<quote><p>The State Dept's privacy goals are not to maintain secrecy against its citizens per se, but to ultimately keep things secret from other countries and their govts..</p></quote>
Pray tell then, how is this stated objective met by warning their potential recruits and troops, all of whom who are citizens not to read the leaked cables.
Aren't you the least bit concerned that vast and broad powers given to the Department of Homeland SECURITY to protect people from terrorist threats, and their expenses which are being funded by taxpayers is being abused to protect the private property rights of a few admittedly politically connected and wealthy corporations?
Of course you don't care. You won't until it personally affects you.
I didn't care much either, until Apple forced the Stanza app to remove its functionality to load books through the USB cable. Which I liked, instead of using the wireless transfer or internet download workarounds
Wait till the Apple restrictions bites you or your favourite app in the ass.
After reading TFA, I think parent poster has a point.
It was a conference on digital media. The Pope basically praised the Internet as a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. Then he warns that some of the stuff on the Internet can pollute the spirit. Given the crap that's online, that's a fair assessment to make.
OTOH, the Vatican really needs some good PR. You ask for forgiveness with a repentant and contrite heart, not with evasions, excuses, justifications or counter-accusations. And start by apologising to the victims, individually if need be. If this is what the Vatican has been trying to do, it didn't come across clearly enough.
For the rest, I think it would be a good idea to tone down on the witch hunting. It is too easy to get emotionally involved online with causes that we do not know the facts of. Lets give both parties breathing space so that they can talk to each other.
Most of these isps try to justify their actions with the excuse that they need to restrict pvp users so that other users consuming less bandwidth can enjoy decent surfing/transfer rates.
While arguably laudable, what really irks me is that these plans were largely sold to users (including pvp users) as non-capped unlimited bandwidth plans.
If they wish to restrict or apply caps, they should be up-front about it. And by up-front, I don't mean burying it in the contract's fine print.
These throttling and scanning attempts would likely lead to civil suits for breach of contract, fraud and/or deceptive advertising in any other industry.
It's surely not a coincidence that the Israeli and Japanese ISPs referred to are actively trying to hide their actions.
The difficulty is that it is difficult for individual users to challenge the actions of these ISPs who more often than not have deep pockets or a near monopoly over internet connectivity in their sphere of the world. Corporate bullying at its best.
...if you accept the claim that '5% of users are using 50% of resources' then that means that an elimination of that 5% of the users could result in 50% less overhead Which problem could easily be eliminated if Comcast had been up-front and honest about their customers' entitlements. For example, if they had sold limited download plans, once the cap had been reached they would well be within their rights to switch off the tap, so to speak for that user.
But if they sold an unlimited download plan to that user, the user is doing nothing more than exercising his contractual rights. What this boils down to is corporate greed. Comcast should not sell what it was not prepared to deliver.
The underlying "for the good of the people" argument you are making simply does not wash. Once Comcast has eliminated the the power users, what is to stop them from lowering the bar further to eliminate another 5% and so on?
As for the second part of your argument, I believe that a sustained, focused boycott would actually be effective in getting them to stop these nonsense. At the end of the day, Comcast is still being run by suits who will have to justify their fat paychecks to angry shareholders and more importantly, institutional investors if their profits nosedive.
Well, if Comcast is too unreasonable about what is "allowed" on their networks, they will end up with a lot of undesirable customers.
Bearing in mind economies of scale and the fact that most of their overheads are fixed (eg server/line maintenance costs) losing a substantial chunk of their clientele is bound to hurt.
Plus theres an old saying, "nature abhors a vacuum"... I would not be surprised to see a upstart company challenging Comcast if they see a potential to make a profit off these disgruntled customers.
The music companies want you to believe you have harmed them out of their fair share. Conveniently forgetting the fact that the original CD has already been paid for. So, their true complaint is that they're earning less that they think they should.
The music companies are motivated by greed, pure and simple. All that "piracy" and "theft" are just fancy words to hide their true intentions. Maybe they should look into ways to make their products more attractive instead of criminalising their customers with the aid of their mercenary lobbyists/legislators.
Perhaps the day is coming close when we will be able to artifically induce optimism in ourselves by tickling the right brain cells.
