I thought that the concept of "universal access", originally instated in the telecommunications act of 1928(?) mandated that rich city folk had to subsidize access to telecommunications (at the time telephone) for far flung rural areas that weren't economically feasible to service.
Perhaps these people should take into account the relatively higher cost or limited availability of internet access when they choose to live in a much cheaper area.
I live in one of the more desirable suburbs of my city. But I am screwed as far as having any access to highspeed internet service. Even as a paying customer!
Perhaps you should have done as I did and looked into the availability of high speed access before buying your house/renting your apartment. Back in 1998, high-speed internet access was available in exactly one suburb of Boston: Cambridge. I chose to live in Somerville for that year and forego internet access, because the rent was much cheaper.
Now, internet access is available in almost all the suburbs, and usually via one or more cable companies plus a half-dozen DSL providers. But if I chose to live 50 miles out of Boston in Bumblefuck, then I'd probably have to live without access. Those are the choices we make.
Why do you think it's someone's responsibility to give you something, especially something you don't need to live, for free or at a discount? Why do you feel you are entitled to the fruits of my labor for your enjoyment?
The stated purpose of "use tax" is to tax the "use" of items not purchased in the state. But, since that tax isn't levied against in-state purchases in addition to sales tax, isn't that simply an underhanded attempt to regulate interstate commerce? I'm surprised these laws were not struck down by the SCOTUS in the past.
The disadvantages inherent in denying lots of people a treatment or cure for 12 years (the typical amount of time a medical patent lasts after the treatment is available) is justified by the fact that, without these monopoly protections, no one would bother spending money to research or develop the cures in the first case.
Let's say 5,000 people/year die from a particular disease. Under the current system, once a cure is developed, 5,000 * 12 = 60,000 people die before the price drops. Without patents, 5,000 * forever = infinite people die before the cure is even found. (This is a bit simplistic in assuming that no one will ever find the cure. But I don't think it's unrealistic to replace 12 by, say, 100 or 200, and still end up with orders of magnitude more deaths.)
Yes, there are universities and other not-for-profit research centers, but (as is typical with free markets) the commercial pharmaceutical industry is much more efficient at finding those things that people really want.
Reason magazine is the official publication of the Reason Foundation, essentially a Libertarian think tank. The article isn't online yet, but it will be sometime within the next month.
FWIW, even as a Libertarian who is distressed by the way copyrights and patents are abused, I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation than, say, copyright does as incentive for the next Britney Spears album.
Can you people PLEASE turn down the political correctness? Some of us like real-life scenarios, because it provides a kind of voyeuristic pleasure to simulate, however unrealistically, the killing of America's enemies.
Why do you think Return to Castle Wolfenstein is so popular? Yeah, the engine and the gameplay are good; but honestly, it's just so morally and emotionally satisfying to shoot Nazis in the brain. Killing a computer representation of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or that wacko Kim Jong Il would be just as fulfilling, I'd imagine.
...does anyone else agree that this is going to make the single most boring movie ever? Perhaps even more boring than that French film with the woman eating sugar from a bag for 20 minutes? The one with the most boring lesbian sex scene ever? (They made lesbian sex BORING! Good lord!)
I've seen quite a few posts regarding the electoral college being the source of many of our problems, but I'd like to counter that there are very good reasons why the electrical...er, electoral college exists:
(1) It partitions voting into smaller entities, which makes validation easier. Can you imagine the idiocy we would have seen in 2000 were the vote for president a pure popular vote, and within (say) a 20,000 vote margin? Yowza; the recount would have gone on for years.
(2) It forces candidates to have wide appeal. If the vote of someone in Nebraska were perfectly interchangable with the vote of someone in New York City, then candidates would spend no time at all trying to address the problems of non-city dwellers: only urban voters would matter, and fuck everyone else.
(3) States are sovereign entities who rightly get part of the vote. Lots of people in the US (including most everyone in government) sadly don't understand what federalism is: a system whereby the states and the Union are both sovereign governments with specific and partially-overlapping powers. The state governments are supposed to, by themselves, have a say in the federal government, which is why the Senate used to be appointed by state governors and why the elector allocation is proportional to state population PLUS 2 for the state itself.
