I think that the caller paying for himself and the callee is the stupid idea.
Both people paying makes more sense, unless someone regulates the sh*t out of it. By that I mean fixed costs for sending calls to another provider. When I call someone, I do not want to worry whether I am calling landline or cell. It should not be my problem, and yet it is.
Both people paying for their sides of communication makes sense. In fact this is what is currently the model for costs on the net. Both people pay for the bandwidth they use. Bellsouth want to shift more of the cost onto the website providers, similar to the caller pays both model. And hence it comes with the same stupidity that the cell phone caller pays model has.
It's interesting that at least one cell provider is now advertising "no cost for incoming calls" You know, if bellsouth will be able to extort $10/month from websites that pass through it, they will be able to reduce their prices to consumers and advertise lower cost to use the same internet. Thus more people will end up using this whole extorion scheme.
OTOH, perhaps the internet connectivity should be paid only by websites, they are the ones generating the revenue. Maybe they should pay for both sides of traffic. What do you think. It works for cell phones, right!
Consumer ISPs try to bring goods to the consumers at the cheapest possible prices to the consumer. One way of reducing this price is to shift part of the cost to someone else.
By charging VoIP and Itunes for consumer's bandwidth they plan to subsidize the consumer, thus making their prices less than their competitors (which should temporarily bring customers, assuming they are not a complete monopoly).
In your toll road example, the idea would be to charge grandma for the use of toll roads, so that more people would chose to take the toll road to drive to her.
The closest example to this is caller pays cell phone, where the caller is charged for his minutes and for the minutes of those he calls, instead of each party paying for their own minutes (send and recv). Interestingly enough, this is just as stupid as what BellSouth is doing, but more people seem to be ok with it.
What about broadcast TV, isn't that censored? Don't the networks have to pass their material by censors before they can put it on the air? Should we change their job title because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the US government employs censorship to some degree? You might argue that the networks hire their own censors, but what rules do you think the censors go by... the FCC, right?
TV is censored based on the law of public decency. Personally, I think this is stupid. I think it is possible to declare this restriction unlawful, since the v-chip mandate no longer makes tv a public channel.
Bad example. Censorship generally deals with the dissemination of information, not actions. You can't really censor an action, per se.
I agree. Bad example. Censorship of intentions is different from censorship of disemination of information. However, it is hard to find government censoring any private property in the US (except in cases where it is publically displayed).
People I've heard from who have lived in China seem to be under the impression that the bulk of the Chinese people support their government. China is a really big country. The few that are protesting represent a small minority. You might argue the people who are not protesting don't really know how horrible the government is because of censhorship and would probably be pretty disgusted if they know what was really going on, but the fact is that they support the government.
I agree. It is called propaganda and nationalism.
As I am sure we all we be somewhat disgusted by our government if we knew what was REALLY going on behind closed doors. But we don't know. Besides profanities on broadcast TV and kiddie porn, there are many other things that the government does effectively prevent the people from knowing much about.
Probably there is. However, be careful to distinguish government secrecy from censorship. They are not the same. Both can be harmful. I accept a certain level of government secrecy...I will accept very little censorship.
In what way does that stop them from thinking about these things? They know that a Great Firewall exists. What stops them from criticizing it in their own minds?
The problem is that no one can share this idea safely. You share the idea with the wrong person, you go to jail, as sharing ideas against the government is a crime. US is getting a bit worse in that respect too. If you have violent ideas, you may end up being prosecuted. Not quite the guantanamo yet (enemy combatant weirdness...blah blah blah), but it is getting worse. (Taking pictures of infrastructure being illegal in certain places is nuts.....perhaps the worst case of censorship in the US. For now I am simply ignoring it. Arrest me if you want.)
I am an optimist about the US government. And I am getting more and more disappointed in the Judicial branch lately. I always felt that if I get arrested for taking pictures of the subway, they will save me. Today I am not so sure. But there is still some freedom of thought here. It is still hard to end up in jail for simply thinking something, or doing something completely innocent.
"Child" renderotica breaks US child porn laws Does it? I have not heard of such a thing. But I may be uninformed on the issue.
I am not surprised on the issue of 16-year old taking photos of themselves. I hope that judges properly interpret the laws in that case. OTOH I am not surprised if they did not.
