What if the law is bad? If a majority of the population believe this, but enough of that majority were convicted of it so as to prevent their voice from being heard at the polls, isn't that a bad thing?
If you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's unreasonable to expect that it will be treated so. Why should company A be allowed to obtain non-private information from company B, but not the government? You do have a choice: don't do business with companies that aggregate (non-private!) data about you. I realize that your life may be difficult by exercising that choice, but you do have that option.
You could change the problem somewhat, and start claiming that your shopping history is, legally, "private" information that everyone should, starting now, be obligated to protect, but then you have to deal with all of those gray areas I suggested in my earlier post. Until you make it impossible or illegal for someone to follow you around while you're in public and keep tabs on the things you buy, it doesn't seem very useful to tell businesses they can't collect precisely the same information.
The aggregation problem has a little more merit, but at its heart, it's just an extension of the collection problem and it doesn't seem useful to try to restrict aggregation when the aggregators could just become better collectors.
Yes, I might react differently with that knowledge. But am I any safer? Does my reaction make me safer? Does it have any positive effect at all? All that knowledge does is cause the other guy to feel isolated and second-class, which does nothing to help that person re-integrate into society.
I'm not sure where you got my assumption that you support vigilante justice. All I did was ask questions that suggest your support of notification laws imply that you are for emotionally-driven actions (laws) over rationally-driven ones. My point is that these measures have no rational basis because they do nothing to make people safer. I wouldn't even go so far as to say they make people feel safer, because they were comfortable living where they are before they knew where all of the (former and convicted) baddies live, right?
If you have statistics that show that people are safer or that felons commit less crimes if they have to notify their neighbors about their past, that would be a rational basis for notification laws, but then you'd also have to weigh that public benefit against the harm you cause the other guy.
Exactly! That guy that had sex with his wife 30 years ago when he was 18 and she was 17, is CERTAINLY planning on anally raping my child when we all come to the door to get some candy. They probably have some sort of contraption under the doormat that does it where I can't see! Sex offenders are crafty like that.
I want to know what my neighbor looks like naked, but that doesn't mean I have a right to. How does the public benefit from knowing this information? Are they any safer with that knowledge? Or is it just feeding our need to be angry at and punish someone that society has already punished? These provisions tend to be enacted due to emotional pressures, not rational ones, which is wrong.
If there exists a rational basis for notification, that notification should include all crimes that make sense (probably violent crimes as discussed). If the basis is entirely emotional, the provisions need to be eliminated completely.
The problem is that the laws aren't strict enough...
No matter how many people speak up and say that the punishment fits the crime (such as the jury that convicted these people in the first place), there will always be someone saying it doesn't go far enough. And who wants to go on record and side with the convicted sex offender? So punishments will get harsher and harsher, and there will still be people saying it's not enough.
Punishment is only part of the solution. Punishment feeds our hunger for retribution and revenge, but it's the least effective at actually solving the problem. Please don't forget about things like the scientific method, deterrence, rehabilitation and proactive assistance for potential criminals. Yes, some people will convict crimes after being released from the criminal justice system. Most will not. Is it really appropriate to punish those people just because they might commit another crime in the future? I've never been convicted of a crime, but 100% of those that are convicted of a crime had never been convicted prior to their first conviction, right? Why not suspect everyone of being a potential offender?
Every so often, someone does need to step up and say, please think of the sex offenders! What kind of a society are we giving our precious children? A suspicious, fascist, paranoid police state? Look at the big picture here.
No, "society" is reacting to the story of some girl that was abused by some guy that just got out of prison for doing the same thing before. It's not about punishing the guy (adding to his "debt"), it's about Protecting The Children from the evil repeat offenders.
You could argue that the effect is the same. The modified law represents the "new" debt to be paid to society by people convicted of these crimes. But that's not why the law was modified. Society didn't decide that the punishment should be harsher, they decided they wanted to track the evil child molesters that The System loosed upon society.
The Democrat/Republican debate is often brought up in this context because many (most?) convicted criminals are low-income, and this class tends to vote Democrat. It is frequently argued that the voting restrictions persist primarily because Republicans don't want to open up this new pool of mostly Democrat voters.
So it should be illegal for a business to disclose anything it learns about you to anyone else? What about your mere presence in the store? What about shielding your presence from other customers? How would you accomplish that? What if the store owner was a family member? Should it be illegal for them to tell another family member you were there? Should it be illegal for them to not invite you to their next party because of what they learned? What about selling something on Craigslist? Should it be illegal for you to talk about the guy that bought your old microwave?
