I wasn't a manager and I never deleted anything, either. Sure, sometimes it was simply to protect myself, but there are a lot of other reasons to sace email.
Frankly, there is no reason to expect people to not retain just about everything. People look at a techie worrying outloud about diskspace liked they'd look at a bartender complaining about all that beer guzzling: just buy some more.
I did this for several years at a previous employer, with Lotus Notes. Hated it as an emailer, but it was just fine for retaining and finding stuff. I'd even mail Word or Excel files to myself.
When I left, my inbox was several thousand files deep, and that was typical.
That's why I don't relish criminalizing copyright infringement.
That said, I hold in equal contempt both what you label as the "content industry" and anyone tries to justify stealing by trolling some self-serving nonsense.
I'm not especially in favor of criminalizing copyright violations, but a maximum 3-year sentence doesn't seem excessive to me, considering the loss of revenue attributable to the illegal copying and distribution of a major media product. Theft or embezzlement of an equivalent sum would likely merit a longer sentence.
Before the "what's yours is mine" folks jump up and down shouting there's no way to determine how much, if any, money is lost due to leaked products, let em say you can't prove no money is lost. Certainly, the objective of the exercise is to get something for free, so one can logically claim a relationship between downloads and lost revenue.
To the best of my knowledge, copyright violation is a typically civil, not a criminal, matter. That's why I wouldn't rush to call the police.
My primary goal and that of the school should be to avoid damage to the school's interests, i.e., avoid getting dragged into a lawsuit. I'd report to the boss. I'd document the fact that I reported it. In fact, I'd do and document everything permitted by my job description to eliminate the illegal traffic. If my boss stepped in and kept me from taking an action, I'd document that, too. Why? To reduce my vulnerability to a potential lawsuit. The same applies to the school: everyone with responsibility for the network needs to be able to show due diligence in eliminating and preventing its use to illegally spread files. If the boss is stupid and covers things up. too bad, I've documented my actions. If a lawsuit happens, the school will likely hang that boss out to dry.
"Snitching" wouldn't be much of an issue unless I could accurately identify the individuals involved. If I could, and was asked or required to provide those names, I would. In any case, I'd close or put a cap on the net usage of the machines in question. I just need to know the machines involved, not the people, to do that.
I don't consider it "spying" for an admin to notice something that might be criminal going on in his network, or that might put his employer at serious civil and financial risk, or both. The net is a public place. There's no reason to assume you have any privacy there, especially if you're a college kid who forget to read the paragraph in the paperwork he got on Day One that told him his use of the school's network and other property obligated him to refrain from illegal or embarrassing use of school property and acknowledged the school's right to monitor his net activities.
The police have nothing to do with this. This is a matter of civil, not criminal, law. (If you don't know the difference, try harder.)
The orginal post equated any reporting of illegal traffic with RIAA spying. That's obviously absurd. If an admin had reason to believe that his or her network was being used to traffic music illegally, then he has an obligation to tell his employer. (Not the police, because this is a civil matter.) Why? Because withholding that information increases their vulnerability to a suit: they had reason to believe their network was used to traffic illeglly and yet did nothing to stop it.
>>...its inappropriate to look inside your packets without reason.
Agreed. But, if your employer gave you a reason (illegal traffic) presumably you would look. A subpoena would compel you to look. Apart from "trolling" randomly among the packets, knowledge that your network is being used illegally could come in any number of ways, just as it does with any other kind of illicit activity.
I already assume the my IPS can see everything I cause to pass through their servers. My privacy depends on their boredom. If they have reason to look, I have no privacy.
Besides, the motivation for this would be to make more money, not to do what "somebody wants them to". It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that anyone buying service from an ISP would agree to avoid using the ISP's facilities for illegal activity, as well as giving the ISP the right to monitor their activity. In fact, I'd bet you've already given your ISP those rights.
Who lumped anything together? There are reasons to pass the info on to the school or to RIAA attornies (such as a threatened subpoena. Someone would have to be deliberately stupid to pretend that college networks aren't being used to illegally traffic music files.)
So, you would fire someone for reporting illegal activity? How does that differ from covering up the crime? If the school knows something is going on and doesn't do anything to stop it, the RIAA ought to sue them.
Since ths is a matter of civil, not criminal, law, no one can give you a precise answer for every hypothetical situation you dream up. Besides, your examples of personal use don't apply large-scale copying of thousands of files for distribution to, potentially, everyone on the planet. Just because you won't show up on the radar when you make a single personal copy doesn't mean you can extrapolate that and claim 10,000 copies are fair use.