So if it isn't done "bulk," it isn't censorship? It is not, because if I chose to do it, I can. I will be put in jail, but the government does not have a system in place to effectively prevent me. Personal responsibility, not government censorship is preventing me from doing these things. Look at the murder example: the government is not censoring my ability to murder. I can think about it, I can accomplish it, I will likely end up a criminal. But censorship has not been involved.
From what I understand, "bulk" censorship is quite endorsed by the majority of the Chinese population. No, it is not. Otherwise, there would be no people protesting the blocking mechanism. You do not see people protesting the child porn laws in the US, do you? (Yea, there are a few nuts probably, but nothing like an actual protest)
Even the Chinese are allowed to think about the things that are censored. That's the problem. They are not. Sites have been taken down that criticize the Great Firewall.
They might be oppressed, but they don't quite have thought police yet. Not yet 1984, but not that far from it.
Can you legally visit child porn sites (or if certain people have their way, ANY porn sites in the near future)?
No, I can not.
Is it legal for the government to place filters in place so that I can not find them?
No, it is not.
Is it legal for the government to take down those site, and arrest the owners?
Yes, it is.
Can you go download Grokster? Visit I2Hub? LokiTorrent? Run the original Napster client (successfully)?
Yes, from p2p networks, quite legally too. Probably not any more (unless I2hub is decentralized). Do not know what lokitorrent is. I suppose it is down. No, it is down.
Is any of it due to government cencorship? No.
Please be careful distinguishing government intervention and bulk censorship (as opposed to personal responsibility) with perfectly sane laws quite endorsed by the society.
Is it legal to commit murder? No Is it legal to threaten with murder? No Is it legal to think about murder? Yes
Cencorship begins only when that last question has to be answered with a "no".
For example, most companies in the US do not meter any calls made entirely on their network, even during peak times, plus they all nights and weekends are not metered as well.
I have recently signed up for a 2-year contract with South Pacific Railway International (SPRInt) for the whole family, For about $60 a month, I have received 3 new phones, 800 minutes (metered during the day incoming and outgoing) shared between the phones, free weekends and nights to anywhere in the US, and free calls to anyone on SPRINT (including all members of the family). We only end up metering 500 minutes a month, with total talk time of about 2500-3500 minutes (3 people incoming and outgoing).
So for about $20 US/month/person, I never think about the prices when I call on the phone. That is what I call a good deal. However, our phones are locked in, and play mp3 files for $4 a track, and new wallpapers are downloadable for about $2 a piece. Guess what we do: we do not download wallpapers or play mp3s on the cell phones.
Except this already happens anyway. When a library is replaced the original is deleted, but the content still hangs around until all programs that rely on that library close, at which point the file system deletes the content.
All programs that start after library has been updated use the updated version.
The main issue is that in windows, two files can not exist under the same name (no concept of linking). (well, sort of. I am not sure if NTFS streams can be used for this.)
You know that Napster case, where the courts managed to define the term "contributory infringement".
I say Sony has been negligent in "making sure" that none of the stuff they distribute contains any copyrighted code. After all the files contained the titles of copyrighted works, and they should have somehow "scanned" for them, just to make sure that they were not distributing them. Perhaps that "copyrighted work detector" that they claimed Napster could build could have come in handy.
I think that the precedent is good enough to sue them for copyright infringement as well.
AFAIK, iHD and B/Java are not DRM, but rather a system for playing menus. The DVD system is kinda cool, but I can not wait for what cool things people will do with it once they get a turing-complete system in there.
But yes, both discs will include pretty much the same DRM. And until it is going to be cracked, I will not be able to play it. And yes, I will have the *-R version of one of those drives for backups.
Ok, so you do not want any technical work done in house, because it is not supported. Fine.
The problem of getting locked in to a vendor still remains. When one vendor gives you closed source programs, and then decides that he no longer supports your version, your only choice is to switch to another product. That is a software manufacturer has a monopoly on supporting that software. In open source, any company can support the software...and no one can claim that they will be bad at it because they do not own the code. As the code is publicly available, they can claim that they are as good at supporting the product as the company that sells the software.
3. Microsoft is desperate to hold on to its domination of the planet earth. After all, when you control over 90% of the desktops on earth there's nowhere to go but down.
I actually want to see what will happen if MS will revoke XP activations for the whole country in an instant. But perhaps that is just that madman in me. I still think this would be an awesome sight...kinda like a nuke exploding a mile away.
AFAIK, it is just politics. EU wants to have some say about which TLDs exist, as well as appoint companies to manage them.
