But you know what the RIAA's next step in either situation will be... If they can't win in the courts under the current laws, just change the laws.
You know the morning after this verdict was released there would have been a line of lobbiests on the steps of Congress. Sad, sad times when money means influence.
If my wife gave birth to a half Chinese baby and told me that it was descended from an ancient lost tribe of Chinese settlers, I might be somewhat suspicious. Gu Jianming, wake up man, she cheated on you... My guess it is with the blond guy you saw in the village about 9 months ago!
While chuckled while reading the article and had the same thought, genetically, that's not possible. Blond hair is a recessive trait; you need both parents to have the gene. So unless one of this fellow's parents also had an affair with a blond to produce him, you musing simply doesn't add up.
It wouldn't be the first time Western traits were found in Chinese population. I remember visiting the Natural History museum in my girlfriend's home city of Chongqing 2 years ago and there was a display there talking about Europeans migrating and interbreeding with locals. However the timeframe for this would have been a thousand or two years before the Roman Empire, back when humanity was generally more nomadic.
I'll say one thing, it definitely now puts this village on a list of places I'd love to visit and see. I've been to this region of China before, but didn't get that far north; I went straight west all the way to Urumqi.
Actually, if they're really serious about this, they have to somehow block people from, as you say, recording and re-distributing. So, what they should be asking for is funds to research how to DRM compression waves (i.e., sound waves).
Well it seems the logical way of implementing such a scheme is direct implants in to everyone's ear drums. If the implant detects any illegal music or noise, your ears turn off.
That'd certainly make electronics manufacturing simpler. The next phase could be for ocular implants.
Anybody care to place a friendly wager that they're not going to honor robots.txt?
I had a similar thought. How much extra bandwidth is this going to suck from sites hunting for copyright material on completely legitimate sites? Particularly sites which might have a lot of large media content.
If I put up a terms of service forbidding the crawling of my site, can I then sue them for bandwidth costs? Seems reasonable to me, why should I be presummed to be guilty?
There wouldn't be certain loss of life from famine if we stopped mass-producing livestock, since you can grow much more grain than meat on a piece of land.
But which would you prefer, a big bowl of oats or a nice juicy burger? Meat is so much tastier then grain, let the cows eat it and we'll eat them.;)
Please let's be clear, it's not antibiotic resistant, because the flu is not a bacteria it's a virus. It's a vaccine resistant strain, which is very different.
It means the chickens aren't protected from GETTING this strain of bird flu. However once they have it there's no drug that currently exists to treat it, it all comes down to one's own immune system (however in the case of chickens it simply means death since I can't see a hospital being set up to care for them and give them hot chicken soup... nevermind)
It would be an anti-viral drug that would have to be developed to treat someone infected with any kind of flu/cold, not an antibiotic. And those are a lot harder to develop, it's much simpler to make a vaccine which causes an immune response preventing any infection from being able to set in to begin with.
It's also why all these antibiotics given to animals in our food supply are nearly completely pointless to begin with, they don't help with viral infections and only make bacteria more resistant.
As a Vancouver resident, I'd rather a system like Hong Kong, the Octopus Card. Works for transit, parking meters, even buying things in most stores. One card, money everywhere, very convinient. I don't see this as a major step forward.
I used to hit mute and do the same (or read email) until I got my MythTV box. I couldn't live without it - watching ads and tv in real time, how archaic.
Actually, this article gives me a better idea, which as probably been thought of before, but it's new for me! Let's start thinking up technologies (like not being able to skip commercials) which we reeeeeally would hate to see come to market. Then let's patent it, and not license the patents. If these media companies can use the law to limit fair use, then I think we should use the law to limit their anti-consumer techologies. We could then make money on the side when they try to implement these techologies by suing them for infringment.
Not saying you didn't made a good choice but there are free enterprise grade Linuxes. Centos is a redhat enterprise recompile.
Yeah, I've never liked Red Hat to begin with, so I was actually happy to be allowed to switch away from it during the whole Fedora switch. Of course I was a little bitter that I had just built a 50 node computational cluster using RH 9 about a week before they announced the discontinuing of the free distros.... sigh.
I want my apt-get! I'm a Debian-boy stuck in a SuSE institution.
We ditched Red Hat when they dropped their free distribution in favour of Fredora (really, what business wants to rely on a distro with a version life cycle of a few months?)
