Lots of things are fine to privatize. The question isn't whether or not its "important" but whether or not its competitive.
Unfortunately we try to apply capitalist ideals to everything, whether its viably competitive or not. Usually that fails miserably. There are just some things in the world that don't lend themselves to competition -- either because they're tied to physical resources that simply can't be divided or because they're so costly to construct that private industry doesn't deem worth the investment.
Things like telephones kind of cross both issues -- its super expensive to run any significant amount of line, plus there are physical space limitations (both to prevent interference between competing lines, plus nobody wants to see 14 sets of wires hanging everywhere when 1 or 2 is sufficient and the rest are just there because we don't like sharing.)
We've got it into our collective heads that private industry is somehow magically more efficient than public services. But that's a total false dichotomy. Competitive industries are more efficient than monopolies. Whether a monopoly is government run or privately run, its still going to be a big mess of greed and inefficiency because there's no pressure to improve.
The only difference is that private monopolies tend to charge more to end users because they've got an incentive to maximize profits that a public service doesn't have -- and that almost always just means increased prices as that's easier to do than coming up with more efficient processes.
But all of that doesn't mean nothing should be privatized. Most things in the world aren't natural monopolies and there's no problem with privatizing them -- competition will weed out the garbage from the market.
But even then you still have to maintain a limited amount of regulation in order to avoid things like non-natural monopolies from forming or to control/prevent externalities such as water and air pollution and to ensure that the products are going to be safe for consumers. Even in a competitive environment (and sometimes especially in a competitive environment,) when profit is the only motivation its far too easy for companies to just ignore things like public safety if it improves their bottom line.
Pure communism is bad. We all agree on that. However, pure capitalism is bad as well. Like almost everything else in the world, the best option by far is a balance between two extremes.
Yes, I was glibly taking the example to its extreme. Obviously feeding a troll here but come on. Read between the lines.
Who do you think pays now?
The big "shitty" corporations, which the OP grouped in with government as things he wanted to see reduced or eliminated. Though I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't have some sort of government subsidy mixed in there.
Libertarian and anarchist are not the same thing, by the way.
I'm aware. Anarchists want no government. Libertarians want a magic government that does exactly and only the things they want, exactly and only at the time they want them, for free, and disappears as soon as the task is complete.
Both are unworkable in the real world, but the anarchist vision at least would be plausible if humans didn't have such a strong desire for leadership.
Actually the Republican party and the Republican establishment do not want Trump.
So? The party (and the resulting government) is more than one person.. though with the amount of party line voting that goes on its sometimes hard to remember that.
Electronic media including emails is considered greatly inferior.
I think you need to join the 21st century. Email is no longer the unloved stepchild of communications. Most people treat it as a legitimate form of communications (and many companies don't even bother reading paper letters/resumes/etc anymore.. which I know isn't the same as the government but it definitely indicates a broader trend.)
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote
No, no it isn't. For exactly the reason I mentioned: One vote gives you 1/350millionth of a say in government, applied to a broad range of issues, once every 4 years. Letters can be written whenever you want and can be specific to an issue that's important to you -- and you can even send it if the elected official isn't the one you voted for!
Trouble with letters isn't that they are useless. The trouble is that people assume if they send a letter that the politician will magically agree with everything they say and implement their ideas immediately. Which is not how things work. Just because you want something and even just because you spent the time drafting a letter, doesn't mean they'll listen to you. But then again they might so its always worth a try if your opinion is that strong.
Again, digital, largely considered to be of little value.
20 years ago perhaps. Maybe even 10 years ago. But that's no longer the case. People have realized that just because I use a keyboard instead of a pen doesn't make my thoughts less relevant, and similarly with online petitions -- just because the "signatures" are in the form of email addresses doesn't mean they aren't just as valid as a written one.
And the online petitions have scale on their side. If you go out canvassing you might get a few hundred signatures. That might be enough to get your local city government to install a new stop light but spread across the hundreds of millions of people in the entire country, 100 signatures from one tiny little area isn't even worth looking at.
100,000 "signatures" with representation from every state on the union on the other hand.. that's hard to ignore. Even if you allow a little fudge room for fakes and duplicates, that's a hell of a lot of people as I said. Even if the politicians ignore it, the media sure as hell won't and once they get involved politics kind of has to keep up.
Of course just like a real petition, you can't just collect signatures and sit on them. There still has to be someone running the operation who's willing and able to take the results to the politicians and/or media. But I'd just assumed that was obvious.
Look at the White House's online petition system
I'd rather not. The whitehouse running their own petition system would be like letting a criminal be the judge at his own trial -- you'd never get a guilty verdict.
Groups like the EFF and OpenMedia.ca as well as many similar groups internationally.. those are the ones you want to go to. I of course tend to focus on internet issues but you can find organizations setting up these kind of petitions for environmental issues and I'm sure many others.
Just keep in mind that the petition is only one step along the way. Someone has to first raise the issue, then raise awareness of the issue, then start and operate the petition, then take the results to someone who will listen and has the power to do something about it. Just like a door-to-door petition process. The petition itself is only one step along the way but its the most important one since its adding the voice of the people to the issue. In recent years, these online
Because someone has to pay for it and nobody likes paying for things anymore. Companies don't like investing when it negatively affects the next quarterly report, even if they'd see a return in 5 years. And homeowners aren't going to pay for a line that does exactly what their current line does (if they could even afford it in the first place.)
I mean none of that should be taken as absolutes -- obviously companies occasionally manage to think beyond 3 months and there's obviously some homeowners who get enough benefit from fiber over copper to drop the cash on it when their phone company refuses to do so, but neither of those are the common case.
