Say what you want, but I for one am glad to see that they are finally taking real action against a credible threat. See? DHS isn't just security theater. I feel safer already!
How about this... to protect the consumer, anything "protected" by DRM is automatically placed in the public domain the minute its DRM ceases to work. It's mind-boggling that the music industry expects their copyrights to last until the end of the Earth, yet don't expect their paying customers' rights to last at least as long.
And they wonder why no one wants to buy their shit...
"Best" will depend on how it is defined. You and I (and AT&T)might include speed in our assessment. Verizon might insist that reliable == best, because speed doesn't matter if you can't connect.
Of course, we all know it is nothing but marketing crap designed to seep into the minds of vapid TV viewers as they eyeball their televisions in a semi-comatose state between doses of "Ghost Whisperer" and "Survivor XXI: Lost in an Antarctic Crevasse".
Instead of taking the court's valuable time with this marketing-driven pissing contest, I propose a more practical solution: Lock the marketing and legal departments of AT&T and Verizon in a vacant warehouse, arm them with machetes and force them to duel to the death. May God protect the side who is telling the truth...
I actually did consider that possibility, either for deceiving foreign intelligence, or for domestic leverage, and/or wag-the-dog type distraction from other events.
People that take action based on this allegation alone are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Yes, I know. This is Congress we're talking about, after all.
You say this as a joke, but that's what members of congress are actually talking about.
FTFA:
Towns [House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns, (D-N.Y.)] said that the file-sharing industry's promises to self-regulate itself had clearly failed. "Specific examples of recent LimeWire leaks range from appalling to shocking," Towns said. "As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry."
Saying "the days of self-regulation should be over" is congresscritterspeak for "we're about to regulate another industry", which in this case would be a) bad, b) useless, and c) undeserved. Bad because it would stymie technical development in the US, and useless because said development would then simply take place elsewhere in the world. Undeserved, because Limewire did not attempt to spread US government secrets. Their software was simply the mechanism by which some idiot (presumably a government-employed idiot, but that would be redundant) knowingly or unknowingly loosed this material into the wild.
Other members want the issue investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and law enforcement authorities. They said that the continued failure by companies such as LimeWire to take more proactive steps to stop inadvertent file-sharing is tantamount to enabling illegal activity resulting from the data leaks.
And how do they propose that Limewire prevent sharers from sharing government secrets? By sending someone to each Limewire installation to make sure the luser configured it correctly? To the power-grabbing, meglomaniacal nanny state committee-rats in congress, here's an idea: clean your own house first. Clamp down on those with the poor judgment to run p2p sharing apps on systems that have sensitive data. Is there a rule against it? No? Make one. Yes? Enforce it. Hell, ban p2p on all govt systems, sensitive or not, and enforce it like the matter of national security it is.
True claim or not, the landlord may figure that using lawyers to intimidate their tenant into silence might be worth a try. What good is the truth if you cannot afford a lawyer of your own to defend yourself against liars?
Well, have you ever tried getting a Harbour Master to pay for your nanodiamonds? It's damn near impossible. I've tried; all they do is look at you like you're out of your mind or something. They're tighter then a Health Maintenance Organization, even.
Thanks for doing all that legwork, and actually surveying all those legally armed people to ascertain how often they practice at the range, and how well they shoot. It's nice to see that ignorant, opinionated ACs never pull speculation like that out of their ass and call it fact.
I'm glad you don't know of anyone who ever died of reinforced doors and windows. Because I'm sure that your experience is so broad as to be almost universal. I'm sure that bars on windows and doors don't impede firefighters' access, say, if incapacitated victims were trapped behind them.
People buy a gun because they choose to take responsibility for their own safety. A gun and ammo adequate for home protection can be bought for a few hundred dollars. Buying and installing the hardware to fortify even a small home costs how much?
Her job is not to deliver news to you, even though that's what she would tell you if asked. Her job is to get ratings. She is doing that by generating controversy. She interviewed a car dealer who is running a promotion involving legal but scary-sounding weapons not because it directly affects a national audience, but because she could exploit it.
The economy is in the toilet, and you want to tax fuel? No. Just plain no. There is no reasonable excuse for taxing the shit out of people worse than we already are. This would hurt everyone, even those without cars, because of the increased cost of transportation for food and other goods. I already don't drive any miles I don't have to. How the hell is this going to cut my demand for fuel? Quite simply, it isn't. It is simply going to shove another tax up my ass. A tax can't modify geography; it won't make anyone's minimum commute distance any shorter.
Furthermore, if you dry up demand for fuel, you kill the market for new biofuels like this. In order to do away with "bad" dino fuel, we need a robust market for biofuel, which will lead to an established, growing, maturing profitable biofuel industry.
The whole reason this article is exciting is that it shows another potential cost-competitive biofuel process. If the process is competitive, why would you raise taxes? Granted, it is possible for world oil prices to fluctuate below the more or less fixed price of this new method of production, but on the whole over the last few years, oil prices have exceeded what this company claims their projected production price would be.
