parity. Where's the outrage?
The "Yao Ming" laptop is a top ten invention of the millennium so far. You have an older one. Mine has 2GB RAM. I'm posting with it right now. It's my everything workhorse (I'm a small business network consultant). It has survived more abuse than I can recount, and it bothers me enormously that there's nothing like it available any longer.
I will eventually break down and buy a 13", but it's a lot bigger. I don't imagine that the rumored Mac tablet will be sufficient for what we do.
As for the poster who suggested that thinness is everything, I must respectfully disagree. Thinner = flimsier. How is it you have no extra room in your backpack with a 12" v a 14" machine. What else are you carrying anyway? LPs?
I'm old enough and smart enough to know that every living person over the age of about 4 knows something useful that I don't. Managing one's existence with the handicap of illiteracy requires smarts and resourcefulness that those of us who can read can scarcely imagine.
The Question Box inventor, Rose Shuman, is the daughter of a lifelong friend of mine. The invention solves two problems: how to bring information to illiterate villagers who lack even mobile phone access, and how to employ some of the educated daughters of conservative families who won't allow them to work outside the home. Invariably, the answering voice of these Question Boxes is just such a woman. She needs only an Internet-connected computer to perform this service in the privacy of her bedroom a few hundred miles away.
The log of their questions is also useful in two ways: it allows us naive Westerners to appreciate better the native intelligence of these villagers, and it allows a wider audience of people to suggest ways to improve the service and to make more efficient the flow of empowering information to the nearly infinite variety of people who desperately need it.
I decommissioned a document management system at my client, a smallish law firm, because the system was too complicated, insecure, and expensive. Updating it to run w/ the latest version of MS-Office would have cost thousand$ just for the s/w. We replaced it with Google Search, and we defined a file hierarchy and naming convention for all documents created after the switchover. Client is very happy, their file access is more efficient, and they saved a bundle of money on administration, not to mention all the h/w and s/w they never bought.
Obviously documents are the lifeblood of any law firm. These guys only have about 100,000 or so, less than the aerospace company in question, but the lesson applies. It's extremely unlikely the IT admin of the aerospace company has the resources to manage, much less install, a proprietary document management system.
The ONLY reason to have a formal document management system with a database (like Microsoft SQL *ugh*) is to control access. But access control is something that really, really should be done through the directory. So unless you're NASA or another organization with many, many millions of documents and a legally mandated auditing requirement, there's no reason to make this more complicated than necessary. And even then....
Of course, if we're talking about images with no searchable text, that's another story.
5.) Good writing contributes immensely to lucid and efficient thinking...and working.
4.) Real-world problem solving only comes with real-world experience. They have to suffer through it to appreciate it.
3.) Collaborative classroom experience is indeed helpful background for the collaborative environment of the real world. That is unless you're the PHB.
2.) IM can and should be a tool for professional collaboration.
1.) Unless someone gets us out of Iraq, you're going to end up defaulting on your mortgage. Seriously, how well do you think McCain is going to work out for us? He's got dementia. He can't tell Sunni from Shiite or Al-Qaeda from Iran. He graduated second from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. Oh, let's hire HIM.
--
"Never lose your sense of outrage." -- I. F. Stone
Sometimes lack of evidence can BE evidence to the contrary, such as when dealing with extremely large samples and finding no evidence of confirmation.
Such would be the case when assessing the existence of deities. The probability of such existence is infinitesimal, since there is not a scintilla of credible scientific evidence that any deities exist or have ever existed here or anywhere in the universe.
The most vulnerable part of any laptop is the screen, and the screen on the iBook is inferior to and more fragile than that on the 12" PowerBook, which I am using at this moment to compose this entry. It's essentially my only computer (I connect it to a second monitor at home), and I am a contract network integration consultant.
Also, iBook is heavier.
But the earlier comments about altitude are operative in this case. While at Everest base camp, don't power up your PowerBook, ThinkPad, or any other device w/ a disk drive. Use your Treo or some other PDA and store the notes on an SD card until you're safely down. And don't plan on watching movies localized for non-US markets. There are strict limits on the number of times your DVD localization can be modified.
It's not just the ISP's deriving revenue from fixed IPv4 addresses. Aside from all the corporate Class A's mentioned up top, there are hundreds or thousands of Class B's, and many of them list the possession of these address pools as an asset on their balance sheets. They are fought over in bankruptcy court. It's outrageous.
I used to work for Ampex, the inventors of the VCR, once a company with about 20,000 employees, now essentially a patent licensing firm with fewer than a hundred. They have a Class B: 136.185.0.0/16. That's right, more Class C address pools than employees.
There are lots of sunset companies in that situation.
Glad to see the discussion get back on topic. Agree w/ posters that we must protect our data on phones, laptops, et al, with encryption and passwords. We can't leave the custody of our privacy entirely in the hands of the state. That's an invitation to abuse.
But I do need to correct the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment by some posters who believe the leading subordinate clause irrelevant. The framers were classically trained and assumed we would be as well. Anyone familiar with Latin would recognize the phraseology as the ablative absolute. The correct way to read it in modern English would be, "Because a well-regulated militia is necessary...."
They would have worded it this way had it been good form to begin a sentence with a conjunction like "because", but they took their grammar seriously, and we've forgotten it all (at our peril).
