Just be honest and say that the console players will put up with worse games and more expensive games.
It makes sense if you think about it. I mean, how many parents go out and buy console games for their kids without really knowing a damn thing about the game itself? I know when I was a kid back in the NES and SNES eras I used to get shitty games all the time; the givers meant well, and I was always gracious, but obviously all they had to go on for a gift for me was "He has a Super Nintendo, therefore, any game is a good gift."
It stands to reason that a ton of parents do the same for their kids with the Xbox 360 today. Plus, most of the places I've been in that sell games have had either clueless employees or people that will tell you a piece of crap isn't a piece of crap just to get it out of their inventory.
And the 360, while easily hackable, does carry a very high risk of getting an XBL ban.
In all honesty, all the people I know with modded 360's don't connect them to Xbox Live. Many of them actually have two consoles: the one they bought originally that got the RRoD or disc tray errors that, due to being out of warranty anyway, they had repaired and modded at the same time...and the regular one they had to buy to replace it with so they could play on XBL.
Not speaking for everyone, obviously, but it seems silly to even bother trying to play a modded 360 on XBL. Everyone I know that's tried had their accounts banned pretty quickly years ago, hence nobody even really tried anymore. In my experiences, anyway.
Maybe you could give people an incentive to actually buy a PC game? First step would be to stop releasing broken-ass console ports to the PC market, I bet that would help sales a lot. Also, get rid of any additional software to run, i.e., Steam and the other ridiculous spyware crap that is bundled with so many PC games today.
They did a study not long ago demonstrating that anonymity encourages anti-social behavior, which also wasn't surprising.
Besides, a large component of lying (in my 'based on nothing but my own experiences' opinion) seems to be the odds of getting caught in said lie. When you're talking to someone face to face, there's a lot of physical clues that aren't present in an email, thus encouraging a person to lie.
Jesus Christ, do people really have that kind of disposable cash laying around these days? They'd better be some life-altering cupcakes for that price.
It's a hard truth. Ronald Reagan famously quipped, when asked about his political party change, that "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the party left me." In their rush towards reactionary fascism over the past 4-5 years, the Republicans today have done the same to more than half their number.
That's pretty much it. I know many self-professed Republicans that are completely disgusted by their own party right now. Many of them are sick and tired of the moral majority bullshit that they're caught up in. The crusades against gay marriage. The crusades against repealing DADT and letting gays serve openly in the military. The crusades against abortion. The attempted shoehorning of Christianity into every corner of government...
Personally, I blame the Tea Party. Until Obama got elected and the Tea Party went apoplectic over the idea that their patron saint, Sarah Palin, didn't win the election, the Republican Party was a hell of a lot more reasonable. That's pretty much dead and buried, they're on a scorched-earth campaign, now. I see it with my own two eye every single day here in Wisconsin, where the Republican Party has been falling all over itself doing "whatever it takes" to prevent a recall of Scott Walker and the loss of control of our State Senate. They pass voter ID laws because of alleged "rampant fraud" they can't back up, then when the UW starts issuing free ID's to students so that they can vote, they howl in opposition about how they should be forced to go to the DMV to get an ID. Meanwhile they're cutting the hours of those DMV's left and right, ostensibly for "budgetary reasons", although boy, it sure does help make it even harder to get your ID so you can vote. Also, they legally can't charge you if you're getting an ID for voting purposes (it would be a poll tax and thus unconstitutional), so this is costing the state millions of dollars, so then they bitch that people shouldn't get free ID's anyway. Not only that, but in order to get the free ID, you have to check a box, and they mandated that DMV employees are not allowed to mention that the ID is free if it is for voting purposes. They're trying to force their newly redrawn district maps be used in future recalls, district maps that go so far as to literally displace democrats from the district they represent and thus force them to move, in effect disenfranchising whole swaths of these communities who would no longer get a say in recalling a representative they elected.
I know that the Democrats are guilty of playing their games, too, but I'm just so sick of all of it I could throw up. Time to call a mulligan on this entire government and start over with The United States of America 2.0.
This is probably going to get rammed through one way or another. After all, these guys all spend billions of dollars every year buying off our representatives, they're not going to let a pesky thing like the outrage of us plebeians get in the way of clamping down on their Intellectual Property and any other IP they can make an even unreasonable claim to.
I would hope SOPA would get challenged in court and rejected on First Amendment grounds (online censorship of web sites seems an awful lot like an attack on Freedom of Speech, to me, but IANAL or judge) but given some of the other rulings we've seen out of the SCOTUS I'm not so sure it would even get overturned, there. Our court, as it sits, seems to be a lot less concerned about the rights of people and a lot more concerned about the rights of "people", i.e., corporations.
You yourself said "Actually absent any specific law or judicial interpretation specifically disallowing such behavior they can do EXACTLY that." I'm telling you, they cannot do that, because it is a violation of free speech. So are you arguing that they have the right to limit your speech or not? They're trying to use SOPA to take down websites that potentially infringe on IP and punish anyone that even links to them. Remember the AACS controversy? They were yanking down websites that even talked about the phenomenon that was going on. In the end, the Streisand Effect won out, but they weren't very happy about it.
If Big Media would stop buying off our representatives in order to make them keep clamping down on our rights, shit like this wouldn't be necessary, but obviously they won't, so it is. Personally, I think it's about time that our government recognized that accessing a web site is no different than speech, it would nip this stupid anti-Net Neutrality bullshit and this SOPA bullshit in the bud in one fell swoop. They have every right to charge us for access to the internet. What we do once we're there, though, is none of their fucking business. We agree on that point. What's wrong with putting that down in our constitution? Where is the potential for abuse?
