If you want a free and open internet, if you want the RIAA to go away, then you need to take away the illegal behavior. If torrent sites had been shut down, if there was no one to sue in the US for bit torrent downloads, then the RIAA would have no foot to stand on. Just letting the status quo go on will undermine the freedom and openness of the internet in a drastic way. It's people that cling to moral principles even while ignoring reality that are only making it worse. It's like when the Republicans say free health care = enslaving doctors. That's a great philosophical argument, but it ignores reality and perpetuates the current healthcare disaster.
Now I agree that the RIAA sucks and that media companies could have easily offered cheap legal alternatives to download music before Napster even existed, and that they bear a huge chunk of the blame for the current situation. And even today, a physical rental at Redbox ($1) is cheaper than an online rental ($3-5), which is insanity. Unfortunately everyone is focused on the illegal use instead of the insane profiteering behavior that should have been regulated. And the illegal use has allowed the RIAA to become so powerful that we will probably never see the government regulate those giant media companies.
Perhaps the software I was getting just wasn't as popular, and yes I know how to setup a firewall.
There shouldn't be any tax money spent. The fact is that "policing" citizens in order to protect the interests of a few greedy powermongers should not cost anything, because it shouldn't be happening in the first place. And since the vast majority of these things are civil, not criminal, matters, I think it's likely that the parties involved are the ones who pay the court costs.
I don't see how you can justify not using police to stop theft and distribution.
As far as all your analogies, none of them have much at all in common with bit torrent use. Clearly there are millions of kids using torrent for illegal purposes and they all need to stop, which requires what the RIAA does. There is no other solution, besides using even more money and arresting millions of people, which seems like a horrible alternative. You have to be somewhat pragmatic.
In the US, the traditional (and still prevailing) legal principle is that you cannot block products or services that have legitimate uses, merely because some people choose to use those things illegally!
Right, it's only when the major use of it is illegal, like machine guns, which they have made illegal (except for certain cases with special permits) for that exact reason. Cars and the rest of the things you state are quite the opposite, 99.9% of their use IS legal.
The same use to be true for selling glass bongs, just because you could use it for tobacco, 99% of the use was for pot, and therefore it was illegal to sell them. There are many other examples of banning products when almost all of their use is for illegal purposes.
Apparently you seem to not understand the different between above ground and underground nuclear tests. Considering nobody knows how to stop earthquakes, but there are many ways to stop asteroids, you comparison is meaningless. I'm sure Japan would have gladly spent a trillion to stop the quake if they could, no?
Whenever I get legit torrents it's always only a couple seeders with high bandwidth that make it work, and those guys know how to setup a server. It's like 99.9% illegal content, and I'd rather not have all the kids getting sued constantly and the RIAA taking over the justice department.
I understand the moral justification for your argument, but the unwanted side effects are too high for my taste. I'm sure the tax payer's costs for all the trials, prosecutors and judges is higher than any benefits you'll see from the legal use of torrents. It's only 'free' because you don't take into account the hidden costs, like tax money being spent.
It would be interesting to see an analysis of the cost per person on policing illegal torrents vs. the cost per person if he had to pay to download open source software if torrents weren't being used.
But it could happen to you, and hackers are a serious threat to our national security and our economy, especially Chinese government sponsored hackers.
And why were they doing that in the first place, just because they are evil? No, they were being forced to do that to combat all the illegal activity taking place. Now they can instead raise prices and put their users in jail, wow, what a great turn of events, I'm so glad they were forced to stop doing that.
The mistake was using bit torrent to steal literally billions of movies, and in first world countries like the US, bit torrent really offers nothing of value. Besides linux downloads, what else is bit torrent used for legally? Those linux nerds seeding all know how to provide mirrors anyway, which there are plenty of already.
So the same as our tactical nukes ~ 750 KT, enough to wipe out Manhattan. Perhaps statistically the chance of hitting a major city is low, but if it does hit a city, it would be tragic and the stats would no longer matter. Even if it was a 1 in a billion chance, I'd be all for spending a trillion dollars trying to nuke it out of existence.
