You seem to be suffering from a number of misconceptions. First, although Kanji may be entered phonetically, there is then a procedure by which the input method allows the user to specify which of the (generally numerous) Kanji which have that pronunciation was supposed to be entered. This can either be entered using the Roman alphabet or Hiragana. However, what appears on the screen when all is said and done isn't just phonetic, and with good reason; there is otherwise a lot of ambiguity, far more than results from homonomy and homophony in English.
It would be just as jarring to a native speaker of Japanese to try to read Japanese purely in Hiragana as it would be for a native English speaker to read something written in a phonetic alphabet. Furthermore, a lot of meaning is lost, since there are so many "homophones".
As for your assertion that it's only CJK which prevent a universal character set in 256 code points, you seem to be forgetting Cyrillic, Greek, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, and any number of other languages which use completely different alphabets.
The UniHan controversy is best viewed as a philosophical difference betwen whether the various language variants are different characters (controversial) or just different glyphs (uncontested).
By way of analogy, there is a pretty good mapping between the greek alphabet and ours, but that doesn't mean it would be trivial for most English speakers to read English which had been transliterated into Greek. It's more than the difference between the letter "A" in Times New Roman vs Arial.
*You* want the ability to burn a CD without restrictions. It remains to be seen whether the public at large finds that feature important enough to hurt Roxio's sales. This will likely lose them some customers, however they believe they will gain more money in the long run by doing this. Market failure doesn't occur just because one company comes out with a product you personally don't like. Roxio's decision is a great opportunity for a different manufacturer, be it a corporation or a free software developer, to create the "better" product.
Roxio's decision is only a problem if it becomes illegal to make an unencumbered CD burner. At that point, though, it's not just market forces at play.
Lack of the ability to burn a cd without encubrance isn't going to kill anyone, and the barrier to entry to making an unencumbered burner is pretty low.
How is it a burden to the day-to-day system? Just don't use the characters you don't need to use. The varying width UTF encodings use fewer bytes for characters closer to the beginning of the code-space, and if that is a bad match to your frequency usage, there's always compression.
Why not use a system of multiple (standardized) character sets. This is extendable, you can always add new encodings/sets etc. The only really fixed mechanism needed is a way to specify a switch from one encoding to the other.
How is this better than a system with one huge character set, and then per-language character encodings which are more efficient for each language? It sounds to me like what you describe is essentially equivalent to the process of adding to the ISO 10646 character space from time to time, and having a bunch of different character encodings, like ISO Latin 1, Windows CP 1252, Mac Extended ASCII, OEM CP foo for language bar, etc.
The major advantage to having a consistent character encoding is that programs (like, say, an email gateway) can much more easily process documents in any language or subset of the universal alphabet, without having to know anything about the encoding used. Code pages are okay if you never need more than 256 characters at a time.
Perhaps not, but there is such a creature as "Extended ASCII". Many in fact. It would be wrong to call them standards (except possibly de-facto standards) but equally wrong to suggest they don't exist.
The article did make the claim that Hangul was "designed... to be able to describe any sound the human throat and mouth is capable of producing in speech".
Hangul is missing representations for a variety of trills, fricatives, pharangeal sounds, uvular and glottal sounds, clicks, and a variety of other sounds not present in Korean speech.
If the commodity ram you put in a machine with updated firmware fails to work, it's because it's out of spec. I paid $190 for 2 256 PC100 SODIMMs which are working just fine in my firmware-updated TiBook. The reason a lot of commodity ram fails to work is becauswe it's out of spec. PC100 means more than "probably runs on a machine with a 100MHz memory bus"
If you really think that people should be forced (whether legally or socially) to compensate developers for copies of their code, you should not be advocating Free Software. The idea behind Free software is that by copying something, you don't take anything away from the person from whom you copy, thus there is nothing wrong with being a "leech". If you disagree, then don't pretend to support the ideals of "Free Software". If developers expect to receive monetary compensation on anything other than a voluntary basis, they should not be developing Free Software.
