Also, it's the woman's fault she got raped, she wore a short dress!
Stop blaming the victim.
I went to the extreme to make a point.
I'm curious, and may sound like a terrible person for even asking the question, but I feel I must: How far does this hypothesis go?
I believe that your polemic is a product of the general (and I believe accurate) belief that most rapes happen in non-hostile situations, where the woman had no significant reason to be on guard. But I think the above polemic has a dangerous side effect.
I live in an extremely rough neighborhood. By the crime maps, I live on the second most dangerous block in San Francisco. Far from the worst in the world, or even in the states, but very rough. Sometimes, late in the evening, I will go out for a soda at the corner store. The corner store where there was a shooting a few weeks back, and right near where the crack dealers ply their trade (my guess is that the two are related).
When I do that, I dress for the occasion. I don't wear my office clothes, and I have my head on a swivel watching for threats.
Hypothetical case one: Suppose I park my car at that corner, leave the windows open, leave the keys in the ignition and the engine running. Then I head up to my apartment, make a sandwich, watch some TV, then head back down to get my car. Do I bear any responsibility for the fact that it is gone when I get there? Should the government buy me a new car because I am the victim?
Hypothetical case two: Suppose I dress up in an nice suit, go to the corner store, and flash a wad of bills when I pay for my soda. Do I bear no part of the responsibility for my mugging? The mugger should go to jail, for sure, and better policing would be nice, but isn't there some degree of due diligence on my part that is reasonable to expect?
Hypothetical case three: Suppose a woman dresses up in an expensive, revealing outfit, and walks up and down sixth street, late in the evening, back and forth past those dangerous fellows near the corner store. In part because she likes the attention she was getting from their hoots and hollers, in part because she doesn't realize just how dangerous they are.
If anyone does anything to her, the person who does it is clearly the aggressor, in the wrong, and should go to jail.
But does she bear any responsibility?
Is it the case that a person can never bear any portion of the responsibility when a crime is committed against them, or is there some level of due diligence that is reasonable to expect in some situations?
I'm all for educating users about the harm they are causing by using insecure operating systems and engaging in dangerous behavior.
However: subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software
Don't dip your damned hand into my pocket and hand money to McAfee before we first educate these people. Then start holding them accountable for the damage they cause. Then, and only then, as a last resort if nothing else works, can we talk about holding their hands because there is no other way out.
I support methadone clinics, but first I support putting junkies who steal in jail. Same thing here. People are wantonly engaged in destructive behavior and you propose that we first harvest the positive externality, before addressing the negative externality of their destructive behavior. I am a strong believer in externalities and the balancing thereof. But let's start with the negative side, with holding the junkies accountable for their behavior.
I understand the unease that the rest of the world has with a single nation controlling ICANN. However, much as I often ask with engineering requests that seem spurious; what is the ROI to justify the change?
What is going wrong, which could reasonably be expected to go better, if we make the change? I'm not saying our stewardship of ICANN has necessarily been perfect, nor that we have a divine right just because we built the Internet. I do believe that the Internet is now a global resource, and that everyone has a very strong vested interest in it. And I am, generally speaking, a globalist -- I'd like to see us all spending more time on bettering all of us.
However, if there are not specific complaints, with a clear and significant path to improvement, it seems difficult to justify transferring control. Making the rest of the world feel good about Internet stewardship is not a good enough reason to risk the gridlock, posturing, saber rattling, and horse trading that could result from U.N. control.
Your post is clearly well-constructed, but I think there are gaps. In the hope that you are a rationalist, I would like to pose some counterpoints. If your views are dogmatic in nature, you can safely ignore this response.
First of all, all human rights are property rights. If the government makes a claim to a person's property, even a percentage of it, then there is no more basis for individual rights. In other words, you can not claim to protect rights while at the same time infringing on them. A person cannot have a "right" to the productive efforts of others. Thus taxes are irrational and immoral.
Zero taxes implies zero government. That system is well studied, and popularly misunderstood, and named anarchy.
Your post is sufficiently intelligent that if you openly consider the free rider problem, I believe you will understand why it necessarily implies that anarchy is suboptimal.
who are you to make the claim that every individual that finds value in advertising is an irrational fool ?
I am no one to do so, and I would not. Nor did I. If I held that position, I would propose banning advertising. As stated in my original post, there is value in advertising. Likewise, there is value in the processes which generate pollution. The problem is that there is also an external cost. If you are interested in understanding why those educated in free market economics almost universally support balancing of negative externalities, you will have to understand what externalities are. See the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Advertising does create demand for a consumer good, but only in the sense that people cannot desire something that they do not know exists.
That is not the only sense in which it creates demand. Pick up a few books on advertising, or try working in the industry for a while. A portion of advertising budgets is dedicated to informing the consumer. Another portion is for customer loyalty, such as branding campaigns. Still other portions are for casting doubt on competing products; some valid, some fabricated. There are many other objectives for ad campaigns, and most campaigns are hybrid in nature.
In short, to claim advertising is only used to inform is to demonstrate a lack of understanding of advertising. Claiming that advertising is always counterproductive would be equally uninformed.
Very little production would be possible without advertising.
You may be hypothesizing that all distribution of information about products is implicitly advertising. If that is the case, then I agree. If, however, we define advertising as a manufacturer or distributor messaging their potential customers, then your statement is not correct. There are many avenues for product information. The canonical advertising-free example is Consumer Reports. There are, of course, many hybrid solutions such as special interest magazines and websites which both distribute hypothetically objective product information and provide advertising space.