I've had to resort to legal counsel on a few occasions regarding fair use. If you do something that has been done before and resulted in a successful claim of fiar use, odds are you, too, can claim fair use. That won't keep you from being sued, but it will help you win the suit.
On the other hand, if you do something that a number of people have already done under an unsuccessful fair use claim, odds are almost certain that you will be sued and will lose. One certain way to lose, I learned for those lawyers, is to make many copies of something and distribute it to many unknown people.
So, yeah, you can make a copy of a CD to play in the car and no one will sue you. (A rather wasteful outlay of cash, don't you think.) Is it fair use? Who knows? But no one is going to attacj you with lawyers.
But, copy thousands of CD's and host them in a grab bag on the net and you have blown any chance of claiming fair use and given a lot of people good reason to sue you.
Any number of reasons exist for a student or an employee to know that the school's facilities are being used to traffic music on the I2. Any number of reasons also exist for someone to pass the information on to the attornies representing either the RIAA or the school.
In fact, I'd wager that a condition of employment at the school is to not engage in or facilitate illegal activity. It would be pretty hard for a network admin to learn that some kid was illegally moving tens of thousands of files through his servers, then keep his mouth shut, and not be vulnerable to charges of aiding a criminal activity. Fear of getting caught covering that up would be a strong motivator to report the activity to the school.
If -- a very big if, I know -- ISP's could accurately identify the music that is moving through their systems, then they could bill extra for that, keep something for themselves, and pass on the rest to the music industry as royalty payments.
I'm always skeptical of studies based on pollings that report something like "use of email has dropped 22 percent due to spam...".
That's an assessment based on the subjective impressions of the people who were polled. People typically do not measure the amount of time spent using email. Time spent in email could rise dramatically, in fact, at the same time total number of messages read dropped dramatically if the user began generating more outgoing messages.
These studies also tend to ignore the differences between email users. A stay-at-home parent is going to interact with a different volume of email than a white-collar minion who lives inside Outlook or Notes.
Personally, I've seen little change in the amount of spam I receive over the last several months. I have 3 accounts: A Yahoo account that is a spam trap; a Gmail account that see little usage yet; and a primary account with a commercial IMAP provider running its own spam filters. I see about 200 spams a week in Yahoo, and 0-5 spams per week in the Gmail and commercial accounts.
Only silly dweebs would think this is "evil". The amount of money they got from their salaries, and the amount of taxes they paid on those saleries, were miniscule compared with their equity in Google stock. They aren't the first wealthy people to take a token salary from the company they founded.
>> The benefits of gov't funded public transport are so enormous...
I agree, but I'm pretty certain, with the exception of cities that currently have good mass transit, any newly funded systems would go largely unused. People expect mass transit to eliminate the need to get in your car and commute. They won't use it if they need to get in the car and commute to the place they get on mass transit.
Back on space: There's a lot of enthusiams these days about privately funded space travel. I have no issues with that. I doubt that, beyond expensive suborbital passenger flights (spadce travel by definition only) and, possibly, orbital flight, I don't believe the private sector will do much else for a long time. Anything beyond short visits to LEO requires the appropriate infrastructure. The private sector won't build that by itself, with its own resources, because the time between the commitment of resources and the final payoff is far too long. Example: Let's assume someone knew how to make money sending people to Mars and back. A number of years, perhaps ten or more, would elapse between the initation of the project and any expectation of seeing revenue, much less proft. Only the government -- the state -- has the ability to take on such efforts.
I don't believe it is accurate to a single railroad monopoly ever existed. Rather, in many locations, freight railway service was monopolized by a single carrier. Farmers, miners, etc., faced prices set by that local or regional monopoly. Railroads, if I recall, frequently colluded on price setting, as well.
I say "freight railway service" because that's where the impact was felt. Livelihoods and incomes depended on shipping freight via the railroads, but much less so on actually travelling by railrooad.
I'd say it is more accurate to say that passenger rail traffic never took off because of the auto, rather than arguing that the car killed passenger rail travel. Usable passenger rail travel, or any other form of mass transit, depends on enough people living in a concentrated area. Those conditions exist in few Americian urban areas because most of the population growth occurred after the auto became popular. That allowed people to spread out. Europe's cities, and their mass transit systems, grew prior to the auto. Even there, few systems could profitably operate within the private sector.