That's where the illegality comes in, the concept of doing harm to another. Discussing "top secret" information would be harming your fellow citizens entirely (although in all fairness I think that the National Security clause is ridiculously abused by our government). Discussing a person's medical history, without their consent, would potentially be harming to that person.
But in all cases there needs to be evidence of wrongdoing. Using your example of medical histories, if we were to apply the same mindset that pro-SOPA lobbyists are trying to apply to Intellectual Property, nurses and doctors would not be allowed to access or discuss your medical history at all because there is a possibility that they could potentially breach your trust later. It assumes that all people are bad actors to stop the one person out of one hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or whatever, that really is one.
Clearly our legal system is founded on a presumption of innocence. SOPA is, for all intents and purposes, a regulation founded on a presumption of guilt. Even if we ignore the fact that, as it stands, there is very little in the way of due process when it comes to the idea of censoring IP violators, that still leaves the fact that a mere accusation is enough to get a web site blocked. Compare this to the burden of evidence that our nation's investigators and prosecutors must gather a murderer or other arch-criminal to justice. Again, extending the example, it would be no different than me shouting "He's a killer!" at a stranger and said stranger getting locked up until the authorities are sufficiently convinced of his innocence.
And even that's ignoring the potential for abuse. The companies behind this are not known for being particularly rational or even handed. After all, they sued, and won a judgement for almost $2,000,000 against a housewife from Minnesota for downloading 24 songs. I can personally attest that I have been hit with DMCA takedown notices multiple times by both Warner Music and Universal Music Group for my Youtube videos which are protected under Fair Use doctrine. I know this, because when I appealed said decision to pull or block my videos, I have had them reinstated every single time. This leads me to believe that they know I am allowed to use this media, but they want it down, anyway, even though I am perfectly within my rights to use it. After all, they're banking on the fact that I won't pursue this, which is why there is a big warning for claiming Fair Use on Youtube. They threaten you to keep you from invoking your rights under the law, even though many of the infringing uses of these songs in non-commerical endeavors on Youtube are indeed, Fair Use.
This bill probably won't even make it past a vote, especially now that the general public has gotten wind of it, but I assure you, they will try again, and again, and again, until they once again hold onto their monopoly on entertainment. Hopefully our court system will throw it out as a First Amendment issue, but if it makes it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, I honestly don't know what will happen. I haven't been too enamored with their voting record as of late.
I have the right to "speak" to whoever I wish, provided myself and the person I am speaking to wishes to have that conversation. Whether it is me talking to someone at a bar, or me "speaking" to another "person" across the world by visiting their website, it is the same principle.
Banning websites is no different than banning books. I think we can all agree that there is no evil great enough to allow them to start banning books all Nazi-like, or at least, the inherent evil in banning books far outweighs the dangers of what could be contained in them warranting such a drastic action.
The internet is a means of communication. By limiting who we can "talk" to on the internet, they are limiting our First Amendment rights. I can go to any damned website I want; if I am breaking the law through my actions on said site, that is one thing, but I have every fucking right to pull up The Pirate Bay if I want to. Until I start downloading those torrents I have done nothing wrong.
They don't have to give me free access to the internet. They just have to get their dirty fingers out of where I'm going when I'm connected to it. That's my business, not theirs. Until I have given them reason to suspect that I have committed a crime, I am protected in going there. The burden is on them to determine if I have committed a crime, they're not allowed to assume I have just because I was there. There is no law against keeping unsavory company. It is completely contrary to the spirit of our Constitution, regardless of whether or not the word "Internet" appears therein.
You'd be forced to work in a position that is not under the umbrella of regulation you previously had a part in crafting and enforcing.
As an example, the Backscatter Radiation/Full Body Scanners in airports that everybody loves so much. Back in like 2007 and 2008, higher up's in the TSA set down regulations for their use, contracted out for their manufacture, training on how to use them, etc. All the things that would be necessary with a new technology. Seems fine, right, I mean, that's their job.
Then, once the regulations were completely in place and these machines were contractually getting bought by the government for $250,000 a piece, (not to mention the dozens of billable training hours multiplied across what, 60,000 employees in the TSA?), then a whole slew of these higher-ups all resigned their posts in the public sector and immediately started working for the private contractors that supplied and maintained them. People from both the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security did this.
See the huge conflict of interest there? They obviously signed those contracts knowing full well that they would be the ones collecting the checks in a few short months. They make the regulations that will benefit these private companies, then go work for these private companies. That's just the obvious cases, there are tons of people in government that are good friends with these government contractors, too. Dick Cheney was the CEO of Haliburton for 5 years before he got elected vice-president in 2000, then 2 years later the war in Iraq and, holy shit, Haliburton was getting blank checks from the government for security over there
If a person wants to hold elected office, they're going to have to take concessions. If you are a policy maker in a regulatory agency or the government, there is no way you should be allowed to immediately transfer to the industry you previously regulated. It is far too easy for people to set up their own sweetheart deals and then immediately jump ship and capitalize on them.
There is no reason why people working in regulatory roles shouldn't have to make sacrifices. In private industry it happens all the time, there are non-compete clauses for a reason. Why is it such a stretch to expect the same thing in public/private career changes?
Nor do they have the authority to tell you who you can "speak to" on the internet, i.e., who you can connect to. Yet here we are, arguing over a bill that would basically give them that right, because they're working at the behest of Big Media who sees that their standard "artificial scarcity" model is flawed in an era of worldwide, open communication.
They're pissed off because the government said, "Fine, if all of these people are stealing your shit, you catch them and present us with compelling evidence and we will prosecute them." but that's not good enough because they want TAXPAYERS to pay for the investigations on their behalf.