It's unfortunate that what he stands up for is often unconstitutional. Think restrictions on political speech in the campaign finance reform legislation. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
Not anymore! I couldn't believe it when I heard it, but a very obnoxious commercial came on the radio the other night saying that Radio Shack would no longer be asking for your name, address, or phone number. If their selection, prices, and quality didn't suck, I might actually start shopping there again. =)
Did rehabilitation work?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Having read numerous accounts of your activities, both favorable and not, my impression is that your punishment was well deserved.
My question is therefore, "Did you learn that it is wrong to intentionally destroy others' work for your own amusement? If so, what part of the punishment was most effective? And, if not, what additional punishment might have changed your mind?"
This is a serious question. I'm not just trolling.
I wrote this just a few days ago. Looks like I spoke too soon, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. It's linked from my blog page, also (http://www.krose.org/~krose/blogs/).
Most of the public doesn't understand exactly what their rights are regarding pre-recorded media, such as DVD movies and music CD's. I suspect a large part of this stems from the fact that most people don't understand why they are given legal protection.
That legal protection stems entirely from a choice made by the Founders to protect creative works from unauthorized use. The constitution says that
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
which led to the development of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Thus, you, as one of The People, are the source of this protection; and the reason you should support that protection is that it promotes the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging innovation.
As a result, there needs to be some balance in the enforcement of copyright. As copyright was intended primarily to increase the size of the public domain---the potential to make profit is merely an incentive to this end---it must be the case that copyright be enforced in a way that does not injure the public for the benefit of a few.
This balance has, over the past century, been tipped in favor of the content producers and owners and against The People little by little. Among the most recent and egregious examples are the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which retroactively increased the term of copyrights to the lifetime of the author plus seventy years, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to bypass technological protections to view content in a way not authorized by the content owner, to provide access to the disabled, or even to access public domain content!
As a result of the slowly changing laws regarding copyright, people have begun to believe that protected works are property in the traditional sense; hence, the appearance of the phrase "intellectual property" to describe copyrighted works. This, I believe, is the most poignant reason why there has been little public outcry against the erosion of the Founders' intended protection of the public interest.
Creative works are not property. A CD (the disc itself), a car, a piece of land, a pair of socks, your toenail clippings---these are property. A band's recording of Smoke on the Water, the musical description of Smoke on the Water---these are creative works and therefore not property. The difference is a very clear and natural one: property consists of tangible things, i.e., those made of matter, which are naturally defensible since the owner would need to be deprived of their use for another to take them, while creative works are those things that have a zero marginal cost of reproduction, i.e., ideas, which are not naturally defensible since someone can take them without in any way reducing the creator's ability to continue using them.
The Founders did not intend for creative works to be "owned" in perpetuity by an individual's family or a corporation; rather, they intended for these works to pass into the public domain after a short period of time (originally 20 years), whereupon they would benefit all of The People. It is arguable (and, in fact, such a case contending so is before the federal courts) that a copyright term of lifetime plus seventy years goes far beyond Congress's constitutional ability to provide protection for creative works for "limited times" in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by their granting a copyright term that denies the public the benefit of these works for a virtually unlimited period for the sole purpose of enriching well-connected corporate interests, while simultaneously effecting no incentive for the heirs of successful individual creators to do any creating themselves.
The aforementioned corporate interests, as embodied in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), have in turn promoted a mindset that any use not explicitly authorized by the content owners is not only immoral but illegal: this includes ripping CD's you own and encoding them as MP3's to your own hard drive and copying them to your iPod or Rio to listen to while on the subway; viewing DVD's under Linux using an "unauthorized" player; and burning a mix CD for one of your friends. Despite what the RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk might tell you, such activities are clearly "fair use" as defined by the courts, and are protected rights; however, under the DMCA, these acts are likely to be de-facto illegal due to the need for users to bypass technological protections to get at the actual content (although the courts have not yet ruled on these points).
I am not arguing that giving a CD to 250,000 of your "closest friends" on Kazaa is fair use; however, I would argue that the mere act of downloading a couple of songs from the internet (no matter the source) in order to sample them before buying the CD is fair use and therefore protected.
The Congress appears to be split on this issue. While they passed the DMCA in 1998, recent attempts to pass even more restrictive business-model protection acts such as Senator Fritz Hollings' (D-Disney) CBDTPA have been stalled, due in large measure to the opposition of Rick Boucher (D-VA) and the work of groups such as DigitalConsumer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of whom are worthy of your support.
