You can't sell those. The green shell is Not For Sale and if found sold that would be a sure sign something illegal happened.
Right. Things marked "not for sale" never get sold on the black market anywhere. Just ask anyone who ever traded food stamps for cash (oh right, you can't do that...).
Most adults in the first world need a mechanic to change a tyre of their car. In Afrika, people fix totally worn-out cars endlessly, and they don't need western mechanics to teach them how. This will happen with the laptops: people will soon understand them, and teach themselves how to fix it when it's broken.
You're missing two things:
1. Those worn-out cars that shade-tree mechanics fix forever (both here and there) are the older cars with simpler engines and controls. No fuel injection, no clutchless shifting, nothing like that. They're simpler cars from the 70s and 80s, not the latest Mercedes and BMW luxury sedans.
2. Computers are thousands (millions?) of times more complicated than a car. Most of a car's failure modes boil down to "car won't go" (or in the case of brakes, "car won't stop"). You can listen to it and have an idea what to look at, and open up the hood and actually look. You can pull a carburetor out, clean it, adjust it, put it back and see if that fixed the problem. You can duct-tape a hose together to get you to the next town where you can get a new one. None of that really applies to a computer. You can't open up a computer, watch how it runs, and get an idea of what does what from basic mechanical principles. You can't pull the cover off the CPU and hand-crank it to see how the gears mesh.
So how are these people going to just learn how to fix their computers from scratch? They're not. Somebody is going to have to teach them what to do, which adds a huge cost to the project.
People keep assuming you can essentially air-drop these things on remote villages with a label on the crank-handle that says "Turn me" and everything will fall into place. It won't. Without proper knowledge infrastructure, any project like this is doomed.
In my experience, it generally costs more than $100 to train a teacher. And it's easily possible for a laptop to contain more information than $100 worth of books.
These two things are not connected. What you just said is semantically equivalent to "It generally costs more than $100 to build an apartment building, and it's easily possible for a shed to hold more juice than $100 worth of oranges."
Teaching is a problem not of information, but of intelligence. You can sit people down in front of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and read it to them until they learn to read it themselves, but they won't learn anything useful from it with no contextual framework to hang it on. Talking about how much information a laptop can hold, or proposing that the laptop reading to people is a substitute for a teacher, is just wrong-headed and betrays a lack of understanding of what teaching really is. If it were all about data we'd just turn kids loose in a library when they learned to read.
I would be seriously surprised if these criticisms were anything that the clever folk at MIT hadn't thought through in great depth.
I wouldn't (though I'm not saying they didn't, just that it wouldn't surprise me given some of the mind-bogglingly stupid things I've seen otherwise intelligent people do for the sake of a pet project).
The parent to your post wasn't "Fisking". He was rebutting your claims with factual citations, not dropping random irrelevancies around. If a fact-based rebuttal with cites isn't what constructive argument is about, what is?
The USPS has done exactly what AOL is trying to do. They have catered to big business that can see an ROI on their investment. Everyone else that sends letters 'First Class' and isn't trying to spam postal patrons gets screwed.
You're forgetting, I think, that all that "postal spam" people complain about subsidizes the first-class mail rate. In other words, if the post office decided to quit accepting bulk-rate-postage-paid mail, your first-class rate would go up, despite the perception otherwise due to bulk-rate being cheaper.
Why? Because the USPS makes anyone who is sending bulk mail do a lot of their work for them. It's not a choice, either, as I understand it -- if your mail volume is more than so many identical pieces per period of time, you must use the bulk system, do all the preprocessing, ensure that your mail is properly packaged, etc. or the USPS won't deliver for you even at the first-class rate (otherwise the whole system would fall down as businesses would simply opt not to take on all the overhead operations required to send bulk-rate mail).
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
Wal-Mart does sell mainstream brand names, but if you look at them you'll notice it's generally one or more of a) a low-quality brand, b) an obsolete model, or c) no cheaper than you could get the same thing anywhere else (and often more expensive).
A lot of Wal-Mart's dominance is predicated on the idea that you can buy stuff there and be reasonably confident that you got a good value for your dollar -- maybe you didn't get the cheapest deal you could have on every item, but close enough that the time and aggravation saved going to every store in town makes up for the extra you paid. These days that's becoming less true, with the ability to check out websites for even small mom and pop shops and know with certainty exactly where the best deal is. And with the rise of tools like Froogle, it's becoming even easier to do that kind of comparison shopping from the comfort of your recliner. How that will affect Wal-Mart's operations remains to be seen.
Have any of you Wal-Mart supporters actually shopped there? Competitively, I mean, with price comparisons and everything. Every time I do, Wal-Mart fails miserably.
