With things like movies, music and software, you rarely, if ever, are buying the actual content. You are buying media and a right to use. This is common and standard practice and has been for a very long time.
EA has seen fit to sell an extremely crippled right to use, which isn't one that makes sense for me.
That question, you mean? No, I don't. This philosophy only results in a sequence of escalations where ultimately everyone loses. Reprisals don't work.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The RIAA/MPAA know people are pirating, so instead of looking internally to see what is wrong with them they only see what is wrong with the people who steal it. If it were a boycott instead of a looting, they'd be desperate to increase sales, not punish their would-be customers.
I guess I'm really arguing for evolution instead of revolution. I don't think that when you burn everything down, something better always arises. I think fixing it is better than destroying it.
But mostly I'm just irritated by the see-through rationalizations people use to steal without guilt. Just because they are wrong does not mean that you aren't wrong, too.
You seem to think that if someone makes more than a certain amount of money when they sell something that they don't deserve to receive any compensation as a result, even though you still use their product? I don't understand your rationalization (although I do see it all over the place).
Teaching an entire generation that if someone charges more than you think is fair it is appropriate and even somehow noble to steal anything you want is profoundly disturbing. This isn't even remotely close to civil disobedience.
I hate what the RIAA does, so I don't use their products. I like music, but I don't need it, and neither do you. Anything else is just a weak attempt at justification for getting something you want for free.
There is a big difference between boycott and looting.
And yes, the cartoon in TFA is really, really creepy.
Your standard off-the-street computer users can't figure out Windows, much less the more technologically-complex Linux.
My mother, who still finds checking voicemail on her cell phone an incomprehensible task, uses Vista just fine. She never used XP (or any other computer) before that.
Not according to the bbc, they say the opening show cost that much. 20 billion in real money
Let's not think crazy.
1) 20 billion British pounds, or about 38 billion USD, is the cost of the games. There are a few big-ticket items included in that figure, like the cost of the Bird's Nest.
2) 25 million British pounds, or about 47 million USD, is the cost of the opening ceremonies.
This, of course, is still a hell of a lot of money to put on a nice show.
That's really part of the whole problem with illegal immigration debate. There are important issues that have nothing to do with race, but some people gravitate towards arguments that have a racial component. This detracts attention from the core issues.
So I ask myself if I would have the same problem if it were our neighbors to the north jumping the border, instead of our neighbors to the south. Yes, yes I would. You don't have to be a racist asshole in order to have a problem with illegal immigration.
Even white, Caucasian, legal immigrants had to put up with bigoted assholes for a generation or two, like the Irish and Italians. It took the Chinese a hell of a lot longer, and one wonders if the American white and black cultures will ever fully mesh.
And these are all "legal" immigrants, who were or became US citizens. How much more difficult will the cultural assimilation of central Americans be when they don't even have legal status in the US? How much longer will it take, or is it even possible?
Anyway, this isn't the forum for a long and drawn-out debate. I'm simply pointing out that there are issues that go way beyond race and search for a scapegoat.
As an investor, again, this doesn't matter. I don't care if you've sold a trillion units or one if you aren't making enough money on them for the stock price to go up or for dividends to be paid.
So if you're working for Company 'A' and in your off time at home you have a personal software project that you end up selling to Company 'B,' Company 'A' should be able to discipline you? I think not. If this was coded on official paid time, then I would whole agree with you, but there is no way to actually know. Therefore, the USAF couldn't legally touch him even if they wanted to.
This is actually often the case in the private sector as well. Have a look at your employment contract; I know mine says that anything I write belongs to my employer unless I am granted a specific exception, and I also know that this contract is enforceable where I live. It has nothing to do with 'personal time' or 'company time'. My company has retained my services, not my time. This is one of the distinctions between hourly and salaried employees.
I'm certain these laws will vary from state to state, so it might not be the case everywhere.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the current administration has been ignoring your constitution without repercussions for eight years now.
It's been a hell of a lot longer than eight years, and the travesties committed against the Constitution by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were far worse than the ones under the current administration.
You think a few thousand foreign nationals in prison at Gitmo is bad? Try over 100,000 prisoners held on US soil, most of which were American citizens, most of which were never accused of any crimes, and were targeted for imprisonment just because of their race.
Just saying that in the perspective of history, the Constitution has gone through worse and survived.
