I don't believe they advertise it as a "selectively filtered text message service". The only thing I can find about filtering from a quick glance at the messaging section of their website is this, which talks about user-controlled filtering: http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23533.xml
And guess what? They can't just put a sticker over the keyhole that says by breaking it, what you thought was a purchase (with paperwork to back it up) is actually a rental.
They actually have to get you to voluntarily enter into a different kind of agreement, up front.
The difference is with regulation we can try to manage risks beforehand, rather than just try to assign blame afterward -- and we don't need to worry who caused a specific harm. We can target activities which are known to be harmful in general, or which we don't know enough about and are too risky relative to their benefit.
Obviously it's not perfect, but what you propose would be worse.
but you didn't buy the air on my property, and I am definitely not on it.
The wind blew my air onto your property. Not *my* fault. Doesn't stop Monsanto from suing farmers when patented seed blows onto their farms.
More to the point, you are consuming as much air as I am (approximately),
You mean it's a common resource we all share, and nobody should own?:-)
We probably consume about the same amount of air (depending on metabolism, activities, etc), but maybe I own more air than you. Maybe you don't own any air at all!
now if you are poisoning the air by some extra means and we had adjacent properties and your poisons entered my territory, I would be seeking retribution.
Prove that it's my dirty air that entered your property and not the polluter across the street.
Throwing yourself in front of a car is actually creating the harm, which is not the same thing as merely being aware of the harm and planning to seek redress after purchase. While this particular situation is pretty scummy, consider the consequences that such a rule would produce.
Company A sues company B for some completely legitimate reason. Company C buys company A in its entirety -- the transaction would have happened whether or not the issue with company B existed. Why is company B off the hook?
Joe buys a house from Bob. This land, like all others in the area, has contaminated soil due to the activities of nearby EvilCorp. Joe buys it anyway because there's not much of an alternative. Should Joe not be able to join the class action lawsuit against EvilCorp, to help pay for cleanup?
Copyright is about my right to publish. My right to control publication can be infringed whether or not I make a profit.
Under what circumstances does society have an interest in granting you this artificial right? Generally, the justification is that without the ability to make money off of the work, fewer works would get created, because the would-be creators (not to mention the supporting roles such as editor, QA, audio/video technician, etc) would be busy doing something else that pays the rent and keeps food on the table. The goal is not (or rather, should not be) control in and of itself.
That right, by itself, is worth something. Hence the statuatory damages.
Is it worth $250,000? Is it worth the loss to society of the ability to make full use of the work?
My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.
I am hereby giving notice that you have been discovered inhaling air, some of which was within the air rights of my property at the time that I bought it (it's your job to figure out whose air the wind blew toward you -- especially if you want to know whom to sue if it's polluted, and you can prove it was that specific breath that made you sick...).
Further unauthorized use of this privately owned asset shall be grounds for litigation. I hope your lawyer's as good (i.e. expensive) as mine.
I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property
The owners of the oil rig sure would. Do the owners of surrounding property have as much money to spend on lobbyists to represent their interests?
You seem to be assuming a justice system that is beyond just nominally "working", but 100% efficient and cost-free to the harmed party, and that everyone is going to have full knowledge, and ample evidence, of the harms that are about to be inflicted upon them (or are being inflicted).
Your example of people getting sent to jail for things like drug possession is curious -- that's an instance of the government pursuing criminal charges, not of individuals bringing civil lawsuits. Exactly the thing that you say doesn't work (not that the War on Drugs(tm) is all that successful, but that's another matter...). If someone breaks into my home, steals my things, and shoots me, should it be up to my next of kin to gather evidence, hire a lawyer, and file a lawsuit against the perpetrator?
Should I file the pollution lawsuit after I've got cancer, and find out what was being dumped into the water supply? Small comfort that'll be, and maybe the entity responsible (at least on paper) doesn't even exist anymore.
You're assuming that whoever I'm calling is a business with formal hours, rather than a coworker, friend, etc.
I work with remote teams in many parts of the world, and when there's a conference call it's usually outside "normal business hours" for someone, and sometimes everyone. It's nice to have a reasonably simple way to figure out just how ridiculous a given time request would be for someone else.
If we're still going to "get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark", it doesn't exactly sound like "we don't rely on the sun anymore".
The knowledge that it's 11:00 doesn't tell me anything about whether it's a reasonable time to call someone in another part of the world, for example. Instead of checking a time zone offset I'd have to consult local sunrise/sunset times?
Then there's daylight saving time -- it's easier to adjust the clocks than to adjust every schedule. I guess you'd ditch that too?