There are brand-name products at Wal-Mart, but they're usually lower-end brands and they're almost always bargain-basement quality or last year's model (superseded by this year's improved model which sells even cheaper but that Wal-Mart doesn't carry). For anything that's brand-name and acceptable quality (meaning "it will outlast its warranty by a significant margin"), you can almost always get it cheaper online or even from another retailer: for a SanDisk 256 MB USB flash drive (SDCZ2-256-A10), walmart.com lists it for $22.88, NewEgg for $17.22. Assuming Wal-Mart's in-store prices are comparable to their online pricing, unless I need that flash-drive right now, I'd be an idiot to waste the time and gas to actually go out and buy it at Wal-Mart. Net result: I pocket the 85 cents I save after buying it and paying shipping at NewEgg, and go out and enjoy my new flash drive (or whatever) while sipping a cup of good-quality coffee two or three days later.
It's obvious that Wal-Mart specializes in cheap "just good enough to get a sale" products to anyone who's spent 5 minutes in there. Notice, for example, all the "Durabrand" electronics. This (if you didn't know) is the Wal-Mart house brand (for electronics at least), and apparently the actual manufacturers of "Durabrand" products are whoever will make the product at a price point Wal-Mart likes. Even in the packaging the stuff looks like cheaply-made, flimsy crap to me.
Sadly that seems to be exactly the type of consumer Wal-Mart caters to: people who want their shiny right this very second, and damn the fact that they could do better than their "always low prices" elsewhere or that the goods they buy will quite likely fall apart into dust, figuratively at least, the day after the warranty expires.
Some other commenter mentioned that all he buys there is plastic tubs and such. That's Wal-Mart's area of expertise all right: cheap plastic crap.
If you want a stable vanilla kernel, use 2.4.. 2.6 is bleeding edge.
Oh, very nice. "Accept that the kernel is unstable and distro maintainers now have to do a lot of work to make it otherwise, or do a technological time-warp back to 2003."
You know, I remember when Red Hat's deep-dicking the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels was frowned upon and made fun of and the first thing a lot of people did to get a sane kernel you could add patches to was compile a stock kernel from kernel.org. So now everybody is required to use distro-custom kernels or expect random half-assery, and that's a good thing?
No, but the odds of every single HR person ever randomly happening upon her site and recognizing her on it are pretty slim. It's more likely that they tied the site to her through records involving her real name, but unless she did something really daft that shouldn't be possible in the way the parent to my post claimed.
I'm a little slow today. If she never used her real name online, how did they identify her site from the information they had about her? Presumably if she used an alias on her site, she made sure never to give it to them.
You do know that every major USENET archive site from Altavista right up to Google Groups has honored retroactive no-archive requests, right?
You generally have to be able to confirm the request through the address you used to post the article, but then again if an address is so old you no longer have access to it, it's probably not likely to come up in the first few pages of results if you've been active on USENET since then.
There's also simple deniability. If the address is so old you can't use it any more, you can probably deny it was ever yours if the subject comes up. The odds of them asking before they kick your resume to the curb are pretty small, though.
...I don't quite follow your logic. You seemed to imply in your original post that making ISPs responsible for the actions of their users will lead to the ISPs no longer messing with traffic...but I don't see B naturally following from A there. I think it's just as likely (if not more) that the ISPs, faced with possible lawsuits on the one hand and freed from any responsibility to provide equal, unbiased service on the other, will start to not only quietly drop packets (as they apparently already do), but also actually shut down ports left and right. "You'll get port 80 and you'll like it, b/c all those other ports are just used by pirates, hackers and bandwidth thieves, and you're not one of those, are you?"
B doesn't naturally follow from A. The idea there would be to make it follow from A by saying "Currently, you enjoy certain legal protections from liability by virtue of being in the service class you're in. If you begin to manipulate the service you provide to discriminate against particular entities, you will lose those protections." Then the government has to make it stick by zealously going after those ISPs who elect to operate in an unprotected regime.
I think it's a viable outcome -- back when the CDA looked like it might make ISPs liable for their users' actions, they were falling all over themselves to back away from any semblance of monitoring or manipulation, because the political capital to block such liability was only there if they could justifiably claim "we don't know anything about it, we just pass bits back and forth." If ISPs begin to dip a toe into the stream of data for purposes of traffic-shaping against certain online entities, they disturb that status quo.