P.S. I use touch-tone phones, I have had broadband for over a decade, my car has automatic transmission, there is a digital synth in the room I'm in right now, and I haven't used a safety blade to shave my face for at least 20 years.
However, I still like tactile feedback so that I can push buttons without looking. That doesn't make me old and unadaptable, that just means I have a preference that a touch-screen device does not meet.
If I was an investor in Amazon, I would be upset that they are not releasing any numbers. I would certainly no longer hold a position in them. It looks pretty small when you think about how many devices Apple and Nintendo are selling.
As an investor, why would you care at all about how many units sold? It doesn't matter if they sold 240 or 240 million, it only matters how much they were sold for, how much it cost to sell them, and what that means to their overall cost and revenue structures.
Knowing that someone has sold X widgets at a sell price of $Y tells you absolutely nothing. Knowing that someone has sold $X in product with an average profit margin of Y% with a cost of $Z to run the company is helpful information.
Take a look at Amazon's 1Q filings and Google the terminology. The math is easy to understand and will tell you a hell of a lot more about what kind of risk you're taking than just looking at how many widgets have been sold.
P.S. My primary reading platform is an eBook device, and I plan on buying an eInk device of some kind this year, but the Kindle is so goddamn ugly I can't stand to look at it.
No, you're thinking of negligence in terms of when it causes harm to a person (injury, death, etc.). In this situation it's still a civil issue, not criminal. In other words, it's still Blizzard suing, not the government prosecuting.
If I were Blizzard and he claimed the code was leaked because he was hacked, I'd probably accuse him of negligence, at the least. He won't be able to say that he got hacked because he is sofa king we todd did and thus avoid all accountability. Lawyers aren't stupid. Generally speaking.
But it's still a ridiculous lawsuit and I hope Blizzard is not able to prevail.
It's your right to be offensive. There are no laws against that.
True. But there are laws against slander, libel, stalking and assault. All of which were, arguably, committed by the posters under an assumption of anonymity. I read a lot of their posts a year or so ago when this hit/. the first time, and these guys were definitely over the line of offensive.
If anything the people running that forum should be the ones being sued.
Seriously? People should not be accountable for what they say, but the place they said it should be? Not to mention the censorship angle... well, I guess I just have a lot of problems with your idea.
Nothing about free speech protections is intended to leave you unaccountable for what you say. There are well-established differences between stating an opinion and slander, and the Internet doesn't change that.
The username/password combos were apparently functioning sets. The DA is saying they found them on Child's own computer. The DA is all in a tizzy because Child's could then use these accounts to sneak into the system and cause mischief without getting tracked back.
Right. The only guy in the world with God level access to this network needs fake usernames/passwords so he can 'cause mischief'?
Give me a fucking break. I can think of many reasons for him to have those combos on his personal system.
He's checking to see what naughtiness has already happened with those accounts
They should have (but maybe do not) procedures for suspicious accounts. If they don't Childs should have created and documented one.
He's got accounts so he can log in with a lower level of access and see what's accessible
More reasonable, but 150 of them? That doesn't seem plausible.
These are usernames/password combos that he sniffed off the network, during routine security testing.
Possibly, but why did he need to keep a copy of the password file? If his goal was to uncover security vulnerabilities, it isn't necessary to keep the credentials uncovered.
These are people with accounts that have had some kind of trouble, and he's got them so he can attempt to diagnose problems linked to user level access.
It is not standard nor best practice to ask a user for their password, ever. If you need to access their account, you use admin privs to change their password, do whatever needs to be done, then ask the user to change it themselves when you no longer need access to their account.
It's a list of post-it pad's he's seen while walking around at work, and he'd been planning to inform the users to change their passwords.
You need the user's name for that. Not their login ID and password. Also, the number of passwords in the file makes this implausible.
They're the output list of a password security checker.
I think this one is redundant. While it is best practice to examine the security of your own network, it is not common nor reasonable to keep an archive of usernames/passwords uncovered.
Apparently the less than brilliant DA's office is unaware that the GOD level admin has the ability to do anything at all on the network and REMOVE ALL TRACES IN THE LOGS afterwards. It's trivial, when you're the one who runs the tattletales.