Instead of taxing "bad" dino fuel more, why not give more tax breaks on "good" biofuel? Let's remove the federal tax on biofuel for 5 years, and then phase it back in if necessary. At the start, biofuels will make up such a small percentage of all fuel sold, the tax loss would be negligible. At the end of that 5 years, the biofuel industry hopefully will have matured and gained marketshare. At that point, I would expect it would be able to stand on its own, and federal fuel taxes could be phased back in as biofuel comprises a larger part of the fuel market in the US.
Not every model that is successful in Europe (or that they manage to endure) is the right solution in the US.
Hah! You kids and your damn punch cards. When I learned programming, we had to use pointy sticks to press individual zeros and ones into a clay tablet. Assembler? Compilers? Hah again! We learned to bake our code tablets in the sun, because there was always a line to get them kiln-dried.
He seems to be making the fundamental error of forgetting what internet content supply and demand look like. There is a near infinite (for practical purposes, anyway) number of content providers - original artists and authors, megacorporations, aggregators, bloggers, "pirates", amateur-gone-semi-pro porn stars, etc., because the internet enables us all to be publishers in some way. Also, each content provider has the ability to cross traditional geographical market boundaries easily, and serve a huge number of customers. The result is that although the signal-to-noise ratio may suck sometimes, there is such a broad amount of content and distribution is so trivial, that the supply side of the graph is completely out of whack - it approaches $0 for infinite content. Which oddly enough, is where most of us like it.
Traditional supply and demand only work in a market where there is a relatively limited number of players who control the product, and supply is limited by traditional manufacturing and distribution.
I am sure that in his position he sees clearly the cost of producing content that others consume essentially for free, but it does not automatically follow from that that many consumers in the market are willing to pay what he wants. Bitch-slapping your customers with rhetoric like his doesn't help either.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you want, but I for one am glad to see that they are finally taking real action against a credible threat. See? DHS isn't just security theater. I feel safer already!
How about this ... to protect the consumer, anything "protected" by DRM is automatically placed in the public domain the minute its DRM ceases to work. It's mind-boggling that the music industry expects their copyrights to last until the end of the Earth, yet don't expect their paying customers' rights to last at least as long.
...
And they wonder why no one wants to buy their shit
My apologies. That was truly insensitive of me.
"Best" will depend on how it is defined. You and I (and AT&T)might include speed in our assessment. Verizon might insist that reliable == best, because speed doesn't matter if you can't connect.
...
Of course, we all know it is nothing but marketing crap designed to seep into the minds of vapid TV viewers as they eyeball their televisions in a semi-comatose state between doses of "Ghost Whisperer" and "Survivor XXI: Lost in an Antarctic Crevasse".
Instead of taking the court's valuable time with this marketing-driven pissing contest, I propose a more practical solution: Lock the marketing and legal departments of AT&T and Verizon in a vacant warehouse, arm them with machetes and force them to duel to the death. May God protect the side who is telling the truth
People that take action based on this allegation alone are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Yes, I know. This is Congress we're talking about, after all.
Hell, they can't even decrypt Skype.
Towns [House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns, (D-N.Y.)] said that the file-sharing industry's promises to self-regulate itself had clearly failed. "Specific examples of recent LimeWire leaks range from appalling to shocking," Towns said. "As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry."
Saying "the days of self-regulation should be over" is congresscritterspeak for "we're about to regulate another industry", which in this case would be a) bad, b) useless, and c) undeserved. Bad because it would stymie technical development in the US, and useless because said development would then simply take place elsewhere in the world. Undeserved, because Limewire did not attempt to spread US government secrets. Their software was simply the mechanism by which some idiot (presumably a government-employed idiot, but that would be redundant) knowingly or unknowingly loosed this material into the wild.
Other members want the issue investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and law enforcement authorities. They said that the continued failure by companies such as LimeWire to take more proactive steps to stop inadvertent file-sharing is tantamount to enabling illegal activity resulting from the data leaks.
And how do they propose that Limewire prevent sharers from sharing government secrets? By sending someone to each Limewire installation to make sure the luser configured it correctly? To the power-grabbing, meglomaniacal nanny state committee-rats in congress, here's an idea: clean your own house first. Clamp down on those with the poor judgment to run p2p sharing apps on systems that have sensitive data. Is there a rule against it? No? Make one. Yes? Enforce it. Hell, ban p2p on all govt systems, sensitive or not, and enforce it like the matter of national security it is.
"O-dumb-a"
Oh, the irony.
"I think you are a pompous bastard child of a whore. "
Hey now, that's MR. pompous bastard child of a whore to you, if you please.
True claim or not, the landlord may figure that using lawyers to intimidate their tenant into silence might be worth a try. What good is the truth if you cannot afford a lawyer of your own to defend yourself against liars?
Well, have you ever tried getting a Harbour Master to pay for your nanodiamonds? It's damn near impossible. I've tried; all they do is look at you like you're out of your mind or something. They're tighter then a Health Maintenance Organization, even.