Property is one manifestation of a freedom (the freedom to own property), so control of someone's property is control of their freedom to control that property.
You are not allowed, as a citizen, to own a nuclear warhead. While this is a control an a restriction on your property rights (preventing you from gaining property rights in such a thing) it is not control of all your freedoms.
I wasn't suggesting that the fact that you were accumulating the wealth was causing the people to starve, but societies everywhere through history seem to have had an underclass of starving people. Personally, I see preventing a starving person from dying as much more concrete a goal than ensuring that the accumulation of wealth is maximally "efficient" in some unspecified sense.
The intent of the question was to see whether you believe there are circumstances in which an economic inefficiency might be socially justifiable.
I suppose that will do for this discussion; Socialism means more than that, but what you stated is, I think, most appropriate for the current topic.
There are, of course, consequences of ownership of industry by the state which go beyond the mere detail of who holds the deed. By 'definition,' though, I mean something you can use to test any given system of government for 'socialism-ness.'
You make it sound like the main difference between one form of government and another is the number of restrictions.
It wasn't supposed to sound that way. I was aiming for the idea that the most important common trait of all governments is that of setting restrictions--despite the fact that there is a wide variation in those restrictions. What sort of government could there be which placed no restrictions of any kind--not even "you must abide by the terms of a contract into which you enter" or "you must not kill a human without provocation"? Such a situation would be precisely a *lack* of government.
I think that would be a superficial analysis of government, analogious to claiming that the main difference between one math problem and another is the value of the results.
It would be incomplete because it would look only at the restrictions placed by the government, and not the effects those restrictions would have. However, I wasn't intending to claim that such an analysis would be complete. I do believe that it is useful for the purposes of classifying governments (as opposed to evaluating them for desirability).
The reason or means by which one arrives at a certain result usually is much more important than the actual result one gets.
That depends *greatly* on the setting of the problem. If you're attempting to discern whether a student is learning material correctly, then it's more valuable to see him get the wrong answer but most of the steps right than it is to have him give you the correct answer he copied from a classmate. If you're engineering a skyscraper that I'm going to work in, though, I don't care how you get your answers so long as they're correct!!
From here on out I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, as I would not particularly be in favor of converting the county I happen to live in (the US) to full-on socialism.
A problem with socialism is that it decreases the efficiency of the accumulation of wealth.
Why is maximizing the overall efficiency of wealth accumulation an important goal?
The collective acts as a drain on those creating the wealth, distributing the wealth to everyone, whether the others created similar wealth or not.
If efficiency is to be the primary goal then it should be noted that wealth redistribution can, in some circumstances, increase the total efficiency of a system: After a certain point, the marginal utility of a dollar decreases; at the low end, a dollar can mean the difference between life and death, then the difference between comfortable living conditions and meager living conditions, then eventually being really really rich and only being really rich. Transfering a dollar from someone with a lot of them to someone with not many can increase overall efficiency because it deprives the rich person of less marginal value than is gained by the poor person. I don't see this in and of itself as justification for making such a transfer, but if the goal is effiency as an end unto itself, it can be a viable strategy if pursued correctly. Most governments at least attempt to temper efficiency with justice. The trouble is agreeing on what constitutes justice.
Everyone is reduced (to some degree) towards the same value.
Well, if that were strictly speaking true, there'd be nobody advocating socialism. Some people, those who receive more than they put out, are raised toward that value. Even if the aggregate efficiency is decreased, some individuals will be better off. It's possible for those who will be better off to vastly outnumber those who won't. Then, the minority go off to star in an Ayn Rand novel or something.
A reason this is a bad thing is that the controllers of the collective cannot possibly have or test all the possible good ideas for the use of wealth; without the accumulation of wealth, it would be impossible for most major innovations to be developed. The only entity accumulating wealth is the collective, which, as I indicated, cannot be as diversified as a capitalistic system. Diversification can be a very good thing.
