ISPs in the USA (including universities) ARE NOT COMMON CARRIERS!
Jeezus, people! Stop propagating this myth!
ISP immunity for subscriber traffic/content comes from Section 230 CDA (yep, that CDA) and the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA. They don't need or want common carrier status.
I have to disagree, actually - I've really seen a lot of parents who still keep up with indie music, whose kids are stuck on mass market stuff. Mom and Dad like The Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, the kid is into Justin Timberlake. And it's not a "rebelling against parents" thing, either - it's more like a substantial aesthetic incuriosity.
Or maybe mom and dad grew up with - and like - the rock and roll that's dead as a popular genre, so they follow the indie niche inheritors of that stylistic mantle.
Sorta like how my parents who grew up when jazz was pop now follow the new generation of jazz artists populating what has become a similar, even smaller niche. So they're hip right? If "hipness" is defined by tastes outside the mainstream, then yes, they're hip - and so is a dork in his basement reading star-trek-meets-harry-potter fan fiction. If "hipness" is defined by having wide-ranging tastes, then no - but indie mom who only likes indie rock doesn't qualify then either.
Kids with disposable income and disposable time drive pop music. Corporations cultivate this market. As they grow up, they may acquire more refined tastes - or they may just keep listening to the familiar sounds of their youth on oldies radio. True since the 50's. Still true.
True since the 50's. Still true.
Apologies to Devo:
Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.
I think it was Danny Baker, the UK DJ/talk radio/TV host who said that "we are the first generation who are hipper than our children". Those of us who lived through punk and new wave (70's and early 80's) in particular saw how "youf" culture was slowly but inevitably swallowed up by the brand giants.
The vast majority of young people are hoodwinked into buying stuff and thinking it and themselves cool/hip/trendy when they're simply meeting the projections of the corporate marketing suits.
The Monkees outsold the Beatles during the 60's. Abba outsold everyone in the 70's. Madonna outsold everyone but Michael Jackson in the 80's. The Backstreet Boys outsold everyone in the 90's. The more things change, etc.
The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other than that controlled by the media industry (and the DMCA is certainly playing with the idea by banning you from distributing circumvention methods, given that a non-DRM-crippled digital camera is a perfectly decent circumvention method).
Read up on the AHRA. It didn't help the recording industry in the end...
Comcast would be well within their rights to drop or deprioritize bittorrent packets, but it's not at all clear that sending TCP reset segments with forged source IP addresses is kosher.
If all traffic flowed through a Comcast-controlled proxy that was disclosed, there probably wouldn't be a problem, but Comcast is actually forging source addresses on both sides with the effect of concealing their actions and fooling the parties on each end into terminating their connections at (what they believe to be) each other's legitimate request.
I imagine this method of traffic limiting could be litigated sooner or later since it affects customers who are not party to the RST-inserting carrier's TOS.
This is not a luxury tax, this is an extremely harmful tariff.
I wasn't talking about the Cisco/Brazil scenario, just the imported camera/DR scenario. I think there's a reasonable distinction that can be made between, essentially, bootstrapping infrastructure and a consumer luxury good.
(FWIW, though, try importing Cisco gear into Ireland, say, or China. The tax-man's judgement cometh and that right soon.)
(I understand the tarrifs to help local businesses... but honestly... there aren't any camera manufacturers in any of those countries).
There sure won't be any local ones starting if those trade barriers fall.
A $400 tax on an imported $300 camera in the DR sounds pretty progressive to me - if you can afford a luxury good like an imported camera, you can almost certainly afford the tax bite. This kind of tax is harder to dodge than, say, a sales tax on local goods.
Even though the iPhone is by far the most popular smart phone, it has the cheapest device plans. Treo users can choose carriers but they always pay much more.
You are dead wrong.
Sprint's unlimited Power Vision (3G) service is $15/mo for regular joes. We won't even mention the SERO plans that start at $30/mo for 500 minutes, unlimited data, unlimited SMS & MMS, unlimited mobile-to-mobile, and free nights/weekends starting at 7.
AT&Tingular charges $20/mo for unlimited data with 200 SMS/MMS messages.
Now, yes, T-Mobile and Verizon suck for users of any smartphones - but it's wrong to say Treo users always pay more.