Cities like New York, Boston, D.C., and San Francisco have good mass transit system. I've found it as easy to get around in those cities as in, say, London. Several others have limited subway and train systems that cater to commuters. We'll never see much beyond that.
I take your point about driving to the airport, but remember that we don't use airplanes to commute or to go the grocery, etc. Besides, there no room in the cities for airports.
If I recall, though, American railroads were quite successful in their privately-held heyday, roughly 1850-1950, so I'm not sure what chaos you're seeing there. Railroads, especially passenger lines, became unprofitable with the explosion of suburban neighborhoods: No one wants to drive to the center of town to wait for a train that will take you to the center of another town. This is perfectly reasonable behavior. Government intervention in the form of Amtrak, etc., is prolonging the agony, but it didn't cause it.
Public transportation suffers, outside large urban areas, because, like railroads, people won't use it. Our suburban areas lack the population density that's needed to really make public transportation an effective proposition. No one wants to pay more taxes to subsidize something they believe they'll never use. No one sees much benefit in a public trnasportation system that, typically, doesn't come closer than a mile or so to their house.
Public tranportation, typically heavily subsidized by the state, works in older European cities because the trains, or buses, or whatever, or are usually a short walk away, regardless of your location. I've lived in Europe for a while, and it was very nice to have the bus stop in front of my house, and to be able to walk for a few minutes and catch a train to anywhere. Not going to happen here, though. (Just as it hasn't happened in newer European urban and suburban areas that have been designed to cater to the needs of the automobile.)
By the way, on standards, you do realize that I haven't argued against standards? Just that a standard that is ignored, regardless of isolated technical merit, is not standard at all. Standards are determined by how people actually behave, not what someone else says they should do.
The crack is not in the external tank. The crack is in the foam insulation surrounding the external tank. The lede in the Space.com story is wrong. Guess Slashdot readers and Slashdot staff can't be bothered to read more than one paragraph.
>> It has already been spelled out why we shouldn't let the market decide
Ok, where? Who says I'm supposed to agree with that line of reasoning?
>> . We need technical standards set by disinterested technicians...
Again, why? Why are standards set by technicans any more valid than standards established by the people that buy and use the products?
And why are you so certain all those "technicians" are disinterested? Standards committees are no more immune from politics than any other kind of committee.
>>...without any stake in the market to assure that the standards are technical in nature and not political as the case would be with the market deciding.
I really doubt technicians working in an industry lack a stake in the success of that industry. More importantly, when markets set standards it isn't political, it is economic decision making, by the people with the right to make those decisions -- consumers.
>> With the fickle market deciding, I wouldn't be able to keep my tv or telephone or computer for more than a year or two before I would need an upgrade to conform to the new standard...
It isn't the market that creates upgrades or new kind of TV's or telepones. It is manufacturers who hope to make a profit selling them. The market determines if they're successful or not. If people want, for example, that new kind of TV, they'll by it. If people don't want, for example, the latest Microsoft upgrade, they won't buy it. Manufacturers follow what the hope are the desires of the marketplace, not the other way around.
>> Office98 is more than good enough for almost all users, but it must be constantly upgraded...
That's you're opinion. Whether it is accurate or whether it has any bearing on the purchasing decisions of people is irrelevant. People have every right to buy what they want. If they want to buy a new product because they like the color of the box, then they will. Nothing wrong with that. Ut's their money.
>> Imagine if we let the market decide how to deliver electricity everytime a "new" concept comes up. We would constantly have to re-invent every appliance...
That almost certainly wouldn't happen because we all have so much invested in appliances that work with the "old" concept. If someone tried to sell something else, no one would buy it.
>> You seem to have a desire to let a few profit at the expense of the rest.
No, I don't, and I've not said or implied anything like that. I've only said that real standards -- what most people want and do most of the time -- are set by the people who buy the products that do those things, which is simply another way of talking about the market.
You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about a tiny clique of self-annointed experts deciding what everyone else should do and then focing us all to adhere to their wishes. Even if a body like the W3C is composed of angels making the very best technical decisions, why should I pay any attention to the W3C? If 98 percent of the world buys my product anyway, who cares what the W3C says?
>> There would be no profit for Sony if they made tv's that can't recieve the gov't mandated signal...
