This kind of post really irks me, because the answer to the OP's "WHY!" question is pretty simple.
Overclocking is about pulling fun little tricks to make your box do stuff that it wasn't intended to do. Usually, it's also a way to tweak a little more performance out of a non-production, home gaming system without spending money on a CPU or video card upgrade.
The point of the dry ice project is that it's simple and it gets the job done on the cheap. You COULD spend a shitload of money on one of those VapoChill compresser coolers, but that ruins the point of the exercise: don't spend much money, and have fun doing it yourself. I mean, why not just buy a faster CPU, or get a dual-processor server board with 8 GB of RAM, or something like that?
Now, MAKING your own compresser cooler (which other people have done) is a neat idea, but it requires a hell of a lot more expertise and time. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that this guy did something neat.
This is a great explanation, and ought to be modded up. I guess you would call it a kind of collective action problem.
Each individual looks at the situation and determines that their own costs are very, very low--while getting hacked/shot is annoying, the odds of it happening a pretty outside. Taking the "cost" as being the actual cost of an incident times the likelihood of an incident, and you get a pretty low number.
But considering the same question from a group point-of-view, it's not a question of weighted risks, so much--we know that SOMEone in the group will get hit/hacked, probably several if we're talking about hacking. So you determine the total societal "cost" as the cost per incident times the number of incidents that will likely occur.
It's not really possible to rationally do risk-assessment in the first situation, because the minute individual cost to me is so low that it's basically noise. But at a group level, it IS possible to weigh the total cost of our collective behavior against alternatives.
I'm not saying that increasing security measures will always be a good idea, here, though--the cost of additional security might be greater than the losses of the status quo, in which case it would make more sense to leave things alone. But at least you can make an informed decision.
I'm also not taking a socialist, collectivist tack, here. There's a lot of room for market-based solutions that use this kind of thinking: Symantec sees millions of individual malware sufferers and provides a product that helps decrease the damage--they market and advertise and push the product to customers like us, adjusting our behavior to something better.
You can only save money if you earn money. If you don't have a job, as a result of outsourcing, you can't buy anything anyway.
Being fired isn't a permanent condition. Yes, you usually have to spend a little while looking for work, but it's almost always a finite time period. Depending on the person, the economy, and a lot of other factors, the amount of time can vary a lot--but it's finite! Consider also that most people have savings, or can rely on other sources of income temporarily (friends/family helping out), or can go into debt (credit cards, etc) in order to make up the lost income.
Therefore, your statement that "If you don't have a job... you can't buy anything, anway" is patently false. Almost all people who don't have jobs continue to buy things while they're unemployed. Then, they find a new job, and pick up where they left off. The unemployed person might curtail their spending a bit, but they're still spending.
Plus, many countries have wonderful things like welfare systems and unemployment assistance. Not all of them, sure, but the bulk of the countries losing jobs to outsourcing are 1st-world nations that DO have social welfare for the recently unemployed.
Erm, want to explain the logic behind this statement? I'd love to hear how you got "2+2" to equal "13,000,000"... Correct me if I'm wrong here but Third World countries contribute to global warming
Now you're just missing the point. I'm not blaming global warming on outsourcing--I don't think that the one has anything in particular to do with the other. Okay? Are we clear on that?
What I AM saying that global warming is a problem because we've tried to maximize short term profit but failed to take the long-term costs of our policites into account. Trying to stop outsourcing is a similar problem--in the short term, you will lose jobs. In the long term, though, everyone's costs will be lower, and everybody will be effectively richer for it.
It's exactly your kind of thinking that got us into this global-warming mess.
The problem with policies that try to stop outsourcing and other movements of labor and capital is that they sacrifice the long-term for the short-term. Even though your current job will be safe right now, your children and your grandchildren (and you in retirement, probably!) will pay a greater price.
The long-term costs emerge in terms of lost efficiency. Capitalist economies have an efficiency tendency: produce the most with the fewest possible resources, because you'll make more profits that way. Outsourcing is an example of this phenomenon. If you accept a short-term cost, you get a long-term gain... if you take a short-term profit, you get a long-term loss.
don't bother to consider that your near-term gains are screwing the future. You've contradicted yourself, sorry, you lose the argument.
No, you just misuderstood the argument, stern to stem. It's your own fault, being as you felt the need to spout off on a topic you obviosuly know so little about. Get a clue.
Next time "engage brain" first, then type...
This was funny, about 20 years ago on Usenet. You might have more success being witty if you try to be creative first. I'd forget about being "funny" for the moment, it seems like it's a little out of your league.
Seriously, you sound like you're about 15 years old.
If a corporation makes profits in your country then it takes money out of your country. By employing people in your country a corporation puts money back into your country.
You're ignoring the gains to a country's economy when (since they're moved operations to a cheaper country) that company can lower its prices and be more competitive. What about all the money that domestic customers save as a result of outsourcing? How do you propose to factor that into the equation?
Sure, the benefit may not start to appear until the next price war between competing companies, but it always comes, eventually. And if you're trying to over-incentivize firms to look solely at the short- and medium-term effects of their policies, everyone is potentially losing more in the long run.
It's exactly your kind of thinking that got us into this global-warming mess: don't bother to consider that your near-term gains are screwing the future.
I missed it--where does it say that people are compelled to participate in open-source projects, or participate in volunteer programming at all?
From TFA:
Why? Recipients of Centrelink's Newstart allowance can fufil part or all of their 'mutual obligation' requirements by doing volunteer work for a community organisation; second is that it might be useful for students or other people starting out to get some "real live" development experience.
It says over and over again that this is "volunteer" work, right? An OSS project can't exactly demand a certain number of programmer hours, can it? If people want to contribute, they do--and they get a check from the Aussie gov't, to boot. If they don't want to participate, they don't. They can make Access databases for their local church or boy scout troop, instead.
And besides--every OSS project gets to pick what code actually gets committed, and what gets ignored. If the quality of the dole-programmers' stuff is shit, X.org and KDE won't include it.
Maybe I'm missing something, though--why do you think that people getting a welfare bonus for this counts as coercion?
Because it is subjective. Different opinions can all be valid.
Different opinions can be valid--that doesn't mean that any given opinion IS valid. Every opinion must stand on its own two feet, not hiding behind slippery relativism!
Here's a little primer... you seem dim on this issue. (Skipped your English lectures, eh?)
The bulk of literary theory subscribes to the idea that there's a LOT of similarity in the way that different people think. For instance, a large group of people might share a language, and all people share types of languages that can be translated into each other, at least with some effort.
If it were entirely subjective, how would literature be possible at all? Wouldn't every different subjective mind interpret a given work totally differently, making the act of authorship meaningless? We write and create because, at the bottom, someone else can intercept our creations and get a message or a concept out of it.
So human interaction via literature is a combination subjective and objective parts, but we're rarely sure which are which. Plus, the ground is often shifting under our feet, as new generations of readers and writers bring new viewpoints to bear.
NONE of this is interpreted to mean that any viewpoint is just as valid as any other. If that were true, why would we bother with criticism? We'd just let everyone do their thing, and be like "Cool, man--that's totally... Um... Valid."
(Remember the Futurama episodes with the Planet of the Neutrals? Think of that, here, while I get some more coffee.)
