I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Are you still talking about software as a service, or did you jump to professional developers working with GPL'd code?
Google has pushed the bounds of copyright, privacy and data protection laws a lot — far too far in some cases, IMNSHO.
However, on this particular count, there seems to be a rush to spot the parallels between Google and TPB while completely ignoring the different contexts, even such obvious things as Google actually co-operating with content owners and taking down infringing content uploaded to its services, while TPB stuck two fingers up at the content owners and the law and assumed if they thumped their chests enough they'd be immune to legal penalty. As a consequence of greater scrutiny, Google will almost certainly have to modify their behaviour significantly over the coming months, perhaps in search and surely in some of their other products, but they will probably be given a decent chance to do so by the authorities and the major content producers. Meanwhile, it seems the guys from TPB will have plenty of spare time to consider whether pure arrogance was an effective strategy after all.
I'm still trying to figure the numbers on deliberately stopping 6,774,000,000+ people from copying/sharing, from free speech, so that 1 person will have an additional incentive to create something.
That's an easy one: if we took your extreme numbers as an example, then if that 1 person did not create or share the work, then all 6,774,000,000+ people would lose 100% of the work they would otherwise have enjoyed.
Your argument is flawed because you are assuming all people have the same value. In this case, they do not, because only one person is contributing anything and everyone else is just a consumer.
Note that copyright based monetary incentive is only one of many possible reasons to create and in a population of billions it is a statistical certainty that a small percentage of the population (say millions) will have good reasons to create with no copyright at all.
Yes, of course. There are always people who are kind enough to donate the results of their labours to society for free. There are always people who believe in supporting those who create things of benefit and make voluntary payments to support that work. And there are plenty of other arrangements to pay for work besides relying on the copyright model. These are all good things, and I'm not objecting in any way to any of them.
But you have to look at the numbers. A huge proportion of the work that you and I and most other people benefit from every day is supported by a copyright model, because that model allows one person or group to create a work at significant cost, and then many people who benefit modestly from the work to share that cost so each only contributes a small fraction of it alone. Moreover, this system creates an incentive for the creator to make works of greater value or of value to more people, since they bear the risk if no-one buys their work but they reap the rewards if their work proves very popular or valuable. None of the patronage- or volunteer-based systems has these valuable practical attributes.
Methinks the current incentive to publish is far too high because individuals are currently grossly information/entertainment overloaded. There's also an incredible amount of waste with a very large percentage of all "IP" created not being used by a very large percentage of the total population. That's economically wasteful when copying costs almost nothing.
I don't think that argument makes much sense. There are billions of people in the world, and millions of creative works released during each of their lifetimes. No one person could ever experience even a modest proportion of all the available work, but everyone has different tastes and needs so that doesn't matter.
Let me put it this way: by your argument, one person creating a work that the entire world population experiences (but 90% of them don't particularly enjoy or otherwise benefit from) is less wasteful than 10 people creating 10 works, each enjoyed by 10% of the world's population but never experienced by 90%. I suppose this is consistent with your views on motivating creating and sharing of works, but personally, I would consider the former approach to be the more wasteful and the latter the more beneficial, since in one case only 10% of people actually got value from some work while in the other case 100% did.
You can't "lock up" information the same way you "lock up" your family jewels.
Of course you can. Information I choose not to share with anyone will remain forever my secret, unless someone else generates the same information at least.
This is the fundamental flaw with many of these anti-copyright arguments: they consider only the distribution of information that is already in circulation, while neglecting how to keep things coming into circulation in the future. Of course it would be better for almost everyone in the short term to screw those who have already shared information and renege on the deal, but that has long-term implications that are much less positive.
Actually, OpenOffice came from Star Office, which originally was StarWritter. StarWriter was released WAY before MS Office ever was.
I think if you look at the history, you'll find that things like MS Word (for DOS) were around at the same sort of time you could get StarWriter on the PC.
In any case, that's pretty academic, because neither modern office suite looks anything like those ancient predecessors. And if you look at how they've evolved, it's pretty clear who is the leader and who is copying the ideas.