Fuck that shit. If their Intellectual Property is as valuable to them as they say it is, then they can expend the resources protecting it. If we taxpayers are going to be burdened with that nonsense, then I fully expect we'll be getting our share of their profits from said protected IP's, right? Let me know when I can expect my check for 1/300 millionth of the profits of [Generic Movie]'s DVD or Bluray Sales. You know, since they want me to pay for the risks to their business due to piracy, I damn sure want my cut of their rewards when it is being stamped out on my dime.
If that means that they need to start charging $50 for a movie ticket, that's fine by me; the free market will sort that out. If a Bluray is going to cost $80 to cover the costs of piracy, well then, c'est la vie. It'd be idiotic for them to do that, as it would only increase the piracy, but hey, free market. They're entitled to make up their losses by passing those costs along to the consumer. Just don't bitch when the consumer says "Uh, no thanks, I don't think I'll be buying that, today." They can't have their cake and eat it, too.
This is just another fucking game, like the banks. "Allow us to reap the rewards of everything we do, but when it fails, be there to subsidize the losses." Bullshit. If their Intellectual Property isn't worth it to them to expend the money or manpower defending it, then I guess their IP isn't worth as much as they thought, huh?
Oh, but remember, "No one will create content anymore if they can't be well compensated for it!!!" Yeah? How about we put that theory to the test? Don't worry, I know the answer...because people WOULD create the content anyway, Big Media would realize that we don't depend on them like we used to when they held all the keys to the entertainment kingdom, and all those millions spent bribing our officials would be for nothing.
48 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every second of every day. If it was up to Big Media, that number would be zero, because then we'd have to continue throwing money at them for entertainment. Hell, they already issue false DMCA notices on videos that are obviously protected by Fair Use, I've gotten hit with a bunch myself, and every single time I file a Fair Use response my video is reinstated. Not most of the time, every single time. So, I wonder...was I really infringing? Or was the DMCA process being abused? And we wan't to give them more power? Give me a break...
In regards to social security...how naive were people to think that this WOULDN'T happen?
So the argument is that because some people have no civic virtue and execute their offices with moral turpitude, we should just assume they all will and resort back to an "every man for himself" style of government?
Sorry, I know there are good people out there that would perform their civic duties honestly. We fill jury boxes with them every single day in this country. How is it that we can trust twelve people to make a fair decision in a criminal case but trusting a person in government to act responsibly is just so crazy?
The problem isn't the government, the problem is the people corrupting it. People don't become corrupted the day they take their oath of office, they become corrupted because they require the assistance of special interests in order to achieve said office. Once we remove the requirement of a person to go, hat in hand, to the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC in order to secure the funding to pay for a campaign, believe me, we will see government start working on behalf of the people again pretty damn quick.
Once they can no longer hold their support over the head of an aspiring rep in order to exact promises from them, they will no longer have to work primarily on their behalf. There are plenty of governments around the world that have not been completely corrupted by special interest groups. Government isn't inherently evil.
You can't separate the politicians from the government, no matter how much you'd like to. If you don't trust politicians, then you sure should not be trusting any government program in the long term.
This is the fundamental difference, as I see it, in your thinking and my own; I believe that there are plenty of good men out there that would not fuck over their fellow man if given the chance, they're just never given the chance because they're not as easily corruptible, whereas you feel that the government itself corrupts any man so that no matter how good he is, he will fuck over his fellow man.
Assuming that I am correct in that assessment, I have to disagree. I have worked along side and interacted plenty of people that still have the good moral character and civic virtue to, in my opinion, execute those offices fairly and responsibly. Cincinnatus was a real person, remember. The problem is they will never, ever get the chance. Why? Because everyone must pass the gatekeepers before they can even attempt to run for office, i.e., the GOP and the DNC.
They are the reason why our government is so broken, not government itself. They have secured their stranglehold on the political process in this country, little by little, over the last hundred or so years, and in doing so, have totally twisted our government to act in their own interests. It's not government in itself that did this, but men, corrupted men, that ignored their civic responsibility to their constituency and instead served their own interests. At no other time have the same two political parties held onto their power in our government as they have today. There is almost no chance whatsoever for anyone to have the resources to run for office in this country without going to one of those two parties with their hat in hand, asking for their support. Said support comes with a price, promises are exacted, and the corruption continues.
If we were able to force simple changes on our government it would clean itself up pretty quickly. Term limits, for one. Disallowing any sitting rep to run for more than two terms would end the political dynasties and cliques. Campaign Finance Reform is another one, a huge one. Disallowing people to give money directly to a candidate, and instead forming and mandating a general election fund that is distributed equally to qualifying candidates, would pretty much end the stranglehold of those two parties in one fell swoop. It would give truly independent politicians a real chance in competing with the guys sponsored by Team Donkey and Team Elephant. Corporate contributions (and control of our government) would end quickly, because they would no longer be able to give their money to the guy they want directly...in making a donation to the guy they support, they would be giving money to his opponent, too.
Then, of course, would be the disallowing of people to move between the public and private sector with impunity, particularly the regulators that jump ship and go immediately work in the industries they previously regulated. Anyone with a brain can see how allowing them to switch sides like that is going to cause problems. The FEC and other financial regulatory bodies are all full of ex-Wall Street Bankers...and those Wall Street firms are all full of ex-Regulators. They trade players back and forth every year. They have luncheons together and conferences to, no shit, discuss how they regulate the financial industry. Imagine if our police met with drug dealers and pimps to discuss how they would enforce laws on drugs and prostitution and took their advice. There would be blood in the streets.
