In this world? Relatively few, but probably still too many.
How many people die due to the policys of a corrupt government?
Many more than are killed by serial killers, and certainly still too many. But still relatively few.
But in this world we do have things like a concept of private property, respect for law, and governments. That's the very reason why we can discuss the tragedy of getting killed by a serial killer or corrupt government.
You seem to be proposing a world that does not include 'governments' but does include everything which is made possible by them. That's kind of like wanting a charge account without the bill.
The world you are proposing, a world of individual entities acting only in their own self interest, and cooperating only where it serves their own benefit, has been given a fair trial...
That's the world we had for some 800 million to 2 billion years, and none of those entities were able to sustain enough technology generation-to-generation to produce something as simple as fire-on demand.
In the world you're promoting, you wouldn't have to worry about getting killed by either serial killers or corrupt governments. But you would have to worry about getting killed by everyone you meet, to feed their children, if they thought they could take you. You probably wouldn't last one day in the world you're proposing. I know I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to.
And to top it all off, you're promoting such an idea on slashdot!
In a place with no government and no laws, I suspect that it would be mighty difficult for someone to take central control of an infrastructure that didn't exist. Especially if the citizens had guns to protect themselves.
Um...if there isn't any infrastructure, how do the citizens get guns? And what exactly are they citizens of if there isn't any infrastructure?
I'd like to see an example of one single government that has ever been just. If there ever has existed one it was surely corrupted pretty quickly. Power corrupts, it is precisely because people have a violent nature that makes it so hard to maintain an incorruptable organization without seroius violations of freedom and liberty.
The cycle goes like this: So long as everyone is acting only in their own interest, we're all just a bunch of animals fighting to see who's genes are best adapted to the local environment. As soon as a few of us rise above all that survival of the fittest we can begin to cooperate and build a society. But the very act of cooperation involves each of us giving up some of our personal freedom in order to grant liberties (they are different things, you know) to others. But the society we gain is generally considered to have a greater value than the freedom's we give-up to get it.
But whenever we create a society, we're also creating a new environment that certain individuals within that environment can exploit for their own survival of the fittest needs. The infrastructure we create when we create such a society (such as a system of agriculture, language, artifacts such as houses, tools, and weapons, etc) becomes infrastructure to be exploited by those who are more comitted to their own survival and less comitted to the survival of the society.
To the extent that such a society can ferret out those 'selfish' individuals and prevent them from using the infrastructure of society for their own aims, the society remains coherent. Maybe that would meet your definition of 'just'. Note that coherence does not require the society to grow.
Selfish individuals who enrich themselves at the expense of the society are fairly easy to spot and root out. A harder problem is identifying those individuals who enrich both themselves and society (not in itself bad) but enrich themselves more. Such societies are characterized by addiction to growth, and quickly develop inequities in wealth, subsequently followed by the development of classes, and eventually leading to a concentration of power in the hands of the most ruthlessly selfish of the selfish individuals in the classic survival of the fittest fashion we're all so familiar with. Working the process in reverse, this leads to a reduced emphasis on cooperation in favor of unilateralism, a gradual (or sometimes rapid) destruction of the infrastructure of society which made the environment attractive to the selfish individuals in the first place, and sometimes leading to the complete destruction of the civilization, but more often leading to a new equilibrium as the
cycle begins to repeat.
As for examples, we've seen very stable civilizations in China (4000+ years) and Egypt (4500+) based on the dynasty model, dependent on the benevolence of a single family line, and characterized by slow technological growth. I'm not sure what your definition of 'just' involves, but perhaps these would qualify. If you compare things like wealth inequities or the extent of outlawed behavior, they might qualify as more just than 20th century America.
Religious institutions could conceivably qualify as societal structures, and perhaps even meet your definition of 'just' as well. Some of these have had runs of 800-3500 years of stability and have tended over that time to be able to manage a far faster rate of technological growth without imploding. Fascinating study, too. Ra
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful.
So?
Once you get anywhere beyond small time, the ability to get anything done at all requires government coordination.
Do you think a completely non-governmental entity could build a highway, dig a canal, construct sewer lines, implement a retirement system, etc?
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful. But that's no different than saying concise sentences generally have a lot of words or that oceans are generally loaded with fish.
If it's waste you're worried about, focus on reducing the waste wherever it is. Yes, you'll find a lot of it in government projects, but you'll also find a lot of it in non-government projects, too.
Anything good the government would do will be done more efficiantly when the people involved are not coerced.
So, how would you propose an airline fly across country? Should they negotiate overflight rights with all the property owners individually?
What should a society do with a serial killer who refuses to stop killing unless coerced?
What's to be done with the Typhoid Mary who insists that disease is a problem for people who suffer from it?
Should I negotiate a contract for the provision of clean air from the power plant next door? Perhaps I can arrange a trade for the rights to run power lines across my property?
Abortion, preemptive war, tax the rich vs tax the poor, social welfare programs, socialized medicine, environment preservation: people who hold strong beliefs about these things are relatively unlikely to find themselves acknowledging the other side as right or themselves wrong on these issues.
It's important to note that "people who hold strong beliefs" can be found leading both the party in power today and the party in power next time. One of the aims of a Constitutional Government is to forge a seperation of those powers, to create an environment where less forceful voices could and would be heard.
There are a lot of Democrats who are upset at the Bush administrations Strong Executive constructions. I wonder if the president's strongest supporters will still think this is a good idea when a Democrat takes office, or if they're hoping that having Bush claim that power now will prevent a Democrat from ever gaining that power?
Concering the federal level, it would probably be best to make it non-partisan.
One of the (lesser) definitions Websters has for politics is the total complex of relations between people living in society and involved not only speaking of things from one's own point-of-view (to ensure that your point-of-view is considered) but also allowing (demanding?) that others speak from their own point-of-view (to ensure you haven't missed something important).
