To me the same principle applies... when this country was founded the main way the government would keep its citizens down was through arms (in the US's case this would be Britain keeping the colonies in line), now a-days it seems to be information.
I seem to recall a post a while back in a discussion on strong encryption (I think in relation to export laws or government snooping) suggesting that the best thing possible would be the government to classify encryption as munitions, so that the right to 'own and bear' it was protected under whichever crazy amendment you have that says you can have guns.:)
Begging the question, IMO. "See, he's acting innocent. Only the most hardened of criminals act innocent when confronted with their guilt, so he MUST be guilty of something!"
Maybe I should rephrase. "If the government that I've allegedly elected and that is supposed to protect and represent me thinks that on a whim it can fuck me without lube and not even give me a lollipop afterwards, then either I'm leaving or it is. If it pisses me off enough I just might force the issue so it's the government that leaves, not me."
The question to ask is what good are the public getting in return for giving up such freedoms, AND paying for the giving up of such freedoms (dont forget who pay for the FBI, Police, etc), and paying for the protection of the revinue to copyright owning entities.
We get to consume big-budget media that would never be created if the investors behind it couldn't be assured of some sane business model that works at the scale required.
Whether that's a fair tradeoff is up for discussion, but bear in mind that the vast majority of illegal copies are copies of big-budget media, so people obviously want very much to consume it.
It makes perfect sense. The GPP could no longer bear to live under the oppressive regime in the U.S. and so they moved to Chile. Hell, I'm tempted to do something similar myself, I'm sick of being smothered by Australia's pantywaist politics. I could just see myself moving to some remote corner of northern Thailand, say, and holing up with an internet connection, surviving on savings and occasional online contract work.
If I lost my job because the FBI destroyed the (innocent) company that I worked for, I'd care a lot more about making sure it didn't happen again (move countries, bomb the FBI, depending on how pissed I was) than about not downloading a fucking movie which I couldn't afford to buy on DVD any more anyway because I'm suddenly unemployed.
Well, if the FBI raided my house and took all my shit because they suspected the guy next door of breaking some law, and then took months to give my stuff back, I'd sure as hell want compensation. Some collateral damage is unavoidable in some cases but that'd be beyond reasonable.
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if the difference between "cloned the hard drives and returned the hardware the next day" and "left the entire data center in a warehouse to rot for a year" is whether anyone on the paper trail has a personal beef with the company in question.
We meet again!:P The excess usage charge is something that (always having been capped because we rely on international cables for most of 'the internet') we've grown out of in.au. It was in for a while, notably Telstra (our ex-government-owned monopoly) stayed with 10c/mb excess charges until 2003 or something ridiculous. But since then, consumers realised that they don't HAVE to put up with $1500 excess per month if their kid or flatmate or whoever decides to download a bunch more stuff, and now we have capped plans as the standard.
You write off as "investing in adequate supporting systems" a process that would involve upgrading most of the internet as a whole by a factor of 1000 or more. That's a massive investment (hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least) which isn't remotely necessary unless we assume that 10% of the internet population will spend 100% of their time downloading episodes of Gundam Wing.
There's nothing wrong with selling slower plans as cheaper - but the true cost of a 1.5mbit connection (assuming full utilisation) is on the order of hundreds of dollars a month. Personally, I'm happy to be able to get a 1.5mbit connection for $50 a month assuming I promise to only donwload 20gb. In higher population density areas, of course the cost is lower, but it's still far higher than the cost of supplying the same sized pipe with a full-utilisation guarantee. Do you honestly want to pay more than a grand a month for an 8mbit pipe? Because that's what one's worth unless the ISP sells by quota instead of last-mile bit rate.
I want you to help me with an experiment. Restrict yourself, for a month, to not downloading mass media that you can get on other channels (TV, DVD rental). Reading webcomics, checking your mail, listening to internet radio. Don't do anything more bandwidth-intensive than youtube. At the end of the month, tell me how much bandwidth you used. 80gb? No. 50gb? Maybe if you're unemployed. My entire household uses around 5-10gb between us.