So we went to SuSE because it had a longer upgrade cycle. Why am I filled with dread the moment I read the title, why can I see Oracle doing the same with SuSE that Red Hat did with it's distro - the free one becomes their test version with the public as beta testers.
Well, I guess this means I can finally convince my boss to switch to Debian.
It's a bad thing... let me rephrase that... It's a process which has potentially negative consequences to some, because the people who are using these cures in a traditional manner do not have access to a computer with internet access. They do not have access to the resources of a genetics lab. They simply do not have the ability to utilize this information. Some company researching the topic may use information they gathered from google to patent a compound, and then later may force the natives using the compound (as they extract it from the plant) to cease and decist, the pharmcorps cadre of lawyers and jackbooted thugs being more influential than that of the natives.
What you are describing is an entirely different problem.
Most of hte information Google would be assembling together IS already freely available, they're just making it easier to use. The problem you're describing is the whole concept for patents and genetic information - that is a scary one, to think someone could patent the code of life almost defies logic.
I'm a very strong believer in open access to scientific data, the results of research should not only be open for peer review but be freely available to be used as the building blocks for further research. You're cutting yourself off at the knees and halting potentially ground breaking research the instant you start restricting how discoveries can be used, each piece of research should build on the previous ones, not have restrictive licensing imposed.
The reality is a vast majority of basic research is done with public funds, research these private companies then use to make their wonder drugs and other discoveries. This means to a degree the public must have some ownership of their work, because of the investment we've made at the ground level of research, something no company could do on their own.
It's one reason why in our lab we GPL all software we develop and try to share as much data as we can with the rest of the bioinformatics community, knowing that through pooling our knowledge we can make the "wow" discoveries and actually make a difference for humanity. It's sad so many other publicly funded labs don't similarly open source their code, though a lot do, which is a great start.
You're right, patented genes and sequences are very scary indeed, and is definitely something which must be fought. But blaiming Google's attempt to do good for research in general for what is a problem with our patent system is false logic. You're right with your Windows analogy.
So. Google is monopolizing genetic resources by putting genetic information online for free?
I was thinking the same thing. If Google is putting this information online for all to use in research, how is that a bad thing?
As a computer scientist who has been working in bioinformatics for over 3 years now, I've been calling for the "googlification" of genomics information ever since I discovered what a mess the community really is. You would not believe how many different databases, with different indexing systems there are out there. To actually do any useful research you first have to spend a month or two trying to make the pieces of data fit together.
Our lab, and many other labs, actually have entire projects dedicated to finding ways to piece these disjoint datasets together for effective quering. This is a huge under-addressed problem in genomics.
And genomic data goes far beyond just the human genome, that's only one small part. If someone could organize all the genomic formation across all the hundreds of genomes which have been sequenced, it would be a very very useful tool. The other half of the problem in genomics databases is half of them are NOT free and available for researchers without paying licensing fees. And to me, a far better use of research dollars is on actual research rather then paying licensing fees for data which was probably originally discovered with public research dollars to begin with. So if Google can open up all this sequence information, and more importantly the related information downstream from just the raw sequences such as pathway information, all the more power to them!
The truth is most genomes ARE already available through sites like NCBI, you can download hundreds of eukaryotic, prokaryotic, and fungi genomes freely already. You can already find similarities between sequences across species through tools such as BLAST, or find orthologs across species with tools such as Ortholuge. I would assume what Google is doing is creating a better way to organize this. And Dr. Venter is already known for trying to find as many diverse genomic sequences as he can, and usually not human ones.
This definitely seems to be panic over nothing, over something which could help genomic research a lot, and ultimately find better ways to protect humans against the nasty bugs out there.
Indeed. And once most people are familure with MySQL and the various tools and language support, there tends to be little reason to switch. PostgreSQL is a better database product, but many (all?) of the features that it's cheering section continue to tell us all about whenever the issue comes up, are simply not ones that the majority of MySQL users want or need. Maybe PostgreSQL fans should target Oracle usres.
Exactly. I know PostgreSQL is a better database engine, but I know mysql, I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything supports MySQL.
I've tried to use PostgreSQL for a few packages which didn't support MySQL, and I just got tired of the learning curve. All the various different executables to do different tasks rather then one shell like MySQL, a permission system which seemed from my limited usage more perverse then MySQL's (and that's saying a lot considering how bad MySQL's is). I'm sure if I learned more there'd be dozens of tricks that would have made the tasks I was attempting trivial... but why? I have better things to do with my time, like write cool code that uses MySQL.