Feeling nervous before an interview? *zap*
Footballer lacks confidence before a game? *zap*
Going out for your first date? *zap*
Meeting her parents? *zap*
This is a guaranteed major money spinner, and I won't be surprised if it becomes addictive as well.
Governments are allowed to censor and suppress their populations. I quite disagree. More accurately, in a country that respects the rule of law, the general public may in certain limited circumstances allow their government to censor or suppress certain types of information, for example secrets which impact on national security, or financial information crucial to the nation's economy.
Perhaps what you meant to say was governments which are not popularly elected and which are not accountable to their citizens can by rule of force censor and suppress their populations who can do nothing about it.
Perhaps you will begin to see the legal or moral issue here if it was your blog or email being censored.
It would be a massive disgrace if this news was true.
An excerpt from the source article:
It's hard to know exactly what happened on a technical level, but politically, it seems pretty clear at this point. The monks and other activists began their protests. The military did not crack down right away, I believe because they feared the impact of citizen journalists posting images and videos of brutality to the Web. The military decided that they were going to take more-severe steps, so they cut access to the Internet through the ISPs, particularly in cities like Yangon and Mandalay. They also cut off access to cell service and otherwise.
This is what's going on in Burma
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/09/28/myanmar-internet-blocked/
Internet cafes were closed down. Both MPT ISP and Myanmar Teleport ISP cut down internet access in Yangon and Mandalay since this morning. The Junta try to prevent more videos, photographs and information about their violent crackdown getting out. I got a news from my friends that last night some militray guys searched office computers from Traders and Sakura Tower building. Most of the downtown movement photos were took from office rooms of those high buildings. GSM phone lines and some land lines were also cut out and very diffficult to contact even in local. GSM short message sending service is not working also. Burma is blacked out now!
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product?
The latest in a long list of blunders by Microsoft.
Don't they understand that if they keep making Vista so unreliable, frustrating or hard to use with all the piracy protections, OS lockdowns, DRM and stuff, people might just not want to use Vista?
I guess they will only get it when even the pirates refuse to pirate Vista, "Because nobody wants it".
Don't take this tecnobrega too seriously. You, as a US American, European or Japanese would not be able to live with the consequences.
Actually, this is what the fine article said:
But tecnobrega also is an economic engine -- moving about $5 million a month through Belem's economy, according to a study by the Getulio Vargas Foundation. The average singer makes about $850 a month -- about five times the minimum wage in Belem, and a decent salary for a musician. The point is, the artist was making five times the average minimum wage in the place he was living in. Well, I'd say that's a pretty comfortable living.
Taking this one step further, assuming this model was successfully applied in US, Europe or Japan and the artist was able to earn five times the minimum wage in those areas... wouldn't this be attractive for the artist concerned?
Granted these are mere assumptions for now, but the events in Brazil suggest that this could happen.
This is what happens in Brazil, from the article:
While piracy is the bane of many musicians trying to control the sale of their songs, tecnobrega artists see counterfeiters as key to their success. Artists, who make their money off of live shows, deliver their CDs directly to the street vendors, who determine the price that market can bear. This "mixtape" phenomenon is popular in other parts of the world, including Argentina and the United States, where it is an integral part of hip-hop.
"Piracy is the way to get established and get your name out. There's no way to stop it, so we're using it to our advantage," explains Gabi Amarantos, who frequently appears on Brazilian TV on the strength of bootleg sales of her CDs (from which artists don't get a cut).
Technically, there is no copyright infringement involved since the artists themselves allow their works to be duplicated.
What is however interesting is that this technobrega movement severely undermines one of the arguments frequently cited by the RIAA in favour of stricter copyright laws, which is that piracy undermines the ability of the music and film industries to invest in the next generation of local talent by lowering revenues from current sales.
Also from the article:
"This year the multinational record labels will only release about 40 records by Brazilian artists, while tecnobrega artists will release around 400," said Ronaldo Lemos, a law professor at Brazil's respected Getulio Vargas Foundation. "The record industry argues if intellectual property isn't protected there will be no innovation. But tecnobrega has shown that's not true."
The original intention of copyright as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause/ was:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Given that the tecnobrega movement has shown that copyright protection is not necessary to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, isn't it time to reconsider the whole basis of copyright law?