Well said. If this has been implemented for the last 5 years in every major OS (hidden from the average user, but not forced), it would have been a very easy and practical implementation, but I'm sure segments from the net neutrality movement would have railed against it.
I don't think people fully understand the consequences of forcing ISPs to do DPI just for QoS.
I was a lot more Libertarian before I found out Australia has a $15/hr min wage with 4 weeks paid vacation and has lower unemployment than the US, which goes against the libertarian view that you can't just legislate wage increases
Perhaps I should concede that going on the dole just because you don't want to work and would rather live of the taxes from other people is ridiculously immoral and is becoming a huge problem in many 1st world countries.
I have sympathy for what you are saying, but there's another point of view.
When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that.
This is only when you purchase something using currency provided by the State. Bartering is legal and is not taxed, however when you use Dollars, there are lots of hidden costs that need to be paid for, like the fed reserve and all that jazz. When you purchase from a store, there are many more hidden costs, and the taxes pay for them. Food inspection, safety inspections, contractual laws, infrastructure, and all the other things that have allowed that store to exist and offer you merchandise. Take a trip to country that lacks much government and sure you don't pay taxes, but things are more expensive or not available at all.
Your advocation for zero taxes isn't realistic anyway, and you are railing against both income and sales taxes, what's left, property?
As far as taxes on gasoline and alcohol and tobacco, those three cost huge amounts of money. Considering beer is still about the same price as water, $1/beer or $1 bottled water, I don't consider that a high tax. Gas taxes were supposed to be used to pay for roads, which makes perfect sense, instead of a toll on every single road in the country, just tax gasoline. Cigarette taxes help reduce tobacco use somewhat, and you can always roll your own for a fraction of the cost, but people would rather pay more for Marlboros.
The income tax came into effect for war time spending and without it Germany would be ruling the world, so yes the country wouldn't exist without the income tax.
By what right does a country claim a human being as its property, simply because it is born inside an artificial border? Its completely absurd.
Yes, exactly. You are born in the US, you have to abide by US laws and tax codes. You can't go kill someone without consequences, and those consequences cost money to enforce. The transition from local taxes and authorities to national taxes and authorities is a natural consequence of communication and transportation technologies making the world smaller. It's completely impractical to go back to locally controlled communities. Even if we did, it would allow safe havens for racism, strict religious views, high pollutions pockets, high crime pockets, and everything else that led to a more national approach.
that would be wonderful. It shouldn't exist at all, naturally, but breaking it up would be a fine start:)
I think in the 1800s there was a need for the USPS, today snail mail is irrelevant.
you're not one of the farmers in the rural dakotas who was bitterly clinging to his AMPS phone unti the day service ended
My uncle has 3g service in remote parts of Tanzania, I'm sure with a little bit of national funding we could get some 3g in the Dakotas. Places like Egypt even have 3g across most of the country.
Any farmer would gladly trade "NO I FUCKING MEAN IT" levels of radiation, at least in emergency situations,
They could just get a HAM license and put out 1kw, that should go for a couple hundred miles
and there are not local government obstacles to building/selling such a device
That's why there is national regulation, otherwise obstacles would exist
So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all. By being a citizen of whatever country you are in, you are bound by their laws and contractually obligated to pay taxes. Move to Amish country if you want to get out from big government, you can ride your horse all day without being taxed.
I suppose you could think of having to pay taxes making you a slave, but what's the alternative. Without taxes your entire country wouldn't exist, nevermind roads, schools, police, and all the rest that go along with civilized society.
Depends if it will be more than my electricity costs, which I'm sure it won't be. I don't have a highly efficient server farm that gets cheap commercial electricity rates. It would probably be cheaper to just build you own server farm for computation than to outsource it to the public.
You argument sounds like you would want the USPS to be broken up into 50 state entities with different laws and regulations in each state. National infrastructure needs to be regulated on a national level. The internet goes across state lines, just like radio waves, therefore it's entirely constitutional for the federal government to regulate it, and was in fact the vision from day 1.
TV channel 37 is reserved for radio astronomy, do you really think scientists would have been able to purchase this from whoever owned that part of the spectrum? Would cell phone manufacturers enjoy a set of 50 different laws to comply with? Would some states allow high radiation devices that give people cancer because they want some extra revenue?