If the controllers of the collective cannot test all possible good ideas, how possibly could any individual? If the answer is that there are more individuals (or at least, more individuals posessing the capital to implement the ideas), then the socialist could rebut that the solution would be to replace a single socialist government with a series of smaller, decentralized ones.
I'm getting very tired, so I'll leave you with a question. It's intentionally polarized for effect, and I'm not suggesting that you would pick one or the other choice.
"To the extent that they conflict as goals, is the maximally efficient accumulation of wealth more important than providing free food to people who are starving because they are otherwise unable to obtain it and will die as a result?" One example conflict would be if it were to be cheaper to just dispose of the dead bodies than to these people food.
Appeals occur not when there is a question of fact, but when there is a question of law. It doesn't matter how "blatent" the alleged conduct is, it matters if there is an error of procedure, or a question of constitutionality or ambiguty in the law.
Socialism, by definition, means that the means of production and distribution are owned collectively, generally by the state.
It's government, by definition, which means that the state dictates what activities will and will not be permitted. Some governments place fewer restrictions than others.
PPPoE doesn't run over dialup, or even standard serial, it runs _o_ver _E_thernet. So, the stack looks something like: TCP/UDP > IP > PPPoE > Ethernet > Cable stuff. Nothing to do with a modem.
I don't understand your position; you will buy shrinkwrapped for money when you could download for free, and you say you do it to support their efforts, from which I infer that you would, all other things being equal, be just as happy with a straight download.
You're paying $70 for something, and the parts of it you apparantly value, you could get for free. You're giving them $70 you don't have to give them, because you want to see them succeed.
That is a donation.
Sure, you get a physical CD, and a manual, and a nice box, but if you value those things at less than $70, you're donating the difference. When you donate to PBS during a pledge drive, they give you some toys or posters or shirts or things, but it's still a donation, because they tend to give you those things at a donation level far higher than those things might otherwise be worth. People pay the extra, because they want to donate, just as you are donating.
It would be far more efficient if you just gave them the $70 via the donation system, because then they wouldn't incur the costs of the physical artifacts you don't really want.
Google does, however, choose to provide a service whereby people who affirm that they were the author of a post may have that post 'nuked'. See Google's Usenet help, item 13.
Maybe ISPs shouldn't advertise 56k service if they know full well that the technology precludes it.
If you sell me a service as having performance x, and then try to tell me I shouldn't complain when I instead get only 85% of x, you're half-right and half-wrong. I shouldn't be complaining about the technology, just the knowing false advertising.
Re:Another day, another lawsuit
on
Launchcast Sued
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· Score: 3
Please at least read this before modding it through the floor.
This anti-RIAA ankle-biting is getting silly. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be frustrated with them; it's not necessary to start making them up. Yes, they're bastards. Yes, their member companies churn out a lot of pop that many people think is crap. Yes, they're lawsuit-happy, and yes, it's cool to hate them, and with some justification.
However, the RIAA does NOT create boy-bands, the record companies do. The RIAA may be the legal arm of the industry, and for many purposes its useful to think of them as literally the same, but they are not themselves the creators of the Backstreet Boys.
More importantly, just because you don't happen to like the Backstreet Boys or Savage Garden, or whatever, doesn't mean that it's all talentless crap. Maybe it's talent that you don't much appreciate (I know I don't), and maybe their "art" if you want to even call it that isn't groundbreaking or anything, but it's not like what they do is trivial. Rail all you want about how The Public (which you, of course, are not a member of, being too "special" for that) are a bunch of sheep who will eat any manufactured tripe thrown at them, but that's simply not true, and it's easy to demonstrate. You've heard of a "one-hit wonder"; some trendy, heavily-marketed zombies pop up out of nowhere, get heavy play, and are never heard from again. Why? Because they weren't popular. Music consumers didn't like it. I guess they do have standards, even if you don't share them. If the industry could just wave its magic wand and turn any old schmuck into a pop star, they would. The unfortunate part of the music oligopy is not what gets produced, but what -doesn't- get produced. There are a lot of financial barriers to entry for musicians these days which technology could help erode; to the extent that the RIAA stands in the way of that is a legitamate reason not to like them.