Back in the day when the copper was being deployed originally, this was of course still true but the government stepped in and made sure the wires were run, either directly or through major incentives to local providers.
There was some effort to do that again with fiber but the government also doesn't want to spend anything anymore and we're culturally super against corporate oversight these days to boot leading to more than one fiasco where companies took the incentives and then just didn't bother following through (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml.) That puts a fast damper on the attempts to incentivize companies and we're all left in a world where widespread fiber is a far-future, if ever, dream instead of a modern reality.
I'm guessing you've never lived too far outside of an urban setting. Power outages are super common in even semi-rural areas. Basically any area that only has one main line coming in from the larger grid, especially if they also happen to be in a high-wind area (tree branches falling on the lines was a very common issue when I lived in such a place.)
And when I say super common, there was a while when I first moved there that during the winter months, multi-hour outages were pretty much a weekly occurrence and multi-day outages happened at least once a year. Its improved a lot since then (and I've since moved as well) but I have little doubt that there's plenty of places Verizon services that are still subject to frequent and long-lasting power disruptions (to make matters worse.. those also tend to be the places where its most expensive to maintain the copper -- long runs and low population really drive up the per-customer costs quickly.)
Not if they can help it. Maybe get a lower bandwidth since its almost certain that a tiny stingray box can't handle the throughput of a real tower, but the whole idea is that you can't tell if you're being snooped so they do everything in their power to maintain effective service while operating.
Greed I agree with but your arguments for control and power? What possible benefit would Verizon get out of fucking people over in a disaster situation? Not to mention POTS systems used to get overrun in those same scenarios before everyone switched to flooding the cell networks -- there's only so many circuits available.
Similarly, why on earth would they want to disrupt control communication? If anything they'd want states of emergency resolved as quickly as possible -- people running for their lives generally don't stop to pay their telephone bill on the way. Especially for a phone service that's currently sitting under 12 feet of water in a collapsed house.
I think your tin foil has is already on and perhaps its a tad tight. Might want to loosen that a bit.
This is purely about greed. Nothing else. Its simply cheaper for them to maintain a handful of cell towers than it is to maintain dozens of roadside boxes and last mile copper (or fiber if it was already there.)
If you can follow regulation for $50,000,000 or skip it for $2,000,000, you break a few rules
That right there is a problem. If breaking a regulation only costs 4% of your returns, its effectively meaningless because its not "you" breaking a few rules, its "everyone" breaking ALL such rules.
That's like saying instead of jailing thieves, we'll fine them $1000. That might be great for preventing low-income theft but its going to coincide with a marked increase in theft in rich neighborhoods where you can make off with $10000 worth of goods and only have to return 10% of your earnings -- IF you get caught. So adjusted for risk it would be even less than that.
the regulators can and should start raising criminal conspiracy charges
They should, but they rarely do. Yes there's been the odd high-profile case as you mentioned later but there's no cumulative effect here so the vast majority of the time the company will just pay their fine, clean up their act for a few weeks until the pressure's off and continue on until the next time they're caught. Corporate fuckarounds don't have a three strikes law.
If our regulations can't keep businesses in line, we need to re-examine if our regulations are behind the current technology
Its not a question of whether the regulations can keep businesses in line. Its a question of whether the regulators can enforce the regulations that exist. I agree that regulations need to be updated and revised as technology and culture changes, but an unenforced regulation is useless regardless of whether its good or bad (also: to whom?)
There definitely should be a method in place to detect (likely the hardest part,) re-evaluate and revoke bad regulations, but simply letting companies ignore them isn't the best solution since they'll happily ignore good regulations as well if they can get away with it. Companies base all of their judgement on their bottom line with little or no regard to the environment, public safety or other desirable metrics.
The job of the regulators is to ensure that damage to those metrics is encoded in corporate bottom lines to ensure those companies do the right thing, and if the regulations are weak or the penalties ineffective then the regulators aren't going to be successful.
If there is no violence, actual threat, coercion, or fraud there should be no crime
If there is no crime, there should be no crime. Excellent tautology there.
Unfortunately history has shown repeatedly over and over that there's always someone out to benefit themselves by hurting others. You want to be rid of government _and_ shitty corporations. How do you expect that's going to work? Do you think the next Standard Oil just say to themselves "you know, we're too big and concentrating too much power lets break ourselves up let competition reduce our profit margins!" That's not a choice any company ever has made. Maybe you just think you can get the entire country to boycott such practices? Stop driving and heating their homes for several months or years out of pure libertarian idealism while their children freeze around them?
You say you have the highest rate of BitCoin acceptance anywhere. Well good for you. What are you going to do about it in your magic world where neither large governments nor large companies exist? You might get someone to start a local ISP and roll out cabling to the richest parts of your town, but who would you convince to drop hundreds of millions of dollars to link up with England or Brazil or India? Or even the tens of millions of dollars to link to the next county? And if there is an entity large enough to spend that kind of money, would they not then fall into your "shitty corporation" category? Not to mention someone to generate all the electricity to run your computers and the ISP and everything else. Or do you have a cool billion sitting around to build your own power plant? And the land to build it on? And where's the motivation to keep your plant from polluting the environment? After all the crap you pump in the river only affects the town downstream you and your friends a perfectly fine! And what's your motivation to provide timely and cheap access to your electricity? Competition? How many power plants do you think the population (never mind the environment) could sustain? And just building lots of smaller plants doesn't really work either since bigger is just flat out better in almost all power plant designs (in terms of lower cost per watt.) Perhaps just assume everyone will go solar? That's at least space and environmentally efficient. Who's going to spend the time and money on research to improve solar technology is another question though (and there's definitely no reason to believe we've reached the peak of solar yet! Unless we stop trying.) Maybe get a lucky tinkerer in his back yard have a eureka moment eventually but dedicated research also costs huge amounts of money -- the scale of which is usually only available to governments and large corporations.