So was it their office that corrupted them? Does their existence in itself necessitate corruption? It didn't for decades, our regulatory bodies worked just fine, for the most part. Sure, there is always room for improvement, but to make the leap from "[organization] is screwed up, we must dump it completely and let the market do what it will" is irresponsible and, honestly, a little ridiculous.
Certainly what these petitions are trying to get is a state where everyone gets Internet access gratis.
Oh, bullshit. This isn't about free internet, this is about open access to it. Neither our government nor private business has the right to tell us where we are allowed to go on the internet. Just because right now this is about IP violators doesn't mean it will stay that way, eventually it will be used as justification to shut it down for reasons of social unrest under the reasoning of "the public good".
I pay for a web connection. What I do with it is my business. If I am infringing upon the rights of others in my actions, than by all means, prosecute me for my actions, that's the way the law works. What you can't do, though, is use the fact that I used my internet connection to break the law as an excuse to block everyone else.
This shit is all based on the premise of guilty before proven innocent. It is totally against the spirit of our legal system in it's entirety.
Those examples you gave were abuse of those rights, but they still don't necessitate limiting the rights of everyone else because of a few bad actors. Just because 10% of people on the internet are trading warez or pirated movies and music doesn't give them the right to infringe upon my rights to freely travel the internet.
If we allow the government (or any private company, not just the government) the right to censor what web sites we can access, the internet is doomed in the U.S.. Just because the sites they want to censor right now are allegedly IP violators (and the alleged part of this can't be ignored; as it stands there is no recourse whatsoever to prevent erroneous reports from killing perfectly legit, legally-operated web sites), that doesn't mean they won't turn their sites on something else later. First it's child pornographers. Then it's IP thieves. Then it's bomb making instructions, fringe websites like Westboro Baptist Church and "Terrorist Groups". Then it's the Occupy organizing websites because of the conflicts with different police forces all over the country. Then it's sites promoting the overthrow of our government. After all, these actions are all "for the public good", right?
Our access to the internet today is just as much a necessary facet of the public's right to revolution as the Second Amendment and Freedom of Speech and Assembly was in our Forefather's time. We've grown beyond the days when someone can ring the town bell and have all the men come rushing to town with their Brown Bess'. The internet is our town bell, so to speak.
Giving the government the ability to limit our access to the internet is no different than allowing the government to rescind the 2nd Amendment and start collecting our guns. Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, evinced this mindset when he wrote the words:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Without unfettered access to the internet, the government is in effect limiting this human right. We have the right to gather and demonstrate and, yes, even throw off our government if we feel that we are not being properly represented. If any of our sitting reps actually respect our founding fathers and the foundations of our country, they will vote against this ridiculous SOPA shit.
The weak point is always going to be the human being. Pile on as much security as you want and people are going to find ways to disable it and make themselves vulnerable. Thousands of jobs in the tech support industry depend on it.
That's great until said private interests and your own interests are in opposition, then you're left with no recourse whatsoever. If we had private roads, and the private company that owned the roads decided you weren't allowed to use them anymore because you were talking crap about them online, or pissed off the wrong person in management, or one of the countless reasons a private company and their lawyers could come up to the justify it, what do you do when you need to use those roads to go to work?
Privatizing everything is just as dangerous to the common man. I know that a lot of people are on this "Government BAD!!! Privatization GOOD!!!!" kick right now, but it bears mentioning that our own government for decades was able to manage and improve our infrastructure just fine. It's not the government that has failed, it is the people in government lately that have failed. Say what you want about all the problems this country had in the past, and how our "golden years" weren't necessarily all sunshine and roses, but there were still a fair number of people in government that came out of World War II with a sense of civic duty. The fact that they've all been forced out by opportunists doesn't mean that government has failed, it means that we need to put better people in government.
Like all this nonsense with Social Security, they take money from it for years and years and then, when they've finally taken enough to put the fund into real danger of not being able to meet it's obligations, now it's being trotted out as an example of why government can't do anything right. Bullshit. S.S. was working just fine until those self-serving assholes started robbing it and playing games with money that didn't belong to them.
That's true, but we're not talking about property here, we're talking about ACCESS to property, public property I might add.
What these guys are trying to do is limit our access to the internet. This is no different than your phone company only allowing you to call people that they approve. You still have to pay for your phone connection, but the phone company has no right whatsoever to tell you who you are allowed to call until you infringe upon that person's rights (i.e., harassing them). You can call whoever you want with a telephone, period.
This is really no different than the concept of the internet. The ISPs can charge us for service, but they can't tell us who we can "talk" to online. We can talk to whoever we want because we're free citizens. Just TALKING to a bunch of people on, say, a forum for breaking the encryption on a new disc-based format (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, for instance?) is not grounds to cut me off. I have every right to talk about that subject, this is a free country; up until the point that my actions actually break the law they are protected by it. End of story.
Why is it so difficult for people to understand this point? We're not trying to make the internet a right as in "they have to give it to you for free". We're trying to make internet access a right, as in you can go wherever you want on the internet without your ISP, either for their own reasons or on someone's behalf, playing content police predetermining what you have a right to access, who you have a right to talk to, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
"How about a nice game of chess?"
Just be honest and say that the console players will put up with worse games and more expensive games.
It makes sense if you think about it. I mean, how many parents go out and buy console games for their kids without really knowing a damn thing about the game itself? I know when I was a kid back in the NES and SNES eras I used to get shitty games all the time; the givers meant well, and I was always gracious, but obviously all they had to go on for a gift for me was "He has a Super Nintendo, therefore, any game is a good gift."
