I imagine that the Chinese have much less power now over the destroyer deal than they did before this incident. Handled the right way, it might have given them ammunition--this way, they've just seriously pissed off the people who are in a position the make the Taiwan deal happen: Congress. Now, voting for the deal is a political no-brainer. It's going to look good to constituents to seem to be standing up to those bad ol' Chinese who held our righteous, god-fearing American sons and daughters for so long and with so little cause. I think you're right about the pride thing--but it's caused the Chinese to overplay their hand. Whatever they do with the plane and crew, it's not going to eliminate our information gathering exploits. But it may hurt them economically and strengthen Taiwan's hand considerably over the next several years. We might lose 24 people and a broken plane which has already given up its secrets. Not a good trade for the Chinese...
Hmm... Well, I just sat down and read my NT server and CAL pack licenses, and all they really say (IANAL, and boy, you probably should be to wade through this crap) is that MS can yank the license if they determine that you're in violation of the EULA. Doesn't say anything about giving them the right to come in and do an audit, which is pretty much the only way they could determine you're in violation of the EULA. Seems kind of circular, don't it?
Well... people like to brag. Gets 'em in trouble, but it's often little to do with the monetary aspect. But I have to agree with you--the whole thing smells like BS. The only question is, is the reporter making the whole thing up, or is he just getting his chain yanked by some thirteen year-old who saw an opportunity in a chatroom?
I don't think that has to be true. I don't think that there's a conspiracy to make twisted, labyrinthine laws, but I do think that it's a misguided effort to do so--and that the inevitable result is a quashing of basic liberties for those who cannot afford to pay to have sense made of them. As you say, social problems are extremely complex and likely unsolvable. If you really believe that, then there's little point in trying to legislate them out to the finest detail. Rather, our reliance needs to be more on the judiciary to make judgement calls. A legislator can't possibly crank out a piece of code that can fairly cover all the different possible aspects of some of these issues. All of this minimum mandatory sentencing crap and zero tolerance policies takes that overlooked, but extremely important, human analysis out of the exaction, and we are the poorer for it.
I agree with the previous poster--fewer laws, more simply stated. There is a long-standing tradition that ignorance or misunderstanding of the law is no excuse for violating it--I would argue that the corollary needs to be that the law must be well-published and understandable. Let judges judge... guidelines are better than rules for most social interaction. Few things can be reliably hard and fast and at the same time just in all cases in such a mixed society.
I'm not too thrilled about spammers, but I'm even less thrilled about the precedent this sort of thing for the Internet--inter-jurisdictional issues are not nearly as cut and dried as they are for physical infractions. If you offed someone in Nevada, for instance, you were in Nevada when you did it--no question about jurisdiction, obviously you violated a local law while you were locally present. Across the Internet, though, things are a bit more hazy--how can you violate California law if you were never in California? Does this hold true for New York? England? Sri Lanka? What about if you don't even know where the destination of your message is physically located? What if the mail server is in one state, but the user is in another? You sent it to my home server in Washington, but maybe I'm on vacation and check my mail from San Francisco. What then?
I guess the best physical analogy would be if you were standing in California and shot across the border and killed someone in Nevada. I have no idea what would happen with such a case--possibly at that point it would be a federal crime, because state lines were crossed in the commission of a felony? I dunno. But I'm not too hot on localities being able to impose their local laws on any user anywhere in the world.
Well, it's a fun analogy, sure, but I don't know how well it applies. The bus isn't the only way to get to the store, and being forced to get back on a bus is not a good comparison to having access blocked at the request point. Even if all that holds, I believe that the rights being violated are those of the bus-riders, and it is not their right to free speech--it's their right to move freely about public spaces (not sure which constitutional clause that goes back to, if any--may be older English common law).
Interesting point. But it occurs to me that nothing in this law affects publication at all--the people doing the speaking are being in no way restricted. Those are the people that freedom of speech is designed to protect. This is a restriction on what users are allowed to see, sure, but it doesn't impose any sort of restraint on the speakers. That, IIRC, was the point of the First Amendment. I think maybe that one little point invalidates all the arguments being made on this topic about the legislation violating freedom of speech. It would be interesting if someone had more relevant case law to present on the matter.
Well, you can argue that they went for the sneakers instead of a wristwatch or wallet because of the ads, but I think that's really beside the point. The point is that they will kill for what they want, and if something strikes their fancy for whatever reason, that's it. There's no use blaming the marketers.