Moreover, I am not hypothesizing an end to advertising. What I am proposing is an end to taxpayer subsidization of advertising. You hypothesize anarchy above, even in that case, the deduction for advertising could be zero. It would just be that a deduction would be meaningless. I am not suggesting that advertising should be banned, only that corporations should not be allowed to reduce their tax burden (the proper level of which is a separate question) by writing off advertising expenses. We, the consumers, should not be subsidizing sponsored messaging.
Less competition and less production would lead to a lower standard of living for absolutely everyone.
This is a dangerous misunderstanding fostered by those who
Why specify online advertising? Why not tax advertising in general?
Advertising is hypothetically good because it increases the quality of information available to the consumer to make purchasing decisions. In practice, it typically does the opposite -- creating artificial demand -- particularly in industries like medicine and law where it is more difficult for the customer to be informed. It still serves a purpose, but it does have a negative external cost to society in reducing the quality of purchasing decisions. So, recapture that external cost the same way we recapture the external cost of pollution. A tax is a way to offset the negative externality.
More simple option; just remove advertising from deductible expenses.
Disclaimer: I work in the advertising industry, and a tax on advertising like I propose would actually hurt the company I work for. So, selfishly, I'd rather you ignore the rational basis for this post.
Reader daemonburrito notes that the (rehosted) "video remains available at the time of this submission."
What I'm about to say is, I'm sure, redundant. I'm saying it anyway:
Warner,
I am pulling a copy right now. It's going in my mystical hidden repository of stuff fools think they can stop me from seeing.
Here's how this rule works: You try to suppress it, I will get it, and I will keep it forever. That is possible because we are better at this than you are. We will always be better at this than you are. The best among us will never work for you, so you will always epic fail. You cannot stop us. Every time you try to kick us, you are going to get a couple broken toes, and we will just get more ornery.
You know, I don't violate copyright because I haven't made up my mind about it yet. I gotta tell you though, it gets more tempting every time you pull some shit like this.
And if you think you can stop me (let alone the next generation of tech naturals) from watching whatever we want, whenever we want, on whatever platform we want, well, you are really stupid. The more you fight, the more practice we get, and the harder we laugh when we pee on your leg.
Try being nice to your customers some time. It might not do you much good, but it won't do you as much harm as what you're doing now.
A hundred bucks a month for internet service is insane.
It would net out zero cost for me, because I'd be able to shut down one of my dedicated servers (the backup one) and plug in one of the old machines I have in the closet to take over that job.
While I believe that all "blow job" jokes are inherently funny, the premise of yours is flawed -- the fact that it is not a worthwhile value to you does not imply that it is the wrong price for others.
Sorry if I'm being pedantic when I should be lightening up, just that your comment strikes me as the same reason some oppose tiered service; because they are happy with their current single-price and single-service and don't seem to want the tails of the market to be served. Speaking as member of a tail, I find your perspective, the pervasiveness of it, and the uproar you and your kind raise when the ISPs try to serve the tails to be harmful to the market.
Going way off on a tangent here, into a "solution" which probably isn't really practical, but which would be cool if it worked.
'But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it's very difficult to derive revenue from it.'
Is there a subset of content which could increase the ability to derive revenue from those countries? If we selected a subset, it would reduce the cost to deliver it. If it was content that increased the ability to derive revenue, it would pay for itself in the long run.
But what am I talking about? Content that increases the ability to derive revenue through advertising? Well, basically, I'm thinking of some TED Talks that have extraordinary ideas for increasing sustainable economic growth in third world countries. What if these companies, who know how to deliver content, focused on content like "how to convert cow dung into fuel pellets", "sustainable yield agriculture in equatorial climates", or "scrap metal Stirling engines". Even if the viewers (those who have access to computers) didn't use the knowledge for themselves, they might develop a hacker ethic to help bring up the rural areas of their country. Increased productivity at the edges lifts the whole country.
For the target countries, it gives them something to watch instead of just building resentment. For the content companies, it is a very long-term approach to developing new markets of the future.
These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon.
This is one of those shining examples of a market inefficiency that should be fixed, but which companies like Verizon have a hard time getting smart about. If Justin McMurry is creating wealth for your company, the best long-term profit solution for you, Verizon, is to find a way to get him a piece of the action.
I know, I know, it seems like letting the inefficiency run while it tilts in your favor makes sense. But that is a short term thing. If you don't feed this budding source of wealth, it will not last very long. Somebody is going to pull a GEICO on you; tighten up the cashflow streams, and take guys like Justin away from you.
Don't let that happen. Find a way to help Justin monetize his support. Put up banner ads on the forum and give him the revenue, for example. To paraphrase an old aphorism about customer service, "If you don't take care of your wealth producers, somebody else will."
I think you raise some very valid issues. I further think that most of what you describe could be solved with increased competition, transparency, and diligent guarding against anti-competitive behavior.
I'm not sure exactly how to achieve those things, though projects like http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1521218Greenlight and fighting TWC's brand of corporate-protectionist legislature seem like good starts.
I am by no means a champion of the ISPs. I want a healthy free market and the maximum elimination of inefficiencies, regardless of who is currently benefiting from them.