So you were in a mixed office where YOU had your pet project to work on, and everyone else was working on shared projects? Lucky you, it's much easier working on solo projects where the source isn't being modified under you.
If you have so much trouble concentrating, I suggest a portable music player or noise-canceling headphones.
I'm talking 'observer' in the theoretical sense, although as others pointed out elsewhere on this discussion, supermassive (center-of-galaxy class) black holes are big enough that at the event horizon the gravity gradient is still pretty small, definitely small enough to be survivable by a human in a ship.
So you could in theory observe all that freaky shit happening as you approach the event horizon. Then again you'd have somewhat of a hard time telling anyone outside the black hole about it...
[Conroy]You hear that, people? He's DEFINITELY a paedo, only one of those sick bastards would oppose my plan to ban a large random subset of the internets.[/Conroy]
If you keep arguing using "logic" I'll have to play my trump card and explain that the devil can quote scripture. That'd prove... something. Yeah.
You realise that if you masturbate to that, the children in it will automatically know that you did, and become victims of child porn, and probably need counseling and huge payouts and whatnot.
I mean really, think of the children!
(@ GGP - "...with the same resolve that any parent would have if it was their child..." With respect, I doubt it, and it's better that way. You would try your damnedest to bring them to justice within the framework of our legal system, whereas a parent who saw their kid being abused like that would probably grab a nailgun and a pair of pliers and get to work, I know I would.)
No, it's not. Hulu, Youtube, netflix and blockbuster streaming, the ever increasing application of Flash... The "web" is much higher bandwidth place today than it was even a year ago. Or do you want to go back to what the "web" looked like in 1995... almost entirely ASCII text with no formating, very few graphics, no flashy interactive content, just text and links to more text. Today, the protocol overhead that you never see is larger than the entire web page of the pre-broadband days. But that's not innovation, that's just a bunch of people sharing TV shows.
How big is one of your modern web pages, including the "protocol overhead that you never see"? 500KB maybe? How big is that season of Friends that you think had that episode Sammy was talking about the other day? It's about 10GB. We're talking a massive difference in scale here. "Innovation" is online apps like gmail. It's flash games that are seldom more than a few megabytes. Innovation takes up much less space than huge blobs of mass media being endlessly, needlessly replicated. Streaming video is the only example you list that actually requires high bandwidth, and even then 'HD' youtube videos are only 900kbps, a far cry from the tens-of-megabits ADSL2+ connections available today.
Limit the amount of bandwidth people get to use, and you will end up holding back internet innovation. If you only get to download 40GB per month, why does anyone need a 100Mbps DOCSIS3.0 modem?
You're mistaking overall download quota for responsiveness. The 'innovative' internet uses that you list are very bursty (again with the exception of streaming video, and that on its own isn't enough to cause major problems) - if I want to play a 10mb Java game, I want it to load as fast as possible. Once it's downloaded, though, I'll play it for half an hour without requiring any further downloads.
Bottom line is that the instantaneous download rate available is the main determinant of the 'user experience' quality of an internet connection, and so it receives more attention than the overall monthly transfer capability that only really affects a small proportion of users.
True and true. However, ISPs have always oversold their capacity by rather large (and ever increasing) margins. In the dialup days, 10:1 to 12:1 was a "good ISP". Today cable providers oversell by over 100:1. (I once worked for an ISP that sold 1.5M DSL connections off a DSLAM with only a 768k connection.) Their entire business model is "screw the customer". They want to advertise 10M service for $19.95 per month, charge you $50 per month, and not even provide 1M of service. "We'll sell you a 100M connection, but only let you use it for 3.9s per month."
