Perhaps any civilization advanced enough to begin broadcasting in the radio spectrum will, within 100 years, start running scientific experiments that are sufficiently dangerous to cause the extinction of the species? Is that possible?
Occam's Razor. The reason extraterrestrials haven't crossed interstellar distances to visit us is probably because it isn't possible to cross interstellar distances safely. No doomsday scenario necessary.
The entire science fiction industry is a desperate fantasy constructed against the utter desolation that logically accompanies Einstein's relativity.
Welcome to the lonely universe. Space is big. Really big. It's far enough to the chemist without having to worry about how far away the nearest ET is.;^)
I do not ask for nor do I require someone's permission to ever play what I bought for my own personal pleasure.... Copyright deals with restriction of DISTRIBUTION. It is the constant and widespread spewing of nonsense like "purchasing a license to listen" over the past decades that has made people forget what copyright is all about.
Copyright is the restriction of duplication. Your "right to copy." By extension it also deals with who is authorized to redistribute a copyrighted work, but the core of it is authorized vs. unauthorized reproduction.
This is why I think companies which advertise "Own it now on DVD" should be sued for false advertising. They should be forced to state "get your authorized copy at a store near you." The easy lie is that you own something after you put your money down.
You don't own the movie. You don't own the songs. You own a hunk of plastic that you have a right to use in accordance with the law. What is "use" though when the players are based in DMCA protected software? You don't even have the right to skip the ads on your DVD player if it is "forbidden by the disc." That's how much right you have.
I will say, you are right, it is not technically a "license." Some actions are a liberty you have under "fair use," but the grim fact is a media purchaser has few rights: Backup, time-shifting, format-shifting. That's about it, all of them based in precedent, if I'm not mistaken, and not explicitly legislated. In other words, in many cases you can't even recoup your legal fees when an unreasonable suit is brought against you, and the "rights" you have are subject to being overturned in a later suit.
Copyright law, as written, counted on scarcity of reproduction and good will between large distributors. Now that anyone can copy, cheaply and easily, the industries built around copyright are pressing every possible advantage against its consumer base, and we are finding out that the consumer has few rights, and those rights we do have can be easily eroded.
In effect, copyright law is obsoleted. We are working in an outdated system, with the mistaken assumption that a media purchase is worth more than spit to the consumer.
What needs to happen is for people to realize that they HAVE NO EXPLICIT RIGHTS when it comes to this matter, be outraged, form lobbying groups, and demand legislation establishing some basic explicit consumer rights regarding copyrighted works.
Or at least stop buying. Stop buying now, and put these outdated business models to rest.
Take the outrage in your post and direct it at Washington. Consumers have been hung out to dry since the NET act and the DMCA were passed. What we need are explicit rights, so that certain types of anti-consumer suits can be dismissed with prejudice and full recovery of legal fees.
The consumer needs a level playing field, and needs to be well informed about exactly where he stands with regard to ownership of any copyrighted work.
The key word here is an "unauthorized" copy, not any copy in RAM.
The judgment says that a copy to RAM is "unauthorized" when it is loaded alongside other code that creates an experience outside the scope of the World of Warcraft license (EULA and TOU). You're creating an unlicensed derivative work when you use such code. If you're running bots, turning WoW into nothing more than a fancy screensaver that farms resources, you're outside the scope of the TOU. Period.
This is breach of license, folks. It's explicitly forbidden in the TOU and EULA.
The court has simply ruled that if you are running a bot program, the limited license granted to the user by Blizzard forbids you to load or keep the program in RAM.
This is not the same as forbidding any copyrighted work to be loaded into RAM for licensed uses. You already have purchased a license to play your music, so if you load it into RAM to do so, you're legal. All the common legal precedents and arguments in favor of transferring it to a different device to listen to it also apply. You are allowed to listen to your music.
This ruling regarding "copy to RAM" is very narrow in scope, and was made in order to determine that WoWGlider itself is illegal to sell because it has no purpose other than to abet license violation, i.e.: It's only useful purpose is to violate the TOU, and there is no way to keep it from violating the TOU when used.
Therefore, it had to be established that loading the program with the express intent to violate the TOU or license agreement is an infringement.
I think it is, and I think it even makes sense. If you're violating your agreement, you're violating your agreement. No one should be able to sell a program whose sole purpose is breach of contract, or infringement!
So no one's going to be sued for loading WoW into RAM for any licensed purpose, but it's a necessary step towards the determination that the bot software cannot be sold.