Well considering many states have monopolies by law ( 1 company for dsl, 1 for cable), competition will never exist.
As far as the RIAA throttling down your torrents so my online video gaming has low lag, I don't see the problem. Throttling has it's purpose, and if they were more open about it, they could offer me higher speeds. I'm in Maine with a 15mbit connection, that'll do 30mbit for like 15 seconds. If it wasn't for people freaking out over throttling, they would just give me a 30mbit connection and just throttle it down to 15 whenever it's necessary.
Prioritizing packets through DPI isn't all bad either, YouTube and Netflix can wait a 100ms more so my headshot packet goes through on time.
Throttling torrents doesn't matter, it's when Wikipedia is throttled to death, and the highest bidder (perhaps FOX or MSNBC) is the only website that is fast enough to use, that's the issue that matters.
I like math too, but I like it for it's purity. Applying simple Algebra to society seems like a simplistic model.
Then the right to healthcare must equal "a right to the labor of other people (slavery)."
Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that. However I could give you thousands of examples where people have become enslaved in debt, merely for getting medical care to survive.
This is why I hate philosophical debates that have no connection to reality, and worse, ignore the actual problems we have.
There are no such things as "human rights", you are born into this World, and hopefully are lucky enough to be in a 1st world country where you aren't a slave.
Freedom of speech enabled Hitler to rise to power and kill millions, I don't think free medical care will have the same side effects.
And it's cheaper to pay someone to work than to have a slave. You don't have to pay for housing, oversight, healthcare... and if you pay someone, they work harder.
I have to say it, OMG! I'm moving to Australia, that's $30,000/yr for 40hr work week, minimum wage. That's unbelievable, I just deleted my rant about not being able to legislate wage increases, apparently you have done exactly that, amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
But that was because there was no viable alternative desktop, there are plenty of viable search alternatives, and they are ALL free!
If you want a free and open internet, if you want the RIAA to go away, then you need to take away the illegal behavior. If torrent sites had been shut down, if there was no one to sue in the US for bit torrent downloads, then the RIAA would have no foot to stand on. Just letting the status quo go on will undermine the freedom and openness of the internet in a drastic way. It's people that cling to moral principles even while ignoring reality that are only making it worse. It's like when the Republicans say free health care = enslaving doctors. That's a great philosophical argument, but it ignores reality and perpetuates the current healthcare disaster.
Now I agree that the RIAA sucks and that media companies could have easily offered cheap legal alternatives to download music before Napster even existed, and that they bear a huge chunk of the blame for the current situation. And even today, a physical rental at Redbox ($1) is cheaper than an online rental ($3-5), which is insanity. Unfortunately everyone is focused on the illegal use instead of the insane profiteering behavior that should have been regulated. And the illegal use has allowed the RIAA to become so powerful that we will probably never see the government regulate those giant media companies.
There shouldn't be any tax money spent. The fact is that "policing" citizens in order to protect the interests of a few greedy powermongers should not cost anything, because it shouldn't be happening in the first place. And since the vast majority of these things are civil, not criminal, matters, I think it's likely that the parties involved are the ones who pay the court costs.
I don't see how you can justify not using police to stop theft and distribution.
As far as all your analogies, none of them have much at all in common with bit torrent use. Clearly there are millions of kids using torrent for illegal purposes and they all need to stop, which requires what the RIAA does. There is no other solution, besides using even more money and arresting millions of people, which seems like a horrible alternative. You have to be somewhat pragmatic.
In the US, the traditional (and still prevailing) legal principle is that you cannot block products or services that have legitimate uses, merely because some people choose to use those things illegally!
Right, it's only when the major use of it is illegal, like machine guns, which they have made illegal (except for certain cases with special permits) for that exact reason. Cars and the rest of the things you state are quite the opposite, 99.9% of their use IS legal.
The same use to be true for selling glass bongs, just because you could use it for tobacco, 99% of the use was for pot, and therefore it was illegal to sell them. There are many other examples of banning products when almost all of their use is for illegal purposes.
