Factual has a pretty good definition, that being "provably correct or incorrect".
With this system, there is a risk that opinions and factually correct (but unpopular) comments would be modded Wrong, but they're currently just modded flamebait or troll when people don't like them, so I don't think this system will make it that much worse. With the ability to cancel the Wrong mod by flagging the response as Wrong, the worst case is a coordinated group of trolls (remember, you can't claim someone else is Wrong if you're currently Wrong) working together to cancel attempts to flag their responses as Wrong, and the length of the flamewar would be limited by number of members and their 5 mod points.
Other things I thought of, to prevent people from simply modding a Wrong post back up (and since the -1 is temporary), the post should cap at +4 until the Wrong mod is cancelled. Likewise, to keep a group of different people from "locking down" a post, there can only be one Wrong mod on a post, even after it's cancelled. This forces any such attack into a single thread.
In practice use (and abuse) would look like this: - Lies, damn lies, and statistics (2, Informative) by foo
then someone posts a -1, Wrong and a correction: - Lies, damn lies, and statistics (1, Wrong) by foo (the Wrong tag overrides any other tag for funny, troll, insightful, whatever) |- Correction: You're wrong! (1) by bar
Now, foo can't cancel this himself, since he's currently Wrong, but someone else who thinks they can prove that foo is right and bar is wrong can come along: - Lies, damn lies, and statistics (2, Informative) by foo (the Wrong mod is cancelled) |- Correction: You're wrong! (0, Wrong) by bar ||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (2) by baz
Finally, nobody can now mod the original post Wrong again, they would have to mod baz's post Wrong if they want to make a statement. - Lies, damn lies, and statistics (-1, Troll) by foo (modded down by trolls) |- Correction: You're wrong! (5, Insightful) by bar (modded up by trolls) ||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (-1, Wrong) by baz (modded down by trolls) |||- Correction: Yuo suck, poopyface! First TrollKrew ftw! (5, Insightful) by trollkrew214 (modded up by trolls)
Then: - Lies, damn lies, and statistics (-1, Troll) by foo |- Correction: You're wrong! (5, Insightful) by bar ||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (-1, Wrong) by baz |||- Correction: Yuo suck, poopyface! First TrollKrew ftw! (4, Wrong) by trollkrew214 (this can't be modded to 5 for now) ||||- Correction: TrollKrew sux! Flamelordz forevah! (5, Insightful) by flamah13... until "trollkrew" or "flamelordz" ran out of users with modpoints.
Further, use of the Wrong mod could be restricted to a subset of all of the users getting mod points, to help limit even coordinated abuse.
I also agree. It's a good job at putting together the best parts of pro and con views to create an informative (if entirely copy-pasted) article.
Hopefully we'll see more of this for other subjects, but I think before this gets too out of hand we need a special "-1, Wrong" mod that works differently - rather than only getting to use it if you don't post in the story, you only get to use it if you also post a correction in response to the comment. If your response is itself modded or metamodded incorrect you lose extra karma (to help convince people not to do this if they're not sure what they're talking about) and are banned from making Wrong mods (to keep it from happening again). A -1, Wrong to a correction undoes the -1, Wrong on the originally corrected post. Correction posts should be checked for at least one link pointing anywhere else so that the person has to at least pretend to the software that they've got a citation.
So anyways, if we have M1 moderation and M2 metamoderation, should backslash be M0, or M3?
Well, according to the article its been around for years and we're just now hearing about it.
It also looks like they've been doing licensing... for $50 million and all your patents. Not exactly startup-friendly, but hey if you're "not infringing" you've got nothing to worry about. Meanwhile their geniuses sit around their skunkworks operation and think up things to patent, which from the descriptions seem to be entirely "process by which problem X is solved", not even the actual solution to the problem.
I don't know, is the article really correct about this being a super-secret operation? It's hard to license out your patents when nobody knows you exist and you're not helping people find out about them.
I can see how this is similar to Apple or Microsoft plunging millions of dollars into R&D but I don't see where they are licensing their technology out to other companies.