The guy deserved what he got. He'll be lucky if damages aren't awarded, but at the very least the injunction against the sale of the program seems completely grounded in common sense and law.
There's really nothing to see here. Just people who read "copy into RAM violates copyright" and either a) misunderstood, or b) have an agenda against copyright law in general, and are being sensational and more than a bit dishonest.
Your new group name should contain a triple predicate. You'll do much better in alt.config if you follow standard Usenet protocols.;^)
-- Toro
Hah! Try this on for size!
on
I Will Derive
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· Score: 1
Try integrating the school system!;^)
-- Toro
Information wants 2 be free (and so does Iron Man)
on
Iron Man Released
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· Score: 3, Funny
What?! No torrent tracker file? What do you mean it was released? How can it be a "release" without a torrent? Don't you know anything? (*wink, wink, say no MORE*)
(Thanks for the review. This looks like one that might be worth a trip to the cineplex.)
Yup. And that set of inventions/discoveries only goes as far as inside the philosophy of mathematics itself. Then you get into the practical application, which is almost entirely a discovery process.
I jumped off the math truck somewhere after multivariable calc, but I appreciate your summary.
It is invented, in that we have set the rules of logic, and other rules and therefore it is one of the few disciplines where there is a "correct" answer, and all other answers are demonstrably wrong. That's because we set the rules, and it is therefore a finite system that we can fully understand.
It is discovered in that when we set new rules, we have yet to discover all the implications of that new rule. Such as chaos mathematics being a natural implication of setting a value to the square root of negative one, which has no real mathematical meaning. We just set a value because we needed to.
It is also discovered in that we discover how our invented system relates to the real world, the non-finite system, by which all of "nature" operates. Discovering this relationship between our invention, mathematics, and the universe at large, is what drives mathematics. Discovering the point at which they interface is a profound experience.
So I'd have to say: it is both an invented and discovered system, and the two forces (reality vs. theory) are what drive new mathematical concepts, and most of the natural sciences.
It's a false dichotomy. Have fun assuming you can't have it both ways, folks.;^)
I ascribe to the belief that the government should leave everyone alone, including me, unless people or entities misbehave, abuse power, or violate the public trust.
This is because governments are historically likely to misbehave, abuse power, and violate the public trust.
But at least the government has some checks and balances built into it that I can affect, organize to change, and vote over without buying a stake.
The next step is not regulation. It is negotiation. People clamoring for net neutrality legislation don't understand this: Any legislation will have unintended consequences. It always does.
So, IMHO, the government should get involved here, as a mediator. If no solution can be brokered, or behavior becomes sufficiently intolerable, then government should legislate. I do wish Comcast every success, but am cynical of any corporate "self-regulation" proposal, given the track record of such efforts (c.f.: the airline industry).
My neighbors have no other choice of consumer broadband service than Comcast. They'd have to lease a T1, otherwise, as they are not close enough to the C.O. for DSL. DSL in my area is only offered by SBC/Ameritech, since they ran the CLECs out of town by allegedly locking them out of their equipment and failing to hold up their ILEC agreements from the last big government intervention.
That is not competition. It is monopoly, duopoly at best, and God help the rural customer, because no profit driven organization cares. Too much infrastructure outlay for too little revenue. This is the state of service in the U.S.
Could the summary have possibly been written any more biased? I would call it providing context and lively writing, not bias.
Bias would be if I colored Comcast as "self-serving," "dishonest," or "besieged by wicked P2P pirates." I did call them a "great monopoly," because I had decided against the word "successful" as too biased. As far as the rest of the summary, the only color commentary I made was to describe government regulation as "evil" (through inference) by suggesting that Comcast thought self-regulation would be a "lesser evil" to government intervention, which so near to an inarguable fact that I would classify it as style.
But since you are offended, I apologize for that bit of bias. Government regulation is not "evil." It is just slow, blunted by committees, outdated by the time it becomes law, and historically plagued by unintended consequences, not the least of which was encouraging the lack of competition in the cable markets that makes Comcast a monopoly in the first place.
I amend that to a "necessary evil," when the consumer has nowhere else to turn, or when previous regulation has serious unintended consequences which cannot be remedied by market forces. That's more than a mouthful, and I'm glad I didn't put it in the summary.
Other than that, if you don't like the facts surrounding the case, that's tough. Comcast's alleged actions have prompted an FCC hearing. There are claims that they are forging packets and that service is declining across the board because they have supposedly overpromised bandwidth and are engaging in arbitrary denial of service. I would be utterly remiss to fail to mention that Comcast is a monopoly in many areas, and that it is responding to FCC pressure.