A bit more on how you do it locally (ie: over mesh wi-fi):
Once there is a financial motive for home users to be more efficient in their use of the backbone, alternative distribution models will become viable. Consider this:
Podcasts start publishing a SHA-256 signature with their shows. Write a client that pulls the feed for the podcast, finds the shows you haven't downloaded yet, then, before hitting the originating server, checks on the mesh for a locally available version. If it's there, great, your machine starts pulling it and becomes a seeder. If not, then it pulls over the backbone and puts the show up for the rest of the community.
As to the question of local caching of illegal content? Well, that's up to the individuals. If a person chooses to do illegal stuff on the mesh, it's like if they choose to do illegal stuff in a public park. The person who does the illegal stuff has to deal with the consequences, and the public park is not held liable just because it happened to be the ground under a person who committed a crime.
Perhaps too rational a solution for these zany times...
I really don't see how you can optimize the backbone without looking at the 1's and 0's to see what is redundant. Or if neutrality is just treating all traffic the same, would an ISP be liable for optimizing the illegal content as well with local caching?
I was thinking more local -- like in my house, on my community wi-fi mesh, in the iPod I take to my friends to dump legally redistributable content on their machines.
I agree with you and would rather not have the ISP doing the caching, for the exact reasons you suggest. The best way to keep the ISPs from becoming the cops is to keep them pure carriers.
Heavy users do not cost the companies more, if those companies actually know how to configure their packet priority queues. Most don't, however. That's their own fault.
Suppose two identical networks with different users. Network A has 100 low volume users, typical sporadic email and web browsing stuff. Network B has 100 high volume users - people like me who often keep their last mile saturated for hours, or even days, at a time.
Network A has a peak load of 500 mbit, and an average rate of 10 mbit. Network B has a peak load of 5000 mbit, and an average rate of 100 mbit.
I'm not a network admin, so I may be missing something. Could you explain in this scenario how Network B could use packet priority to achieve the same upstream requirement as a similarly optimized instance of Network A?
If not, could you explain how it is that heavy users are not more expensive than light users?
I notice they never offer a discounted rate for the Grandma who only uses her broadband to check her email once a week. Funny how these caps or premium charges only work in the favor of the ISP, isn't it?
And sad. Between the lack of healthy competition and the fact that Grandma has to subsidize me, the market is totally unfair to Grandma. I wholeheartedly support increased competition which, coupled with tiered pricing, would drive down the cost to low-consumption users.
It's been so long I don't remember if we had the '-' in the middle or not -- I think so. Definitely not the current incarnation, though. I left Micro Trends for a job in NYC in 1998, and the owner cashed out shortly thereafter to open a night club.
By that argument, when I go to a buffet my 4 trips to the pasta bar are subsidized by the poor guy who could only make 3. If you're going to advertise for all-you-can-eat, shouldn't you have to provide it?
Absolutely. The ISPs should also be charged, convicted, and brutally penalized for the false advertising they have premeditatedly engaged in for years.
Um, we "heavy users" don't demand anything except that the company is up front and honest with us about what we're getting for what we're paying. Selling me "unlimited" service which is actually subject to undocumented caps is not honest.
I wholeheartedly agree. That blatant false advertising should have been stamped out long ago. I've been railing against 'unlimited' for as long as they've been lying through their teeth in saying it.
Everyone's talking about Hulu being the problem, and mention is made in one of the comments of multiple heads in a single house watching Hulu or Netflix at the same time.
Here's a thought; cache locally. Distribute to your peers over wi-fi or portable storage (ie: your iPod). The same video should not be getting sent over the backbones twenty times to different apartments in my apartment complex.
Problem with that? DRM. Hate DRM'd media? Make the DRM consumers pay for their retarded use of bandwidth. Meanwhile the more enlightened among us can be locally caching and off-backbone distributing non-DRM content like The Wood Whisperer (just found that, awesome for the physical hacker in you).
Tiered pricing would totally screw the single-view-per-download business model, which only really makes sense for DRM'd media.
Aligning bandwidth consumption cost to the ISP with bandwidth consumption cost to the customer is efficient pricing. The ISPs will profit more from heavy users, putting them on the side of the heavy users. Content control business models will have a harder time competing with future-oriented distributed distribution models. And all it will cost is paying for your extra consumption.
It is the core essence of market efficiency - aligning the price to the customer with the cost to the provider. It's a good thing.
(and support net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business)
Right now, the ISPs are charging the same price to heavy users and light users. Heavy users cost the ISP more than light users. Therefore, their profit motive is to maximize light users and minimize heavy users.
Tiering would align their profit motive with heavy users (due to volume discounts).
As long as heavy users keep demanding that light users subsidize their usage, by not charging differential pricing, the ISPs will continue to be profit motivated to cut off heavy users. They will continue to be on the side of content restriction. They will continue to be the enemy of we heavy users.
Choose your poison: Get the ISPs on our side by letting them profit from our heavy usage, or keep them in an antagonistic position towards us. I like getting free money from light users, but it's not a healthy market strategy. It puts me in an adversarial relationship with my ISP. I'd rather pay for what I use and have them treat me as their golden customer.
Support tiered pricing (and net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business). Get the ISPs back on our side (like they were in the 90's, when we geeks were their only customers). It'll cost more, but we'll be the golden-haired boys again. Stop demanding free stuff you cheap fuckers.
The year was 1996. I was young, dumb, and full of... self-confidence.
