The underlying problem is that the moderators fail to understand context of a question and simply view everything as a bunch of rules needing to be followed.
I don't know about the fuel mix in the state of New York (and maybe the headline is a mistake), but one explanation is that there are 2 ways to use the offshore area: 1) for producing wind power and 2) to drill for oil for cars. Cuomo's decision may pre-empt using the land for oil exploration and drilling. That's my two cents anyway.
Marc Jacobson has done a lot of research into the viability of renewables. (Indeed, he presented this very idea to NY a few years ago. https://news.stanford.edu/news... ) He found that using solar and wind are complementary. Wind tends to be highest at night; solar by day.
I hear you that cds are a technology past its due date.
But public libraries can buy, store and lend physical media easily and not have to deal with DRM or licensing restrictions.
Patrons can check out CDs and then decide to rip from them in the privacy of their own homes. Totally legal too.
Ironically, the ripping habit (which I admit I have) leads me to buy a lot of digital music that I never would have learned about otherwise.
Even if CDs stopped being sold tomorrow, there are still lots of indie/fringe CDs out there which aren't being sold digitally anywhere. Don't believe me? Go to a garage sale or used CD/DVD store and count the number of CDs still unknown to most of the musical world.....
In a recent feature on This American Life, Betsy DeVos was depicted as being a very compassionate and generous person (she helped individual students to get private schooling), but lacking empathy (she didn't understand the multiple issues with public schools and the diverse population and the regulatory frameworks for the public school system in the US. Also, she didn't appreciate the need for scalable solutions). MORE: https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
The problem when unemployed is that you need to monitor your phone for job-related calls, so you have to keep the ringer on.
Also, my particular cell phone makes it really difficult to blacklist numbers.
I seem to recall that the rules state that if you send them a note by snail mail, they are required to stop contacting you by phone.
Recently I was late on paying a Chase card, and I literally got called every single day about the matter. Eventually I called up and said, hey, I'm unemployed, I'm waiting on a check to arrive, and the rep explained that they will be robodialing my phone every single day until it is paid.
For a while I was giving out my skype number instead of my cell so they wouldn't keep harassing me, until I realized that I had enrolled in two step authentication using my phone as the second step. That meant they would always have my cell phone number. Which really sucks.
Amarok is a really robust solution which can organize files virtually by artist name or by actual directory structure. It lets you customize display (to show composer, etc) and save ratings which is awesome. It has lots of options for sorting.....
The conventional wisdom was that clementine forked from amarok, that amarok got too feature rich and complex. There's truth in that (and clementine works reliably), but amarok just has so many wonderful features. Plus, it is cross platform (although I don't think the Windows version works too well).
My main complaint with amarok is that it is a real memory hog and doesn't play well with Unity on Ubuntu 12.04. I recently upgraded to 8 gigs RAM and those problems mostly seem to have disappeared.
Finally, it's not cross-platform, but I really love Foobar 2000 on windows. It does a lot of things well, especially if you install the plugins. It's a decent-to-good CD ripper too (although dbpoweramp is the not open source gold standard).
This is nonsense. How dare you post false accusations without bothering to provide a source! A real source like CNN/NYT or even any credible science magazine, not Fox or some fossil fuel lobbyist's blog.
the short answer is that sometimes CO2 trails temperature increase, sometimes it doesn't.
Usually when CO2 trails climate, it's because of orbital forcing, but interestingly, sometimes that temperature increase will increase ocean acidification and amply carbon feedbacks.
Hey, the carbon/feedback cycle is complex, no doubt about it. But carbon is a forcing -- no doubt about it, and right now GHG are responsible for the lion's share of the present and future temperature increase.
I know you may say that CD prices are expensive based on what new CDs sell for.
But go back to say 2004 and earlier, and you will find for the most part the cost of CDs is practically nothing. You can buy 90% of CDs for $2 or less (plus shipping).
Most of the time, you can buy a CD for $1 or less.
For most part, prices of old CDs are still cheaper than mp3s of these albums.
One other thought. I'll all for liberalization and reform of copyright laws, but it seems that the pirated sites for Russian music (to take one country as an example) far outnumber the legit sites. I once tried to buy an obscure Russian electronica classic by Agata Kristi and couldn't find any site which sold it legitimately although I could find dozens which distributed it (some of which charged money, some of which did not).
Gosh, does that mean I need to learn Urdu just to figure out where they think I ought to buy something?:) Or just to figure out which website is the official site and which is some fanboy's site for the same Pakistani popstar?