The problem with all these libertarian dreams is that they only work if a majority of people don't follow them, at least if you scale them up past the size of a small town or so where people are close enough to have significant and direct influence on each other. Beyond that, it almost always breaks down into "we want everything the world has to offer but don't want to accept responsibility for our part in it." Its just not a winning formula.
Government exists for a reason. Sure they have a habit of stepping into areas they really shouldn't be (marriage is a good example) but what you need is checks against that, not complete elimination. And even the libertarians who grudgingly accept a small government still don't want to pay taxes as if governments can magically pull money out of thin air (well technically they can just print it, but that only leads to mass inflation. So yay you get to keep your $1000 this year but its only worth $10 in next year's money and pennies the year after. Savings! Then again a lot of you want to return to the gold standard so back to pulling money out of thin air.)
Ok so I've definitely ranted far too long already but the TL;DR is this: Libertarian idealism is simply impractical on any sort of large
Well if you want to get pedantic, you're only assuming that "people" means "most people." As long as there's more than one person somewhere who would rather be literally dry ass-fucked then the GP is still technically valid.
Of course very few people would interpret it that way just like very few people really give a damn if you use "literally" in the figurative sense, or use "who" when "whom" is more appropriate or any of the other grammar nazi-isms that you trolls love to go on about. (Oh crap. I forgot to capitalize Nazi as a proper noun. The end is nigh! There's even a little red underline warning me of the world's imminent doom!)
And voting for Republicans rewards the tactics of the Republicans. That's kind of the point. GOP also doesn't care how much you bitch and moan once they're in office. Its called politics. You win and then can stop thinking about it for 3 years.
As for your vote being power. Well it is. You have ~1/350million of a country's worth of power. Yippie. That you can use to choose between all of two options once every four years. If you happen to consider a specific issue to be of particular important, your vote is completely worthless unless it just happens to be something one of the two parties decide to talk about once every 4 years (or every two years if you want to include midterms.) If your favorite issue doesn't fall into that narrow category then even your tiny amount of voting power won't help you.
Letters and emails are actually super helpful (well-written ones at least. A giant ball of flame is less so.) That doesn't mean every single one will be responded to (or even read, though most of them will at least see the eyeballs of an aid.) And it definitely doesn't mean your politician is going to agree with you and start pushing whatever issue is up your rear that day. But the fact that you sat down and wrote an email means you're more involved in the political process than 80-90% of the country and that doesn't go unnoticed.
If you really want to make change though, petitions are the way to go right now. I know it seems silly but the internet has taken something that used to help convince a small town mayor and scaled it up so that it has at least the potentially to be effective on a national scale.
Everyone, including politicians, know the downsides, in-grouping and system gaming potential of anything on the internet but if you can get 100,000 virtual signatures and can prove that a good majority of them are legitimate (ie: you didn't just randomly generate 100k email addresses or hire a Chinese labor farm to fake 100k signatures or something like that) then news agencies and politicians and other such people start to take notice.
100k is a hell of a lot of folk who are all saying the same thing and even if it doesn't cost any individual much effort to click "I agree," the fact that so many of them DO agree can start making real change possible.
Main thing its missing is a working video blocker so that videos will start playing when I want them to, not as soon as a tab is loaded. Right now I have like 3 or 4 different extensions loaded purely to try and prevent autoplaying videos and it still doesn't get them all. So annoying.
Under current law. That's my point. This whole discussion is about changing the laws. Just because you can't today doesn't mean you won't be able to next year. And similarly, just because you make a house (or car or spaceship) analogy doesn't mean that lawmakers will follow your analogy -- different things get different laws all the time no matter how similar they are from any single specific viewpoint.
Well I imagine that's the point: If its for-profit, knowledge is presumed, even if the poster in fact did not have knowledge. They _should_ have done their due diligence and therefore known that what they were linking to was infringing.
Its the not-for-profit case that's in question: If I link to those infringing images from my FB page, its obviously not for profit (at least not my profit..) so that presumption of knowledge doesn't apply and that's where the question comes up: How would they prove I knew my link was pointing to infringing material?
That's what I mean by a semi-intentional loophole. There's no discussion regarding how to do that. Its just assumed that "if its not for profit then its not important enough for anyone to bother so its OK." Which is probably true 99.9% of the time. But then that 1000th case will come along a decade later and suddenly everything hits the fan because somebody was lazy back when they wrote the loophole into the law (and/or lacked the foresight to see even such a glaring loophole.)
ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published."
Very similar in practice, but not quite the same thing. In particular, it means the infringing status of the link depends not on the link itself, but on whatever's on the other side of the link.
In some ways that's actually scarier. It means that something that isn't infringing today might be infringing tomorrow so sites would have to be constantly re-scanning every link they've ever posted to ensure that whatever's on the other side of the link hasn't changed to something that's now infringing.
I mean that's already the case if you host copies of the content you've licensed. When the license expires you need to remove that content. But that's a lot simpler because you're hosting it so you (should) know what's there and can just delete the file when the license expires. You have full control over the process. Sure your old articles will have some 404'd links but whatever they're old.
Under the new regime you'd have to actually go through every single article and replace, remove or otherwise invalidate any external links you've used that may no longer be licensed. Never mind the potential for abuse if someone intentionally replaces a licensed imaged with an infringing one at the same link.