I had been posting little Perl includes to a Slackware server at my ISP for a couple months. I was a pure hacker - everything I knew was from trying it. I was still getting emails from their admin saying things like, "Could you stop putting 'end(0);' at the end of your scripts - it's supposed to be 'exit(0);.' You're filling up our error logs."
I made a ten page static website for a little Mom & Pop computer company (Micro Trends). The owner of the company put the URL in an ad in Computer Shopper magazine and his phone and fax caught on fire. The ISP said we were generating too much traffic, and they'd have to start charging him for bandwidth.
So he decides to expand, pull in a T-1, split off... four channels IIRC for data and use the rest for voice. Meanwhile, he talks to me about working for him full time on the website. We reach an agreement and I show up. He hands me a Cisco router, a computer, and a CD with RedHat Rembrandt on it, then points me at a closet where the T-1 lands. "It should be easy," he says, "my cousin set up his own."
So I dive in. I sat in that closet (a coat closet, not a euphemism for a small server room) for the next week, my head spinning with thoughts like, "What does 'kernel panic' mean? It sounds bad." To that I added a few dozen phone calls to Cisco support, the ISP, and everyone I knew who had ever used the word 'Linux' in a sentence (all two of them -- Thanks, JY and Neil).
It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you are not aware of your limitations. I posted a test page early in the second week, and migrated traffic to the new server the week after that.
Then I started on the dynamic site. Filled with things like a a custom shopping basked that carried the order -- including the prices we would charge -- in a cookie. The customer's credit card was transmitted in the clear over HTTP, of course. But that is a story for another article.
It was a helluva lot of fun. I've never looked back, and have not regretted a day of it.
I think they'll just use it to try to funnel users butting up against its limits towards full Oracle. If they kill it they lose that potential sales channel.
A rational assessment of a solid business model that simultaneously benefits both a proprietary and an Open Source product. It is clearly beneficial to Oracle and at worst is indifferent to the users of Oracle DBMS and MySQL. That is the sort of win/win thinking that benefits us all to consider. Thank you for your post.
The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
And that is one of the major reasons why professional software engineers love commercial Open Source software. The company is on no uncertain terms with the customer: Keep us happy and we keep giving you money for support contracts. Turn into a dick and we walk. It is a vastly healthier relationship for mission critical business information systems.
Before I go on, let me note that what I am about to say does not consider redistribution, which is its own thorny problem and is intrinsically linked to copyright.
On the matter of continued use and improvement, a critical matter to information systems, the fiat monopoly of copyright is extremely dangerous to the customer. If a commercial proprietary software vendor changes the terms of the bargain, the options are to use the existing software as it is, to migrate your information infrastructure, or to accept the new terms. The first, using the software as it stands, is usually impractical in this rapidly evolving industry. The second, migration, can be enormously expensive. The final option, paying the Dane Gelt, is often the least objectionable option at the time.
And so it is that while redistribution is an issue which copyright may handle well, continued use and improvement falls heavily in favor of Open Source or non-copyright. Because continued use and improvement is so critical to mission critical information systems, it is in our industry that the onus of copyright has become most visible, and in our industry that Open Source first became a significant market option.
'knowledge on emerging social trends and evolving best practice in social media.'
Soooo... some 56 year old CEO who regularly asks questions like, "Have you heard of these two new sites, 'Tweets' and 'Twitter'?" is going to ask his best 47 year olds (the hip kids) to form a committee to write the official company policy so they can tell the 24 year old kid, who has been using social media for nearly half his life, about the best practices in social media?
Man, that sure is some big, clankin' hubris you got there, old man. You may well be giving Steve Ballmer a run for the "head stuffed furthest up one's nethers" prize.
How 'bout this: Telstra announced that they would be forming a committee of 23 year olds to explain to the executives what social networking is.
I'm closer to the old guy than the young gun, but lets face it - the kids are the ones who are defining this disruptive technology. Discount them at your peril.
It won't quite make Ubuntu as hard as OpenBSD with the same SE kit, but it will make it much harder in actual operation than even the design objectives for Windows. And still as usable as Ubuntu (ie: more user-friendly for those uninitiated in either OS than Windows).
Aside: I still tell my brother, Mom, and Dad that they should stick with Windows for now. I'm not a zealot. But "It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today." reflects either a lack of awareness, creative definitions for the words in the sentence, or deception.
When Microsoft gets noexec and chroot we can maybe start to have this conversation. I'm not saying it's a bad OS. I recommend it to people, including my immediate family members. But it is not trying to be as hard as some other operating systems. Be realistic.
4. Upgrade the infrastructure to support the increasing bandwidth usage of your average user and charge everyone slightly more for this new faster service?
I like this solution, but unfortunately it wouldn't be a slight increase. The United States has a low population density, cultural preference not to use government funds for Internet infrastructure, and low competition in backbones. Those things combine to mean that laying major bandwidth upgrades will be expensive per customer. We could fund it by doubling the price to everyone, but that would limit penetration, which I think is also suboptimal.
Competing levels of service would help drive more backbone development. It would put the ISPs interests more in line with the high volume users. Currently their profit incentive is to inhibit consumption and keep the price at $40/month. Tiered service would allow the market to push for the service levels it wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it's the woman's fault she got raped, she wore a short dress!
Stop blaming the victim.
I went to the extreme to make a point.
I'm curious, and may sound like a terrible person for even asking the question, but I feel I must: How far does this hypothesis go?