Seriously though, it can be time-consuming to go to sites for individual artists. A lot of them don't have good English translations. I tried buying something on a Russian site, and although I know a little Russian, i couldn't follow the instructions.
As a sidenote, I have noticed that a lot of musicians have abominable websites. Setting up a shopping cart for digital downloads might seem like a trivial task for a slashdot geek, but it's unrealistic to expect musicians to get it done. (I like bandcamp, which has simplified a lot of things-- but I doubt that much of the global music scene has discovered bandcamp).
Yesasia sells CDs, and it's a really slick site (I think it might be based in US though). But they don't sell digital -- only CD media...Indian sites have more digital stores, but frankly I have no idea which of them are legit.
And yes, I realize that "rewarding the artist" is a nebulous concept (especially when the artist may have signed the recording contract 30 years ago). But I think it's reasonable for it to be easy to tell which ecommerce sites are legit and which are not.
Frankly I don't care if fair use is a right or an affirmative defense (whatever that is).
the problem is that IP attorneys frequently insert boilerplate warnings that have little legal validity except to convince the uninformed that they don't in fact have fair use rights. It's a deceptive trade practice in my opinion.
Hey I'd concede the point if the guy if copyright law allowed people to use copyrighted material if the owner failed to respond to a request to use it.
I've been trying to arrange a public performance of Happy Birthday for the last three years. Each year I write Warner Chappell and ASCAP for permission to sing the song. And I never receive a reply.
At the risk of sounding like a newb, can anyone recommend a good content filtering system for a home?
I don't worry about these things normally (because I am unmarried) but my sister and brother (who both have small children) are petrified about letting their child touch a network-enabled computer.
From a standpoint of ease of use and effectiveness, what's good?
In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that Google bought Youtube.
they have enough muscle that they will not remove a video merely because of political pressure. It's hard to know if a startup company could have the same cojones.
I have a beef with their vanity page/notability policies. If they were more candid, they would make this their policy:
We at Wikipedia honestly have no idea which people deserve a wiki page and which do not. We have no criteria about how to judge which poets, programmers, bloggers, painters, philosophers, singers, musicians, sculptors or choreographers will be worth remembering 100 years from now. For that reason, any profile of you without a link to any corporate product will automatically be deleted. However, if you have participated in a gangbang on camera, been a short-lived Internet phenomena, been accused of a heinous crime, or had your dog poop on a subway, heck, that's good enough for us! Join the club!
obviously. I'm talking about the latest manifestation of erotica: pornographic videos. India is a very tolerant society with a long tradition of sexual artwork and literature.
That does not explain why the Indian government restricts porn sites today. If it were only China, I would say, the ban is just symptomatic of repressive society. But India is not considered a repressive society. It is also a democracy.
There is probably more victimization (and disease) in the brothel than in the video production studio (at least, if you look in America). Why the draconian treatment of porn and the relative indifference to prostitution in China and India?
Obviously I don't condone such draconian measures, and I'm generally a free speech enthusiast.
But isn't it interesting how governments of two of the most important nations of the world have strict controls on pornography.
China, because they like censorship in general.
But India has always put tight controls on sexually-related material. I don't know if they have a decency/obscenity code that webmasters need to follow. But certainly there is next to no production of porn-related material (especially when compared to Japan and US).
We cannot call India "backwards" or "repressive" with regard to free speech or sexual expression. They just haven't warmed up to porn.
Perhaps pornography is simply a Western invention and a predilection that strikes people in Asia as bizzare. Then again, I have no doubt that people in these countries are freely downloading Western porn; they just aren't producing it themselves.
One has to ask whether tolerance of porn/erotica is less a measure of liberalism than social norms. On the other hand, I feel pretty sure that in Asia/India and Arab countries prostitutions is rampant.
So pick your poison: prostitution/AIDS or porn/stripping.
One might even make the argument that whereas porn has been infiltrated by lots of feminists/actresses-turned-directors, brothels have remained a bastion of male rule.
Maybe it boils down to the technological issues; once enough people are armed with videocameras and ftp accounts, mores will change. But until that time, people in China and India will go gaga over Paris Hilton and Western porn stars.
this is a great book!
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been reading and using this book for a few weeks. It's great!
One thing not mentioned in the review is how badly the open source community needed an updated gimp book. Gimp is already a mature open source project, and two books that came out a few years ago were long outdated.
The best thing about the book is the generous use of images to illustrate her points.. A Press did a fantastic job with layout and making it easy to find things.