I'm not particularly fond of this crop of pop and "rap-metal" bands, but for me to say its because they have absolutely no talent or that their songs are just cheeze would just be an attempt to justify the unpopularity (by top 40 standards) of my own standard of music.
Just accept that you have different taste from many other people. It's frustrating that the existing record companies don't cater to that taste sufficiently, but that's just an opportunity for other labels and other musicians. Don't blame the RIAA for "other peoples' poor taste."
You may find MojoNation a bit more to your liking; MN brokers transact with one another in a crypto e-cash currency called "Mojo". Using others' bandwidth costs Mojo, providing bandwidth to others earns you Mojo.
Re:Could this be used as a "legitimate use of p2p"
on
Swarmcast GPLed
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· Score: 2
A secure hash function is the solution for validity. Get a trusted source to give you something like a mojonation sharemap or a freenet content hash key which point you to the file you want by telling you its hash. Use whatever mechanism is provided by the system to query for a particular file, which the provider identifies by its hash. Download it, and re-compute the hash. If they don't match, throw it away (and mark the source as less trustworthy). If they do match, it's either exactly what the trusted source specified, or someone managed to get a hash collision (fairly unlikely with a secure hash).
A series of high-speed mirrors requires a lot of (expensive) fat pipes. Getting away from that requirement is the whole point behind swarm distribution.
The issue isn't whether they have the right do control traffic on their private network, which they do, but whether they have an obligation to be up-front to their customers about such blocking, which I believe they should.
They are intentionally degrading the performance of their network in such a way as to cause the appearence of the trouble being at the remote site.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be suffering from a number of misconceptions. First, although Kanji may be entered phonetically, there is then a procedure by which the input method allows the user to specify which of the (generally numerous) Kanji which have that pronunciation was supposed to be entered. This can either be entered using the Roman alphabet or Hiragana. However, what appears on the screen when all is said and done isn't just phonetic, and with good reason; there is otherwise a lot of ambiguity, far more than results from homonomy and homophony in English.
It would be just as jarring to a native speaker of Japanese to try to read Japanese purely in Hiragana as it would be for a native English speaker to read something written in a phonetic alphabet. Furthermore, a lot of meaning is lost, since there are so many "homophones".
As for your assertion that it's only CJK which prevent a universal character set in 256 code points, you seem to be forgetting Cyrillic, Greek, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, and any number of other languages which use completely different alphabets.
The UniHan controversy is best viewed as a philosophical difference betwen whether the various language variants are different characters (controversial) or just different glyphs (uncontested).
By way of analogy, there is a pretty good mapping between the greek alphabet and ours, but that doesn't mean it would be trivial for most English speakers to read English which had been transliterated into Greek. It's more than the difference between the letter "A" in Times New Roman vs Arial.
*You* want the ability to burn a CD without restrictions. It remains to be seen whether the public at large finds that feature important enough to hurt Roxio's sales. This will likely lose them some customers, however they believe they will gain more money in the long run by doing this. Market failure doesn't occur just because one company comes out with a product you personally don't like. Roxio's decision is a great opportunity for a different manufacturer, be it a corporation or a free software developer, to create the "better" product.
Roxio's decision is only a problem if it becomes illegal to make an unencumbered CD burner. At that point, though, it's not just market forces at play.
Lack of the ability to burn a cd without encubrance isn't going to kill anyone, and the barrier to entry to making an unencumbered burner is pretty low.
How is it a burden to the day-to-day system? Just don't use the characters you don't need to use. The varying width UTF encodings use fewer bytes for characters closer to the beginning of the code-space, and if that is a bad match to your frequency usage, there's always compression.