Today, when we talk about politics we're almost always discussing it in it's partisan meaning; the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government.
It's important to note that the former definition of politics is tied closely with democracy but that the latter definition is applicable to any form of government.
I'd view this as a sign that we, culturally, are distancing ourselves from democracy and instead employing a kind of common hubris wherein we believe that we are right and therefore our opponents must be wrong.
Unilateralism serves us well, but only so long as we are the ones in power. Shortsighted and dangerous, I'd call it.
We have seen these turns before in history, in the rise of authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian governments, and always to disasterous effect.
It almost seems as if we humans are incapable of understanding that sometimes we, ourselves, are not perfect, not omnipotent, and capable of seeing the correct long-term path only with the aid of others perspectives.
Perhaps we need self-doubt more than we might be willing to admit?
I don't believe there would any benefit to me with this new arrangement and yet I would be expected to pay for it anyway.
Not necessarity. The major players (FCC, IRS, Telcos, traditional ISP's like AOL and Earthlink, and content providers represented by the RIAA and the MPAA) have already figured out how to make this two-tier system work, under existing laws and legal precedence. The standards have already been agreed to. Here's how it's going to work:
First, this second-tier is only aimed at people who have exceptional Internet needs, not your average joe. You aren't required to pay taxes (or at least not any additional taxes) to fund TierTwo access. Access to any TierOne site for any TierOne user is guaranteed to be on an equal access basis, and that's written into the law. No blocking, no service degradation (even for such things as latency) is allowed. Network providers are required to meet certain standards and they don't get a break for things like 'congestion' and such. There are serious sanctions and stiff fines (not to mention mounds of paperwork) for even minor degradation events. Prices for TierOne access are expected to remain reasonable (well below charges for TierTwo access) and price regulation will be put into place if low cost access can't be maintained by market forces. And the best part is that providers are required by law to provide TierOne access across the entire markets they serve, no cherry-picking just the most lucrative
subscribers.
TierTwo will only be necessary if you're one of those high-end internet users who has exceptional networking needs. For example, if you need gobs and gobs of bandwidth, or if you use an application that demands extremely high reliability, or if you need extremely low latency, or if you need special services most people would never have a need for, like a static IP, or other such stuff.
In fact, the Internet will function pretty much like it does today (at least that's what everyone is working hard for, because otherwise it will never fly) and the only change will be that some people may decide to give up TierTwo service if they don't need the value-added stuff and instead go back to TierOne to save some money.
About the only thing that will come as a surprise is where they've drawn the line between TierOne and TierTwo: 56Kbps bidirectionali, established point-to-point on an as-needed basis. Call it: Dial-up.
This system is already in place. The FCC Regulatory structure and Tax rates are already well understood. We have a structure to account for the value of previously subsidized infrastructure investments and so on. The ISP's have a sane legislative context on which to form their business models, and while the content providers aren't happy about not being able to go after the Common Carriers, they are agreed that they don't have much to fear from pirates running at dial-up speeds.
Welcome to the new Internet: Just like 1984, but more so.
Like I said before: consumers and businesses already pay taxes to use highways, just like you and businesses have paid for access to the network.
Your analogy is flawed.
In the U.S., highways are built by and maintained with public money which is gathered in the form of taxes, including such things as fuel taxes, license and registration fees, etc. (Toll roads are an exception.) So to say that both private individuals and business both indirectly fund the roads is for the most part correct.
This does not hold for the Internet.
The Internet is composed of a large number of privately built, privately owned, and privately maintained networks which have been internetworked together. If you use dialup, then you are using the publically finded (and paid for largely by tax dollars) telephone system running across public infrastructure under Common Carrier rules to reach a private modem bank. Once you hit the modem bank, you're on a private network. If you have any sort of broadband access (cable modem, high-bandwidth portion of a DSL line, etc) you're on a private network as soon as you hit the network interface. Even if your Internet access is provided by a municipality or a public school, it's considered a private network.
So the telco's have a point to say you're using their network. Unless you're in favor of nationalizing the Internet (let's not go there, please) you really have no claim to it as just a taxpayer.
So while both "you and businesses" can demand a phone line, you can't demand high-speed Internet access: it's only available if some private network provided chooses to let you have access, and you choose to pay their asking price.
As long as there are three wires (telephone, cable, fios) leading to my home (not to mention wireless/satellite and internet over power line) is around, I will always choose the best deal for me leaving the greediest to die.
You've got three? Dang! Some guys have all the luck.
I live within commuting distance of a high-tech center, and all but the last 15 miles or so of my commute is through countryside where even dialtone is sometimes flaky.
I'm afraid some people still think in terms of "The Internet" as being a place you connect to, and once there, the world is at your doorstep. While I agree that's the world I want, and the would which would work best for us all, the story discusses the world from the point of view of the networking companies who own the fabric of that network.
Imagine a world, instead, where you choose an ISP and access plan based on the content they have access to, kinda like choosing a Satellite TV provider based on the channels they offer. If you want both Google and Amazon, then you need to subscribe to the GoldenInfoPlusCommerce package. If you want access to sites in the *.sex domain, then you need the AdultPremmium package add-on. Of course, you can subscribe to PlatinumWorks and get all those, plus posting privleges on your favorite (affiliated) blogs, too.
The alternative, of course, is for your favorite Mom and Pop ISP to try to run their own wires to Yahoo, AOL, Slashdot, etc, and so avoid paying the Incumbents to use their wires, but is that really going to be less expensive, if even fesible?
But what about wireless? Wherein there is either Licensed Spectrum wireless (satellite, cell-phone, WiMax, etc) where you'll still be paying someone to use something they own, or Unlicensed Spectrum wireless, (WiFi) wherein you can use as much bandwidth as you want for free, and so can everyone else, including all the Licensed Spectrum wireless bandwidth owners who have a vested interest in making sure you can't get any real value out of it.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about Mesh Networking (wired or wireless) wherein you can get your internet fix from your friendly neighbor, so long as you don't mind sharing your bandwith to meet his { leftist communist pinko | right wing fanatical christian | child porn swapping | MPAA infringing | insert your own favorite bandwidth hog here } fix on an equal basis.