Publicly traded stock has been around for centuries now. If anything, I blame it on the websites that enabled a whole new class of traders: the daytraders. These are the people who have nothing better to do than sit around all day trading on every little shift of the market, holding stock for days or even just hours, and who expect the value tomorrow to be better than today's, with no care about what the value will be in a week since they'll be long gone.
is there a real commercial incentive today or do we have to wait till ol' Mother Earth runs out of diggable dirt-based useful stuff first?
We'll have to wait well beyond then. First we'll have to wait until whats on Earth has been used up. We could go earlier, but the cost-benefit analysis says that it'll cost a lot and if they don't do it, then major corporations will benefit hugely by selling less metal for more money.
Once what we've got is all "gone", we'll have to wait some more... see, like idiots the people of the future kept saying "oh theres plenty it'll last for decades, and once it's gone we'll figure something else out!" Only now that it's gone, they're discovering that they really needed that metal to "figure something else out". So now "other" major companies (the mining companies went bankrupt when they ran out of metal to mine, all the miners were laid off, and the top brass assembled a new company, exactly the same as the old, but with cheaper workers since all of the freshly unemployed weren't exactly in a good bargaining position). These companies will recycle the used metal.
Except! It would be a terrible shame if these companies spent billions figuring out how to recycle all the rare metals and then lost their market to fresh space-ore. So they patent the process of retrieving ore from orbit, and proceed to sit on it for the duration of the patent. Meanwhile, they start spreading FUD about how much more expensive it would be to get ore from space and now that they can recycle nickel and other metals, they don't need it anyway. Metal is plentiful again, and people quit caring about space.
Problem solved, assuming that we manage to pull off a miracle and find a replacement for oil before it runs out, and not after the last part needed for the oil replacement equipment gets stranded in the middle of the desert because the truck it was on ran out of gas. Maybe companies will figure out a stopgap recycling solution for oil too... soylent oil anyone?
But you know, most of the world is stupid and doesn't understand this kind of stuff, or has stupid opinions about it, and will be afraid of it.
Don't mind me, I'm just buying some powder, a makeup brush and tape. Don't mind my friend in line ahead of you, he's just testing out his new windex on the fingerprint reader to make sure the bottle isn't defective.
I'm not "stupid" but I do have opinions of this. Based on their demo (flash) they use a simple pad-based scanner where you press your finger, rather than a strip-based scanner which you would drag your finger across (smearing prints in the process). All thats needed is to look over your shoulder as you tap in your "search number" as the demo calls your PIN, and I'm you (for the purpose of buying food, at least).
I won't use it, but I'll feel sorry for the people that do, and when they try to contest odd charges they're told that it was bought with their fingerprint so they had to have been the ones to do it. Reminds me of the giant ATM scandal in the UK, and it's harder to steal a fingerprint than a PIN, right?
The problem? ATT, BellSouth, Rodgers, etc. are not charging their customers, they're charging the companies who run the sites that their customers visit.
If you don't have a problem with this, I invite you to write to your state government and the federal government and propose that they abolish gasoline taxes in favor of billing the cost of road construction and repair to Ford, Chevy, Saturn, etc. After all, they should pay for the priviledge of having roads for their customers to drive on.
You are right regarding government intervention, of course, but the damage from the government granted monopolies is done. Even if all of the cities and municipalities walk away from the fees they collect for granting Bell permission to lay the only phone lines in the city (and comcast the only cable lines), who is going to come in now and lay new ones?
What's needed is not more laws, but to apply business transaction laws we already have in place. The peering arrangements these ISPs have all dictate who pays what for which traffic, why are they not pursuing payment through their contractual routes? If ATT gets a lot of traffic from UUnet, they should charge UUnet, and UUnet can then pass that charge on to its customers like Google, YouTube and Amazon. I posit that the answer is that ATT (and other ISPs) are in fact not dealing with excessive amounts of traffic, and therefore can't use the balance provisions of their peering agreements to charge the backbones for their traffic. After all, when was the last time you had trouble pulling up Google's website when it wasn't your computer's fault?