Interactions with others will always be a gray area. Your total, free, ubiquitous privacy ideal is impractical. Market forces (where companies compete based on their willingness to accommodate your desire for privacy) seem like a good approach. There's no law that says you have to use these services, or that you can't work through an intermediary. Maybe some day we can do everything via a fully-anonymized Internet connection and you'll never have to see another person's face and you'll never have to worry about anything you do being tracked back to you. While that'd be great for "privacy", I'm not so sure I like that vision.
And unless they do lose such a court case then no code gets released.
If they lose, they are NOT automatically required to release their own source code. The GPL is not quite this viral. They still very much retain the rights over their own copyrighted works (their contributions to the GPLed code). Those contributions do not automatically go under the GPL unless they intentionally, explicitly release it under the GPL.
If they lose any hypothetical court case, they pay damages and stop distributing the infringing software. End of story. They, of course, have other options to avoid a lawsuit in the first place (replace the GPLed code with code they can commercially license, commercially license the GPLed code itself (from its original authors), or release their own code under the GPL). The court will not make them give up the rights to their own code.
There's a difference between wireless coverage being "naturally" spotty in a given location, or a failure on the wireless provider's side that temporarily prevents a call from going through, and someone deliberately disrupting communication, knowing that by doing so, they might be preventing an emergency call. A whopping difference! The former is no one's fault and expected, while the latter is intentional.
I likened it to someone hanging up on someone else's call because that's exactly what a jamming device would do! It's just a little more covert. Rather than reaching up and hitting the button to disconnect, it disrupts the signal so that the phone disconnects. The intent and effect are exactly the same, and would almost certainly be treated the same should it come up in a civil case.
Passive interference is something else entirely, but you still have someone intentionally disrupting communication when communication would have otherwise been possible. If that area had poor coverage to begin with, there wouldn't be much room to complain, but if someone can't get an emergency call out solely because of the interference, it would not surprise me in the least if a lawsuit resulted from that. I won't go so far as to say I believe they'd win, but the mere presence of lawsuits is enough of a headache that people would probably want to be wary of doing something like this.
I understand that it would be a perfectly acceptable thing to do with a passive cage.
I wouldn't put any money on that either. Keep in mind we're talking about two different things. The first is the deliberate act of preventing communication that could result in harm if no one can summon emergency services as a result. The second is the FCC's regulation prohibiting active interference to a radio signal. Both, independently, could land you in hot water (a civil suit for the former, and fines for the latter). Just because you choose a passive approach to blocking radio signals as opposed to actively jamming it doesn't change the outcome, and it's the outcome that matters. If you choose, unilaterally, to block someone else's ability to summon emergency services, it seems a little ridiculous to me to say that you shouldn't be held responsible for the harm that results. It's no different than walking up to someone trying to call 911 and hanging up their phone every time they try to make the call.
You might put me on the fence by putting up signage all over your movie theater saying, "Cell phone signals may be blocked inside the theater. In case of emergency, use the provided emergency phones or exit the theater before attempting your call." That way people know in advance that they won't be able to make calls. But you're still making the decision to delay emergency services, so I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get sued anyway, even if you're likely to win. And even so, the use of signs just covers "institutional" blocking of cell signals, not situations where some random Joe has a cell phone jammer in his pocket and uses it surreptitiously.
if the person is so stupid as to rely on a cell phone as their one and only solution, that's their own stupid fault.
It's not an issue of how reasonable it was to rely on it. If someone tried to make an emergency call, and the only thing preventing that call from succeeding was your willful (illegal) interference, you are liable for the harm that results. That might not be a big deal if the call is only delayed a few seconds as they make their way outside, but what about on a train? Your decision to jam cell phones around you could delay an emergency response by several minutes. Why do you think you shouldn't be held accountable for that?
Buying a car is a purchase of a tangible item. Buying a game like this is the purchase of a license. You can import both items into whatever country you want, but you don't fundamentally change the item itself when you import it. Your car doesn't magically get a bigger engine. The license doesn't magically change its terms to allow the game to be played outside of the region it was intended for.
if valve wished to restrict access to the thai/russian version, they should not have allowed activation in the first place.