Why on earth would you care whether it was just sneakers or not? I mean, we are talking about murder for trivial things here and whether those trivial things happen to be sneakers or some other arbitrary paraphenelia, I don't really see the difference.
On the contrary, I understood his point perfectly. Mine was that those sorts of thugs have never required the hyperinflation of perceived value as an excuse; any value is acceptible. People have been killing one another over trivial matters for millenia, completely sans marketers. If that kind of person decides they fancy your shoes, they'll try to take them whether they just saw a cool Nike commercial or not.
Disclaimer: I am in no way in favor of marketers or other sales ilk of any sort.
Another thing that happens--or at least it has happened to me--is that a moderator will be reading along, and come across a post he/she thinks is worthy of modding up. Maybe it's only at two and should be a three or so. So she/he mods it up--but while that's happening, another moderator comes through and sees the same thing. Since neither of them have refreshed while they were reading, even if one of them mods the post up five minutes before the other, they both think they're just bumping it up to a 3--but since they both did it, it's now a four. Inadvertently over-rated.
Nah. People have been coveting other people's crap for millions of years; marketers may take advantage of this impulse to sell you stuff, but they hardly manufacture the phenomenon. Pretending otherwise is a cop-out.
Hmmm. I'd heard of Freenet, of course, and was aware that it could handle documents of just about any sort, but doesn't it require the software to retrieve them? If the viewer base has to install anything beyond their web browser then, IMHO, a distributed site system just won't work. Plus, IIRC, Freenet has some problems with rarely viewed documents dropping out of the system or becoming unretrievable.
It's not a horrible solution for information distribution (especially in contexts where anonymity is important), but neither is it a good replacement for a website, methinks.
As far as section 10, referenced above and most directly relevant, is concerned, imports and exports only apply to goods imported from or exported to foreign countires. Section 9, the other section in question, deals only with restricting Congress from imposing taxes on goods exported from the states (this was a sore point at the time because of England's prohibitive taxes on colonial imports and exports), not with states laying taxes on goods between themselves. Which, technically, these aren't anyway, because they're not being taxed exclusively on the basis of being either an import or an export, but simply the the fact of sale.
This will last about 1 year before your contract with the service provider changes terms ( I've read before on/. that there are some SP that already limit bandwidth ). Could you imagine the amount of people hosting their own system, just one needs to be popular like/. and boom there goes the free ride.
Everyone has some sort of bandwidth cap, even if it's just the amount of bits they're physically able of pushing down the line in a second. My point is that if you distribute this around, then no one needs to hit or exceed their cap. And you could certainly design your system so that individual hosters could limit the amount of their own bandwidth that was consumed by the shared site, as well as the times it was consumed. Hell, even when I'm putting up a professional site with big pipes and heavy duty servers on the back end, I always assign some sort of upper limit, just to keep performance from slowing to a crawl if for some reason it gets hammered.
I'm too busy/lazy to go out and look this up right now, but aren't you guys really talking about imports/exports to and from the United States? My recollection isn't perfect, but I think the intent of those clauses was to keep any individual state from imposing its own separate taxes on goods sent or received from foreign countries, not from between one another.
I think you're pretty much dead-on with toning down the html--I've worked on bandwidth challenged sites where that has made a world of difference, especially on frequently hit pages.
As for DSLing your own personal web server, why not take it a step further--have a bunch of people DSLing your own personal web server.
Since the sentiment certainly seems to be there, and since distributed computing seems to be the order of the day, where's the Open Source version of Akamai type site load-balancing? It strikes me that there are a ton of geeks out there with relatively lightly used high-speed access lines, who totally love a lot of these sites that are going to have to fold if they can't get cheaper bandwidth. What's needed is a free software package that will allow those users to safely and easily mirror sites they support and a centralized setup to allocate requests to them based on traffic, location, and available bandwidth. Of course, the centralized server to distribute the load is still going to require a chunk of bandwidth, hardware, and support time, and probably rack-space at a co-lo, but with their own bandwidth payments reduced by load distribution, subscribing sites could afford to subsidize the solution by splitting those costs.
It could be that high-bandwidth line penetration is not yet where it needs to be to support many high-volumes sites, or maybe the owners of those lines aren't confident enough in the safety of their boxes to want to run the web services that would be necessary. And for database driven sites, it wouldn't work at all. But I think that the rapid proliferation of Napsterites, SETI@Home users and the like shows that it's at least possible to split up the work if you make it simple enough.