Welcome to Libretarian Hell.
We have a long way to go before everyone has three adequate pipes to their own home. I'm not saying it wouldn't work once we get there, but to date the only model we have of a network communication system which works is one where network netruality is maintained either through technological necessity, social agreement, or by law.
Congress needs to declare the war OVER so we can have our Constitution back.
Under the Administration's view of presidential power under time of war, the Congress does not have the authority to end a conflict. The only power Congress is Constitutionally allowed to exercise is one of bugetary control; They can cut-off all appropriations (it can't be done selectively) and thereby 'starve' the military into a surrender, but that's the only authority the Constitution reserves for them.
Senator Biden referred to this on the 4th day of the Alito hearings, if you read the transcripts (search for "architect of the president's memorandum").
Understand, I'm not making that claim; I tend to agree with the "majority of the constitutional scholarship", but Bush appears to be asserting that, now that Congress has issued the AUMF, laws no longer apply to the President.
Remembering Bush's continued assertion that this "War on Terror" is likely to continue indefinitely, that ought to frighten any Democrat. Then again, if you figure that someday there might be a (perhaps even loonier) Democrat in the Oval Office, ought to frighten any Republican, too. Of course, the rest of us have already soiled our pants.
Or maybe that explains what's been happening with the elections lately: If the First and Fourth Amendments are no longer applicable, why should anyone expect Bush to respect the Twenty-Second?
If this post prompts at least one of you to become interested enough in your own government to read a bit of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing transcript, I'll consider it to be a success.
Now then, where the F was the ACLU when the Clinton Admin was conducting physical searches without warrants?
I don't know which radical right web site you got this talking point from, but you may need to go back there and finish reading the fact sheet. Otherwise you risk mis-representing the facts and might appear uninformed.
Clinton did authorize a physical search, without a warrant, in the Ames case. However, existing law authorizes that in the case of suspected domestic spying.
Or was there some other case you were thinking of? Can you offer us a source?
...domestic spying on a relatively small part of the population.
I'd sure like to know what you're basing your "relatively small part of the population" claim on. Either you're in-the-know and revealing classified information which, as the President has said, is an extremely damaging thing, or you're just guessing that only a "relatively small part of the population" has been affected by the President's blatant dereliction of his sworn duty to defend the Constitution of the United States.
There will be a huge area of the country that suddenly goes 'dark' as these guys put up their system in place.
That's not what BellSouth is suggesting, nor would it even be smart of them as you've correctly pointed out.
Instead, the end user would see this manifest itself as a 'delay' in the connection. Imagine one day you start to notice that your favorite "Not_A_Bellsouth_Subscriber" web site starts acting slow; pages take forever to load, etc, or you find yourself asking people who their ISP is before starting an on-line game of Quake?
But BellSouth isn't a government and has no legal right to act as a government.
It's called private property, and unlike the Telephone system, most ISP's would like to have everyone agree that they own their network lock, stock, and barrel.
That's why no one can demand that you allow them to access your WAP. And you can't demand access to theirs. This is furthe complicated by the Internet Protocol itself; if your connection suddenly develops 200ms of lag, or starts losing 50% of the packets, there's no one you can blame, let alone sue, because those functions are not guaranteed services under IP.
This is tantamount to BellSouth tossing out their common carrier status.
Common Carrier only applies to voiceband. And BellSouth wants to avoid being saddled with these regulations.
The Common Carrier concept views the (telephone) network as a pipe; when you call Aunt Mable, you're talking to her and she's talking to you. The network is just a pipe.
The FCC view of the Internet is different; when you connect to http://example.net/ you're not getting the service from example.net but rather from an access point (ISP modem bank, DSLAM, cable company router, etc) owned by your ISP. Since it's their equipment, they can pick and choose the level of service they provide.
Then the federal and state agencies involved would have to go elsewhere for their service while renogatiating their contracts (or more likely abandoning them for their new carriers.)
Not directly related to this thread, but it might interest you to know that the U. S. Federal Government currently prohibits carriers from using VoIP circuits to provide National Service/Emergency Preparedness calls. Clearly they understand something we would be wise to understand as well.
He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the Internet, which is being used for more and more content-intensive purposes.
"Hmmm. You know, that's a mighty nice stream of IP packets you've got there. It's be an awful shame if some of them started getting broken, you know, kinda accidentally like. Awful shame..."
But consider:
The FCC has ruled that anything above 64Kbps is no longer narrowband, and therefore no longer subject to common carrier rules.
TCP/IP, as a networking protocol, was never designed to work in an environment crossing political and financial boundaries.
Translation: The Internet which drew you here was just a temporary illusion. I hope you enjoyed the ride, but please watch your step as you exit carefully to the right. Have a nice day.
I really feel sorry for all the people who built their business and made their investments based on this flawed understanding of what the Internet is.
This doesn't mean the Internet is going to go away, but it does mean the Internet you have right now is going to change. My predictions:
More Web-based resources will become subscription-only services. Less content will be freely available.
Higher prices for consumer-grade Internet access, but with that expanded service area coverage.
Much more restricted capability of consumer-grade access. No more 'naked DSL', $60 a month will let you browse the web (and use web-mail) but nothing more. If you want to run a web server, use a VPN client, run your own mail server, or p2p you'll be paying extra.
To get less-expensive Web access, you'll have to run everything through an Internet access device at your premesis which you don't own, like a cable modem. satellite receiver, or Xbox.
Free Software will be severely impacted. The Free Software movement was made possible by reducing the communication and colaboration costs to near zero. Very few private individuals are going to be able to finance their own web site for their own pet project, even if it's on someone elses server.