Additionally, I can safely say that the issue is not traffic related, as TCP and some applications that use UDP will retransmit a packet until the packet makes it through. Any ISP that started dropping packets after they receive them will start seeing their traffic go up as they end up handling copies of the packets they dropped the first time around. If they start dropping the acknowledgement packets as well, they're handling a copy of the packet they actually delivered the first time, plus a copy of the ack packet they dropped. Sure, TCP will slow down if a lot of packets drop, but that doesn't change the fact that if you drop half the packets of a 10MB transfer, you're now stuck carrying 20MB (10MB file + 5MB of retransmits + 2.5MB of retransmits that got dropped + 1.25+0.75+...).
Secondly, there has historically been some level of fraud in consumer-level ISP options, carefully negotiated in the fine print. Namely, the common practice of overselling capacity. When an airline oversells a flight, it at least makes an effort to recompense the customers who are unable to board through a replacement ticket for a later flight, and sometimes even a free night at the airport hotel when there are no more flights that day. However, when the ISP oversells its capacity, there is typically no recompense for being unable to attain the advertised speeds, and furthermore some of those ISPs intentionally throttle customers to a fraction of their rated speed (an earlier slashdot story told the tale of one person who was getting 700kbps on a 1.5mbit dsl line, so they downgraded to a 768kbit line... and got 300kbps).
Finally, what certain CxOs have publically announced they wish to do is clearly fraudulent. Consider this analogy: You are a company that produces brownie mixes (content). You pay a distributor (your ISP) to obtain shelfspace and deliver your product to supermarkets across the country. How they do this is not your business. Your distributor contracts (peering arrangement) with a grocery (consumer ISP) to get 3 shelf-feet of product space at eye level, for $500,000. The grocery takes the distributor's money, then calls you: "Hi, your distributor paid us $500,000 for 3 shelf-feet of space. Unless you pay us another $500,000 we can only give your product one foot on top of the shelves, out of reach." What exactly did the distributor pay half a million dollars for?
This is exactly what Bellsouth's CTO is proposing. Apple already pays their ISP to get iTMS's music to the internet. Their ISP already pays other ISPs to get the music to the customers. Bill Smith thinks that he should be able to charge Apple an additional nickel per song in protection money or something "might happen" to that nice packet they have there, despite the fact th
who thinks that Microsoft should pay for the traffic caused by millions of people downloading security patches for Windows?
I hope you're not insinuating that they are not paying. Because they do. They buy internet access, and thats how the files get to you, when you download them using the internet access you paid for. Both ends of this transaction are already paid for.
You know, you remind me of a roommate I had in college who asked me if he could put a webpage up on his windows 98 computer. I showed him microsoft's Personal Web Server, and he went about getting a website up on his computer. A few weeks later, he asked me why nobody could get to his website when his computer was turned off. You see, he thought the internet was this magical place where websites just floated free in the ether until someone wanted to visit them. He had no idea that the stuff he downloaded on the internet was coming from another computer uploading it somewhere else.
Maybe pedantically it's not between you and the ISP.
Other people have no responsibility to honor the contract between the ISP and the Coffeeshop. If the coffeeshop does not take steps to provide service in ways that honor that contract, this is solely their fault.
That reason being the feeling that you were doing something wrong and wished to hide it
Or he had people's SSNs on his laptop and couldn't risk it getting stolen. Or he's antisocial and doesn't want someone sitting next to him. Or he's got a fear of germs and the coffeeshop is insufficiently sterilized.
If the guy was looking at kiddie pr0n or something, that'd be on the laptop and in the story and this would be a nonstarter. But no, you've gotta assume the guy was doing something, anything bad, to the point of grasping at straws like "he has something to hide" just to prop up your position: "he must have been feeling guilty so he must have been doing something wrong".
The postmark thing is generally not acceptable, since they can be faked. You could even mail an empty envelope to yourself and steam it open and reseal it with whatever you wanted at a later date.
As another person alluded, it also doesn't prove that you made the document, only that you (ostensibly) mailed a copy of it.
Exactly what 'burden' does enforcing a rating system place on society?