From the original article:
The committee has a bee in its collective bonnet about the issue of data security, and believes that P2P users across the country are inadvertently leaking private information and financial records into the tubes. Such information could be used for identity theft (and also has national security implications in some cases), and the Oversight Committee wants the FTC to do something. So why is the committee going after the medium (p2p) instead of the users leaking the secrets?
Going by their logic, other methods of communication like email, msn, icq, snail mail etc. are also potentially capable of leaking national secrets.
Isn't it simpler, cheaper and more importantly, less inconvenient to the general public to just issue a directive to all government officials not to use any p2p at their work computers or at all?
The internet allows more direct attacks on other candidates possible too, as John McCain, Republican presidential candidate hopeful, discovered. His MySpace page used an image hosted on another person's site. When that person switched the image to one stating McCain had reversed his position on gay marriage, the change was reflected on McCain's page and he was left red-faced.
Although people who saw this probably realised it was a prank, it illustrates the ease with which campaign material can be altered with little chance of being caught.
There is no issue of "campaign material being altered" since the image in question belonged to and was hosted by the other person in the first place, which image was hotlinked without his permission by McCain's staff.
Actually, RIAA won. In simple terms her offer was "Okay I'm willing to plead guilty and pay you $300 inclusive of everything" and RIAA accepted. So the award is made against her.
It's different from convincing the RIAA to "drop the matter".
Interesting, but will never happen. And this is the biggest flaw.
However, it would be set up so that the gold you sell will be taken off next month's bill, with the stipulation that you can reduce your bill to 0, but you can't reduce it past 0.
I strongly doubt Blizzard will sanction any system that deprives them of their regular monthly income from player subscriptions. Not to mention one that will make it completely impossible to forecast their future income and cash flow.
Speculation:
Assuming this system is set up, what is likely to happen is this:-
Average Joe hears about the new system. He sells 100g to make enough to play for free the next month.
He tells his friends. They start saving up gold to play for free, too. Good gold farming areas get flooded with high level players. Good gears are priced higher to earn more gold.
Because of the huge supply of gold for sale, the price of gold drops and you need to sell more gold to play the next month for free. And even more the month after.
Because there are some rich players who have bought gold and are willing to pay to get the best gears, the prices of gears go up dramatically beyond the reach of non gold-buying players.
Frustrated players buy gold so that they have a chance of getting some good gears.
Rinse and repeat.
Likely End result
Frustrated player-farmers who farm all day to buy time - and waste that time farming more gold for next month.
Frustrated non-gold buying players who can never find anything affordable on the auction house.
Frustrated gold buying players who see the prices of the items they want being jacked up higher and higher every month.
Frustrated average players being unable to compete with higher levelled players farming in their area.
What most casual players will do in that situation, is quit. I think this is a bad idea.
Has anyone noticed in the euphoria over distros standing up to M$ that M$ has already won the first round?
Look what happened :
- Linux distros stand (more or less) united vs. M$
- M$ issues FUD over patents
- Some distros give in and licence with M$
- Community gets upset with licensed distros and threatens to boycott them.
So what happens if the community carries through its threat and boycotts Suse/Xandros/Linspire? They may, or may not die. If they die, the pool of competitors against M$ just got smaller, and the choices available to Linux users shrink. If they don't die, the community is fractured on whether or not to support these distros, and most probably there will be infighting within the community of Linux users.
Slashdot Mirror
<quote><p>The State Dept's privacy goals are not to maintain secrecy against its citizens per se, but to ultimately keep things secret from other countries and their govts..</p></quote>
Pray tell then, how is this stated objective met by warning their potential recruits and troops, all of whom who are citizens not to read the leaked cables.
...and it's running should not be subject to the whims of any organisation like IFPI or RIAA, nor the arbitrary laws of any country, even the US of A.
Do it, now.
... the ends justifies the means?
Aren't you the least bit concerned that vast and broad powers given to the Department of Homeland SECURITY to protect people from terrorist threats, and their expenses which are being funded by taxpayers is being abused to protect the private property rights of a few admittedly politically connected and wealthy corporations?
Well, you should be.