Go ahead and tell me that the "Pound Puppies" cartoons from the 1980s were the pinnacle of human literary achievement. Then try to tell me again that "different opinions can all be valid." One of two things will happen:
1) You will understand sui generis why what you said makes no sense, OR
2) You will be swallowed in a paradox, or something like that.
You're welcome for the free literary crit lesson--it cost me a shitload more at NYU, and it really wasn't much better than this.
But yeah, it sure does allow the slip-ups (and the occasional outright corruption) to get through mostly unchallenged.
See my root-level comment, below, about the slip-up issue. Basically, it's up to your defense attorney to challenge a bad warrant during pre-trial hearings. If you can undermine the legitimacy of a warrant, you can potentially get all the evidence collected on that warrant, AND and subsequent evidence collected as a result of that knowledge (phone conversations lead them to other evidence) thrown out of court.
But if the warrent is bad because of an honest mistake, it doesn't get thrown out. You have to show a negiligent mistake or some worse motive in order to win the jackpot.
Of course not! Feel free to keep using your cell phone for drug deals and terrorist chatter, Valiss...
Or should I say, Bin Laden! Thought you could hide behind a high Slashdot UID, did ya?
Seriously, though, cellular "wire" taps are trivial. They can usually go through the carrier, or they can use receiving equipment if they're in the same cell to query the cell tower and intercept you there.
Since the advent of digital cellular, though, you need more equipment and expertise needed to tap a cellphone. So the good news is that you don't really have to worry about anyone besides law enforcement listening in, unless your outside a digital service area and your phone fails over to analog.
I've had moments in Brooklyn Heights, in NYC (which is notorious for bad cellular reception) where I'm on the phone and I can suddenly hear the conversation of a person a block away on my phone. When I look down, sure enough, it's on analog.
Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received.
This is a little harsh, I think. First of all, the judge isn't saying "I believe that the wiretap target is guilty, therefore I authorize the wiretap." You don't have to be presumed guilty for a warrant to be necessary--there just has to be some indication that you may be guilty, the purpose of the warrant being to find out for sure.
Second of all, the system admits that it isn't perfect because human judgement has flaws, and attempts to balance individual rights against the need for effective law enforcement. The US Supreme Court has allowed an exception to search and seizure rules called the "good faith" exception. Basically, the doctrine states that if a law enforcement officer asks for a warrant or executes a search based on a warrant, and it's later shown that the warrant was invalid (shouldn't have been issued, information was bad, whatever), the SEARCH isn't necessarily invalid. As long as the officers involved made an honest mistake, the courts say that they're allowed to use the evidence to prosecute.
Why's this relevant? Because it shows that the point of the warrant-granting process is to check abusive behavior by law enforcement. It does its best to prevent honest, innocent people from being hassled, but it's not meant to try a case before the evidence is collected!
It seems likely, then, that in a properly-functioning system, nearly all warrant requests will be granted. Since officers know that someone is watching and second-guessing their warrant requests, they're not likely to try to slip bullshit pretenses in. The officers know the rules in advance, and probably won't bother trying to get a warrant unless they're pretty sure it's going to be successful.
It's the same reason why District Attorneys, nationwide, have a better-than 95% average conviction rate for cases brought to trial. If they think the case isn't going to stick, they won't try it.
Wire line services can provide 911 location service because the phones are physically wired to a specific location.
Not entirely true. Ever wonder why the operator asks you to confirm your address when you call 911 (at least, they have the three times I've had to call)? Because they have phone company data, but that data isn't always up-to-the-minute.
One solution, which many other posters have offered, is to require VOIP providers to maintain the same location data on customers that normal telcos do now. The VOIP provider, in turn, can require the customer to provide the physical address of the VOIP device.
Sure, the customer can always lie about this, but at that point it becomes their own problem: if run phone cable from my friend's apartment to my own place, and call 911 from there, it's certainly not the phone company's fault that my location isn't accurate!
This will require an all new VoIP implementation/protocol, as well as new VoIP equipment to make it work.
Now you just sound like John Dvorak.
The current system isn't perfect, and new VOIP implementations aren't going to have to be perfect, either. As long as they work well enough, which is do-able with user-supplied address data.
****
As a side-note, what about VOIP gateways for organizations that use IP internally? It's the same problem as we currently have with PBXs that route calls from multiple locations over leased lines. It's a common enough practice for a business to provide phone service to remote offices via T1s from a central office, routing all of the voice through a single PBX setup in the main office, which then hooks into the telco. A 911 call isn't going to reveal that information, necessarily.
As long as automatic locating works in 90% of cases (easily achievable using the above-described methods), the other 10% can be taken care of well enough with other methods--operator verification being the big one.
I'm not saying that the existence of arbitrage arrangements makes price discrimination morally or economically OK. Just the opposite: Effective arbitrage makes price discrimination NOT WORK AT ALL. So if there's arbitrage, there's no real point in trying to sell at different prices in different markets.
Prior to the Internet and fast, cheap international shipping, price discrimination was a LOT easier in different countries. Nowadays, it doesn't work as well--look at what's happening to perscription drugs being imported to the US. Technology suddenly made arbitrage possible, and so companies and industries that had previously relied on price discrimination to maintain their profit levels had to start turning to lobbying and FUD, in many cases.
I have trouble believing it is for any purpose other than maximizing profit.
Misunderstandings aside, THIS is where I think we really differ in the argument. I don't think it's inherently wrong for a business to maximize profits in this fashion. Like I said, price discrimination is a double-edged sword on the efficiency question: sometimes it's better for everybody, sometimes it's worse. Since it's nearly impossible to develop a general principle that distinguishes between "good" and "bad" price discrimination, I don't think we're justified in banning the practice.
As a consumer, it rankles me as much as it rankles you. But we both have to realize that some goods/services wouldn't be sold at all if not for price discrimination. It raises revenues when used properly: many business plans wouldn't be profitable at all, if not for price discrimination.
While we're at it, why don't we shoot all the oil and coal and natural gas into space, too? After all, they're what power all those tanks and jet fighters that fight our wars...
How about all the steel in the world, too, to keep people from making knives?
Seriously--did you ever stop to think about the fact that nuclear fission might be a useful thing?
Some of us happen to think that nuclear fuels will help PREVENT wars over dwindling fossil fuel resources. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, hippie!
Whoa, whoa... So it isn't illegal. (But it should be.) How much did you actually discuss this in marketing class? Did you cover the economic effects of price discrimination?
It's a lot easier to make the argument with some supply and demand curves in front of use, but I'll try it in words: price discrimination can help market efficiency (not always, though!), by increasing the total amount of profit a supplier makes AND increasing the amount of product that they can ship (more happy consumers).
The simplified case is this: some of the market is willing to pay $100 for a product; others may only pay $80 at most, others can't/won't go higher than $40... in reality, any good-sized market will be a smooth transition (hence the demand "curve"), but it's easier to understand if you think of it in discrete terms.
If you price at $100, you won't sell anything to the people who won't pay that much. But if you charge $40 to capture the bigger market, you'll be making $60 less per unit from the people who ARE willing to pay more. In many cases, cost considerations will force you to sell for MORE than the $40 per unit price, so there's no way you can sell to the "no more than $40" crowd at all.
BUT, if you price discriminate, you can charge more to the people who will pay more, and less to the people who will pay less. This mostly works in situations where you have an economy of scale in manufacturing something--software, music, and movies are the classic examples of this, because making additional copies once you've built the initial version is sooooo cheap.