What rating system? Did you READ the law in question? The entire issue is that this particular law and many others exactly like it do some vague handwaving, outlaw some "violent" or "sexual" material, then basically say "this will be determined on a case by case basis by a judge". In other words, is Pac-Man "violent"? WHO KNOWS?! We'll have to sue someone for selling a copy to a minor so that we can get the case before a judge to find out? Who is going to pay for all of this? How is anyone going to sell anything to your kid if theres no way of knowing before hand if Jack Thompson is going to leap out of the woodwork and have them arrested? Hell, you've seen how Thompson works, half his crusades are on behalf of adults who bought their kids Grand Theft Auto and were appalled by the violence and lawbreaking in the game. Do you not think he'd stoop low enough to accuse a store of selling a game to a kid when they actually sold it to the parent? All the parent has to do is pay in cash or stand up in court and claim the kid took their credit card.
If you cannot see how making things illegal specifically on a case-by-case basis with no provision for finding out if something is acceptable until after you've broken the law is a burden to society, then nobody here can save you.
You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players
So dig up the streets once and lay some nice big conduit for every tom dick and harry to pay to install in. When its full, you'll have received enough to dig the streets up again (several years later) and lay another nice big conduit. If the company fails they get a choice of pulling their lines out or selling them to the city to get the installation cost back, and the next company to come along gets an option to use those lines at a discount.
Can you point to the law that created these controls? PGP was published as a book for the purpose of export (see here, search for "State Department seems to think that books are exportable, while software is not"). There was no such rule at the time (at one time, Zimmerman was claimed to have uploaded pgp to a foreign mirror, but at no time was this book called into question), and as far as I know, since then encryption controls have become only more lax at the complaints of companies unable to compete with foreign companies who had no such restrictions.
One person buying a 10 bedroom mansion might hire a force of 40 carpenters, of which half might be assistants learning a trade.
How many carpenters would it take to accomodate one thousand people buying 2 bedroom houses each? How many assistants would be trained?
Every time "voodoo" economics is brought up, nobody ever explains just how the upper 5% of the population will ever manage to "trickle down" anywhere near as effectively as middle class could do it.
Next you'll be telling me that using OnStar for directions makes me violate my own rights, since I shouldn't know where my car is
No, but now that I've taped my cellphone under your rear bumper, I know where your car is.
People like to talk about how improper uses of things like this (see also: guns, VCRs, bittorrent, nmap) should not invalidate the proper uses, but at least with those there is no illusions about "someone can kill someone else with this" or "someone can infringe copyright with this". These days, from domestic surveillance to cellphone tracking, the people pushing the technology are trying very hard to hide the capability for misuse.
Maybe these days people just expect the government to be run like a company (when was the last time you got even so much as a stock form rejection email from a job application?) but all it takes is a secretary dropping a "sorry, after 'mature reflexion' we decided not to see you" letter in the fax machine and hitting send.
The French PM may have "maturely" decided not to have the meeting but his lack of response to any of the letters requesting it was quite immature.
I agree. The idea these people are putting forward (not just telcos, several cable ISPs are in on it as well!) is a horrible, horrible one, which I hope to never see in action.
But if it does come to it, I hope the content providers are ready. Google should not pay, and simply post a front page explaining that "Your ISP is reducing your access to us". Other companies that bill their users should pay, and pass that cost directly to the users in the form of a line item "verizon (or whatever) charge *" with a "* please call verizon customer service at 1-888-whatever for questions concerning this charge".
If the content providers stand up for themselves and provide the customers with education about the situation (god knows the ISPs won't, despite all the idiots insisting that some fairy hand will magically make everything better) then we still have a chance at making this go away, law or no law.
Slashdot Mirror
Factual has a pretty good definition, that being "provably correct or incorrect".
... until "trollkrew" or "flamelordz" ran out of users with modpoints.
With this system, there is a risk that opinions and factually correct (but unpopular) comments would be modded Wrong, but they're currently just modded flamebait or troll when people don't like them, so I don't think this system will make it that much worse. With the ability to cancel the Wrong mod by flagging the response as Wrong, the worst case is a coordinated group of trolls (remember, you can't claim someone else is Wrong if you're currently Wrong) working together to cancel attempts to flag their responses as Wrong, and the length of the flamewar would be limited by number of members and their 5 mod points.
