What are we now, "Land of the fee, home of the scared?" Pretty much. When something nasty happens, people insist that the authorities Do Something. And of course, what they do is designed more to shut people up than to actually fix things. So we get blanket "zero tolerance" rules. Thus all those school shootings produced bans, not just on guns, but on gun-like objects.
The depressing thing is that the editor who posted this story is not Zonk or kdawson or one of the other nitwits with zero reading skills. It's Rob Malda himself, the boss of this noble web site. I guess he's too busy playing Killer Lesbian Sims to actually pay attention any more.
You'd have a point if (a) you had to have an active server to own a.com subdomain (you don't) and (b) the blacklist was distributed from ordb.com (it wasn't). The blacklist was distributed by relays.ordb.com. Shut down that server, remove its DNS entry: problem solved. Nobody can recreate relays.ordb.com without the permission of the owner of ordb.com.
The site owner is a dick and a moron — it's not very hard to configure a web server so that hotlinking isn't possible.
And is it the fault of the individual users who had all their email discarded? Many of which are individuals who didn't even know their service providers were using ORDB.
Why TF did ORDB's owners choose such an obnoxious way to make their point? If they were trying to establish once and for all that blacklist maintainers are self-rightous, mentally-challenged assholes, well, they convinced me a long time ago.
Which leads me to suspect that the breakdown is bogus. Mass media companies are notorious for cooking the books. For example, very few movies ever turn a profit on paper, no matter how many gazillion tickets they sell. Which is why there are so many lawsuits by people owed royalties.
I have a brother-in-law who's a middle-ranked professional musician; don't know how many CDs he's got out there, but he has multiple gold records, so it's in the millions. I don't pry into his finances, but if he had earned $1.60 a CD, he'd be living a lot more comfortably than he is, and he wouldn't have to do so much session work.
Not the story, this post. I have to use the story as an excuse to plug my own favorite casual gaming site, Kongregate. The cute thing about them is that most of their games are user uploads. Many of these have rough edges (my personal favorite time sink^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgame, Desktop Tower Defense, has hand-drawn icons and sound effects that seem to have been done by somebody with a microphone and a talent for silly noises), but that just adds to the fun.
Kneejerkiness aside, your post ignores one little detail: Ou is arguing that the protocol needs to be changed to support P2P.
I do share your skepticism about his defense of P2P throttling by ISPs. That said, do you really know that he's wrong about P2P apps soaking up bandwidth? A useful response is to demand that he present independent evidence (not from ISPs) that P2P is actually a problem. Simply going into flame mode and questioning his motives is childish and pointless.
And can we retire that stupid acronym already? It's become meaningless. Nowadays, one side's logical argument is the other side's FUD, and vice versa.
I'm talking laws because laws are what corporations are governed by. Where do you think laws come from? They're the expression of a nation's values and ethics.
Starting with the Reagan era, we've been placing a high value on property rights, which is why you often hear people saying "it's private property" as if that were the only issue. Well, property rights are important, but they've never been the only right that mattered, and the pendulum is starting to swing back, as people realize how thoroughly big business has abused the free hand they've been dealt for the last couple of decades.
So if there isn't a law saying ISPs shouldn't be allowed to censor their users, most people would say there should be. Maybe there is; the FCC, in its response to the Comcast/P2P hassle, seems to think so.
I believe in the right to free speech, but I'm not going to bang down AOL's door if they censor someone. I expect the person being censored to move to another provider. Except that all retail providers have to deal with the same fairly small set of backbone providers. If all the backbone providers were to impose stringent content rules on the retail ISPs and the hosting providers, they could effectively dictate what kind of content would be available.
There have, in fact, been isolated cases of people losing their hosting accounts because they offended somebody. In one case, Time-Warner, responding to pressure from religious groups, told a hosting provider to get rid of the anti-Christian web site Blackdeath.org. The host had no choice to comply: without Time-Warner's backbone they'd be out of business.
OK, not a typical case. But it should give you some idea of what would happen if all the backbone providers set themselves up as censors all at once. The fact that this isn't covered by the Second Amendment is beside the point; it would be exactly the kind of throttle on free speech that Americans don't care for.
And I take offense to your idea that global bandwidth providers' pipes are public. You're offended??!! If a difference of opinion offends you... oh, never mind.
When I was a kid, there were many businesses that refused to serve people of color, or give them the same level of service as white people. Now, in complete violation of their property rights, businesses are required to treat all customers the same, regardless of race. Are you offended by that?