You're right that they might opt for walled-garden status, but that's essentially suicide. Walled gardens like the old AOL really aren't viable any more. It's also a legal quagmire -- AOL in those days had major concerns with the legality of TOS enforcement (probably still do, because they still run a "gated garden" of sorts). So the choice for ISPs comes down to accepting the unsurvivably high legal liability and customer annoyance that would come with traffic-shaping, or giving up traffic-shaping for legal immunity and staying in business and profitable.
It's time to start calling these kinds of schemes (selectively degrading Internet service to companies the ISP dislikes) by some kind of simple name that encapsulates the negative impact to the customer. I suggest "Internet Minus". It's the Internet, minus the sites and services people really want.
This has got to be the most ass-backward wrong thing I've heard on Slashdot in some time... Do you really want your ISP breathing down your neck about what you do with the bandwidth you paid for b/c they're afraid that they'll be sued for what you do? What you suggest will have the exact opposite effect from what you seem to think.
No, it will have exactly the effect I think -- ISPs will either quit messing with packets to and from their customers, or customers will become so harassed by ISPs that do so and fear lawsuits that they'll leave in droves. It's a tough cure, I'll grant you.
I suspect that perhaps you don't understand what common carrier status actually means. (Your choice of the word "legal theory" to describe it seems to back up that suspicion).
"A common carrier is an organization that transports a product or service using its facilities, or those of other carriers, and offers its services to the general public." We all know about Wikipedia, I think.
What's wrong with the term "legal theory" to describe "common carrier" and similar concepts? It's an idea that's arisen through legal practice -- it's not really a natural concept like "freedom of speech".
In any case the idea of common carrier status as applied to utilities and particularly to telecommunications is still being formed (see key FCC decisions as late as 1998, together with the fact that we're still debating the proper role of ISPs in relation to providing service to the public). So no one really "knows what it means" in any kind of absolute sense.
I read that very article before posting, which is why I said "or similar legal theories". Some ISPs might be considered common carriers for certain purposes -- if Verizon, a telco, starts providing VoIP over its FiOS fiber service, does Verizon FiOS become a common-carrier service? Current law is very unclear.
In any case, the business operations of Comcast and other cable companies depend on monopoly franchises granted by local governments. That means they have a responsibility beyond maximizing their own profit if they want to keep the monopoly that enables that profit. It's not "common-carrier" status, exactly, but it means they have a similar responsibility to provide service to customers on non-discriminatory terms if that's what the locality decides to require.
According to the FCC, Internet service providers are "information services", not common carriers. They exist under a different but related set of legal regulations (see In re Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, 13 FCC Rcd. 11501 (1998)).
The solution to these kinds of games by telcos and cable companies is to remove whatever legal protections the perpetrators may enjoy under common-carrier or similar legal theories. When they suddenly become criminally liable for the unsavory activities of their users they'll rethink this idea.
Given that they stood up to the DoJ in the face of a subpoena, I would suspect a more likely Google response if they lose (or it looks likely they will) would be a highly efficient way of destroying anything like "web search log data" in their systems. It only takes a week to put something together...
"Sorry guys, it looks like a really nasty program wiped out everything. And then it melted the hard drives down. So there's nothing to give you access to or hand over any more. Have a nice day. And don't worry, the steel spikes you see descending from the ceiling in the man-trap where you are, are completely harmless, and the armored exit doors are locked for your convenience."
...specifically, the MITS Altair 8800. There's a wonderful section in Steven Levy's Hackers about it and how baffled the company was at the intense demand for such a thing; from the link above, "...results of a program were indicated by the pattern of flashing lights on the front panel." That wasn't a status display, it was the output.
I will stop taking my child's deduction at age 16. she will have to start putting in her own tax forms every year and when she hit's 18 she will qualify for every financial aid benefit as she will look extremely poor.
You can choose not to take the deduction yourself but that doesn't automatically entitle her to do so. Your child is still legally required to file on her forms that someone else can (as in "is allowed to", whether anyone actually does or not) claim her as a dependent. So her tax forms are going to reflect her actual dependent status. She might get away with self-deducting as long as you don't, but a minor claiming herself with a pittance (if any) income and listing your address on the return is quite likely to be a red flag for an audit.
What you could conceivably do is charge her a token "rent" with board included. Make sure she keeps receipts, they will be questioned and she probably will have to endure at least one audit. And the IRS will probably rule that it's an abusive tax dodge (because you're still effectively paying her way by implicitly subsidizing her living expenses whether or not you actually put money in her hands) and disallow her claiming herself, and you're back to square one.
When I was trying to get recognized as an independent adult back in 1994, the school financial aid officer started by asking for proof that I had actually paid the majority of my own living expenses for the previous year. (I eventually got recognized on other grounds.)
You mean well, but risking jail time for your daughter and yourself on charges of conspiracy to commit tax evasion is probably not a good way to start her off in life.