I believe that your polemic is a product of the general (and I believe accurate) belief that most rapes happen in non-hostile situations, where the woman had no significant reason to be on guard. But I think the above polemic has a dangerous side effect.
I live in an extremely rough neighborhood. By the crime maps, I live on the second most dangerous block in San Francisco. Far from the worst in the world, or even in the states, but very rough. Sometimes, late in the evening, I will go out for a soda at the corner store. The corner store where there was a shooting a few weeks back, and right near where the crack dealers ply their trade (my guess is that the two are related).
When I do that, I dress for the occasion. I don't wear my office clothes, and I have my head on a swivel watching for threats.
Hypothetical case one: Suppose I park my car at that corner, leave the windows open, leave the keys in the ignition and the engine running. Then I head up to my apartment, make a sandwich, watch some TV, then head back down to get my car. Do I bear any responsibility for the fact that it is gone when I get there? Should the government buy me a new car because I am the victim?
Hypothetical case two: Suppose I dress up in an nice suit, go to the corner store, and flash a wad of bills when I pay for my soda. Do I bear no part of the responsibility for my mugging? The mugger should go to jail, for sure, and better policing would be nice, but isn't there some degree of due diligence on my part that is reasonable to expect?
Hypothetical case three: Suppose a woman dresses up in an expensive, revealing outfit, and walks up and down sixth street, late in the evening, back and forth past those dangerous fellows near the corner store. In part because she likes the attention she was getting from their hoots and hollers, in part because she doesn't realize just how dangerous they are.
If anyone does anything to her, the person who does it is clearly the aggressor, in the wrong, and should go to jail.
But does she bear any responsibility?
Is it the case that a person can never bear any portion of the responsibility when a crime is committed against them, or is there some level of due diligence that is reasonable to expect in some situations?
I'm all for educating users about the harm they are causing by using insecure operating systems and engaging in dangerous behavior.
However:
subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software
Don't dip your damned hand into my pocket and hand money to McAfee before we first educate these people. Then start holding them accountable for the damage they cause. Then, and only then, as a last resort if nothing else works, can we talk about holding their hands because there is no other way out.
I support methadone clinics, but first I support putting junkies who steal in jail. Same thing here. People are wantonly engaged in destructive behavior and you propose that we first harvest the positive externality, before addressing the negative externality of their destructive behavior. I am a strong believer in externalities and the balancing thereof. But let's start with the negative side, with holding the junkies accountable for their behavior.
I understand the unease that the rest of the world has with a single nation controlling ICANN. However, much as I often ask with engineering requests that seem spurious; what is the ROI to justify the change?
What is going wrong, which could reasonably be expected to go better, if we make the change? I'm not saying our stewardship of ICANN has necessarily been perfect, nor that we have a divine right just because we built the Internet. I do believe that the Internet is now a global resource, and that everyone has a very strong vested interest in it. And I am, generally speaking, a globalist -- I'd like to see us all spending more time on bettering all of us.
However, if there are not specific complaints, with a clear and significant path to improvement, it seems difficult to justify transferring control. Making the rest of the world feel good about Internet stewardship is not a good enough reason to risk the gridlock, posturing, saber rattling, and horse trading that could result from U.N. control.
Your post is clearly well-constructed, but I think there are gaps. In the hope that you are a rationalist, I would like to pose some counterpoints. If your views are dogmatic in nature, you can safely ignore this response.
First of all, all human rights are property rights. If the government makes a claim to a person's property, even a percentage of it, then there is no more basis for individual rights. In other words, you can not claim to protect rights while at the same time infringing on them. A person cannot have a "right" to the productive efforts of others. Thus taxes are irrational and immoral.
Zero taxes implies zero government. That system is well studied, and popularly misunderstood, and named anarchy.
While I like the idea of true freedom, the problem with anarchy is free riders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
Your post is sufficiently intelligent that if you openly consider the free rider problem, I believe you will understand why it necessarily implies that anarchy is suboptimal.
who are you to make the claim that every individual that finds value in advertising is an irrational fool ?
I am no one to do so, and I would not. Nor did I. If I held that position, I would propose banning advertising. As stated in my original post, there is value in advertising. Likewise, there is value in the processes which generate pollution. The problem is that there is also an external cost. If you are interested in understanding why those educated in free market economics almost universally support balancing of negative externalities, you will have to understand what externalities are. See the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Advertising does create demand for a consumer good, but only in the sense that people cannot desire something that they do not know exists.
That is not the only sense in which it creates demand. Pick up a few books on advertising, or try working in the industry for a while. A portion of advertising budgets is dedicated to informing the consumer. Another portion is for customer loyalty, such as branding campaigns. Still other portions are for casting doubt on competing products; some valid, some fabricated. There are many other objectives for ad campaigns, and most campaigns are hybrid in nature.
In short, to claim advertising is only used to inform is to demonstrate a lack of understanding of advertising. Claiming that advertising is always counterproductive would be equally uninformed.
Very little production would be possible without advertising.
You may be hypothesizing that all distribution of information about products is implicitly advertising. If that is the case, then I agree. If, however, we define advertising as a manufacturer or distributor messaging their potential customers, then your statement is not correct. There are many avenues for product information. The canonical advertising-free example is Consumer Reports. There are, of course, many hybrid solutions such as special interest magazines and websites which both distribute hypothetically objective product information and provide advertising space.