That is the context surrounding Comcast's P.R. statement, which I quoted in the summary, and linked as an article. If it made the linked P.R. exercise seem shady, it is your bias that makes it thus.
I honestly hope Comcast can fix this internally, and as a writer, I am a strong proponent of copyright. Your analysis of the kind of person who is angry with Comcast's monkey business is marred by specious assumptions and personal bias.
Actually, self-regulation is not crap when dealing with moral issues. This is because the political will for change is the outrage instanced with each entertainment product that is misrated, and therefore there is high motivation to keep the "morally sensitive" consumer appeased.
It is crap on a stick when it comes to economic issues. This is because the economic power is entirely seated in the entity with the most money, and that is never an individual consumer. The only way a consumer can gain direct power against poorly behaving companies on an economic basis is the class-action suit, and the political will to jump through all those hoops, and front the cost, is tepid at best.
As this is an economic issue between an 800 lb. gorilla that claims it will not sit on a justifiably outraged gnat, self-regulation will fail. It can't even see the little guy and will step on him by accident, if not in malice.
The government is a source of representative power to deal with such animals. It is the only entity that can properly enforce such agreements, and only if the enforcers are fully funded. Political will to spend money in a budget, or keep it there, is always greater than political will to drag out a class-action, especially if there are no grounds for a suit because there is no legal precedent in the first place.
Government action wins. Hands down. But only if it is needed. Comcast has at least demonstrated that it needs a full rectal exam by the gorilla experts at the FCC.
A little study of military history would have revealed that throughout the Revolutionary and Civil wars (among others), any prisoners captured out of uniform were almost always denied treatment as "prisoners" and were often instead promptly executed as spies. Yes, and in those same days it was common law in England that you should hang for stealing a loaf of bread.
Why are you suggesting we dial back legal precedent 200 years? Because "military history" somehow demands it? It is absolutely not practiced with the same ruthlessness today, and your "guideline" is not part of the rules of engagement for urban warfare.
Urban centers contain masses of civilians who have an intrinsic, and sometimes legal, right to defend themselves from well-armed, crazy-ass militias and gangs like the Mahdi Army and foreign funded gangs like Al Quaeda or Hezbollah.
That right to defend oneself from thugs and warlords is one of the foundations and reasons for the second amendment right to bear arms, the other being the right overthrow a despotic government. Perhaps the Founders were a little touchy about despotic governments, but people in a city where civilization has broken down have a right to their lives. This means people, with guns and uncertain allegiances, are out of uniform, and they are not shot as spies in accordance with some absurd, 200-year-old "guideline." They are detained and processed whenever possible.
I imagine that belligerents we pick up alone in the countryside are still occasionally executed in accordance with your "guideline" so long as no one important will witness it or come looking for the person. That has been the history of war since Cain and Abel, but it is nothing to be honored.
Obviously, if we followed your "guideline" as widely as you claim, we would have no need for Gitmo. We'd just dig graves instead of building a prison. It's cheaper and more efficient.
But undermining the Geneva Conventions and undermining U.S. Law in the unlawful suspension of habeus corpus and counsel rights in the case of Jose Padilla, deserved scumbag that he may be, is wrong. You give a citizen access to a lawyer and you prosecute, no matter the uncertainty of the times, unless the country is in a total war or a full-scale rebellion.
And if we are in such a total war, why do we not have ward captains running weekly terror response drills? Why aren't we rationing? Because it would harm consumer confidence? Too late.
Moreover, waterboarding is torture. The Bill of Rights, the inalienable rights that inform it as set out in the Declaration, and basic human dignity, are not something a President can suspend simply because "times are bad," and certainly not because our barbaric history of warfare demands blood. We should provide the best rights to our detainees that we can, not keep them in some alegal halfway house for political prisoners.
As far as I'm concerned, total war or full-scale insurrection (like the War Between the States) is the only justification for the suspension of basic rights, and nothing justifies cruel and inhuman treatment.
These policies are a gross overreaction that need to be denounced, discontinued, and apologized for as quickly as possible. We are on the wrong path.
The simple answer is we need laws, and public servants who understand the laws and the issues, for our new situation of having an "imaginary economy," where the only proof is often the voltage level of a circuit.
Today: We are in the phase of judges trying to claim that putting a program into RAM might be an illegal copy process, and demanding a core dump as evidence.