How is this better than a system with one huge character set, and then per-language character encodings which are more efficient for each language? It sounds to me like what you describe is essentially equivalent to the process of adding to the ISO 10646 character space from time to time, and having a bunch of different character encodings, like ISO Latin 1, Windows CP 1252, Mac Extended ASCII, OEM CP foo for language bar, etc.
The major advantage to having a consistent character encoding is that programs (like, say, an email gateway) can much more easily process documents in any language or subset of the universal alphabet, without having to know anything about the encoding used. Code pages are okay if you never need more than 256 characters at a time.
Perhaps not, but there is such a creature as "Extended ASCII". Many in fact. It would be wrong to call them standards (except possibly de-facto standards) but equally wrong to suggest they don't exist.
The article did make the claim that Hangul was "designed ... to be able to describe any sound the human throat and mouth is capable of producing in speech".
Hangul is missing representations for a variety of trills, fricatives, pharangeal sounds, uvular and glottal sounds, clicks, and a variety of other sounds not present in Korean speech.
If the commodity ram you put in a machine with updated firmware fails to work, it's because it's out of spec. I paid $190 for 2 256 PC100 SODIMMs which are working just fine in my firmware-updated TiBook. The reason a lot of commodity ram fails to work is becauswe it's out of spec. PC100 means more than "probably runs on a machine with a 100MHz memory bus"
Got Google? The paper linked includes the formula itself, as well as information about its assumptions and justifications.
If you really think that people should be forced (whether legally or socially) to compensate developers for copies of their code, you should not be advocating Free Software. The idea behind Free software is that by copying something, you don't take anything away from the person from whom you copy, thus there is nothing wrong with being a "leech". If you disagree, then don't pretend to support the ideals of "Free Software". If developers expect to receive monetary compensation on anything other than a voluntary basis, they should not be developing Free Software.
or "flying car teams" instead of motorcycle gang...
Property is one manifestation of a freedom (the freedom to own property), so control of someone's property is control of their freedom to control that property.
You are not allowed, as a citizen, to own a nuclear warhead. While this is a control an a restriction on your property rights (preventing you from gaining property rights in such a thing) it is not control of all your freedoms.
I wasn't suggesting that the fact that you were accumulating the wealth was causing the people to starve, but societies everywhere through history seem to have had an underclass of starving people. Personally, I see preventing a starving person from dying as much more concrete a goal than ensuring that the accumulation of wealth is maximally "efficient" in some unspecified sense.
The intent of the question was to see whether you believe there are circumstances in which an economic inefficiency might be socially justifiable.
I suppose that will do for this discussion; Socialism means more than that, but what you stated is, I think, most appropriate for the current topic.
There are, of course, consequences of ownership of industry by the state which go beyond the mere detail of who holds the deed. By 'definition,' though, I mean something you can use to test any given system of government for 'socialism-ness.'
You make it sound like the main difference between one form of government and another is the number of restrictions.
It wasn't supposed to sound that way. I was aiming for the idea that the most important common trait of all governments is that of setting restrictions--despite the fact that there is a wide variation in those restrictions. What sort of government could there be which placed no restrictions of any kind--not even "you must abide by the terms of a contract into which you enter" or "you must not kill a human without provocation"? Such a situation would be precisely a *lack* of government.
I think that would be a superficial analysis of government, analogious to claiming that the main difference between one math problem and another is the value of the results.
It would be incomplete because it would look only at the restrictions placed by the government, and not the effects those restrictions would have. However, I wasn't intending to claim that such an analysis would be complete. I do believe that it is useful for the purposes of classifying governments (as opposed to evaluating them for desirability).
The reason or means by which one arrives at a certain result usually is much more important than the actual result one gets.