Just as VoIP finally makes headway into the telephony business on a large scale, it will become every network provider's favorite cash cow. The same will happen with any popular technology.
We'll watch as the network owners divide the Internet up into pieces which individually are smaller, more tightly controlled, more closely held, and thus more profitable. This will kick-off a period of Metcalf's Law operating in reverse, where the aggregate value of the network as a whole will be reduced exponentially as entire classes of connectivity are disconnected. This 'destruction of value' will take the form, for example, of thousands of Linksys owners collectively waking-up one morning (literally) to discover their $50 investment has become worthless. This is the same process (in reverse) which built the Internet as we know it, but will happen a lot quicker than the 5 years of carpet bombing with AOL disks.
The good news in all of this is that the noosphere extends beyond the current Internet, and the noosphere has not been damaged by this process. Expect a new Internet (not Internet 2.0) to rise from the ashes of the old.
The bad news is that there are a lot of big new dinosaurs which will need to be made extinct before that can happen, and the last time it took 150 years to get rid of just one.
When that executive of a recording industry association in Europe (I forget which one) said that 'being able to listen to the music you bought off us on a Mac or Linux is a privilege and not a right' he was entirely wrong.i
I have to disagree here. It's not your music, it's (in effect) his. There's no law by which you can demand that he allow you to listen to that music on any arbitrary device; you have to negotiate that privilege with him, and pay the price he demands. If he sells you a disk with the understanding that you are not to play it on a Mac (or to cover it with cheese sauce) and you choose to do so anyway, you're breaking your end of the agreement.
Most publishers don't (or can't) do that. They might say it's not supported on Mac or Linux and leave it up to you to try to figure out how to do it, but they don't make you agree not to play it on a Mac. Or if they do, at least their lawyers make them be up-front about it.
No, his association companies receiving my money is a privilege and not a right, and a privilege I can revoke at any time.
I agree with you that if you don't like their product you shouldn't have to give them any money. I disagree that this is how it is. In the U.S., compulsory license laws (whereby a tax is added onto the cost of blank media and paid to the music publishers to cover the cost of copying you might do) force you to give money to the music publishers even if you don't like their product, or are incapable of using it. (Deaf people pay this compulsory license tax on CD-R media and audio tapes used for data storage only.)
The model we are moving toward (and can't get there fast enough, if you ask me) is for a world where in order to play an MPAA movie or listen to an RIAA CD, you will need a special-purpose hardware device (think: E-book reader or DVD player) which specifically serves the needs of a specific publisher.
Unfortunately, their efforts, if successful, will result in no 'open' or 'general purpose' devices able to read the media (which, many argue for many reasons can never happen), no general purpose communication platforms (kkss the Internet bye-bye) and ultimately the death of media companies in the market place due to competition from other media companies (each with their own proprietary media and devices) and publishers who do not attempt to restrict access using DRM.
The threat here is that their efforts will result in a 'music tax' anyway. Think about this: If you publish (and own the copyrights to) a song, and choose to give it away (for reasons that make sense to you) and I choose to 'buy' (er. download for free) it for reasons that make sense to me, I still have to pay the compulsory music tax, that tax gets paid to the RIAA -affiliated publishers (who I'm trying to boycott), and you don't see a penny of it.
But it doesn't only apply to Sony's copyrighted material. If Time/Warner goes after someone for uploading their stuff, I'd expect the default first defense to become "Sony Rootkit", and let the Time/Warner lawyers talk things over with the Sony Lawyers and figure out a solution among themselves.
This may mark the end of the RIAA's (and MPAA's too) ability to sue people for music sharing.
if they did all that before they learned about the rootkit, then Sony just handed them a get-out-of-liability-free card for anything that happens on that computer from that point forward.
Spam gets sent to California? Sony pays the $10,000 fine.
Caught hacking into the CIA? Sony gets the free trip to gitmo.
Downloading kiddee porn? Not me, Mom. It's Sony's fault!
Let's take it one step farther...
Uploading Sony music onto P2P? Why don't you go cease-and-desist-yourself.
Now you understand just how far Sony has screwed this one up.
Put simply, the EULA is not asking "Can we install the software?".
I follow you this far. To my reading of it, you are correct. But there's another aspect to this many (perhaps even Sony's Lawyers) have missed.
One of the more common things which one would agree to when accepting a EULA is an agreement to assume any subsequent liability, indemnifying the other party (Sony, in this case) against liability for flaws in the product, and such. The idea being (to choose a farsical example) that before you install the Sony rootkit onto a CDROM-equipped heart/lung machine, you must agree to accept full responsibility for doing so. Sony has no way of knowing, beforehand, that you are planning to install it onto a heart/lung machine, and probably did not perform anything in the way of due dilligence to ensure it wouldn't bluescreen heart/lung machines accidentially. (How could they?) So instead they should issue a generic warning that there are certain circumstances where installing this software might not be a good idea, that it's your responsibility to ensure that installing the software (playing the music) won't have any bad consequences, and that if you choose to install it there anyway, they won't be
responsible for anything bad that might happen. That's what the EULA is for; to protect them.
But apparently, Sony is installing software without first securing that all important get-out-of-liability-free EULA card first. I'm sure sopme Sony lawyers are having nightmares about this.
While it's unlikely anyone tried to install a Sony music CD onto a heart/lung machine, the liability is not limited to those circumstances.
If a doctor tried to play music on his laptop, and later a medical liability case hinges around how bad data got into a patients medical report, Sony could become a party to the lawsuit, because a reasonable claim could be made that the Sony rootkit allowed some hacker to make changes to the patient medical report (and cover his tracks), and the burden of proof might well be on Sony to prove a) that such an intrusion did not take place, and b) that the doctor did in-fact accept the EULA releiving Sony of responsibility. That's going to be a tough burder to meet.
Of course, I haven't read the EULA itself, so I'm just guessing at what it insulates Sony against.