Dear DA office: IF YOU LOOK HARD YOU'LL UNDOUBTEDLY FIND EVIDENCE TRACY EAVESDROPPING ON THE NETWORK SNIFFING AND ATTEMPTING TO ILLEGALLY PENETRATE THE SYSTEM. IT'S PART OF HIS JOB, MORONS. IF YOU KEEP BRINGING THIS CRAP UP, YOU'LL ONLY LOOK STUPIDER.
Keep this up, and Nifong will have company in the 'worlds dumbest DA's club'
I think you should examine the well-documented, published, and logical security & administration best practices. Keeping a password list on a PC is a great way to compromise your network. If it turns out that these are, indeed, valid user security credentials, Childs doesn't appear to know the first thing about information security.
They aren't worried about releasing him on bail with what they know Child's knows. They are worried about what they don't know that he knows.
Perhaps the copy of the password file found on his office PC is not the only copy? How could you know that he doesn't have it on a USB key in a safe deposit box or something along those lines.
I wouldn't want him where I couldn't keep an eye on him until everything he had access to (and probably everything I didn't think he had access to) had undergone a complete audit.
...with routers from at least three different manufacturers. Haven't needed it since putting a UPS in place.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
# This script will send an ICMP ping to a target host. If the ping fails to # echo back, it will then execute BottleRocket (br) to send a X10 power off and # power on to the specified device via a X10 Firecracker module.
use strict; use Net::Ping;
my $testHost = '4.2.2.1'; my $x10Device = 'A1'; my $serialPort = '/dev/ttyUSB0'; my $br = '/usr/bin/br';
Yes, I do this to, and it helps quite a bit. pfSense has a decent traffic shaper. But this doesn't help as much when my voice/video/high priority traffic is competing with everyone else's bulk traffic out in the cloud.
What might be a more reasonable compromise is for ISPs to reserve a fixed 64kbps or so per user. Even that, though, will quickly get expensive. They really need to be allowed to use QoS to provide acceptable performance for latency-sensitive applications while continuing to service bulk traffic - and doing it all cheaply.
If they did that, VoIP becomes more expensive to provide than standard telephone lines.
Traditional telephone companies don't have a phone line reserved for every single customer. They know what their trunk usage patterns look like and provision accordingly. Very rarely, you might get an "all circuits are busy" message, when they have over-provisioned their trunks.
You save money on VoIP because the over-subscription capability increases, making the service cheaper to provide. Over-subscription is a Good Thing that saves money. Over-provisioning is not.
What we really need is an Internet-wide QoS policy. This could be implemented simultaneously with the transition to IPv6.
But assuming that happens, the ISPs still can't trust users to flag their own traffic, because all the l33t gamers would quickly realize that their pings are lower when they flag all their traffic for the high-priority queues. Or worse, the user flags all their BitTorrent traffic as high priority because they want more bandwidth for themselves and don't care if they are screwing their neighbors.
So that means that the ISPs have to put devices in place that they control that can effectively determine the traffic type and tag it accordingly. So they'd need either uber-fast deep inspection and packet modification engines ($$$) or they need the intelligence built into the devices installed at the customer premises ($$$). Both of these things are a lot more expensive than what's in use today.
And then there's the maintenance issue. What happens when a new real-time protocol rolls out (e.g. Skype)? All the ISPs would have to modify their infrastructure to identify and tag the traffic, and if one ISP in the middle failed to do so it breaks the whole end-to-end QoS model.
I've no doubt we'll get to a QoS-enabled Internet... one day. Might be a decade or two away though.
Slashdot Mirror
With things like movies, music and software, you rarely, if ever, are buying the actual content. You are buying media and a right to use. This is common and standard practice and has been for a very long time.
EA has seen fit to sell an extremely crippled right to use, which isn't one that makes sense for me.
Do you believe that turnabout is fair play?
That question, you mean? No, I don't. This philosophy only results in a sequence of escalations where ultimately everyone loses. Reprisals don't work.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. The RIAA/MPAA know people are pirating, so instead of looking internally to see what is wrong with them they only see what is wrong with the people who steal it. If it were a boycott instead of a looting, they'd be desperate to increase sales, not punish their would-be customers.
I guess I'm really arguing for evolution instead of revolution. I don't think that when you burn everything down, something better always arises. I think fixing it is better than destroying it.
But mostly I'm just irritated by the see-through rationalizations people use to steal without guilt. Just because they are wrong does not mean that you aren't wrong, too.