I think where the discrepancy is coming in is that 'last mile' transfer rates between ISP and the consumer have risen far faster than total bandwidth available to the ISP, because demand has risen faster than either of them. For instance, my ISP, Internode, probably has around 350k customers (they had 150k 2 years ago and were growing at ~50k/year), and a 10Gbps national network. Even with no international traffic, that's only 3.74kBps per user, and yet the slowest plan they sell is (I think) 512/128.
They're basically trying to give people the fastest internet they can, but don't have the back-end bandwidth to back it up if everyone runs their connections continuously at maximum rate. Download quotas are a way around this. I honestly don't see what's so damn hard about "you should have to pay more for downloading 100gb/month than for downloading 1gb/month".
Spaghettification. Let me guess. I can see only two options: one -- due to the bizarre effects of the intense gravitational pull, and because we're entering a region of time and space where the laws of physics no longer apply, we all of us inexplicably develop an irresistible urge to consume vast amounts of a certain wheat-based Italian noodle conventionally served with Parmesan cheese; or two -- we, the crew, get turned into spaghetti. I have a feeling we can eliminate option one.
It sounded (from TFA) like the event horizon is actually subjective; that you'd never "hit" it from the point of view of an observer falling into the black hole.
Of course, what the Academician probably meant was "the pixels go a funny shape and then the world goes blue with big grey letters on it".
They just said that 20% of your paid time, doing something other than what they are paying you to do, is reasonable? Would a company paying you 20% less all of the sudden be reasonable? If you are getting paid, STFU and get the work done. If there's no work to do, clock out and go home.
No, they said that people who spend 20% of their work time browsing the internet do 9% more work overall than people who don't browse the internet during work time.
Sorry for the double post, but I forgot to link this - an article on Southern Cross Cable, explaining why our Australian internets are copiously more expensive than your Americanium internets.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife won't let me dabble in beer, she says I have to drink it normally or I'm not allowed to have it.
Dabbling makes you sticky.
To me the same principle applies... when this country was founded the main way the government would keep its citizens down was through arms (in the US's case this would be Britain keeping the colonies in line), now a-days it seems to be information.
I seem to recall a post a while back in a discussion on strong encryption (I think in relation to export laws or government snooping) suggesting that the best thing possible would be the government to classify encryption as munitions, so that the right to 'own and bear' it was protected under whichever crazy amendment you have that says you can have guns. :)
Begging the question, IMO. "See, he's acting innocent. Only the most hardened of criminals act innocent when confronted with their guilt, so he MUST be guilty of something!"
Maybe I should rephrase. "If the government that I've allegedly elected and that is supposed to protect and represent me thinks that on a whim it can fuck me without lube and not even give me a lollipop afterwards, then either I'm leaving or it is. If it pisses me off enough I just might force the issue so it's the government that leaves, not me."
The question to ask is what good are the public getting in return for giving up such freedoms, AND paying for the giving up of such freedoms (dont forget who pay for the FBI, Police, etc), and paying for the protection of the revinue to copyright owning entities.
We get to consume big-budget media that would never be created if the investors behind it couldn't be assured of some sane business model that works at the scale required.
Whether that's a fair tradeoff is up for discussion, but bear in mind that the vast majority of illegal copies are copies of big-budget media, so people obviously want very much to consume it.
It makes perfect sense. The GPP could no longer bear to live under the oppressive regime in the U.S. and so they moved to Chile. Hell, I'm tempted to do something similar myself, I'm sick of being smothered by Australia's pantywaist politics. I could just see myself moving to some remote corner of northern Thailand, say, and holing up with an internet connection, surviving on savings and occasional online contract work.
If I lost my job because the FBI destroyed the (innocent) company that I worked for, I'd care a lot more about making sure it didn't happen again (move countries, bomb the FBI, depending on how pissed I was) than about not downloading a fucking movie which I couldn't afford to buy on DVD any more anyway because I'm suddenly unemployed.
It's an indicator of the sad state of the world that I'd give you a +1, informative if I could.