Would midnight and noon still be 0:00 and 12:00, or could you have mid"night" in the middle of the day?:-P
Federal and state gas taxes are insufficient to pay for construction and maintenance of the highway system, much less all the regular streets that the last mile delivery trucks run on.
Then those taxes should be raised to pay for that, and other taxes reduced to compensate. Make the people who use the roads pay for the roads.
I agree entirely, but what should be and what is are not always the same.
Don't penalize amazon and all the online sellers because the government is too stupid to allocate taxes properly and fairly, and wants to subsidize road costs with unrelated taxes.
It's not so much that the "government is too stupid", but that a significant chunk of the electorate screams bloody murder if their precious gas gets even slightly more expensive.
"Government is too spineless" might be more accurate.
Why should local purchases be taxed but not interstate delivery orders?
Simple: because interstate delivery orders are more efficient,
If they're more efficient, that ought to be reflected in lower base prices, plus consumer preference due to less hassle/cost on their end getting to the store.
Why do they need a subsidy in the form of a tax exemption on top of that?
it uses less fuel than driving around to 10 stores to compare prices,
How many purchases actually involve that? More common is driving to one store (bad, but not sure how much worse it is than the extra driving (and likely idling time) of a local delivery truck), and not always that for people that live in walkable/transitable areas.
Making drivers bear the full cost of driving would help with customer choice here, too.
it doesn't require parking lots which waste tons of land,
Stop having zoning codes that require low densities and minimum parking.
The customers who would be taxed have plenty of representation. Amazon just doesn't want to lose the competitive advantage of providing tax evasion services.
If Amazon doesn't want to follow the tax laws of a given jurisdiction, it should refuse to sell items for delivery there. It's not an Internet Tax, it's a Sales Tax -- the same one those customers were paying before they started buying things across state lines. In many states, the customers are supposed to be paying an equivalent Use Tax on those items, but enforcement is difficult.
I could see exempting small vendors for whom the compliance costs of dealing with many jurisdictions would be too high, but that's not the case with Amazon -- and surely the market could provide services to help vendors sort it out?
So then, what exactly do states need money from Amazon for?
They don't need money from Amazon. They need money from Amazon's customers, who live in those states. Why should local purchases be taxed but not interstate delivery orders?
To pay for police services? That's supposed to be paid by property taxes (on the residences of people who but from Amazon). To pay for fire services? Same thing.
So everything states do is currently fully paid by property taxes (and income, etc), and the sales tax is collected for fun?:-P
Amazon pays Federal taxes for the roads: they ship stuff by carriers like UPS and Fedex, who buy fuel, which pays fuel tax, which pays for roads.
Federal and state gas taxes are insufficient to pay for construction and maintenance of the highway system, much less all the regular streets that the last mile delivery trucks run on. Much like your property versus sales tax statement above, you seem to be falling for a fallacy that paying some part of the bill means you've paid the whole thing.
And that's before you factor in the other costs of burning that fuel, such as pollution, oil spills, and wars.
It is typically not illegal to walk on the side of a road. Street View at Main St and Deer Valley Dr did not show any signs prohibiting pedestrians, nor was the separate pedestrian path very visible, nor were there any signs indicating the presence of the path, how to access it, or where it leads.
It is also not typically considered the pedestrian's fault when a driver cannot control their weap^H^H^H^Hvehicle well enough to avoid hitting said pedestrian, provided the pedestrian doesn't do something particularly stupid (no, just walking on the side of the road doesn't count -- jay walking is a different story).
It's also not typically considered the map's fault, though.
In Ohio, every interstate highway, state route, or other divided highway has a sign on every on-ramp stating it is illegal for pedestrians, bicycles, or powered vehicles under a certain amount of HP (catches mopeds and scooters but not motorcycles) to enter the highway.
I don't know about Utah, but in Ohio, the judge would throw the case out because she was breaking the fucking law to begin with.
This does not appear to have been a fucking freeway.
In other words, we should focus on solutions involving fairy dust and genie wishes. Or, "I support sustainability as long as it doesn't inconvenience me in the slightest."
The answer is not "let's all live in slums", though that could be the result if we wait until it's too late to change course. Yes, we should push hard on clean, renewable energy generation, and advanced recycling techniques --- but completely dismissing any conservation-based approaches is foolish. This is hard enough of a problem as it is.
Let's say my CPU draws on average 10W more than it needs to when some flash is running in the background (I frequently find firefox taking 100% of my CPU, and it's almost always a window with some flash advertisement whose closure makes it go away -- except when nothing but killing firefox will do it).
Suppose my computer is in this state an average of four hours per day.