It is time that the balance was tipped back toward The People. Given the nearly unlimited power of our national government and the increasing unlikelihood that the courts and the Congress will begin to again follow the original intent of our constitution, this will take education and effort. You can begin by signalling your support to the groups above and by calling your representatives and telling them that you support fair use instead and oppose government protection of outdated business models. Yet there is no substitute for spreading the word: only when our representatives encounter widespread opposition from the public will the blood money of the content owners pale in comparison to the wrath of the voters.
Andy Grove of Intel best summed up the desires of the media giants when he asked:
Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge? Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?
: Spending has not increased past inflation and : devaluation over the last biennium. Revenues have : decreased.
Tell that to those of us here in the People's Republik of Massachusetts, in which the state budget has gone from $9 billion to $22 billion in 12 years. That far outstrips the rate of inflation.
: These are just some silly bureaucrats trying to : pull the solution to Oregon's multimillion-dollar : budget deficit (caused by one of the lowest tax : rates in the nation)
That's funny; I always thought budget deficits were caused by too much spending. I guess if I run over my personal budget, I should just inform my company that they need to pay me more, and enforce that new policy with a gun.
I've seen lots of comments about how this is a waste of time, or a waste of bandwidth, or what have you.
I venture to guess that the real purpose behind this is to speak the entire Linux source tree so there's no question that it is protected speech. Thus, any efforts to supress it via mechanisms like the DMCA or CBDTPA (or whatever the fuck it's called) would be much more clearly in violation of the first amendment.
Of course, there's no guarantee that this approach would be worth a damn, since patents/copyright already supersede free speech rights in lots of cases, but it's not completely pointless.
...I'm waiting with some amusement for calls to nationalize the Linux source code and imprison the current kernel developers.
"It doesn't matter if it's someone's homebrew project: simply by virtue of distributing it and acting like they had over the prior 10 years, they lulled us into a false sense of security. Then, WHAM! Bait and switch."
"We the users should have full rights over the development of this kernel. After all, this is a public works project."
"Linus, Alan, and everyone else use the roads to get to work, right? Or, if not, they buy food that is transported by the roads. Or, if not, they enjoy the smell of the asphalt. In any event, they are enjoying a public resource, which means we all have a right to the fruits of their labor."
I laugh whenever I hear these arguments applied to anything. I truly hope you're laughing to hear these arguments applied to Linux.
Re:Breaux-Nickles
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Does that mean they're going to reduce the regulation on the DSL providers?
No?
Oh, you mean they're going to make it fair through an ebbing tide that lowers all boats. That's typically what government does: make it harder for everyone, all in the name of fairness.
...is why they should settle for a half-hearted attempt to please, when they can get the real thing for free, along with support by a comparable international corporation? To anyone not already in bed with Microsoft (and thus not yet beholden to Office or Exchange), there's simply no contest. And I think this is what's scaring the source code out of Microsoft.
lol.... It wasn't intended as flamebait. I simply can't stand the celebrity culture, and especially the self-made celebrity culture in which people like Rob use their positions in one domain (news for nerds editor) to create reputation in other areas (family man, leftist shill) that have nothing to do with the first.
Of course, he couldn't do this if Slashdot were filled more with the types of people who follow actual news for nerds and fewer of the types of people who like being part of a cult of personality.
Rob did a great thing in founding Slashdot, because it gave geeks a place to gather and share ideas more efficiently, and to create political clout for those issues that affect all geeks equally. It seems everything else he's done, however, is simply self-aggrandizement and ego-stroking to achieve his own non-geek-related personal and political goals.
Once he cuts that shit out, I'll have a lot more respect for this site. Until then, I'm going to continue to be a voice of dissent.
Who gives a fuck? Really? I'm not interested in the personal lives of much more respectable editors of much more respectable publications, so what makes Rob think I care about his?
I know this'll get modded down by the "Slashdot can do no wrong" crowd, but I'm sure I speak for lots of people who don't have as much karma to burn.
"one of the best-qualified people in the world to answer questions on this topic" = "someone who agrees with the majority of Slashdot readers"
I'm not saying this because I disagree with Larry's conclusions (although I do, to some extent); I'm just trying to point out the bias that permeates this site. The word "news" has been redefined over the past 35 years to mean "commentary," and that's too bad.
> Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but > wouldn't that mean that high framerates would > cause the voltage to skyrocket?
That's like saying "lower tax revenue would cause government budgets to starve": as that statement presumes a bias towards big government being the default, your statement presumes an initial bias towards current displays using very little electricity, which isn't the case with LCD's.
Given the current state of display technology, the statement, "higher framerates would cause the voltage to perhaps approach what is used by LCD's today, even when that LCD is sitting idle."
Prices would probably go down some in the US (to compensate for competition) and up some in other countries (to mitigate the effects of re-exporters), but they would still be different; it's just that they would be closer because the presence of re-exporters would upper-bound what the distributors could charge directly.
The fact is, though, that the distributors couldn't do anything too dramatic or they would lose substantial overseas business: for them, it would be a choice between charging a premium in the US and selling only to Americans, or charging less and selling to everyone. I suspect the latter would net them more money.
Pinko commie, me? I am a libertarian, dude. I'm for the pure, free market: one in which content owners don't have government authority backing up their policies at the point of a gun. I think you should reread my post more carefully.
DVD's have a built-in way to enforce trade restrictions: region encoding. Of course, film distributors will claim it's about release dates or other such crap; but in reality, region encoding was always intended as an anti-free trade measure.
The distributors want to extract as much money as they can from each market: while they can easily get $18 for a DVD in the US, that would be way too high in China.
The way to scuttle this is to reform copyright to be free trade- and fair use-friendly: demand that, as a condition of receiving copyright protection, distributors not cripple the product in any way---no "copy protection," no region encoding, etc.---and allow users to buy and sell and resell them as they please, and to make copies for archival purposes or for limited distribution to friends. (Note: Your 10,000 closest friends on Gnutella don't count.)
OTOH, if the distributors want to put in anti-free trade or anti-fair use measures, they obviously don't need copyright protection. (LOL)
The point of this proposal is simply to shift the balance back to the center, away from the veritable power orgy for content owners that exists today. Reasonable people realize that copyright, patent, and trademark protections exist for a reason; reasonable people do not believe that these protections should come at the expense of all liberty for users.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps these people should take into account the relatively higher cost or limited availability of internet access when they choose to live in a much cheaper area.
Perhaps you should have done as I did and looked into the availability of high speed access before buying your house/renting your apartment. Back in 1998, high-speed internet access was available in exactly one suburb of Boston: Cambridge. I chose to live in Somerville for that year and forego internet access, because the rent was much cheaper.
Now, internet access is available in almost all the suburbs, and usually via one or more cable companies plus a half-dozen DSL providers. But if I chose to live 50 miles out of Boston in Bumblefuck, then I'd probably have to live without access. Those are the choices we make.
Why do you think it's someone's responsibility to give you something, especially something you don't need to live, for free or at a discount? Why do you feel you are entitled to the fruits of my labor for your enjoyment?
The stated purpose of "use tax" is to tax the "use" of items not purchased in the state. But, since that tax isn't levied against in-state purchases in addition to sales tax, isn't that simply an underhanded attempt to regulate interstate commerce? I'm surprised these laws were not struck down by the SCOTUS in the past.
The disadvantages inherent in denying lots of people a treatment or cure for 12 years (the typical amount of time a medical patent lasts after the treatment is available) is justified by the fact that, without these monopoly protections, no one would bother spending money to research or develop the cures in the first case.
Let's say 5,000 people/year die from a particular disease. Under the current system, once a cure is developed, 5,000 * 12 = 60,000 people die before the price drops. Without patents, 5,000 * forever = infinite people die before the cure is even found. (This is a bit simplistic in assuming that no one will ever find the cure. But I don't think it's unrealistic to replace 12 by, say, 100 or 200, and still end up with orders of magnitude more deaths.)
Yes, there are universities and other not-for-profit research centers, but (as is typical with free markets) the commercial pharmaceutical industry is much more efficient at finding those things that people really want.
Reason magazine is the official publication of the Reason Foundation, essentially a Libertarian think tank. The article isn't online yet, but it will be sometime within the next month.
FWIW, even as a Libertarian who is distressed by the way copyrights and patents are abused, I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation than, say, copyright does as incentive for the next Britney Spears album.