Other things I thought of, to prevent people from simply modding a Wrong post back up (and since the -1 is temporary), the post should cap at +4 until the Wrong mod is cancelled. Likewise, to keep a group of different people from "locking down" a post, there can only be one Wrong mod on a post, even after it's cancelled. This forces any such attack into a single thread.
In practice use (and abuse) would look like this:
- Lies, damn lies, and statistics (2, Informative) by foo
then someone posts a -1, Wrong and a correction:
- Lies, damn lies, and statistics (1, Wrong) by foo (the Wrong tag overrides any other tag for funny, troll, insightful, whatever)
|- Correction: You're wrong! (1) by bar
Now, foo can't cancel this himself, since he's currently Wrong, but someone else who thinks they can prove that foo is right and bar is wrong can come along:
- Lies, damn lies, and statistics (2, Informative) by foo (the Wrong mod is cancelled)
|- Correction: You're wrong! (0, Wrong) by bar
||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (2) by baz
Finally, nobody can now mod the original post Wrong again, they would have to mod baz's post Wrong if they want to make a statement.
- Lies, damn lies, and statistics (-1, Troll) by foo (modded down by trolls)
|- Correction: You're wrong! (5, Insightful) by bar (modded up by trolls)
||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (-1, Wrong) by baz (modded down by trolls)
|||- Correction: Yuo suck, poopyface! First TrollKrew ftw! (5, Insightful) by trollkrew214 (modded up by trolls)
Then:
- Lies, damn lies, and statistics (-1, Troll) by foo
|- Correction: You're wrong! (5, Insightful) by bar
||- Correction: No, he's right and I can prove it (-1, Wrong) by baz
|||- Correction: Yuo suck, poopyface! First TrollKrew ftw! (4, Wrong) by trollkrew214 (this can't be modded to 5 for now)
||||- Correction: TrollKrew sux! Flamelordz forevah! (5, Insightful) by flamah13
Further, use of the Wrong mod could be restricted to a subset of all of the users getting mod points, to help limit even coordinated abuse.
B. They can get more benefit by spending their money elsewhere
Hey, somebody has to pay people to climb to the tops of mountains and scream the name of their drug.
I also agree. It's a good job at putting together the best parts of pro and con views to create an informative (if entirely copy-pasted) article.
Hopefully we'll see more of this for other subjects, but I think before this gets too out of hand we need a special "-1, Wrong" mod that works differently - rather than only getting to use it if you don't post in the story, you only get to use it if you also post a correction in response to the comment. If your response is itself modded or metamodded incorrect you lose extra karma (to help convince people not to do this if they're not sure what they're talking about) and are banned from making Wrong mods (to keep it from happening again). A -1, Wrong to a correction undoes the -1, Wrong on the originally corrected post. Correction posts should be checked for at least one link pointing anywhere else so that the person has to at least pretend to the software that they've got a citation.
So anyways, if we have M1 moderation and M2 metamoderation, should backslash be M0, or M3?
Well, according to the article its been around for years and we're just now hearing about it.
... for $50 million and all your patents. Not exactly startup-friendly, but hey if you're "not infringing" you've got nothing to worry about. Meanwhile their geniuses sit around their skunkworks operation and think up things to patent, which from the descriptions seem to be entirely "process by which problem X is solved", not even the actual solution to the problem.
It also looks like they've been doing licensing
Why is it the same people who love evolution are the same people who want to keep everything the same?
Because I for one do NOT welcome our newly evolved cockroach overlords!
Isn't this exactly the same?
I don't know, is the article really correct about this being a super-secret operation? It's hard to license out your patents when nobody knows you exist and you're not helping people find out about them.
I can see how this is similar to Apple or Microsoft plunging millions of dollars into R&D but I don't see where they are licensing their technology out to other companies.