I agree, but this is completely irrelevant to the parent poster's point. It's still a Thai-only license key, so why expect it to keep working? It's like moving into a new apartment and signing up for basic cable, seeing that you have HBO for a few days, and then bitching when they turn it off. WTF?
in essence, your argument boils down to - it's ok to outsource labor, and for retailers to make a profit by importing cheap products. it is not ok for consumers to do the same.
It's impossible for consumers to do the same. If consumers could do the same, then the $50 copies would never get sold. If they decided not to region-lock the game, or were barred from doing so, their choices would be limited to those presented by the parent poster: either sell it for $50 everywhere, which means nobody in poorer markets would buy it, or sell it for $15 everywhere, which means a few more people in your rich market would buy it, plus some people in your poorer markets. If you'd make more money selling it at $50 than you would selling it at $15 (likely in this situation), it would be stupid to sell it at $15, wouldn't it? Freedom of choice indeed!
But not letting people play the game that they paid for is completely asinine,
They're perfectly able to play the game they paid for. They just have to be in Thailand to do it. Like it says on the box.
This is a different product than what was sold to people in the US. Valve decided to separate the markets because the supply-and-demand model works differently there than it does here, partly because of higher rates of piracy. They made a business decision to sell essentially two variants of the same game. People walking into the store buying these things, or buying from reputable online vendors, would have understood the difference and purchased the proper variant, or, if they were in Thailand at the time and knew they would be playing it back in the US, they would have decided not to purchase and wait until they got home.
Valve didn't do anything evil here, unless you consider locking licenses to specific geographies evil (a separate discussion). They're certainly not responsible for "screwing" these "paying customers" out of their money. The Thai businesses that sold them these license keys did that. Don't punish Valve for something a retailer did.
And this is one of the reasons we have government: to force the things that the free market will never do on its own. There are very clear benefits to the general public by forcing broadcasters to stop using bandwidth-hungry analog signals and start using bandwidth-efficient digital ones. The fact that you choose to get your local network broadcasts through a cable company instead of over the airwaves, and your cable experience is poor, is largely irrelevant. The issue here is with broadcast signals, not cable. While there may be side-effects of this switch to digital that affect cable companies and the analog content they may carry, these problems (and their solutions) are largely independent of whether broadcast itself is analog or digital.
Exactly. How can they not without being accused of selective enforcement? They need to go after Amazon and every other bookstore that sells it, and get a list of their customers and go after every one. Shouldn't be too difficult in today's legal climate.
At that point everyone should see the absurdity of all of this.
This is at most an inconvenience for those people who choose to make revenue this way, not theft or an immoral activity.
I won't go so far as to say it's theft or immoral, but I wouldn't say that it's a mere inconvenience either. Most of the interesting content on the Internet is provided by sites that (a) do not sell anything; (b) do not have a big corporate/government/university sponsor funding them; and (c) don't have enough of a draw to attract enough subscriptions or donations. They exist solely because the advertising model allows them to exist. Make it more expensive for them to continue running by consuming more of their content without allowing them to make as much money from advertising, and many of these sites will start to disappear.
Is this simply "their problem" because they couldn't find a better business model? Not all web sites are or want to be businesses. I'd argue that the loss of much of the Internet's content would be a loss for us all. Your average blog owner might have no problem ponying up some cash each month to keep his site running, but what happens when that blog gets popular?
Somehow, people still found a way to afford to publish their sites. In the unlikely case that all advertisements on the web were to suddenly stop paying off, the web would still exist.
The lens on your wayback machine needs cleaning, I think. Before advertising, the web sites that existed fell into these categories:
corporate, government and university sites, funded to host whatever content they deem appropriate
subscription or donation-supported sites, where the viewers paid actual money for the site's content
hobbyist sites, where only the passion of the owner and his willingness to spend some of his discretionary income kept the site alive
Those hobbyist sites that attracted too much attention would usually go offline, because the person supporting it couldn't afford to anymore. Most of your big/interesting projects were hosted on university networks, where bandwidth was effectively free to students and faculty.
Do you think Slashdot of today would exist in a world without advertising revenue? What about Google?
So yeah, the web would continue to exist, but I'd wager that most of the sites on it would disappear. On the bright side, though, most of your typosquatting and search spam would disappear too.
On-demand services would still require unicast streaming.