No, your economic problem is that you don't see the flaw in your model of distribution; everyone has to re-invent and market their own wheels despite several different patents on things that anyone would have thought of such as circles, cylinders, and doughnut shaped objects.
You seem to be confusing copyright and patents.
Truly useful tools sell them selves and only require word of mouth advertising.
And how does that work in a world where "word of mouth advertising" is equivalent to giving someone the complete product for free?
If I come across something that I think could be solved by software I just search sourceforge and 98% of the time there already is a useful app there, the other 2% there's a project in development, and most of the core developers on this software ARE getting paid.
OK, maybe that's good enough for you. I'm a professional, my time is valuable, my clients' time is valuable, and I want the best tools for the job. In — as you might put it — 98% of cases, that means paying some real money for a properly designed, easy to use, decently tested and actually finished and working commercial product. Or are you one of those amusing people who thinks the GIMP is OK as an alternative to Photoshop, despite the fact that approximately 100% of professional graphic artists disagree?
Just because you want to charge my co-workers $2.50 to install an app to cut-and-paste on their defective-by-design i-phones doesn't make my anti-copyright arguments wrong.
Just because you want to invent obvious strawmen doesn't make my arguments wrong, either.
An interesting example, because while Mosaic illustrated a brilliant idea, it was the (commercially developed) spin-offs that made the Web useful for more than distributing academic papers in electronic form and the like.
There are lots of examples in law where providers of a service arent held responsible for how their customers us that service.
Yes, there are, and that is perfectly reasonable. However, I'm not aware of any service that is explicitly set up to flout the law, rather than incidentally allowing use for illegal purposes as part of a more general service, where the providers receive such a shield.
An argument is that such services providers arent reasonably capable of policing their services, and i think thats a reasonable argument for most torrent sites
That is a very dangerous argument to make. It generalises to "If you want to do something and can't do it within the law, it's fine to break the law."
An alternative view is that if you can't run service legally, then you shouldn't run it at all.
Also, we should be a little bit object and consider that "everyone is doin it, so it cant be that bad".
There are at least two fundamental, objective flaws with that argument.
The first is that, objectively, there is little data to support that claim. People here made a big deal of a study a while back that showed that, in one relatively small country that doesn't have a huge market for home-grown content, just over half of the population engaged in significant copyright infringement.
The other is that just because a lot of people do something, that doesn't make it right. It can also mean that the people don't fully appreciate the significance and implications of their choice. This is particularly common in "victimless" crimes: drinking before driving used to be socially acceptable, but now it is not, and likewise driving while using a mobile phone is becoming unacceptable as people are educated about how dangerous it really is. Here in the UK smoking is now banned in many places, and most people (including a lot of people who run bars and clubs that have had to ban it) approve of this, having seen the reality that our entertainment industry didn't suddenly collapse but we don't all have to put up with other people's harmful smoke any more.
My own view is that as a society we should be encouraging people "to work", rather than "have worked", copyright protections encourages people to stop working and live of their past actions.
While I agree with your principle, I don't agree with your conclusion. If you know that as soon as you release something you've put a lot of work into, everyone can just copy it for free, then what incentive do you have to do the work in the first place?
Your argument is certainly a decent one against unduly long copyright terms, but I think it's actually an argument in favour of copyright as a basic legal/economic tool.
As a minor aside, I don't find even the "Free Software has pushed innovation" argument particularly compelling. A lot of the most popular and high-profile free software out there is heavily based on successful commercial products, from Linux (UNIX), OpenOffice (MS Office) and Firefox (Netscape/IE) on down. Sure, there is some really original software, and there are some original features in the big name products too, but it's not as if there's a killer FOSS product that has fundamentally changed how huge numbers of people use computers.
My economic problem with the anti-copyright arguments is that they basically assume that fixed costs for developing works are zero and reduce everything to considering the marginal cost of redistribution, which really is near zero in the age of the Internet. Among those fixed costs you don't just find code monkeys, you also find market researchers, UI designers and usability guys, technical authors, and many others who contribute to creating new and useful software.