Publicly traded stock has been around for centuries now. If anything, I blame it on the websites that enabled a whole new class of traders: the daytraders. These are the people who have nothing better to do than sit around all day trading on every little shift of the market, holding stock for days or even just hours, and who expect the value tomorrow to be better than today's, with no care about what the value will be in a week since they'll be long gone.
is there a real commercial incentive today or do we have to wait till ol' Mother Earth runs out of diggable dirt-based useful stuff first?
We'll have to wait well beyond then. First we'll have to wait until whats on Earth has been used up. We could go earlier, but the cost-benefit analysis says that it'll cost a lot and if they don't do it, then major corporations will benefit hugely by selling less metal for more money.
Once what we've got is all "gone", we'll have to wait some more... see, like idiots the people of the future kept saying "oh theres plenty it'll last for decades, and once it's gone we'll figure something else out!" Only now that it's gone, they're discovering that they really needed that metal to "figure something else out". So now "other" major companies (the mining companies went bankrupt when they ran out of metal to mine, all the miners were laid off, and the top brass assembled a new company, exactly the same as the old, but with cheaper workers since all of the freshly unemployed weren't exactly in a good bargaining position). These companies will recycle the used metal.
Except! It would be a terrible shame if these companies spent billions figuring out how to recycle all the rare metals and then lost their market to fresh space-ore. So they patent the process of retrieving ore from orbit, and proceed to sit on it for the duration of the patent. Meanwhile, they start spreading FUD about how much more expensive it would be to get ore from space and now that they can recycle nickel and other metals, they don't need it anyway. Metal is plentiful again, and people quit caring about space.
Problem solved, assuming that we manage to pull off a miracle and find a replacement for oil before it runs out, and not after the last part needed for the oil replacement equipment gets stranded in the middle of the desert because the truck it was on ran out of gas. Maybe companies will figure out a stopgap recycling solution for oil too... soylent oil anyone?
But you know, most of the world is stupid and doesn't understand this kind of stuff, or has stupid opinions about it, and will be afraid of it.
Don't mind me, I'm just buying some powder, a makeup brush and tape. Don't mind my friend in line ahead of you, he's just testing out his new windex on the fingerprint reader to make sure the bottle isn't defective.
I'm not "stupid" but I do have opinions of this. Based on their demo (flash) they use a simple pad-based scanner where you press your finger, rather than a strip-based scanner which you would drag your finger across (smearing prints in the process). All thats needed is to look over your shoulder as you tap in your "search number" as the demo calls your PIN, and I'm you (for the purpose of buying food, at least).
I won't use it, but I'll feel sorry for the people that do, and when they try to contest odd charges they're told that it was bought with their fingerprint so they had to have been the ones to do it. Reminds me of the giant ATM scandal in the UK, and it's harder to steal a fingerprint than a PIN, right?
What have the future generations done for us that we should care for them? Fuck'em.
Decide which discount nursing home you'll spend the rest of your life in, for one.
or how I have to price it to different customers.
The problem? ATT, BellSouth, Rodgers, etc. are not charging their customers, they're charging the companies who run the sites that their customers visit.
If you don't have a problem with this, I invite you to write to your state government and the federal government and propose that they abolish gasoline taxes in favor of billing the cost of road construction and repair to Ford, Chevy, Saturn, etc. After all, they should pay for the priviledge of having roads for their customers to drive on.
You are right regarding government intervention, of course, but the damage from the government granted monopolies is done. Even if all of the cities and municipalities walk away from the fees they collect for granting Bell permission to lay the only phone lines in the city (and comcast the only cable lines), who is going to come in now and lay new ones?
What's needed is not more laws, but to apply business transaction laws we already have in place. The peering arrangements these ISPs have all dictate who pays what for which traffic, why are they not pursuing payment through their contractual routes? If ATT gets a lot of traffic from UUnet, they should charge UUnet, and UUnet can then pass that charge on to its customers like Google, YouTube and Amazon. I posit that the answer is that ATT (and other ISPs) are in fact not dealing with excessive amounts of traffic, and therefore can't use the balance provisions of their peering agreements to charge the backbones for their traffic. After all, when was the last time you had trouble pulling up Google's website when it wasn't your computer's fault?