And I agree that some sort of distributed multicast approach is most logical for an IPTV service, but at some point you're going to have to negotiate with the ISP/telco for that last mile of connectivity, unless you want to run your own data connections to your customers' homes. The ISP isn't going to hook you (the content provider) up with your own network path to their customers unless you pay for it. And since that last network hop is likely to be congested regularly, you'd still need to negotiate for QoS (prioritization) of your packets going over that last hop. In other words, you still need to do things that net neutrality advocates oppose.
AT&T can provide IPTV, VoIP and data over the same broadband connection because they control the entire network and can make these prioritization calls. The trick is allowing a 3rd party to do all of that as well, and you simply can't do that without incurring lots of additional costs, and someone's going to have to pay for that, assuming it's legal to do it.
I agree that lots of hardware out there is QoS-capable. When I was talking about the need for new routers and the like I was talking about the infrastructure needed to support an independent trusted network path. The backbone providers would never honor untrusted QoS flags because they're untrusted. If you could make everyone on the Internet agree to filter based on reverse path verification, you'd go a long way toward solving the IP spoofing problem, but (a) this isn't going to happen; and (b) it doesn't prevent a malicious/misconfigured network with legitimate IP addresses from spewing forth QoS-flagged packets inappropriately.
Applying QoS flags to packets only after they arrive at the ISP's network helps, but since your packets are still traveling over the public Internet without QoS, you (the content provider) have no time/bandwidth guarantees and no way to ensure service levels to your customers. This seems to work OK today with providers like Vonage and YouTube, but is it going to be enough for long-term sustained HDTV IPTV streams? My most optimistic response is just a maybe.
Either way, you'd require content providers to pay the ISP money for packet prioritization. This is (as far as I understand it) exactly what net neutrality advocates oppose. Though without a separate network to maintain the costs would presumably be relatively one-time. This may be more palatable to some but I suspect not most.
The carriers would presumably like to make this a recurring charge, and not a one-time fee that in my opinion it should be.
You're making the assumption that all of this QoS stuff can be done on existing networks. The problem is that HBO probably isn't directly connected to AT&T today (for example). You can't do QoS over the public Internet. You need a trusted network path*. This means new infrastructure: new data connections, new routers, etc. These things have ongoing maintenance costs.
* - Even if the transit routers preserved the QoS flags on their way to your network, (1) you'd still have degraded service if any backbone link became congested, since the backbone routers wouldn't honor those QoS flags; and (2) DoS attacks against your IPTV service would be feasible, since you could just spoof the IP address of HBO, set some QoS flags, and laugh as ISP routers honored those flags.
So what am I paying for if they are willing to stand up and say "not only are we not giving you what you paid for, but we freely admit that we are doing so deliberately and have no intention of ever giving it to you"?
I don't understand this. If you have a 10Mbit DSL connection, and you start up a BitTorrent that starts using 9990kbits/sec, do you think it's fair to get upset with your ISP because the remaining 10kbits/sec is less than 10Mbit?
You don't have an infinite amount of bandwidth on your broadband connection. Prioritization of data is about deciding how to make the most use of that bandwidth. It's about you being able to start up a 2Mbit IPTV stream, and guaranteeing that your BitTorrent will be throttled down to 8Mbit/sec so as to guarantee that your TV programming won't cut out. Prioritization is about congestion control, not restricting bandwidth when there's no need to.
I do agree that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily throttle traffic they don't like just because the content provider hasn't paid them off. And if we feel we need laws to prevent that, then by all means make them. But I don't think anyone's actually thinking of doing that. Just make sure your bans don't outlaw QoS entirely, because it's needed if you want services like 3rd-party IPTV.
The only way that can work is if at least some content is intentionally delivered SLOWER than the user's paid-for bandwidth.
I don't think this is accurate. Prioritization only kicks in when there's a need to prioritize. The HOV lane on some freeways is an example of prioritization. If you carpool, you get access to an additional lane on the highway. But if the highway isn't fully utilized, that additional lane ("prioritization") doesn't get you there any faster than anyone else.
When congestion occurs, however, such as when you fire up BitTorrent or start an HTTP download of a large file, routers have to decide how to cram all of that data down a network connection that can't handle it. They do this usually by queuing or dropping packets, and do not differentiate between the different types of packets. Everything is degraded equally. You perceive this as a slower download speed than your neighbor that might have a faster connection. But most importantly, all of your downloads get slower equally. No service is untouched by this congestion.