I'd be very surprised if the "install anyway" aspect of this was approved by a lawyer; if it was, he'll probably lose his job. If it wasn't approved by a lawyer, the one who failed to get such approval may be losing their job. But one thing Sony really can't do (IMHO) is just call it a mistake, because that would be admitting negligence without even a fight.
This one is going to be interesting to follow. It's almost one of those cases where Sony might hope for a quick class-action settlement just so they can fall-back to a "we already settled all of our obligations under the class action lawsuit; your wrongful death lawsuit is moot, because we already sent you a "coupon for a free CD".
Slashdot Mirror
In this world? Relatively few, but probably still too many.
Many more than are killed by serial killers, and certainly still too many. But still relatively few.
But in this world we do have things like a concept of private property, respect for law, and governments. That's the very reason why we can discuss the tragedy of getting killed by a serial killer or corrupt government.
You seem to be proposing a world that does not include 'governments' but does include everything which is made possible by them. That's kind of like wanting a charge account without the bill.
The world you are proposing, a world of individual entities acting only in their own self interest, and cooperating only where it serves their own benefit, has been given a fair trial...
That's the world we had for some 800 million to 2 billion years, and none of those entities were able to sustain enough technology generation-to-generation to produce something as simple as fire-on demand.
In the world you're promoting, you wouldn't have to worry about getting killed by either serial killers or corrupt governments. But you would have to worry about getting killed by everyone you meet, to feed their children, if they thought they could take you. You probably wouldn't last one day in the world you're proposing. I know I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to.
And to top it all off, you're promoting such an idea on slashdot!
Get some perspective, please.
Um...if there isn't any infrastructure, how do the citizens get guns? And what exactly are they citizens of if there isn't any infrastructure?
The cycle goes like this: So long as everyone is acting only in their own interest, we're all just a bunch of animals fighting to see who's genes are best adapted to the local environment. As soon as a few of us rise above all that survival of the fittest we can begin to cooperate and build a society. But the very act of cooperation involves each of us giving up some of our personal freedom in order to grant liberties (they are different things, you know) to others. But the society we gain is generally considered to have a greater value than the freedom's we give-up to get it.
But whenever we create a society, we're also creating a new environment that certain individuals within that environment can exploit for their own survival of the fittest needs. The infrastructure we create when we create such a society (such as a system of agriculture, language, artifacts such as houses, tools, and weapons, etc) becomes infrastructure to be exploited by those who are more comitted to their own survival and less comitted to the survival of the society.
To the extent that such a society can ferret out those 'selfish' individuals and prevent them from using the infrastructure of society for their own aims, the society remains coherent. Maybe that would meet your definition of 'just'. Note that coherence does not require the society to grow.
Selfish individuals who enrich themselves at the expense of the society are fairly easy to spot and root out. A harder problem is identifying those individuals who enrich both themselves and society (not in itself bad) but enrich themselves more. Such societies are characterized by addiction to growth, and quickly develop inequities in wealth, subsequently followed by the development of classes, and eventually leading to a concentration of power in the hands of the most ruthlessly selfish of the selfish individuals in the classic survival of the fittest fashion we're all so familiar with. Working the process in reverse, this leads to a reduced emphasis on cooperation in favor of unilateralism, a gradual (or sometimes rapid) destruction of the infrastructure of society which made the environment attractive to the selfish individuals in the first place, and sometimes leading to the complete destruction of the civilization, but more often leading to a new equilibrium as the cycle begins to repeat.
As for examples, we've seen very stable civilizations in China (4000+ years) and Egypt (4500+) based on the dynasty model, dependent on the benevolence of a single family line, and characterized by slow technological growth. I'm not sure what your definition of 'just' involves, but perhaps these would qualify. If you compare things like wealth inequities or the extent of outlawed behavior, they might qualify as more just than 20th century America.
Religious institutions could conceivably qualify as societal structures, and perhaps even meet your definition of 'just' as well. Some of these have had runs of 800-3500 years of stability and have tended over that time to be able to manage a far faster rate of technological growth without imploding. Fascinating study, too. Ra
So?
Once you get anywhere beyond small time, the ability to get anything done at all requires government coordination.
Do you think a completely non-governmental entity could build a highway, dig a canal, construct sewer lines, implement a retirement system, etc?
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful. But that's no different than saying concise sentences generally have a lot of words or that oceans are generally loaded with fish.
If it's waste you're worried about, focus on reducing the waste wherever it is. Yes, you'll find a lot of it in government projects, but you'll also find a lot of it in non-government projects, too.
So, how would you propose an airline fly across country? Should they negotiate overflight rights with all the property owners individually?
What should a society do with a serial killer who refuses to stop killing unless coerced?
What's to be done with the Typhoid Mary who insists that disease is a problem for people who suffer from it?
Should I negotiate a contract for the provision of clean air from the power plant next door? Perhaps I can arrange a trade for the rights to run power lines across my property?
It's important to note that "people who hold strong beliefs" can be found leading both the party in power today and the party in power next time. One of the aims of a Constitutional Government is to forge a seperation of those powers, to create an environment where less forceful voices could and would be heard.
There are a lot of Democrats who are upset at the Bush administrations Strong Executive constructions. I wonder if the president's strongest supporters will still think this is a good idea when a Democrat takes office, or if they're hoping that having Bush claim that power now will prevent a Democrat from ever gaining that power?
One of the (lesser) definitions Websters has for politics is the total complex of relations between people living in society and involved not only speaking of things from one's own point-of-view (to ensure that your point-of-view is considered) but also allowing (demanding?) that others speak from their own point-of-view (to ensure you haven't missed something important).
Today, when we talk about politics we're almost always discussing it in it's partisan meaning; the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government.
It's important to note that the former definition of politics is tied closely with democracy but that the latter definition is applicable to any form of government.