Can you people PLEASE turn down the political correctness? Some of us like real-life scenarios, because it provides a kind of voyeuristic pleasure to simulate, however unrealistically, the killing of America's enemies.
Why do you think Return to Castle Wolfenstein is so popular? Yeah, the engine and the gameplay are good; but honestly, it's just so morally and emotionally satisfying to shoot Nazis in the brain. Killing a computer representation of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or that wacko Kim Jong Il would be just as fulfilling, I'd imagine.
...does anyone else agree that this is going to make the single most boring movie ever? Perhaps even more boring than that French film with the woman eating sugar from a bag for 20 minutes? The one with the most boring lesbian sex scene ever? (They made lesbian sex BORING! Good lord!)
I've seen quite a few posts regarding the electoral college being the source of many of our problems, but I'd like to counter that there are very good reasons why the electrical...er, electoral college exists:
(1) It partitions voting into smaller entities, which makes validation easier. Can you imagine the idiocy we would have seen in 2000 were the vote for president a pure popular vote, and within (say) a 20,000 vote margin? Yowza; the recount would have gone on for years.
(2) It forces candidates to have wide appeal. If the vote of someone in Nebraska were perfectly interchangable with the vote of someone in New York City, then candidates would spend no time at all trying to address the problems of non-city dwellers: only urban voters would matter, and fuck everyone else.
(3) States are sovereign entities who rightly get part of the vote. Lots of people in the US (including most everyone in government) sadly don't understand what federalism is: a system whereby the states and the Union are both sovereign governments with specific and partially-overlapping powers. The state governments are supposed to, by themselves, have a say in the federal government, which is why the Senate used to be appointed by state governors and why the elector allocation is proportional to state population PLUS 2 for the state itself.
Cheers,
Kyle
...because this is a really good idea? My god, something good to come out of CCU! What horrors!
It's unfortunate that what he stands up for is often unconstitutional. Think restrictions on political speech in the campaign finance reform legislation. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." are they having trouble with?
> Except to get your home address. heh
Not anymore! I couldn't believe it when I heard it, but a very obnoxious commercial came on the radio the other night saying that Radio Shack would no longer be asking for your name, address, or phone number. If their selection, prices, and quality didn't suck, I might actually start shopping there again. =)
Having read numerous accounts of your activities, both favorable and not, my impression is that your punishment was well deserved.
My question is therefore, "Did you learn that it is wrong to intentionally destroy others' work for your own amusement? If so, what part of the punishment was most effective? And, if not, what additional punishment might have changed your mind?"
This is a serious question. I'm not just trolling.
I wrote this just a few days ago. Looks like I spoke too soon, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. It's linked from my blog page, also (http://www.krose.org/~krose/blogs/).
Most of the public doesn't understand exactly what their rights are regarding pre-recorded media, such as DVD movies and music CD's. I suspect a large part of this stems from the fact that most people don't understand why they are given legal protection.
That legal protection stems entirely from a choice made by the Founders to protect creative works from unauthorized use. The constitution says that
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
which led to the development of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Thus, you, as one of The People, are the source of this protection; and the reason you should support that protection is that it promotes the progress of science and useful arts by encouraging innovation.
As a result, there needs to be some balance in the enforcement of copyright. As copyright was intended primarily to increase the size of the public domain---the potential to make profit is merely an incentive to this end---it must be the case that copyright be enforced in a way that does not injure the public for the benefit of a few.
This balance has, over the past century, been tipped in favor of the content producers and owners and against The People little by little. Among the most recent and egregious examples are the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which retroactively increased the term of copyrights to the lifetime of the author plus seventy years, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to bypass technological protections to view content in a way not authorized by the content owner, to provide access to the disabled, or even to access public domain content!
As a result of the slowly changing laws regarding copyright, people have begun to believe that protected works are property in the traditional sense; hence, the appearance of the phrase "intellectual property" to describe copyrighted works. This, I believe, is the most poignant reason why there has been little public outcry against the erosion of the Founders' intended protection of the public interest.