The Future: We need mandatory hard records of specified sensitive transactions (e.g.: e-voting, health, finance), we need whistleblower laws that protect what would otherwise be considered improper employee investigation and documentation of ephemeral computer records (it looks a lot like espionage), and we need legislators that understand the technology economy, and know where new laws are needed, and where the old ones will suffice.
Then we need to fund enforcement, which has taken a dive in recent years.
The newly qualified legislators are scheduled to arrive in Congress in about 20-40 years, if the older tech-savvy generation can teach the new aspirants to value their own privacy, and get them to understand that the fifth amendment doesn't apply if you put it all up on MySpace. I have confidence that these qualified people will eventually come to Congress.
Until then, enjoy the wait. In the short term, enforcement money, and will, has been gutted. In the long term, the Congress is not yet savvy to these issues, so the law is inadequate, and new law is written by lobbyists who want less accountability, not more.
Unfortunately, you don't have a leg to stand on while we amend the unintended consequences of our move to the "paperless society." I'm sorry.:^/
Interesting. It's nice to know there was some rational basis, even if a lot of it was just cooked up in the marketing department.
Weighing everything equally was what seemed wrong to me. There's a big difference between things like Tandy sound not being 100% compatible (big whoop), and your video calls (Tandy again!) or i/o ports needing third party support to work!
There's something to be said for Microsoft's phenomenal OOBE support that many people seem to have conveniently forgotten. It's one of those inconvenient truths all of us MS haters here at/. are blind to.
Linux takes setup. It's setup we were already used to, and welcome because it's far easier than the PC compatibles we had to work with in the 80's (and phenomenal considering the complexity of the current hardware), but the average user sees it as awful OOBE support.
Unfortunately, we are finding out that being an "operator" is not easy, you can't make it easy, and all those folks who bought "easy" are now part of a botnet, with a compromised box, or clicking insanely at a UAC dialogue they don't understand or care about.
You sound like a die-hard Mac guy, so let me tell you, the PC market went through this phase. For a long while, what was listed on a PC was a percentage of how much it was IBM-PC, and then MS-DOS, compatible.
Machines with a low percentage didn't tend to do well, though I never really understood where the figure was coming from in the first place.
If the generic machine sucks, and Apple's PR crew remains at its current legendary level, the blame will be clearly attributed to the fact that the hardware sucks. Plain and simple.
The only threat to Apple here is if the hardware doesn't suck, and they can no longer justify charging monopolist prices on the "genuine" Apples. As a Mac user, you should welcome this.
As a PC user, I've been through this in the 80's, as Microsoft wrested control of the "PC" platform from IBM. Once that was done, we didn't have to worry about 85% MS-DOS compatible clones any more. Windows just hobbled along regardless of what hardware you threw at it. XP was pretty damn good at catching a variety of platforms, in fact.
So while it may seem strange to a Mac monoculturalist, I think this development is a good thing, and might put Mac technologies, based on Free BSD if I'm not mistaken, within my reach, which is a far better choice than Linux kludges built on a sprawling PC infrastructure, with hardware vendors attached at the hip to Microsoft and therefore shorting Linux decent drivers (ATi, I'm looking at you).
I'll leave the rest to the BSD vs. Linux crowd. They may want to weigh in here. I like this. I like this a lot.
Really, this seems to me to be evidence of the results of tearing down boundaries between the public and the private, work and home, and the overall limitations placed upon personal space in modern work processes.
Basically, we're going to find out that there is a downside to telecommuting, etc. People need more than a cubicle. They need a place to be alone.
Every person needs to a way to get away from their work. I can still remember those old AT&T ads, back when AT&T was more than just a rebranded SBC, and their famous question "How would you like to do your work on the beach?" My answer was a uncategorical: no.
I want to smell the salt air when I go to the beach. The admonition is clear: Turn off your cellphone, and assorted gadgetry, and take a break, or you will break.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps any civilization advanced enough to begin broadcasting in the radio spectrum will, within 100 years, start running scientific experiments that are sufficiently dangerous to cause the extinction of the species? Is that possible?
Occam's Razor. The reason extraterrestrials haven't crossed interstellar distances to visit us is probably because it isn't possible to cross interstellar distances safely. No doomsday scenario necessary.
The entire science fiction industry is a desperate fantasy constructed against the utter desolation that logically accompanies Einstein's relativity.