Additionally, I can safely say that the issue is not traffic related, as TCP and some applications that use UDP will retransmit a packet until the packet makes it through. Any ISP that started dropping packets after they receive them will start seeing their traffic go up as they end up handling copies of the packets they dropped the first time around. If they start dropping the acknowledgement packets as well, they're handling a copy of the packet they actually delivered the first time, plus a copy of the ack packet they dropped. Sure, TCP will slow down if a lot of packets drop, but that doesn't change the fact that if you drop half the packets of a 10MB transfer, you're now stuck carrying 20MB (10MB file + 5MB of retransmits + 2.5MB of retransmits that got dropped + 1.25+0.75+...).
Secondly, there has historically been some level of fraud in consumer-level ISP options, carefully negotiated in the fine print. Namely, the common practice of overselling capacity. When an airline oversells a flight, it at least makes an effort to recompense the customers who are unable to board through a replacement ticket for a later flight, and sometimes even a free night at the airport hotel when there are no more flights that day. However, when the ISP oversells its capacity, there is typically no recompense for being unable to attain the advertised speeds, and furthermore some of those ISPs intentionally throttle customers to a fraction of their rated speed (an earlier slashdot story told the tale of one person who was getting 700kbps on a 1.5mbit dsl line, so they downgraded to a 768kbit line... and got 300kbps).
Finally, what certain CxOs have publically announced they wish to do is clearly fraudulent. Consider this analogy: You are a company that produces brownie mixes (content). You pay a distributor (your ISP) to obtain shelfspace and deliver your product to supermarkets across the country. How they do this is not your business. Your distributor contracts (peering arrangement) with a grocery (consumer ISP) to get 3 shelf-feet of product space at eye level, for $500,000. The grocery takes the distributor's money, then calls you: "Hi, your distributor paid us $500,000 for 3 shelf-feet of space. Unless you pay us another $500,000 we can only give your product one foot on top of the shelves, out of reach." What exactly did the distributor pay half a million dollars for?
This is exactly what Bellsouth's CTO is proposing. Apple already pays their ISP to get iTMS's music to the internet. Their ISP already pays other ISPs to get the music to the customers. Bill Smith thinks that he should be able to charge Apple an additional nickel per song in protection money or something "might happen" to that nice packet they have there, despite the fact th
who thinks that Microsoft should pay for the traffic caused by millions of people downloading security patches for Windows?
I hope you're not insinuating that they are not paying. Because they do. They buy internet access, and thats how the files get to you, when you download them using the internet access you paid for. Both ends of this transaction are already paid for.
You know, you remind me of a roommate I had in college who asked me if he could put a webpage up on his windows 98 computer. I showed him microsoft's Personal Web Server, and he went about getting a website up on his computer. A few weeks later, he asked me why nobody could get to his website when his computer was turned off. You see, he thought the internet was this magical place where websites just floated free in the ether until someone wanted to visit them. He had no idea that the stuff he downloaded on the internet was coming from another computer uploading it somewhere else.
Maybe pedantically it's not between you and the ISP.
Other people have no responsibility to honor the contract between the ISP and the Coffeeshop. If the coffeeshop does not take steps to provide service in ways that honor that contract, this is solely their fault.
That reason being the feeling that you were doing something wrong and wished to hide it
Or he had people's SSNs on his laptop and couldn't risk it getting stolen. Or he's antisocial and doesn't want someone sitting next to him. Or he's got a fear of germs and the coffeeshop is insufficiently sterilized.
If the guy was looking at kiddie pr0n or something, that'd be on the laptop and in the story and this would be a nonstarter. But no, you've gotta assume the guy was doing something, anything bad, to the point of grasping at straws like "he has something to hide" just to prop up your position: "he must have been feeling guilty so he must have been doing something wrong".
The postmark thing is generally not acceptable, since they can be faked. You could even mail an empty envelope to yourself and steam it open and reseal it with whatever you wanted at a later date.
As another person alluded, it also doesn't prove that you made the document, only that you (ostensibly) mailed a copy of it.