Hmmm... I wonder how much of the decrease in fatalities is due more to structural and safety improvements in autos over the same period as the speed limit increases than due to the increases themselves. I guess probably the best way to check would be in total number of accidents, adjusted for traffic volumes. But my gut feeling would be that the proliferation of airbags, side-impact protection, and SUVs has more to do with that stats than speeds. NASCAR drivers get in a hell of a lot of accidents--they're also much better protected than your average motorist.
A quick Google search turns up a lot of opinions on both sides--I found at least one good study that indicated an increase in fatalities on rural interstates where speed limits were increased. I think it depends on the factors you are willing to look at--differential speed makes a difference in auto/auto events, but absolute speed is probably more of a factor in auto/embankment crashes, or those involving inclement conditions.
On the topic of the media and Seattle protests, the mainstream media did not cover globalization issues at all prior to the protests.
Nor did they after, or during. They covered the protests, the protestors, the city, the cops--never, substantially, the issues.
What's unfortunate is that the so called independent media doesn't really either. They churn out a lot of propaganda, but very few balanced, well-written stories about the issues. If they were twenty years older and wore ties, they'd be corporate PR flacks. Very few of them are any more disinterested and objective about the topics they cover than the "corporatized" media they disdain. It's great to have the alternate viewpoint, to be sure, but I'd rather see a more neutral, balanced presentation than a simple "stick it to the man" schtick.
Okay; I see your distinction. And I agree that civil disobedience is a more involved matter that doesn't bear close examination in this sort of forum.
The only other nitpicky thing I have to say is that I don't think that Napster users are so much "attempting to deprive creative authors of a legitimate livelihood" as they are just trying to mack free tunes. Stating it in the way you do assigns a motivation to their efforts that is missing in reality. For that matter, I am not asserting that they are downloading free tunes out of some altruistic desire to make information free; my point is more that the RIAA and other industry groups are acting to prevent such uses, along with Napster type services (futiley, I think).
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine that the Chinese have much less power now over the destroyer deal than they did before this incident. Handled the right way, it might have given them ammunition--this way, they've just seriously pissed off the people who are in a position the make the Taiwan deal happen: Congress. Now, voting for the deal is a political no-brainer. It's going to look good to constituents to seem to be standing up to those bad ol' Chinese who held our righteous, god-fearing American sons and daughters for so long and with so little cause. I think you're right about the pride thing--but it's caused the Chinese to overplay their hand. Whatever they do with the plane and crew, it's not going to eliminate our information gathering exploits. But it may hurt them economically and strengthen Taiwan's hand considerably over the next several years. We might lose 24 people and a broken plane which has already given up its secrets. Not a good trade for the Chinese...
What a Microsoft-like way of eliminating the competition...
(-1 Flamebait, I know...)
Isn't the word "Shakespeare" singular?
j/k
Oh, yes, because we all share the same 'most sacred symbols.' Or I guess maybe that's just the important WASPs, right? The rest probably don't count.
Hmm... Well, I just sat down and read my NT server and CAL pack licenses, and all they really say (IANAL, and boy, you probably should be to wade through this crap) is that MS can yank the license if they determine that you're in violation of the EULA. Doesn't say anything about giving them the right to come in and do an audit, which is pretty much the only way they could determine you're in violation of the EULA. Seems kind of circular, don't it?
Probably the CAF is just branching out.
Well... people like to brag. Gets 'em in trouble, but it's often little to do with the monetary aspect. But I have to agree with you--the whole thing smells like BS. The only question is, is the reporter making the whole thing up, or is he just getting his chain yanked by some thirteen year-old who saw an opportunity in a chatroom?
I don't think that has to be true. I don't think that there's a conspiracy to make twisted, labyrinthine laws, but I do think that it's a misguided effort to do so--and that the inevitable result is a quashing of basic liberties for those who cannot afford to pay to have sense made of them. As you say, social problems are extremely complex and likely unsolvable. If you really believe that, then there's little point in trying to legislate them out to the finest detail. Rather, our reliance needs to be more on the judiciary to make judgement calls. A legislator can't possibly crank out a piece of code that can fairly cover all the different possible aspects of some of these issues. All of this minimum mandatory sentencing crap and zero tolerance policies takes that overlooked, but extremely important, human analysis out of the exaction, and we are the poorer for it.