What I believe is this:
When you boycott a product, the manufacturer tries to figure out how to adapt so that the consumer starts to buy it again.
When you steal a product, the manufacturer tries to figure out how to prosecute you.
If their sales were down and no one was pirating their product, do you think changes would happen more quickly, or more slowly?
It's ok to not be part of the solution. Just don't delude yourself into believing you are.
You seem to think that if someone makes more than a certain amount of money when they sell something that they don't deserve to receive any compensation as a result, even though you still use their product? I don't understand your rationalization (although I do see it all over the place).
Teaching an entire generation that if someone charges more than you think is fair it is appropriate and even somehow noble to steal anything you want is profoundly disturbing. This isn't even remotely close to civil disobedience.
I hate what the RIAA does, so I don't use their products. I like music, but I don't need it, and neither do you. Anything else is just a weak attempt at justification for getting something you want for free.
There is a big difference between boycott and looting.
And yes, the cartoon in TFA is really, really creepy.
Your standard off-the-street computer users can't figure out Windows, much less the more technologically-complex Linux.
My mother, who still finds checking voicemail on her cell phone an incomprehensible task, uses Vista just fine. She never used XP (or any other computer) before that.
Not according to the bbc, they say the opening show cost that much. 20 billion in real money
Let's not think crazy.
1) 20 billion British pounds, or about 38 billion USD, is the cost of the games. There are a few big-ticket items included in that figure, like the cost of the Bird's Nest.
2) 25 million British pounds, or about 47 million USD, is the cost of the opening ceremonies.
This, of course, is still a hell of a lot of money to put on a nice show.
That's really part of the whole problem with illegal immigration debate. There are important issues that have nothing to do with race, but some people gravitate towards arguments that have a racial component. This detracts attention from the core issues.
So I ask myself if I would have the same problem if it were our neighbors to the north jumping the border, instead of our neighbors to the south. Yes, yes I would. You don't have to be a racist asshole in order to have a problem with illegal immigration.
Even white, Caucasian, legal immigrants had to put up with bigoted assholes for a generation or two, like the Irish and Italians. It took the Chinese a hell of a lot longer, and one wonders if the American white and black cultures will ever fully mesh.
And these are all "legal" immigrants, who were or became US citizens. How much more difficult will the cultural assimilation of central Americans be when they don't even have legal status in the US? How much longer will it take, or is it even possible?
Anyway, this isn't the forum for a long and drawn-out debate. I'm simply pointing out that there are issues that go way beyond race and search for a scapegoat.
State and Federal workers don't respond to 911 calls.
No, they just pay for most of the PSAPs where the phones ring.
According to the free market conservatives the government does more damage to the economy than anything.
Except for all those people they employ. Can you say wage erosion?
I think it would interesting to see what the world would be like if all the state and federal workers were fired. Would things be better or worse?
I think it would be deliciously ironic if that happened and you called 911 while experiencing heart attack symptoms.
That's before you lost your job due the complete economic collapse that followed.
As an investor, again, this doesn't matter. I don't care if you've sold a trillion units or one if you aren't making enough money on them for the stock price to go up or for dividends to be paid.
So if you're working for Company 'A' and in your off time at home you have a personal software project that you end up selling to Company 'B,' Company 'A' should be able to discipline you? I think not. If this was coded on official paid time, then I would whole agree with you, but there is no way to actually know. Therefore, the USAF couldn't legally touch him even if they wanted to.
This is actually often the case in the private sector as well. Have a look at your employment contract; I know mine says that anything I write belongs to my employer unless I am granted a specific exception, and I also know that this contract is enforceable where I live. It has nothing to do with 'personal time' or 'company time'. My company has retained my services, not my time. This is one of the distinctions between hourly and salaried employees.
I'm certain these laws will vary from state to state, so it might not be the case everywhere.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the current administration has been ignoring your constitution without repercussions for eight years now.
It's been a hell of a lot longer than eight years, and the travesties committed against the Constitution by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were far worse than the ones under the current administration.
You think a few thousand foreign nationals in prison at Gitmo is bad? Try over 100,000 prisoners held on US soil, most of which were American citizens, most of which were never accused of any crimes, and were targeted for imprisonment just because of their race.
Just saying that in the perspective of history, the Constitution has gone through worse and survived.