PostgreSQL is the Beta of databases. The superior system but the loser in the race because of reasons beyond it's control.
Why is it the government can make pretty much anything secret even when it has nothing to do with security, and meanwhile citizens are losing more and more privacy from things like warrantless wiretapping? Bunch of hypocrites.
Because politicians don't like public scrutiny. They suddenly have an excuse to close off access for information which could be used to hold them accountable or embrassass them. They like to make decisions behind closed doors which benefit themselves and their supporters and not have the nosey public interfering, heaven forbid the information could be used to toss them from office.
Up north we're experiencing a similar problem at the federal and provincial (BC) level. Governments which are increasingly becoming more secret in their dealings and contracts - and we don't even have them using security as an excuse! Combine this with an apathetic public which just assumes all government is corrupt and you have a situation where the politicians get away with whatever they please.
It's typical of right-wing governments, they know their agendas mainly benefit a small, elite group despite any rhetoric they may spew. This is why they like secrecy so much, heaven forbid the public actually catch on to the number that's being pulled on them.
The solution is to stop whining and actually become politically active. Our cousins to the south certainly have a bigger battle ahead of them with a two party system where both parties are self-serving groups of individuals with a complete disconnect from the ordinary citizen. But if we continue fighting, in time we can wake the public up to this assault on democracy and freedom.
Agreed, I can see all the lawyers drooling already...
What is also means is a drop in sales for the next while. Just like the speculation that Apple's Intel announcement would mean people would hold off buying a new Apple until the switch was made; I can see a lot of people holding off on purchasing a new video card until this is settled.
I know I had been thinking of building a new computer this summer, including some fancy new PCI-X video card (which probably would have been ATI). But I shall now hold off until the dust all settles and we know exactly what's happening with these specs.
Definitely not very user friendly for us left handed people... Unless I can somehow make my thumb jump back and forth to click all three buttons. Ouch, talk about thumb carpotunnel.... it'll be worse then thumb pad controllers.
Here's a different spin... it's in the interest of those in political power right now to side with the Bells and cable companies.
The internet has become a powerful new medium to challenge the powers that be, to rally and organize in protest, and to simply inform people of injustices occuring. The internet is a throne in the side of many many politicians.
A private network, in which this mass spread of information and organization tools are restricted would put big grins on the faces of people like Bush.
Also, consider a website which might attack a certain Bell or cable company. Or might be trying to gain support to push for network neutrality. Or simply is not in the interests of those who run a broadband network, what's preventing the Bells and cable companies from simply blocking that site? We had a recent experience with that here in British Columbia, Telus, the main telephone company blocked access to a website for it's DSL subscribers which was run by the then striking union. Censorship in the name of corporate interest is possible, and is very scary.
I'm left pondering how this could effect the economy. There are many, many small internet companies that depend on the open nature of the internet. Everything from geneology websites to hosting companies like Server Beach (which we continually see advertised on slashdot). If these companies didn't have equal access, how many would siddenly go out of business, how would that effect the entire tech sector? I predict a lot of layoffs and a collapse worse then the dot-com bubble.
As someone working in research, a lot of what we do these days involves shared internet databases and resources. The negative effect on research would also be huge, suddenly one might not have access to some genomic sequence needed for an analysis, new discoveries could be slowed dramatically or not discovered at all. We could even find outselves back in the days when you sent away for some database to be mailed to you on CD, rather then simply look it up online.
The negative effects of a pay-for-play system far outweight any benefits, and those benefits would be for a very small group of people.
In the United States we have a free-market where small business is the backbone of our economy. If people don't like working for corporations they always have the option of starting up their own business and working for themselves. The other option is getting an MBA and learning business where you can work your way up the ladder on the business side instead of being in the trenches of the Data Center. Either way everyone has options.
The business world is a pyramid, isn't that what the economics and MBA classes always teach? A large number of people have to be at the bottom so others can climb up.
Not everyone can climb up, otherwise the system wouldn't work. So who gets left at the bottom? Do those who don't get the breaks and can't climb up the ladder deserve their conditions and life? Should they be left to a lesser life because in every competition someone must lose, no matter how good the competitors?