It stands to reason that a ton of parents do the same for their kids with the Xbox 360 today. Plus, most of the places I've been in that sell games have had either clueless employees or people that will tell you a piece of crap isn't a piece of crap just to get it out of their inventory.
And the 360, while easily hackable, does carry a very high risk of getting an XBL ban.
In all honesty, all the people I know with modded 360's don't connect them to Xbox Live. Many of them actually have two consoles: the one they bought originally that got the RRoD or disc tray errors that, due to being out of warranty anyway, they had repaired and modded at the same time...and the regular one they had to buy to replace it with so they could play on XBL.
Not speaking for everyone, obviously, but it seems silly to even bother trying to play a modded 360 on XBL. Everyone I know that's tried had their accounts banned pretty quickly years ago, hence nobody even really tried anymore. In my experiences, anyway.
Maybe you could give people an incentive to actually buy a PC game? First step would be to stop releasing broken-ass console ports to the PC market, I bet that would help sales a lot. Also, get rid of any additional software to run, i.e., Steam and the other ridiculous spyware crap that is bundled with so many PC games today.
I thought iTunes itself was the spyware?
They did a study not long ago demonstrating that anonymity encourages anti-social behavior, which also wasn't surprising.
Besides, a large component of lying (in my 'based on nothing but my own experiences' opinion) seems to be the odds of getting caught in said lie. When you're talking to someone face to face, there's a lot of physical clues that aren't present in an email, thus encouraging a person to lie.
Christopher Walken said it best, though. I admit that may not have as much to do with the topic at hand, I just fucking love that scene...
Two pounds a piece? Four dollars a cupcake??
Jesus Christ, do people really have that kind of disposable cash laying around these days? They'd better be some life-altering cupcakes for that price.
I would have expected this here in the U.S. or China, not South Africa. We're having a bad influence on the rest of the world, I think...
Well, when you're not a multinational conglomerate you don't have the luxury of pissing off tens of thousands of people like they can.
Hell, they don't even have to worry about Class Action Lawsuits anymore. They might as well change their motto to "Take it or leave it, we really don't give a shit either way, we'll win in the end (TM)"
It's a hard truth. Ronald Reagan famously quipped, when asked about his political party change, that "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the party left me." In their rush towards reactionary fascism over the past 4-5 years, the Republicans today have done the same to more than half their number.
That's pretty much it. I know many self-professed Republicans that are completely disgusted by their own party right now. Many of them are sick and tired of the moral majority bullshit that they're caught up in. The crusades against gay marriage. The crusades against repealing DADT and letting gays serve openly in the military. The crusades against abortion. The attempted shoehorning of Christianity into every corner of government...
Personally, I blame the Tea Party. Until Obama got elected and the Tea Party went apoplectic over the idea that their patron saint, Sarah Palin, didn't win the election, the Republican Party was a hell of a lot more reasonable. That's pretty much dead and buried, they're on a scorched-earth campaign, now. I see it with my own two eye every single day here in Wisconsin, where the Republican Party has been falling all over itself doing "whatever it takes" to prevent a recall of Scott Walker and the loss of control of our State Senate. They pass voter ID laws because of alleged "rampant fraud" they can't back up, then when the UW starts issuing free ID's to students so that they can vote, they howl in opposition about how they should be forced to go to the DMV to get an ID. Meanwhile they're cutting the hours of those DMV's left and right, ostensibly for "budgetary reasons", although boy, it sure does help make it even harder to get your ID so you can vote. Also, they legally can't charge you if you're getting an ID for voting purposes (it would be a poll tax and thus unconstitutional), so this is costing the state millions of dollars, so then they bitch that people shouldn't get free ID's anyway. Not only that, but in order to get the free ID, you have to check a box, and they mandated that DMV employees are not allowed to mention that the ID is free if it is for voting purposes. They're trying to force their newly redrawn district maps be used in future recalls, district maps that go so far as to literally displace democrats from the district they represent and thus force them to move, in effect disenfranchising whole swaths of these communities who would no longer get a say in recalling a representative they elected.
I know that the Democrats are guilty of playing their games, too, but I'm just so sick of all of it I could throw up. Time to call a mulligan on this entire government and start over with The United States of America 2.0.
All Your Data Are Belong To Us.
This is probably going to get rammed through one way or another. After all, these guys all spend billions of dollars every year buying off our representatives, they're not going to let a pesky thing like the outrage of us plebeians get in the way of clamping down on their Intellectual Property and any other IP they can make an even unreasonable claim to.
I would hope SOPA would get challenged in court and rejected on First Amendment grounds (online censorship of web sites seems an awful lot like an attack on Freedom of Speech, to me, but IANAL or judge) but given some of the other rulings we've seen out of the SCOTUS I'm not so sure it would even get overturned, there. Our court, as it sits, seems to be a lot less concerned about the rights of people and a lot more concerned about the rights of "people", i.e., corporations.
There is no obvious need for a new amendment to the Constitution for the internet.
Uh, actually, stupid shit like this are the whole reason why people are pushing so hard for a Constitutional Amendment.
You yourself said "Actually absent any specific law or judicial interpretation specifically disallowing such behavior they can do EXACTLY that." I'm telling you, they cannot do that, because it is a violation of free speech. So are you arguing that they have the right to limit your speech or not? They're trying to use SOPA to take down websites that potentially infringe on IP and punish anyone that even links to them. Remember the AACS controversy? They were yanking down websites that even talked about the phenomenon that was going on. In the end, the Streisand Effect won out, but they weren't very happy about it.
