You just hit the nail on the head: the RIAA (and other old-school distribution methods) is caput. The head is dead, the body just doesn't know it yet.
Justin Bieber had a YouTube channel that he set up himself, and is now a huge pop phenom. I can't stand his music, but obviously I'm not his market; but I do respect the hell out of his initiative and the big "fuck you" it represents to established interests.
You might think that, but let's face it, memory management in Windows hasn't visibly improved in decades*. Any number of interview candidate submissions could have helped, and yet it hasn't.
Their problem is they weren't sure which one was best; so they used them all, and set up a round-robin system to select which manager to use for which process instance.
Your post can be best summarized as "Censorship is irreversible and inherently evil; competition is self-correcting and inherently good." I find it difficult to argue with that viewpoint.
Longer answer: read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone, especially the section on Criticism. The CIA funded several groups in Afghanistan against the Soviets, but bin Laden's was no among them; he had his own money (inherited from his father's construction business) and funded his own soldiers. There is no evidence to suggest any CIA money ever went to equipping or training bin Laden or his followers.
And even if there were, it would not make one iota of difference. Choosing the lesser of two evils sometimes means you're left with a really evil choice.
Where do you live that only Time Warner provides broadband access? I bet AT&T, Coverity, and Speakeasy all provide DSL access, you just don't realize it. And if Time Warner started blocking Facebook & Google, you can bet your ass their competition would make a note of that in their advertising, so if you weren't aware of them before you would be now.
You also seem to be OK with spending government money and increasing the cost of doing business with absolutely no benefit. Where's the sense in that?
My response to all this supposition is: meh. The startup costs to create a new ISP are pretty small compared to any of the other utilities you mentioned, competitors could jump into the market pretty easily. So that takes care of the no-name ISPs.
As for the big ones, they don't compete locally, they compete nationally. So while Comcast might be the only competition in BFE, NH, they have plenty of competition in other markets...competition that will eat their lunch if suddenly half of the internet is not accessible over their network.
Again, this whole thing is a solution in search of a problem. Government regulation will only raise costs and hence prices, and will likely stimy the ability of the market to respond to other pressures.
The first time a large ISP tries to charge Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or some other large site money to allow their customers access to it and that same site says "No" and gets blocked/slowed down, their competitors (the ISP's, that is) are going to add that to their ad campaigns and you'll see their customers desert them in droves.
If AT&T told me I couldn't access Wikipedia, or Fark, or even Spankwire from their network because their operators weren't paying some stupid monthly charge, I'd cancel my iPhone contract and go get a droid on Verizon...and I work for AT&T! I can't imagine their other customers would be more loyal.
An easement doesn't go away without the express permission of everyone involved in the easement. If your neighbor has an easement across your property to get to his garage, he doesn't lose it because he didn't pay you "rent" on that easement. That's one of the main differences between easements and leaseholds.
A better analogy would be the phone company charging other phone companies to route calls across their network. And guess what? They all do that, they all have peering arrangements with each other for call completion. It's a system that's worked well for decades and the international phone system has not fallen apart because of it. The Internet will survive, as well.
Germany, Japan, and South Korea are all pikers when it comes to where we've had troops, and for how long.
We still have Marines and sailors at Guantanamo Bay over 100 years after the end of the Spanish-American War. Ditto with the Philippines. Using those two measuring sticks, there's no reason to think we'll ever leave Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, once we have a foothold there. Not passing judgment on whether this is a good idea or not (there are good arguments to be made on both sides of that one), just stating the reality of the situation.
Then you'd still need a way for those different servers to know about each other. Which still means some kind of central repository.
Although now that I think about it, if each of these servers provided a standard XML file at the same URL (eg, http://example.com/users.xml), then search engines could crawl that file and have their list of who's on what. That might work.
#1 is the biggest hurdle any social networking site has to beat to beat FB at their own game. I recently got back in touch with some old shipmates from the Navy, guys I hadn't spoken to in 20 years who are now on my friends list. Without a central repository of user accounts, there's no way we would've ever gotten back in touch.
Running your own microblogging service is great for businesses and organizations who want to keep their customers/partners/employees in the know about events, and it might even be good for keeping in touch with people you're already in touch with. But so far I haven't seen any realistic ways to find old friends posited. If someone can figure that part out then FB will die the death it deserves.