That depends *greatly* on the setting of the problem. If you're attempting to discern whether a student is learning material correctly, then it's more valuable to see him get the wrong answer but most of the steps right than it is to have him give you the correct answer he copied from a classmate. If you're engineering a skyscraper that I'm going to work in, though, I don't care how you get your answers so long as they're correct!!
From here on out I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, as I would not particularly be in favor of converting the county I happen to live in (the US) to full-on socialism.
A problem with socialism is that it decreases the efficiency of the accumulation of wealth.
Why is maximizing the overall efficiency of wealth accumulation an important goal?
The collective acts as a drain on those creating the wealth, distributing the wealth to everyone, whether the others created similar wealth or not.
If efficiency is to be the primary goal then it should be noted that wealth redistribution can, in some circumstances, increase the total efficiency of a system: After a certain point, the marginal utility of a dollar decreases; at the low end, a dollar can mean the difference between life and death, then the difference between comfortable living conditions and meager living conditions, then eventually being really really rich and only being really rich. Transfering a dollar from someone with a lot of them to someone with not many can increase overall efficiency because it deprives the rich person of less marginal value than is gained by the poor person. I don't see this in and of itself as justification for making such a transfer, but if the goal is effiency as an end unto itself, it can be a viable strategy if pursued correctly. Most governments at least attempt to temper efficiency with justice. The trouble is agreeing on what constitutes justice.
Everyone is reduced (to some degree) towards the same value.
Well, if that were strictly speaking true, there'd be nobody advocating socialism. Some people, those who receive more than they put out, are raised toward that value. Even if the aggregate efficiency is decreased, some individuals will be better off. It's possible for those who will be better off to vastly outnumber those who won't. Then, the minority go off to star in an Ayn Rand novel or something.
A reason this is a bad thing is that the controllers of the collective cannot possibly have or test all the possible good ideas for the use of wealth; without the accumulation of wealth, it would be impossible for most major innovations to be developed. The only entity accumulating wealth is the collective, which, as I indicated, cannot be as diversified as a capitalistic system. Diversification can be a very good thing.
If the controllers of the collective cannot test all possible good ideas, how possibly could any individual? If the answer is that there are more individuals (or at least, more individuals posessing the capital to implement the ideas), then the socialist could rebut that the solution would be to replace a single socialist government with a series of smaller, decentralized ones.
I'm getting very tired, so I'll leave you with a question. It's intentionally polarized for effect, and I'm not suggesting that you would pick one or the other choice.
"To the extent that they conflict as goals, is the maximally efficient accumulation of wealth more important than providing free food to people who are starving because they are otherwise unable to obtain it and will die as a result?" One example conflict would be if it were to be cheaper to just dispose of the dead bodies than to these people food.
Appeals occur not when there is a question of fact, but when there is a question of law. It doesn't matter how "blatent" the alleged conduct is, it matters if there is an error of procedure, or a question of constitutionality or ambiguty in the law.
Socialism, by definition, means that the means of production and distribution are owned collectively, generally by the state.
It's government, by definition, which means that the state dictates what activities will and will not be permitted. Some governments place fewer restrictions than others.
PPPoE doesn't run over dialup, or even standard serial, it runs _o_ver _E_thernet. So, the stack looks something like: TCP/UDP > IP > PPPoE > Ethernet > Cable stuff. Nothing to do with a modem.
I don't understand your position; you will buy shrinkwrapped for money when you could download for free, and you say you do it to support their efforts, from which I infer that you would, all other things being equal, be just as happy with a straight download.
You're paying $70 for something, and the parts of it you apparantly value, you could get for free. You're giving them $70 you don't have to give them, because you want to see them succeed.
That is a donation.
Sure, you get a physical CD, and a manual, and a nice box, but if you value those things at less than $70, you're donating the difference. When you donate to PBS during a pledge drive, they give you some toys or posters or shirts or things, but it's still a donation, because they tend to give you those things at a donation level far higher than those things might otherwise be worth. People pay the extra, because they want to donate, just as you are donating.