Moreover, I am not hypothesizing an end to advertising. What I am proposing is an end to taxpayer subsidization of advertising. You hypothesize anarchy above, even in that case, the deduction for advertising could be zero. It would just be that a deduction would be meaningless. I am not suggesting that advertising should be banned, only that corporations should not be allowed to reduce their tax burden (the proper level of which is a separate question) by writing off advertising expenses. We, the consumers, should not be subsidizing sponsored messaging.
Less competition and less production would lead to a lower standard of living for absolutely everyone.
This is a dangerous misunderstanding fostered by those who
Why specify online advertising? Why not tax advertising in general?
Advertising is hypothetically good because it increases the quality of information available to the consumer to make purchasing decisions. In practice, it typically does the opposite -- creating artificial demand -- particularly in industries like medicine and law where it is more difficult for the customer to be informed. It still serves a purpose, but it does have a negative external cost to society in reducing the quality of purchasing decisions. So, recapture that external cost the same way we recapture the external cost of pollution. A tax is a way to offset the negative externality.
More simple option; just remove advertising from deductible expenses.
See Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Disclaimer: I work in the advertising industry, and a tax on advertising like I propose would actually hurt the company I work for. So, selfishly, I'd rather you ignore the rational basis for this post.
Reader daemonburrito notes that the (rehosted) "video remains available at the time of this submission."
What I'm about to say is, I'm sure, redundant. I'm saying it anyway:
Warner,
I am pulling a copy right now. It's going in my mystical hidden repository of stuff fools think they can stop me from seeing.
Here's how this rule works: You try to suppress it, I will get it, and I will keep it forever. That is possible because we are better at this than you are. We will always be better at this than you are. The best among us will never work for you, so you will always epic fail. You cannot stop us. Every time you try to kick us, you are going to get a couple broken toes, and we will just get more ornery.
You know, I don't violate copyright because I haven't made up my mind about it yet. I gotta tell you though, it gets more tempting every time you pull some shit like this.
And if you think you can stop me (let alone the next generation of tech naturals) from watching whatever we want, whenever we want, on whatever platform we want, well, you are really stupid. The more you fight, the more practice we get, and the harder we laugh when we pee on your leg.
Try being nice to your customers some time. It might not do you much good, but it won't do you as much harm as what you're doing now.
A hundred bucks a month for internet service is insane.
It would net out zero cost for me, because I'd be able to shut down one of my dedicated servers (the backup one) and plug in one of the old machines I have in the closet to take over that job.
While I believe that all "blow job" jokes are inherently funny, the premise of yours is flawed -- the fact that it is not a worthwhile value to you does not imply that it is the wrong price for others.
Sorry if I'm being pedantic when I should be lightening up, just that your comment strikes me as the same reason some oppose tiered service; because they are happy with their current single-price and single-service and don't seem to want the tails of the market to be served. Speaking as member of a tail, I find your perspective, the pervasiveness of it, and the uproar you and your kind raise when the ISPs try to serve the tails to be harmful to the market.
Going way off on a tangent here, into a "solution" which probably isn't really practical, but which would be cool if it worked.
'But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it's very difficult to derive revenue from it.'
Is there a subset of content which could increase the ability to derive revenue from those countries? If we selected a subset, it would reduce the cost to deliver it. If it was content that increased the ability to derive revenue, it would pay for itself in the long run.
But what am I talking about? Content that increases the ability to derive revenue through advertising? Well, basically, I'm thinking of some TED Talks that have extraordinary ideas for increasing sustainable economic growth in third world countries. What if these companies, who know how to deliver content, focused on content like "how to convert cow dung into fuel pellets", "sustainable yield agriculture in equatorial climates", or "scrap metal Stirling engines". Even if the viewers (those who have access to computers) didn't use the knowledge for themselves, they might develop a hacker ethic to help bring up the rural areas of their country. Increased productivity at the edges lifts the whole country.
For the target countries, it gives them something to watch instead of just building resentment. For the content companies, it is a very long-term approach to developing new markets of the future.
Just spitballing. Any thoughts?
These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon.
This is one of those shining examples of a market inefficiency that should be fixed, but which companies like Verizon have a hard time getting smart about. If Justin McMurry is creating wealth for your company, the best long-term profit solution for you, Verizon, is to find a way to get him a piece of the action.
I know, I know, it seems like letting the inefficiency run while it tilts in your favor makes sense. But that is a short term thing. If you don't feed this budding source of wealth, it will not last very long. Somebody is going to pull a GEICO on you; tighten up the cashflow streams, and take guys like Justin away from you.
Don't let that happen. Find a way to help Justin monetize his support. Put up banner ads on the forum and give him the revenue, for example. To paraphrase an old aphorism about customer service, "If you don't take care of your wealth producers, somebody else will."
I think you raise some very valid issues. I further think that most of what you describe could be solved with increased competition, transparency, and diligent guarding against anti-competitive behavior.
I'm not sure exactly how to achieve those things, though projects like http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1521218Greenlight and fighting TWC's brand of corporate-protectionist legislature seem like good starts.
I am by no means a champion of the ISPs. I want a healthy free market and the maximum elimination of inefficiencies, regardless of who is currently benefiting from them.