Junis surely must have some interesting thoughts on the state of Afghanistan and his feelings towards the USA today. I'm also interested to know if he ever upgraded from that Commodore he was using to download movies - the one he hid from the Taliban in his chicken coop.
The USA, like most countries, doesn't have it's shit together like it once did. Even the hot military-industrial-complex shit that enabled the space race is no longer together, having more or less collapsed under the weight of too much money to be made doing fuck-all. (Compare the UH-1 Iroquois to the V-22 Osprey.)
The folks who still have their shit together, like Google, don't need to go to the moon. They've got other ways to make money - like knowing what kind of waffles you might like to buy for breakfast.
Actually, I thought that was the whole point of the Net Neutrality Stink. The Telecoms wanted congress to enact legislation to allow them to create a tiered internet. As a response opponents decided to lobby for the opposite: a law that explicitly forbids such a thing.
No. The cable companies lobbied the FCC (not congress) to explicitly classify cable internet access as an "information service" not a "communications service" - which they did. Independent ISPs sued, and the US Supreme Court held that the FCC had not misclassified cable internet access, and thus cable providers were free to exclude other ISPs from their networks. Telcos then lobbied the FCC to reclassify DSL as an information service, freeing them from any semblance of a common carrier burden.
As it stands now, there is nothing but potential public outrage preventing any ISP from degrading access to sites and services that don't pay up. The lobbying effort now is to draft and pass a law requiring content-neutral carriage of a given protocol. Big internet sites (that aren't ISP) are driving this effort because they know there will be no end to the vigorish extracted by consumer isps to get through to end users. (Whoops! There goes Google's margins...)
I suppose the police will argue that listing the items as police bugs on an auction site shows awareness that the bugs weren't his to sell. Thus, he'd "stolen" them by their logic.
Mr. Williams' day in court promises to be interesting...
You do realize that the Honda, Toyota, and even BMW plants in the US are non-Union shops, right? UAW is still limited to the traditionally domestic manufacturers and have repeatedly failed to make inroads at any of the on-shored plants.
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Foreign automakers only set up shop in states with "right-to-work" laws or legal climates favorable to union-busting.
I'm not making any judgment about the relative merits of unionized auto manufacturing labor, just pointing out that foreign automakers set up shop in the US in an era where there was sufficient infrastructure and cheap labor in union-hostile states to make avoiding unions relatively easy.
Congress can make an exception to protecting our rights to free expression (like copying someone else's expression) where economics requires exclusivity of some expressions to promote progress in science and useful arts. But only where necessary for that promotion of progress, and only for limited times - and only to authors and inventors. Not when economics doesn't require the exemption. Not for unlimited (or so long that the limits are effectively meaningless, or renewable) times. And not to record labels, which are neither authors nor inventors.
Saying it don't make it so in our legal system. The Copyright Clause says nothing about economics, only about the progress of science and useful arts (and the courts are not going to second-guess congress on what legislative actions promote progress.) SCOTUS held in Eldred v. Ashcroft that Congress has the power to repeatedly and retroactively extend copyright to whatever term they wish, so long as it's not literally forever. And record labels, who are corporations, are legal persons - that's the literal meaning of the word "corporation." Copyrights in the the US are assignable, and may be owned by persons juristic or natural.
I agree that the state of copyright law in this country is fucked (and don't even get me started on patents) but change is not going to come from the courts, where precedent contradicting almost every one of your assertions about the constitutional underpinnings of copyright still stand. Lessig got nowhere with by focusing on precedent and the Copyright Clause in Eldred.
Better to look at the economic arguments instead. Most people are shocked to learn that IBM's annual revenues alone exceed those of all MPAA and RIAA members combined. The copyright cartel's nowhere near as big or economically important as the technology or even the consumer electronics industries.
Show me where socialism and government control over business activity has brought about prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty?
The US after the Great Depression? You know, the one that came about because of ineffective government regulation of the financial sector?
I don't buy the argument that services for which the delivery infrastructure is a classic natural monopoly and the demand is inelastic - like electricity - should be put in the hands of a private entity with a profit motive.
This article's a troll. Depending on the audience of the site, dumping Firefox user-agents means dumping 10-60% of your US traffic - and considerably more in Europe and Australia.
Nobody (at least nobody in business for long) is going to do that just to spite the few % of Firefox users who run Adblock. It's inconceivable that any major web property would shoot themselves in the foot this way.