I wish he were more up-front about that -- when I looked at the site a month or so ago there was a lot about what a great idea they'd had and such. It wasn't until I started digging that I found the tiny funding numbers and the burden (to most people) imposed on applicants.
If it had said at the front page "Y Combinator funds shoestring technology startups run by recent grads -- click here to apply!" I wouldn't have looked past that and just gone blissfully on my way.
I'm not saying Y Combinator is bad, per se -- it's good for a certain limited set of people. I'm largely just frustrated that I look out at the people I know who have skills and ideas, and I see a lot of people like me. And when I look at the field of people willing to fund startups I see either VCs looking for 24-year-old ABT grad students to fund at a pittance, or VCs looking for buzzword-compliant ideas whether or not they're any good (and often wanting a majority stake and management control in anything they fund to boot). There doesn't seem to be anyone willing to moderately fund a small group and allow it to retain control of itself both professionally and personally.
If I had to pick one thing I thought Y Combinator ought to change that would bring it more and better-quality teams, it would be to add that they would assist with job (re)placement (in a meaningful sense, not just "here's a random recruiter's business card" like a previous job did to me) for teams they accept that do not continue past the end of the boot camp. For one thing a lot of VCs carry a stable of "session geeks" and these people would be the perfect pool for such talent in a lot of ways.
Either that, or just drop the relocation requirement.
The government may be able to make soldiers and other employees swear to secrecy, but if a civilian gets ahold of information there is no legitimate state power to prevent them from speaking or writing about it.
Wasn't this part of what the Pentagon Papers case was about? Once info has escaped the classified arena, the government has to meet a much heavier burden of proof than "that's classified" to enjoin its further dissemination.
See also the case where Tom Clancy claims he was visited by men with very thin watches after printing a photo of a foreign installation of some sort in Cardinal of the Kremlin. The photo in question was obtained through a foreign commercial satellite service (which at the time basically meant the French one, whose name I forget -- SPOT?) The spooks (allegedly) got the same photo (presumably from the same place) and someone unaware of its provenance marked it "classified". Came the day he published CotK, they were Not Amused that this "classified data" had been "leaked" to the best-seller list by an unclassified civilian.
I'm actually beginning to look for potential VC funding for a startup idea I have, something three or four guys could prototype in a couple of months with a pretty small amount of funding, working part-time outside regular jobs (I have a team in mind but not all of them may be able to commit). I looked at Y Combinator because it's "geek-friendly" but have decided I will probably have to pass.
Why? Their boot camps require everyone involved to move to either Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA, find their own office and living space (in two of the most expensive markets in the US for both!) and then code up a prototype in some number of weeks. After that, if you don't get funded, you're done and you go back home... assuming you have a home and a job left to go back to. Yes, they offer assistance with all this, but the whole idea isn't really practical on its face for the people they purport to be trying to serve: small-timers with big ideas trying to work on a shoestring. I can't afford to just drop my middle-income tech job, leave my wife behind while I go haring off hundreds or thousands of miles away, on a chance that my team may successfully code a prototype and get funded. Neither could any of the other people I'm thinking of going in with... except one guy. (And he already lives in Brighton, ironically enough.)
Y Combinator works if you're a single, highly employable geek with no obligations, but most of the people I know with the skill to accomplish things worth investing in are either married, have broad skills but relatively specialized job experience (= smaller market with correspondingly smaller proportion of available jobs), or have things like family and financial obligations they can't just drop and leave behind on a whim. So where's financing that's friendly to our situation?
Slashdot Mirror
Aha! My bad.
You can't sell those. The green shell is Not For Sale and if found sold that would be a sure sign something illegal happened.
Right. Things marked "not for sale" never get sold on the black market anywhere. Just ask anyone who ever traded food stamps for cash (oh right, you can't do that...).
Most adults in the first world need a mechanic to change a tyre of their car. In Afrika, people fix totally worn-out cars endlessly, and they don't need western mechanics to teach them how. This will happen with the laptops: people will soon understand them, and teach themselves how to fix it when it's broken.
You're missing two things:
1. Those worn-out cars that shade-tree mechanics fix forever (both here and there) are the older cars with simpler engines and controls. No fuel injection, no clutchless shifting, nothing like that. They're simpler cars from the 70s and 80s, not the latest Mercedes and BMW luxury sedans.