States don't have views. Information does not want to be free. Abstract entities don't feel human emotions, and when people pretend they do, I have to ask what point they'd like to make that they can't support with more objective arguments.
In the end what MS has to do is clamp down like a vice on new sales of XP (bundled or otherwise).
Why would they do that? A sale of XP still makes them profit.
Microsoft's problem is that they can't get the high proportion of the market that already has a PC and has already paid Microsoft for an operating system to pay them again by upgrading, because people's needs have already been met by XP and nothing MS has produced since offers any compelling reason to change.
Given that most people have powerful enough PCs these days to do everything they need, and both businesses and personal users are questioning the benefits of a three-year upgrade cycle that never seems to make things any faster anyway because the next generation of software is even more bloated, I doubt bundled OS sales with new PCs are producing the kind of income MS would prefer either.
Basically, Microsoft is still offering solutions to a problem they solved for people several years ago, and no-one wants to pay for that. MS need to offer either a significantly better solution or a new product that helps people in other ways.
ISPs and Telcos are well aware of the likely future trends in demand, I'm sure.
In any case, many people want to be millionaires, but we can't all win the lottery. People might just have to get used to the idea that some big companies have to spend big bucks to set up the networks they want to use, and that if they want to watch streaming video or spend all day sharing BitTorrents then it's going to cost them more than Joe and Jane who just read e-mail and surf the web a bit.
This offends geeks who have become used to having the world on a stick for a dollar a week, but that's just because that small minority of people have had it far better than everyone else for years and now everyone else wants their turn too, please.
ISPs need to fess up about exactly how much bandwidth each customer will get
Yes, they do.
I wish ISPs would be more transparent in their pricing policies, bandwidth and contention ratios, because then the people around here who want 8GB unlimited traffic for $10 a month would get the abrupt reality check they seem to need.
Why do you give a shit about anything? Ultimately, it's all personal preference, but your definition of non-essential isn't necessarily the same as someone else's.
I happen to like a society that has values beyond the purely utilitarian survival-of-the-species stuff. I value individuality and the unique contributions everyone makes, and I believe these would be the first casualties in a privacy-free world, so as a consequence I value privacy itself.
you still haven't made a case for why the membership list shouldn't be published
Because I believe people have a right to privacy, and that it is in the long-term interests of both individuals and society as a whole to respect and enforce such a right.
British law, incidentally, agrees with me. It is unfortunate, though rather convenient for the government in this case, that in order to exercise that particular legal right, one must first forfeit it.
There is a reason that courts consider evidence obtained under dubious circumstances inadmissible, even holding this more important than getting the "correct" outcome in any one trial. It is the same reason that smart people do not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms to hostage takers, even though on that one occasion it may result in a terrorist attack or the death of a hostage.
Giving a voice to people who betray confidences, as Wikileaks does, merely shows that betraying confidences has no adverse consequences. Taken to its logical conclusions, this means no-one trusts anyone with anything sensitive, and a lot of society breaks as a result. No, I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a world that didn't encourage that outcome.
The fact is that 'official secrets/state secrets/national security' tends to get overused when every single time its rubber stamped.
Yes it does, and that's disgraceful, and those who do it to shield themselves from public scrutiny should be removed from power.
But IMHO, this means there are insufficient checks and balances in the system: there should have been someone (actually, several someones) completely independent of the government of the day, from whom nothing may be kept secret, and whose public function is nothing but oversight of the government and an absolute right to compel the government to reveal information that is not legitimately restricted. For example, a panel of 12 people could be chosen at random from the same pool of people who may be called on to perform jury service, with an absolute option to decline so only those willing to do the job properly need stay on (and other random people selected until the total of 12 is reached), and any Freedom of Information request declined by any government body might automatically come before those 12 people for them to rule upon any they choose to view much as the senior court in some countries may choose to hear any case.