And if your car had an address (itself, not the location where you parked it -- that bit of ground isn't moving no matter what you do with your car) then maybe that address would be copyrightable. Who knows.
But since cars don't have addresses that can be linked to in any meaningful way, that's not really an issue we need to be concerned with in the foreseeable future.
Also, things like OnStar's tracking identifiers (or whatever they use) don't count as the cars "address" in terms of this argument either, since those aren't publicly available or accessible (and OnStar probably would sue you for something -- maybe not copyright, but something -- if you figured that stuff out and decided to publish it.)
So? Ancillary copyright isn't a good idea by any means, but that's not because of what some guy said 20 years ago, even if that guy was Tim Berners-Lee. The web has evolved a lot since 1997.
They do. Frequently. And the hosting site just says its unmonitored user content and claim service provider protections. So they're stuck with an IP address at best, if they were even lucky enough to get that from the hosting company. So they attempt to prosecute "John Does" and that typically doesn't lead very far either.
Its not unreasonable that they want to protect their interests, but the anonymity of the internet makes it damned near impossible to find the true culprit so they're grasping at straws all the way up and down the chain wherever they can think to find one.
The offended parties aren't to blame here. They're doing what they can in a shitty (for them) situation. The people to blame are the governments that put business interests ahead of the people they're supposed to be serving.
If copyright holders can't figure out how to make a profit in the internet age then they should be allowed to go the hell out of business and get replaced by more savvy companies rather than mangling our legal system to turn the entire population into full-on criminals for (individually) minor offenses.
I think Google could have nipped this in the bud a couple years ago: "Ok you don't want us to link to you? Done. Enjoy having all your competitors at the top of the search rankings." I don't imagine it would have gone much past the first one or two whiners.
Of course its too late for that now that its exploded from "we want some of Google's money" to "lets break the internet some more!"
Calling that a crime is unworkable in both the physical and internet world.
I believe you're very wrong there. Digital data can be moved (and removed) in a way that a physical address simply cannot. Sure you can destroy the building at that address and put up a new one or pave it over or do whatever else you want, but that land is still there.
Web addresses are far more malleable. That court website could be taken offline tomorrow and its just gone. Its not like destroying a building where the land still remains -- the website is completely non-existent at that point. And that's an enormous difference that the law SHOULD be taking into account.
And if you'd rather try to compare a website to the building rather than the land it stands upon, then you're not really helping your cause since buildings have been copyrighted in the EU already.
How is the bits representing that link any more of a "fact" than the bits representing the image that link points to?
But never minding that, I don't think anyone says links should be copyrightable -- A link that points to copyrighted information infringes on that information's copyrignt, not on the link's copyright (if there is such a thing.)
For example, if that image link you mentioned above gets changed by Playboy on their end, then the copyright infringement is cleared up without your own involvement at all, because the raw text of the link isn't the infringement and since it no longer points to a copyrighted image, its obviously no longer infringing on said image.
Not that I'm agreeing with this kind of ancillary copyright crap. I think its a horrific abuse of the legal system. But fighting legal battles with linguistic pedantry has never gotten anyone very far even when they're right because fundamentally the law is about actions, not terminology (and even more so in a multilingual entity like the EU. I doubt they use "link" or "fact" or any other English term in France but EU law still applies to them nonetheless.)
The way I'm reading it is that guilt is based on knowledge that what you're doing is infringement, and that knowledge is presumed if you're doing it for profit.
However, you could still be guilty if you post a link with knowledge that its infringing even if you don't post it for profit.
I'm not sure how they're planning on determining knowledge of infringement. My guess is that its one of those semi-intentional loopholes where they just assume people won't take advantage of the situation because nobody who's big enough to matter would fail to have knowledge of their actions.
Of course TFS isn't as in-depth as the article (never mind the actual ruling) so maybe that's covered but just from what I see there's a huge potential for sites like/. and Reddit to get sued for something vague like "well you know your site could potentially host infringing links and that constitutes knowledge of infringement so you're liable."
I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it. Which might seem like the same thing when you don't have any other use for the property but from a legal perspective, its still yours.
As for the first, I'm pretty sure freedom of speech doesn't cover zoning regulations to start with since that's not "speech" by any definition I've ever heard. Privacy protection might help you hide your activities if you're planning to go against the new zoning but that only holds up until you do something that makes your business public knowledge in which case you'd likely get fined for breaking the regulations.
That said, there may well be some applicable law somewhere. It just might not be a constitutional amendment. There's thousands of laws that aren't in the constitution (every single municipal and state law to start with! And hundreds if not thousands of federal laws as well, never mind when they start digging into case law which isn't actually laws in the technical sense of the government creating and enforcing them but are still given significant consideration in court.)
Of course, that kind of tinkering with human DNA is unethical.
I think the bigger problem is that its unpredictable since genetics has continually proven itself to be more complex than we currently understand. At some point we might get ahead of it but we're not anywhere close to it yet. The biggest and best arguments against GMO crops and other genetic engineering is that we just don't know what the long-term results will be.
And testing on humans in order to learn more is considered unethical. If you could somehow prove that your genetic manipulation prevented heart disease without any other serious effects then you'd probably be able to get past the whole ethics issue without much trouble. But being able to prove that without testing on several hundred (or thousand) embryos is nearly impossible.
Which gives us a bit of a catch-22. We could potentially significantly improve the lives of future generations, but at the cost of treating some number of our current generations' babies essentially the same way we treat lab mice. And that's just not a trade-off we're willing to make in our current society.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of things are fine to privatize. The question isn't whether or not its "important" but whether or not its competitive.