...for standing up for their beliefs. And for not giving in to threats.
Wish I could say the same for the useless elected politicians though.
Of course you don't care. You won't until it personally affects you.
I didn't care much either, until Apple forced the Stanza app to remove its functionality to load books through the USB cable. Which I liked, instead of using the wireless transfer or internet download workarounds
Wait till the Apple restrictions bites you or your favourite app in the ass.
After reading TFA, I think parent poster has a point.
It was a conference on digital media. The Pope basically praised the Internet as a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. Then he warns that some of the stuff on the Internet can pollute the spirit. Given the crap that's online, that's a fair assessment to make.
OTOH, the Vatican really needs some good PR. You ask for forgiveness with a repentant and contrite heart, not with evasions, excuses, justifications or counter-accusations. And start by apologising to the victims, individually if need be. If this is what the Vatican has been trying to do, it didn't come across clearly enough.
For the rest, I think it would be a good idea to tone down on the witch hunting. It is too easy to get emotionally involved online with causes that we do not know the facts of. Lets give both parties breathing space so that they can talk to each other.
Most of these isps try to justify their actions with the excuse that they need to restrict pvp users so that other users consuming less bandwidth can enjoy decent surfing/transfer rates. While arguably laudable, what really irks me is that these plans were largely sold to users (including pvp users) as non-capped unlimited bandwidth plans. If they wish to restrict or apply caps, they should be up-front about it. And by up-front, I don't mean burying it in the contract's fine print. These throttling and scanning attempts would likely lead to civil suits for breach of contract, fraud and/or deceptive advertising in any other industry. It's surely not a coincidence that the Israeli and Japanese ISPs referred to are actively trying to hide their actions. The difficulty is that it is difficult for individual users to challenge the actions of these ISPs who more often than not have deep pockets or a near monopoly over internet connectivity in their sphere of the world. Corporate bullying at its best.
...if you accept the claim that '5% of users are using 50% of resources' then that means that an elimination of that 5% of the users could result in 50% less overhead Which problem could easily be eliminated if Comcast had been up-front and honest about their customers' entitlements. For example, if they had sold limited download plans, once the cap had been reached they would well be within their rights to switch off the tap, so to speak for that user.But if they sold an unlimited download plan to that user, the user is doing nothing more than exercising his contractual rights. What this boils down to is corporate greed. Comcast should not sell what it was not prepared to deliver.
The underlying "for the good of the people" argument you are making simply does not wash. Once Comcast has eliminated the the power users, what is to stop them from lowering the bar further to eliminate another 5% and so on?
As for the second part of your argument, I believe that a sustained, focused boycott would actually be effective in getting them to stop these nonsense. At the end of the day, Comcast is still being run by suits who will have to justify their fat paychecks to angry shareholders and more importantly, institutional investors if their profits nosedive.
Well, if Comcast is too unreasonable about what is "allowed" on their networks, they will end up with a lot of undesirable customers. Bearing in mind economies of scale and the fact that most of their overheads are fixed (eg server/line maintenance costs) losing a substantial chunk of their clientele is bound to hurt. Plus theres an old saying, "nature abhors a vacuum"... I would not be surprised to see a upstart company challenging Comcast if they see a potential to make a profit off these disgruntled customers.
The music companies are motivated by greed, pure and simple. All that "piracy" and "theft" are just fancy words to hide their true intentions. Maybe they should look into ways to make their products more attractive instead of criminalising their customers with the aid of their mercenary lobbyists/legislators.
So this is not a hoax, after all.
Perhaps the day is coming close when we will be able to artifically induce optimism in ourselves by tickling the right brain cells.
Feeling nervous before an interview? *zap*
Footballer lacks confidence before a game? *zap*
Going out for your first date? *zap*
Meeting her parents? *zap*
This is a guaranteed major money spinner, and I won't be surprised if it becomes addictive as well.
What the company did was against the US embargo, actually. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2144178/fortinet-investigates-sanctions/
So yes, it's illegal but the company doesn't care.
Perhaps what you meant to say was governments which are not popularly elected and which are not accountable to their citizens can by rule of force censor and suppress their populations who can do nothing about it.