We are supposed to have a more moderate set of checks and balances already in the UK, yet our current administration seems to think that even after the Information Tribunal has ruled that data should be released or, for that matter, a court has ruled that a law is illegal, it's OK to just continue as they were ignoring those inconvenient rulings. Such abuse of authority should be a personal criminal offence carrying a life sentence, IMNSHO, for there are few greater threats to the well-being of society than a government without sufficient checks and balances.
You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain.
Membership of a political party should not be subject to legal penalties in a supposedly free country, either, but right now it is. How can you guide public opinion if the government can pass arbitrary laws penalising you merely for holding that opinion?
The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation.
If the truth is such a powerful weapon, then how is it that such people manage to get elected in the first place? Can none of the other large, well-financed, high-profile parties defeat a bunch of "siblings of the Nazis and KKK" using convincing argument and reasoning based on real evidence? If the only way the major parties can defeat the BNP's arguments is by banning them and telling us the State knows best, then I think we have bigger problems to deal with than the BNP anyway.
One could stretch publishing membership of an organisation which is often linked to racist violence was necessary in a democratic society, especially as some of the members appear to have been in jobs that ban membership of the BNP.
I'm sorry, but as a matter of principle, I just can't agree with that. Can you really not see the problem with a government run by one political party being able to disadvantage citizens merely for belonging to a rival political party? Is there nothing wrong with banning someone from holding public offices merely for expressing certain political views? Is guilt by association really an appropriate yardstick to use in judging these matters? I don't think so.
The BNP might be a load of racist thugs, or they might be mostly a load of people who just want to keep England for the English with a few hardliners who resort to inappropriate violence. The point is that it doesn't matter. Those who resort to violence should be punished for being violent, not for their political affiliation. Those who discriminate racially in an inappropriate way should be punished for their discrimination, not for their political affiliation. No-one should ever be punished merely for their political affiliation. Such behaviour is anathema to democracy.
And so did the United States of America. I wonder how things would have turned out if the authors of things like the Federalist Papers had been outed by Wikileaks.
It's both sad and dangerous that people have already become so ignorant of history that some think the holocaust was 'based only on racial/religious prejudice'.
Please read my post again. I didn't say that the holocaust was based only on that. I said that millions of people were incarcerated or killed only for that. And unless you know a lot of Jews who lived happily during the period of German history in question, I stand by that claim: being Jewish was sufficient to get you locked up or dead.
In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised.
The moment you share a fact with anyone, its secrecy is potentially compromised. But for society to function, we must have a certain level of trust, and it does no-one any favours to reward arbitrarily betraying such trust.
But, to be honest, I heard the jackboots on concrete as well...
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice. I guess making comparisons with the Nazis because this particular unpopular decision was made in Germany makes a certain type of person feel good. Irony, thy name is Slashdot.
In your haste to attack what you would have liked me to write, you have completely missed the point. I am not against exposing government deceit and corruption. Nor, for that matter, is a responsible free press.
But not everything posted on Wikileaks is for that purpose. Some things are legitimately kept secret. If you disagree, please indicate what overriding public benefit justifies advertising normally private but factually accurate information in the following cases:
the travel plans of foreign dignatories visiting the government on a diplomatic mission;
the identity of a senior judge who entered a building in which an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was taking place at the time in order to visit his aunt who lived upstairs;
the identities of girls under the age of consent who visited a drop-in session at a family planning clinic where free contraceptives were available;
the plans for an imminent raid to arrest suspected terrorists following an undercover investigation by the police;
the identity of a man standing trial for rape after a malicious accusation by a jealous ex.
It isn't hard to think of times when respecting privacy/confidentiality is appropriate behaviour, and there can be very real negative consequences for failing to do so. You do not have, nor should you, the right to know everything about everyone. You might find this mildly irritating in an age of voyeuristic reality TV shows and Internet forums full of conspiracy theories, but you'll get over it pretty quickly, which is more than would be likely in any of the scenarios I described above if the information were leaked.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Are you still talking about software as a service, or did you jump to professional developers working with GPL'd code?