Welcome to the lonely universe. Space is big. Really big. It's far enough to the chemist without having to worry about how far away the nearest ET is. ;^)
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Toro
I do not ask for nor do I require someone's permission to ever play what I bought for my own personal pleasure. ... Copyright deals with restriction of DISTRIBUTION. It is the constant and widespread spewing of nonsense like "purchasing a license to listen" over the past decades that has made people forget what copyright is all about.
Copyright is the restriction of duplication. Your "right to copy." By extension it also deals with who is authorized to redistribute a copyrighted work, but the core of it is authorized vs. unauthorized reproduction.
This is why I think companies which advertise "Own it now on DVD" should be sued for false advertising. They should be forced to state "get your authorized copy at a store near you." The easy lie is that you own something after you put your money down.
You don't own the movie. You don't own the songs. You own a hunk of plastic that you have a right to use in accordance with the law. What is "use" though when the players are based in DMCA protected software? You don't even have the right to skip the ads on your DVD player if it is "forbidden by the disc." That's how much right you have.
I will say, you are right, it is not technically a "license." Some actions are a liberty you have under "fair use," but the grim fact is a media purchaser has few rights: Backup, time-shifting, format-shifting. That's about it, all of them based in precedent, if I'm not mistaken, and not explicitly legislated. In other words, in many cases you can't even recoup your legal fees when an unreasonable suit is brought against you, and the "rights" you have are subject to being overturned in a later suit.
Copyright law, as written, counted on scarcity of reproduction and good will between large distributors. Now that anyone can copy, cheaply and easily, the industries built around copyright are pressing every possible advantage against its consumer base, and we are finding out that the consumer has few rights, and those rights we do have can be easily eroded.
In effect, copyright law is obsoleted. We are working in an outdated system, with the mistaken assumption that a media purchase is worth more than spit to the consumer.
What needs to happen is for people to realize that they HAVE NO EXPLICIT RIGHTS when it comes to this matter, be outraged, form lobbying groups, and demand legislation establishing some basic explicit consumer rights regarding copyrighted works.
Or at least stop buying. Stop buying now, and put these outdated business models to rest.
Take the outrage in your post and direct it at Washington. Consumers have been hung out to dry since the NET act and the DMCA were passed. What we need are explicit rights, so that certain types of anti-consumer suits can be dismissed with prejudice and full recovery of legal fees.
The consumer needs a level playing field, and needs to be well informed about exactly where he stands with regard to ownership of any copyrighted work.
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Toro
The key word here is an "unauthorized" copy, not any copy in RAM.
The judgment says that a copy to RAM is "unauthorized" when it is loaded alongside other code that creates an experience outside the scope of the World of Warcraft license (EULA and TOU). You're creating an unlicensed derivative work when you use such code. If you're running bots, turning WoW into nothing more than a fancy screensaver that farms resources, you're outside the scope of the TOU. Period.
This is breach of license, folks. It's explicitly forbidden in the TOU and EULA.
The court has simply ruled that if you are running a bot program, the limited license granted to the user by Blizzard forbids you to load or keep the program in RAM.
This is not the same as forbidding any copyrighted work to be loaded into RAM for licensed uses. You already have purchased a license to play your music, so if you load it into RAM to do so, you're legal. All the common legal precedents and arguments in favor of transferring it to a different device to listen to it also apply. You are allowed to listen to your music.
This ruling regarding "copy to RAM" is very narrow in scope, and was made in order to determine that WoWGlider itself is illegal to sell because it has no purpose other than to abet license violation, i.e.: It's only useful purpose is to violate the TOU, and there is no way to keep it from violating the TOU when used.
Therefore, it had to be established that loading the program with the express intent to violate the TOU or license agreement is an infringement.
I think it is, and I think it even makes sense. If you're violating your agreement, you're violating your agreement. No one should be able to sell a program whose sole purpose is breach of contract, or infringement!
So no one's going to be sued for loading WoW into RAM for any licensed purpose, but it's a necessary step towards the determination that the bot software cannot be sold.
The guy deserved what he got. He'll be lucky if damages aren't awarded, but at the very least the injunction against the sale of the program seems completely grounded in common sense and law.
There's really nothing to see here. Just people who read "copy into RAM violates copyright" and either a) misunderstood, or b) have an agenda against copyright law in general, and are being sensational and more than a bit dishonest.