I do lean more towards your argument with regards to the last mile being public, as in most cases the corporation who owns those lines was provided a monopoly and some sort of public funding or subsidy. Well, only protecting the "last mile" is pretty pointless, as I've already argued. And if you're going to exempt business that take "public funding or subsidy" from your Property Uber Alles philosophy, then you've pretty much rendered it moot.
You're talking laws, I'm talking rights. People recognize rights beyond those that the law (currently) protects. In this case, I think most people would not want the owners of a public data pipe to be the sole judge of who gets to send content across that pipe.
Stupidity like this will cause both companies problems with their customers in court and in the marketplace. I don't think a few disgruntled Swedish users are going to have much of a legal or economic impact on Cogent. Telia certainly will suffer, but they're not the ones that pulled the plug. According to Cogent, this is all Telia's fault for not being a good peering partner. But there really ought to be a better way to settle this than disrupting Internet access for millions of people.
What really has me concerned is that Cogent is choosing to punish Telia beyond simply shutting down the peering points. They've blocked all traffic that originates from Telia's network even if it comes through a third network. Doesn't that violate their peering agreements with the third networks? And isn't it dangerously like censorship? Perhaps someone should ask the FCC.
Well, look at it the other way, non-threaded programs are easier to write and are thus typically more robust and reliable. Even if that were true, it wouldn't apply to Firefox, or any other serious web browser. Maintaining the GUI and downloading embedded content efficiently both require serious concurrent programming. The fact that Firefox tends to lock up when it runs certain plugins doesn't mean it's not being concurrent. It means it's trying to be concurrent, and doing a shoddy job of it.
I don't need Wikipedia to tell me how people use words. The gap between origin and usage is beside the point. When was the last time you used "fuck", to mean "have sex", "cunt" to mean "vagina" and "motherfucker" to mean, well, you know, what Oedipus did?
Which speaks to the nasty truth about TV censorship: it's not about "decency" or "protecting the children," it's about keeping people from complaining. Thus you can't say "cunt", but you can say "nookie" even though it's also a reference to the vagina, because most people (or at least the people who run the Outraged Parents of America or whatever) think it's just a cute way of saying "have sex". Then there's "prick" and "schmuck" which are English and Yiddish words for the same thing. As a person of Jewish persuasion, I don't know whether to be offended or amused.
but in the end product reviews and trusted brand names should sort it out Right, because the big brand names never sell crap.
If anybody can sell a piece of wire and call it a "Gray-Hoverman antenna" then they'll do so. Competition is fine, but most of the big manufacturers compete on price, period. If you're not careful to restrict who can claim they're selling your invention, not only does the cheap crap own the marketplace, but it destroys the reputation for the real thing. That's why we have trademarks.
Yes it does. But if the name of the device isn't protected, then there's nothing to prevent every ripoff artist from building a sub-spec device and selling it as the real thing. Since these are always cheaper, they have a way of driving the real device off the market and giving it an undeserved reputation for being a POS.
Read the post you're replying to, dude. I did notice that it was GPLed.
GPL protects the plans. It doesn't stop me from selling old coathangers and calling them "Gray-Hoverman antennas." For that, you need trademark protection.
The server is Slashdotted, so I can't find out what legal protection this new antenna has. I hope it has some protection against cheap knockoffs. Most people aren't going to want to build this themselves, and will want to buy a factory-made version.
The Hoverman-Gray is described as "GPLed". If that's the only legal protection it has, then I predict a lot of cheap knockoffs that don't work very well. Some trademark protection (with free licenses for anybody who agrees to follow the spec) would be nice.
"Few"? Try none. SGI EOLed its last IRIX product in 2006. There might still be somebody working on patches for their support customers, but that's a small part of what is now a very small company.
It's not news that an old system was replaced by a new system. It is interesting that an old supercomputer wasn't replaced by a new supercomputer; a cluster of cheap commodity systems does the job just as well when you don't need real-time performance. This sort of creative use of PCs is what drove SGI into bankruptcy and irrelevance.
This Philipine newspaper story fills in some important details missing from the Australian PC News article: the age of the SGI system (10 years) and the reason it was costing so much to run (expensive to get application support for IRIX, an OS that hasn't had a major update in the same 10-year period).
This last issue is what really killed the SGI system: not its age (these big installations are often around for decades), but the fact that only a few people are working on SGI platforms any more, and those that do can command premium prices. If the system had been from Sun, HP, or IBM, or any company with an OS still under active development, it might have been cost effective to keep it in place. This is particularly relevant on Slashdot, where we're always hearing from folks who just don't understand why there isn't better application support for their favorite platform.
I'm still curious as to what specific SGI system got junked. Best guess: a low-end Origin.