The appointment of management companies can probably be useful for kickbacks, which is probably the reason why we are having this discussion now. And the TLDs is just a giant clusterfuck anyway; other countries having input will not fix the system.
The only good thing taht I hope comes out of this due to necessity and stupidity is a distributed DNS. Once no one can manage the names, people will stop arguing about hits.
In reality this squablle is all about which country gets to select the company gets to manage the.com.org and.net.
This apparantly provides a giant source money to the company. What this means is Europe is highly jealous that ICANN is used as a giant kickback machine to Verisign, and they want a piece of that.
Frankly I am highly disappointed in Slashdotters who apparently have no clue how the internet works, and are willing to make an issue of political profiteering into something that apparently matters to the average geek. I see the US side going -- we invented it, so we get to keep it. And the EU side claiming that since the US has a bad human rights record, it should not administer the DNS root.
WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE!
Nothing is happening. The internet is not fragmenting. No one is blocking anything. The only thing that happened is that someone in Europe decided to get a piece of the root domain pie.
Fine. EU, get yourself a bunch of DNS roots, and run your own root file. I do not care. I will simply have an automatic resolver that lets me add.us if I want to use USDNS and.eu if I want to use EUDNS...and most everything will be as it was.
Every single comment I read, I cringe. Slashdotters need to get a brain.
But if DNS root splits due to EU wanting US to not have complete control, you will immediately have the situation where european businesses can lose domains in US, and US buisenesses will lose their domains in Europe.
Once again the solution is just as bad as the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the caller paying for himself and the callee is the stupid idea.
Both people paying makes more sense, unless someone regulates the sh*t out of it. By that I mean fixed costs for sending calls to another provider. When I call someone, I do not want to worry whether I am calling landline or cell. It should not be my problem, and yet it is.
Both people paying for their sides of communication makes sense.
In fact this is what is currently the model for costs on the net. Both people pay for the bandwidth they use.
Bellsouth want to shift more of the cost onto the website providers, similar to the caller pays both model.
And hence it comes with the same stupidity that the cell phone caller pays model has.
It's interesting that at least one cell provider is now advertising "no cost for incoming calls"
You know, if bellsouth will be able to extort $10/month from websites that pass through it, they will be able to reduce their prices to consumers and advertise lower cost to use the same internet. Thus more people will end up using this whole extorion scheme.
OTOH, perhaps the internet connectivity should be paid only by websites, they are the ones generating the revenue. Maybe they should pay for both sides of traffic. What do you think. It works for cell phones, right!
It is very simple.
Consumer ISPs try to bring goods to the consumers at the cheapest possible prices to the consumer. One way of reducing this price is to shift part of the cost to someone else.
By charging VoIP and Itunes for consumer's bandwidth they plan to subsidize the consumer, thus making their prices less than their competitors (which should temporarily bring customers, assuming they are not a complete monopoly).
In your toll road example, the idea would be to charge grandma for the use of toll roads, so that more people would chose to take the toll road to drive to her.
The closest example to this is caller pays cell phone, where the caller is charged for his minutes and for the minutes of those he calls, instead of each party paying for their own minutes (send and recv). Interestingly enough, this is just as stupid as what BellSouth is doing, but more people seem to be ok with it.
For the same reason why DVDs do not play on a vanilla Windows install.
No WinDVD/other decoder = WiMP can not play them.
What about broadcast TV, isn't that censored? Don't the networks have to pass their material by censors before they can put it on the air? Should we change their job title because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the US government employs censorship to some degree? You might argue that the networks hire their own censors, but what rules do you think the censors go by... the FCC, right?
TV is censored based on the law of public decency. Personally, I think this is stupid. I think it is possible to declare this restriction unlawful, since the v-chip mandate no longer makes tv a public channel.
Bad example. Censorship generally deals with the dissemination of information, not actions. You can't really censor an action, per se.
I agree. Bad example. Censorship of intentions is different from censorship of disemination of information. However, it is hard to find government censoring any private property in the US (except in cases where it is publically displayed).
People I've heard from who have lived in China seem to be under the impression that the bulk of the Chinese people support their government. China is a really big country. The few that are protesting represent a small minority. You might argue the people who are not protesting don't really know how horrible the government is because of censhorship and would probably be pretty disgusted if they know what was really going on, but the fact is that they support the government.
I agree. It is called propaganda and nationalism.
As I am sure we all we be somewhat disgusted by our government if we knew what was REALLY going on behind closed doors. But we don't know. Besides profanities on broadcast TV and kiddie porn, there are many other things that the government does effectively prevent the people from knowing much about.
