The difference that people have such an outcry against isn't even between video games and other media for their violence...it's the new kind of immersion we see.
First person shooters were a whole new world, for most everyone. Slightly third person shooters have a very similiar feel of putting you in someone's shoes. And what happens in those games? You kill people.
Lots of people.
Soldier of Fortune didn't just tally up your score for blowing the limbs off countless dirty foreigners, You got extra counts of how many headshots, groin shots, and throat shots you got, because the ones where they gurgle to death are that much cooler.
Video games are free speech, and adults should be able to play them, but you can't say that's not a new realm of violence.
Both Gore and Bush have demonstrated net-idiocy. The net is nothing more than the worlds biggest library, and like any library, you make sure that your 5 year old doesnt go in unattended. Thats not for politicians to discuss, and I dont care, since they can't properly regulate it, especially as corporations cross national borders, and you cant even stop 'dangerous information' at the water's edge properly.
But Katz also screams about this...
Gore has repeatedly attacked TV, movies and the Net for the "cultural pollution" it's bringing to children's lives. And even before last night, Bush was demanding a wholesome "family hour" on TV every night.
I'm not sure this is even a bad idea. In fact, this is just the kind of anti-corporate legislation I want. Bush is saying that these companies have become part of the popular culture, that their service has become so entwined and vital to the American mind that they cannot allow profits alone to be the motive for what goes on TV. Because it really is a problem finding just happy TV for kids sometimes. Between The Learning Channel's 12 different "Life in the ER" series--entertainment built on the suffering of others, the History Channel's "Guts and Glory Sunday" nights, with nothing but shockumentaries on how glorious it was for people to die in horrible ways in war, and The Discovery Channels various shows based on re-enactments of murder and rape (The FBI files, the new detectives, whatever), I have found that the happiest channel on TV right now is the damn Food Network. These are channels that 5 years ago actually had decent programming. I don't even know whats on the networks in prime time, I've not switched to them in years, they degraded into sly penis-size jokes long ago.
What I'm getting at is that maybe Bush realizes that as these companies grow to become integral parts of America, they have to have other motivations for their services than profit. Or maybe hes pandering to the more right-wing voters, and its a decent outcome.
This is the reason telephone companies are regulated--"Well, if you dont like it, then you just wont have a phone" isnt a valid argument from a company. Phones are too important. A lot more companies need to fall in this category.
The fact is that if you've had a DNA test and there's no problem then you will be getting an advantage - companies will be more likely to insure you at a much cheaper rate. And seeing as anything that brings down those premiums is good, I don't really see how this can be construed as a negative move on behalf of the UK government.
When the first designer babies come along in 25 years, see how much you appreciate being told your children will cost twice as much to insure as happily-tested, genetic-condition free whippersnappers. Do you risk getting your children tested? What if it turns out they are 'at risk?' You, and your kids, for that matter, are pretty screwed now, aren't you, since we have already seen in the last year alone what a great job of keeping information and medical records private big companies do--especially those that thrive on information, i.e. insurance companies.
Sure, this step is no big deal, since about.0001% of the population has this particular condition, nasty as it is, so you are better off getting tested, and saving a few bucks a month. But wait--in 5 years, the test for prostate cancer becomes 'technically reliable', and your genetic test is still on file somewhere. Lets just double check that real quick, shall we? Ooops, you just got denied coverage.
Dont think that when tests for the big killers, cancers and heart disease and the like, are 'technically reliable', that you will have the option of opting out of the testing. That quick blood test at the doctor's checkup when you get your coverage will be testing for a whole lot more than it does today.
And seeing as anything that brings down those premiums is good,
You could do a lot of things to bring down premium costs that are most assuredly not good.
Napster is causing a vast nmber of consumers to believe that free music on the Internet is an entitlement. Napster encourages literaly millions of Napster users, who never would consider taking a CD from a record store without paying, to commit infringement by downloading music from the computer hard drives of strangers without paying. Thus, as one Napster user posted on the Napster website: "We all know it's illegal. We just dont think it's wrong." This view subverts the very purpose of copyright law, to the long term detriment of the public.
Thats right everyone. "They are changing some peoples opinions" is now a valid legal argument. I can see similiar attempts in the 1770's..."The works of Thomas Paine cause vast numbers of people to believe they should have elected representation. This subverts the very purpose of King George's majesty, to the long-term detriment of the public."