That's a very simplistic answer that doesn't actually solve the problem, that someone is always going to have to take these crap jobs. And unless it's a job seeker's market (which last time I checked it wasn't, particularly with increasing outsources), the employees left at the bottom are not in a position to make such demands for better treatment. That is why unions were formed.
So, rather then being confrontational through organizations such as unions, why can we not proactively correct the system so all workers, including those at the bottom of the pyramid, get the respect and decent working conditions they deserve?
You would have a voice in this, through your dollar(s). What would you be willing to spend to get on a highly filtered and unequal "Internet"? What would you be willing to spend to get on the Internet that's completely unfiltered and all the players are equal? If you're principled, you would say no price would get you on the first network. As for the latter, the only question is how much bandwidth are you getting?
Err, what would cause the company to listen if they have a monopoly? That is the point of being a monopoly, you don't have to listen to anyone.
If it was fully deregulated, and both the local telephone company and cable company refused to share their network, what could you really do? Switch back and forth between the two of them? And if both saw dollar signs in all these exclusive deals and traffic shaping to those who pay for access to their network, then what? You have no choices. People have tasted the nectar, do you really think they'd cut them self completely off the internet for this reason? Sadly, they'd be forced to live with picking one or the other....
When a monopoly or duopoly exists, really, what voice does the consumer have? None. That is the point behind government regulation, to protect the consumer in situations of "natural monopolies." (review your economics textbooks for the definition of that term)
As for bitching about government interfering and consumers knowing best - umm, last time I checked the government was suppose to be working in the public's best interest. Now if that isn't the case in your jurisdiction, perhaps instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to consumer protection, you should instead stand up and have a regeim change of your own, bringing in a government that does what it's suppose to.
As the lyrics to one of my favourite songs goes... If you don't like What you got Why don't you change it If your world is all screwed up Rearrange it
Slashdot Mirror
But you know what the RIAA's next step in either situation will be... If they can't win in the courts under the current laws, just change the laws.
You know the morning after this verdict was released there would have been a line of lobbiests on the steps of Congress. Sad, sad times when money means influence.
Are the "That's it! I'm moving to the US!" comments :-)
No, no, silly. It will be, "That's it! I'm moving to Sweden!"
If my wife gave birth to a half Chinese baby and told me that it was descended from an ancient lost tribe of Chinese settlers, I might be somewhat suspicious. Gu Jianming, wake up man, she cheated on you... My guess it is with the blond guy you saw in the village about 9 months ago!
While chuckled while reading the article and had the same thought, genetically, that's not possible. Blond hair is a recessive trait; you need both parents to have the gene. So unless one of this fellow's parents also had an affair with a blond to produce him, you musing simply doesn't add up.
It wouldn't be the first time Western traits were found in Chinese population. I remember visiting the Natural History museum in my girlfriend's home city of Chongqing 2 years ago and there was a display there talking about Europeans migrating and interbreeding with locals. However the timeframe for this would have been a thousand or two years before the Roman Empire, back when humanity was generally more nomadic.
I'll say one thing, it definitely now puts this village on a list of places I'd love to visit and see. I've been to this region of China before, but didn't get that far north; I went straight west all the way to Urumqi.
They've got a lot of balls, trying something like that.
:)
High pressure, large projectile type object....
Why do I have visions of this turning in to one giant canon?
Actually, if they're really serious about this, they have to somehow block people from, as you say, recording and re-distributing. So, what they should be asking for is funds to research how to DRM compression waves (i.e., sound waves).
Well it seems the logical way of implementing such a scheme is direct implants in to everyone's ear drums. If the implant detects any illegal music or noise, your ears turn off.
That'd certainly make electronics manufacturing simpler. The next phase could be for ocular implants.
Anybody care to place a friendly wager that they're not going to honor robots.txt?
I had a similar thought. How much extra bandwidth is this going to suck from sites hunting for copyright material on completely legitimate sites? Particularly sites which might have a lot of large media content.
If I put up a terms of service forbidding the crawling of my site, can I then sue them for bandwidth costs? Seems reasonable to me, why should I be presummed to be guilty?
Or Canada (assuming you're a blue state voter, we have enough red-staters in Alberta).
Seriously, this is the perfect reason to lobby for a national healthcare system. It will save the American public and businesses in the long run.
There wouldn't be certain loss of life from famine if we stopped mass-producing livestock, since you can grow much more grain than meat on a piece of land.
;)
But which would you prefer, a big bowl of oats or a nice juicy burger? Meat is so much tastier then grain, let the cows eat it and we'll eat them.