I agree with the previous poster--fewer laws, more simply stated. There is a long-standing tradition that ignorance or misunderstanding of the law is no excuse for violating it--I would argue that the corollary needs to be that the law must be well-published and understandable. Let judges judge... guidelines are better than rules for most social interaction. Few things can be reliably hard and fast and at the same time just in all cases in such a mixed society.
I'm not too thrilled about spammers, but I'm even less thrilled about the precedent this sort of thing for the Internet--inter-jurisdictional issues are not nearly as cut and dried as they are for physical infractions. If you offed someone in Nevada, for instance, you were in Nevada when you did it--no question about jurisdiction, obviously you violated a local law while you were locally present. Across the Internet, though, things are a bit more hazy--how can you violate California law if you were never in California? Does this hold true for New York? England? Sri Lanka? What about if you don't even know where the destination of your message is physically located? What if the mail server is in one state, but the user is in another? You sent it to my home server in Washington, but maybe I'm on vacation and check my mail from San Francisco. What then?
I guess the best physical analogy would be if you were standing in California and shot across the border and killed someone in Nevada. I have no idea what would happen with such a case--possibly at that point it would be a federal crime, because state lines were crossed in the commission of a felony? I dunno. But I'm not too hot on localities being able to impose their local laws on any user anywhere in the world.
Well, it's a fun analogy, sure, but I don't know how well it applies. The bus isn't the only way to get to the store, and being forced to get back on a bus is not a good comparison to having access blocked at the request point. Even if all that holds, I believe that the rights being violated are those of the bus-riders, and it is not their right to free speech--it's their right to move freely about public spaces (not sure which constitutional clause that goes back to, if any--may be older English common law).
Interesting point. But it occurs to me that nothing in this law affects publication at all--the people doing the speaking are being in no way restricted. Those are the people that freedom of speech is designed to protect. This is a restriction on what users are allowed to see, sure, but it doesn't impose any sort of restraint on the speakers. That, IIRC, was the point of the First Amendment. I think maybe that one little point invalidates all the arguments being made on this topic about the legislation violating freedom of speech. It would be interesting if someone had more relevant case law to present on the matter.
Well, you can argue that they went for the sneakers instead of a wristwatch or wallet because of the ads, but I think that's really beside the point. The point is that they will kill for what they want, and if something strikes their fancy for whatever reason, that's it. There's no use blaming the marketers.
Why on earth would you care whether it was just sneakers or not? I mean, we are talking about murder for trivial things here and whether those trivial things happen to be sneakers or some other arbitrary paraphenelia, I don't really see the difference.
On the contrary, I understood his point perfectly. Mine was that those sorts of thugs have never required the hyperinflation of perceived value as an excuse; any value is acceptible. People have been killing one another over trivial matters for millenia, completely sans marketers. If that kind of person decides they fancy your shoes, they'll try to take them whether they just saw a cool Nike commercial or not.
Disclaimer: I am in no way in favor of marketers or other sales ilk of any sort.
Another thing that happens--or at least it has happened to me--is that a moderator will be reading along, and come across a post he/she thinks is worthy of modding up. Maybe it's only at two and should be a three or so. So she/he mods it up--but while that's happening, another moderator comes through and sees the same thing. Since neither of them have refreshed while they were reading, even if one of them mods the post up five minutes before the other, they both think they're just bumping it up to a 3--but since they both did it, it's now a four. Inadvertently over-rated.
Nah. People have been coveting other people's crap for millions of years; marketers may take advantage of this impulse to sell you stuff, but they hardly manufacture the phenomenon. Pretending otherwise is a cop-out.
Hmmm. I'd heard of Freenet, of course, and was aware that it could handle documents of just about any sort, but doesn't it require the software to retrieve them? If the viewer base has to install anything beyond their web browser then, IMHO, a distributed site system just won't work. Plus, IIRC, Freenet has some problems with rarely viewed documents dropping out of the system or becoming unretrievable.
It's not a horrible solution for information distribution (especially in contexts where anonymity is important), but neither is it a good replacement for a website, methinks.
Well, I got two contradictory replies to the post, and so I decided to go look it up anyway: You lose.
Relevant Findlaw Article
As far as section 10, referenced above and most directly relevant, is concerned, imports and exports only apply to goods imported from or exported to foreign countires. Section 9, the other section in question, deals only with restricting Congress from imposing taxes on goods exported from the states (this was a sore point at the time because of England's prohibitive taxes on colonial imports and exports), not with states laying taxes on goods between themselves. Which, technically, these aren't anyway, because they're not being taxed exclusively on the basis of being either an import or an export, but simply the the fact of sale.