If you had the option of subscribing to an IPTV service (competing with traditional cable television) over your broadband connection, don't you think you might want your ISP to prioritize those IPTV packets ahead of others? The alternative is to have your IPTV stream cut out every time you start downloading a file, because the file transfer is competing for some of the same bandwidth as your IPTV stream, and once your IPTV stream drops below the minimum bandwidth needed to carry that stream in real-time, you lose it.
There's more to prioritization than simply "punishing" content providers that don't pay you more money. I wholeheartedly embrace the idea of preventing ISPs from charging more for traffic they just don't like, but the idea of prioritizing one set of packets over another isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you remember that this only matters when a link is congested. You'll never see "lower priority" traffic be slow unless your connection is already congested. Does it really surprise you when web sites seem to come up slowly when you have a big BitTorrent transfer in progress?
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What if the law is bad? If a majority of the population believe this, but enough of that majority were convicted of it so as to prevent their voice from being heard at the polls, isn't that a bad thing?
If you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's unreasonable to expect that it will be treated so. Why should company A be allowed to obtain non-private information from company B, but not the government? You do have a choice: don't do business with companies that aggregate (non-private!) data about you. I realize that your life may be difficult by exercising that choice, but you do have that option.
You could change the problem somewhat, and start claiming that your shopping history is, legally, "private" information that everyone should, starting now, be obligated to protect, but then you have to deal with all of those gray areas I suggested in my earlier post. Until you make it impossible or illegal for someone to follow you around while you're in public and keep tabs on the things you buy, it doesn't seem very useful to tell businesses they can't collect precisely the same information.
The aggregation problem has a little more merit, but at its heart, it's just an extension of the collection problem and it doesn't seem useful to try to restrict aggregation when the aggregators could just become better collectors.
Yes, I might react differently with that knowledge. But am I any safer? Does my reaction make me safer? Does it have any positive effect at all? All that knowledge does is cause the other guy to feel isolated and second-class, which does nothing to help that person re-integrate into society.
I'm not sure where you got my assumption that you support vigilante justice. All I did was ask questions that suggest your support of notification laws imply that you are for emotionally-driven actions (laws) over rationally-driven ones. My point is that these measures have no rational basis because they do nothing to make people safer. I wouldn't even go so far as to say they make people feel safer, because they were comfortable living where they are before they knew where all of the (former and convicted) baddies live, right?
If you have statistics that show that people are safer or that felons commit less crimes if they have to notify their neighbors about their past, that would be a rational basis for notification laws, but then you'd also have to weigh that public benefit against the harm you cause the other guy.
Exactly! That guy that had sex with his wife 30 years ago when he was 18 and she was 17, is CERTAINLY planning on anally raping my child when we all come to the door to get some candy. They probably have some sort of contraption under the doormat that does it where I can't see! Sex offenders are crafty like that.
I want to know what my neighbor looks like naked, but that doesn't mean I have a right to. How does the public benefit from knowing this information? Are they any safer with that knowledge? Or is it just feeding our need to be angry at and punish someone that society has already punished? These provisions tend to be enacted due to emotional pressures, not rational ones, which is wrong.
If there exists a rational basis for notification, that notification should include all crimes that make sense (probably violent crimes as discussed). If the basis is entirely emotional, the provisions need to be eliminated completely.
No matter how many people speak up and say that the punishment fits the crime (such as the jury that convicted these people in the first place), there will always be someone saying it doesn't go far enough. And who wants to go on record and side with the convicted sex offender? So punishments will get harsher and harsher, and there will still be people saying it's not enough.
Punishment is only part of the solution. Punishment feeds our hunger for retribution and revenge, but it's the least effective at actually solving the problem. Please don't forget about things like the scientific method, deterrence, rehabilitation and proactive assistance for potential criminals. Yes, some people will convict crimes after being released from the criminal justice system. Most will not. Is it really appropriate to punish those people just because they might commit another crime in the future? I've never been convicted of a crime, but 100% of those that are convicted of a crime had never been convicted prior to their first conviction, right? Why not suspect everyone of being a potential offender?
Every so often, someone does need to step up and say, please think of the sex offenders! What kind of a society are we giving our precious children? A suspicious, fascist, paranoid police state? Look at the big picture here.
No, "society" is reacting to the story of some girl that was abused by some guy that just got out of prison for doing the same thing before. It's not about punishing the guy (adding to his "debt"), it's about Protecting The Children from the evil repeat offenders.