I'd view this as a sign that we, culturally, are distancing ourselves from democracy and instead employing a kind of common hubris wherein we believe that we are right and therefore our opponents must be wrong.
Unilateralism serves us well, but only so long as we are the ones in power. Shortsighted and dangerous, I'd call it.
We have seen these turns before in history, in the rise of authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian governments, and always to disasterous effect.
It almost seems as if we humans are incapable of understanding that sometimes we, ourselves, are not perfect, not omnipotent, and capable of seeing the correct long-term path only with the aid of others perspectives.
Perhaps we need self-doubt more than we might be willing to admit?
Not necessarity. The major players (FCC, IRS, Telcos, traditional ISP's like AOL and Earthlink, and content providers represented by the RIAA and the MPAA) have already figured out how to make this two-tier system work, under existing laws and legal precedence. The standards have already been agreed to. Here's how it's going to work:
First, this second-tier is only aimed at people who have exceptional Internet needs, not your average joe. You aren't required to pay taxes (or at least not any additional taxes) to fund TierTwo access. Access to any TierOne site for any TierOne user is guaranteed to be on an equal access basis, and that's written into the law. No blocking, no service degradation (even for such things as latency) is allowed. Network providers are required to meet certain standards and they don't get a break for things like 'congestion' and such. There are serious sanctions and stiff fines (not to mention mounds of paperwork) for even minor degradation events. Prices for TierOne access are expected to remain reasonable (well below charges for TierTwo access) and price regulation will be put into place if low cost access can't be maintained by market forces. And the best part is that providers are required by law to provide TierOne access across the entire markets they serve, no cherry-picking just the most lucrative subscribers.
TierTwo will only be necessary if you're one of those high-end internet users who has exceptional networking needs. For example, if you need gobs and gobs of bandwidth, or if you use an application that demands extremely high reliability, or if you need extremely low latency, or if you need special services most people would never have a need for, like a static IP, or other such stuff.
In fact, the Internet will function pretty much like it does today (at least that's what everyone is working hard for, because otherwise it will never fly) and the only change will be that some people may decide to give up TierTwo service if they don't need the value-added stuff and instead go back to TierOne to save some money.
About the only thing that will come as a surprise is where they've drawn the line between TierOne and TierTwo: 56Kbps bidirectionali, established point-to-point on an as-needed basis. Call it: Dial-up.
This system is already in place. The FCC Regulatory structure and Tax rates are already well understood. We have a structure to account for the value of previously subsidized infrastructure investments and so on. The ISP's have a sane legislative context on which to form their business models, and while the content providers aren't happy about not being able to go after the Common Carriers, they are agreed that they don't have much to fear from pirates running at dial-up speeds.
Welcome to the new Internet: Just like 1984, but more so.
Your analogy is flawed.
In the U.S., highways are built by and maintained with public money which is gathered in the form of taxes, including such things as fuel taxes, license and registration fees, etc. (Toll roads are an exception.) So to say that both private individuals and business both indirectly fund the roads is for the most part correct.
This does not hold for the Internet.
The Internet is composed of a large number of privately built, privately owned, and privately maintained networks which have been internetworked together. If you use dialup, then you are using the publically finded (and paid for largely by tax dollars) telephone system running across public infrastructure under Common Carrier rules to reach a private modem bank. Once you hit the modem bank, you're on a private network. If you have any sort of broadband access (cable modem, high-bandwidth portion of a DSL line, etc) you're on a private network as soon as you hit the network interface. Even if your Internet access is provided by a municipality or a public school, it's considered a private network.
So the telco's have a point to say you're using their network. Unless you're in favor of nationalizing the Internet (let's not go there, please) you really have no claim to it as just a taxpayer.
So while both "you and businesses" can demand a phone line, you can't demand high-speed Internet access: it's only available if some private network provided chooses to let you have access, and you choose to pay their asking price.
You've got three? Dang! Some guys have all the luck.
I live within commuting distance of a high-tech center, and all but the last 15 miles or so of my commute is through countryside where even dialtone is sometimes flaky.
I'm afraid some people still think in terms of "The Internet" as being a place you connect to, and once there, the world is at your doorstep. While I agree that's the world I want, and the would which would work best for us all, the story discusses the world from the point of view of the networking companies who own the fabric of that network.
Imagine a world, instead, where you choose an ISP and access plan based on the content they have access to, kinda like choosing a Satellite TV provider based on the channels they offer. If you want both Google and Amazon, then you need to subscribe to the GoldenInfoPlusCommerce package. If you want access to sites in the *.sex domain, then you need the AdultPremmium package add-on. Of course, you can subscribe to PlatinumWorks and get all those, plus posting privleges on your favorite (affiliated) blogs, too.
The alternative, of course, is for your favorite Mom and Pop ISP to try to run their own wires to Yahoo, AOL, Slashdot, etc, and so avoid paying the Incumbents to use their wires, but is that really going to be less expensive, if even fesible?
But what about wireless? Wherein there is either Licensed Spectrum wireless (satellite, cell-phone, WiMax, etc) where you'll still be paying someone to use something they own, or Unlicensed Spectrum wireless, (WiFi) wherein you can use as much bandwidth as you want for free, and so can everyone else, including all the Licensed Spectrum wireless bandwidth owners who have a vested interest in making sure you can't get any real value out of it.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about Mesh Networking (wired or wireless) wherein you can get your internet fix from your friendly neighbor, so long as you don't mind sharing your bandwith to meet his { leftist communist pinko | right wing fanatical christian | child porn swapping | MPAA infringing | insert your own favorite bandwidth hog here } fix on an equal basis.
Welcome to Libretarian Hell.
We have a long way to go before everyone has three adequate pipes to their own home. I'm not saying it wouldn't work once we get there, but to date the only model we have of a network communication system which works is one where network netruality is maintained either through technological necessity, social agreement, or by law.