So that's why DVD prices are so high! No, wait a minute....
The kind of monopoly that matters to this discussion is a manufacturing monopoly. All manufacturers license technology from somebody who has a "monopoly" on it, but if lots of competing manufacturers license the same technology, it does little to raise prices. You could even argue that having a standard technology that enables a lot of different companies to compete directly with each other helps lower prices. Which is pretty much what happened to the DVD market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I just can't take a wimpy zombie seriously. Stopped by nerf guns? What's next? "Excuse me, sir, do you mind if I eat your brain?"
The depressing thing is that the editor who posted this story is not Zonk or kdawson or one of the other nitwits with zero reading skills. It's Rob Malda himself, the boss of this noble web site. I guess he's too busy playing Killer Lesbian Sims to actually pay attention any more.
You'd have a point if (a) you had to have an active server to own a .com subdomain (you don't) and (b) the blacklist was distributed from ordb.com (it wasn't). The blacklist was distributed by relays.ordb.com. Shut down that server, remove its DNS entry: problem solved. Nobody can recreate relays.ordb.com without the permission of the owner of ordb.com.
The site owner is a dick and a moron — it's not very hard to configure a web server so that hotlinking isn't possible.
And is it the fault of the individual users who had all their email discarded? Many of which are individuals who didn't even know their service providers were using ORDB.
Why TF did ORDB's owners choose such an obnoxious way to make their point? If they were trying to establish once and for all that blacklist maintainers are self-rightous, mentally-challenged assholes, well, they convinced me a long time ago.
Which leads me to suspect that the breakdown is bogus. Mass media companies are notorious for cooking the books. For example, very few movies ever turn a profit on paper, no matter how many gazillion tickets they sell. Which is why there are so many lawsuits by people owed royalties.
I have a brother-in-law who's a middle-ranked professional musician; don't know how many CDs he's got out there, but he has multiple gold records, so it's in the millions. I don't pry into his finances, but if he had earned $1.60 a CD, he'd be living a lot more comfortably than he is, and he wouldn't have to do so much session work.
Not the story, this post. I have to use the story as an excuse to plug my own favorite casual gaming site, Kongregate. The cute thing about them is that most of their games are user uploads. Many of these have rough edges (my personal favorite time sink^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgame, Desktop Tower Defense, has hand-drawn icons and sound effects that seem to have been done by somebody with a microphone and a talent for silly noises), but that just adds to the fun.
Kneejerkiness aside, your post ignores one little detail: Ou is arguing that the protocol needs to be changed to support P2P.
I do share your skepticism about his defense of P2P throttling by ISPs. That said, do you really know that he's wrong about P2P apps soaking up bandwidth? A useful response is to demand that he present independent evidence (not from ISPs) that P2P is actually a problem. Simply going into flame mode and questioning his motives is childish and pointless.
And can we retire that stupid acronym already? It's become meaningless. Nowadays, one side's logical argument is the other side's FUD, and vice versa.
Starting with the Reagan era, we've been placing a high value on property rights, which is why you often hear people saying "it's private property" as if that were the only issue. Well, property rights are important, but they've never been the only right that mattered, and the pendulum is starting to swing back, as people realize how thoroughly big business has abused the free hand they've been dealt for the last couple of decades.
So if there isn't a law saying ISPs shouldn't be allowed to censor their users, most people would say there should be. Maybe there is; the FCC, in its response to the Comcast/P2P hassle, seems to think so. I believe in the right to free speech, but I'm not going to bang down AOL's door if they censor someone. I expect the person being censored to move to another provider. Except that all retail providers have to deal with the same fairly small set of backbone providers. If all the backbone providers were to impose stringent content rules on the retail ISPs and the hosting providers, they could effectively dictate what kind of content would be available.
There have, in fact, been isolated cases of people losing their hosting accounts because they offended somebody. In one case, Time-Warner, responding to pressure from religious groups, told a hosting provider to get rid of the anti-Christian web site Blackdeath.org. The host had no choice to comply: without Time-Warner's backbone they'd be out of business.
OK, not a typical case. But it should give you some idea of what would happen if all the backbone providers set themselves up as censors all at once. The fact that this isn't covered by the Second Amendment is beside the point; it would be exactly the kind of throttle on free speech that Americans don't care for. And I take offense to your idea that global bandwidth providers' pipes are public. You're offended??!! If a difference of opinion offends you... oh, never mind.