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Toro
Your new group name should contain a triple predicate. You'll do much better in alt.config if you follow standard Usenet protocols. ;^)
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Toro
Try integrating the school system! ;^)
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Toro
What?! No torrent tracker file? What do you mean it was released? How can it be a "release" without a torrent? Don't you know anything? (*wink, wink, say no MORE*)
(Thanks for the review. This looks like one that might be worth a trip to the cineplex.)
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Toro
Yup. And that set of inventions/discoveries only goes as far as inside the philosophy of mathematics itself. Then you get into the practical application, which is almost entirely a discovery process.
I jumped off the math truck somewhere after multivariable calc, but I appreciate your summary.
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Toro
God, I wish I could say things with such brevity. Bingo. You win the cupie doll.
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Toro
It is invented, in that we have set the rules of logic, and other rules and therefore it is one of the few disciplines where there is a "correct" answer, and all other answers are demonstrably wrong. That's because we set the rules, and it is therefore a finite system that we can fully understand.
;^)
It is discovered in that when we set new rules, we have yet to discover all the implications of that new rule. Such as chaos mathematics being a natural implication of setting a value to the square root of negative one, which has no real mathematical meaning. We just set a value because we needed to.
It is also discovered in that we discover how our invented system relates to the real world, the non-finite system, by which all of "nature" operates. Discovering this relationship between our invention, mathematics, and the universe at large, is what drives mathematics. Discovering the point at which they interface is a profound experience.
So I'd have to say: it is both an invented and discovered system, and the two forces (reality vs. theory) are what drive new mathematical concepts, and most of the natural sciences.
It's a false dichotomy. Have fun assuming you can't have it both ways, folks.
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Toro
I don't know, but the instant I saw the "soylent" tag I thought this:
Soylent Green is PETA!!
I think that might solve a lot of our problems.
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Toro
What a Wiitard.
Is he hunting wabbits or fwying sauce-hwahs?
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Toro
I ascribe to the belief that the government should leave everyone alone, including me, unless people or entities misbehave, abuse power, or violate the public trust.
This is because governments are historically likely to misbehave, abuse power, and violate the public trust.
But at least the government has some checks and balances built into it that I can affect, organize to change, and vote over without buying a stake.
The next step is not regulation. It is negotiation. People clamoring for net neutrality legislation don't understand this: Any legislation will have unintended consequences. It always does.
So, IMHO, the government should get involved here, as a mediator. If no solution can be brokered, or behavior becomes sufficiently intolerable, then government should legislate. I do wish Comcast every success, but am cynical of any corporate "self-regulation" proposal, given the track record of such efforts (c.f.: the airline industry).
My neighbors have no other choice of consumer broadband service than Comcast. They'd have to lease a T1, otherwise, as they are not close enough to the C.O. for DSL. DSL in my area is only offered by SBC/Ameritech, since they ran the CLECs out of town by allegedly locking them out of their equipment and failing to hold up their ILEC agreements from the last big government intervention.
That is not competition. It is monopoly, duopoly at best, and God help the rural customer, because no profit driven organization cares. Too much infrastructure outlay for too little revenue. This is the state of service in the U.S.
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Toro
Bias would be if I colored Comcast as "self-serving," "dishonest," or "besieged by wicked P2P pirates." I did call them a "great monopoly," because I had decided against the word "successful" as too biased. As far as the rest of the summary, the only color commentary I made was to describe government regulation as "evil" (through inference) by suggesting that Comcast thought self-regulation would be a "lesser evil" to government intervention, which so near to an inarguable fact that I would classify it as style.
But since you are offended, I apologize for that bit of bias. Government regulation is not "evil." It is just slow, blunted by committees, outdated by the time it becomes law, and historically plagued by unintended consequences, not the least of which was encouraging the lack of competition in the cable markets that makes Comcast a monopoly in the first place.
I amend that to a "necessary evil," when the consumer has nowhere else to turn, or when previous regulation has serious unintended consequences which cannot be remedied by market forces. That's more than a mouthful, and I'm glad I didn't put it in the summary.
Other than that, if you don't like the facts surrounding the case, that's tough. Comcast's alleged actions have prompted an FCC hearing. There are claims that they are forging packets and that service is declining across the board because they have supposedly overpromised bandwidth and are engaging in arbitrary denial of service. I would be utterly remiss to fail to mention that Comcast is a monopoly in many areas, and that it is responding to FCC pressure.
That is the context surrounding Comcast's P.R. statement, which I quoted in the summary, and linked as an article. If it made the linked P.R. exercise seem shady, it is your bias that makes it thus.