Cite your sources, and you'll gain credibility.
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Age: 0
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 13:10:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Sat, 21 Jan 2006 13:10:28 GMT
With the understanding that this was not intended to be an accurate estimate, it's still an exaggeration.
Apple has, at the very least, shown it's operating system to be more flexible (or morphable) than Microsoft's Windows.
Apple already made a successful platform jump once before (from 680x0 to PPC) and maintained side-by-side compatibility.
They've also now made an operating system jump (from the MacOS 9.x series to the OSX series fully encapsulating MacOS 9.x as Classic.)
I think the best Windows ever offered was a version of NT which ran on a Sun box. That didn't last too long.
So they've already paid the price for freedom from hardware lockin. Now they're just cashing-in.
I look forward to testing some old System 4.1 apps in Classic under OSX on Intel. From everything else I've seen, support should be transparent.
Which, when you think about it, truly is priceless.
'tain't no such werd. Didja mean insightful or inciteful?
Well, we have an admission from the President himself, but based on previous testimony, his reliability might be called into question.
Under the Administration's view of presidential power under time of war, the Congress does not have the authority to end a conflict. The only power Congress is Constitutionally allowed to exercise is one of bugetary control; They can cut-off all appropriations (it can't be done selectively) and thereby 'starve' the military into a surrender, but that's the only authority the Constitution reserves for them.
Senator Biden referred to this on the 4th day of the Alito hearings, if you read the transcripts (search for "architect of the president's memorandum").
Understand, I'm not making that claim; I tend to agree with the "majority of the constitutional scholarship", but Bush appears to be asserting that, now that Congress has issued the AUMF, laws no longer apply to the President.
Remembering Bush's continued assertion that this "War on Terror" is likely to continue indefinitely, that ought to frighten any Democrat. Then again, if you figure that someday there might be a (perhaps even loonier) Democrat in the Oval Office, ought to frighten any Republican, too. Of course, the rest of us have already soiled our pants.
Or maybe that explains what's been happening with the elections lately: If the First and Fourth Amendments are no longer applicable, why should anyone expect Bush to respect the Twenty-Second?
If this post prompts at least one of you to become interested enough in your own government to read a bit of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing transcript, I'll consider it to be a success.
I don't know which radical right web site you got this talking point from, but you may need to go back there and finish reading the fact sheet. Otherwise you risk mis-representing the facts and might appear uninformed.
Clinton did authorize a physical search, without a warrant, in the Ames case. However, existing law authorizes that in the case of suspected domestic spying.
Or was there some other case you were thinking of? Can you offer us a source?
I'd sure like to know what you're basing your "relatively small part of the population" claim on. Either you're in-the-know and revealing classified information which, as the President has said, is an extremely damaging thing, or you're just guessing that only a "relatively small part of the population" has been affected by the President's blatant dereliction of his sworn duty to defend the Constitution of the United States.
I was not aware of this. Can you point me to a recent source so I can bring myself up to speed?
That's not what BellSouth is suggesting, nor would it even be smart of them as you've correctly pointed out.
Instead, the end user would see this manifest itself as a 'delay' in the connection. Imagine one day you start to notice that your favorite "Not_A_Bellsouth_Subscriber" web site starts acting slow; pages take forever to load, etc, or you find yourself asking people who their ISP is before starting an on-line game of Quake?
It's called private property, and unlike the Telephone system, most ISP's would like to have everyone agree that they own their network lock, stock, and barrel.
That's why no one can demand that you allow them to access your WAP. And you can't demand access to theirs. This is furthe complicated by the Internet Protocol itself; if your connection suddenly develops 200ms of lag, or starts losing 50% of the packets, there's no one you can blame, let alone sue, because those functions are not guaranteed services under IP.
Common Carrier only applies to voiceband. And BellSouth wants to avoid being saddled with these regulations.
The Common Carrier concept views the (telephone) network as a pipe; when you call Aunt Mable, you're talking to her and she's talking to you. The network is just a pipe.
The FCC view of the Internet is different; when you connect to http://example.net/ you're not getting the service from example.net but rather from an access point (ISP modem bank, DSLAM, cable company router, etc) owned by your ISP. Since it's their equipment, they can pick and choose the level of service they provide.
Not directly related to this thread, but it might interest you to know that the U. S. Federal Government currently prohibits carriers from using VoIP circuits to provide National Service/Emergency Preparedness calls. Clearly they understand something we would be wise to understand as well.
No, because broadband is not regulated by Common Carrier laws.
Are we still beating the "Government is bad, deregulate everything now" drum?
"Hmmm. You know, that's a mighty nice stream of IP packets you've got there. It's be an awful shame if some of them started getting broken, you know, kinda accidentally like. Awful shame..."
But consider:
Translation: The Internet which drew you here was just a temporary illusion. I hope you enjoyed the ride, but please watch your step as you exit carefully to the right. Have a nice day.
I really feel sorry for all the people who built their business and made their investments based on this flawed understanding of what the Internet is.
This doesn't mean the Internet is going to go away, but it does mean the Internet you have right now is going to change. My predictions:
- More Web-based resources will become subscription-only services. Less content will be freely available.
- Higher prices for consumer-grade Internet access, but with that expanded service area coverage.
- Much more restricted capability of consumer-grade access. No more 'naked DSL', $60 a month will let you browse the web (and use web-mail) but nothing more. If you want to run a web server, use a VPN client, run your own mail server, or p2p you'll be paying extra.
- To get less-expensive Web access, you'll have to run everything through an Internet access device at your premesis which you don't own, like a cable modem. satellite receiver, or Xbox.
- Free Software will be severely impacted. The Free Software movement was made possible by reducing the communication and colaboration costs to near zero. Very few private individuals are going to be able to finance their own web site for their own pet project, even if it's on someone elses server.
- Just as VoIP finally makes headway into the telephony business on a large scale, it will become every network provider's favorite cash cow. The same will happen with any popular technology.