P.S. I use touch-tone phones, I have had broadband for over a decade, my car has automatic transmission, there is a digital synth in the room I'm in right now, and I haven't used a safety blade to shave my face for at least 20 years.
However, I still like tactile feedback so that I can push buttons without looking. That doesn't make me old and unadaptable, that just means I have a preference that a touch-screen device does not meet.
As soon as you try the current iPhone keyboard for more than 10 minutes and see it actually is REALLY good.
As a long-time Treo 600/650 user...
I would imagine that damn near any smartphone would come out ahead when compared to the stinking cesspool that is the Treo 650.
That's like saying "When comparing the iPhone to, say, a stick in the ass with sandy Vasoline used as lube, the iPhone is REALLY good".
Not that the iPhone isn't good. Just saying that the Treo 650 made baby Jesus cry.
If I was an investor in Amazon, I would be upset that they are not releasing any numbers. I would certainly no longer hold a position in them. It looks pretty small when you think about how many devices Apple and Nintendo are selling.
As an investor, why would you care at all about how many units sold? It doesn't matter if they sold 240 or 240 million, it only matters how much they were sold for, how much it cost to sell them, and what that means to their overall cost and revenue structures.
Knowing that someone has sold X widgets at a sell price of $Y tells you absolutely nothing. Knowing that someone has sold $X in product with an average profit margin of Y% with a cost of $Z to run the company is helpful information.
Take a look at Amazon's 1Q filings and Google the terminology. The math is easy to understand and will tell you a hell of a lot more about what kind of risk you're taking than just looking at how many widgets have been sold.
P.S. My primary reading platform is an eBook device, and I plan on buying an eInk device of some kind this year, but the Kindle is so goddamn ugly I can't stand to look at it.
No, you're thinking of negligence in terms of when it causes harm to a person (injury, death, etc.). In this situation it's still a civil issue, not criminal. In other words, it's still Blizzard suing, not the government prosecuting.
If I were Blizzard and he claimed the code was leaked because he was hacked, I'd probably accuse him of negligence, at the least. He won't be able to say that he got hacked because he is sofa king we todd did and thus avoid all accountability. Lawyers aren't stupid. Generally speaking.
But it's still a ridiculous lawsuit and I hope Blizzard is not able to prevail.
Interesting gives karma. Funny does not. Mods trying to be helpful, there.
It's your right to be offensive. There are no laws against that.
True. But there are laws against slander, libel, stalking and assault. All of which were, arguably, committed by the posters under an assumption of anonymity. I read a lot of their posts a year or so ago when this hit /. the first time, and these guys were definitely over the line of offensive.
If anything the people running that forum should be the ones being sued.
Seriously? People should not be accountable for what they say, but the place they said it should be? Not to mention the censorship angle... well, I guess I just have a lot of problems with your idea. Nothing about free speech protections is intended to leave you unaccountable for what you say. There are well-established differences between stating an opinion and slander, and the Internet doesn't change that.
from TFA --
The username/password combos were apparently functioning sets. The DA is saying they found them on Child's own computer. The DA is all in a tizzy because Child's could then use these accounts to sneak into the system and cause mischief without getting tracked back.
Right. The only guy in the world with God level access to this network needs fake usernames/passwords so he can 'cause mischief'?
Give me a fucking break. I can think of many reasons for him to have those combos on his personal system.
They should have (but maybe do not) procedures for suspicious accounts. If they don't Childs should have created and documented one.
He's got accounts so he can log in with a lower level of access and see what's accessible
More reasonable, but 150 of them? That doesn't seem plausible.
These are usernames/password combos that he sniffed off the network, during routine security testing.
Possibly, but why did he need to keep a copy of the password file? If his goal was to uncover security vulnerabilities, it isn't necessary to keep the credentials uncovered.
These are people with accounts that have had some kind of trouble, and he's got them so he can attempt to diagnose problems linked to user level access.
It is not standard nor best practice to ask a user for their password, ever. If you need to access their account, you use admin privs to change their password, do whatever needs to be done, then ask the user to change it themselves when you no longer need access to their account.
It's a list of post-it pad's he's seen while walking around at work, and he'd been planning to inform the users to change their passwords.
You need the user's name for that. Not their login ID and password. Also, the number of passwords in the file makes this implausible.
They're the output list of a password security checker.