Sure, you can see right through it ... assuming your eyes work with "extreme ultraviolet radiation".
Thanks for doing all that legwork, and actually surveying all those legally armed people to ascertain how often they practice at the range, and how well they shoot. It's nice to see that ignorant, opinionated ACs never pull speculation like that out of their ass and call it fact.
I'm glad you don't know of anyone who ever died of reinforced doors and windows. Because I'm sure that your experience is so broad as to be almost universal. I'm sure that bars on windows and doors don't impede firefighters' access, say, if incapacitated victims were trapped behind them.
People buy a gun because they choose to take responsibility for their own safety. A gun and ammo adequate for home protection can be bought for a few hundred dollars. Buying and installing the hardware to fortify even a small home costs how much?
Her job is not to deliver news to you, even though that's what she would tell you if asked. Her job is to get ratings. She is doing that by generating controversy. She interviewed a car dealer who is running a promotion involving legal but scary-sounding weapons not because it directly affects a national audience, but because she could exploit it.
Good luck getting your HMO to cover diamonds.
The economy is in the toilet, and you want to tax fuel? No. Just plain no. There is no reasonable excuse for taxing the shit out of people worse than we already are. This would hurt everyone, even those without cars, because of the increased cost of transportation for food and other goods. I already don't drive any miles I don't have to. How the hell is this going to cut my demand for fuel? Quite simply, it isn't. It is simply going to shove another tax up my ass. A tax can't modify geography; it won't make anyone's minimum commute distance any shorter.
Furthermore, if you dry up demand for fuel, you kill the market for new biofuels like this. In order to do away with "bad" dino fuel, we need a robust market for biofuel, which will lead to an established, growing, maturing profitable biofuel industry.
The whole reason this article is exciting is that it shows another potential cost-competitive biofuel process. If the process is competitive, why would you raise taxes? Granted, it is possible for world oil prices to fluctuate below the more or less fixed price of this new method of production, but on the whole over the last few years, oil prices have exceeded what this company claims their projected production price would be.
Instead of taxing "bad" dino fuel more, why not give more tax breaks on "good" biofuel? Let's remove the federal tax on biofuel for 5 years, and then phase it back in if necessary. At the start, biofuels will make up such a small percentage of all fuel sold, the tax loss would be negligible. At the end of that 5 years, the biofuel industry hopefully will have matured and gained marketshare. At that point, I would expect it would be able to stand on its own, and federal fuel taxes could be phased back in as biofuel comprises a larger part of the fuel market in the US.
Not every model that is successful in Europe (or that they manage to endure) is the right solution in the US.
I guess men from the Renaissance were the same as us, except highly compressible.
They weren't any more or less compressible, they just used a more efficient algorithm.
"Hi, I'm a Mac, and I am a PC."
Pfft. That's not what you were saying back when we old-timers solved the Y-zero-K problem for you.
In hindsight, I can't believe none of us saw that one coming. Well, actually, three of us did, but none of the rest of us listened to them.
Yeah, in Egypt maybe. I was based in Mesopotamia at the time, and the Tigris and Euphrates didn't flood nearly as much as the Nile.
Glad I got outta there before the neighborhood went to hell.
Hah! You kids and your damn punch cards. When I learned programming, we had to use pointy sticks to press individual zeros and ones into a clay tablet. Assembler? Compilers? Hah again! We learned to bake our code tablets in the sun, because there was always a line to get them kiln-dried.
This was before lawns were invented.
Nobody seriously believes the Russian government has any intentions of cracking down on organized crime.
Interestingly, authorities in Italy (according to a Russian News site) are voicing a similar concern, but with what sounds like an Open Source twist: "The encryption system used in this computer program is not being uncovered by a developer which strongly complicates the work of law-enforcement agencies." Are they just looking for the source code? Or are they looking for developer cooperation in making the crypto crackable? The likely Italian-to-Russian-to-English translation makes it hard for me to guess the answer.
He seems to be making the fundamental error of forgetting what internet content supply and demand look like. There is a near infinite (for practical purposes, anyway) number of content providers - original artists and authors, megacorporations, aggregators, bloggers, "pirates", amateur-gone-semi-pro porn stars, etc., because the internet enables us all to be publishers in some way. Also, each content provider has the ability to cross traditional geographical market boundaries easily, and serve a huge number of customers. The result is that although the signal-to-noise ratio may suck sometimes, there is such a broad amount of content and distribution is so trivial, that the supply side of the graph is completely out of whack - it approaches $0 for infinite content. Which oddly enough, is where most of us like it.
Traditional supply and demand only work in a market where there is a relatively limited number of players who control the product, and supply is limited by traditional manufacturing and distribution.
I am sure that in his position he sees clearly the cost of producing content that others consume essentially for free, but it does not automatically follow from that that many consumers in the market are willing to pay what he wants. Bitch-slapping your customers with rhetoric like his doesn't help either.
I'll bet there's an interesting book there waiting to be written.