If Big Media would stop buying off our representatives in order to make them keep clamping down on our rights, shit like this wouldn't be necessary, but obviously they won't, so it is. Personally, I think it's about time that our government recognized that accessing a web site is no different than speech, it would nip this stupid anti-Net Neutrality bullshit and this SOPA bullshit in the bud in one fell swoop. They have every right to charge us for access to the internet. What we do once we're there, though, is none of their fucking business. We agree on that point. What's wrong with putting that down in our constitution? Where is the potential for abuse?
That's where the illegality comes in, the concept of doing harm to another. Discussing "top secret" information would be harming your fellow citizens entirely (although in all fairness I think that the National Security clause is ridiculously abused by our government). Discussing a person's medical history, without their consent, would potentially be harming to that person.
But in all cases there needs to be evidence of wrongdoing. Using your example of medical histories, if we were to apply the same mindset that pro-SOPA lobbyists are trying to apply to Intellectual Property, nurses and doctors would not be allowed to access or discuss your medical history at all because there is a possibility that they could potentially breach your trust later. It assumes that all people are bad actors to stop the one person out of one hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or whatever, that really is one.
Clearly our legal system is founded on a presumption of innocence. SOPA is, for all intents and purposes, a regulation founded on a presumption of guilt. Even if we ignore the fact that, as it stands, there is very little in the way of due process when it comes to the idea of censoring IP violators, that still leaves the fact that a mere accusation is enough to get a web site blocked. Compare this to the burden of evidence that our nation's investigators and prosecutors must gather a murderer or other arch-criminal to justice. Again, extending the example, it would be no different than me shouting "He's a killer!" at a stranger and said stranger getting locked up until the authorities are sufficiently convinced of his innocence.
And even that's ignoring the potential for abuse. The companies behind this are not known for being particularly rational or even handed. After all, they sued, and won a judgement for almost $2,000,000 against a housewife from Minnesota for downloading 24 songs. I can personally attest that I have been hit with DMCA takedown notices multiple times by both Warner Music and Universal Music Group for my Youtube videos which are protected under Fair Use doctrine. I know this, because when I appealed said decision to pull or block my videos, I have had them reinstated every single time. This leads me to believe that they know I am allowed to use this media, but they want it down, anyway, even though I am perfectly within my rights to use it. After all, they're banking on the fact that I won't pursue this, which is why there is a big warning for claiming Fair Use on Youtube. They threaten you to keep you from invoking your rights under the law, even though many of the infringing uses of these songs in non-commerical endeavors on Youtube are indeed, Fair Use.
This bill probably won't even make it past a vote, especially now that the general public has gotten wind of it, but I assure you, they will try again, and again, and again, until they once again hold onto their monopoly on entertainment. Hopefully our court system will throw it out as a First Amendment issue, but if it makes it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, I honestly don't know what will happen. I haven't been too enamored with their voting record as of late.
I have the right to "speak" to whoever I wish, provided myself and the person I am speaking to wishes to have that conversation. Whether it is me talking to someone at a bar, or me "speaking" to another "person" across the world by visiting their website, it is the same principle.
Banning websites is no different than banning books. I think we can all agree that there is no evil great enough to allow them to start banning books all Nazi-like, or at least, the inherent evil in banning books far outweighs the dangers of what could be contained in them warranting such a drastic action.
The internet is a means of communication. By limiting who we can "talk" to on the internet, they are limiting our First Amendment rights. I can go to any damned website I want; if I am breaking the law through my actions on said site, that is one thing, but I have every fucking right to pull up The Pirate Bay if I want to. Until I start downloading those torrents I have done nothing wrong.
They don't have to give me free access to the internet. They just have to get their dirty fingers out of where I'm going when I'm connected to it. That's my business, not theirs. Until I have given them reason to suspect that I have committed a crime, I am protected in going there. The burden is on them to determine if I have committed a crime, they're not allowed to assume I have just because I was there. There is no law against keeping unsavory company. It is completely contrary to the spirit of our Constitution, regardless of whether or not the word "Internet" appears therein.
You'd be forced to work in a position that is not under the umbrella of regulation you previously had a part in crafting and enforcing.
As an example, the Backscatter Radiation/Full Body Scanners in airports that everybody loves so much. Back in like 2007 and 2008, higher up's in the TSA set down regulations for their use, contracted out for their manufacture, training on how to use them, etc. All the things that would be necessary with a new technology. Seems fine, right, I mean, that's their job.
Then, once the regulations were completely in place and these machines were contractually getting bought by the government for $250,000 a piece, (not to mention the dozens of billable training hours multiplied across what, 60,000 employees in the TSA?), then a whole slew of these higher-ups all resigned their posts in the public sector and immediately started working for the private contractors that supplied and maintained them. People from both the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security did this.
See the huge conflict of interest there? They obviously signed those contracts knowing full well that they would be the ones collecting the checks in a few short months. They make the regulations that will benefit these private companies, then go work for these private companies. That's just the obvious cases, there are tons of people in government that are good friends with these government contractors, too. Dick Cheney was the CEO of Haliburton for 5 years before he got elected vice-president in 2000, then 2 years later the war in Iraq and, holy shit, Haliburton was getting blank checks from the government for security over there
If a person wants to hold elected office, they're going to have to take concessions. If you are a policy maker in a regulatory agency or the government, there is no way you should be allowed to immediately transfer to the industry you previously regulated. It is far too easy for people to set up their own sweetheart deals and then immediately jump ship and capitalize on them.
There is no reason why people working in regulatory roles shouldn't have to make sacrifices. In private industry it happens all the time, there are non-compete clauses for a reason. Why is it such a stretch to expect the same thing in public/private career changes?