Fucking duh, RIAA. Ever consider that changing views is legal?
Its declared goals also included the following: "Seize control of digital distribution....Napster brings about death of the CD... Record stores (Tower Records) obsoleted."
I suppose its also a valid legal argument that "We have been making money like this for a long time, and its now our right to do so." Read the first excerpt again: Napster is causing a vast number of consumers to believe that free music on the Internet is an entitlement. But the RIAA's entitlement is ok.
This is the same deal as Galoob's situation with Nintendo back in 92 or so. Galoob made the game genie, which simply changed the values of memory addresses by putting itself between the cart and the system, for a variety of effects.
Nintendo sued Galoob, claiming galoob had no right to release something that Nintendo didnt say they could, and lost. It falls smack-dab under reverse engineering provisions. The case is actually cited by Napster in its recent appeal for the stay of the shutdown injunction, and is also being cited in MPAA vs whoever and RIAA vs whoever cases, I believe.
Look folks, deep down inside, we ALL know what Napster is for. Lots of people will say "Well, why not shut down IRC. It also facilitates the transfer of illegal material." Um, was IRC *designed* to do this? Are the creators of IRC *profiting* from that? Guess what, folks....Napster is both
No, not quite. Napster is profiting, technically, from the service of finding other users with music to share. Would ICQ be liable if I random chatted someone with 'I love The backstreet boys!' in their info, and we traded mp3's? Of course not. Napster is just more specialized at this. Users pay for bandwith, the hard drive space.
Was IRC designed to transfer illegal material? It was designed to transfer files. Napster was too, it just so happens that a much, much larger percentage of files of the type.mp3 are not legal to transfer (I think. If I ICQ a copy of a song to someone over ICQ, does it fall under fair use? What if I copy a cd song to a tape and give it to them? IANAL). Now, this is a tricky situation, because Napster does what it does exceedingly well, and with a high level of ease of use. The question comes down to, can we declare software or a service illegal because people dont use it legally most of the time? Some of the time? Who decides how much of the time a service has to be used legally to decide if its illegal? We all know that almost everything can be used illegaly (getaway cars in bank robberies, ban cars with high horsepower), but where is the line?
Is there a line defining what ratio of legal/illegal use makes a service illegal?
Did Napster cross it?
Where is it?
Who put it there, and why there?
Who said they could?
This case has the potential to reverse whatever the case was that declared VCR's legal, because it can re-define how often something has to be used legally and illegaly and stay legal. That is a frightening thought.
If the RIAA wins this case, we have to start asking some new questions. Can we ban FTP? IRC? What about #crackz on an IRC server?
Opinions are always going to differ. I personally believe that you have to take the bad with the good, and that in this case, Napster should be allowed to operate. That you cannot eliminate crime without elminating freedom. Others would say that such a small percentage of Napster's files being transfered is not worth the massive, massive numbers of illegaly traded ones to go free and unpunished. Somewhere between those two viewpoints, theres a not-so-happy, always war-torn and shifting, legally battled moral ground. Who decides where, in that middle ground, the law stands?
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time. Ayup. We'll go back to 40 million different channels of distribution. IRC; unreliable, spammy, cable-modem crushing gnutella; local bbs's, baby, because you know how cool zmodem and procomm are. Face it, pal, Napster had *75 million* users. Do you think they got them because those users all COULD learn how to use mirc, dcc, and read how to download a file through the massive spam from #mp3cafe? Or do you think its because its mp3's for dummies? Last weekend I helped my friend's brother download some music with Napster. He could hardly figure IT out--he wasnt going to get the songs that stopped at "Getting info...", because hey, they were getting the info for 2 hours. Is this person going to learn how to use irc? Have these kinds of people ever heard of gnutella? Do you think the vast majority of those 75 million users, all just too pissed off at those evil RIAA bastards (the geeks all say so), all sit down, spend 30 hours learning how to efficiently find mp3's on the other alternatives? Or are they going to say "15 bucks for a CD is worth less to me than the time I will spend learning how to do this mp3 bullshit." Face it man, breaking up Napster doesnt let online music hit the masses, it just sends it back to the internet-educated elite, the few who can take the time to scour 45 ftp servers with too many users logged on, to sit on IRC and wait for queue slot #423,232,887,133 to come up for the latest from N'Sync. Know what? Most people just dont care enough. Why do you want this "river" (What's up with that analogy, anyway? INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE LIKE WATER!) to be split into 40 streams anyway? A centralized server was A GOOD THING. A simple, easy to use, interface, with everyone's mp3's in one, single pool. A single point of failure, because you know the mission-critical mp3 downloads will be really screwed then. I dont want to go boating down 40 streams before I find the species of trout I want to fish for, I want to get on the big river and fish for it. Paddle back up your mp3 river into reality.