You could argue that the effect is the same. The modified law represents the "new" debt to be paid to society by people convicted of these crimes. But that's not why the law was modified. Society didn't decide that the punishment should be harsher, they decided they wanted to track the evil child molesters that The System loosed upon society.
The Democrat/Republican debate is often brought up in this context because many (most?) convicted criminals are low-income, and this class tends to vote Democrat. It is frequently argued that the voting restrictions persist primarily because Republicans don't want to open up this new pool of mostly Democrat voters.
So it should be illegal for a business to disclose anything it learns about you to anyone else? What about your mere presence in the store? What about shielding your presence from other customers? How would you accomplish that? What if the store owner was a family member? Should it be illegal for them to tell another family member you were there? Should it be illegal for them to not invite you to their next party because of what they learned? What about selling something on Craigslist? Should it be illegal for you to talk about the guy that bought your old microwave?
Interactions with others will always be a gray area. Your total, free, ubiquitous privacy ideal is impractical. Market forces (where companies compete based on their willingness to accommodate your desire for privacy) seem like a good approach. There's no law that says you have to use these services, or that you can't work through an intermediary. Maybe some day we can do everything via a fully-anonymized Internet connection and you'll never have to see another person's face and you'll never have to worry about anything you do being tracked back to you. While that'd be great for "privacy", I'm not so sure I like that vision.
If they lose, they are NOT automatically required to release their own source code. The GPL is not quite this viral. They still very much retain the rights over their own copyrighted works (their contributions to the GPLed code). Those contributions do not automatically go under the GPL unless they intentionally, explicitly release it under the GPL.
If they lose any hypothetical court case, they pay damages and stop distributing the infringing software. End of story. They, of course, have other options to avoid a lawsuit in the first place (replace the GPLed code with code they can commercially license, commercially license the GPLed code itself (from its original authors), or release their own code under the GPL). The court will not make them give up the rights to their own code.
You're still hung up on expectation.
There's a difference between wireless coverage being "naturally" spotty in a given location, or a failure on the wireless provider's side that temporarily prevents a call from going through, and someone deliberately disrupting communication, knowing that by doing so, they might be preventing an emergency call. A whopping difference! The former is no one's fault and expected, while the latter is intentional.
I likened it to someone hanging up on someone else's call because that's exactly what a jamming device would do! It's just a little more covert. Rather than reaching up and hitting the button to disconnect, it disrupts the signal so that the phone disconnects. The intent and effect are exactly the same, and would almost certainly be treated the same should it come up in a civil case.
Passive interference is something else entirely, but you still have someone intentionally disrupting communication when communication would have otherwise been possible. If that area had poor coverage to begin with, there wouldn't be much room to complain, but if someone can't get an emergency call out solely because of the interference, it would not surprise me in the least if a lawsuit resulted from that. I won't go so far as to say I believe they'd win, but the mere presence of lawsuits is enough of a headache that people would probably want to be wary of doing something like this.
I wouldn't put any money on that either. Keep in mind we're talking about two different things. The first is the deliberate act of preventing communication that could result in harm if no one can summon emergency services as a result. The second is the FCC's regulation prohibiting active interference to a radio signal. Both, independently, could land you in hot water (a civil suit for the former, and fines for the latter). Just because you choose a passive approach to blocking radio signals as opposed to actively jamming it doesn't change the outcome, and it's the outcome that matters. If you choose, unilaterally, to block someone else's ability to summon emergency services, it seems a little ridiculous to me to say that you shouldn't be held responsible for the harm that results. It's no different than walking up to someone trying to call 911 and hanging up their phone every time they try to make the call.
You might put me on the fence by putting up signage all over your movie theater saying, "Cell phone signals may be blocked inside the theater. In case of emergency, use the provided emergency phones or exit the theater before attempting your call." That way people know in advance that they won't be able to make calls. But you're still making the decision to delay emergency services, so I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get sued anyway, even if you're likely to win. And even so, the use of signs just covers "institutional" blocking of cell signals, not situations where some random Joe has a cell phone jammer in his pocket and uses it surreptitiously.
It's not an issue of how reasonable it was to rely on it. If someone tried to make an emergency call, and the only thing preventing that call from succeeding was your willful (illegal) interference, you are liable for the harm that results. That might not be a big deal if the call is only delayed a few seconds as they make their way outside, but what about on a train? Your decision to jam cell phones around you could delay an emergency response by several minutes. Why do you think you shouldn't be held accountable for that?