Unfortunately we try to apply capitalist ideals to everything, whether its viably competitive or not. Usually that fails miserably. There are just some things in the world that don't lend themselves to competition -- either because they're tied to physical resources that simply can't be divided or because they're so costly to construct that private industry doesn't deem worth the investment.
Things like telephones kind of cross both issues -- its super expensive to run any significant amount of line, plus there are physical space limitations (both to prevent interference between competing lines, plus nobody wants to see 14 sets of wires hanging everywhere when 1 or 2 is sufficient and the rest are just there because we don't like sharing.)
We've got it into our collective heads that private industry is somehow magically more efficient than public services. But that's a total false dichotomy. Competitive industries are more efficient than monopolies. Whether a monopoly is government run or privately run, its still going to be a big mess of greed and inefficiency because there's no pressure to improve.
The only difference is that private monopolies tend to charge more to end users because they've got an incentive to maximize profits that a public service doesn't have -- and that almost always just means increased prices as that's easier to do than coming up with more efficient processes.
But all of that doesn't mean nothing should be privatized. Most things in the world aren't natural monopolies and there's no problem with privatizing them -- competition will weed out the garbage from the market.
But even then you still have to maintain a limited amount of regulation in order to avoid things like non-natural monopolies from forming or to control/prevent externalities such as water and air pollution and to ensure that the products are going to be safe for consumers. Even in a competitive environment (and sometimes especially in a competitive environment,) when profit is the only motivation its far too easy for companies to just ignore things like public safety if it improves their bottom line.
Pure communism is bad. We all agree on that. However, pure capitalism is bad as well. Like almost everything else in the world, the best option by far is a balance between two extremes.
It is not remotely a tautology.
Yes, I was glibly taking the example to its extreme. Obviously feeding a troll here but come on. Read between the lines.
Who do you think pays now?
The big "shitty" corporations, which the OP grouped in with government as things he wanted to see reduced or eliminated. Though I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't have some sort of government subsidy mixed in there.
Libertarian and anarchist are not the same thing, by the way.
I'm aware. Anarchists want no government. Libertarians want a magic government that does exactly and only the things they want, exactly and only at the time they want them, for free, and disappears as soon as the task is complete.
Both are unworkable in the real world, but the anarchist vision at least would be plausible if humans didn't have such a strong desire for leadership.
Actually the Republican party and the Republican establishment do not want Trump.
So? The party (and the resulting government) is more than one person.. though with the amount of party line voting that goes on its sometimes hard to remember that.
Electronic media including emails is considered greatly inferior.
I think you need to join the 21st century. Email is no longer the unloved stepchild of communications. Most people treat it as a legitimate form of communications (and many companies don't even bother reading paper letters/resumes/etc anymore.. which I know isn't the same as the government but it definitely indicates a broader trend.)
And still even a letter is vastly inferior to a vote
No, no it isn't. For exactly the reason I mentioned: One vote gives you 1/350millionth of a say in government, applied to a broad range of issues, once every 4 years. Letters can be written whenever you want and can be specific to an issue that's important to you -- and you can even send it if the elected official isn't the one you voted for!
Trouble with letters isn't that they are useless. The trouble is that people assume if they send a letter that the politician will magically agree with everything they say and implement their ideas immediately. Which is not how things work. Just because you want something and even just because you spent the time drafting a letter, doesn't mean they'll listen to you. But then again they might so its always worth a try if your opinion is that strong.
Again, digital, largely considered to be of little value.
20 years ago perhaps. Maybe even 10 years ago. But that's no longer the case. People have realized that just because I use a keyboard instead of a pen doesn't make my thoughts less relevant, and similarly with online petitions -- just because the "signatures" are in the form of email addresses doesn't mean they aren't just as valid as a written one.
And the online petitions have scale on their side. If you go out canvassing you might get a few hundred signatures. That might be enough to get your local city government to install a new stop light but spread across the hundreds of millions of people in the entire country, 100 signatures from one tiny little area isn't even worth looking at.
100,000 "signatures" with representation from every state on the union on the other hand.. that's hard to ignore. Even if you allow a little fudge room for fakes and duplicates, that's a hell of a lot of people as I said. Even if the politicians ignore it, the media sure as hell won't and once they get involved politics kind of has to keep up.
Of course just like a real petition, you can't just collect signatures and sit on them. There still has to be someone running the operation who's willing and able to take the results to the politicians and/or media. But I'd just assumed that was obvious.
Look at the White House's online petition system
I'd rather not. The whitehouse running their own petition system would be like letting a criminal be the judge at his own trial -- you'd never get a guilty verdict.
Groups like the EFF and OpenMedia.ca as well as many similar groups internationally.. those are the ones you want to go to. I of course tend to focus on internet issues but you can find organizations setting up these kind of petitions for environmental issues and I'm sure many others.
Just keep in mind that the petition is only one step along the way. Someone has to first raise the issue, then raise awareness of the issue, then start and operate the petition, then take the results to someone who will listen and has the power to do something about it. Just like a door-to-door petition process. The petition itself is only one step along the way but its the most important one since its adding the voice of the people to the issue. In recent years, these online
Because someone has to pay for it and nobody likes paying for things anymore. Companies don't like investing when it negatively affects the next quarterly report, even if they'd see a return in 5 years. And homeowners aren't going to pay for a line that does exactly what their current line does (if they could even afford it in the first place.)
I mean none of that should be taken as absolutes -- obviously companies occasionally manage to think beyond 3 months and there's obviously some homeowners who get enough benefit from fiber over copper to drop the cash on it when their phone company refuses to do so, but neither of those are the common case.