200 years ago, You woke up and worked until you slept. You might have a hearty dinner of bread and salt at night. Then youd wake up and do it again, and repeat this until you died. After a while, we started owning the land we worked, but things really werent the same.
Now, we kind of have a mix. We dont own the 'land we work', but we have more time to live than any generation previous, period, ever. You work your 8 hours a day, your debt to civilization, and then you do whatever you want in the rest of your time. Do you own anything but debt? Do you have anything to pass to your children? No, but anything you have will be obselete by the time they care anyway. It's an interesting quandry.
We enjoy a rather unprecedented amount of freedom, even from 50 years ago--remember October Sky as an example: a lot of people were literaly born into their job, and this is just not nearly as true today. The price (cause?) of this freedom is a lack of ownership. No matter what people say, we really can do a lot more today than we ever could before.
Now, this system is not for everyone. It has certainly redefined 'self-supporting'. I just recently moved out of my mothers house at 20, I work for money well above the average for my age and rent a cheesy apartment for 350 a month (real estates cheap here). Today, thats self supporting...50 years ago, since I don't truely own anything, I probably woulnt be considered that. And for these people that this new system does not work for...I don't know. Its unfair to leave them in the cold. But that is the way America is heading, even more so in the future, because soon enough drinking Coke (tm) will constitute consent to a liscense agreement in which you agree not to reverse engineer the ingridients.
Whats -truely- scary are restrictions on behavior. The case of criminal libel from a 16 year old acting like a 16 year old in Utah posted on/. just a few days ago is frightening. So's Wave America.
But Kevin Spacey in American Beauty had it right--just let things you love flow through you, because theres not enough time to try and hold on to it all.
Sorry, but I dont think this would work. I think im what makes napster so cool. I have an upload queue set and 1.3 gigs of stuff sitting there, most of it specialized (i.e. I have a -LOT- from one or two bands, more than just another entry of the newest song), and log on all the time just to be nice. I am lucky to have uncapped cable, so I can transfer 30k/sec and not notice the ping in half-life. I wouldnt be online a lot if i was sparing CPU cycles too. What you see as Napster's flaw, I see as its greatest asset--transparent server. Napsters mild customizability lets me keep bandwith in check, and the cpu processes are minimal.
I'm just your average, leisure cable modem user. I admit to having only taken basic steps to protect my system. Ive shut off netbios and all the other useless things, I could probably still be nuked, but I dont keep anything critical on this computer, and I'd rather have the performance. I can replace just about everything on my drive in a day or two. But I like to think I'm reasonably secure against script kiddies trying to get control.
Now, the other day, when running my not-so-regular port scan, I noticed that port 139 (netbios) wasnt just closed, but gone! I'm not running any kind of firewall, and my only explanation (remember, im not so good at this, though) is that @home has cut off incoming traffic to port 139 to their end users on my segment, at an unknown router/firewall somewhere.
Its a tiny step in the right direction, I suppose.
Slashdot praises congress for the digital signature act, and rails them for trying to defend the internet?
I think most, but not all, of those who worry about government monitoring of the internet need to think twice. The internet is rapidly becoming a massive, massive part of the econimic structure of the world. While I can't claim to know the details of this new wiretapping act, I can't say I dont want some kind of regulation.
I had a conversation once with someone who worked at mediaone, an idle one, over a mud. When one of mediaones mail servers was under a hack attack and he noticed, this guy threw three t3's of ICMP at the poor saps cable modem until he got in touch with @home and got him shut down. Great, right? I thought it was kind of funny, too. But is this kind of anarchy at work what you want running the stock market? Responsible for raw materials being shipped around the world? Making sure food gets from farms to cities? Imagine the days before direct deposit--if someone could fly a helicopter over your bank and drop 40 tons of pudding on top of it the day you are trying to deposit your paycheck, I'll bet youd be pretty mad. Thats how the net works right now, folks. Any idiot who feels like it can clog things up for no good reason.