Buying a car is a purchase of a tangible item. Buying a game like this is the purchase of a license. You can import both items into whatever country you want, but you don't fundamentally change the item itself when you import it. Your car doesn't magically get a bigger engine. The license doesn't magically change its terms to allow the game to be played outside of the region it was intended for.
I agree, but this is completely irrelevant to the parent poster's point. It's still a Thai-only license key, so why expect it to keep working? It's like moving into a new apartment and signing up for basic cable, seeing that you have HBO for a few days, and then bitching when they turn it off. WTF?
It's impossible for consumers to do the same. If consumers could do the same, then the $50 copies would never get sold. If they decided not to region-lock the game, or were barred from doing so, their choices would be limited to those presented by the parent poster: either sell it for $50 everywhere, which means nobody in poorer markets would buy it, or sell it for $15 everywhere, which means a few more people in your rich market would buy it, plus some people in your poorer markets. If you'd make more money selling it at $50 than you would selling it at $15 (likely in this situation), it would be stupid to sell it at $15, wouldn't it? Freedom of choice indeed!
They're perfectly able to play the game they paid for. They just have to be in Thailand to do it. Like it says on the box.
This is a different product than what was sold to people in the US. Valve decided to separate the markets because the supply-and-demand model works differently there than it does here, partly because of higher rates of piracy. They made a business decision to sell essentially two variants of the same game. People walking into the store buying these things, or buying from reputable online vendors, would have understood the difference and purchased the proper variant, or, if they were in Thailand at the time and knew they would be playing it back in the US, they would have decided not to purchase and wait until they got home.
Valve didn't do anything evil here, unless you consider locking licenses to specific geographies evil (a separate discussion). They're certainly not responsible for "screwing" these "paying customers" out of their money. The Thai businesses that sold them these license keys did that. Don't punish Valve for something a retailer did.
And this is one of the reasons we have government: to force the things that the free market will never do on its own. There are very clear benefits to the general public by forcing broadcasters to stop using bandwidth-hungry analog signals and start using bandwidth-efficient digital ones. The fact that you choose to get your local network broadcasts through a cable company instead of over the airwaves, and your cable experience is poor, is largely irrelevant. The issue here is with broadcast signals, not cable. While there may be side-effects of this switch to digital that affect cable companies and the analog content they may carry, these problems (and their solutions) are largely independent of whether broadcast itself is analog or digital.
Exactly. How can they not without being accused of selective enforcement? They need to go after Amazon and every other bookstore that sells it, and get a list of their customers and go after every one. Shouldn't be too difficult in today's legal climate.
At that point everyone should see the absurdity of all of this.
I won't go so far as to say it's theft or immoral, but I wouldn't say that it's a mere inconvenience either. Most of the interesting content on the Internet is provided by sites that (a) do not sell anything; (b) do not have a big corporate/government/university sponsor funding them; and (c) don't have enough of a draw to attract enough subscriptions or donations. They exist solely because the advertising model allows them to exist. Make it more expensive for them to continue running by consuming more of their content without allowing them to make as much money from advertising, and many of these sites will start to disappear.
Is this simply "their problem" because they couldn't find a better business model? Not all web sites are or want to be businesses. I'd argue that the loss of much of the Internet's content would be a loss for us all. Your average blog owner might have no problem ponying up some cash each month to keep his site running, but what happens when that blog gets popular?
The lens on your wayback machine needs cleaning, I think. Before advertising, the web sites that existed fell into these categories:
Those hobbyist sites that attracted too much attention would usually go offline, because the person supporting it couldn't afford to anymore. Most of your big/interesting projects were hosted on university networks, where bandwidth was effectively free to students and faculty.
Do you think Slashdot of today would exist in a world without advertising revenue? What about Google?
So yeah, the web would continue to exist, but I'd wager that most of the sites on it would disappear. On the bright side, though, most of your typosquatting and search spam would disappear too.
On-demand services would still require unicast streaming.
And I agree that some sort of distributed multicast approach is most logical for an IPTV service, but at some point you're going to have to negotiate with the ISP/telco for that last mile of connectivity, unless you want to run your own data connections to your customers' homes. The ISP isn't going to hook you (the content provider) up with your own network path to their customers unless you pay for it. And since that last network hop is likely to be congested regularly, you'd still need to negotiate for QoS (prioritization) of your packets going over that last hop. In other words, you still need to do things that net neutrality advocates oppose.