I appreciate how the book reviewed a few basic points with general information. In short, this book has a little bit for everybody.
ISP hopping; that's a really good argument (especially in an age of user-created content). On the other hand, look at how people responded to email lock in: they signed up for web-based email services.
the harm from net neutrality is opportunity costs. It becomes harder for ISPs to offer new kinds of service. Or at least it becomes more expensive ( only companies which can afford lawyers to understand the regulation can offer these services).
The impact of tiered pricing may be for amazon.com, etc to send their webhosting overseas. Of course, SBC etc can still use discriminatory pricing, but at least amazon.com can find other ISP which claim to send traffic through SBC's pipes for less.
maybe the question should be rephrased: how can we create a business environment where companies won't have an incentive to relocate webhosting overseas?
Because borders define laws, the net neutrality issue may be an area where national borders are going to start to be important again. (and the example of China's firewall may provide good evidence of how people circumvent barriers imposed by their ISP).
I realize that "net neutrality" is conventional wisdom among geeks, but I remain very skeptical. To summarize:
1)bandwidth is already plentiful; we're talking about hypothetical harms here. (For the record, I actually downgraded my broadband a few months ago, with absolutely no complaints).
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide. Even if legislators were relatively well-informed and up-to-date, the pace of technology change tends to outstrip that of legislative oversight; this legislation will probably be obsolete on the day it is passed.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
5)I worry less about tiered service than I do about ISPs blocking p2p traffic. Then again, I see no need to enact legislation merely to keep certain ports open.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
7)what concerns me more is restrictive Terms of Service and EULAs. If ISPs offer twice the bandwidth for half the cost, that is great. But if the saving comes with all sorts of extra provisions on TOS, then the battle has been lost.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from. To use myself as an example, the only way I can obtain DSL access in my apartment complex is by getting SBC phone service first. SBC could double the prices of a landline, and I'd have no choice but to swallow it. Then again, I could easily switch to a wireless phone carrier that includes wireless Net service. Or if worse comes to worse, I could obtain satellite. But government regulation would introduce an element of uncertainty and legal wrangling that could deter the offering of new services. For the record, I had a legal dispute with SBC, so I ended up going with a local company for DSL (although I still had to pay for a landline). It's still possible even in the day of semi-monopolies to withhold support from the incumbent ISP.
Hi, I've thought long and hard about this. (I'm actually in the middle of having a will made to take this into account). Let me say that there's not a lot of good options and almost no archiving services exist for handling personal digital content. You really need to document your intentions clearly (preferably on the webpage you produced it on--Creative Commons Attribution license, for example), because it is hard to depend on people following these intentions after you die.
Lawyers who prepare wills are loathe to touch copyright issues in your will (especially when the financial value is hypothetical). That requires getting a copyright attorney. The best thing to do is appoint a dependable/knowledgable executor or trustee (see below).
My suggestions:
1)sign a durable power of attorney to a close friend or family member. That gives them access to bank acccounts and web acccounts. (I don't think executors can do this without a court order). Usually you can download a form from the net for free.
2)Emphasize to executors and family members about the first thing they need to do when you die: FIND OUT WHO ARE THE WEBHOSTS AND ENSURE THOSE THINGS CONTINUE TO BE PAID. Nongeeky people are clueless about this. (also, it might be good checking into webhost policies for handling nonpayment of webhosting).
3)A yearly zip file consisting of contact information of friends, account info, and passwords would be a good idea. I'll leave it to slashdotters to figure out how to safeguard this.
4)I'm a writer/content producer and I created a testamentary trust for someone living after me to archive my creative content. That said, unless you pay lots of legal fees to draw up something more elaborate, it's hard to depend on your executor or trustee to handle the archiving duties well. The best way to ensure that "sensitive information" doesn't get tossed aside or shared inappropriately is to bequeath your computer equipment to someone with the discretion and technical proficiency to know what needs to be done.
5)I should reiterate the necessity of making a good list of people to contact after your death. My siblings and parents have absolutely no idea who needs to be contacted. Some of these contacts would be in a better position to know what to do and what kinds of online content you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I have a SO horror story to tell. For 2 consecutive years I was the #1 contributor on a low traffic Stack Exchange (Ebooks).
I eventually left the site for good after moderators took down too many of my contributions. I just grew sick of it.
The funny thing is, these moderators had no background in the subject; they almost never contributed an answer; they made the SE a worse place.
I finally posted this rant on my own domain because I grew weary of this nonsense: http://www.ghostlypopulations....