The internet is fast, fast approaching a point where it is within every facet of our lives, is vital to every level of the production of things we take for granted in modern life (what would happen if someone DoS'd your city's sewage system in 10 years, when it might be wired to the point that it mattered?). If the internet is going to be so vital to our lives, and it is, unaccountability cannot play such a large role in it.
Now, again, I must stress I don't know enough about Clintons new wiretapping budget, and in fact, it's probably a privacy-violating, unenforceable load of monkey crap, going by the Clinton administration track record with technology legislation. But some kind of regulation on the net, while not overdue, is going to be due sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
First person shooters were a whole new world, for most everyone. Slightly third person shooters have a very similiar feel of putting you in someone's shoes. And what happens in those games? You kill people.
Lots of people.
Soldier of Fortune didn't just tally up your score for blowing the limbs off countless dirty foreigners, You got extra counts of how many headshots, groin shots, and throat shots you got, because the ones where they gurgle to death are that much cooler.
Video games are free speech, and adults should be able to play them, but you can't say that's not a new realm of violence.
lilnobody
But Katz also screams about this...
Gore has repeatedly attacked TV, movies and the Net for the "cultural pollution" it's bringing to children's lives. And even before last night, Bush was demanding a wholesome "family hour" on TV every night.
I'm not sure this is even a bad idea. In fact, this is just the kind of anti-corporate legislation I want. Bush is saying that these companies have become part of the popular culture, that their service has become so entwined and vital to the American mind that they cannot allow profits alone to be the motive for what goes on TV. Because it really is a problem finding just happy TV for kids sometimes. Between The Learning Channel's 12 different "Life in the ER" series--entertainment built on the suffering of others, the History Channel's "Guts and Glory Sunday" nights, with nothing but shockumentaries on how glorious it was for people to die in horrible ways in war, and The Discovery Channels various shows based on re-enactments of murder and rape (The FBI files, the new detectives, whatever), I have found that the happiest channel on TV right now is the damn Food Network. These are channels that 5 years ago actually had decent programming. I don't even know whats on the networks in prime time, I've not switched to them in years, they degraded into sly penis-size jokes long ago.
What I'm getting at is that maybe Bush realizes that as these companies grow to become integral parts of America, they have to have other motivations for their services than profit. Or maybe hes pandering to the more right-wing voters, and its a decent outcome.
This is the reason telephone companies are regulated--"Well, if you dont like it, then you just wont have a phone" isnt a valid argument from a company. Phones are too important. A lot more companies need to fall in this category.
lilnobody
When the first designer babies come along in 25 years, see how much you appreciate being told your children will cost twice as much to insure as happily-tested, genetic-condition free whippersnappers. Do you risk getting your children tested? What if it turns out they are 'at risk?' You, and your kids, for that matter, are pretty screwed now, aren't you, since we have already seen in the last year alone what a great job of keeping information and medical records private big companies do--especially those that thrive on information, i.e. insurance companies.
Sure, this step is no big deal, since about .0001% of the population has this particular condition, nasty as it is, so you are better off getting tested, and saving a few bucks a month. But wait--in 5 years, the test for prostate cancer becomes 'technically reliable', and your genetic test is still on file somewhere. Lets just double check that real quick, shall we? Ooops, you just got denied coverage.
Dont think that when tests for the big killers, cancers and heart disease and the like, are 'technically reliable', that you will have the option of opting out of the testing. That quick blood test at the doctor's checkup when you get your coverage will be testing for a whole lot more than it does today.
And seeing as anything that brings down those premiums is good,You could do a lot of things to bring down premium costs that are most assuredly not good.
lilnobody
That's right, they are. So what? There are illegal file transfers, yes. How is changing a viewpoint illegal?
Thats right everyone. "They are changing some peoples opinions" is now a valid legal argument. I can see similiar attempts in the 1770's..."The works of Thomas Paine cause vast numbers of people to believe they should have elected representation. This subverts the very purpose of King George's majesty, to the long-term detriment of the public."
Fucking duh, RIAA. Ever consider that changing views is legal?
Its declared goals also included the following: "Seize control of digital distribution....Napster brings about death of the CD... Record stores (Tower Records) obsoleted."
I suppose its also a valid legal argument that "We have been making money like this for a long time, and its now our right to do so." Read the first excerpt again: Napster is causing a vast number of consumers to believe that free music on the Internet is an entitlement. But the RIAA's entitlement is ok.