I honestly hope Comcast can fix this internally, and as a writer, I am a strong proponent of copyright. Your analysis of the kind of person who is angry with Comcast's monkey business is marred by specious assumptions and personal bias.
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Toro
Actually, self-regulation is not crap when dealing with moral issues. This is because the political will for change is the outrage instanced with each entertainment product that is misrated, and therefore there is high motivation to keep the "morally sensitive" consumer appeased.
It is crap on a stick when it comes to economic issues. This is because the economic power is entirely seated in the entity with the most money, and that is never an individual consumer. The only way a consumer can gain direct power against poorly behaving companies on an economic basis is the class-action suit, and the political will to jump through all those hoops, and front the cost, is tepid at best.
As this is an economic issue between an 800 lb. gorilla that claims it will not sit on a justifiably outraged gnat, self-regulation will fail. It can't even see the little guy and will step on him by accident, if not in malice.
The government is a source of representative power to deal with such animals. It is the only entity that can properly enforce such agreements, and only if the enforcers are fully funded. Political will to spend money in a budget, or keep it there, is always greater than political will to drag out a class-action, especially if there are no grounds for a suit because there is no legal precedent in the first place.
Government action wins. Hands down. But only if it is needed. Comcast has at least demonstrated that it needs a full rectal exam by the gorilla experts at the FCC.
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Toro
LOL. Let me guess. Did he forget how to work his scientific notation when getting his sums wrong, or did he just fail the unit on "percentages?"
;^)
German efficiency, right down to the urban legend story on Slashdot, and the misplaced decimal poi.nt
I love this place.
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Toro
Why are you suggesting we dial back legal precedent 200 years? Because "military history" somehow demands it? It is absolutely not practiced with the same ruthlessness today, and your "guideline" is not part of the rules of engagement for urban warfare.
Urban centers contain masses of civilians who have an intrinsic, and sometimes legal, right to defend themselves from well-armed, crazy-ass militias and gangs like the Mahdi Army and foreign funded gangs like Al Quaeda or Hezbollah.
That right to defend oneself from thugs and warlords is one of the foundations and reasons for the second amendment right to bear arms, the other being the right overthrow a despotic government. Perhaps the Founders were a little touchy about despotic governments, but people in a city where civilization has broken down have a right to their lives. This means people, with guns and uncertain allegiances, are out of uniform, and they are not shot as spies in accordance with some absurd, 200-year-old "guideline." They are detained and processed whenever possible.
I imagine that belligerents we pick up alone in the countryside are still occasionally executed in accordance with your "guideline" so long as no one important will witness it or come looking for the person. That has been the history of war since Cain and Abel, but it is nothing to be honored.
Obviously, if we followed your "guideline" as widely as you claim, we would have no need for Gitmo. We'd just dig graves instead of building a prison. It's cheaper and more efficient.
But undermining the Geneva Conventions and undermining U.S. Law in the unlawful suspension of habeus corpus and counsel rights in the case of Jose Padilla, deserved scumbag that he may be, is wrong. You give a citizen access to a lawyer and you prosecute, no matter the uncertainty of the times, unless the country is in a total war or a full-scale rebellion.
And if we are in such a total war, why do we not have ward captains running weekly terror response drills? Why aren't we rationing? Because it would harm consumer confidence? Too late.
Moreover, waterboarding is torture. The Bill of Rights, the inalienable rights that inform it as set out in the Declaration, and basic human dignity, are not something a President can suspend simply because "times are bad," and certainly not because our barbaric history of warfare demands blood. We should provide the best rights to our detainees that we can, not keep them in some alegal halfway house for political prisoners.
As far as I'm concerned, total war or full-scale insurrection (like the War Between the States) is the only justification for the suspension of basic rights, and nothing justifies cruel and inhuman treatment.
These policies are a gross overreaction that need to be denounced, discontinued, and apologized for as quickly as possible. We are on the wrong path.
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Toro
The simple answer is we need laws, and public servants who understand the laws and the issues, for our new situation of having an "imaginary economy," where the only proof is often the voltage level of a circuit.
:^/
Today: We are in the phase of judges trying to claim that putting a program into RAM might be an illegal copy process, and demanding a core dump as evidence.
The Future: We need mandatory hard records of specified sensitive transactions (e.g.: e-voting, health, finance), we need whistleblower laws that protect what would otherwise be considered improper employee investigation and documentation of ephemeral computer records (it looks a lot like espionage), and we need legislators that understand the technology economy, and know where new laws are needed, and where the old ones will suffice.