Usually, this works such that the supplier can ship a lot more product than they otherwise would be able to ship. A side effect is that the cost per unit to manufacture the product is less, which means the whole process is more efficient in terms of inputs. Also, the supplier makes a shitload more money.
Some call this unfair, or bad. Personally, I'm not offended by it at all. If you offer me something at a given price, I'll take it or I won't--I'm not going to whine about how much you charge other people. It's like the parable of the farmer who hires three men to work at different pay rates--he makes a deal with each individual, and each man is happy with his deal, until two of them realize that someone else got a better deal. It's a personal thing, whether you care or not, not a moral thing.
And in the real world, arbitrage usually makes it impossible or difficult to price discriminate, except in special cases. So there's not much point in trying.
Just to play devil's advocate, by this line of reasoning, shouldn't videos of murder, etc. be banned, because people were harmed in making them?
You have a good point, here. The issue of why possession of kidde porn, versus actually making it, is illegal is a little more complicated. I think that the distinction isn't entirely motivated by legal theories, or by concrete and consistent philosophy.
Child pornography pushes a lot more buttons than murder... it seems strange, but sex crimes are far more viscerally disturbing to most people, probably because of the sexual element. Rape is the same way. Even though rape and child abuse can't be capital crimes in the US (you can only be executed for murder, and even then it's qualified by various other factors), there's a definite feeling that they're worse acts than murder.
Part of the theory behind child porn legislation is that the market for such materials induces the acts of child abuse--if nobody wanted that stuff, nobody would make it (make much of it, anyway). Some types of drug legislation work on similar theories. Possession and trafficking is the driving force behind the market, creating the demand, and so the people who have it are considered indirectly complicit in the abuse necessary to create the images.
It's much harder to apply this "market making" theory to videos of murder. I suppose that, in theory, there could be a market for murder videos and people might kill innocent victims to make videos for that market. In reality, no such market seems to exist. That would indicate that there aren't enough people willing to pay for such things, or enough people willing to commit the acts necessary to supply them. I have heard of some commercially-available collections of videos of dead or dying people (the "Faces of Death" video series), but these aren't made for the purpose of selling them--they're deaths that happened to be captured on video, and then found and put to commercial use.
Laws aren't always entirely consistent, as abstract theory goes. Often, laws reflect unspoken assumptions about human nature. To tell you the truth, I don't have a problem with the disparity in treatment between child porn and murder videos, mostly because of the practical aspect of it.
Now, IF there emerged a market for videos of people being killed, and that market was being supplied with intentional acts of murder, I'd say we would have good cause to make some new laws.
If you want an interesting, related topic, look into the urban myths and realities of "snuff" films, and some of the various law-enforcement activities over the years that have attempted to uncover a snuff industry and come up empty.
So return the damn camera! If you bought the camera, and it (for some strange reason) didn't support the ability to move the photos off AT ALL (you had to view them in the little LCD), you'd be similiarly pissed off. Then, you'd go buy a new camera that wasn't crippled.
OR, you'd just buy the Nikon software with the camera for an extra $100, and you'd shut the hell up because you don't really care. Camera cost plus software cost is still acceptable to you.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that this is a silly and annoying problem with this camera--but it's not like they're claiming copyright over the users's images, or something, which you seem to be hinting at.
you assert that shows can stay on TV because networks don't care about advertising because they can make money with DVD sales. I would see the relationship working the opposite way. For example, there are millions of Star Trek fans, of all the series, who would probably buy every boxed DVD set of enterprise, no matter how good or bad it is. Some even claim the series is much better than when it started. If DVD sales drove a show to continue broadcasting, wouldn't Enterprise have a few more seasons?
First of all, I DID NOT say that networks "don't care about ratings." That's just stupid--they still make a hell of a lot of their revenues from advertising, so they sure as fuck care about ratings.
First, in the Enterpise case, the broadcaster and the show producer are two different companies, so there's not even an opportunity for this effect to take place! Are you missing the point on purpose, here?
But I'll humor this, because it's a good point to make. Let's pretend that Enterprise IS produced by the broadcaster, do that all the financial interests are in one company. There's still a mix of factors involved in whether a TV show stays in production. Star Trek might have a rabid fan base that will buy every DVD, toy spaceship, commemmorative plate, and dildo that Paramount whores out, and it may still be not enough to justify the show's production costs. (Sorry to the Star Trek fans--that was a cheap shot.) TV is expensive, and all the potential revenue from advertising plus other crap may not be as much as the broadcaster thinks it can make from putting another show in its place.
Older shows had much less advertising... So I say advertising is a HUGE problem.
So why don't you do like the rest of us who feel that way, and buy a TiVo? Or watch HBO instead? Or hit "mute" at commercials and pick up a book, like I do?
Seriously, though--probably, adverts have gotten audience's tolerances and expectations have changed. It's not the end of the world, is it? But even so, this attitude from you supports my initial argument: if we put content online, it would be easier to support multiple revenue models. View the shows with commercials for free, or pay a fee/subscription and get no (or fewer) commercials. Wouldn't that be nice, to get the choice?
Football is an all american game. Should it now be that kids can't watch it anymore?
Ummm... I think pro football is a little too violent for kids, but that's why I enjoy watching it. Your point here is purely subjective: the stuff that offends some is perfectly fine, in fact good content, to others. There are things YOU enjoy watching on TV, like those gunfights in "Bonanaza!" or a really good tackle in Monday Night Football, that other Americans would ban from TV because they're too violent.
Having a government-enforced decency standard is one possible solution to this problem, but it one that's technology-driven. Back when the TV regulation regime was laid out, we didn't have the Internet or digital media. There was only so much spectrum for a limited number of TV channels, and we didn't have good, convenient encryption for privacy, so everybody had to share the same content on a few public channels.
Nowadays, we have better solutions because technology has changed: we still have Monday night football, but it's a digital multicast on the Internet. Advertising is customized: If you have kids in your home, you get family-friendly commercials (no sexy stuff); if you're a white supremacist, you don't have to see the Owens skit (since interracial romance seems to offend you). If you're willing to pay for it, you don't have to see any commercials at all!
And we take those old-fashioned, bandwidth-wasting TV frequencies and repurpose them: more data flowing through the same airspace, being more efficient. This could dramatically lower the cost of offering wireless, last-mile broadband Internet services, because there would be a shitload more
You're right, there have been a few successful efforts to regulate privately-viewed content on the Internet. Most of the big, Federal-level stuff hasn't gone over too well, either as legislation or in the courts when challenged. COPA is the big example I'm thinking of. The Internet just isn't as easy for bluenoses to come down on as TV and other media.
There is that Utah law that requires ISPs to give customers tools that can be used to self-censor, either in the form of parental-control software or router-level blocking of defined offensive sites. This has some problems (like the government maintaining the list of offensive sites!), but it's not really a big concern because it's the customer's choice whether they want to censor or not. This doesn't change the status quo, except to put the burden of paying for the blocking software on the ISP instead of the customer.
There's also that Pennsylvania law that has a list of sites that ISPs must block, but I'm not sure what the current status is... but the scope seems limited, both in terms of the sites blocked (there haven't been any allegations that stuff was blocked based on obscene content or political concerns) and the limited impact (it's only PA, and it's easy to evade). But someone may correct me on those impressions.