Nintendo sued Galoob, claiming galoob had no right to release something that Nintendo didnt say they could, and lost. It falls smack-dab under reverse engineering provisions. The case is actually cited by Napster in its recent appeal for the stay of the shutdown injunction, and is also being cited in MPAA vs whoever and RIAA vs whoever cases, I believe.
lilnobody
No, not quite. Napster is profiting, technically, from the service of finding other users with music to share. Would ICQ be liable if I random chatted someone with 'I love The backstreet boys!' in their info, and we traded mp3's? Of course not. Napster is just more specialized at this. Users pay for bandwith, the hard drive space.
Was IRC designed to transfer illegal material? It was designed to transfer files. Napster was too, it just so happens that a much, much larger percentage of files of the type .mp3 are not legal to transfer (I think. If I ICQ a copy of a song to someone over ICQ, does it fall under fair use? What if I copy a cd song to a tape and give it to them? IANAL). Now, this is a tricky situation, because Napster does what it does exceedingly well, and with a high level of ease of use. The question comes down to, can we declare software or a service illegal because people dont use it legally most of the time? Some of the time? Who decides how much of the time a service has to be used legally to decide if its illegal? We all know that almost everything can be used illegaly (getaway cars in bank robberies, ban cars with high horsepower), but where is the line?
Is there a line defining what ratio of legal/illegal use makes a service illegal?
Did Napster cross it?
Where is it?
Who put it there, and why there?
Who said they could?
This case has the potential to reverse whatever the case was that declared VCR's legal, because it can re-define how often something has to be used legally and illegaly and stay legal. That is a frightening thought.
If the RIAA wins this case, we have to start asking some new questions. Can we ban FTP? IRC? What about #crackz on an IRC server?
Opinions are always going to differ. I personally believe that you have to take the bad with the good, and that in this case, Napster should be allowed to operate. That you cannot eliminate crime without elminating freedom. Others would say that such a small percentage of Napster's files being transfered is not worth the massive, massive numbers of illegaly traded ones to go free and unpunished. Somewhere between those two viewpoints, theres a not-so-happy, always war-torn and shifting, legally battled moral ground. Who decides where, in that middle ground, the law stands?
Who, indeed?
lilnobody
Pulling Napster out of the picture this late in the game is not going to have the effect they want. The river will merely find a new path, and this time the path won't be a single set of servers, or one company that people are dependant upon for MP3s. This time the water will flow in many directions, over many very distributed and varying forms of trading that we've been building all this time. Ayup. We'll go back to 40 million different channels of distribution. IRC; unreliable, spammy, cable-modem crushing gnutella; local bbs's, baby, because you know how cool zmodem and procomm are. Face it, pal, Napster had *75 million* users. Do you think they got them because those users all COULD learn how to use mirc, dcc, and read how to download a file through the massive spam from #mp3cafe? Or do you think its because its mp3's for dummies? Last weekend I helped my friend's brother download some music with Napster. He could hardly figure IT out--he wasnt going to get the songs that stopped at "Getting info...", because hey, they were getting the info for 2 hours. Is this person going to learn how to use irc? Have these kinds of people ever heard of gnutella? Do you think the vast majority of those 75 million users, all just too pissed off at those evil RIAA bastards (the geeks all say so), all sit down, spend 30 hours learning how to efficiently find mp3's on the other alternatives? Or are they going to say "15 bucks for a CD is worth less to me than the time I will spend learning how to do this mp3 bullshit." Face it man, breaking up Napster doesnt let online music hit the masses, it just sends it back to the internet-educated elite, the few who can take the time to scour 45 ftp servers with too many users logged on, to sit on IRC and wait for queue slot #423,232,887,133 to come up for the latest from N'Sync. Know what? Most people just dont care enough. Why do you want this "river" (What's up with that analogy, anyway? INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE LIKE WATER!) to be split into 40 streams anyway? A centralized server was A GOOD THING. A simple, easy to use, interface, with everyone's mp3's in one, single pool. A single point of failure, because you know the mission-critical mp3 downloads will be really screwed then. I dont want to go boating down 40 streams before I find the species of trout I want to fish for, I want to get on the big river and fish for it. Paddle back up your mp3 river into reality.
The 'offtopic' selection of moderation is there for a reason, but why would I waste a point modding it down when its at zero already?
nobody
200 years ago, You woke up and worked until you slept. You might have a hearty dinner of bread and salt at night. Then youd wake up and do it again, and repeat this until you died. After a while, we started owning the land we worked, but things really werent the same.