Nor do they have the authority to tell you who you can "speak to" on the internet, i.e., who you can connect to. Yet here we are, arguing over a bill that would basically give them that right, because they're working at the behest of Big Media who sees that their standard "artificial scarcity" model is flawed in an era of worldwide, open communication.
They're pissed off because the government said, "Fine, if all of these people are stealing your shit, you catch them and present us with compelling evidence and we will prosecute them." but that's not good enough because they want TAXPAYERS to pay for the investigations on their behalf.
Fuck that shit. If their Intellectual Property is as valuable to them as they say it is, then they can expend the resources protecting it. If we taxpayers are going to be burdened with that nonsense, then I fully expect we'll be getting our share of their profits from said protected IP's, right? Let me know when I can expect my check for 1/300 millionth of the profits of [Generic Movie]'s DVD or Bluray Sales. You know, since they want me to pay for the risks to their business due to piracy, I damn sure want my cut of their rewards when it is being stamped out on my dime.
If that means that they need to start charging $50 for a movie ticket, that's fine by me; the free market will sort that out. If a Bluray is going to cost $80 to cover the costs of piracy, well then, c'est la vie. It'd be idiotic for them to do that, as it would only increase the piracy, but hey, free market. They're entitled to make up their losses by passing those costs along to the consumer. Just don't bitch when the consumer says "Uh, no thanks, I don't think I'll be buying that, today." They can't have their cake and eat it, too.
This is just another fucking game, like the banks. "Allow us to reap the rewards of everything we do, but when it fails, be there to subsidize the losses." Bullshit. If their Intellectual Property isn't worth it to them to expend the money or manpower defending it, then I guess their IP isn't worth as much as they thought, huh?
Oh, but remember, "No one will create content anymore if they can't be well compensated for it!!!" Yeah? How about we put that theory to the test? Don't worry, I know the answer...because people WOULD create the content anyway, Big Media would realize that we don't depend on them like we used to when they held all the keys to the entertainment kingdom, and all those millions spent bribing our officials would be for nothing.
48 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every second of every day. If it was up to Big Media, that number would be zero, because then we'd have to continue throwing money at them for entertainment. Hell, they already issue false DMCA notices on videos that are obviously protected by Fair Use, I've gotten hit with a bunch myself, and every single time I file a Fair Use response my video is reinstated. Not most of the time, every single time. So, I wonder...was I really infringing? Or was the DMCA process being abused? And we wan't to give them more power? Give me a break...
That reminds me, it's time for my daily coffee and hand job at the local Starbucks...
In regards to social security...how naive were people to think that this WOULDN'T happen?
So the argument is that because some people have no civic virtue and execute their offices with moral turpitude, we should just assume they all will and resort back to an "every man for himself" style of government?
Sorry, I know there are good people out there that would perform their civic duties honestly. We fill jury boxes with them every single day in this country. How is it that we can trust twelve people to make a fair decision in a criminal case but trusting a person in government to act responsibly is just so crazy?
The problem isn't the government, the problem is the people corrupting it. People don't become corrupted the day they take their oath of office, they become corrupted because they require the assistance of special interests in order to achieve said office. Once we remove the requirement of a person to go, hat in hand, to the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC in order to secure the funding to pay for a campaign, believe me, we will see government start working on behalf of the people again pretty damn quick.
Once they can no longer hold their support over the head of an aspiring rep in order to exact promises from them, they will no longer have to work primarily on their behalf. There are plenty of governments around the world that have not been completely corrupted by special interest groups. Government isn't inherently evil.
You can't separate the politicians from the government, no matter how much you'd like to. If you don't trust politicians, then you sure should not be trusting any government program in the long term.
This is the fundamental difference, as I see it, in your thinking and my own; I believe that there are plenty of good men out there that would not fuck over their fellow man if given the chance, they're just never given the chance because they're not as easily corruptible, whereas you feel that the government itself corrupts any man so that no matter how good he is, he will fuck over his fellow man.
Assuming that I am correct in that assessment, I have to disagree. I have worked along side and interacted plenty of people that still have the good moral character and civic virtue to, in my opinion, execute those offices fairly and responsibly. Cincinnatus was a real person, remember. The problem is they will never, ever get the chance. Why? Because everyone must pass the gatekeepers before they can even attempt to run for office, i.e., the GOP and the DNC.
They are the reason why our government is so broken, not government itself. They have secured their stranglehold on the political process in this country, little by little, over the last hundred or so years, and in doing so, have totally twisted our government to act in their own interests. It's not government in itself that did this, but men, corrupted men, that ignored their civic responsibility to their constituency and instead served their own interests. At no other time have the same two political parties held onto their power in our government as they have today. There is almost no chance whatsoever for anyone to have the resources to run for office in this country without going to one of those two parties with their hat in hand, asking for their support. Said support comes with a price, promises are exacted, and the corruption continues.
If we were able to force simple changes on our government it would clean itself up pretty quickly. Term limits, for one. Disallowing any sitting rep to run for more than two terms would end the political dynasties and cliques. Campaign Finance Reform is another one, a huge one. Disallowing people to give money directly to a candidate, and instead forming and mandating a general election fund that is distributed equally to qualifying candidates, would pretty much end the stranglehold of those two parties in one fell swoop. It would give truly independent politicians a real chance in competing with the guys sponsored by Team Donkey and Team Elephant. Corporate contributions (and control of our government) would end quickly, because they would no longer be able to give their money to the guy they want directly...in making a donation to the guy they support, they would be giving money to his opponent, too.