Suppose I pay 10 cents per kWh..01 kW * $.10/kWh * 4 hours * 365 days = $1.46
Not exactly breaking the bank (and I did hesitate to include it because I figured I'd get a response like this) but more than "one red cent", and it adds up to a small but non-trivial amount of waste when you multiply it by all users.
Plus, I've heard some people (on Windows, IIRC) claim that having flash running inhibits auto-suspend, which would make the waste significantly higher -- though to be fair, my experience with Windows auto-suspend is that breathing too heavily in the room could inhibit auto-suspend.
And then there's battery life for laptops and other portables...
Will it be able to, for instance, stream recommended alternative videos or advertisements while the video is paused, for instance? It's not that I want that, but a lot of site owners do.
Sorry, but those site owners can fuck off. If I tell the browser (or component therein) that I want things to stop moving, stop making noise, and stop chewing up CPU cycles and running up my power bill, then I want them to STOP!
Flash is particularly bad in this regard, and this (along with its limited platform availability and general flakiness) is why I'm not a fan of it. When I can get a working, robust flash player that pays attention to *me* more than to the bits coming over the internet, let me know.
You realize that when you call mmap() on something that resides on a disk or similar device (as opposed to a special device such as/dev/mem), the OS will copy data to and from the disk as needed, right? And that you're not actually directly mapping the data on disk?
Neither hard disks nor SSDs expose a memory-like interface that could be used in the manner that Artraze suggests. It can be done with NOR flash, but such memory is slow and small and not something you would want to run general purpose computing off of.
Why is there no stable ABI that allows hardware manufacturers to do this in Linux? Surely the Linux community can see how nice it would be if a consumer got home and no matter what item they bought there was a "Linux 32/64" driver on the CD that worked no matter if they were in Xandros, Red Hat, Ubuntu, PCLOS, etc, right?
And that "Linux 32/64" driver, if in the form of a blob of x86 machine code, would be useless on these ARM machines. The source drivers that the Linux community prefers, however, should work fine (barring bugs). Nice, huh?
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I'm not sure that providing an incentive to plant and cut down trees is better than reducing the incentive to cut down the trees that already exist.
Tax large-scale treecutting, and use the proceeds to plant trees.
I don't believe they advertise it as a "selectively filtered text message service". The only thing I can find about filtering from a quick glance at the messaging section of their website is this, which talks about user-controlled filtering: http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23533.xml
It's called a lease. Or a rental.
And guess what? They can't just put a sticker over the keyhole that says by breaking it, what you thought was a purchase (with paperwork to back it up) is actually a rental.
They actually have to get you to voluntarily enter into a different kind of agreement, up front.
The difference is with regulation we can try to manage risks beforehand, rather than just try to assign blame afterward -- and we don't need to worry who caused a specific harm. We can target activities which are known to be harmful in general, or which we don't know enough about and are too risky relative to their benefit.
Obviously it's not perfect, but what you propose would be worse.
but you didn't buy the air on my property, and I am definitely not on it.
The wind blew my air onto your property. Not *my* fault. Doesn't stop Monsanto from suing farmers when patented seed blows onto their farms.
More to the point, you are consuming as much air as I am (approximately),
You mean it's a common resource we all share, and nobody should own? :-)
We probably consume about the same amount of air (depending on metabolism, activities, etc), but maybe I own more air than you. Maybe you don't own any air at all!
now if you are poisoning the air by some extra means and we had adjacent properties and your poisons entered my territory, I would be seeking retribution.
Prove that it's my dirty air that entered your property and not the polluter across the street.
Throwing yourself in front of a car is actually creating the harm, which is not the same thing as merely being aware of the harm and planning to seek redress after purchase. While this particular situation is pretty scummy, consider the consequences that such a rule would produce.
Company A sues company B for some completely legitimate reason. Company C buys company A in its entirety -- the transaction would have happened whether or not the issue with company B existed. Why is company B off the hook?
Joe buys a house from Bob. This land, like all others in the area, has contaminated soil due to the activities of nearby EvilCorp. Joe buys it anyway because there's not much of an alternative. Should Joe not be able to join the class action lawsuit against EvilCorp, to help pay for cleanup?
Copyright is about my right to publish.
My right to control publication can be infringed whether or not I make a profit.
Under what circumstances does society have an interest in granting you this artificial right? Generally, the justification is that without the ability to make money off of the work, fewer works would get created, because the would-be creators (not to mention the supporting roles such as editor, QA, audio/video technician, etc) would be busy doing something else that pays the rent and keeps food on the table. The goal is not (or rather, should not be) control in and of itself.
That right, by itself, is worth something. Hence the statuatory damages.
Is it worth $250,000? Is it worth the loss to society of the ability to make full use of the work?