When I was a kid, there were many businesses that refused to serve people of color, or give them the same level of service as white people. Now, in complete violation of their property rights, businesses are required to treat all customers the same, regardless of race. Are you offended by that? I do lean more towards your argument with regards to the last mile being public, as in most cases the corporation who owns those lines was provided a monopoly and some sort of public funding or subsidy. Well, only protecting the "last mile" is pretty pointless, as I've already argued. And if you're going to exempt business that take "public funding or subsidy" from your Property Uber Alles philosophy, then you've pretty much rendered it moot.
You're talking laws, I'm talking rights. People recognize rights beyond those that the law (currently) protects. In this case, I think most people would not want the owners of a public data pipe to be the sole judge of who gets to send content across that pipe.
You're saying that restricting what's said is censorship, but restricting who's allowed to say it isn't? That's nonsense.
As for "It's Cogent's network": Property rights do not trump all other rights.
What really has me concerned is that Cogent is choosing to punish Telia beyond simply shutting down the peering points. They've blocked all traffic that originates from Telia's network even if it comes through a third network. Doesn't that violate their peering agreements with the third networks? And isn't it dangerously like censorship? Perhaps someone should ask the FCC.
I don't care whether FF3 is more memory-efficient than IE7. I need it to be more memory-efficient than FF2!
I don't need Wikipedia to tell me how people use words. The gap between origin and usage is beside the point. When was the last time you used "fuck", to mean "have sex", "cunt" to mean "vagina" and "motherfucker" to mean, well, you know, what Oedipus did?
Which speaks to the nasty truth about TV censorship: it's not about "decency" or "protecting the children," it's about keeping people from complaining. Thus you can't say "cunt", but you can say "nookie" even though it's also a reference to the vagina, because most people (or at least the people who run the Outraged Parents of America or whatever) think it's just a cute way of saying "have sex". Then there's "prick" and "schmuck" which are English and Yiddish words for the same thing. As a person of Jewish persuasion, I don't know whether to be offended or amused.
If anybody can sell a piece of wire and call it a "Gray-Hoverman antenna" then they'll do so. Competition is fine, but most of the big manufacturers compete on price, period. If you're not careful to restrict who can claim they're selling your invention, not only does the cheap crap own the marketplace, but it destroys the reputation for the real thing. That's why we have trademarks.
Who said anything about a copyright?
Yes it does. But if the name of the device isn't protected, then there's nothing to prevent every ripoff artist from building a sub-spec device and selling it as the real thing. Since these are always cheaper, they have a way of driving the real device off the market and giving it an undeserved reputation for being a POS.
Read the post you're replying to, dude. I did notice that it was GPLed.
GPL protects the plans. It doesn't stop me from selling old coathangers and calling them "Gray-Hoverman antennas." For that, you need trademark protection.
The server is Slashdotted, so I can't find out what legal protection this new antenna has. I hope it has some protection against cheap knockoffs. Most people aren't going to want to build this themselves, and will want to buy a factory-made version.
The Hoverman-Gray is described as "GPLed". If that's the only legal protection it has, then I predict a lot of cheap knockoffs that don't work very well. Some trademark protection (with free licenses for anybody who agrees to follow the spec) would be nice.
"Few"? Try none. SGI EOLed its last IRIX product in 2006. There might still be somebody working on patches for their support customers, but that's a small part of what is now a very small company.
It's not news that an old system was replaced by a new system. It is interesting that an old supercomputer wasn't replaced by a new supercomputer; a cluster of cheap commodity systems does the job just as well when you don't need real-time performance. This sort of creative use of PCs is what drove SGI into bankruptcy and irrelevance.
This Philipine newspaper story fills in some important details missing from the Australian PC News article: the age of the SGI system (10 years) and the reason it was costing so much to run (expensive to get application support for IRIX, an OS that hasn't had a major update in the same 10-year period).
This last issue is what really killed the SGI system: not its age (these big installations are often around for decades), but the fact that only a few people are working on SGI platforms any more, and those that do can command premium prices. If the system had been from Sun, HP, or IBM, or any company with an OS still under active development, it might have been cost effective to keep it in place. This is particularly relevant on Slashdot, where we're always hearing from folks who just don't understand why there isn't better application support for their favorite platform.
I'm still curious as to what specific SGI system got junked. Best guess: a low-end Origin.
So that's why DVD prices are so high! No, wait a minute....
The kind of monopoly that matters to this discussion is a manufacturing monopoly. All manufacturers license technology from somebody who has a "monopoly" on it, but if lots of competing manufacturers license the same technology, it does little to raise prices. You could even argue that having a standard technology that enables a lot of different companies to compete directly with each other helps lower prices. Which is pretty much what happened to the DVD market.