*****
One little note: Kiddie porn isn't even an issue, here--bans on child pornography have NOTHING to do with obscenity or decency standards. It's illegal to possess or make child porn, in public or in private, it on or off the Internet. The law places those materials (I think rightly so!) outside the realm of free speech and privacy protections beccause we assume that children were exploited/harmed in making them, and so the making or possession of child porn is a harmful act. It's similar to the "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" line of thinking (which I also agree with).
Not to be a dick, but did you notice the difference between my proposal and yours? I'll spell it our for you:
LET'S MINIMIZE THE NEED FOR CENSORSHIP.
Isn't that a good thing? The quality of shows is entirely subjective--the LAST thing I want is somebody appointed by George Fucking Bush determining what kind of TV is "good" or "bad" in quality. Just imagine a world where the only thing on is "Seventh Heaven".
And you're sadly mistaken if you don't think that older TV existed solely for advertising. In fact, it was more advertising-driven than current TV, because the old rules forbid broadcasters from having a financial interest in the content-creation companies. This meant that the sole determinant in what money a broadcaster made was ratings (->advertising revenue), as opposed to making additional money from syndication or DVD sales or what-have-you. That's the only reason why shows like "Arrested Development", which are critically-acclaimed but moderately rated, can stay on-the-air.
Or are you doing a funny, and I'm missing the boat? I don't think so, mostly on account of this comment of yours:
The problem with the internet is it does not respect established boundries. Where does your broadcast end? What if your broadcast is very offensive to my neighborhood, and we wish to have a blackout.
That's the point: we established a legal/regulatory regime early in the history of television that gave the government a role in regulating the content of the limited amount of TV spectrum. With the Internet, there's an unlimited "spectrum" (for all practical purposes, anyway) and no real government mandate to regulate the content. Notice how most of the serious efforts by US and state governments to regulate net content have failed: COPA being the prime example. In cases where content-related laws do get passed, they tend to be of the type "as an ISP, give your customers the tools needed to censor themselves, if they so desire."
With TV, we assume that any person should be able to turn on their set and not have their standards of decency offended. With the Internet, we don't have such an attitude. If all the content was moved the Internet, we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of the government making decisions about what's decent and what's not.
This may seem off-topic at first, but bear with me...
I have to admit, I've got a lot of sympathy for people who don't want to see particular things on TV--nudity, violence, whatever. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, and I don't think most content is socially harmful, but my preference not to be subjected to shit-sex videos is the same as some Mormon's preference not to see Janet Jackson's nipples.
That's the problem, though--broadcast TV is defined as a "public" medium, partly because everybody can and does receive it in the clear, and partly because (in the US and Canada, at least) spectrum rights are public property, and as such must serve the public interests, meaning that the content on those waves shouldn't be terribly offensive to many people.
But I really, REALLY dislike the idea of government-appointed (or even elected) censors dictating what can go on the air, or imposing after-the-fact fines when broadcasters step out of line.
So I say, fuck broadcasting. Go radical--eliminate the concept of broadcast TV, as we know it. Practical transition problems aside, this could solve a lot of problems. Give those frequencies up to metropolitan-area data transmissions, and get those people online. With the combination of:
1) fast, cheap, ubiquitous Internet access,
2) content providers offering TV-similar video online (streaming TV shows instead of broadcasting them),
3) effective and comprehensive video search capabilities that work at least as well as mid-1990s text search engines.
On the Internet, it's a lot easier to see what you want and avoid what you dislike. The Mormons get their wholesome family crud, and I get my skin flicks and pot jokes. Everybody's happy!
Notice something about the pricing for those devices? They're expensive. FW requires more intelligence at the device end, just because it's a peer-to-peer bus instead of a master-slave relationship. USB has always had a slight edge, in terms of how the end devices need less smarts to work.
If the devices are simpler, they can (potentially) be smaller, cheaper, and less prone to failures. Granted, the difference in equipment between USB and FW isn't much, but it was something before cheap single-chip device solutions became available.
I think that mostly, the dearth of FW devices is driven by the understanding that USB is still more common than FW, especially on the previous generation of PC laptops (many of which didn't have FW ports built in). Combined with the cheaper/smaller factors, there's a slight edge in building USB devices over FW.
Not to be a dick, but the central problem that you're missing, here, is the link between the "who collects the taxes" point and the "how do we valuate the taxable assets".
In the US (I can't speak for anywhere else), property taxes are collected at a local level--city or county, usually. That doesn't mean that the local government gets all the property tax money--in many cases, state governments see a cut of the revenue. But in all cases, there's a LOCAL collection process.
Why the local process? Because in order to tax a property at a percentage of its value, we have to determine a value for it, somehow (duh, right? Anyway...) But you cannot just trust the property owner to provide a value without some kind of external standard, because the property owner would obviously be incentivized to assign as low a value as possible.
With many assets, you solve this problem by using the actual purchase price as the value. When business calculate depreciation losses on computer equipment, they take the purchase price of the computers they bought and apply a formula that tells them how much they're allowed to write off as a loss. No judgement calls, here--get the inital value from the receipt and plug it into the formula. The formula itself is a standard accounting operation that the tax code expects you to use.
But with real estate (unlike capital assets like computers), we can't assume that something gets less valuable over time as you use it. Most real estate tends to increase in value over time, or at least hold its value. But it can go up or down, depending on the local market conditions. The conditions that determine value are waaaaay too complex to pull the depreciation trick: we can't come up with a basic formula that you can just plug defined values into, and expect to get a decent approximation of value.
That's where the question of WHO collects the property taxes comes into question. Local tax boards employ assessors who occasionally assign a value to each property in their area--you might not get assessed every year, but at least once every couple of years. The assessor usually picks the new value based on the average purchase price in your neighborhood, with modifications for other factors that any real-estate agent could second guess.
First: how could you have an analogous valuation system for intellectual property?
- IP values could easily be as prone to change up/down as real estate prices. Some rise, some fall, some stay the same, in a complex relationship of causes.
- Most IP isn't bought and sold as often as it's licensed out. Basing values on the purchase prices of similar goods doesn't work well if you don't have a lot of purchases to go on.
- Unlike real estate, every piece of IP is fundamentally different in market-relevant ways. Real estate agents know that location is the primary factor in property value--the individual houses don't matter, too much. You can plausibly say that since the similar house next door sold last month for $500,000, your house is probably worth about $500,000 right now. You can't do with intellectual property because there's no overriding factor in price determinations that works like the "location" question.
Second: who's going to be responsible for doing the valuations, and how much will it cost?
- Since IP is all based on federal law, it only really makes sense to do this at the national level. There's no reason why a company in CA should pay more or less than a company in North Dakota for IP protections, all else being equal.
- Where are you going to find enough people that are experts in IP marketing and valuation to be able to visit each and every IP holder in the US and review their stock of IP? This requires a hell of a lot more judgment than real estate valuations, where you can essentially look at ZIP code maps and assign values based on property sales nearby (which is what most assessors actually do!). So you need a lot of people with a lot of real-world
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of post really irks me, because the answer to the OP's "WHY!" question is pretty simple.
Overclocking is about pulling fun little tricks to make your box do stuff that it wasn't intended to do. Usually, it's also a way to tweak a little more performance out of a non-production, home gaming system without spending money on a CPU or video card upgrade.