Probably there is. However, be careful to distinguish government secrecy from censorship. They are not the same. Both can be harmful. I accept a certain level of government secrecy...I will accept very little censorship.
In what way does that stop them from thinking about these things? They know that a Great Firewall exists. What stops them from criticizing it in their own minds?
The problem is that no one can share this idea safely. You share the idea with the wrong person, you go to jail, as sharing ideas against the government is a crime. US is getting a bit worse in that respect too. If you have violent ideas, you may end up being prosecuted. Not quite the guantanamo yet (enemy combatant weirdness...blah blah blah), but it is getting worse. (Taking pictures of infrastructure being illegal in certain places is nuts.....perhaps the worst case of censorship in the US. For now I am simply ignoring it. Arrest me if you want.)
I am an optimist about the US government. And I am getting more and more disappointed in the Judicial branch lately. I always felt that if I get arrested for taking pictures of the subway, they will save me. Today I am not so sure. But there is still some freedom of thought here. It is still hard to end up in jail for simply thinking something, or doing something completely innocent.
"Child" renderotica breaks US child porn laws
Does it? I have not heard of such a thing. But I may be uninformed on the issue.
I am not surprised on the issue of 16-year old taking photos of themselves. I hope that judges properly interpret the laws in that case. OTOH I am not surprised if they did not.
So if it isn't done "bulk," it isn't censorship?
It is not, because if I chose to do it, I can. I will be put in jail, but the government does not have a system in place to effectively prevent me. Personal responsibility, not government censorship is preventing me from doing these things. Look at the murder example: the government is not censoring my ability to murder. I can think about it, I can accomplish it, I will likely end up a criminal. But censorship has not been involved.
From what I understand, "bulk" censorship is quite endorsed by the majority of the Chinese population.
No, it is not. Otherwise, there would be no people protesting the blocking mechanism. You do not see people protesting the child porn laws in the US, do you? (Yea, there are a few nuts probably, but nothing like an actual protest)
Even the Chinese are allowed to think about the things that are censored.
That's the problem. They are not. Sites have been taken down that criticize the Great Firewall.
They might be oppressed, but they don't quite have thought police yet.
Not yet 1984, but not that far from it.
I like how you equate endorsing the anti-child porn laws with trolling.
Can you legally visit child porn sites (or if certain people have their way, ANY porn sites in the near future)?
No, I can not.
Is it legal for the government to place filters in place so that I can not find them?
No, it is not.
Is it legal for the government to take down those site, and arrest the owners?
Yes, it is.
Can you go download Grokster? Visit I2Hub? LokiTorrent? Run the original Napster client (successfully)?
Yes, from p2p networks, quite legally too.
Probably not any more (unless I2hub is decentralized).
Do not know what lokitorrent is. I suppose it is down.
No, it is down.
Is any of it due to government cencorship?
No.
Please be careful distinguishing government intervention and bulk censorship (as opposed to personal responsibility) with perfectly sane laws quite endorsed by the society.
Is it legal to commit murder? No
Is it legal to threaten with murder? No
Is it legal to think about murder? Yes
Cencorship begins only when that last question has to be answered with a "no".
Am I the only person who thinks that 1440x900 is a pretty low resolution for a 15" laptop?
My 10" laptop has 1280x768 for goodness sakes.
It is not an even comparison there too.
For example, most companies in the US do not meter any calls made entirely on their network, even during peak times, plus they all nights and weekends are not metered as well.
I have recently signed up for a 2-year contract with South Pacific Railway International (SPRInt) for the whole family, For about $60 a month, I have received 3 new phones, 800 minutes (metered during the day incoming and outgoing) shared between the phones, free weekends and nights to anywhere in the US, and free calls to anyone on SPRINT (including all members of the family). We only end up metering 500 minutes a month, with total talk time of about 2500-3500 minutes (3 people incoming and outgoing).
So for about $20 US/month/person, I never think about the prices when I call on the phone. That is what I call a good deal. However, our phones are locked in, and play mp3 files for $4 a track, and new wallpapers are downloadable for about $2 a piece. Guess what we do: we do not download wallpapers or play mp3s on the cell phones.
Piracy rate is the amount of booty divided by the time it takes to get it, of course.
Yarrrrr!
ONE MILLION DOLLARS of grant money, that is. That is not even illegal, similar to owning Starbucks.