My point is precisely that there must be NO COMMONS.
I am hereby giving notice that you have been discovered inhaling air, some of which was within the air rights of my property at the time that I bought it (it's your job to figure out whose air the wind blew toward you -- especially if you want to know whom to sue if it's polluted, and you can prove it was that specific breath that made you sick...).
Further unauthorized use of this privately owned asset shall be grounds for litigation. I hope your lawyer's as good (i.e. expensive) as mine.
I don't think a private owners would lobby to set a liability cap on damages caused by an oil spill in his private property
The owners of the oil rig sure would. Do the owners of surrounding property have as much money to spend on lobbyists to represent their interests?
You seem to be assuming a justice system that is beyond just nominally "working", but 100% efficient and cost-free to the harmed party, and that everyone is going to have full knowledge, and ample evidence, of the harms that are about to be inflicted upon them (or are being inflicted).
Your example of people getting sent to jail for things like drug possession is curious -- that's an instance of the government pursuing criminal charges, not of individuals bringing civil lawsuits. Exactly the thing that you say doesn't work (not that the War on Drugs(tm) is all that successful, but that's another matter...). If someone breaks into my home, steals my things, and shoots me, should it be up to my next of kin to gather evidence, hire a lawyer, and file a lawsuit against the perpetrator?
Should I file the pollution lawsuit after I've got cancer, and find out what was being dumped into the water supply? Small comfort that'll be, and maybe the entity responsible (at least on paper) doesn't even exist anymore.
You're assuming that whoever I'm calling is a business with formal hours, rather than a coworker, friend, etc.
I work with remote teams in many parts of the world, and when there's a conference call it's usually outside "normal business hours" for someone, and sometimes everyone. It's nice to have a reasonably simple way to figure out just how ridiculous a given time request would be for someone else.
Which raises the question of why the software that failed relied on human-readable time for internal operation...
If we're still going to "get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark", it doesn't exactly sound like "we don't rely on the sun anymore".
The knowledge that it's 11:00 doesn't tell me anything about whether it's a reasonable time to call someone in another part of the world, for example. Instead of checking a time zone offset I'd have to consult local sunrise/sunset times?
Then there's daylight saving time -- it's easier to adjust the clocks than to adjust every schedule. I guess you'd ditch that too?
Would midnight and noon still be 0:00 and 12:00, or could you have mid"night" in the middle of the day? :-P
Nuclear doesn't spew its hazardous waste into the air.
"Energy independence" is not the only concern.
Federal and state gas taxes are insufficient to pay for construction and maintenance of the highway system, much less all the regular streets that the last mile delivery trucks run on.
Then those taxes should be raised to pay for that, and other taxes reduced to compensate. Make the people who use the roads pay for the roads.
I agree entirely, but what should be and what is are not always the same.
Don't penalize amazon and all the online sellers because the government is too stupid to allocate taxes properly and fairly, and wants to subsidize road costs with unrelated taxes.
It's not so much that the "government is too stupid", but that a significant chunk of the electorate screams bloody murder if their precious gas gets even slightly more expensive.
"Government is too spineless" might be more accurate.
Why should local purchases be taxed but not interstate delivery orders?
Simple: because interstate delivery orders are more efficient,
If they're more efficient, that ought to be reflected in lower base prices, plus consumer preference due to less hassle/cost on their end getting to the store.
Why do they need a subsidy in the form of a tax exemption on top of that?
it uses less fuel than driving around to 10 stores to compare prices,
How many purchases actually involve that? More common is driving to one store (bad, but not sure how much worse it is than the extra driving (and likely idling time) of a local delivery truck), and not always that for people that live in walkable/transitable areas.
Making drivers bear the full cost of driving would help with customer choice here, too.
it doesn't require parking lots which waste tons of land,
Stop having zoning codes that require low densities and minimum parking.
The customers who would be taxed have plenty of representation. Amazon just doesn't want to lose the competitive advantage of providing tax evasion services.
If Amazon doesn't want to follow the tax laws of a given jurisdiction, it should refuse to sell items for delivery there. It's not an Internet Tax, it's a Sales Tax -- the same one those customers were paying before they started buying things across state lines. In many states, the customers are supposed to be paying an equivalent Use Tax on those items, but enforcement is difficult.
I could see exempting small vendors for whom the compliance costs of dealing with many jurisdictions would be too high, but that's not the case with Amazon -- and surely the market could provide services to help vendors sort it out?
So then, what exactly do states need money from Amazon for?
They don't need money from Amazon. They need money from Amazon's customers, who live in those states. Why should local purchases be taxed but not interstate delivery orders?