Back in the day when the copper was being deployed originally, this was of course still true but the government stepped in and made sure the wires were run, either directly or through major incentives to local providers.
There was some effort to do that again with fiber but the government also doesn't want to spend anything anymore and we're culturally super against corporate oversight these days to boot leading to more than one fiasco where companies took the incentives and then just didn't bother following through (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml.) That puts a fast damper on the attempts to incentivize companies and we're all left in a world where widespread fiber is a far-future, if ever, dream instead of a modern reality.
The power outage for phone argument is over used.
I'm guessing you've never lived too far outside of an urban setting. Power outages are super common in even semi-rural areas. Basically any area that only has one main line coming in from the larger grid, especially if they also happen to be in a high-wind area (tree branches falling on the lines was a very common issue when I lived in such a place.)
And when I say super common, there was a while when I first moved there that during the winter months, multi-hour outages were pretty much a weekly occurrence and multi-day outages happened at least once a year. Its improved a lot since then (and I've since moved as well) but I have little doubt that there's plenty of places Verizon services that are still subject to frequent and long-lasting power disruptions (to make matters worse.. those also tend to be the places where its most expensive to maintain the copper -- long runs and low population really drive up the per-customer costs quickly.)
Not if they can help it. Maybe get a lower bandwidth since its almost certain that a tiny stingray box can't handle the throughput of a real tower, but the whole idea is that you can't tell if you're being snooped so they do everything in their power to maintain effective service while operating.
Greed I agree with but your arguments for control and power? What possible benefit would Verizon get out of fucking people over in a disaster situation? Not to mention POTS systems used to get overrun in those same scenarios before everyone switched to flooding the cell networks -- there's only so many circuits available.
Similarly, why on earth would they want to disrupt control communication? If anything they'd want states of emergency resolved as quickly as possible -- people running for their lives generally don't stop to pay their telephone bill on the way. Especially for a phone service that's currently sitting under 12 feet of water in a collapsed house.
I think your tin foil has is already on and perhaps its a tad tight. Might want to loosen that a bit.
This is purely about greed. Nothing else. Its simply cheaper for them to maintain a handful of cell towers than it is to maintain dozens of roadside boxes and last mile copper (or fiber if it was already there.)
If you can follow regulation for $50,000,000 or skip it for $2,000,000, you break a few rules
That right there is a problem. If breaking a regulation only costs 4% of your returns, its effectively meaningless because its not "you" breaking a few rules, its "everyone" breaking ALL such rules.
That's like saying instead of jailing thieves, we'll fine them $1000. That might be great for preventing low-income theft but its going to coincide with a marked increase in theft in rich neighborhoods where you can make off with $10000 worth of goods and only have to return 10% of your earnings -- IF you get caught. So adjusted for risk it would be even less than that.
the regulators can and should start raising criminal conspiracy charges
They should, but they rarely do. Yes there's been the odd high-profile case as you mentioned later but there's no cumulative effect here so the vast majority of the time the company will just pay their fine, clean up their act for a few weeks until the pressure's off and continue on until the next time they're caught. Corporate fuckarounds don't have a three strikes law.
If our regulations can't keep businesses in line, we need to re-examine if our regulations are behind the current technology
Its not a question of whether the regulations can keep businesses in line. Its a question of whether the regulators can enforce the regulations that exist. I agree that regulations need to be updated and revised as technology and culture changes, but an unenforced regulation is useless regardless of whether its good or bad (also: to whom?)
There definitely should be a method in place to detect (likely the hardest part,) re-evaluate and revoke bad regulations, but simply letting companies ignore them isn't the best solution since they'll happily ignore good regulations as well if they can get away with it. Companies base all of their judgement on their bottom line with little or no regard to the environment, public safety or other desirable metrics.
The job of the regulators is to ensure that damage to those metrics is encoded in corporate bottom lines to ensure those companies do the right thing, and if the regulations are weak or the penalties ineffective then the regulators aren't going to be successful.
If there is no violence, actual threat, coercion, or fraud there should be no crime
If there is no crime, there should be no crime. Excellent tautology there.
Unfortunately history has shown repeatedly over and over that there's always someone out to benefit themselves by hurting others. You want to be rid of government _and_ shitty corporations. How do you expect that's going to work? Do you think the next Standard Oil just say to themselves "you know, we're too big and concentrating too much power lets break ourselves up let competition reduce our profit margins!" That's not a choice any company ever has made. Maybe you just think you can get the entire country to boycott such practices? Stop driving and heating their homes for several months or years out of pure libertarian idealism while their children freeze around them?
You say you have the highest rate of BitCoin acceptance anywhere. Well good for you. What are you going to do about it in your magic world where neither large governments nor large companies exist? You might get someone to start a local ISP and roll out cabling to the richest parts of your town, but who would you convince to drop hundreds of millions of dollars to link up with England or Brazil or India? Or even the tens of millions of dollars to link to the next county? And if there is an entity large enough to spend that kind of money, would they not then fall into your "shitty corporation" category? Not to mention someone to generate all the electricity to run your computers and the ISP and everything else. Or do you have a cool billion sitting around to build your own power plant? And the land to build it on? And where's the motivation to keep your plant from polluting the environment? After all the crap you pump in the river only affects the town downstream you and your friends a perfectly fine! And what's your motivation to provide timely and cheap access to your electricity? Competition? How many power plants do you think the population (never mind the environment) could sustain? And just building lots of smaller plants doesn't really work either since bigger is just flat out better in almost all power plant designs (in terms of lower cost per watt.) Perhaps just assume everyone will go solar? That's at least space and environmentally efficient. Who's going to spend the time and money on research to improve solar technology is another question though (and there's definitely no reason to believe we've reached the peak of solar yet! Unless we stop trying.) Maybe get a lucky tinkerer in his back yard have a eureka moment eventually but dedicated research also costs huge amounts of money -- the scale of which is usually only available to governments and large corporations.