Please let's be clear, it's not antibiotic resistant, because the flu is not a bacteria it's a virus. It's a vaccine resistant strain, which is very different.
It means the chickens aren't protected from GETTING this strain of bird flu. However once they have it there's no drug that currently exists to treat it, it all comes down to one's own immune system (however in the case of chickens it simply means death since I can't see a hospital being set up to care for them and give them hot chicken soup... nevermind)
It would be an anti-viral drug that would have to be developed to treat someone infected with any kind of flu/cold, not an antibiotic. And those are a lot harder to develop, it's much simpler to make a vaccine which causes an immune response preventing any infection from being able to set in to begin with.
It's also why all these antibiotics given to animals in our food supply are nearly completely pointless to begin with, they don't help with viral infections and only make bacteria more resistant.
After reading the article and it's comments, I've decided that the best would be to make it allways load an upside-down goatse
;)
Who could tell the difference?
As a Vancouver resident, I'd rather a system like Hong Kong, the Octopus Card. Works for transit, parking meters, even buying things in most stores. One card, money everywhere, very convinient. I don't see this as a major step forward.
When ads are on I go read articles on /.
I used to hit mute and do the same (or read email) until I got my MythTV box. I couldn't live without it - watching ads and tv in real time, how archaic.
Actually, this article gives me a better idea, which as probably been thought of before, but it's new for me! Let's start thinking up technologies (like not being able to skip commercials) which we reeeeeally would hate to see come to market. Then let's patent it, and not license the patents. If these media companies can use the law to limit fair use, then I think we should use the law to limit their anti-consumer techologies. We could then make money on the side when they try to implement these techologies by suing them for infringment.
Not saying you didn't made a good choice but there are free enterprise grade Linuxes. Centos is a redhat enterprise recompile.
Yeah, I've never liked Red Hat to begin with, so I was actually happy to be allowed to switch away from it during the whole Fedora switch. Of course I was a little bitter that I had just built a 50 node computational cluster using RH 9 about a week before they announced the discontinuing of the free distros.... sigh.
I want my apt-get! I'm a Debian-boy stuck in a SuSE institution.
We ditched Red Hat when they dropped their free distribution in favour of Fredora (really, what business wants to rely on a distro with a version life cycle of a few months?)
So we went to SuSE because it had a longer upgrade cycle. Why am I filled with dread the moment I read the title, why can I see Oracle doing the same with SuSE that Red Hat did with it's distro - the free one becomes their test version with the public as beta testers.
Well, I guess this means I can finally convince my boss to switch to Debian.
It's a bad thing... let me rephrase that... It's a process which has potentially negative consequences to some, because the people who are using these cures in a traditional manner do not have access to a computer with internet access. They do not have access to the resources of a genetics lab. They simply do not have the ability to utilize this information. Some company researching the topic may use information they gathered from google to patent a compound, and then later may force the natives using the compound (as they extract it from the plant) to cease and decist, the pharmcorps cadre of lawyers and jackbooted thugs being more influential than that of the natives.
What you are describing is an entirely different problem.
Most of hte information Google would be assembling together IS already freely available, they're just making it easier to use. The problem you're describing is the whole concept for patents and genetic information - that is a scary one, to think someone could patent the code of life almost defies logic.
I'm a very strong believer in open access to scientific data, the results of research should not only be open for peer review but be freely available to be used as the building blocks for further research. You're cutting yourself off at the knees and halting potentially ground breaking research the instant you start restricting how discoveries can be used, each piece of research should build on the previous ones, not have restrictive licensing imposed.
The reality is a vast majority of basic research is done with public funds, research these private companies then use to make their wonder drugs and other discoveries. This means to a degree the public must have some ownership of their work, because of the investment we've made at the ground level of research, something no company could do on their own.
It's one reason why in our lab we GPL all software we develop and try to share as much data as we can with the rest of the bioinformatics community, knowing that through pooling our knowledge we can make the "wow" discoveries and actually make a difference for humanity. It's sad so many other publicly funded labs don't similarly open source their code, though a lot do, which is a great start.
You're right, patented genes and sequences are very scary indeed, and is definitely something which must be fought. But blaiming Google's attempt to do good for research in general for what is a problem with our patent system is false logic. You're right with your Windows analogy.
So. Google is monopolizing genetic resources by putting genetic information online for free?