A bit more on how you do it locally (ie: over mesh wi-fi):
Once there is a financial motive for home users to be more efficient in their use of the backbone, alternative distribution models will become viable. Consider this:
Podcasts start publishing a SHA-256 signature with their shows. Write a client that pulls the feed for the podcast, finds the shows you haven't downloaded yet, then, before hitting the originating server, checks on the mesh for a locally available version. If it's there, great, your machine starts pulling it and becomes a seeder. If not, then it pulls over the backbone and puts the show up for the rest of the community.
As to the question of local caching of illegal content? Well, that's up to the individuals. If a person chooses to do illegal stuff on the mesh, it's like if they choose to do illegal stuff in a public park. The person who does the illegal stuff has to deal with the consequences, and the public park is not held liable just because it happened to be the ground under a person who committed a crime.
Perhaps too rational a solution for these zany times...
I really don't see how you can optimize the backbone without looking at the 1's and 0's to see what is redundant. Or if neutrality is just treating all traffic the same, would an ISP be liable for optimizing the illegal content as well with local caching?
I was thinking more local -- like in my house, on my community wi-fi mesh, in the iPod I take to my friends to dump legally redistributable content on their machines.
I agree with you and would rather not have the ISP doing the caching, for the exact reasons you suggest. The best way to keep the ISPs from becoming the cops is to keep them pure carriers.
Heavy users do not cost the companies more, if those companies actually know how to configure their packet priority queues. Most don't, however. That's their own fault.
Suppose two identical networks with different users. Network A has 100 low volume users, typical sporadic email and web browsing stuff. Network B has 100 high volume users - people like me who often keep their last mile saturated for hours, or even days, at a time.
Network A has a peak load of 500 mbit, and an average rate of 10 mbit. Network B has a peak load of 5000 mbit, and an average rate of 100 mbit.
I'm not a network admin, so I may be missing something. Could you explain in this scenario how Network B could use packet priority to achieve the same upstream requirement as a similarly optimized instance of Network A?
If not, could you explain how it is that heavy users are not more expensive than light users?
I notice they never offer a discounted rate for the Grandma who only uses her broadband to check her email once a week. Funny how these caps or premium charges only work in the favor of the ISP, isn't it?
And sad. Between the lack of healthy competition and the fact that Grandma has to subsidize me, the market is totally unfair to Grandma. I wholeheartedly support increased competition which, coupled with tiered pricing, would drive down the cost to low-consumption users.
Is that micro-trends.com?
It's been so long I don't remember if we had the '-' in the middle or not -- I think so. Definitely not the current incarnation, though. I left Micro Trends for a job in NYC in 1998, and the owner cashed out shortly thereafter to open a night club.
By that argument, when I go to a buffet my 4 trips to the pasta bar are subsidized by the poor guy who could only make 3. If you're going to advertise for all-you-can-eat, shouldn't you have to provide it?
Absolutely. The ISPs should also be charged, convicted, and brutally penalized for the false advertising they have premeditatedly engaged in for years.
Um, we "heavy users" don't demand anything except that the company is up front and honest with us about what we're getting for what we're paying. Selling me "unlimited" service which is actually subject to undocumented caps is not honest.
I wholeheartedly agree. That blatant false advertising should have been stamped out long ago. I've been railing against 'unlimited' for as long as they've been lying through their teeth in saying it.
Here's another argument in support of tiering:
Everyone's talking about Hulu being the problem, and mention is made in one of the comments of multiple heads in a single house watching Hulu or Netflix at the same time.
Here's a thought; cache locally. Distribute to your peers over wi-fi or portable storage (ie: your iPod). The same video should not be getting sent over the backbones twenty times to different apartments in my apartment complex.
Problem with that? DRM. Hate DRM'd media? Make the DRM consumers pay for their retarded use of bandwidth. Meanwhile the more enlightened among us can be locally caching and off-backbone distributing non-DRM content like The Wood Whisperer (just found that, awesome for the physical hacker in you).
Tiered pricing would totally screw the single-view-per-download business model, which only really makes sense for DRM'd media.
Aligning bandwidth consumption cost to the ISP with bandwidth consumption cost to the customer is efficient pricing. The ISPs will profit more from heavy users, putting them on the side of the heavy users. Content control business models will have a harder time competing with future-oriented distributed distribution models. And all it will cost is paying for your extra consumption.
It is the core essence of market efficiency - aligning the price to the customer with the cost to the provider. It's a good thing.
(and support net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business)
Right now, the ISPs are charging the same price to heavy users and light users. Heavy users cost the ISP more than light users. Therefore, their profit motive is to maximize light users and minimize heavy users.
Tiering would align their profit motive with heavy users (due to volume discounts).
As long as heavy users keep demanding that light users subsidize their usage, by not charging differential pricing, the ISPs will continue to be profit motivated to cut off heavy users. They will continue to be on the side of content restriction. They will continue to be the enemy of we heavy users.
Choose your poison: Get the ISPs on our side by letting them profit from our heavy usage, or keep them in an antagonistic position towards us. I like getting free money from light users, but it's not a healthy market strategy. It puts me in an adversarial relationship with my ISP. I'd rather pay for what I use and have them treat me as their golden customer.
Support tiered pricing (and net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business). Get the ISPs back on our side (like they were in the 90's, when we geeks were their only customers). It'll cost more, but we'll be the golden-haired boys again. Stop demanding free stuff you cheap fuckers.
The year was 1996. I was young, dumb, and full of ... self-confidence.