AT&T can provide IPTV, VoIP and data over the same broadband connection because they control the entire network and can make these prioritization calls. The trick is allowing a 3rd party to do all of that as well, and you simply can't do that without incurring lots of additional costs, and someone's going to have to pay for that, assuming it's legal to do it.
I agree that lots of hardware out there is QoS-capable. When I was talking about the need for new routers and the like I was talking about the infrastructure needed to support an independent trusted network path. The backbone providers would never honor untrusted QoS flags because they're untrusted. If you could make everyone on the Internet agree to filter based on reverse path verification, you'd go a long way toward solving the IP spoofing problem, but (a) this isn't going to happen; and (b) it doesn't prevent a malicious/misconfigured network with legitimate IP addresses from spewing forth QoS-flagged packets inappropriately.
Applying QoS flags to packets only after they arrive at the ISP's network helps, but since your packets are still traveling over the public Internet without QoS, you (the content provider) have no time/bandwidth guarantees and no way to ensure service levels to your customers. This seems to work OK today with providers like Vonage and YouTube, but is it going to be enough for long-term sustained HDTV IPTV streams? My most optimistic response is just a maybe.
Either way, you'd require content providers to pay the ISP money for packet prioritization. This is (as far as I understand it) exactly what net neutrality advocates oppose. Though without a separate network to maintain the costs would presumably be relatively one-time. This may be more palatable to some but I suspect not most.
You're making the assumption that all of this QoS stuff can be done on existing networks. The problem is that HBO probably isn't directly connected to AT&T today (for example). You can't do QoS over the public Internet. You need a trusted network path*. This means new infrastructure: new data connections, new routers, etc. These things have ongoing maintenance costs.
* - Even if the transit routers preserved the QoS flags on their way to your network, (1) you'd still have degraded service if any backbone link became congested, since the backbone routers wouldn't honor those QoS flags; and (2) DoS attacks against your IPTV service would be feasible, since you could just spoof the IP address of HBO, set some QoS flags, and laugh as ISP routers honored those flags.
I don't understand this. If you have a 10Mbit DSL connection, and you start up a BitTorrent that starts using 9990kbits/sec, do you think it's fair to get upset with your ISP because the remaining 10kbits/sec is less than 10Mbit?
You don't have an infinite amount of bandwidth on your broadband connection. Prioritization of data is about deciding how to make the most use of that bandwidth. It's about you being able to start up a 2Mbit IPTV stream, and guaranteeing that your BitTorrent will be throttled down to 8Mbit/sec so as to guarantee that your TV programming won't cut out. Prioritization is about congestion control, not restricting bandwidth when there's no need to.
I do agree that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily throttle traffic they don't like just because the content provider hasn't paid them off. And if we feel we need laws to prevent that, then by all means make them. But I don't think anyone's actually thinking of doing that. Just make sure your bans don't outlaw QoS entirely, because it's needed if you want services like 3rd-party IPTV.
I don't think this is accurate. Prioritization only kicks in when there's a need to prioritize. The HOV lane on some freeways is an example of prioritization. If you carpool, you get access to an additional lane on the highway. But if the highway isn't fully utilized, that additional lane ("prioritization") doesn't get you there any faster than anyone else.
When congestion occurs, however, such as when you fire up BitTorrent or start an HTTP download of a large file, routers have to decide how to cram all of that data down a network connection that can't handle it. They do this usually by queuing or dropping packets, and do not differentiate between the different types of packets. Everything is degraded equally. You perceive this as a slower download speed than your neighbor that might have a faster connection. But most importantly, all of your downloads get slower equally. No service is untouched by this congestion.
If you had the option of subscribing to an IPTV service (competing with traditional cable television) over your broadband connection, don't you think you might want your ISP to prioritize those IPTV packets ahead of others? The alternative is to have your IPTV stream cut out every time you start downloading a file, because the file transfer is competing for some of the same bandwidth as your IPTV stream, and once your IPTV stream drops below the minimum bandwidth needed to carry that stream in real-time, you lose it.
There's more to prioritization than simply "punishing" content providers that don't pay you more money. I wholeheartedly embrace the idea of preventing ISPs from charging more for traffic they just don't like, but the idea of prioritizing one set of packets over another isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you remember that this only matters when a link is congested. You'll never see "lower priority" traffic be slow unless your connection is already congested. Does it really surprise you when web sites seem to come up slowly when you have a big BitTorrent transfer in progress?