Well, if the FBI raided my house and took all my shit because they suspected the guy next door of breaking some law, and then took months to give my stuff back, I'd sure as hell want compensation. Some collateral damage is unavoidable in some cases but that'd be beyond reasonable.
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if the difference between "cloned the hard drives and returned the hardware the next day" and "left the entire data center in a warehouse to rot for a year" is whether anyone on the paper trail has a personal beef with the company in question.
We meet again! :P The excess usage charge is something that (always having been capped because we rely on international cables for most of 'the internet') we've grown out of in .au. It was in for a while, notably Telstra (our ex-government-owned monopoly) stayed with 10c/mb excess charges until 2003 or something ridiculous. But since then, consumers realised that they don't HAVE to put up with $1500 excess per month if their kid or flatmate or whoever decides to download a bunch more stuff, and now we have capped plans as the standard.
You write off as "investing in adequate supporting systems" a process that would involve upgrading most of the internet as a whole by a factor of 1000 or more. That's a massive investment (hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least) which isn't remotely necessary unless we assume that 10% of the internet population will spend 100% of their time downloading episodes of Gundam Wing.
There's nothing wrong with selling slower plans as cheaper - but the true cost of a 1.5mbit connection (assuming full utilisation) is on the order of hundreds of dollars a month. Personally, I'm happy to be able to get a 1.5mbit connection for $50 a month assuming I promise to only donwload 20gb. In higher population density areas, of course the cost is lower, but it's still far higher than the cost of supplying the same sized pipe with a full-utilisation guarantee. Do you honestly want to pay more than a grand a month for an 8mbit pipe? Because that's what one's worth unless the ISP sells by quota instead of last-mile bit rate.
I want you to help me with an experiment. Restrict yourself, for a month, to not downloading mass media that you can get on other channels (TV, DVD rental). Reading webcomics, checking your mail, listening to internet radio. Don't do anything more bandwidth-intensive than youtube. At the end of the month, tell me how much bandwidth you used. 80gb? No. 50gb? Maybe if you're unemployed. My entire household uses around 5-10gb between us.
So you were in a mixed office where YOU had your pet project to work on, and everyone else was working on shared projects? Lucky you, it's much easier working on solo projects where the source isn't being modified under you.
If you have so much trouble concentrating, I suggest a portable music player or noise-canceling headphones.
I'm talking 'observer' in the theoretical sense, although as others pointed out elsewhere on this discussion, supermassive (center-of-galaxy class) black holes are big enough that at the event horizon the gravity gradient is still pretty small, definitely small enough to be survivable by a human in a ship.
So you could in theory observe all that freaky shit happening as you approach the event horizon. Then again you'd have somewhat of a hard time telling anyone outside the black hole about it...
...you fool, this isn't about preventing child abuse! It's about cleaning up the internet!
...Oops.
[Conroy]You hear that, people? He's DEFINITELY a paedo, only one of those sick bastards would oppose my plan to ban a large random subset of the internets.[/Conroy]
If you keep arguing using "logic" I'll have to play my trump card and explain that the devil can quote scripture. That'd prove... something. Yeah.
You realise that if you masturbate to that, the children in it will automatically know that you did, and become victims of child porn, and probably need counseling and huge payouts and whatnot.
I mean really, think of the children!
(@ GGP - "...with the same resolve that any parent would have if it was their child..." With respect, I doubt it, and it's better that way. You would try your damnedest to bring them to justice within the framework of our legal system, whereas a parent who saw their kid being abused like that would probably grab a nailgun and a pair of pliers and get to work, I know I would.)
No, it's not. Hulu, Youtube, netflix and blockbuster streaming, the ever increasing application of Flash... The "web" is much higher bandwidth place today than it was even a year ago. Or do you want to go back to what the "web" looked like in 1995... almost entirely ASCII text with no formating, very few graphics, no flashy interactive content, just text and links to more text. Today, the protocol overhead that you never see is larger than the entire web page of the pre-broadband days. But that's not innovation, that's just a bunch of people sharing TV shows.