I can't help noticing that you didn't actually answer the question.
If anything, Google is more infringing.
Google has pushed the bounds of copyright, privacy and data protection laws a lot — far too far in some cases, IMNSHO.
However, on this particular count, there seems to be a rush to spot the parallels between Google and TPB while completely ignoring the different contexts, even such obvious things as Google actually co-operating with content owners and taking down infringing content uploaded to its services, while TPB stuck two fingers up at the content owners and the law and assumed if they thumped their chests enough they'd be immune to legal penalty. As a consequence of greater scrutiny, Google will almost certainly have to modify their behaviour significantly over the coming months, perhaps in search and surely in some of their other products, but they will probably be given a decent chance to do so by the authorities and the major content producers. Meanwhile, it seems the guys from TPB will have plenty of spare time to consider whether pure arrogance was an effective strategy after all.
I'm still trying to figure the numbers on deliberately stopping 6,774,000,000+ people from copying/sharing, from free speech, so that 1 person will have an additional incentive to create something.
That's an easy one: if we took your extreme numbers as an example, then if that 1 person did not create or share the work, then all 6,774,000,000+ people would lose 100% of the work they would otherwise have enjoyed.
Your argument is flawed because you are assuming all people have the same value. In this case, they do not, because only one person is contributing anything and everyone else is just a consumer.
Note that copyright based monetary incentive is only one of many possible reasons to create and in a population of billions it is a statistical certainty that a small percentage of the population (say millions) will have good reasons to create with no copyright at all.
Yes, of course. There are always people who are kind enough to donate the results of their labours to society for free. There are always people who believe in supporting those who create things of benefit and make voluntary payments to support that work. And there are plenty of other arrangements to pay for work besides relying on the copyright model. These are all good things, and I'm not objecting in any way to any of them.
But you have to look at the numbers. A huge proportion of the work that you and I and most other people benefit from every day is supported by a copyright model, because that model allows one person or group to create a work at significant cost, and then many people who benefit modestly from the work to share that cost so each only contributes a small fraction of it alone. Moreover, this system creates an incentive for the creator to make works of greater value or of value to more people, since they bear the risk if no-one buys their work but they reap the rewards if their work proves very popular or valuable. None of the patronage- or volunteer-based systems has these valuable practical attributes.
Methinks the current incentive to publish is far too high because individuals are currently grossly information/entertainment overloaded. There's also an incredible amount of waste with a very large percentage of all "IP" created not being used by a very large percentage of the total population. That's economically wasteful when copying costs almost nothing.
I don't think that argument makes much sense. There are billions of people in the world, and millions of creative works released during each of their lifetimes. No one person could ever experience even a modest proportion of all the available work, but everyone has different tastes and needs so that doesn't matter.
Let me put it this way: by your argument, one person creating a work that the entire world population experiences (but 90% of them don't particularly enjoy or otherwise benefit from) is less wasteful than 10 people creating 10 works, each enjoyed by 10% of the world's population but never experienced by 90%. I suppose this is consistent with your views on motivating creating and sharing of works, but personally, I would consider the former approach to be the more wasteful and the latter the more beneficial, since in one case only 10% of people actually got value from some work while in the other case 100% did.
You can't "lock up" information the same way you "lock up" your family jewels.
Of course you can. Information I choose not to share with anyone will remain forever my secret, unless someone else generates the same information at least.
This is the fundamental flaw with many of these anti-copyright arguments: they consider only the distribution of information that is already in circulation, while neglecting how to keep things coming into circulation in the future. Of course it would be better for almost everyone in the short term to screw those who have already shared information and renege on the deal, but that has long-term implications that are much less positive.
Actually, OpenOffice came from Star Office, which originally was StarWritter. StarWriter was released WAY before MS Office ever was.
I think if you look at the history, you'll find that things like MS Word (for DOS) were around at the same sort of time you could get StarWriter on the PC.