And how would you prove that it is an "original work" and you have "created it" if you didn't register it.
Simple, when you get around to wanting to sue someone over it, you file your registration, which you can do at any time.
Exactly what 'burden' does enforcing a rating system place on society?
What rating system? Did you READ the law in question? The entire issue is that this particular law and many others exactly like it do some vague handwaving, outlaw some "violent" or "sexual" material, then basically say "this will be determined on a case by case basis by a judge". In other words, is Pac-Man "violent"? WHO KNOWS?! We'll have to sue someone for selling a copy to a minor so that we can get the case before a judge to find out? Who is going to pay for all of this? How is anyone going to sell anything to your kid if theres no way of knowing before hand if Jack Thompson is going to leap out of the woodwork and have them arrested? Hell, you've seen how Thompson works, half his crusades are on behalf of adults who bought their kids Grand Theft Auto and were appalled by the violence and lawbreaking in the game. Do you not think he'd stoop low enough to accuse a store of selling a game to a kid when they actually sold it to the parent? All the parent has to do is pay in cash or stand up in court and claim the kid took their credit card.
If you cannot see how making things illegal specifically on a case-by-case basis with no provision for finding out if something is acceptable until after you've broken the law is a burden to society, then nobody here can save you.
You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players
So dig up the streets once and lay some nice big conduit for every tom dick and harry to pay to install in. When its full, you'll have received enough to dig the streets up again (several years later) and lay another nice big conduit. If the company fails they get a choice of pulling their lines out or selling them to the city to get the installation cost back, and the next company to come along gets an option to use those lines at a discount.
Can you point to the law that created these controls? PGP was published as a book for the purpose of export (see here, search for "State Department seems to think that books are exportable, while software is not"). There was no such rule at the time (at one time, Zimmerman was claimed to have uploaded pgp to a foreign mirror, but at no time was this book called into question), and as far as I know, since then encryption controls have become only more lax at the complaints of companies unable to compete with foreign companies who had no such restrictions.
And raising the level of education
One person buying a 10 bedroom mansion might hire a force of 40 carpenters, of which half might be assistants learning a trade.
How many carpenters would it take to accomodate one thousand people buying 2 bedroom houses each? How many assistants would be trained?
Every time "voodoo" economics is brought up, nobody ever explains just how the upper 5% of the population will ever manage to "trickle down" anywhere near as effectively as middle class could do it.
The kid that cleans up at the stables isn't called the "Barn Star".
Tell him to get a camera and sell thousands of copies of the movie and he'll be whatever star he wants to be.
Next you'll be telling me that using OnStar for directions makes me violate my own rights, since I shouldn't know where my car is
No, but now that I've taped my cellphone under your rear bumper, I know where your car is.
People like to talk about how improper uses of things like this (see also: guns, VCRs, bittorrent, nmap) should not invalidate the proper uses, but at least with those there is no illusions about "someone can kill someone else with this" or "someone can infringe copyright with this". These days, from domestic surveillance to cellphone tracking, the people pushing the technology are trying very hard to hide the capability for misuse.
Maybe these days people just expect the government to be run like a company (when was the last time you got even so much as a stock form rejection email from a job application?) but all it takes is a secretary dropping a "sorry, after 'mature reflexion' we decided not to see you" letter in the fax machine and hitting send.
The French PM may have "maturely" decided not to have the meeting but his lack of response to any of the letters requesting it was quite immature.
I hope no net neutrality passes.
I agree. The idea these people are putting forward (not just telcos, several cable ISPs are in on it as well!) is a horrible, horrible one, which I hope to never see in action.
But if it does come to it, I hope the content providers are ready. Google should not pay, and simply post a front page explaining that "Your ISP is reducing your access to us". Other companies that bill their users should pay, and pass that cost directly to the users in the form of a line item "verizon (or whatever) charge *" with a "* please call verizon customer service at 1-888-whatever for questions concerning this charge".
If the content providers stand up for themselves and provide the customers with education about the situation (god knows the ISPs won't, despite all the idiots insisting that some fairy hand will magically make everything better) then we still have a chance at making this go away, law or no law.