The problem with all these libertarian dreams is that they only work if a majority of people don't follow them, at least if you scale them up past the size of a small town or so where people are close enough to have significant and direct influence on each other. Beyond that, it almost always breaks down into "we want everything the world has to offer but don't want to accept responsibility for our part in it." Its just not a winning formula.
Government exists for a reason. Sure they have a habit of stepping into areas they really shouldn't be (marriage is a good example) but what you need is checks against that, not complete elimination. And even the libertarians who grudgingly accept a small government still don't want to pay taxes as if governments can magically pull money out of thin air (well technically they can just print it, but that only leads to mass inflation. So yay you get to keep your $1000 this year but its only worth $10 in next year's money and pennies the year after. Savings! Then again a lot of you want to return to the gold standard so back to pulling money out of thin air.)
Ok so I've definitely ranted far too long already but the TL;DR is this: Libertarian idealism is simply impractical on any sort of large
Well if you want to get pedantic, you're only assuming that "people" means "most people." As long as there's more than one person somewhere who would rather be literally dry ass-fucked then the GP is still technically valid.
Of course very few people would interpret it that way just like very few people really give a damn if you use "literally" in the figurative sense, or use "who" when "whom" is more appropriate or any of the other grammar nazi-isms that you trolls love to go on about. (Oh crap. I forgot to capitalize Nazi as a proper noun. The end is nigh! There's even a little red underline warning me of the world's imminent doom!)
And voting for Republicans rewards the tactics of the Republicans. That's kind of the point. GOP also doesn't care how much you bitch and moan once they're in office. Its called politics. You win and then can stop thinking about it for 3 years.
As for your vote being power. Well it is. You have ~1/350million of a country's worth of power. Yippie. That you can use to choose between all of two options once every four years. If you happen to consider a specific issue to be of particular important, your vote is completely worthless unless it just happens to be something one of the two parties decide to talk about once every 4 years (or every two years if you want to include midterms.) If your favorite issue doesn't fall into that narrow category then even your tiny amount of voting power won't help you.
Letters and emails are actually super helpful (well-written ones at least. A giant ball of flame is less so.) That doesn't mean every single one will be responded to (or even read, though most of them will at least see the eyeballs of an aid.) And it definitely doesn't mean your politician is going to agree with you and start pushing whatever issue is up your rear that day. But the fact that you sat down and wrote an email means you're more involved in the political process than 80-90% of the country and that doesn't go unnoticed.
If you really want to make change though, petitions are the way to go right now. I know it seems silly but the internet has taken something that used to help convince a small town mayor and scaled it up so that it has at least the potentially to be effective on a national scale.
Everyone, including politicians, know the downsides, in-grouping and system gaming potential of anything on the internet but if you can get 100,000 virtual signatures and can prove that a good majority of them are legitimate (ie: you didn't just randomly generate 100k email addresses or hire a Chinese labor farm to fake 100k signatures or something like that) then news agencies and politicians and other such people start to take notice.
100k is a hell of a lot of folk who are all saying the same thing and even if it doesn't cost any individual much effort to click "I agree," the fact that so many of them DO agree can start making real change possible.
Main thing its missing is a working video blocker so that videos will start playing when I want them to, not as soon as a tab is loaded. Right now I have like 3 or 4 different extensions loaded purely to try and prevent autoplaying videos and it still doesn't get them all. So annoying.
Of course it wouldn't.
Why not?
And it certainly shouldn't.
Agreed.
you can not copyright a reference
Under current law. That's my point. This whole discussion is about changing the laws. Just because you can't today doesn't mean you won't be able to next year. And similarly, just because you make a house (or car or spaceship) analogy doesn't mean that lawmakers will follow your analogy -- different things get different laws all the time no matter how similar they are from any single specific viewpoint.
Well I imagine that's the point: If its for-profit, knowledge is presumed, even if the poster in fact did not have knowledge. They _should_ have done their due diligence and therefore known that what they were linking to was infringing.
Its the not-for-profit case that's in question: If I link to those infringing images from my FB page, its obviously not for profit (at least not my profit..) so that presumption of knowledge doesn't apply and that's where the question comes up: How would they prove I knew my link was pointing to infringing material?
That's what I mean by a semi-intentional loophole. There's no discussion regarding how to do that. Its just assumed that "if its not for profit then its not important enough for anyone to bother so its OK." Which is probably true 99.9% of the time. But then that 1000th case will come along a decade later and suddenly everything hits the fan because somebody was lazy back when they wrote the loophole into the law (and/or lacked the foresight to see even such a glaring loophole.)
ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published."
Very similar in practice, but not quite the same thing. In particular, it means the infringing status of the link depends not on the link itself, but on whatever's on the other side of the link.
In some ways that's actually scarier. It means that something that isn't infringing today might be infringing tomorrow so sites would have to be constantly re-scanning every link they've ever posted to ensure that whatever's on the other side of the link hasn't changed to something that's now infringing.
I mean that's already the case if you host copies of the content you've licensed. When the license expires you need to remove that content. But that's a lot simpler because you're hosting it so you (should) know what's there and can just delete the file when the license expires. You have full control over the process. Sure your old articles will have some 404'd links but whatever they're old.
Under the new regime you'd have to actually go through every single article and replace, remove or otherwise invalidate any external links you've used that may no longer be licensed. Never mind the potential for abuse if someone intentionally replaces a licensed imaged with an infringing one at the same link.