In any case, that's pretty academic, because neither modern office suite looks anything like those ancient predecessors. And if you look at how they've evolved, it's pretty clear who is the leader and who is copying the ideas.
No, your economic problem is that you don't see the flaw in your model of distribution; everyone has to re-invent and market their own wheels despite several different patents on things that anyone would have thought of such as circles, cylinders, and doughnut shaped objects.
You seem to be confusing copyright and patents.
Truly useful tools sell them selves and only require word of mouth advertising.
And how does that work in a world where "word of mouth advertising" is equivalent to giving someone the complete product for free?
If I come across something that I think could be solved by software I just search sourceforge and 98% of the time there already is a useful app there, the other 2% there's a project in development, and most of the core developers on this software ARE getting paid.
OK, maybe that's good enough for you. I'm a professional, my time is valuable, my clients' time is valuable, and I want the best tools for the job. In — as you might put it — 98% of cases, that means paying some real money for a properly designed, easy to use, decently tested and actually finished and working commercial product. Or are you one of those amusing people who thinks the GIMP is OK as an alternative to Photoshop, despite the fact that approximately 100% of professional graphic artists disagree?
Just because you want to charge my co-workers $2.50 to install an app to cut-and-paste on their defective-by-design i-phones doesn't make my anti-copyright arguments wrong.
Just because you want to invent obvious strawmen doesn't make my arguments wrong, either.
Mosaic.
An interesting example, because while Mosaic illustrated a brilliant idea, it was the (commercially developed) spin-offs that made the Web useful for more than distributing academic papers in electronic form and the like.
There are lots of examples in law where providers of a service arent held responsible for how their customers us that service.
Yes, there are, and that is perfectly reasonable. However, I'm not aware of any service that is explicitly set up to flout the law, rather than incidentally allowing use for illegal purposes as part of a more general service, where the providers receive such a shield.
An argument is that such services providers arent reasonably capable of policing their services, and i think thats a reasonable argument for most torrent sites
That is a very dangerous argument to make. It generalises to "If you want to do something and can't do it within the law, it's fine to break the law."
An alternative view is that if you can't run service legally, then you shouldn't run it at all.
Also, we should be a little bit object and consider that "everyone is doin it, so it cant be that bad".
There are at least two fundamental, objective flaws with that argument.
The first is that, objectively, there is little data to support that claim. People here made a big deal of a study a while back that showed that, in one relatively small country that doesn't have a huge market for home-grown content, just over half of the population engaged in significant copyright infringement.
The other is that just because a lot of people do something, that doesn't make it right. It can also mean that the people don't fully appreciate the significance and implications of their choice. This is particularly common in "victimless" crimes: drinking before driving used to be socially acceptable, but now it is not, and likewise driving while using a mobile phone is becoming unacceptable as people are educated about how dangerous it really is. Here in the UK smoking is now banned in many places, and most people (including a lot of people who run bars and clubs that have had to ban it) approve of this, having seen the reality that our entertainment industry didn't suddenly collapse but we don't all have to put up with other people's harmful smoke any more.
My own view is that as a society we should be encouraging people "to work", rather than "have worked", copyright protections encourages people to stop working and live of their past actions.
While I agree with your principle, I don't agree with your conclusion. If you know that as soon as you release something you've put a lot of work into, everyone can just copy it for free, then what incentive do you have to do the work in the first place?
Your argument is certainly a decent one against unduly long copyright terms, but I think it's actually an argument in favour of copyright as a basic legal/economic tool.
As a minor aside, I don't find even the "Free Software has pushed innovation" argument particularly compelling. A lot of the most popular and high-profile free software out there is heavily based on successful commercial products, from Linux (UNIX), OpenOffice (MS Office) and Firefox (Netscape/IE) on down. Sure, there is some really original software, and there are some original features in the big name products too, but it's not as if there's a killer FOSS product that has fundamentally changed how huge numbers of people use computers.