But,that's not what I said, is it? I said a new way to deliver sound and images, i.e., something that doesn't come within the FCC's purview.
I'm glad, too, that the FCC regulates frequency use. But, if no one wanted to buy the boxes that receive the signals broadcast on those frequencies, that standard would be moot. The standard exists and works only because the market supports it.
>> ...and my cynicism comes from much experience.
Somehow I doubt that. Sounds more like a lot of misunderstanding of how people really work.
>>...That's precisely why we shouldn't let the market determine the standards...
The market is precisely the only thing that can establish meaningful standards. Standards amount to what most people do most of the time. What good are products that adhere to "standards" if no one uses those products?
And, just who is this "we" that "should let the market" set standards? The market is everyone, so are you suggesting some government agency with the power to enforce standards against the people's will?
>> AM stereo is another example of this failure of the market...
Huh? AM radio is talk radio. That's where the money is. Who needs to listen to Rush in stereo? He's all mono, even in person.
>> It assures that the best standards are used, not necessarily the most profitable...
No. It would assure that the "best" standards are ignored if no one could make money following them.
>> If the W3C is supposed to set browser standards...
Who sez? The only people who said the W3C is supposed to set browser standards is the W3C.
>> The market should set the price, not the standard. We have real technicians available that should be setting the standard. Let's use them. The market is destroying the whole concept of standards... for profit.
Why shouldn't the market set standards? Why should we let "technicians" with little stake in the game and no interest in the behavior or interests of real people have dictatorial powers over anyone using a browser? If someone markets a browser that allows me to do something I want to do, why should I care if that browser make the standards technicians happy?
>> Sony can't change TV standards because the FCC...
If Sony dominated the TV market and found a new and more profitable way to deliver sound and images to people's homes and offices, it could bring that to market with no concern about the FCC. No FCC regulations would apply to Sony's new products.
It would take a very large "contribution" to change that.
You show that combination of naivete and inexperienced cynicism that so many people put on like a pair of jeans.
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I wasn't a manager and I never deleted anything, either. Sure, sometimes it was simply to protect myself, but there are a lot of other reasons to sace email.
Frankly, there is no reason to expect people to not retain just about everything. People look at a techie worrying outloud about diskspace liked they'd look at a bartender complaining about all that beer guzzling: just buy some more.
I did this for several years at a previous employer, with Lotus Notes. Hated it as an emailer, but it was just fine for retaining and finding stuff. I'd even mail Word or Excel files to myself.
When I left, my inbox was several thousand files deep, and that was typical.
That's why I don't relish criminalizing copyright infringement.
That said, I hold in equal contempt both what you label as the "content industry" and anyone tries to justify stealing by trolling some self-serving nonsense.
I'm not especially in favor of criminalizing copyright violations, but a maximum 3-year sentence doesn't seem excessive to me, considering the loss of revenue attributable to the illegal copying and distribution of a major media product. Theft or embezzlement of an equivalent sum would likely merit a longer sentence.
Before the "what's yours is mine" folks jump up and down shouting there's no way to determine how much, if any, money is lost due to leaked products, let em say you can't prove no money is lost. Certainly, the objective of the exercise is to get something for free, so one can logically claim a relationship between downloads and lost revenue.
Remember that.
To the best of my knowledge, copyright violation is a typically civil, not a criminal, matter. That's why I wouldn't rush to call the police.
My primary goal and that of the school should be to avoid damage to the school's interests, i.e., avoid getting dragged into a lawsuit. I'd report to the boss. I'd document the fact that I reported it. In fact, I'd do and document everything permitted by my job description to eliminate the illegal traffic. If my boss stepped in and kept me from taking an action, I'd document that, too. Why? To reduce my vulnerability to a potential lawsuit. The same applies to the school: everyone with responsibility for the network needs to be able to show due diligence in eliminating and preventing its use to illegally spread files. If the boss is stupid and covers things up. too bad, I've documented my actions. If a lawsuit happens, the school will likely hang that boss out to dry.
"Snitching" wouldn't be much of an issue unless I could accurately identify the individuals involved. If I could, and was asked or required to provide those names, I would. In any case, I'd close or put a cap on the net usage of the machines in question. I just need to know the machines involved, not the people, to do that.
I don't consider it "spying" for an admin to notice something that might be criminal going on in his network, or that might put his employer at serious civil and financial risk, or both. The net is a public place. There's no reason to assume you have any privacy there, especially if you're a college kid who forget to read the paragraph in the paperwork he got on Day One that told him his use of the school's network and other property obligated him to refrain from illegal or embarrassing use of school property and acknowledged the school's right to monitor his net activities.