It would be far more efficient if you just gave them the $70 via the donation system, because then they wouldn't incur the costs of the physical artifacts you don't really want.
Google does, however, choose to provide a service whereby people who affirm that they were the author of a post may have that post 'nuked'. See Google's Usenet help, item 13.
So fraud is okay when everyone else is doing it. Gotcha.
Maybe ISPs shouldn't advertise 56k service if they know full well that the technology precludes it.
If you sell me a service as having performance x, and then try to tell me I shouldn't complain when I instead get only 85% of x, you're half-right and half-wrong. I shouldn't be complaining about the technology, just the knowing false advertising.
Please at least read this before modding it through the floor.
This anti-RIAA ankle-biting is getting silly. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be frustrated with them; it's not necessary to start making them up. Yes, they're bastards. Yes, their member companies churn out a lot of pop that many people think is crap. Yes, they're lawsuit-happy, and yes, it's cool to hate them, and with some justification.
However, the RIAA does NOT create boy-bands, the record companies do. The RIAA may be the legal arm of the industry, and for many purposes its useful to think of them as literally the same, but they are not themselves the creators of the Backstreet Boys.
More importantly, just because you don't happen to like the Backstreet Boys or Savage Garden, or whatever, doesn't mean that it's all talentless crap. Maybe it's talent that you don't much appreciate (I know I don't), and maybe their "art" if you want to even call it that isn't groundbreaking or anything, but it's not like what they do is trivial. Rail all you want about how The Public (which you, of course, are not a member of, being too "special" for that) are a bunch of sheep who will eat any manufactured tripe thrown at them, but that's simply not true, and it's easy to demonstrate. You've heard of a "one-hit wonder"; some trendy, heavily-marketed zombies pop up out of nowhere, get heavy play, and are never heard from again. Why? Because they weren't popular. Music consumers didn't like it. I guess they do have standards, even if you don't share them. If the industry could just wave its magic wand and turn any old schmuck into a pop star, they would. The unfortunate part of the music oligopy is not what gets produced, but what -doesn't- get produced. There are a lot of financial barriers to entry for musicians these days which technology could help erode; to the extent that the RIAA stands in the way of that is a legitamate reason not to like them.
I'm not particularly fond of this crop of pop and "rap-metal" bands, but for me to say its because they have absolutely no talent or that their songs are just cheeze would just be an attempt to justify the unpopularity (by top 40 standards) of my own standard of music.
Just accept that you have different taste from many other people. It's frustrating that the existing record companies don't cater to that taste sufficiently, but that's just an opportunity for other labels and other musicians. Don't blame the RIAA for "other peoples' poor taste."
Andrew Plotkin has a much better (in terms of quality of the review itself) review of Myst 3.
You may find MojoNation a bit more to your liking; MN brokers transact with one another in a crypto e-cash currency called "Mojo". Using others' bandwidth costs Mojo, providing bandwidth to others earns you Mojo.
A secure hash function is the solution for validity. Get a trusted source to give you something like a mojonation sharemap or a freenet content hash key which point you to the file you want by telling you its hash. Use whatever mechanism is provided by the system to query for a particular file, which the provider identifies by its hash. Download it, and re-compute the hash. If they don't match, throw it away (and mark the source as less trustworthy). If they do match, it's either exactly what the trusted source specified, or someone managed to get a hash collision (fairly unlikely with a secure hash).
A series of high-speed mirrors requires a lot of (expensive) fat pipes. Getting away from that requirement is the whole point behind swarm distribution.
The issue isn't whether they have the right do control traffic on their private network, which they do, but whether they have an obligation to be up-front to their customers about such blocking, which I believe they should.
They are intentionally degrading the performance of their network in such a way as to cause the appearence of the trouble being at the remote site.
You generally can't "opt-in" to a backbone.
"...Democracy is defended in 3 stages. Ballot Box, Jury Box, Cartridge Box."
Ambrose Bierce