Creative works are not property. A CD (the disc itself), a car, a piece of land, a pair of socks, your toenail clippings---these are property. A band's recording of Smoke on the Water, the musical description of Smoke on the Water---these are creative works and therefore not property. The difference is a very clear and natural one: property consists of tangible things, i.e., those made of matter, which are naturally defensible since the owner would need to be deprived of their use for another to take them, while creative works are those things that have a zero marginal cost of reproduction, i.e., ideas, which are not naturally defensible since someone can take them without in any way reducing the creator's ability to continue using them.
The Founders did not intend for creative works to be "owned" in perpetuity by an individual's family or a corporation; rather, they intended for these works to pass into the public domain after a short period of time (originally 20 years), whereupon they would benefit all of The People. It is arguable (and, in fact, such a case contending so is before the federal courts) that a copyright term of lifetime plus seventy years goes far beyond Congress's constitutional ability to provide protection for creative works for "limited times" in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by their granting a copyright term that denies the public the benefit of these works for a virtually unlimited period for the sole purpose of enriching well-connected corporate interests, while simultaneously effecting no incentive for the heirs of successful individual creators to do any creating themselves.
The aforementioned corporate interests, as embodied in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), have in turn promoted a mindset that any use not explicitly authorized by the content owners is not only immoral but illegal: this includes ripping CD's you own and encoding them as MP3's to your own hard drive and copying them to your iPod or Rio to listen to while on the subway; viewing DVD's under Linux using an "unauthorized" player; and burning a mix CD for one of your friends. Despite what the RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk might tell you, such activities are clearly "fair use" as defined by the courts, and are protected rights; however, under the DMCA, these acts are likely to be de-facto illegal due to the need for users to bypass technological protections to get at the actual content (although the courts have not yet ruled on these points).
I am not arguing that giving a CD to 250,000 of your "closest friends" on Kazaa is fair use; however, I would argue that the mere act of downloading a couple of songs from the internet (no matter the source) in order to sample them before buying the CD is fair use and therefore protected.
The Congress appears to be split on this issue. While they passed the DMCA in 1998, recent attempts to pass even more restrictive business-model protection acts such as Senator Fritz Hollings' (D-Disney) CBDTPA have been stalled, due in large measure to the opposition of Rick Boucher (D-VA) and the work of groups such as DigitalConsumer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of whom are worthy of your support.
It is time that the balance was tipped back toward The People. Given the nearly unlimited power of our national government and the increasing unlikelihood that the courts and the Congress will begin to again follow the original intent of our constitution, this will take education and effort. You can begin by signalling your support to the groups above and by calling your representatives and telling them that you support fair use instead and oppose government protection of outdated business models. Yet there is no substitute for spreading the word: only when our representatives encounter widespread opposition from the public will the blood money of the content owners pale in comparison to the wrath of the voters.
Andy Grove of Intel best summed up the desires of the media giants when he asked:
Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge? Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?
: Spending has not increased past inflation and
: devaluation over the last biennium. Revenues have
: decreased.
Tell that to those of us here in the People's Republik of Massachusetts, in which the state budget has gone from $9 billion to $22 billion in 12 years. That far outstrips the rate of inflation.
: These are just some silly bureaucrats trying to
: pull the solution to Oregon's multimillion-dollar
: budget deficit (caused by one of the lowest tax
: rates in the nation)
That's funny; I always thought budget deficits were caused by too much spending. I guess if I run over my personal budget, I should just inform my company that they need to pay me more, and enforce that new policy with a gun.
I've seen lots of comments about how this is a waste of time, or a waste of bandwidth, or what have you.
I venture to guess that the real purpose behind this is to speak the entire Linux source tree so there's no question that it is protected speech. Thus, any efforts to supress it via mechanisms like the DMCA or CBDTPA (or whatever the fuck it's called) would be much more clearly in violation of the first amendment.
Of course, there's no guarantee that this approach would be worth a damn, since patents/copyright already supersede free speech rights in lots of cases, but it's not completely pointless.
...I'm waiting with some amusement for calls to nationalize the Linux source code and imprison the current kernel developers.
"It doesn't matter if it's someone's homebrew project: simply by virtue of distributing it and acting like they had over the prior 10 years, they lulled us into a false sense of security. Then, WHAM! Bait and switch."
"We the users should have full rights over the development of this kernel. After all, this is a public works project."
"Linus, Alan, and everyone else use the roads to get to work, right? Or, if not, they buy food that is transported by the roads. Or, if not, they enjoy the smell of the asphalt. In any event, they are enjoying a public resource, which means we all have a right to the fruits of their labor."