Now, we kind of have a mix. We dont own the 'land we work', but we have more time to live than any generation previous, period, ever. You work your 8 hours a day, your debt to civilization, and then you do whatever you want in the rest of your time. Do you own anything but debt? Do you have anything to pass to your children? No, but anything you have will be obselete by the time they care anyway. It's an interesting quandry.
We enjoy a rather unprecedented amount of freedom, even from 50 years ago--remember October Sky as an example: a lot of people were literaly born into their job, and this is just not nearly as true today. The price (cause?) of this freedom is a lack of ownership. No matter what people say, we really can do a lot more today than we ever could before.
Now, this system is not for everyone. It has certainly redefined 'self-supporting'. I just recently moved out of my mothers house at 20, I work for money well above the average for my age and rent a cheesy apartment for 350 a month (real estates cheap here). Today, thats self supporting...50 years ago, since I don't truely own anything, I probably woulnt be considered that. And for these people that this new system does not work for...I don't know. Its unfair to leave them in the cold. But that is the way America is heading, even more so in the future, because soon enough drinking Coke (tm) will constitute consent to a liscense agreement in which you agree not to reverse engineer the ingridients.
Whats -truely- scary are restrictions on behavior. The case of criminal libel from a 16 year old acting like a 16 year old in Utah posted on /. just a few days ago is frightening. So's Wave America.
But Kevin Spacey in American Beauty had it right--just let things you love flow through you, because theres not enough time to try and hold on to it all.
nobodySorry, but I dont think this would work. I think im what makes napster so cool. I have an upload queue set and 1.3 gigs of stuff sitting there, most of it specialized (i.e. I have a -LOT- from one or two bands, more than just another entry of the newest song), and log on all the time just to be nice. I am lucky to have uncapped cable, so I can transfer 30k/sec and not notice the ping in half-life. I wouldnt be online a lot if i was sparing CPU cycles too. What you see as Napster's flaw, I see as its greatest asset--transparent server. Napsters mild customizability lets me keep bandwith in check, and the cpu processes are minimal.
I'm just your average, leisure cable modem user. I admit to having only taken basic steps to protect my system. Ive shut off netbios and all the other useless things, I could probably still be nuked, but I dont keep anything critical on this computer, and I'd rather have the performance. I can replace just about everything on my drive in a day or two. But I like to think I'm reasonably secure against script kiddies trying to get control.
Now, the other day, when running my not-so-regular port scan, I noticed that port 139 (netbios) wasnt just closed, but gone! I'm not running any kind of firewall, and my only explanation (remember, im not so good at this, though) is that @home has cut off incoming traffic to port 139 to their end users on my segment, at an unknown router/firewall somewhere.
Its a tiny step in the right direction, I suppose.
Slashdot praises congress for the digital signature act, and rails them for trying to defend the internet?
I think most, but not all, of those who worry about government monitoring of the internet need to think twice. The internet is rapidly becoming a massive, massive part of the econimic structure of the world. While I can't claim to know the details of this new wiretapping act, I can't say I dont want some kind of regulation.
I had a conversation once with someone who worked at mediaone, an idle one, over a mud. When one of mediaones mail servers was under a hack attack and he noticed, this guy threw three t3's of ICMP at the poor saps cable modem until he got in touch with @home and got him shut down. Great, right? I thought it was kind of funny, too. But is this kind of anarchy at work what you want running the stock market? Responsible for raw materials being shipped around the world? Making sure food gets from farms to cities? Imagine the days before direct deposit--if someone could fly a helicopter over your bank and drop 40 tons of pudding on top of it the day you are trying to deposit your paycheck, I'll bet youd be pretty mad. Thats how the net works right now, folks. Any idiot who feels like it can clog things up for no good reason.
The internet is fast, fast approaching a point where it is within every facet of our lives, is vital to every level of the production of things we take for granted in modern life (what would happen if someone DoS'd your city's sewage system in 10 years, when it might be wired to the point that it mattered?). If the internet is going to be so vital to our lives, and it is, unaccountability cannot play such a large role in it.
Now, again, I must stress I don't know enough about Clintons new wiretapping budget, and in fact, it's probably a privacy-violating, unenforceable load of monkey crap, going by the Clinton administration track record with technology legislation. But some kind of regulation on the net, while not overdue, is going to be due sometime.
ben
cabal@home.com