The underlying problem is that the moderators fail to understand context of a question and simply view everything as a bunch of rules needing to be followed.
I don't know about the fuel mix in the state of New York (and maybe the headline is a mistake), but one explanation is that there are 2 ways to use the offshore area: 1) for producing wind power and 2) to drill for oil for cars. Cuomo's decision may pre-empt using the land for oil exploration and drilling. That's my two cents anyway.
Marc Jacobson has done a lot of research into the viability of renewables. (Indeed, he presented this very idea to NY a few years ago. https://news.stanford.edu/news... ) He found that using solar and wind are complementary. Wind tends to be highest at night; solar by day.
I hear you that cds are a technology past its due date.
But public libraries can buy, store and lend physical media easily and not have to deal with DRM or licensing restrictions.
Patrons can check out CDs and then decide to rip from them in the privacy of their own homes. Totally legal too.
Ironically, the ripping habit (which I admit I have) leads me to buy a lot of digital music that I never would have learned about otherwise.
Even if CDs stopped being sold tomorrow, there are still lots of indie/fringe CDs out there which aren't being sold digitally anywhere. Don't believe me? Go to a garage sale or used CD/DVD store and count the number of CDs still unknown to most of the musical world.....
In a recent feature on This American Life, Betsy DeVos was depicted as being a very compassionate and generous person (she helped individual students to get private schooling), but lacking empathy (she didn't understand the multiple issues with public schools and the diverse population and the regulatory frameworks for the public school system in the US. Also, she didn't appreciate the need for scalable solutions). MORE: https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
The problem when unemployed is that you need to monitor your phone for job-related calls, so you have to keep the ringer on.
Also, my particular cell phone makes it really difficult to blacklist numbers.
I seem to recall that the rules state that if you send them a note by snail mail, they are required to stop contacting you by phone.
Recently I was late on paying a Chase card, and I literally got called every single day about the matter. Eventually I called up and said, hey, I'm unemployed, I'm waiting on a check to arrive, and the rep explained that they will be robodialing my phone every single day until it is paid.
For a while I was giving out my skype number instead of my cell so they wouldn't keep harassing me, until I realized that I had enrolled in two step authentication using my phone as the second step. That meant they would always have my cell phone number. Which really sucks.
Emusic is a good place to buy DRM free music. It's 20-40% cheaper too!
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2013/04/fave-emusic-finds/
But emusic has no cloud backup. (I just back up my emusic stuff and ripped files to Amazon cloud player.
Amarok is a really robust solution which can organize files virtually by artist name or by actual directory structure. It lets you customize display (to show composer, etc) and save ratings which is awesome. It has lots of options for sorting.....
The conventional wisdom was that clementine forked from amarok, that amarok got too feature rich and complex. There's truth in that (and clementine works reliably), but amarok just has so many wonderful features. Plus, it is cross platform (although I don't think the Windows version works too well).
My main complaint with amarok is that it is a real memory hog and doesn't play well with Unity on Ubuntu 12.04. I recently upgraded to 8 gigs RAM and those problems mostly seem to have disappeared.
Finally, it's not cross-platform, but I really love Foobar 2000 on windows. It does a lot of things well, especially if you install the plugins. It's a decent-to-good CD ripper too (although dbpoweramp is the not open source gold standard).
This is nonsense. How dare you post false accusations without bothering to provide a source! A real source like CNN/NYT or even any credible science magazine, not Fox or some fossil fuel lobbyist's blog.
the short answer is that sometimes CO2 trails temperature increase, sometimes it doesn't.
Usually when CO2 trails climate, it's because of orbital forcing, but interestingly, sometimes that temperature increase will increase ocean acidification and amply carbon feedbacks.
Hey, the carbon/feedback cycle is complex, no doubt about it. But carbon is a forcing -- no doubt about it, and right now GHG are responsible for the lion's share of the present and future temperature increase.
Here's deeper discussion of this issue: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
Here's a video that responds to the CO2 trails climate meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A
I know you may say that CD prices are expensive based on what new CDs sell for.
But go back to say 2004 and earlier, and you will find for the most part the cost of CDs is practically nothing. You can buy 90% of CDs for $2 or less (plus shipping).
Most of the time, you can buy a CD for $1 or less.
For most part, prices of old CDs are still cheaper than mp3s of these albums.
One other thought. I'll all for liberalization and reform of copyright laws, but it seems that the pirated sites for Russian music (to take one country as an example) far outnumber the legit sites. I once tried to buy an obscure Russian electronica classic by Agata Kristi and couldn't find any site which sold it legitimately although I could find dozens which distributed it (some of which charged money, some of which did not).