I was thinking the same thing. If Google is putting this information online for all to use in research, how is that a bad thing?
As a computer scientist who has been working in bioinformatics for over 3 years now, I've been calling for the "googlification" of genomics information ever since I discovered what a mess the community really is. You would not believe how many different databases, with different indexing systems there are out there. To actually do any useful research you first have to spend a month or two trying to make the pieces of data fit together.
Our lab, and many other labs, actually have entire projects dedicated to finding ways to piece these disjoint datasets together for effective quering. This is a huge under-addressed problem in genomics.
And genomic data goes far beyond just the human genome, that's only one small part. If someone could organize all the genomic formation across all the hundreds of genomes which have been sequenced, it would be a very very useful tool. The other half of the problem in genomics databases is half of them are NOT free and available for researchers without paying licensing fees. And to me, a far better use of research dollars is on actual research rather then paying licensing fees for data which was probably originally discovered with public research dollars to begin with. So if Google can open up all this sequence information, and more importantly the related information downstream from just the raw sequences such as pathway information, all the more power to them!
The truth is most genomes ARE already available through sites like NCBI, you can download hundreds of eukaryotic, prokaryotic, and fungi genomes freely already. You can already find similarities between sequences across species through tools such as BLAST, or find orthologs across species with tools such as Ortholuge. I would assume what Google is doing is creating a better way to organize this. And Dr. Venter is already known for trying to find as many diverse genomic sequences as he can, and usually not human ones.
This definitely seems to be panic over nothing, over something which could help genomic research a lot, and ultimately find better ways to protect humans against the nasty bugs out there.
I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
you mean "betamax", right?
Yes, my bad for not using the whole term to be clear.
Indeed. And once most people are familure with MySQL and the various tools and language support, there tends to be little reason to switch. PostgreSQL is a better database product, but many (all?) of the features that it's cheering section continue to tell us all about whenever the issue comes up, are simply not ones that the majority of MySQL users want or need. Maybe PostgreSQL fans should target Oracle usres.
Exactly. I know PostgreSQL is a better database engine, but I know mysql, I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything supports MySQL.
I've tried to use PostgreSQL for a few packages which didn't support MySQL, and I just got tired of the learning curve. All the various different executables to do different tasks rather then one shell like MySQL, a permission system which seemed from my limited usage more perverse then MySQL's (and that's saying a lot considering how bad MySQL's is). I'm sure if I learned more there'd be dozens of tricks that would have made the tasks I was attempting trivial... but why? I have better things to do with my time, like write cool code that uses MySQL.
PostgreSQL is the Beta of databases. The superior system but the loser in the race because of reasons beyond it's control.
Why is it the government can make pretty much anything secret even when it has nothing to do with security, and meanwhile citizens are losing more and more privacy from things like warrantless wiretapping? Bunch of hypocrites.
Because politicians don't like public scrutiny. They suddenly have an excuse to close off access for information which could be used to hold them accountable or embrassass them. They like to make decisions behind closed doors which benefit themselves and their supporters and not have the nosey public interfering, heaven forbid the information could be used to toss them from office.
Up north we're experiencing a similar problem at the federal and provincial (BC) level. Governments which are increasingly becoming more secret in their dealings and contracts - and we don't even have them using security as an excuse! Combine this with an apathetic public which just assumes all government is corrupt and you have a situation where the politicians get away with whatever they please.
It's typical of right-wing governments, they know their agendas mainly benefit a small, elite group despite any rhetoric they may spew. This is why they like secrecy so much, heaven forbid the public actually catch on to the number that's being pulled on them.
The solution is to stop whining and actually become politically active. Our cousins to the south certainly have a bigger battle ahead of them with a two party system where both parties are self-serving groups of individuals with a complete disconnect from the ordinary citizen. But if we continue fighting, in time we can wake the public up to this assault on democracy and freedom.
an opportunity for a class action!
Agreed, I can see all the lawyers drooling already...
What is also means is a drop in sales for the next while. Just like the speculation that Apple's Intel announcement would mean people would hold off buying a new Apple until the switch was made; I can see a lot of people holding off on purchasing a new video card until this is settled.
I know I had been thinking of building a new computer this summer, including some fancy new PCI-X video card (which probably would have been ATI). But I shall now hold off until the dust all settles and we know exactly what's happening with these specs.