I think this one is redundant. While it is best practice to examine the security of your own network, it is not common nor reasonable to keep an archive of usernames/passwords uncovered.
Apparently the less than brilliant DA's office is unaware that the GOD level admin has the ability to do anything at all on the network and REMOVE ALL TRACES IN THE LOGS afterwards. It's trivial, when you're the one who runs the tattletales.
Dear DA office: IF YOU LOOK HARD YOU'LL UNDOUBTEDLY FIND EVIDENCE TRACY EAVESDROPPING ON THE NETWORK SNIFFING AND ATTEMPTING TO ILLEGALLY PENETRATE THE SYSTEM. IT'S PART OF HIS JOB, MORONS. IF YOU KEEP BRINGING THIS CRAP UP, YOU'LL ONLY LOOK STUPIDER.
Keep this up, and Nifong will have company in the 'worlds dumbest DA's club'
I think you should examine the well-documented, published, and logical security & administration best practices. Keeping a password list on a PC is a great way to compromise your network. If it turns out that these are, indeed, valid user security credentials, Childs doesn't appear to know the first thing about information security.
They aren't worried about releasing him on bail with what they know Child's knows. They are worried about what they don't know that he knows. Perhaps the copy of the password file found on his office PC is not the only copy? How could you know that he doesn't have it on a USB key in a safe deposit box or something along those lines. I wouldn't want him where I couldn't keep an eye on him until everything he had access to (and probably everything I didn't think he had access to) had undergone a complete audit.
...with routers from at least three different manufacturers. Haven't needed it since putting a UPS in place.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
# This script will send an ICMP ping to a target host. If the ping fails to
# echo back, it will then execute BottleRocket (br) to send a X10 power off and
# power on to the specified device via a X10 Firecracker module.
use strict;
use Net::Ping;
my $testHost = '4.2.2.1';
my $x10Device = 'A1';
my $serialPort = '/dev/ttyUSB0';
my $br = '/usr/bin/br';
my $ping = Net::Ping->new("icmp");
if(!$ping->ping($testHost)) {
print "Ping test to $testHost failed.\n";
print "Powering off device $x10Device.\n";
for(my $i=0; $i<3; ++$i) {
system("$br -x $serialPort -f $x10Device");
}
sleep(5);
print "Powering on device $x10Device.\n";
for(my $i=0; $i<3; ++$i) {
system("$br -r 5 -x $serialPort -n $x10Device");
}
}
$ping->close;
Yes, I do this to, and it helps quite a bit. pfSense has a decent traffic shaper. But this doesn't help as much when my voice/video/high priority traffic is competing with everyone else's bulk traffic out in the cloud.
What might be a more reasonable compromise is for ISPs to reserve a fixed 64kbps or so per user. Even that, though, will quickly get expensive. They really need to be allowed to use QoS to provide acceptable performance for latency-sensitive applications while continuing to service bulk traffic - and doing it all cheaply.
If they did that, VoIP becomes more expensive to provide than standard telephone lines.
Traditional telephone companies don't have a phone line reserved for every single customer. They know what their trunk usage patterns look like and provision accordingly. Very rarely, you might get an "all circuits are busy" message, when they have over-provisioned their trunks.
You save money on VoIP because the over-subscription capability increases, making the service cheaper to provide. Over-subscription is a Good Thing that saves money. Over-provisioning is not.
What we really need is an Internet-wide QoS policy. This could be implemented simultaneously with the transition to IPv6.
But assuming that happens, the ISPs still can't trust users to flag their own traffic, because all the l33t gamers would quickly realize that their pings are lower when they flag all their traffic for the high-priority queues. Or worse, the user flags all their BitTorrent traffic as high priority because they want more bandwidth for themselves and don't care if they are screwing their neighbors.
So that means that the ISPs have to put devices in place that they control that can effectively determine the traffic type and tag it accordingly. So they'd need either uber-fast deep inspection and packet modification engines ($$$) or they need the intelligence built into the devices installed at the customer premises ($$$). Both of these things are a lot more expensive than what's in use today.
And then there's the maintenance issue. What happens when a new real-time protocol rolls out (e.g. Skype)? All the ISPs would have to modify their infrastructure to identify and tag the traffic, and if one ISP in the middle failed to do so it breaks the whole end-to-end QoS model.
I've no doubt we'll get to a QoS-enabled Internet... one day. Might be a decade or two away though.