The point of the dry ice project is that it's simple and it gets the job done on the cheap. You COULD spend a shitload of money on one of those VapoChill compresser coolers, but that ruins the point of the exercise: don't spend much money, and have fun doing it yourself. I mean, why not just buy a faster CPU, or get a dual-processor server board with 8 GB of RAM, or something like that?
Now, MAKING your own compresser cooler (which other people have done) is a neat idea, but it requires a hell of a lot more expertise and time. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that this guy did something neat.
It's a sharp map, you said? Sharper than the sharpiest sharp map ever made sharply of a sharp?
How about "higher resolution?" Or are you actually talking about a map that I can cut myself with?
Because honestly, Roland... your prose make me want to cut myself. And I stopped that in high school.
This is a great explanation, and ought to be modded up. I guess you would call it a kind of collective action problem.
Each individual looks at the situation and determines that their own costs are very, very low--while getting hacked/shot is annoying, the odds of it happening a pretty outside. Taking the "cost" as being the actual cost of an incident times the likelihood of an incident, and you get a pretty low number.
But considering the same question from a group point-of-view, it's not a question of weighted risks, so much--we know that SOMEone in the group will get hit/hacked, probably several if we're talking about hacking. So you determine the total societal "cost" as the cost per incident times the number of incidents that will likely occur.
It's not really possible to rationally do risk-assessment in the first situation, because the minute individual cost to me is so low that it's basically noise. But at a group level, it IS possible to weigh the total cost of our collective behavior against alternatives.
I'm not saying that increasing security measures will always be a good idea, here, though--the cost of additional security might be greater than the losses of the status quo, in which case it would make more sense to leave things alone. But at least you can make an informed decision.
I'm also not taking a socialist, collectivist tack, here. There's a lot of room for market-based solutions that use this kind of thinking: Symantec sees millions of individual malware sufferers and provides a product that helps decrease the damage--they market and advertise and push the product to customers like us, adjusting our behavior to something better.
You can only save money if you earn money. If you don't have a job, as a result of outsourcing, you can't buy anything anyway.
Being fired isn't a permanent condition. Yes, you usually have to spend a little while looking for work, but it's almost always a finite time period. Depending on the person, the economy, and a lot of other factors, the amount of time can vary a lot--but it's finite! Consider also that most people have savings, or can rely on other sources of income temporarily (friends/family helping out), or can go into debt (credit cards, etc) in order to make up the lost income.
Therefore, your statement that "If you don't have a job... you can't buy anything, anway" is patently false. Almost all people who don't have jobs continue to buy things while they're unemployed. Then, they find a new job, and pick up where they left off. The unemployed person might curtail their spending a bit, but they're still spending.
Plus, many countries have wonderful things like welfare systems and unemployment assistance. Not all of them, sure, but the bulk of the countries losing jobs to outsourcing are 1st-world nations that DO have social welfare for the recently unemployed.
Erm, want to explain the logic behind this statement? I'd love to hear how you got "2+2" to equal "13,000,000"...
Correct me if I'm wrong here but Third World countries contribute to global warming
Now you're just missing the point. I'm not blaming global warming on outsourcing--I don't think that the one has anything in particular to do with the other. Okay? Are we clear on that?
What I AM saying that global warming is a problem because we've tried to maximize short term profit but failed to take the long-term costs of our policites into account. Trying to stop outsourcing is a similar problem--in the short term, you will lose jobs. In the long term, though, everyone's costs will be lower, and everybody will be effectively richer for it.
It's exactly your kind of thinking that got us into this global-warming mess.
The problem with policies that try to stop outsourcing and other movements of labor and capital is that they sacrifice the long-term for the short-term. Even though your current job will be safe right now, your children and your grandchildren (and you in retirement, probably!) will pay a greater price.
The long-term costs emerge in terms of lost efficiency. Capitalist economies have an efficiency tendency: produce the most with the fewest possible resources, because you'll make more profits that way. Outsourcing is an example of this phenomenon. If you accept a short-term cost, you get a long-term gain... if you take a short-term profit, you get a long-term loss.
don't bother to consider that your near-term gains are screwing the future.
You've contradicted yourself, sorry, you lose the argument.
No, you just misuderstood the argument, stern to stem. It's your own fault, being as you felt the need to spout off on a topic you obviosuly know so little about. Get a clue.
Next time "engage brain" first, then type...
This was funny, about 20 years ago on Usenet. You might have more success being witty if you try to be creative first. I'd forget about being "funny" for the moment, it seems like it's a little out of your league.
Seriously, you sound like you're about 15 years old.
If a corporation makes profits in your country then it takes money out of your country. By employing people in your country a corporation puts money back into your country.
You're ignoring the gains to a country's economy when (since they're moved operations to a cheaper country) that company can lower its prices and be more competitive. What about all the money that domestic customers save as a result of outsourcing? How do you propose to factor that into the equation?
Sure, the benefit may not start to appear until the next price war between competing companies, but it always comes, eventually. And if you're trying to over-incentivize firms to look solely at the short- and medium-term effects of their policies, everyone is potentially losing more in the long run.
It's exactly your kind of thinking that got us into this global-warming mess: don't bother to consider that your near-term gains are screwing the future.
Right... So are you saying I'm correct, or that the OP is correct? I honestly can't tell.
I missed it--where does it say that people are compelled to participate in open-source projects, or participate in volunteer programming at all?
From TFA:
Why? Recipients of Centrelink's Newstart allowance can fufil part or all of their 'mutual obligation' requirements by doing volunteer work for a community organisation; second is that it might be useful for students or other people starting out to get some "real live" development experience.
It says over and over again that this is "volunteer" work, right? An OSS project can't exactly demand a certain number of programmer hours, can it? If people want to contribute, they do--and they get a check from the Aussie gov't, to boot. If they don't want to participate, they don't. They can make Access databases for their local church or boy scout troop, instead.
And besides--every OSS project gets to pick what code actually gets committed, and what gets ignored. If the quality of the dole-programmers' stuff is shit, X.org and KDE won't include it.
Maybe I'm missing something, though--why do you think that people getting a welfare bonus for this counts as coercion?
Because it is subjective. Different opinions can all be valid.
Different opinions can be valid--that doesn't mean that any given opinion IS valid. Every opinion must stand on its own two feet, not hiding behind slippery relativism!
Here's a little primer... you seem dim on this issue. (Skipped your English lectures, eh?)
The bulk of literary theory subscribes to the idea that there's a LOT of similarity in the way that different people think. For instance, a large group of people might share a language, and all people share types of languages that can be translated into each other, at least with some effort.
If it were entirely subjective, how would literature be possible at all? Wouldn't every different subjective mind interpret a given work totally differently, making the act of authorship meaningless? We write and create because, at the bottom, someone else can intercept our creations and get a message or a concept out of it.
So human interaction via literature is a combination subjective and objective parts, but we're rarely sure which are which. Plus, the ground is often shifting under our feet, as new generations of readers and writers bring new viewpoints to bear.
NONE of this is interpreted to mean that any viewpoint is just as valid as any other. If that were true, why would we bother with criticism? We'd just let everyone do their thing, and be like "Cool, man--that's totally... Um... Valid."
(Remember the Futurama episodes with the Planet of the Neutrals? Think of that, here, while I get some more coffee.)