(e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)
Require whatever microblogging software you're using to use public/private key authentication. To add someone as a friend, you add their public key which they have provided. To read a status update, you provide your private key. If it doesn't match one of the public keys in the authorized keys file, you don't get access. All of this could be handled behind the scenes and be invisible to users.
Well if those same scientists would get nuclear fusion and energy-matter conversion working, then we'd have unlimited resources and they wouldn't have to fight over them anymore. So really, it's their own fault for being lazy.
I feel for you; I understand that what with all the high paid bureaucrats and politicians, hookers cost a fortune there. Here in the midwest you can get a cup of hot steamy sex for twenty bucks or even less.
To be fair, the hot steamy cup of sex in DC is more like slow roasted gourmet coffee that was hand ground and boiled in pure aquifer water then complimented with pure cream and cane sugar. The same thing in the midwest is day-old Wafflehouse sludge that really should've been reheated in the microwave before the waitress spilled half of it on the table when she served it to you.
I used to feel the same way about Facebook. Until I realized that I was able to have short conversations with friends who live thousands of miles away, at least once a week. And while I really don't care when my ex-sister-in-law is buying donuts for her office, it is great seeing the pics she posts of her son as he grows; and to see the sonograms of my friends' baby in Ohio; and all the other little things that, before, I would rarely or never know is going on among my far-flung friends and family. Yes, it was possible to share all of these things, but it's so much simpler to have one place for all of it. Which makes people more likely to share it in the first place.
The importance of these kinds of insights isn't to excuse the behavior of terrorists or bullies, but to learn to recognize what causes that behavior in the first place so we can prevent it. It's important to end the cycle of violence, and I think the best way to do that is to save kids who are in these situations and put them in a new location where that abuse won't be continued. It may also be necessary to execute the abusers of those kids to ensure they are never able to do the same to others but I'm leery of going to that extent from the get go, given the inherent dangers of capital punishment.
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A Ruby developer who's crazy? Color me shocked.
You just hit the nail on the head: the RIAA (and other old-school distribution methods) is caput. The head is dead, the body just doesn't know it yet.
Justin Bieber had a YouTube channel that he set up himself, and is now a huge pop phenom. I can't stand his music, but obviously I'm not his market; but I do respect the hell out of his initiative and the big "fuck you" it represents to established interests.
If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
Seriously, you think sexual harassment (an entirely civil matter) is worse than embezzlement (a criminal matter)? How does that make a lick of sense?
Step 1) Buy a 3G USB dongle.
Step 2) Disconnect your ethernet cable, insert dongle.
Step 3) Surf porn without risking your career.
Is that really that freakin' hard for the CEO of a major computer manufacturer to figure out???
You might think that, but let's face it, memory management in Windows hasn't visibly improved in decades*. Any number of interview candidate submissions could have helped, and yet it hasn't.
Their problem is they weren't sure which one was best; so they used them all, and set up a round-robin system to select which manager to use for which process instance.
Your post can be best summarized as "Censorship is irreversible and inherently evil; competition is self-correcting and inherently good." I find it difficult to argue with that viewpoint.
Middle-aged Idiot Leading Fascists?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone, especially the section on Criticism. The CIA funded several groups in Afghanistan against the Soviets, but bin Laden's was no among them; he had his own money (inherited from his father's construction business) and funded his own soldiers. There is no evidence to suggest any CIA money ever went to equipping or training bin Laden or his followers.
And even if there were, it would not make one iota of difference. Choosing the lesser of two evils sometimes means you're left with a really evil choice.
Thanks, Rainier.
Where do you live that only Time Warner provides broadband access? I bet AT&T, Coverity, and Speakeasy all provide DSL access, you just don't realize it. And if Time Warner started blocking Facebook & Google, you can bet your ass their competition would make a note of that in their advertising, so if you weren't aware of them before you would be now.
You also seem to be OK with spending government money and increasing the cost of doing business with absolutely no benefit. Where's the sense in that?
It's a truism that regulatory burdens always increase costs. It's as certain as death and taxes.
My response to all this supposition is: meh. The startup costs to create a new ISP are pretty small compared to any of the other utilities you mentioned, competitors could jump into the market pretty easily. So that takes care of the no-name ISPs.
As for the big ones, they don't compete locally, they compete nationally. So while Comcast might be the only competition in BFE, NH, they have plenty of competition in other markets...competition that will eat their lunch if suddenly half of the internet is not accessible over their network.
Again, this whole thing is a solution in search of a problem. Government regulation will only raise costs and hence prices, and will likely stimy the ability of the market to respond to other pressures.