Perhaps you will begin to see the legal or moral issue here if it was your blog or email being censored.
An excerpt from the source article: It's hard to know exactly what happened on a technical level, but politically, it seems pretty clear at this point. The monks and other activists began their protests. The military did not crack down right away, I believe because they feared the impact of citizen journalists posting images and videos of brutality to the Web. The military decided that they were going to take more-severe steps, so they cut access to the Internet through the ISPs, particularly in cities like Yangon and Mandalay. They also cut off access to cell service and otherwise.
This is what's going on in Burma http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/09/28/myanmar-internet-blocked/ Internet cafes were closed down. Both MPT ISP and Myanmar Teleport ISP cut down internet access in Yangon and Mandalay since this morning. The Junta try to prevent more videos, photographs and information about their violent crackdown getting out. I got a news from my friends that last night some militray guys searched office computers from Traders and Sakura Tower building. Most of the downtown movement photos were took from office rooms of those high buildings. GSM phone lines and some land lines were also cut out and very diffficult to contact even in local. GSM short message sending service is not working also. Burma is blacked out now!
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product?
The latest in a long list of blunders by Microsoft.
Don't they understand that if they keep making Vista so unreliable, frustrating or hard to use with all the piracy protections, OS lockdowns, DRM and stuff, people might just not want to use Vista?
I guess they will only get it when even the pirates refuse to pirate Vista, "Because nobody wants it".
Actually, this is what the fine article said: But tecnobrega also is an economic engine -- moving about $5 million a month through Belem's economy, according to a study by the Getulio Vargas Foundation. The average singer makes about $850 a month -- about five times the minimum wage in Belem, and a decent salary for a musician. The point is, the artist was making five times the average minimum wage in the place he was living in. Well, I'd say that's a pretty comfortable living.
Taking this one step further, assuming this model was successfully applied in US, Europe or Japan and the artist was able to earn five times the minimum wage in those areas... wouldn't this be attractive for the artist concerned?
Granted these are mere assumptions for now, but the events in Brazil suggest that this could happen.
"Piracy is the way to get established and get your name out. There's no way to stop it, so we're using it to our advantage," explains Gabi Amarantos, who frequently appears on Brazilian TV on the strength of bootleg sales of her CDs (from which artists don't get a cut).
Technically, there is no copyright infringement involved since the artists themselves allow their works to be duplicated.
What is however interesting is that this technobrega movement severely undermines one of the arguments frequently cited by the RIAA in favour of stricter copyright laws, which is that piracy undermines the ability of the music and film industries to invest in the next generation of local talent by lowering revenues from current sales.
Also from the article
The original intention of copyright as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause/ was
Given that the tecnobrega movement has shown that copyright protection is not necessary to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, isn't it time to reconsider the whole basis of copyright law?
There is no issue of "campaign material being altered" since the image in question belonged to and was hosted by the other person in the first place, which image was hotlinked without his permission by McCain's staff.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/
I would take the rest of the article with a pinch of salt.
Actually, RIAA won. In simple terms her offer was "Okay I'm willing to plead guilty and pay you $300 inclusive of everything" and RIAA accepted. So the award is made against her. It's different from convincing the RIAA to "drop the matter".
However, it would be set up so that the gold you sell will be taken off next month's bill, with the stipulation that you can reduce your bill to 0, but you can't reduce it past 0.
I strongly doubt Blizzard will sanction any system that deprives them of their regular monthly income from player subscriptions. Not to mention one that will make it completely impossible to forecast their future income and cash flow.
Speculation
Likely End result
What most casual players will do in that situation, is quit. I think this is a bad idea.
Has anyone noticed in the euphoria over distros standing up to M$ that M$ has already won the first round?
/Xandros /Linspire? They may, or may not die. If they die, the pool of competitors against M$ just got smaller, and the choices available to Linux users shrink. If they don't die, the community is fractured on whether or not to support these distros, and most probably there will be infighting within the community of Linux users.
Look what happened :
- Linux distros stand (more or less) united vs. M$
- M$ issues FUD over patents
- Some distros give in and licence with M$
- Community gets upset with licensed distros and threatens to boycott them.
So what happens if the community carries through its threat and boycotts Suse
Either way its profit for M$.