We'll watch as the network owners divide the Internet up into pieces which individually are smaller, more tightly controlled, more closely held, and thus more profitable. This will kick-off a period of Metcalf's Law operating in reverse, where the aggregate value of the network as a whole will be reduced exponentially as entire classes of connectivity are disconnected. This 'destruction of value' will take the form, for example, of thousands of Linksys owners collectively waking-up one morning (literally) to discover their $50 investment has become worthless. This is the same process (in reverse) which built the Internet as we know it, but will happen a lot quicker than the 5 years of carpet bombing with AOL disks.The good news in all of this is that the noosphere extends beyond the current Internet, and the noosphere has not been damaged by this process. Expect a new Internet (not Internet 2.0) to rise from the ashes of the old.
The bad news is that there are a lot of big new dinosaurs which will need to be made extinct before that can happen, and the last time it took 150 years to get rid of just one.
I have to disagree here. It's not your music, it's (in effect) his. There's no law by which you can demand that he allow you to listen to that music on any arbitrary device; you have to negotiate that privilege with him, and pay the price he demands. If he sells you a disk with the understanding that you are not to play it on a Mac (or to cover it with cheese sauce) and you choose to do so anyway, you're breaking your end of the agreement.
Most publishers don't (or can't) do that. They might say it's not supported on Mac or Linux and leave it up to you to try to figure out how to do it, but they don't make you agree not to play it on a Mac. Or if they do, at least their lawyers make them be up-front about it.
I agree with you that if you don't like their product you shouldn't have to give them any money. I disagree that this is how it is. In the U.S., compulsory license laws (whereby a tax is added onto the cost of blank media and paid to the music publishers to cover the cost of copying you might do) force you to give money to the music publishers even if you don't like their product, or are incapable of using it. (Deaf people pay this compulsory license tax on CD-R media and audio tapes used for data storage only.)
The model we are moving toward (and can't get there fast enough, if you ask me) is for a world where in order to play an MPAA movie or listen to an RIAA CD, you will need a special-purpose hardware device (think: E-book reader or DVD player) which specifically serves the needs of a specific publisher.
Unfortunately, their efforts, if successful, will result in no 'open' or 'general purpose' devices able to read the media (which, many argue for many reasons can never happen), no general purpose communication platforms (kkss the Internet bye-bye) and ultimately the death of media companies in the market place due to competition from other media companies (each with their own proprietary media and devices) and publishers who do not attempt to restrict access using DRM.
The threat here is that their efforts will result in a 'music tax' anyway. Think about this: If you publish (and own the copyrights to) a song, and choose to give it away (for reasons that make sense to you) and I choose to 'buy' (er. download for free) it for reasons that make sense to me, I still have to pay the compulsory music tax, that tax gets paid to the RIAA -affiliated publishers (who I'm trying to boycott), and you don't see a penny of it.
This may mark the end of the RIAA's (and MPAA's too) ability to sue people for music sharing.
If someone purchased a Sony rootkit music CD, and
If they put it into their computer, and
if they declined the EULA, and
if they did all that before they learned about the rootkit, then Sony just handed them a get-out-of-liability-free card for anything that happens on that computer from that point forward.
Spam gets sent to California? Sony pays the $10,000 fine.
Caught hacking into the CIA? Sony gets the free trip to gitmo.
Downloading kiddee porn? Not me, Mom. It's Sony's fault!
Let's take it one step farther...
Uploading Sony music onto P2P? Why don't you go cease-and-desist-yourself.
Now you understand just how far Sony has screwed this one up.
I follow you this far. To my reading of it, you are correct. But there's another aspect to this many (perhaps even Sony's Lawyers) have missed.
One of the more common things which one would agree to when accepting a EULA is an agreement to assume any subsequent liability, indemnifying the other party (Sony, in this case) against liability for flaws in the product, and such. The idea being (to choose a farsical example) that before you install the Sony rootkit onto a CDROM-equipped heart/lung machine, you must agree to accept full responsibility for doing so. Sony has no way of knowing, beforehand, that you are planning to install it onto a heart/lung machine, and probably did not perform anything in the way of due dilligence to ensure it wouldn't bluescreen heart/lung machines accidentially. (How could they?) So instead they should issue a generic warning that there are certain circumstances where installing this software might not be a good idea, that it's your responsibility to ensure that installing the software (playing the music) won't have any bad consequences, and that if you choose to install it there anyway, they won't be responsible for anything bad that might happen. That's what the EULA is for; to protect them.
But apparently, Sony is installing software without first securing that all important get-out-of-liability-free EULA card first. I'm sure sopme Sony lawyers are having nightmares about this.
While it's unlikely anyone tried to install a Sony music CD onto a heart/lung machine, the liability is not limited to those circumstances.
If a doctor tried to play music on his laptop, and later a medical liability case hinges around how bad data got into a patients medical report, Sony could become a party to the lawsuit, because a reasonable claim could be made that the Sony rootkit allowed some hacker to make changes to the patient medical report (and cover his tracks), and the burden of proof might well be on Sony to prove a) that such an intrusion did not take place, and b) that the doctor did in-fact accept the EULA releiving Sony of responsibility. That's going to be a tough burder to meet.
Of course, I haven't read the EULA itself, so I'm just guessing at what it insulates Sony against.
I'd be very surprised if the "install anyway" aspect of this was approved by a lawyer; if it was, he'll probably lose his job. If it wasn't approved by a lawyer, the one who failed to get such approval may be losing their job. But one thing Sony really can't do (IMHO) is just call it a mistake, because that would be admitting negligence without even a fight.
This one is going to be interesting to follow. It's almost one of those cases where Sony might hope for a quick class-action settlement just so they can fall-back to a "we already settled all of our obligations under the class action lawsuit; your wrongful death lawsuit is moot, because we already sent you a "coupon for a free CD".