This will last about 1 year before your contract with the service provider changes terms ( I've read before on /. that there are some SP that already limit bandwidth ). Could you imagine the amount of people hosting their own system, just one needs to be popular like /. and boom there goes the free ride.
Everyone has some sort of bandwidth cap, even if it's just the amount of bits they're physically able of pushing down the line in a second. My point is that if you distribute this around, then no one needs to hit or exceed their cap. And you could certainly design your system so that individual hosters could limit the amount of their own bandwidth that was consumed by the shared site, as well as the times it was consumed. Hell, even when I'm putting up a professional site with big pipes and heavy duty servers on the back end, I always assign some sort of upper limit, just to keep performance from slowing to a crawl if for some reason it gets hammered.
I'm too busy/lazy to go out and look this up right now, but aren't you guys really talking about imports/exports to and from the United States? My recollection isn't perfect, but I think the intent of those clauses was to keep any individual state from imposing its own separate taxes on goods sent or received from foreign countries, not from between one another.
I think you're pretty much dead-on with toning down the html--I've worked on bandwidth challenged sites where that has made a world of difference, especially on frequently hit pages.
As for DSLing your own personal web server, why not take it a step further--have a bunch of people DSLing your own personal web server.
Since the sentiment certainly seems to be there, and since distributed computing seems to be the order of the day, where's the Open Source version of Akamai type site load-balancing? It strikes me that there are a ton of geeks out there with relatively lightly used high-speed access lines, who totally love a lot of these sites that are going to have to fold if they can't get cheaper bandwidth. What's needed is a free software package that will allow those users to safely and easily mirror sites they support and a centralized setup to allocate requests to them based on traffic, location, and available bandwidth. Of course, the centralized server to distribute the load is still going to require a chunk of bandwidth, hardware, and support time, and probably rack-space at a co-lo, but with their own bandwidth payments reduced by load distribution, subscribing sites could afford to subsidize the solution by splitting those costs.
It could be that high-bandwidth line penetration is not yet where it needs to be to support many high-volumes sites, or maybe the owners of those lines aren't confident enough in the safety of their boxes to want to run the web services that would be necessary. And for database driven sites, it wouldn't work at all. But I think that the rapid proliferation of Napsterites, SETI@Home users and the like shows that it's at least possible to split up the work if you make it simple enough.
LOL. Oh, come on, I bet you would have just wasted those 350 days vegging on the couch and reading /.
Hmmm... I wonder how much of the decrease in fatalities is due more to structural and safety improvements in autos over the same period as the speed limit increases than due to the increases themselves. I guess probably the best way to check would be in total number of accidents, adjusted for traffic volumes. But my gut feeling would be that the proliferation of airbags, side-impact protection, and SUVs has more to do with that stats than speeds. NASCAR drivers get in a hell of a lot of accidents--they're also much better protected than your average motorist.
A quick Google search turns up a lot of opinions on both sides--I found at least one good study that indicated an increase in fatalities on rural interstates where speed limits were increased. I think it depends on the factors you are willing to look at--differential speed makes a difference in auto/auto events, but absolute speed is probably more of a factor in auto/embankment crashes, or those involving inclement conditions.
On the topic of the media and Seattle protests, the mainstream media did not cover globalization issues at all prior to the protests.
Nor did they after, or during. They covered the protests, the protestors, the city, the cops--never, substantially, the issues.
What's unfortunate is that the so called independent media doesn't really either. They churn out a lot of propaganda, but very few balanced, well-written stories about the issues. If they were twenty years older and wore ties, they'd be corporate PR flacks. Very few of them are any more disinterested and objective about the topics they cover than the "corporatized" media they disdain. It's great to have the alternate viewpoint, to be sure, but I'd rather see a more neutral, balanced presentation than a simple "stick it to the man" schtick.
I don't think they probably drink water... Jolt, maybe.
Okay; I see your distinction. And I agree that civil disobedience is a more involved matter that doesn't bear close examination in this sort of forum.
The only other nitpicky thing I have to say is that I don't think that Napster users are so much "attempting to deprive creative authors of a legitimate livelihood" as they are just trying to mack free tunes. Stating it in the way you do assigns a motivation to their efforts that is missing in reality. For that matter, I am not asserting that they are downloading free tunes out of some altruistic desire to make information free; my point is more that the RIAA and other industry groups are acting to prevent such uses, along with Napster type services (futiley, I think).