Then we need to fund enforcement, which has taken a dive in recent years.
The newly qualified legislators are scheduled to arrive in Congress in about 20-40 years, if the older tech-savvy generation can teach the new aspirants to value their own privacy, and get them to understand that the fifth amendment doesn't apply if you put it all up on MySpace. I have confidence that these qualified people will eventually come to Congress.
Until then, enjoy the wait. In the short term, enforcement money, and will, has been gutted. In the long term, the Congress is not yet savvy to these issues, so the law is inadequate, and new law is written by lobbyists who want less accountability, not more.
Unfortunately, you don't have a leg to stand on while we amend the unintended consequences of our move to the "paperless society." I'm sorry.
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Toro
Interesting. It's nice to know there was some rational basis, even if a lot of it was just cooked up in the marketing department.
/. are blind to.
Weighing everything equally was what seemed wrong to me. There's a big difference between things like Tandy sound not being 100% compatible (big whoop), and your video calls (Tandy again!) or i/o ports needing third party support to work!
There's something to be said for Microsoft's phenomenal OOBE support that many people seem to have conveniently forgotten. It's one of those inconvenient truths all of us MS haters here at
Linux takes setup. It's setup we were already used to, and welcome because it's far easier than the PC compatibles we had to work with in the 80's (and phenomenal considering the complexity of the current hardware), but the average user sees it as awful OOBE support.
Unfortunately, we are finding out that being an "operator" is not easy, you can't make it easy, and all those folks who bought "easy" are now part of a botnet, with a compromised box, or clicking insanely at a UAC dialogue they don't understand or care about.
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Toro
Oh my god, did you seriously just misspell "Godwin" in a response about misspelling?
What a (sic) joke!
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Toro
Iron Man will be renaming himself "Palladium," fighting to keep your computer trustworthy against open terror!
;^)]]
I will be smelling stale milk for weeks after putting it out my nose laughing. I guess the "Heroes Happen Here" stuff isn't taking off?
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Toro
(Note: I believe this article was about a new comic book, not the movie, which features "Iron Monger" (Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane) as the enemy.)
[[UAC warning: Someone is making a schizoid post! mod Funny or Informative? Yeah, you should probably just click "ignore"
You sound like a die-hard Mac guy, so let me tell you, the PC market went through this phase. For a long while, what was listed on a PC was a percentage of how much it was IBM-PC, and then MS-DOS, compatible.
Machines with a low percentage didn't tend to do well, though I never really understood where the figure was coming from in the first place.
If the generic machine sucks, and Apple's PR crew remains at its current legendary level, the blame will be clearly attributed to the fact that the hardware sucks. Plain and simple.
The only threat to Apple here is if the hardware doesn't suck, and they can no longer justify charging monopolist prices on the "genuine" Apples. As a Mac user, you should welcome this.
As a PC user, I've been through this in the 80's, as Microsoft wrested control of the "PC" platform from IBM. Once that was done, we didn't have to worry about 85% MS-DOS compatible clones any more. Windows just hobbled along regardless of what hardware you threw at it. XP was pretty damn good at catching a variety of platforms, in fact.
So while it may seem strange to a Mac monoculturalist, I think this development is a good thing, and might put Mac technologies, based on Free BSD if I'm not mistaken, within my reach, which is a far better choice than Linux kludges built on a sprawling PC infrastructure, with hardware vendors attached at the hip to Microsoft and therefore shorting Linux decent drivers (ATi, I'm looking at you).
I'll leave the rest to the BSD vs. Linux crowd. They may want to weigh in here. I like this. I like this a lot.
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Toro
Name it Metamunicipal: Get your fiber here.
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Toro
Bugger. :(
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Toro
How soon will it be before we manage to produce Von Neumann probe?
Hint to the project leader: Contact NASA, this is some cool stuff. Just don't screw up like the Slylandro did.
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Toro
Really, this seems to me to be evidence of the results of tearing down boundaries between the public and the private, work and home, and the overall limitations placed upon personal space in modern work processes.
Basically, we're going to find out that there is a downside to telecommuting, etc. People need more than a cubicle. They need a place to be alone.
Every person needs to a way to get away from their work. I can still remember those old AT&T ads, back when AT&T was more than just a rebranded SBC, and their famous question "How would you like to do your work on the beach?" My answer was a uncategorical: no.
I want to smell the salt air when I go to the beach. The admonition is clear: Turn off your cellphone, and assorted gadgetry, and take a break, or you will break.
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Toro