Go ahead and tell me that the "Pound Puppies" cartoons from the 1980s were the pinnacle of human literary achievement. Then try to tell me again that "different opinions can all be valid." One of two things will happen:
1) You will understand sui generis why what you said makes no sense, OR
2) You will be swallowed in a paradox, or something like that.
You're welcome for the free literary crit lesson--it cost me a shitload more at NYU, and it really wasn't much better than this.
But yeah, it sure does allow the slip-ups (and the occasional outright corruption) to get through mostly unchallenged.
See my root-level comment, below, about the slip-up issue. Basically, it's up to your defense attorney to challenge a bad warrant during pre-trial hearings. If you can undermine the legitimacy of a warrant, you can potentially get all the evidence collected on that warrant, AND and subsequent evidence collected as a result of that knowledge (phone conversations lead them to other evidence) thrown out of court.
But if the warrent is bad because of an honest mistake, it doesn't get thrown out. You have to show a negiligent mistake or some worse motive in order to win the jackpot.
Of course not! Feel free to keep using your cell phone for drug deals and terrorist chatter, Valiss...
Or should I say, Bin Laden! Thought you could hide behind a high Slashdot UID, did ya?
Seriously, though, cellular "wire" taps are trivial. They can usually go through the carrier, or they can use receiving equipment if they're in the same cell to query the cell tower and intercept you there.
Since the advent of digital cellular, though, you need more equipment and expertise needed to tap a cellphone. So the good news is that you don't really have to worry about anyone besides law enforcement listening in, unless your outside a digital service area and your phone fails over to analog.
I've had moments in Brooklyn Heights, in NYC (which is notorious for bad cellular reception) where I'm on the phone and I can suddenly hear the conversation of a person a block away on my phone. When I look down, sure enough, it's on analog.
So be careful out there, kids.
Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received.
This is a little harsh, I think. First of all, the judge isn't saying "I believe that the wiretap target is guilty, therefore I authorize the wiretap." You don't have to be presumed guilty for a warrant to be necessary--there just has to be some indication that you may be guilty, the purpose of the warrant being to find out for sure.
Second of all, the system admits that it isn't perfect because human judgement has flaws, and attempts to balance individual rights against the need for effective law enforcement. The US Supreme Court has allowed an exception to search and seizure rules called the "good faith" exception. Basically, the doctrine states that if a law enforcement officer asks for a warrant or executes a search based on a warrant, and it's later shown that the warrant was invalid (shouldn't have been issued, information was bad, whatever), the SEARCH isn't necessarily invalid. As long as the officers involved made an honest mistake, the courts say that they're allowed to use the evidence to prosecute.
Why's this relevant? Because it shows that the point of the warrant-granting process is to check abusive behavior by law enforcement. It does its best to prevent honest, innocent people from being hassled, but it's not meant to try a case before the evidence is collected!
It seems likely, then, that in a properly-functioning system, nearly all warrant requests will be granted. Since officers know that someone is watching and second-guessing their warrant requests, they're not likely to try to slip bullshit pretenses in. The officers know the rules in advance, and probably won't bother trying to get a warrant unless they're pretty sure it's going to be successful.
It's the same reason why District Attorneys, nationwide, have a better-than 95% average conviction rate for cases brought to trial. If they think the case isn't going to stick, they won't try it.
Wire line services can provide 911 location service because the phones are physically wired to a specific location.
Not entirely true. Ever wonder why the operator asks you to confirm your address when you call 911 (at least, they have the three times I've had to call)? Because they have phone company data, but that data isn't always up-to-the-minute.
One solution, which many other posters have offered, is to require VOIP providers to maintain the same location data on customers that normal telcos do now. The VOIP provider, in turn, can require the customer to provide the physical address of the VOIP device.
Sure, the customer can always lie about this, but at that point it becomes their own problem: if run phone cable from my friend's apartment to my own place, and call 911 from there, it's certainly not the phone company's fault that my location isn't accurate!
This will require an all new VoIP implementation/protocol, as well as new VoIP equipment to make it work.
Now you just sound like John Dvorak.
The current system isn't perfect, and new VOIP implementations aren't going to have to be perfect, either. As long as they work well enough, which is do-able with user-supplied address data.
****
As a side-note, what about VOIP gateways for organizations that use IP internally? It's the same problem as we currently have with PBXs that route calls from multiple locations over leased lines. It's a common enough practice for a business to provide phone service to remote offices via T1s from a central office, routing all of the voice through a single PBX setup in the main office, which then hooks into the telco. A 911 call isn't going to reveal that information, necessarily.
As long as automatic locating works in 90% of cases (easily achievable using the above-described methods), the other 10% can be taken care of well enough with other methods--operator verification being the big one.
I'm not saying that the existence of arbitrage arrangements makes price discrimination morally or economically OK. Just the opposite: Effective arbitrage makes price discrimination NOT WORK AT ALL. So if there's arbitrage, there's no real point in trying to sell at different prices in different markets.
Prior to the Internet and fast, cheap international shipping, price discrimination was a LOT easier in different countries. Nowadays, it doesn't work as well--look at what's happening to perscription drugs being imported to the US. Technology suddenly made arbitrage possible, and so companies and industries that had previously relied on price discrimination to maintain their profit levels had to start turning to lobbying and FUD, in many cases.
I have trouble believing it is for any purpose other than maximizing profit.
Misunderstandings aside, THIS is where I think we really differ in the argument. I don't think it's inherently wrong for a business to maximize profits in this fashion. Like I said, price discrimination is a double-edged sword on the efficiency question: sometimes it's better for everybody, sometimes it's worse. Since it's nearly impossible to develop a general principle that distinguishes between "good" and "bad" price discrimination, I don't think we're justified in banning the practice.
As a consumer, it rankles me as much as it rankles you. But we both have to realize that some goods/services wouldn't be sold at all if not for price discrimination. It raises revenues when used properly: many business plans wouldn't be profitable at all, if not for price discrimination.
Yo, if you were too stupid to:
- not research a major electronics/computer purchase;
- take some test shots and try out the whole process before shooting anything interesting;
Then the answer is "who the fuck cares?" Some products don't work like you expect at first glance--live with it, and protect yourself.
While we're at it, why don't we shoot all the oil and coal and natural gas into space, too? After all, they're what power all those tanks and jet fighters that fight our wars...
How about all the steel in the world, too, to keep people from making knives?
Seriously--did you ever stop to think about the fact that nuclear fission might be a useful thing?
Some of us happen to think that nuclear fuels will help PREVENT wars over dwindling fossil fuel resources. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, hippie!
Whoa, whoa... So it isn't illegal. (But it should be.) How much did you actually discuss this in marketing class? Did you cover the economic effects of price discrimination?
It's a lot easier to make the argument with some supply and demand curves in front of use, but I'll try it in words: price discrimination can help market efficiency (not always, though!), by increasing the total amount of profit a supplier makes AND increasing the amount of product that they can ship (more happy consumers).
The simplified case is this: some of the market is willing to pay $100 for a product; others may only pay $80 at most, others can't/won't go higher than $40... in reality, any good-sized market will be a smooth transition (hence the demand "curve"), but it's easier to understand if you think of it in discrete terms.
If you price at $100, you won't sell anything to the people who won't pay that much. But if you charge $40 to capture the bigger market, you'll be making $60 less per unit from the people who ARE willing to pay more. In many cases, cost considerations will force you to sell for MORE than the $40 per unit price, so there's no way you can sell to the "no more than $40" crowd at all.