How big is one of your modern web pages, including the "protocol overhead that you never see"? 500KB maybe? How big is that season of Friends that you think had that episode Sammy was talking about the other day? It's about 10GB. We're talking a massive difference in scale here. "Innovation" is online apps like gmail. It's flash games that are seldom more than a few megabytes. Innovation takes up much less space than huge blobs of mass media being endlessly, needlessly replicated. Streaming video is the only example you list that actually requires high bandwidth, and even then 'HD' youtube videos are only 900kbps, a far cry from the tens-of-megabits ADSL2+ connections available today.
Limit the amount of bandwidth people get to use, and you will end up holding back internet innovation. If you only get to download 40GB per month, why does anyone need a 100Mbps DOCSIS3.0 modem?
You're mistaking overall download quota for responsiveness. The 'innovative' internet uses that you list are very bursty (again with the exception of streaming video, and that on its own isn't enough to cause major problems) - if I want to play a 10mb Java game, I want it to load as fast as possible. Once it's downloaded, though, I'll play it for half an hour without requiring any further downloads.
Bottom line is that the instantaneous download rate available is the main determinant of the 'user experience' quality of an internet connection, and so it receives more attention than the overall monthly transfer capability that only really affects a small proportion of users.
True and true. However, ISPs have always oversold their capacity by rather large (and ever increasing) margins. In the dialup days, 10:1 to 12:1 was a "good ISP". Today cable providers oversell by over 100:1. (I once worked for an ISP that sold 1.5M DSL connections off a DSLAM with only a 768k connection.) Their entire business model is "screw the customer". They want to advertise 10M service for $19.95 per month, charge you $50 per month, and not even provide 1M of service. "We'll sell you a 100M connection, but only let you use it for 3.9s per month."
I think where the discrepancy is coming in is that 'last mile' transfer rates between ISP and the consumer have risen far faster than total bandwidth available to the ISP, because demand has risen faster than either of them. For instance, my ISP, Internode, probably has around 350k customers (they had 150k 2 years ago and were growing at ~50k/year), and a 10Gbps national network. Even with no international traffic, that's only 3.74kBps per user, and yet the slowest plan they sell is (I think) 512/128.
They're basically trying to give people the fastest internet they can, but don't have the back-end bandwidth to back it up if everyone runs their connections continuously at maximum rate. Download quotas are a way around this. I honestly don't see what's so damn hard about "you should have to pay more for downloading 100gb/month than for downloading 1gb/month".
I'm gonna have to whoosh a whoosh here.
:)
Whooosh!
Spaghettification. Let me guess. I can see only two options: one -- due to the bizarre effects of the intense gravitational pull, and because we're entering a region of time and space where the laws of physics no longer apply, we all of us inexplicably develop an irresistible urge to consume vast amounts of a certain wheat-based Italian noodle conventionally served with Parmesan cheese; or two -- we, the crew, get turned into spaghetti. I have a feeling we can eliminate option one.
Mmmm, nearly lunchtime.
Well, if they want to mutilate the language of my profession like that, I shall build a research based on an algorithm.
It sounded (from TFA) like the event horizon is actually subjective; that you'd never "hit" it from the point of view of an observer falling into the black hole.
Of course, what the Academician probably meant was "the pixels go a funny shape and then the world goes blue with big grey letters on it".
I'd hate to die at 85 and not feel like I'd earned it. Maybe I should try this 'smoking' thing.
They just said that 20% of your paid time, doing something other than what they are paying you to do, is reasonable? Would a company paying you 20% less all of the sudden be reasonable? If you are getting paid, STFU and get the work done. If there's no work to do, clock out and go home.
No, they said that people who spend 20% of their work time browsing the internet do 9% more work overall than people who don't browse the internet during work time.
Sorry for the double post, but I forgot to link this - an article on Southern Cross Cable, explaining why our Australian internets are copiously more expensive than your Americanium internets.