Apparently you seem to not understand the different between above ground and underground nuclear tests. Considering nobody knows how to stop earthquakes, but there are many ways to stop asteroids, you comparison is meaningless. I'm sure Japan would have gladly spent a trillion to stop the quake if they could, no?
Whenever I get legit torrents it's always only a couple seeders with high bandwidth that make it work, and those guys know how to setup a server. It's like 99.9% illegal content, and I'd rather not have all the kids getting sued constantly and the RIAA taking over the justice department.
I understand the moral justification for your argument, but the unwanted side effects are too high for my taste. I'm sure the tax payer's costs for all the trials, prosecutors and judges is higher than any benefits you'll see from the legal use of torrents. It's only 'free' because you don't take into account the hidden costs, like tax money being spent.
It would be interesting to see an analysis of the cost per person on policing illegal torrents vs. the cost per person if he had to pay to download open source software if torrents weren't being used.
But it could happen to you, and hackers are a serious threat to our national security and our economy, especially Chinese government sponsored hackers.
I think the conspiracy he meant was more like one government hacker, not a multi-national super-secret ring, that was Stuxnet.
And why were they doing that in the first place, just because they are evil? No, they were being forced to do that to combat all the illegal activity taking place. Now they can instead raise prices and put their users in jail, wow, what a great turn of events, I'm so glad they were forced to stop doing that.
The mistake was using bit torrent to steal literally billions of movies, and in first world countries like the US, bit torrent really offers nothing of value. Besides linux downloads, what else is bit torrent used for legally? Those linux nerds seeding all know how to provide mirrors anyway, which there are plenty of already.
So the same as our tactical nukes ~ 750 KT, enough to wipe out Manhattan. Perhaps statistically the chance of hitting a major city is low, but if it does hit a city, it would be tragic and the stats would no longer matter. Even if it was a 1 in a billion chance, I'd be all for spending a trillion dollars trying to nuke it out of existence.
Well said. If this has been implemented for the last 5 years in every major OS (hidden from the average user, but not forced), it would have been a very easy and practical implementation, but I'm sure segments from the net neutrality movement would have railed against it.
I don't think people fully understand the consequences of forcing ISPs to do DPI just for QoS.
I was a lot more Libertarian before I found out Australia has a $15/hr min wage with 4 weeks paid vacation and has lower unemployment than the US, which goes against the libertarian view that you can't just legislate wage increases
Perhaps I should concede that going on the dole just because you don't want to work and would rather live of the taxes from other people is ridiculously immoral and is becoming a huge problem in many 1st world countries.
I have sympathy for what you are saying, but there's another point of view.
When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that.
This is only when you purchase something using currency provided by the State. Bartering is legal and is not taxed, however when you use Dollars, there are lots of hidden costs that need to be paid for, like the fed reserve and all that jazz. When you purchase from a store, there are many more hidden costs, and the taxes pay for them. Food inspection, safety inspections, contractual laws, infrastructure, and all the other things that have allowed that store to exist and offer you merchandise. Take a trip to country that lacks much government and sure you don't pay taxes, but things are more expensive or not available at all.
Your advocation for zero taxes isn't realistic anyway, and you are railing against both income and sales taxes, what's left, property?
As far as taxes on gasoline and alcohol and tobacco, those three cost huge amounts of money. Considering beer is still about the same price as water, $1/beer or $1 bottled water, I don't consider that a high tax. Gas taxes were supposed to be used to pay for roads, which makes perfect sense, instead of a toll on every single road in the country, just tax gasoline. Cigarette taxes help reduce tobacco use somewhat, and you can always roll your own for a fraction of the cost, but people would rather pay more for Marlboros.
The income tax came into effect for war time spending and without it Germany would be ruling the world, so yes the country wouldn't exist without the income tax.
By what right does a country claim a human being as its property, simply because it is born inside an artificial border? Its completely absurd.
Yes, exactly. You are born in the US, you have to abide by US laws and tax codes. You can't go kill someone without consequences, and those consequences cost money to enforce. The transition from local taxes and authorities to national taxes and authorities is a natural consequence of communication and transportation technologies making the world smaller. It's completely impractical to go back to locally controlled communities. Even if we did, it would allow safe havens for racism, strict religious views, high pollutions pockets, high crime pockets, and everything else that led to a more national approach.