BUT, if you price discriminate, you can charge more to the people who will pay more, and less to the people who will pay less. This mostly works in situations where you have an economy of scale in manufacturing something--software, music, and movies are the classic examples of this, because making additional copies once you've built the initial version is sooooo cheap.
Usually, this works such that the supplier can ship a lot more product than they otherwise would be able to ship. A side effect is that the cost per unit to manufacture the product is less, which means the whole process is more efficient in terms of inputs. Also, the supplier makes a shitload more money.
Some call this unfair, or bad. Personally, I'm not offended by it at all. If you offer me something at a given price, I'll take it or I won't--I'm not going to whine about how much you charge other people. It's like the parable of the farmer who hires three men to work at different pay rates--he makes a deal with each individual, and each man is happy with his deal, until two of them realize that someone else got a better deal. It's a personal thing, whether you care or not, not a moral thing.
And in the real world, arbitrage usually makes it impossible or difficult to price discriminate, except in special cases. So there's not much point in trying.
Just to play devil's advocate, by this line of reasoning, shouldn't videos of murder, etc. be banned, because people were harmed in making them?
You have a good point, here. The issue of why possession of kidde porn, versus actually making it, is illegal is a little more complicated. I think that the distinction isn't entirely motivated by legal theories, or by concrete and consistent philosophy.
Child pornography pushes a lot more buttons than murder... it seems strange, but sex crimes are far more viscerally disturbing to most people, probably because of the sexual element. Rape is the same way. Even though rape and child abuse can't be capital crimes in the US (you can only be executed for murder, and even then it's qualified by various other factors), there's a definite feeling that they're worse acts than murder.
Part of the theory behind child porn legislation is that the market for such materials induces the acts of child abuse--if nobody wanted that stuff, nobody would make it (make much of it, anyway). Some types of drug legislation work on similar theories. Possession and trafficking is the driving force behind the market, creating the demand, and so the people who have it are considered indirectly complicit in the abuse necessary to create the images.
It's much harder to apply this "market making" theory to videos of murder. I suppose that, in theory, there could be a market for murder videos and people might kill innocent victims to make videos for that market. In reality, no such market seems to exist. That would indicate that there aren't enough people willing to pay for such things, or enough people willing to commit the acts necessary to supply them. I have heard of some commercially-available collections of videos of dead or dying people (the "Faces of Death" video series), but these aren't made for the purpose of selling them--they're deaths that happened to be captured on video, and then found and put to commercial use.
Laws aren't always entirely consistent, as abstract theory goes. Often, laws reflect unspoken assumptions about human nature. To tell you the truth, I don't have a problem with the disparity in treatment between child porn and murder videos, mostly because of the practical aspect of it.
Now, IF there emerged a market for videos of people being killed, and that market was being supplied with intentional acts of murder, I'd say we would have good cause to make some new laws.
If you want an interesting, related topic, look into the urban myths and realities of "snuff" films, and some of the various law-enforcement activities over the years that have attempted to uncover a snuff industry and come up empty.
Right--the Slashdot editor is just making a big deal out of the OSS angle because (guess what!) this is Slashdot.
So return the damn camera! If you bought the camera, and it (for some strange reason) didn't support the ability to move the photos off AT ALL (you had to view them in the little LCD), you'd be similiarly pissed off. Then, you'd go buy a new camera that wasn't crippled.
OR, you'd just buy the Nikon software with the camera for an extra $100, and you'd shut the hell up because you don't really care. Camera cost plus software cost is still acceptable to you.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that this is a silly and annoying problem with this camera--but it's not like they're claiming copyright over the users's images, or something, which you seem to be hinting at.
you assert that shows can stay on TV because networks don't care about advertising because they can make money with DVD sales. I would see the relationship working the opposite way. For example, there are millions of Star Trek fans, of all the series, who would probably buy every boxed DVD set of enterprise, no matter how good or bad it is. Some even claim the series is much better than when it started. If DVD sales drove a show to continue broadcasting, wouldn't Enterprise have a few more seasons?
First of all, I DID NOT say that networks "don't care about ratings." That's just stupid--they still make a hell of a lot of their revenues from advertising, so they sure as fuck care about ratings.
First, in the Enterpise case, the broadcaster and the show producer are two different companies, so there's not even an opportunity for this effect to take place! Are you missing the point on purpose, here?
But I'll humor this, because it's a good point to make. Let's pretend that Enterprise IS produced by the broadcaster, do that all the financial interests are in one company. There's still a mix of factors involved in whether a TV show stays in production. Star Trek might have a rabid fan base that will buy every DVD, toy spaceship, commemmorative plate, and dildo that Paramount whores out, and it may still be not enough to justify the show's production costs. (Sorry to the Star Trek fans--that was a cheap shot.) TV is expensive, and all the potential revenue from advertising plus other crap may not be as much as the broadcaster thinks it can make from putting another show in its place.
Older shows had much less advertising... So I say advertising is a HUGE problem.
So why don't you do like the rest of us who feel that way, and buy a TiVo? Or watch HBO instead? Or hit "mute" at commercials and pick up a book, like I do?
Seriously, though--probably, adverts have gotten audience's tolerances and expectations have changed. It's not the end of the world, is it? But even so, this attitude from you supports my initial argument: if we put content online, it would be easier to support multiple revenue models. View the shows with commercials for free, or pay a fee/subscription and get no (or fewer) commercials. Wouldn't that be nice, to get the choice?
Football is an all american game. Should it now be that kids can't watch it anymore?
Ummm... I think pro football is a little too violent for kids, but that's why I enjoy watching it. Your point here is purely subjective: the stuff that offends some is perfectly fine, in fact good content, to others. There are things YOU enjoy watching on TV, like those gunfights in "Bonanaza!" or a really good tackle in Monday Night Football, that other Americans would ban from TV because they're too violent.
Having a government-enforced decency standard is one possible solution to this problem, but it one that's technology-driven. Back when the TV regulation regime was laid out, we didn't have the Internet or digital media. There was only so much spectrum for a limited number of TV channels, and we didn't have good, convenient encryption for privacy, so everybody had to share the same content on a few public channels.
Nowadays, we have better solutions because technology has changed: we still have Monday night football, but it's a digital multicast on the Internet. Advertising is customized: If you have kids in your home, you get family-friendly commercials (no sexy stuff); if you're a white supremacist, you don't have to see the Owens skit (since interracial romance seems to offend you). If you're willing to pay for it, you don't have to see any commercials at all!
And we take those old-fashioned, bandwidth-wasting TV frequencies and repurpose them: more data flowing through the same airspace, being more efficient. This could dramatically lower the cost of offering wireless, last-mile broadband Internet services, because there would be a shitload more
You're right, there have been a few successful efforts to regulate privately-viewed content on the Internet. Most of the big, Federal-level stuff hasn't gone over too well, either as legislation or in the courts when challenged. COPA is the big example I'm thinking of. The Internet just isn't as easy for bluenoses to come down on as TV and other media.
There is that Utah law that requires ISPs to give customers tools that can be used to self-censor, either in the form of parental-control software or router-level blocking of defined offensive sites. This has some problems (like the government maintaining the list of offensive sites!), but it's not really a big concern because it's the customer's choice whether they want to censor or not. This doesn't change the status quo, except to put the burden of paying for the blocking software on the ISP instead of the customer.