To pay for police services? That's supposed to be paid by property taxes (on the residences of people who but from Amazon). To pay for fire services? Same thing.
So everything states do is currently fully paid by property taxes (and income, etc), and the sales tax is collected for fun? :-P
Amazon pays Federal taxes for the roads: they ship stuff by carriers like UPS and Fedex, who buy fuel, which pays fuel tax, which pays for roads.
Federal and state gas taxes are insufficient to pay for construction and maintenance of the highway system, much less all the regular streets that the last mile delivery trucks run on. Much like your property versus sales tax statement above, you seem to be falling for a fallacy that paying some part of the bill means you've paid the whole thing.
And that's before you factor in the other costs of burning that fuel, such as pollution, oil spills, and wars.
It is typically not illegal to walk on the side of a road. Street View at Main St and Deer Valley Dr did not show any signs prohibiting pedestrians, nor was the separate pedestrian path very visible, nor were there any signs indicating the presence of the path, how to access it, or where it leads.
It is also not typically considered the pedestrian's fault when a driver cannot control their weap^H^H^H^Hvehicle well enough to avoid hitting said pedestrian, provided the pedestrian doesn't do something particularly stupid (no, just walking on the side of the road doesn't count -- jay walking is a different story).
It's also not typically considered the map's fault, though.
In Ohio, every interstate highway, state route, or other divided highway has a sign on every on-ramp stating it is illegal for pedestrians, bicycles, or powered vehicles under a certain amount of HP (catches mopeds and scooters but not motorcycles) to enter the highway.
I don't know about Utah, but in Ohio, the judge would throw the case out because she was breaking the fucking law to begin with.
This does not appear to have been a fucking freeway.
I believe the lower charge is for transactions that go through the debit networks (i.e. with a PIN), and don't involve Visa or Mastercard.
A liquor chain here gives a 5% "cash" discount for using either cash, or debit with PIN. You only pay full price if you do a credit transaction.
In other words, we should focus on solutions involving fairy dust and genie wishes. Or, "I support sustainability as long as it doesn't inconvenience me in the slightest."
The answer is not "let's all live in slums", though that could be the result if we wait until it's too late to change course. Yes, we should push hard on clean, renewable energy generation, and advanced recycling techniques --- but completely dismissing any conservation-based approaches is foolish. This is hard enough of a problem as it is.
Let's say my CPU draws on average 10W more than it needs to when some flash is running in the background (I frequently find firefox taking 100% of my CPU, and it's almost always a window with some flash advertisement whose closure makes it go away -- except when nothing but killing firefox will do it).
Suppose my computer is in this state an average of four hours per day.
Suppose I pay 10 cents per kWh. .01 kW * $.10/kWh * 4 hours * 365 days = $1.46
Not exactly breaking the bank (and I did hesitate to include it because I figured I'd get a response like this) but more than "one red cent", and it adds up to a small but non-trivial amount of waste when you multiply it by all users.
Plus, I've heard some people (on Windows, IIRC) claim that having flash running inhibits auto-suspend, which would make the waste significantly higher -- though to be fair, my experience with Windows auto-suspend is that breathing too heavily in the room could inhibit auto-suspend.
And then there's battery life for laptops and other portables...
Feel free to do the same to anyone saying "this sucks".
Will it be able to, for instance, stream recommended alternative videos or advertisements while the video is paused, for instance? It's not that I want that, but a lot of site owners do.
Sorry, but those site owners can fuck off. If I tell the browser (or component therein) that I want things to stop moving, stop making noise, and stop chewing up CPU cycles and running up my power bill, then I want them to STOP!
Flash is particularly bad in this regard, and this (along with its limited platform availability and general flakiness) is why I'm not a fan of it. When I can get a working, robust flash player that pays attention to *me* more than to the bits coming over the internet, let me know.
You realize that when you call mmap() on something that resides on a disk or similar device (as opposed to a special device such as /dev/mem), the OS will copy data to and from the disk as needed, right? And that you're not actually directly mapping the data on disk?
Neither hard disks nor SSDs expose a memory-like interface that could be used in the manner that Artraze suggests. It can be done with NOR flash, but such memory is slow and small and not something you would want to run general purpose computing off of.
Why is there no stable ABI that allows hardware manufacturers to do this in Linux? Surely the Linux community can see how nice it would be if a consumer got home and no matter what item they bought there was a "Linux 32/64" driver on the CD that worked no matter if they were in Xandros, Red Hat, Ubuntu, PCLOS, etc, right?
And that "Linux 32/64" driver, if in the form of a blob of x86 machine code, would be useless on these ARM machines. The source drivers that the Linux community prefers, however, should work fine (barring bugs). Nice, huh?