Well said.
Sometimes I think most of the people who post here are barely in control of themselves, much less anyone else.
The police have nothing to do with this. This is a matter of civil, not criminal, law. (If you don't know the difference, try harder.)
The orginal post equated any reporting of illegal traffic with RIAA spying. That's obviously absurd. If an admin had reason to believe that his or her network was being used to traffic music illegally, then he has an obligation to tell his employer. (Not the police, because this is a civil matter.) Why? Because withholding that information increases their vulnerability to a suit: they had reason to believe their network was used to traffic illeglly and yet did nothing to stop it.
So, you'd fire an admin who reported illegal activity on the network for which you are legally repsonsible, eh?
Be sure to put that on your resume. Peoeple who aid and abet crime are always first to be hired.
>> ...its inappropriate to look inside your packets without reason.
Agreed. But, if your employer gave you a reason (illegal traffic) presumably you would look. A subpoena would compel you to look. Apart from "trolling" randomly among the packets, knowledge that your network is being used illegally could come in any number of ways, just as it does with any other kind of illicit activity.
I already assume the my IPS can see everything I cause to pass through their servers. My privacy depends on their boredom. If they have reason to look, I have no privacy.
Besides, the motivation for this would be to make more money, not to do what "somebody wants them to". It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that anyone buying service from an ISP would agree to avoid using the ISP's facilities for illegal activity, as well as giving the ISP the right to monitor their activity. In fact, I'd bet you've already given your ISP those rights.
Who lumped anything together? There are reasons to pass the info on to the school or to RIAA attornies (such as a threatened subpoena. Someone would have to be deliberately stupid to pretend that college networks aren't being used to illegally traffic music files.)
So, you would fire someone for reporting illegal activity? How does that differ from covering up the crime? If the school knows something is going on and doesn't do anything to stop it, the RIAA ought to sue them.
So, you think anyone who deals with illegal activity on their netowrk is, by definition, an "RIAA mole"?
You are making excuses for thieves.
Since ths is a matter of civil, not criminal, law, no one can give you a precise answer for every hypothetical situation you dream up. Besides, your examples of personal use don't apply large-scale copying of thousands of files for distribution to, potentially, everyone on the planet. Just because you won't show up on the radar when you make a single personal copy doesn't mean you can extrapolate that and claim 10,000 copies are fair use.
I've had to resort to legal counsel on a few occasions regarding fair use. If you do something that has been done before and resulted in a successful claim of fiar use, odds are you, too, can claim fair use. That won't keep you from being sued, but it will help you win the suit.
On the other hand, if you do something that a number of people have already done under an unsuccessful fair use claim, odds are almost certain that you will be sued and will lose. One certain way to lose, I learned for those lawyers, is to make many copies of something and distribute it to many unknown people.
So, yeah, you can make a copy of a CD to play in the car and no one will sue you. (A rather wasteful outlay of cash, don't you think.) Is it fair use? Who knows? But no one is going to attacj you with lawyers.
But, copy thousands of CD's and host them in a grab bag on the net and you have blown any chance of claiming fair use and given a lot of people good reason to sue you.
Any number of reasons exist for a student or an employee to know that the school's facilities are being used to traffic music on the I2. Any number of reasons also exist for someone to pass the information on to the attornies representing either the RIAA or the school.
In fact, I'd wager that a condition of employment at the school is to not engage in or facilitate illegal activity. It would be pretty hard for a network admin to learn that some kid was illegally moving tens of thousands of files through his servers, then keep his mouth shut, and not be vulnerable to charges of aiding a criminal activity. Fear of getting caught covering that up would be a strong motivator to report the activity to the school.
If -- a very big if, I know -- ISP's could accurately identify the music that is moving through their systems, then they could bill extra for that, keep something for themselves, and pass on the rest to the music industry as royalty payments.
I'm always skeptical of studies based on pollings that report something like "use of email has dropped 22 percent due to spam...".
That's an assessment based on the subjective impressions of the people who were polled. People typically do not measure the amount of time spent using email. Time spent in email could rise dramatically, in fact, at the same time total number of messages read dropped dramatically if the user began generating more outgoing messages.