And if your car had an address (itself, not the location where you parked it -- that bit of ground isn't moving no matter what you do with your car) then maybe that address would be copyrightable. Who knows.
But since cars don't have addresses that can be linked to in any meaningful way, that's not really an issue we need to be concerned with in the foreseeable future.
Also, things like OnStar's tracking identifiers (or whatever they use) don't count as the cars "address" in terms of this argument either, since those aren't publicly available or accessible (and OnStar probably would sue you for something -- maybe not copyright, but something -- if you figured that stuff out and decided to publish it.)
So? Ancillary copyright isn't a good idea by any means, but that's not because of what some guy said 20 years ago, even if that guy was Tim Berners-Lee. The web has evolved a lot since 1997.
They do. Frequently. And the hosting site just says its unmonitored user content and claim service provider protections. So they're stuck with an IP address at best, if they were even lucky enough to get that from the hosting company. So they attempt to prosecute "John Does" and that typically doesn't lead very far either.
Its not unreasonable that they want to protect their interests, but the anonymity of the internet makes it damned near impossible to find the true culprit so they're grasping at straws all the way up and down the chain wherever they can think to find one.
The offended parties aren't to blame here. They're doing what they can in a shitty (for them) situation. The people to blame are the governments that put business interests ahead of the people they're supposed to be serving.
If copyright holders can't figure out how to make a profit in the internet age then they should be allowed to go the hell out of business and get replaced by more savvy companies rather than mangling our legal system to turn the entire population into full-on criminals for (individually) minor offenses.
I think Google could have nipped this in the bud a couple years ago: "Ok you don't want us to link to you? Done. Enjoy having all your competitors at the top of the search rankings." I don't imagine it would have gone much past the first one or two whiners.
Of course its too late for that now that its exploded from "we want some of Google's money" to "lets break the internet some more!"
Woops mangled that URL. It should be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower%23Illumination_copyright.
Calling that a crime is unworkable in both the physical and internet world.
I believe you're very wrong there. Digital data can be moved (and removed) in a way that a physical address simply cannot. Sure you can destroy the building at that address and put up a new one or pave it over or do whatever else you want, but that land is still there.
Web addresses are far more malleable. That court website could be taken offline tomorrow and its just gone. Its not like destroying a building where the land still remains -- the website is completely non-existent at that point. And that's an enormous difference that the law SHOULD be taking into account.
And if you'd rather try to compare a website to the building rather than the land it stands upon, then you're not really helping your cause since buildings have been copyrighted in the EU already.
How is the bits representing that link any more of a "fact" than the bits representing the image that link points to?
But never minding that, I don't think anyone says links should be copyrightable -- A link that points to copyrighted information infringes on that information's copyrignt, not on the link's copyright (if there is such a thing.)
For example, if that image link you mentioned above gets changed by Playboy on their end, then the copyright infringement is cleared up without your own involvement at all, because the raw text of the link isn't the infringement and since it no longer points to a copyrighted image, its obviously no longer infringing on said image.
Not that I'm agreeing with this kind of ancillary copyright crap. I think its a horrific abuse of the legal system. But fighting legal battles with linguistic pedantry has never gotten anyone very far even when they're right because fundamentally the law is about actions, not terminology (and even more so in a multilingual entity like the EU. I doubt they use "link" or "fact" or any other English term in France but EU law still applies to them nonetheless.)
The way I'm reading it is that guilt is based on knowledge that what you're doing is infringement, and that knowledge is presumed if you're doing it for profit.
However, you could still be guilty if you post a link with knowledge that its infringing even if you don't post it for profit.
I'm not sure how they're planning on determining knowledge of infringement. My guess is that its one of those semi-intentional loopholes where they just assume people won't take advantage of the situation because nobody who's big enough to matter would fail to have knowledge of their actions.
Of course TFS isn't as in-depth as the article (never mind the actual ruling) so maybe that's covered but just from what I see there's a huge potential for sites like /. and Reddit to get sued for something vague like "well you know your site could potentially host infringing links and that constitutes knowledge of infringement so you're liable."
I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it. Which might seem like the same thing when you don't have any other use for the property but from a legal perspective, its still yours.
As for the first, I'm pretty sure freedom of speech doesn't cover zoning regulations to start with since that's not "speech" by any definition I've ever heard. Privacy protection might help you hide your activities if you're planning to go against the new zoning but that only holds up until you do something that makes your business public knowledge in which case you'd likely get fined for breaking the regulations.
That said, there may well be some applicable law somewhere. It just might not be a constitutional amendment. There's thousands of laws that aren't in the constitution (every single municipal and state law to start with! And hundreds if not thousands of federal laws as well, never mind when they start digging into case law which isn't actually laws in the technical sense of the government creating and enforcing them but are still given significant consideration in court.)
Of course, that kind of tinkering with human DNA is unethical.
I think the bigger problem is that its unpredictable since genetics has continually proven itself to be more complex than we currently understand. At some point we might get ahead of it but we're not anywhere close to it yet. The biggest and best arguments against GMO crops and other genetic engineering is that we just don't know what the long-term results will be.
And testing on humans in order to learn more is considered unethical. If you could somehow prove that your genetic manipulation prevented heart disease without any other serious effects then you'd probably be able to get past the whole ethics issue without much trouble. But being able to prove that without testing on several hundred (or thousand) embryos is nearly impossible.
Which gives us a bit of a catch-22. We could potentially significantly improve the lives of future generations, but at the cost of treating some number of our current generations' babies essentially the same way we treat lab mice. And that's just not a trade-off we're willing to make in our current society.