My economic problem with the anti-copyright arguments is that they basically assume that fixed costs for developing works are zero and reduce everything to considering the marginal cost of redistribution, which really is near zero in the age of the Internet. Among those fixed costs you don't just find code monkeys, you also find market researchers, UI designers and usability guys, technical authors, and many others who contribute to creating new and useful software.
s/the state does not like/who break the law/
States don't have views. Information does not want to be free. Abstract entities don't feel human emotions, and when people pretend they do, I have to ask what point they'd like to make that they can't support with more objective arguments.
In the end what MS has to do is clamp down like a vice on new sales of XP (bundled or otherwise).
Why would they do that? A sale of XP still makes them profit.
Microsoft's problem is that they can't get the high proportion of the market that already has a PC and has already paid Microsoft for an operating system to pay them again by upgrading, because people's needs have already been met by XP and nothing MS has produced since offers any compelling reason to change.
Given that most people have powerful enough PCs these days to do everything they need, and both businesses and personal users are questioning the benefits of a three-year upgrade cycle that never seems to make things any faster anyway because the next generation of software is even more bloated, I doubt bundled OS sales with new PCs are producing the kind of income MS would prefer either.
Basically, Microsoft is still offering solutions to a problem they solved for people several years ago, and no-one wants to pay for that. MS need to offer either a significantly better solution or a new product that helps people in other ways.
ISPs and Telcos are well aware of the likely future trends in demand, I'm sure.
In any case, many people want to be millionaires, but we can't all win the lottery. People might just have to get used to the idea that some big companies have to spend big bucks to set up the networks they want to use, and that if they want to watch streaming video or spend all day sharing BitTorrents then it's going to cost them more than Joe and Jane who just read e-mail and surf the web a bit.
This offends geeks who have become used to having the world on a stick for a dollar a week, but that's just because that small minority of people have had it far better than everyone else for years and now everyone else wants their turn too, please.
ISPs need to fess up about exactly how much bandwidth each customer will get
Yes, they do.
I wish ISPs would be more transparent in their pricing policies, bandwidth and contention ratios, because then the people around here who want 8GB unlimited traffic for $10 a month would get the abrupt reality check they seem to need.
Why do you give a shit about anything? Ultimately, it's all personal preference, but your definition of non-essential isn't necessarily the same as someone else's.
I happen to like a society that has values beyond the purely utilitarian survival-of-the-species stuff. I value individuality and the unique contributions everyone makes, and I believe these would be the first casualties in a privacy-free world, so as a consequence I value privacy itself.
you still haven't made a case for why the membership list shouldn't be published
Because I believe people have a right to privacy, and that it is in the long-term interests of both individuals and society as a whole to respect and enforce such a right.
British law, incidentally, agrees with me. It is unfortunate, though rather convenient for the government in this case, that in order to exercise that particular legal right, one must first forfeit it.
There is a reason that courts consider evidence obtained under dubious circumstances inadmissible, even holding this more important than getting the "correct" outcome in any one trial. It is the same reason that smart people do not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms to hostage takers, even though on that one occasion it may result in a terrorist attack or the death of a hostage.
Giving a voice to people who betray confidences, as Wikileaks does, merely shows that betraying confidences has no adverse consequences. Taken to its logical conclusions, this means no-one trusts anyone with anything sensitive, and a lot of society breaks as a result. No, I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a world that didn't encourage that outcome.
The fact is that 'official secrets/state secrets/national security' tends to get overused when every single time its rubber stamped.
Yes it does, and that's disgraceful, and those who do it to shield themselves from public scrutiny should be removed from power.
But IMHO, this means there are insufficient checks and balances in the system: there should have been someone (actually, several someones) completely independent of the government of the day, from whom nothing may be kept secret, and whose public function is nothing but oversight of the government and an absolute right to compel the government to reveal information that is not legitimately restricted. For example, a panel of 12 people could be chosen at random from the same pool of people who may be called on to perform jury service, with an absolute option to decline so only those willing to do the job properly need stay on (and other random people selected until the total of 12 is reached), and any Freedom of Information request declined by any government body might automatically come before those 12 people for them to rule upon any they choose to view much as the senior court in some countries may choose to hear any case.