These studies also tend to ignore the differences between email users. A stay-at-home parent is going to interact with a different volume of email than a white-collar minion who lives inside Outlook or Notes.
Personally, I've seen little change in the amount of spam I receive over the last several months. I have 3 accounts: A Yahoo account that is a spam trap; a Gmail account that see little usage yet; and a primary account with a commercial IMAP provider running its own spam filters. I see about 200 spams a week in Yahoo, and 0-5 spams per week in the Gmail and commercial accounts.
Only silly dweebs would think this is "evil". The amount of money they got from their salaries, and the amount of taxes they paid on those saleries, were miniscule compared with their equity in Google stock. They aren't the first wealthy people to take a token salary from the company they founded.
So, get over it. Making Money Isn't Evil.
>> The benefits of gov't funded public transport are so enormous...
I agree, but I'm pretty certain, with the exception of cities that currently have good mass transit, any newly funded systems would go largely unused. People expect mass transit to eliminate the need to get in your car and commute. They won't use it if they need to get in the car and commute to the place they get on mass transit.
Back on space: There's a lot of enthusiams these days about privately funded space travel. I have no issues with that. I doubt that, beyond expensive suborbital passenger flights (spadce travel by definition only) and, possibly, orbital flight, I don't believe the private sector will do much else for a long time. Anything beyond short visits to LEO requires the appropriate infrastructure. The private sector won't build that by itself, with its own resources, because the time between the commitment of resources and the final payoff is far too long. Example: Let's assume someone knew how to make money sending people to Mars and back. A number of years, perhaps ten or more, would elapse between the initation of the project and any expectation of seeing revenue, much less proft. Only the government -- the state -- has the ability to take on such efforts.
I don't believe it is accurate to a single railroad monopoly ever existed. Rather, in many locations, freight railway service was monopolized by a single carrier. Farmers, miners, etc., faced prices set by that local or regional monopoly. Railroads, if I recall, frequently colluded on price setting, as well.
I say "freight railway service" because that's where the impact was felt. Livelihoods and incomes depended on shipping freight via the railroads, but much less so on actually travelling by railrooad.
I'd say it is more accurate to say that passenger rail traffic never took off because of the auto, rather than arguing that the car killed passenger rail travel. Usable passenger rail travel, or any other form of mass transit, depends on enough people living in a concentrated area. Those conditions exist in few Americian urban areas because most of the population growth occurred after the auto became popular. That allowed people to spread out. Europe's cities, and their mass transit systems, grew prior to the auto. Even there, few systems could profitably operate within the private sector.
Cities like New York, Boston, D.C., and San Francisco have good mass transit system. I've found it as easy to get around in those cities as in, say, London. Several others have limited subway and train systems that cater to commuters. We'll never see much beyond that.
I take your point about driving to the airport, but remember that we don't use airplanes to commute or to go the grocery, etc. Besides, there no room in the cities for airports.
Glad you agree on this one.
If I recall, though, American railroads were quite successful in their privately-held heyday, roughly 1850-1950, so I'm not sure what chaos you're seeing there. Railroads, especially passenger lines, became unprofitable with the explosion of suburban neighborhoods: No one wants to drive to the center of town to wait for a train that will take you to the center of another town. This is perfectly reasonable behavior. Government intervention in the form of Amtrak, etc., is prolonging the agony, but it didn't cause it.
Public transportation suffers, outside large urban areas, because, like railroads, people won't use it. Our suburban areas lack the population density that's needed to really make public transportation an effective proposition. No one wants to pay more taxes to subsidize something they believe they'll never use. No one sees much benefit in a public trnasportation system that, typically, doesn't come closer than a mile or so to their house.
Public tranportation, typically heavily subsidized by the state, works in older European cities because the trains, or buses, or whatever, or are usually a short walk away, regardless of your location. I've lived in Europe for a while, and it was very nice to have the bus stop in front of my house, and to be able to walk for a few minutes and catch a train to anywhere. Not going to happen here, though. (Just as it hasn't happened in newer European urban and suburban areas that have been designed to cater to the needs of the automobile.)
By the way, on standards, you do realize that I haven't argued against standards? Just that a standard that is ignored, regardless of isolated technical merit, is not standard at all. Standards are determined by how people actually behave, not what someone else says they should do.
The crack is not in the external tank. The crack is in the foam insulation surrounding the external tank. The lede in the Space.com story is wrong. Guess Slashdot readers and Slashdot staff can't be bothered to read more than one paragraph.