Diabolically clever.
Add to that:
- Ripping CDs from the menu interface, and adding it to your collection
- Doing the same with DVDs
I am willing to bet that Apple will never accomplish the second one.
My summary of Front Row vs. Mythtv:
Front Row looks good, but has ass functionality. Mythtv has good functionality, but looks like ass.
Except this already happens anyway. When a library is replaced the original is deleted, but the content still hangs around until all programs that rely on that library close, at which point the file system deletes the content.
All programs that start after library has been updated use the updated version.
The main issue is that in windows, two files can not exist under the same name (no concept of linking). (well, sort of. I am not sure if NTFS streams can be used for this.)
You know that Napster case, where the courts managed to define the term "contributory infringement".
I say Sony has been negligent in "making sure" that none of the stuff they distribute contains any copyrighted code. After all the files contained the titles of copyrighted works, and they should have somehow "scanned" for them, just to make sure that they were not distributing them. Perhaps that "copyrighted work detector" that they claimed Napster could build could have come in handy.
I think that the precedent is good enough to sue them for copyright infringement as well.
No, I am quite sure that summoned Gnuthulhu, the free as in speech, recursively named Great Old One (no RMS, not you).
ph'ngnui mgnu'nafh Gnuthulhu Gnur'lyeh wgah'nagnul fhtagnu
According to the above, HD-DVD will use a bitrate almost 4 times smaller than Blu-Ray. That can not be a good thing.
AFAIK, iHD and B/Java are not DRM, but rather a system for playing menus. The DVD system is kinda cool, but I can not wait for what cool things people will do with it once they get a turing-complete system in there.
But yes, both discs will include pretty much the same DRM. And until it is going to be cracked, I will not be able to play it. And yes, I will have the *-R version of one of those drives for backups.
And if you like it, send a few bucks their way via their Donate page, or their Store.
Ok, so you do not want any technical work done in house, because it is not supported. Fine.
The problem of getting locked in to a vendor still remains. When one vendor gives you closed source programs, and then decides that he no longer supports your version, your only choice is to switch to another product. That is a software manufacturer has a monopoly on supporting that software. In open source, any company can support the software...and no one can claim that they will be bad at it because they do not own the code. As the code is publicly available, they can claim that they are as good at supporting the product as the company that sells the software.
Less lock-in as far as I can see is a good thing.
3. Microsoft is desperate to hold on to its domination of the planet earth. After all, when you control over 90% of the desktops on earth there's nowhere to go but down.
I actually want to see what will happen if MS will revoke XP activations for the whole country in an instant. But perhaps that is just that madman in me. I still think this would be an awesome sight...kinda like a nuke exploding a mile away.
the guys who paint the exit numbers are in charge of the interstates
Best. Analogy. Evar. Thank You.
AFAIK, it is just politics. EU wants to have some say about which TLDs exist, as well as appoint companies to manage them.
The appointment of management companies can probably be useful for kickbacks, which is probably the reason why we are having this discussion now. And the TLDs is just a giant clusterfuck anyway; other countries having input will not fix the system.
The only good thing taht I hope comes out of this due to necessity and stupidity is a distributed DNS. Once no one can manage the names, people will stop arguing about hits.
Finally, at least one person gets close.
.com .org and .net.
.us if I want to use USDNS and .eu if I want to use EUDNS...and most everything will be as it was.
In reality this squablle is all about which country gets to select the company gets to manage the
This apparantly provides a giant source money to the company. What this means is Europe is highly jealous that ICANN is used as a giant kickback machine to Verisign, and they want a piece of that.
Frankly I am highly disappointed in Slashdotters who apparently have no clue how the internet works, and are willing to make an issue of political profiteering into something that apparently matters to the average geek. I see the US side going -- we invented it, so we get to keep it. And the EU side claiming that since the US has a bad human rights record, it should not administer the DNS root.
WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE!
Nothing is happening. The internet is not fragmenting. No one is blocking anything. The only thing that happened is that someone in Europe decided to get a piece of the root domain pie.
Fine. EU, get yourself a bunch of DNS roots, and run your own root file. I do not care. I will simply have an automatic resolver that lets me add
Every single comment I read, I cringe. Slashdotters need to get a brain.
But if DNS root splits due to EU wanting US to not have complete control, you will immediately have the situation where european businesses can lose domains in US, and US buisenesses will lose their domains in Europe.
Once again the solution is just as bad as the problem.