Several years later, I was overjoyed to realize that the Agata Kristi album made it to Amazon.com . I guess you can draw your own conclusions.....
(I'm the original poster of the ASK SLASHDOT).
Gosh, does that mean I need to learn Urdu just to figure out where they think I ought to buy something? :) Or just to figure out which website is the official site and which is some fanboy's site for the same Pakistani popstar?
Seriously though, it can be time-consuming to go to sites for individual artists. A lot of them don't have good English translations. I tried buying something on a Russian site, and although I know a little Russian, i couldn't follow the instructions.
As a sidenote, I have noticed that a lot of musicians have abominable websites. Setting up a shopping cart for digital downloads might seem like a trivial task for a slashdot geek, but it's unrealistic to expect musicians to get it done. (I like bandcamp, which has simplified a lot of things-- but I doubt that much of the global music scene has discovered bandcamp).
Yesasia sells CDs, and it's a really slick site (I think it might be based in US though). But they don't sell digital -- only CD media...Indian sites have more digital stores, but frankly I have no idea which of them are legit.
And yes, I realize that "rewarding the artist" is a nebulous concept (especially when the artist may have signed the recording contract 30 years ago). But I think it's reasonable for it to be easy to tell which ecommerce sites are legit and which are not.
OT. I'm writing a book about music collecting for geeks. You can see my list of fave jamendo albums free for downloading here http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/special/11-incredible-musicians-you-can-download-for-free-best-of-jamendo/
in css 3 media queries will be able to handle that. (that's also something which should be supported in epub3).
Frankly I don't care if fair use is a right or an affirmative defense (whatever that is).
the problem is that IP attorneys frequently insert boilerplate warnings that have little legal validity except to convince the uninformed that they don't in fact have fair use rights. It's a deceptive trade practice in my opinion.
Hey I'd concede the point if the guy if copyright law allowed people to use copyrighted material if the owner failed to respond to a request to use it.
I've been trying to arrange a public performance of Happy Birthday for the last three years. Each year I write Warner Chappell and ASCAP for permission to sing the song. And I never receive a reply.
This apparently is standard practice.
At the risk of sounding like a newb, can anyone recommend a good content filtering system for a home?
I don't worry about these things normally (because I am unmarried) but my sister and brother (who both have small children) are petrified about letting their child touch a network-enabled computer.
From a standpoint of ease of use and effectiveness, what's good?
In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that Google bought Youtube.
they have enough muscle that they will not remove a video merely because of political pressure. It's hard to know if a startup company could have the same cojones.
obviously. I'm talking about the latest manifestation of erotica: pornographic videos. India is a very tolerant society with a long tradition of sexual artwork and literature.
That does not explain why the Indian government restricts porn sites today. If it were only China, I would say, the ban is just symptomatic of repressive society. But India is not considered a repressive society. It is also a democracy.
There is probably more victimization (and disease) in the brothel than in the video production studio (at least, if you look in America). Why the draconian treatment of porn and the relative indifference to prostitution in China and India?
Obviously I don't condone such draconian measures, and I'm generally a free speech enthusiast.
But isn't it interesting how governments of two of the most important nations of the world have strict controls on pornography.
China, because they like censorship in general.
But India has always put tight controls on sexually-related material. I don't know if they have a decency/obscenity code that webmasters need to follow. But certainly there is next to no production of porn-related material (especially when compared to Japan and US).
We cannot call India "backwards" or "repressive" with regard to free speech or sexual expression. They just haven't warmed up to porn.
Perhaps pornography is simply a Western invention and a predilection that strikes people in Asia as bizzare. Then again, I have no doubt that people in these countries are freely downloading Western porn; they just aren't producing it themselves.
One has to ask whether tolerance of porn/erotica is less a measure of liberalism than social norms. On the other hand, I feel pretty sure that in Asia/India and Arab countries prostitutions is rampant.
So pick your poison: prostitution/AIDS or porn/stripping.
One might even make the argument that whereas porn has been infiltrated by lots of feminists/actresses-turned-directors, brothels have remained a bastion of male rule.
Maybe it boils down to the technological issues; once enough people are armed with videocameras and ftp accounts, mores will change. But until that time, people in China and India will go gaga over Paris Hilton and Western porn stars.
I've been reading and using this book for a few weeks. It's great!
One thing not mentioned in the review is how badly the open source community needed an updated gimp book. Gimp is already a mature open source project, and two books that came out a few years ago were long outdated.