Definitely not very user friendly for us left handed people... Unless I can somehow make my thumb jump back and forth to click all three buttons. Ouch, talk about thumb carpotunnel.... it'll be worse then thumb pad controllers.
Here's a different spin... it's in the interest of those in political power right now to side with the Bells and cable companies.
The internet has become a powerful new medium to challenge the powers that be, to rally and organize in protest, and to simply inform people of injustices occuring. The internet is a throne in the side of many many politicians.
A private network, in which this mass spread of information and organization tools are restricted would put big grins on the faces of people like Bush.
Also, consider a website which might attack a certain Bell or cable company. Or might be trying to gain support to push for network neutrality. Or simply is not in the interests of those who run a broadband network, what's preventing the Bells and cable companies from simply blocking that site? We had a recent experience with that here in British Columbia, Telus, the main telephone company blocked access to a website for it's DSL subscribers which was run by the then striking union. Censorship in the name of corporate interest is possible, and is very scary.
I'm left pondering how this could effect the economy. There are many, many small internet companies that depend on the open nature of the internet. Everything from geneology websites to hosting companies like Server Beach (which we continually see advertised on slashdot). If these companies didn't have equal access, how many would siddenly go out of business, how would that effect the entire tech sector? I predict a lot of layoffs and a collapse worse then the dot-com bubble.
As someone working in research, a lot of what we do these days involves shared internet databases and resources. The negative effect on research would also be huge, suddenly one might not have access to some genomic sequence needed for an analysis, new discoveries could be slowed dramatically or not discovered at all. We could even find outselves back in the days when you sent away for some database to be mailed to you on CD, rather then simply look it up online.
The negative effects of a pay-for-play system far outweight any benefits, and those benefits would be for a very small group of people.
Microsoft security is sounding more and more like a protection racket...
"It'd be a shame if anything happened to those Word documents of yours..."
In the United States we have a free-market where small business is the backbone of our economy. If people don't like working for corporations they always have the option of starting up their own business and working for themselves. The other option is getting an MBA and learning business where you can work your way up the ladder on the business side instead of being in the trenches of the Data Center. Either way everyone has options.
The business world is a pyramid, isn't that what the economics and MBA classes always teach? A large number of people have to be at the bottom so others can climb up.
Not everyone can climb up, otherwise the system wouldn't work. So who gets left at the bottom? Do those who don't get the breaks and can't climb up the ladder deserve their conditions and life? Should they be left to a lesser life because in every competition someone must lose, no matter how good the competitors?
That's a very simplistic answer that doesn't actually solve the problem, that someone is always going to have to take these crap jobs. And unless it's a job seeker's market (which last time I checked it wasn't, particularly with increasing outsources), the employees left at the bottom are not in a position to make such demands for better treatment. That is why unions were formed.
So, rather then being confrontational through organizations such as unions, why can we not proactively correct the system so all workers, including those at the bottom of the pyramid, get the respect and decent working conditions they deserve?
Umm...the customer, ie: you?
You would have a voice in this, through your dollar(s). What would you be willing to spend to get on a highly filtered and unequal "Internet"? What would you be willing to spend to get on the Internet that's completely unfiltered and all the players are equal? If you're principled, you would say no price would get you on the first network. As for the latter, the only question is how much bandwidth are you getting?
Err, what would cause the company to listen if they have a monopoly? That is the point of being a monopoly, you don't have to listen to anyone.
If it was fully deregulated, and both the local telephone company and cable company refused to share their network, what could you really do? Switch back and forth between the two of them? And if both saw dollar signs in all these exclusive deals and traffic shaping to those who pay for access to their network, then what? You have no choices. People have tasted the nectar, do you really think they'd cut them self completely off the internet for this reason? Sadly, they'd be forced to live with picking one or the other....
When a monopoly or duopoly exists, really, what voice does the consumer have? None. That is the point behind government regulation, to protect the consumer in situations of "natural monopolies." (review your economics textbooks for the definition of that term)
As for bitching about government interfering and consumers knowing best - umm, last time I checked the government was suppose to be working in the public's best interest. Now if that isn't the case in your jurisdiction, perhaps instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to consumer protection, you should instead stand up and have a regeim change of your own, bringing in a government that does what it's suppose to.
As the lyrics to one of my favourite songs goes...
If you don't like
What you got
Why don't you change it
If your world is all screwed up
Rearrange it
Raise a Little Hell - Trooper