/. get paid to be this bad?
Do people at
>> It has already been spelled out why we shouldn't let the market decide
...without any stake in the market to assure that the standards are technical in nature and not political as the case would be with the market deciding.
...and my cynicism comes from much experience.
Ok, where? Who says I'm supposed to agree with that line of reasoning?
>> . We need technical standards set by disinterested technicians...
Again, why? Why are standards set by technicans any more valid than standards established by the people that buy and use the products?
And why are you so certain all those "technicians" are disinterested? Standards committees are no more immune from politics than any other kind of committee.
>>
I really doubt technicians working in an industry lack a stake in the success of that industry. More importantly, when markets set standards it isn't political, it is economic decision making, by the people with the right to make those decisions -- consumers.
>> With the fickle market deciding, I wouldn't be able to keep my tv or telephone or computer for more than a year or two before I would need an upgrade to conform to the new standard...
It isn't the market that creates upgrades or new kind of TV's or telepones. It is manufacturers who hope to make a profit selling them. The market determines if they're successful or not. If people want, for example, that new kind of TV, they'll by it. If people don't want, for example, the latest Microsoft upgrade, they won't buy it. Manufacturers follow what the hope are the desires of the marketplace, not the other way around.
>> Office98 is more than good enough for almost all users, but it must be constantly upgraded...
That's you're opinion. Whether it is accurate or whether it has any bearing on the purchasing decisions of people is irrelevant. People have every right to buy what they want. If they want to buy a new product because they like the color of the box, then they will. Nothing wrong with that. Ut's their money.
>> Imagine if we let the market decide how to deliver electricity everytime a "new" concept comes up. We would constantly have to re-invent every appliance...
That almost certainly wouldn't happen because we all have so much invested in appliances that work with the "old" concept. If someone tried to sell something else, no one would buy it.
>> You seem to have a desire to let a few profit at the expense of the rest.
No, I don't, and I've not said or implied anything like that. I've only said that real standards -- what most people want and do most of the time -- are set by the people who buy the products that do those things, which is simply another way of talking about the market.
You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about a tiny clique of self-annointed experts deciding what everyone else should do and then focing us all to adhere to their wishes. Even if a body like the W3C is composed of angels making the very best technical decisions, why should I pay any attention to the W3C? If 98 percent of the world buys my product anyway, who cares what the W3C says?
>> There would be no profit for Sony if they made tv's that can't recieve the gov't mandated signal...
But,that's not what I said, is it? I said a new way to deliver sound and images, i.e., something that doesn't come within the FCC's purview.
I'm glad, too, that the FCC regulates frequency use. But, if no one wanted to buy the boxes that receive the signals broadcast on those frequencies, that standard would be moot. The standard exists and works only because the market supports it.
>>
Somehow I doubt that. Sounds more like a lot of misunderstanding of how people really work.
>> ...That's precisely why we shouldn't let the market determine the standards...
The market is precisely the only thing that can establish meaningful standards. Standards amount to what most people do most of the time. What good are products that adhere to "standards" if no one uses those products?
And, just who is this "we" that "should let the market" set standards? The market is everyone, so are you suggesting some government agency with the power to enforce standards against the people's will?
>> AM stereo is another example of this failure of the market...
Huh? AM radio is talk radio. That's where the money is. Who needs to listen to Rush in stereo? He's all mono, even in person.
>> It assures that the best standards are used, not necessarily the most profitable...
No. It would assure that the "best" standards are ignored if no one could make money following them.
>> If the W3C is supposed to set browser standards...
Who sez? The only people who said the W3C is supposed to set browser standards is the W3C.
>> The market should set the price, not the standard. We have real technicians available that should be setting the standard. Let's use them. The market is destroying the whole concept of standards... for profit.
Why shouldn't the market set standards? Why should we let "technicians" with little stake in the game and no interest in the behavior or interests of real people have dictatorial powers over anyone using a browser? If someone markets a browser that allows me to do something I want to do, why should I care if that browser make the standards technicians happy?
>> Sony can't change TV standards because the FCC...
If Sony dominated the TV market and found a new and more profitable way to deliver sound and images to people's homes and offices, it could bring that to market with no concern about the FCC. No FCC regulations would apply to Sony's new products.
It would take a very large "contribution" to change that.
You show that combination of naivete and inexperienced cynicism that so many people put on like a pair of jeans.