We are supposed to have a more moderate set of checks and balances already in the UK, yet our current administration seems to think that even after the Information Tribunal has ruled that data should be released or, for that matter, a court has ruled that a law is illegal, it's OK to just continue as they were ignoring those inconvenient rulings. Such abuse of authority should be a personal criminal offence carrying a life sentence, IMNSHO, for there are few greater threats to the well-being of society than a government without sufficient checks and balances.
You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain.
Membership of a political party should not be subject to legal penalties in a supposedly free country, either, but right now it is. How can you guide public opinion if the government can pass arbitrary laws penalising you merely for holding that opinion?
The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation.
If the truth is such a powerful weapon, then how is it that such people manage to get elected in the first place? Can none of the other large, well-financed, high-profile parties defeat a bunch of "siblings of the Nazis and KKK" using convincing argument and reasoning based on real evidence? If the only way the major parties can defeat the BNP's arguments is by banning them and telling us the State knows best, then I think we have bigger problems to deal with than the BNP anyway.
If the truth isn't on your side, then what side are you on?
The side of justice? The side of fairness? The side of happiness?
A little truth can be a dangerous thing. The correct counter to it is usually more truth, but sometimes that isn't a realistic or timely option.
One could stretch publishing membership of an organisation which is often linked to racist violence was necessary in a democratic society, especially as some of the members appear to have been in jobs that ban membership of the BNP.
I'm sorry, but as a matter of principle, I just can't agree with that. Can you really not see the problem with a government run by one political party being able to disadvantage citizens merely for belonging to a rival political party? Is there nothing wrong with banning someone from holding public offices merely for expressing certain political views? Is guilt by association really an appropriate yardstick to use in judging these matters? I don't think so.
The BNP might be a load of racist thugs, or they might be mostly a load of people who just want to keep England for the English with a few hardliners who resort to inappropriate violence. The point is that it doesn't matter. Those who resort to violence should be punished for being violent, not for their political affiliation. Those who discriminate racially in an inappropriate way should be punished for their discrimination, not for their political affiliation. No-one should ever be punished merely for their political affiliation. Such behaviour is anathema to democracy.
Even the Nazis started somewhere.
And so did the United States of America. I wonder how things would have turned out if the authors of things like the Federalist Papers had been outed by Wikileaks.
See also "slippery slope fallacy".
It's both sad and dangerous that people have already become so ignorant of history that some think the holocaust was 'based only on racial/religious prejudice'.
Please read my post again. I didn't say that the holocaust was based only on that. I said that millions of people were incarcerated or killed only for that. And unless you know a lot of Jews who lived happily during the period of German history in question, I stand by that claim: being Jewish was sufficient to get you locked up or dead.
In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised.
The moment you share a fact with anyone, its secrecy is potentially compromised. But for society to function, we must have a certain level of trust, and it does no-one any favours to reward arbitrarily betraying such trust.
But, to be honest, I heard the jackboots on concrete as well...
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice. I guess making comparisons with the Nazis because this particular unpopular decision was made in Germany makes a certain type of person feel good. Irony, thy name is Slashdot.
In your haste to attack what you would have liked me to write, you have completely missed the point. I am not against exposing government deceit and corruption. Nor, for that matter, is a responsible free press.
But not everything posted on Wikileaks is for that purpose. Some things are legitimately kept secret. If you disagree, please indicate what overriding public benefit justifies advertising normally private but factually accurate information in the following cases:
It isn't hard to think of times when respecting privacy/confidentiality is appropriate behaviour, and there can be very real negative consequences for failing to do so. You do not have, nor should you, the right to know everything about everyone. You might find this mildly irritating in an age of voyeuristic reality TV shows and Internet forums full of conspiracy theories, but you'll get over it pretty quickly, which is more than would be likely in any of the scenarios I described above if the information were leaked.