I laugh whenever I hear these arguments applied to anything. I truly hope you're laughing to hear these arguments applied to Linux.
Does that mean they're going to reduce the regulation on the DSL providers?
No?
Oh, you mean they're going to make it fair through an ebbing tide that lowers all boats. That's typically what government does: make it harder for everyone, all in the name of fairness.
Doesn't anyone see a problem with this?
...is why they should settle for a half-hearted attempt to please, when they can get the real thing for free, along with support by a comparable international corporation? To anyone not already in bed with Microsoft (and thus not yet beholden to Office or Exchange), there's simply no contest. And I think this is what's scaring the source code out of Microsoft.
lol.... It wasn't intended as flamebait. I simply can't stand the celebrity culture, and especially the self-made celebrity culture in which people like Rob use their positions in one domain (news for nerds editor) to create reputation in other areas (family man, leftist shill) that have nothing to do with the first.
Of course, he couldn't do this if Slashdot were filled more with the types of people who follow actual news for nerds and fewer of the types of people who like being part of a cult of personality.
Rob did a great thing in founding Slashdot, because it gave geeks a place to gather and share ideas more efficiently, and to create political clout for those issues that affect all geeks equally. It seems everything else he's done, however, is simply self-aggrandizement and ego-stroking to achieve his own non-geek-related personal and political goals.
Once he cuts that shit out, I'll have a lot more respect for this site. Until then, I'm going to continue to be a voice of dissent.
Who gives a fuck? Really? I'm not interested in the personal lives of much more respectable editors of much more respectable publications, so what makes Rob think I care about his?
I know this'll get modded down by the "Slashdot can do no wrong" crowd, but I'm sure I speak for lots of people who don't have as much karma to burn.
"one of the best-qualified people in the world to answer questions on this topic" = "someone who agrees with the majority of Slashdot readers"
I'm not saying this because I disagree with Larry's conclusions (although I do, to some extent); I'm just trying to point out the bias that permeates this site. The word "news" has been redefined over the past 35 years to mean "commentary," and that's too bad.
> Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but
> wouldn't that mean that high framerates would
> cause the voltage to skyrocket?
That's like saying "lower tax revenue would cause government budgets to starve": as that statement presumes a bias towards big government being the default, your statement presumes an initial bias towards current displays using very little electricity, which isn't the case with LCD's.
Given the current state of display technology, the statement, "higher framerates would cause the voltage to perhaps approach what is used by LCD's today, even when that LCD is sitting idle."
Prices would probably go down some in the US (to compensate for competition) and up some in other countries (to mitigate the effects of re-exporters), but they would still be different; it's just that they would be closer because the presence of re-exporters would upper-bound what the distributors could charge directly.
The fact is, though, that the distributors couldn't do anything too dramatic or they would lose substantial overseas business: for them, it would be a choice between charging a premium in the US and selling only to Americans, or charging less and selling to everyone. I suspect the latter would net them more money.
Pinko commie, me? I am a libertarian, dude. I'm for the pure, free market: one in which content owners don't have government authority backing up their policies at the point of a gun. I think you should reread my post more carefully.
DVD's have a built-in way to enforce trade restrictions: region encoding. Of course, film distributors will claim it's about release dates or other such crap; but in reality, region encoding was always intended as an anti-free trade measure.
The distributors want to extract as much money as they can from each market: while they can easily get $18 for a DVD in the US, that would be way too high in China.
The way to scuttle this is to reform copyright to be free trade- and fair use-friendly: demand that, as a condition of receiving copyright protection, distributors not cripple the product in any way---no "copy protection," no region encoding, etc.---and allow users to buy and sell and resell them as they please, and to make copies for archival purposes or for limited distribution to friends. (Note: Your 10,000 closest friends on Gnutella don't count.)
OTOH, if the distributors want to put in anti-free trade or anti-fair use measures, they obviously don't need copyright protection. (LOL)
The point of this proposal is simply to shift the balance back to the center, away from the veritable power orgy for content owners that exists today. Reasonable people realize that copyright, patent, and trademark protections exist for a reason; reasonable people do not believe that these protections should come at the expense of all liberty for users.
Cheers,
Kyle