The best thing about the book is the generous use of images to illustrate her points.. A Press did a fantastic job with layout and making it easy to find things.
I appreciate how the book reviewed a few basic points with general information. In short, this book has a little bit for everybody.
ISP hopping; that's a really good argument (especially in an age of user-created content). On the other hand, look at how people responded to email lock in: they signed up for web-based email services.
the harm from net neutrality is opportunity costs. It becomes harder for ISPs to offer new kinds of service. Or at least it becomes more expensive ( only companies which can afford lawyers to understand the regulation can offer these services).
bravo. Good responses.
The impact of tiered pricing may be for amazon.com, etc to send their webhosting overseas. Of course, SBC etc can still use discriminatory pricing, but at least amazon.com can find other ISP which claim to send traffic through SBC's pipes for less.
maybe the question should be rephrased: how can we create a business environment where companies won't have an incentive to relocate webhosting overseas?
Because borders define laws, the net neutrality issue may be an area where national borders are going to start to be important again. (and the example of China's firewall may provide good evidence of how people circumvent barriers imposed by their ISP).
I realize that "net neutrality" is conventional wisdom among geeks, but I remain very skeptical. To summarize:
1)bandwidth is already plentiful; we're talking about hypothetical harms here. (For the record, I actually downgraded my broadband a few months ago, with absolutely no complaints).
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide. Even if legislators were relatively well-informed and up-to-date, the pace of technology change tends to outstrip that of legislative oversight; this legislation will probably be obsolete on the day it is passed.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
5)I worry less about tiered service than I do about ISPs blocking p2p traffic. Then again, I see no need to enact legislation merely to keep certain ports open.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
7)what concerns me more is restrictive Terms of Service and EULAs. If ISPs offer twice the bandwidth for half the cost, that is great. But if the saving comes with all sorts of extra provisions on TOS, then the battle has been lost.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from. To use myself as an example, the only way I can obtain DSL access in my apartment complex is by getting SBC phone service first. SBC could double the prices of a landline, and I'd have no choice but to swallow it. Then again, I could easily switch to a wireless phone carrier that includes wireless Net service. Or if worse comes to worse, I could obtain satellite. But government regulation would introduce an element of uncertainty and legal wrangling that could deter the offering of new services. For the record, I had a legal dispute with SBC, so I ended up going with a local company for DSL (although I still had to pay for a landline). It's still possible even in the day of semi-monopolies to withhold support from the incumbent ISP.
lately, I've been trying to keep track of all of the EULA's I've been agreeing to. It's overwhelming.
This wiki
http://www.gripewiki.com/index.php/EULA_Library
is trying to keep a public record of eulas (along with some analysis).
Hi, I've thought long and hard about this. (I'm actually in the middle of having a will made to take this into account). Let me say that there's not a lot of good options and almost no archiving services exist for handling personal digital content. You really need to document your intentions clearly (preferably on the webpage you produced it on--Creative Commons Attribution license, for example), because it is hard to depend on people following these intentions after you die.
Lawyers who prepare wills are loathe to touch copyright issues in your will (especially when the financial value is hypothetical). That requires getting a copyright attorney. The best thing to do is appoint a dependable/knowledgable executor or trustee (see below).
My suggestions:
1)sign a durable power of attorney to a close friend or family member. That gives them access to bank acccounts and web acccounts. (I don't think executors can do this without a court order). Usually you can download a form from the net for free.
2)Emphasize to executors and family members about the first thing they need to do when you die: FIND OUT WHO ARE THE WEBHOSTS AND ENSURE THOSE THINGS CONTINUE TO BE PAID. Nongeeky people are clueless about this. (also, it might be good checking into webhost policies for handling nonpayment of webhosting).
3)A yearly zip file consisting of contact information of friends, account info, and passwords would be a good idea. I'll leave it to slashdotters to figure out how to safeguard this.
4)I'm a writer/content producer and I created a testamentary trust for someone living after me to archive my creative content. That said, unless you pay lots of legal fees to draw up something more elaborate, it's hard to depend on your executor or trustee to handle the archiving duties well. The best way to ensure that "sensitive information" doesn't get tossed aside or shared inappropriately is to bequeath your computer equipment to someone with the discretion and technical proficiency to know what needs to be done.
5)I should reiterate the necessity of making a good list of people to contact after your death. My siblings and parents have absolutely no idea who needs to be contacted. Some of these contacts would be in a better position to know what to do and what kinds of online content you have.
6)obviously media backups are a good idea.