Oh and as far as not regulating the major trunks, then it won't make any difference, as that's where all the control is.
that would be wonderful. It shouldn't exist at all, naturally, but breaking it up would be a fine start :)
I think in the 1800s there was a need for the USPS, today snail mail is irrelevant.
you're not one of the farmers in the rural dakotas who was bitterly clinging to his AMPS phone unti the day service ended
My uncle has 3g service in remote parts of Tanzania, I'm sure with a little bit of national funding we could get some 3g in the Dakotas. Places like Egypt even have 3g across most of the country.
Any farmer would gladly trade "NO I FUCKING MEAN IT" levels of radiation, at least in emergency situations,
They could just get a HAM license and put out 1kw, that should go for a couple hundred miles
and there are not local government obstacles to building/selling such a device
That's why there is national regulation, otherwise obstacles would exist
So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all. By being a citizen of whatever country you are in, you are bound by their laws and contractually obligated to pay taxes. Move to Amish country if you want to get out from big government, you can ride your horse all day without being taxed.
I suppose you could think of having to pay taxes making you a slave, but what's the alternative. Without taxes your entire country wouldn't exist, nevermind roads, schools, police, and all the rest that go along with civilized society.
Depends if it will be more than my electricity costs, which I'm sure it won't be. I don't have a highly efficient server farm that gets cheap commercial electricity rates. It would probably be cheaper to just build you own server farm for computation than to outsource it to the public.
You argument sounds like you would want the USPS to be broken up into 50 state entities with different laws and regulations in each state. National infrastructure needs to be regulated on a national level. The internet goes across state lines, just like radio waves, therefore it's entirely constitutional for the federal government to regulate it, and was in fact the vision from day 1.
TV channel 37 is reserved for radio astronomy, do you really think scientists would have been able to purchase this from whoever owned that part of the spectrum? Would cell phone manufacturers enjoy a set of 50 different laws to comply with? Would some states allow high radiation devices that give people cancer because they want some extra revenue?
Well considering many states have monopolies by law ( 1 company for dsl, 1 for cable), competition will never exist.
As far as the RIAA throttling down your torrents so my online video gaming has low lag, I don't see the problem. Throttling has it's purpose, and if they were more open about it, they could offer me higher speeds. I'm in Maine with a 15mbit connection, that'll do 30mbit for like 15 seconds. If it wasn't for people freaking out over throttling, they would just give me a 30mbit connection and just throttle it down to 15 whenever it's necessary.
Prioritizing packets through DPI isn't all bad either, YouTube and Netflix can wait a 100ms more so my headshot packet goes through on time.
Throttling torrents doesn't matter, it's when Wikipedia is throttled to death, and the highest bidder (perhaps FOX or MSNBC) is the only website that is fast enough to use, that's the issue that matters.
I like math too, but I like it for it's purity. Applying simple Algebra to society seems like a simplistic model.
Then the right to healthcare must equal "a right to the labor of other people (slavery)."
Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that. However I could give you thousands of examples where people have become enslaved in debt, merely for getting medical care to survive.
This is why I hate philosophical debates that have no connection to reality, and worse, ignore the actual problems we have.
There are no such things as "human rights", you are born into this World, and hopefully are lucky enough to be in a 1st world country where you aren't a slave.
Freedom of speech enabled Hitler to rise to power and kill millions, I don't think free medical care will have the same side effects.
Control inflation? They are creating inflation by printing money, stop printing money and inflation ends. Wage increases don't cause inflation.
US GDP grows at 2-3%, yet there is still inflation, which means the money supply of dollars is growing at a higher rate, maybe 4%.
These are both exponential growth rates.
For Gold to lose value, in the way you are thinking, it would have to grow at more than 4%, but it's only growing at about 1%.
And it's cheaper to pay someone to work than to have a slave. You don't have to pay for housing, oversight, healthcare... and if you pay someone, they work harder.
I have to say it, OMG! I'm moving to Australia, that's $30,000/yr for 40hr work week, minimum wage. That's unbelievable, I just deleted my rant about not being able to legislate wage increases, apparently you have done exactly that, amazing.
Cheers.