I get a little tired of rich, jet setting, mansion owners going on about the environment, even when I agree with them or approve of the work they do.
Woz is a nice, funny guy. He's not exactly a committed environmentalist living a spartan low-footprint lifestyle. He likes to joke about his energy efficient Hummer ("it's super efficient because it carries four segways at a time" to segway polo matches.)
I've been using an IBM M13 buckling-spring (clicky) keyboard with built-in trackpoint for years. I carry it from job to job. I have a new-in-box spare in my storage unit in case it ever gets swiped (because it's sure not going to fail on its own. It's built like a tank.)
These regularly show up on ebay, just watch out you don't get a later model without the clicky keys (unless you prefer a membrane keyboard.)
Highly recommended - it's nice not to have to move my hands from the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, how can you put a list like this together without mentioning the Cannon Fodder intro?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaFfFuEOj0
-Isaac
ISPs in the USA (including universities) ARE NOT COMMON CARRIERS!
Jeezus, people! Stop propagating this myth!
ISP immunity for subscriber traffic/content comes from Section 230 CDA (yep, that CDA) and the safe-harbor provisions of the DMCA. They don't need or want common carrier status.
-Isaac
The Monkees outsold the Beatles during the 60's. Abba outsold everyone in the 70's. Madonna outsold everyone but Michael Jackson in the 80's. The Backstreet Boys outsold everyone in the 90's. The more things change, etc.
Your generation != special.
-Isaac
I called it.
-Isaac
Read up on the AHRA. It didn't help the recording industry in the end...
-Isaac
Comcast would be well within their rights to drop or deprioritize bittorrent packets, but it's not at all clear that sending TCP reset segments with forged source IP addresses is kosher.
If all traffic flowed through a Comcast-controlled proxy that was disclosed, there probably wouldn't be a problem, but Comcast is actually forging source addresses on both sides with the effect of concealing their actions and fooling the parties on each end into terminating their connections at (what they believe to be) each other's legitimate request.
I imagine this method of traffic limiting could be litigated sooner or later since it affects customers who are not party to the RST-inserting carrier's TOS.
-Isaac
I wasn't talking about the Cisco/Brazil scenario, just the imported camera/DR scenario. I think there's a reasonable distinction that can be made between, essentially, bootstrapping infrastructure and a consumer luxury good.
(FWIW, though, try importing Cisco gear into Ireland, say, or China. The tax-man's judgement cometh and that right soon.)
-Isaac
There sure won't be any local ones starting if those trade barriers fall.
A $400 tax on an imported $300 camera in the DR sounds pretty progressive to me - if you can afford a luxury good like an imported camera, you can almost certainly afford the tax bite. This kind of tax is harder to dodge than, say, a sales tax on local goods.
You are dead wrong.
Sprint's unlimited Power Vision (3G) service is $15/mo for regular joes. We won't even mention the SERO plans that start at $30/mo for 500 minutes, unlimited data, unlimited SMS & MMS, unlimited mobile-to-mobile, and free nights/weekends starting at 7.
AT&Tingular charges $20/mo for unlimited data with 200 SMS/MMS messages.
Now, yes, T-Mobile and Verizon suck for users of any smartphones - but it's wrong to say Treo users always pay more.
Would you publish a follow-up story on Junis?
I found Jon Katz's Message from Kabul truly mesmerizing.
Junis surely must have some interesting thoughts on the state of Afghanistan and his feelings towards the USA today. I'm also interested to know if he ever upgraded from that Commodore he was using to download movies - the one he hid from the Taliban in his chicken coop.
-Isaac
The USA, like most countries, doesn't have it's shit together like it once did. Even the hot military-industrial-complex shit that enabled the space race is no longer together, having more or less collapsed under the weight of too much money to be made doing fuck-all. (Compare the UH-1 Iroquois to the V-22 Osprey.)
The folks who still have their shit together, like Google, don't need to go to the moon. They've got other ways to make money - like knowing what kind of waffles you might like to buy for breakfast.
-Isaac
Who cares about 10 years of Slashdot - I'm waiting to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Andover.net/VA Linux merger...
*bahahaha*
Sorry, it just slipped out.
Congrats guys, I know how it feels. It was a real head-trip when my site (http://ticalc.org) hit 10 years.