Then, of course, would be the disallowing of people to move between the public and private sector with impunity, particularly the regulators that jump ship and go immediately work in the industries they previously regulated. Anyone with a brain can see how allowing them to switch sides like that is going to cause problems. The FEC and other financial regulatory bodies are all full of ex-Wall Street Bankers...and those Wall Street firms are all full of ex-Regulators. They trade players back and forth every year. They have luncheons together and conferences to, no shit, discuss how they regulate the financial industry. Imagine if our police met with drug dealers and pimps to discuss how they would enforce laws on drugs and prostitution and took their advice. There would be blood in the streets.
So was it their office that corrupted them? Does their existence in itself necessitate corruption? It didn't for decades, our regulatory bodies worked just fine, for the most part. Sure, there is always room for improvement, but to make the leap from "[organization] is screwed up, we must dump it completely and let the market do what it will" is irresponsible and, honestly, a little ridiculous.
Certainly what these petitions are trying to get is a state where everyone gets Internet access gratis.
Oh, bullshit. This isn't about free internet, this is about open access to it. Neither our government nor private business has the right to tell us where we are allowed to go on the internet. Just because right now this is about IP violators doesn't mean it will stay that way, eventually it will be used as justification to shut it down for reasons of social unrest under the reasoning of "the public good".
I pay for a web connection. What I do with it is my business. If I am infringing upon the rights of others in my actions, than by all means, prosecute me for my actions, that's the way the law works. What you can't do, though, is use the fact that I used my internet connection to break the law as an excuse to block everyone else.
This shit is all based on the premise of guilty before proven innocent. It is totally against the spirit of our legal system in it's entirety.
Those examples you gave were abuse of those rights, but they still don't necessitate limiting the rights of everyone else because of a few bad actors. Just because 10% of people on the internet are trading warez or pirated movies and music doesn't give them the right to infringe upon my rights to freely travel the internet.
If we allow the government (or any private company, not just the government) the right to censor what web sites we can access, the internet is doomed in the U.S.. Just because the sites they want to censor right now are allegedly IP violators (and the alleged part of this can't be ignored; as it stands there is no recourse whatsoever to prevent erroneous reports from killing perfectly legit, legally-operated web sites), that doesn't mean they won't turn their sites on something else later. First it's child pornographers. Then it's IP thieves. Then it's bomb making instructions, fringe websites like Westboro Baptist Church and "Terrorist Groups". Then it's the Occupy organizing websites because of the conflicts with different police forces all over the country. Then it's sites promoting the overthrow of our government. After all, these actions are all "for the public good", right?
Our access to the internet today is just as much a necessary facet of the public's right to revolution as the Second Amendment and Freedom of Speech and Assembly was in our Forefather's time. We've grown beyond the days when someone can ring the town bell and have all the men come rushing to town with their Brown Bess'. The internet is our town bell, so to speak.
Giving the government the ability to limit our access to the internet is no different than allowing the government to rescind the 2nd Amendment and start collecting our guns. Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, evinced this mindset when he wrote the words:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Without unfettered access to the internet, the government is in effect limiting this human right. We have the right to gather and demonstrate and, yes, even throw off our government if we feel that we are not being properly represented. If any of our sitting reps actually respect our founding fathers and the foundations of our country, they will vote against this ridiculous SOPA shit.
The weak point is always going to be the human being. Pile on as much security as you want and people are going to find ways to disable it and make themselves vulnerable. Thousands of jobs in the tech support industry depend on it.
That's great until said private interests and your own interests are in opposition, then you're left with no recourse whatsoever. If we had private roads, and the private company that owned the roads decided you weren't allowed to use them anymore because you were talking crap about them online, or pissed off the wrong person in management, or one of the countless reasons a private company and their lawyers could come up to the justify it, what do you do when you need to use those roads to go to work?
Privatizing everything is just as dangerous to the common man. I know that a lot of people are on this "Government BAD!!! Privatization GOOD!!!!" kick right now, but it bears mentioning that our own government for decades was able to manage and improve our infrastructure just fine. It's not the government that has failed, it is the people in government lately that have failed. Say what you want about all the problems this country had in the past, and how our "golden years" weren't necessarily all sunshine and roses, but there were still a fair number of people in government that came out of World War II with a sense of civic duty. The fact that they've all been forced out by opportunists doesn't mean that government has failed, it means that we need to put better people in government.
Like all this nonsense with Social Security, they take money from it for years and years and then, when they've finally taken enough to put the fund into real danger of not being able to meet it's obligations, now it's being trotted out as an example of why government can't do anything right. Bullshit. S.S. was working just fine until those self-serving assholes started robbing it and playing games with money that didn't belong to them.
That's true, but we're not talking about property here, we're talking about ACCESS to property, public property I might add.
What these guys are trying to do is limit our access to the internet. This is no different than your phone company only allowing you to call people that they approve. You still have to pay for your phone connection, but the phone company has no right whatsoever to tell you who you are allowed to call until you infringe upon that person's rights (i.e., harassing them). You can call whoever you want with a telephone, period.
This is really no different than the concept of the internet. The ISPs can charge us for service, but they can't tell us who we can "talk" to online. We can talk to whoever we want because we're free citizens. Just TALKING to a bunch of people on, say, a forum for breaking the encryption on a new disc-based format (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, for instance?) is not grounds to cut me off. I have every right to talk about that subject, this is a free country; up until the point that my actions actually break the law they are protected by it. End of story.
Why is it so difficult for people to understand this point? We're not trying to make the internet a right as in "they have to give it to you for free". We're trying to make internet access a right, as in you can go wherever you want on the internet without your ISP, either for their own reasons or on someone's behalf, playing content police predetermining what you have a right to access, who you have a right to talk to, etc.