There's also that Pennsylvania law that has a list of sites that ISPs must block, but I'm not sure what the current status is... but the scope seems limited, both in terms of the sites blocked (there haven't been any allegations that stuff was blocked based on obscene content or political concerns) and the limited impact (it's only PA, and it's easy to evade). But someone may correct me on those impressions.
*****
One little note: Kiddie porn isn't even an issue, here--bans on child pornography have NOTHING to do with obscenity or decency standards. It's illegal to possess or make child porn, in public or in private, it on or off the Internet. The law places those materials (I think rightly so!) outside the realm of free speech and privacy protections beccause we assume that children were exploited/harmed in making them, and so the making or possession of child porn is a harmful act. It's similar to the "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" line of thinking (which I also agree with).
Not to be a dick, but did you notice the difference between my proposal and yours? I'll spell it our for you:
LET'S MINIMIZE THE NEED FOR CENSORSHIP.
Isn't that a good thing? The quality of shows is entirely subjective--the LAST thing I want is somebody appointed by George Fucking Bush determining what kind of TV is "good" or "bad" in quality. Just imagine a world where the only thing on is "Seventh Heaven".
And you're sadly mistaken if you don't think that older TV existed solely for advertising. In fact, it was more advertising-driven than current TV, because the old rules forbid broadcasters from having a financial interest in the content-creation companies. This meant that the sole determinant in what money a broadcaster made was ratings (->advertising revenue), as opposed to making additional money from syndication or DVD sales or what-have-you. That's the only reason why shows like "Arrested Development", which are critically-acclaimed but moderately rated, can stay on-the-air.
Or are you doing a funny, and I'm missing the boat? I don't think so, mostly on account of this comment of yours:
The problem with the internet is it does not respect established boundries. Where does your broadcast end? What if your broadcast is very offensive to my neighborhood, and we wish to have a blackout.
That's the point: we established a legal/regulatory regime early in the history of television that gave the government a role in regulating the content of the limited amount of TV spectrum. With the Internet, there's an unlimited "spectrum" (for all practical purposes, anyway) and no real government mandate to regulate the content. Notice how most of the serious efforts by US and state governments to regulate net content have failed: COPA being the prime example. In cases where content-related laws do get passed, they tend to be of the type "as an ISP, give your customers the tools needed to censor themselves, if they so desire."
With TV, we assume that any person should be able to turn on their set and not have their standards of decency offended. With the Internet, we don't have such an attitude. If all the content was moved the Internet, we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of the government making decisions about what's decent and what's not.
This may seem off-topic at first, but bear with me...
I have to admit, I've got a lot of sympathy for people who don't want to see particular things on TV--nudity, violence, whatever. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, and I don't think most content is socially harmful, but my preference not to be subjected to shit-sex videos is the same as some Mormon's preference not to see Janet Jackson's nipples.
That's the problem, though--broadcast TV is defined as a "public" medium, partly because everybody can and does receive it in the clear, and partly because (in the US and Canada, at least) spectrum rights are public property, and as such must serve the public interests, meaning that the content on those waves shouldn't be terribly offensive to many people.
But I really, REALLY dislike the idea of government-appointed (or even elected) censors dictating what can go on the air, or imposing after-the-fact fines when broadcasters step out of line.
So I say, fuck broadcasting. Go radical--eliminate the concept of broadcast TV, as we know it. Practical transition problems aside, this could solve a lot of problems. Give those frequencies up to metropolitan-area data transmissions, and get those people online. With the combination of:
1) fast, cheap, ubiquitous Internet access,
2) content providers offering TV-similar video online (streaming TV shows instead of broadcasting them),
3) effective and comprehensive video search capabilities that work at least as well as mid-1990s text search engines.
On the Internet, it's a lot easier to see what you want and avoid what you dislike. The Mormons get their wholesome family crud, and I get my skin flicks and pot jokes. Everybody's happy!
Notice something about the pricing for those devices? They're expensive. FW requires more intelligence at the device end, just because it's a peer-to-peer bus instead of a master-slave relationship. USB has always had a slight edge, in terms of how the end devices need less smarts to work.
If the devices are simpler, they can (potentially) be smaller, cheaper, and less prone to failures. Granted, the difference in equipment between USB and FW isn't much, but it was something before cheap single-chip device solutions became available.
I think that mostly, the dearth of FW devices is driven by the understanding that USB is still more common than FW, especially on the previous generation of PC laptops (many of which didn't have FW ports built in). Combined with the cheaper/smaller factors, there's a slight edge in building USB devices over FW.
Not to be a dick, but the central problem that you're missing, here, is the link between the "who collects the taxes" point and the "how do we valuate the taxable assets".
In the US (I can't speak for anywhere else), property taxes are collected at a local level--city or county, usually. That doesn't mean that the local government gets all the property tax money--in many cases, state governments see a cut of the revenue. But in all cases, there's a LOCAL collection process.
Why the local process? Because in order to tax a property at a percentage of its value, we have to determine a value for it, somehow (duh, right? Anyway...) But you cannot just trust the property owner to provide a value without some kind of external standard, because the property owner would obviously be incentivized to assign as low a value as possible.
With many assets, you solve this problem by using the actual purchase price as the value. When business calculate depreciation losses on computer equipment, they take the purchase price of the computers they bought and apply a formula that tells them how much they're allowed to write off as a loss. No judgement calls, here--get the inital value from the receipt and plug it into the formula. The formula itself is a standard accounting operation that the tax code expects you to use.
But with real estate (unlike capital assets like computers), we can't assume that something gets less valuable over time as you use it. Most real estate tends to increase in value over time, or at least hold its value. But it can go up or down, depending on the local market conditions. The conditions that determine value are waaaaay too complex to pull the depreciation trick: we can't come up with a basic formula that you can just plug defined values into, and expect to get a decent approximation of value.
That's where the question of WHO collects the property taxes comes into question. Local tax boards employ assessors who occasionally assign a value to each property in their area--you might not get assessed every year, but at least once every couple of years. The assessor usually picks the new value based on the average purchase price in your neighborhood, with modifications for other factors that any real-estate agent could second guess.
First: how could you have an analogous valuation system for intellectual property?
- IP values could easily be as prone to change up/down as real estate prices. Some rise, some fall, some stay the same, in a complex relationship of causes.
- Most IP isn't bought and sold as often as it's licensed out. Basing values on the purchase prices of similar goods doesn't work well if you don't have a lot of purchases to go on.
- Unlike real estate, every piece of IP is fundamentally different in market-relevant ways. Real estate agents know that location is the primary factor in property value--the individual houses don't matter, too much. You can plausibly say that since the similar house next door sold last month for $500,000, your house is probably worth about $500,000 right now. You can't do with intellectual property because there's no overriding factor in price determinations that works like the "location" question.
Second: who's going to be responsible for doing the valuations, and how much will it cost?
- Since IP is all based on federal law, it only really makes sense to do this at the national level. There's no reason why a company in CA should pay more or less than a company in North Dakota for IP protections, all else being equal.
- Where are you going to find enough people that are experts in IP marketing and valuation to be able to visit each and every IP holder in the US and review their stock of IP? This requires a hell of a lot more judgment than real estate valuations, where you can essentially look at ZIP code maps and assign values based on property sales nearby (which is what most assessors actually do!). So you need a lot of people with a lot of real-world