-Isaac
Fortunately, nobody's discovered the Aldergrove/Lynden and Abbotsford/Sumas crossings.
Peace Arch and Blaine are for chumps.
No. The cable companies lobbied the FCC (not congress) to explicitly classify cable internet access as an "information service" not a "communications service" - which they did. Independent ISPs sued, and the US Supreme Court held that the FCC had not misclassified cable internet access, and thus cable providers were free to exclude other ISPs from their networks. Telcos then lobbied the FCC to reclassify DSL as an information service, freeing them from any semblance of a common carrier burden.
As it stands now, there is nothing but potential public outrage preventing any ISP from degrading access to sites and services that don't pay up. The lobbying effort now is to draft and pass a law requiring content-neutral carriage of a given protocol. Big internet sites (that aren't ISP) are driving this effort because they know there will be no end to the vigorish extracted by consumer isps to get through to end users. (Whoops! There goes Google's margins...)
-Isaac
How many times must this myth bubble to the surface? ISPs ARE NOT COMMON CARRIERS (at least in the USA).
If ISPs were common carriers, there would be no 'net neutrality' debate - it'd be a settled matter.
-Isaac
Surveillance package. It's gonna be made by Rockwell, for Rockwell.
The subject in this case, Ralph Williams, has been arrested for theft of property. See http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1318360/1336811 for a more recent article.
I suppose the police will argue that listing the items as police bugs on an auction site shows awareness that the bugs weren't his to sell. Thus, he'd "stolen" them by their logic.
Mr. Williams' day in court promises to be interesting...
-Isaac
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Foreign automakers only set up shop in states with "right-to-work" laws or legal climates favorable to union-busting.
I'm not making any judgment about the relative merits of unionized auto manufacturing labor, just pointing out that foreign automakers set up shop in the US in an era where there was sufficient infrastructure and cheap labor in union-hostile states to make avoiding unions relatively easy.
-Isaac
Saying it don't make it so in our legal system. The Copyright Clause says nothing about economics, only about the progress of science and useful arts (and the courts are not going to second-guess congress on what legislative actions promote progress.) SCOTUS held in Eldred v. Ashcroft that Congress has the power to repeatedly and retroactively extend copyright to whatever term they wish, so long as it's not literally forever. And record labels, who are corporations, are legal persons - that's the literal meaning of the word "corporation." Copyrights in the the US are assignable, and may be owned by persons juristic or natural.
I agree that the state of copyright law in this country is fucked (and don't even get me started on patents) but change is not going to come from the courts, where precedent contradicting almost every one of your assertions about the constitutional underpinnings of copyright still stand. Lessig got nowhere with by focusing on precedent and the Copyright Clause in Eldred.
Better to look at the economic arguments instead. Most people are shocked to learn that IBM's annual revenues alone exceed those of all MPAA and RIAA members combined. The copyright cartel's nowhere near as big or economically important as the technology or even the consumer electronics industries.
-Isaac
The US after the Great Depression? You know, the one that came about because of ineffective government regulation of the financial sector?
I don't buy the argument that services for which the delivery infrastructure is a classic natural monopoly and the demand is inelastic - like electricity - should be put in the hands of a private entity with a profit motive.
Nice troll, though.
-Isaac
This article's a troll. Depending on the audience of the site, dumping Firefox user-agents means dumping 10-60% of your US traffic - and considerably more in Europe and Australia.
Nobody (at least nobody in business for long) is going to do that just to spite the few % of Firefox users who run Adblock. It's inconceivable that any major web property would shoot themselves in the foot this way.
-Isaac
Woz is a nice, funny guy. He's not exactly a committed environmentalist living a spartan low-footprint lifestyle. He likes to joke about his energy efficient Hummer ("it's super efficient because it carries four segways at a time" to segway polo matches.)
-Isaac
You mean Bernie Taupin.
I've been using an IBM M13 buckling-spring (clicky) keyboard with built-in trackpoint for years. I carry it from job to job. I have a new-in-box spare in my storage unit in case it ever gets swiped (because it's sure not going to fail on its own. It's built like a tank.)
These regularly show up on ebay, just watch out you don't get a later model without the clicky keys (unless you prefer a membrane keyboard.)
Highly recommended - it's nice not to have to move my hands from the keyboard.
-Isaac