I had been posting little Perl includes to a Slackware server at my ISP for a couple months. I was a pure hacker - everything I knew was from trying it. I was still getting emails from their admin saying things like, "Could you stop putting 'end(0);' at the end of your scripts - it's supposed to be 'exit(0);.' You're filling up our error logs."
I made a ten page static website for a little Mom & Pop computer company (Micro Trends). The owner of the company put the URL in an ad in Computer Shopper magazine and his phone and fax caught on fire. The ISP said we were generating too much traffic, and they'd have to start charging him for bandwidth.
So he decides to expand, pull in a T-1, split off... four channels IIRC for data and use the rest for voice. Meanwhile, he talks to me about working for him full time on the website. We reach an agreement and I show up. He hands me a Cisco router, a computer, and a CD with RedHat Rembrandt on it, then points me at a closet where the T-1 lands. "It should be easy," he says, "my cousin set up his own."
So I dive in. I sat in that closet (a coat closet, not a euphemism for a small server room) for the next week, my head spinning with thoughts like, "What does 'kernel panic' mean? It sounds bad." To that I added a few dozen phone calls to Cisco support, the ISP, and everyone I knew who had ever used the word 'Linux' in a sentence (all two of them -- Thanks, JY and Neil).
It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you are not aware of your limitations. I posted a test page early in the second week, and migrated traffic to the new server the week after that.
Then I started on the dynamic site. Filled with things like a a custom shopping basked that carried the order -- including the prices we would charge -- in a cookie. The customer's credit card was transmitted in the clear over HTTP, of course. But that is a story for another article.
It was a helluva lot of fun. I've never looked back, and have not regretted a day of it.
I think they'll just use it to try to funnel users butting up against its limits towards full Oracle. If they kill it they lose that potential sales channel.
A rational assessment of a solid business model that simultaneously benefits both a proprietary and an Open Source product. It is clearly beneficial to Oracle and at worst is indifferent to the users of Oracle DBMS and MySQL. That is the sort of win/win thinking that benefits us all to consider. Thank you for your post.
The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
And that is one of the major reasons why professional software engineers love commercial Open Source software. The company is on no uncertain terms with the customer: Keep us happy and we keep giving you money for support contracts. Turn into a dick and we walk. It is a vastly healthier relationship for mission critical business information systems.
Before I go on, let me note that what I am about to say does not consider redistribution, which is its own thorny problem and is intrinsically linked to copyright.
On the matter of continued use and improvement, a critical matter to information systems, the fiat monopoly of copyright is extremely dangerous to the customer. If a commercial proprietary software vendor changes the terms of the bargain, the options are to use the existing software as it is, to migrate your information infrastructure, or to accept the new terms. The first, using the software as it stands, is usually impractical in this rapidly evolving industry. The second, migration, can be enormously expensive. The final option, paying the Dane Gelt, is often the least objectionable option at the time.
And so it is that while redistribution is an issue which copyright may handle well, continued use and improvement falls heavily in favor of Open Source or non-copyright. Because continued use and improvement is so critical to mission critical information systems, it is in our industry that the onus of copyright has become most visible, and in our industry that Open Source first became a significant market option.
'knowledge on emerging social trends and evolving best practice in social media.'
Soooo... some 56 year old CEO who regularly asks questions like, "Have you heard of these two new sites, 'Tweets' and 'Twitter'?" is going to ask his best 47 year olds (the hip kids) to form a committee to write the official company policy so they can tell the 24 year old kid, who has been using social media for nearly half his life, about the best practices in social media?
Man, that sure is some big, clankin' hubris you got there, old man. You may well be giving Steve Ballmer a run for the "head stuffed furthest up one's nethers" prize.
How 'bout this: Telstra announced that they would be forming a committee of 23 year olds to explain to the executives what social networking is.
I'm closer to the old guy than the young gun, but lets face it - the kids are the ones who are defining this disruptive technology. Discount them at your peril.
but Vista isn't as secure as the NSA's classified operating systems.
Not classified. Published as Open Source. Called SELinux. Available as an enhancement to most major distros. Can be applied to any *nix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux
It won't quite make Ubuntu as hard as OpenBSD with the same SE kit, but it will make it much harder in actual operation than even the design objectives for Windows. And still as usable as Ubuntu (ie: more user-friendly for those uninitiated in either OS than Windows).
Aside: I still tell my brother, Mom, and Dad that they should stick with Windows for now. I'm not a zealot. But "It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today." reflects either a lack of awareness, creative definitions for the words in the sentence, or deception.
When Microsoft gets noexec and chroot we can maybe start to have this conversation. I'm not saying it's a bad OS. I recommend it to people, including my immediate family members. But it is not trying to be as hard as some other operating systems. Be realistic.
4. Upgrade the infrastructure to support the increasing bandwidth usage of your average user and charge everyone slightly more for this new faster service?
I like this solution, but unfortunately it wouldn't be a slight increase. The United States has a low population density, cultural preference not to use government funds for Internet infrastructure, and low competition in backbones. Those things combine to mean that laying major bandwidth upgrades will be expensive per customer. We could fund it by doubling the price to everyone, but that would limit penetration, which I think is also suboptimal.
Competing levels of service would help drive more backbone development. It would put the ISPs interests more in line with the high volume users. Currently their profit incentive is to inhibit consumption and keep the price at $40/month. Tiered service would allow the market to push for the service levels it wants.