The first time a large ISP tries to charge Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or some other large site money to allow their customers access to it and that same site says "No" and gets blocked/slowed down, their competitors (the ISP's, that is) are going to add that to their ad campaigns and you'll see their customers desert them in droves.
If AT&T told me I couldn't access Wikipedia, or Fark, or even Spankwire from their network because their operators weren't paying some stupid monthly charge, I'd cancel my iPhone contract and go get a droid on Verizon...and I work for AT&T! I can't imagine their other customers would be more loyal.
An easement doesn't go away without the express permission of everyone involved in the easement. If your neighbor has an easement across your property to get to his garage, he doesn't lose it because he didn't pay you "rent" on that easement. That's one of the main differences between easements and leaseholds.
A better analogy would be the phone company charging other phone companies to route calls across their network. And guess what? They all do that, they all have peering arrangements with each other for call completion. It's a system that's worked well for decades and the international phone system has not fallen apart because of it. The Internet will survive, as well.
Germany, Japan, and South Korea are all pikers when it comes to where we've had troops, and for how long.
We still have Marines and sailors at Guantanamo Bay over 100 years after the end of the Spanish-American War. Ditto with the Philippines. Using those two measuring sticks, there's no reason to think we'll ever leave Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, once we have a foothold there. Not passing judgment on whether this is a good idea or not (there are good arguments to be made on both sides of that one), just stating the reality of the situation.
Sounds an awful lot like UUCP. There's a reason that was supplanted by SMTP using MX records (a centralized DB).
Then you'd still need a way for those different servers to know about each other. Which still means some kind of central repository.
Although now that I think about it, if each of these servers provided a standard XML file at the same URL (eg, http://example.com/users.xml), then search engines could crawl that file and have their list of who's on what. That might work.
#1 is the biggest hurdle any social networking site has to beat to beat FB at their own game. I recently got back in touch with some old shipmates from the Navy, guys I hadn't spoken to in 20 years who are now on my friends list. Without a central repository of user accounts, there's no way we would've ever gotten back in touch.
Running your own microblogging service is great for businesses and organizations who want to keep their customers/partners/employees in the know about events, and it might even be good for keeping in touch with people you're already in touch with. But so far I haven't seen any realistic ways to find old friends posited. If someone can figure that part out then FB will die the death it deserves.
You do realize you're on a forum powered by Open Source software, right? And yet you no trouble posting. So what's your objection again?
(e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)
Require whatever microblogging software you're using to use public/private key authentication. To add someone as a friend, you add their public key which they have provided. To read a status update, you provide your private key. If it doesn't match one of the public keys in the authorized keys file, you don't get access. All of this could be handled behind the scenes and be invisible to users.
Well if those same scientists would get nuclear fusion and energy-matter conversion working, then we'd have unlimited resources and they wouldn't have to fight over them anymore. So really, it's their own fault for being lazy.
Aren't those two things kinda, you know, the same? I can't imagine a functional team would enjoy pissing in each other's Wheaties.
I feel for you; I understand that what with all the high paid bureaucrats and politicians, hookers cost a fortune there. Here in the midwest you can get a cup of hot steamy sex for twenty bucks or even less.
To be fair, the hot steamy cup of sex in DC is more like slow roasted gourmet coffee that was hand ground and boiled in pure aquifer water then complimented with pure cream and cane sugar. The same thing in the midwest is day-old Wafflehouse sludge that really should've been reheated in the microwave before the waitress spilled half of it on the table when she served it to you.
I used to feel the same way about Facebook. Until I realized that I was able to have short conversations with friends who live thousands of miles away, at least once a week. And while I really don't care when my ex-sister-in-law is buying donuts for her office, it is great seeing the pics she posts of her son as he grows; and to see the sonograms of my friends' baby in Ohio; and all the other little things that, before, I would rarely or never know is going on among my far-flung friends and family. Yes, it was possible to share all of these things, but it's so much simpler to have one place for all of it. Which makes people more likely to share it in the first place.
The importance of these kinds of insights isn't to excuse the behavior of terrorists or bullies, but to learn to recognize what causes that behavior in the first place so we can prevent it. It's important to end the cycle of violence, and I think the best way to do that is to save kids who are in these situations and put them in a new location where that abuse won't be continued. It may also be necessary to execute the abusers of those kids to ensure they are never able to do the same to others but I'm leery of going to that extent from the get go, given the inherent dangers of capital punishment.