My philosophy is to make the users own their laptops. The company can finance them, but the user must own them. Otherwise, the laptops are treated like rented cars: badly.
It's amazing how much more respectfully the machines and their data are treated by people who own them. And it's amazing how much more willing they are to learn how to care for them properly. Many of the solutions here work well, but all of the best ones require the diligence of the users. That only happens when they own.
My other recommendation is always, always encrypt.
Microsoft has done this to Novell before. Novell used to dominate the market for network operating systems, to the point where the FTC wouldn't let them acquire directory services technology from Banyan for antitrust reasons! Novell killed themselves creating directory on their own while Microsoft bided their time becoming the application server of choice. Then after Novell had crowded out all the other players, Micro$oft ate Novell's lunch and dinner.
Micro$oft is hoping Novell can do this again, and they're setting them up with this patent FUD.
*In 9th grade geometry, they basically made me repeat the math I learned in 4th grade.*
In America, most kids don't get to geometry until TENTH GRADE! It is absolutely learnable six years earlier. Most kids should be at calculus by 10th grade. The American math curriculum is a punch line, treading water from 3rd grade until high school when, for some, a modicum of teaching resumes. A lot of essential math is NEVER taught: logic? non-Euclidean geometry? probability and statistics? linear algebra? These are basic building blocks of rational thought.
But if you're qualified in math, why on Earth would you pursue a career as a math teacher? Making a quarter what you would in the private sector? Enduring unrelenting intellectual abuse from a school administration? And teaching a curriculum six years too late to students who have had every iota of motivation and curiosity programmed out of them?
No Child Left Behind = No Child Learns Anything
I think we can both agree to draw the line at MySpace. Only trolling pedophiles should legally be able to use that site anywhere, never mind public libraries.
But many social networking sites have actual, literate, valuable content, or links to same. As in pornography, who gets to decide what is and what isn't? Not some pandering state legislator, I hope. And not some creationist Dixie librarian either. Ooh, not PC. But you get the idea.
Public library computers are supposed to be for research, not socializing. Why do we need an incredibly badly written law to try ever so lamely to make that point? So that a cheap politician can score points with clueless parents?
"If our society has reached the point where schoolchildren can't do their schoolwork without help from their peers on social networking sites, I'd be in favor of outlawing the use of the internet by anyone under the age of 18. But I'd like to think that our kids aren't quite that dumb yet."
Don't be stuck in the '60's man. (That's when I grew up, BTW). High school students who get homework in AP physics or what not ought to be able to collaborate. And these are the very people most likely to use networking sites to do just that.
And how should we differentiate between Facebook and college Web sites that post homework (for the express and endorsed purpose of collaboration)?
The paradigm of individual self-reliance died along with our privacy. RIP
But social networking sites are demonstrably and materially vital to the objective of helping schoolchildren with their schoolwork. Kids collaborate. They help each other, and that is the central paradigm of our world today. That's how everything worth doing gets done.
We can't for this purpose or almost any other distinguish between social networking and any other kind, and the Internet is after all a network, no?
So it's not just our rights of Assembly that the bill seeks to abridge, it is the functionality of the Internet itself. Clueless.
(A) I'm not at all comfortable this will be overturned on appeal (and what a waste of legal fees!).
o id-Collections/dp/3908163323/sr=8-1/qid=1171153037 /ref=sr_1_1/104-8147539-7210360?ie=UTF8&s=books
(B) There is a long, illustrious, and exceedingly valuable tradition of nude photography as art, including (perhaps especially) of persons under the age of 18.
http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Bodies-Nudes-Polar
So this isn't merely a travesty of the American justice system. It is a First Amendment violation, because constitutionally the crime CAN'T be the transmission of these photographs or, as the judges implied, the existence of the photos themselves. It can only be how they are used.
The average age of first sexual encounter in the US is 17 (might even be true for Slashdotters), so by the standards of our legal system, we are a nation of rapists. It's not just the politicians and corporations.
Time, maybe, to rethink our laws.
More than the ISP, the real problem is Microsoft. What proportion of that 25% is Windows machines? >99%? And what proportion of OS-X, Linux, and other Unix flavors are part of a botnet? Far less than 1%. It should be a criminal offense to connect a Windows machine older than Win2K to a broadband Internet connection. Nothing less than the viability of the Internet is at stake. That's both an economic and national security issue.
Just compare to what happened in the music space. The rent-your-music scene is a negligible, money-losing business. Only iTunes allows some semblance of perpetual possession. What's their market share? 90%?
The movie download market will face similar consumer resistance. There are an awful lot of good movies out there that aren't on cable. And a few dozen HD movies will fill up most hard drives, even terabyte hard drives, so the need for archival offline media like DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray will persist for a long time. That's completely aside from their utility in moving around large data files.
Which brings us to the ongoing American bandwidth joke. Sorry, but most consumers are unwilling to wait 3 hours or more for a movie to download, especially if they can't own it. This is America. Want-It-Now Consumer-Nation. And we're stuck with the lamest Internet bandwidth in the industrialized world. For this application, it's hurting commerce. Didn't we invent the Internet? Until the Democrats and the FCC break some legs over at the telecom boardrooms, that situation won't improve. A major upgrade of America's Internet access is probably more than ten years off. Our loss is Sony's gain. Go long.