2. Computers are thousands (millions?) of times more complicated than a car. Most of a car's failure modes boil down to "car won't go" (or in the case of brakes, "car won't stop"). You can listen to it and have an idea what to look at, and open up the hood and actually look. You can pull a carburetor out, clean it, adjust it, put it back and see if that fixed the problem. You can duct-tape a hose together to get you to the next town where you can get a new one. None of that really applies to a computer. You can't open up a computer, watch how it runs, and get an idea of what does what from basic mechanical principles. You can't pull the cover off the CPU and hand-crank it to see how the gears mesh.
So how are these people going to just learn how to fix their computers from scratch? They're not. Somebody is going to have to teach them what to do, which adds a huge cost to the project.
People keep assuming you can essentially air-drop these things on remote villages with a label on the crank-handle that says "Turn me" and everything will fall into place. It won't. Without proper knowledge infrastructure, any project like this is doomed.
In my experience, it generally costs more than $100 to train a teacher. And it's easily possible for a laptop to contain more information than $100 worth of books.
These two things are not connected. What you just said is semantically equivalent to "It generally costs more than $100 to build an apartment building, and it's easily possible for a shed to hold more juice than $100 worth of oranges."
Teaching is a problem not of information, but of intelligence. You can sit people down in front of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and read it to them until they learn to read it themselves, but they won't learn anything useful from it with no contextual framework to hang it on. Talking about how much information a laptop can hold, or proposing that the laptop reading to people is a substitute for a teacher, is just wrong-headed and betrays a lack of understanding of what teaching really is. If it were all about data we'd just turn kids loose in a library when they learned to read.
I would be seriously surprised if these criticisms were anything that the clever folk at MIT hadn't thought through in great depth.
I wouldn't (though I'm not saying they didn't, just that it wouldn't surprise me given some of the mind-bogglingly stupid things I've seen otherwise intelligent people do for the sake of a pet project).
The parent to your post wasn't "Fisking". He was rebutting your claims with factual citations, not dropping random irrelevancies around. If a fact-based rebuttal with cites isn't what constructive argument is about, what is?
The USPS has done exactly what AOL is trying to do. They have catered to big business that can see an ROI on their investment. Everyone else that sends letters 'First Class' and isn't trying to spam postal patrons gets screwed.
You're forgetting, I think, that all that "postal spam" people complain about subsidizes the first-class mail rate. In other words, if the post office decided to quit accepting bulk-rate-postage-paid mail, your first-class rate would go up, despite the perception otherwise due to bulk-rate being cheaper.
Why? Because the USPS makes anyone who is sending bulk mail do a lot of their work for them. It's not a choice, either, as I understand it -- if your mail volume is more than so many identical pieces per period of time, you must use the bulk system, do all the preprocessing, ensure that your mail is properly packaged, etc. or the USPS won't deliver for you even at the first-class rate (otherwise the whole system would fall down as businesses would simply opt not to take on all the overhead operations required to send bulk-rate mail).
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
A lot of Wal-Mart's dominance is predicated on the idea that you can buy stuff there and be reasonably confident that you got a good value for your dollar -- maybe you didn't get the cheapest deal you could have on every item, but close enough that the time and aggravation saved going to every store in town makes up for the extra you paid. These days that's becoming less true, with the ability to check out websites for even small mom and pop shops and know with certainty exactly where the best deal is. And with the rise of tools like Froogle, it's becoming even easier to do that kind of comparison shopping from the comfort of your recliner. How that will affect Wal-Mart's operations remains to be seen.
There are brand-name products at Wal-Mart, but they're usually lower-end brands and they're almost always bargain-basement quality or last year's model (superseded by this year's improved model which sells even cheaper but that Wal-Mart doesn't carry). For anything that's brand-name and acceptable quality (meaning "it will outlast its warranty by a significant margin"), you can almost always get it cheaper online or even from another retailer: for a SanDisk 256 MB USB flash drive (SDCZ2-256-A10), walmart.com lists it for $22.88, NewEgg for $17.22. Assuming Wal-Mart's in-store prices are comparable to their online pricing, unless I need that flash-drive right now, I'd be an idiot to waste the time and gas to actually go out and buy it at Wal-Mart. Net result: I pocket the 85 cents I save after buying it and paying shipping at NewEgg, and go out and enjoy my new flash drive (or whatever) while sipping a cup of good-quality coffee two or three days later.
It's obvious that Wal-Mart specializes in cheap "just good enough to get a sale" products to anyone who's spent 5 minutes in there. Notice, for example, all the "Durabrand" electronics. This (if you didn't know) is the Wal-Mart house brand (for electronics at least), and apparently the actual manufacturers of "Durabrand" products are whoever will make the product at a price point Wal-Mart likes. Even in the packaging the stuff looks like cheaply-made, flimsy crap to me.
Sadly that seems to be exactly the type of consumer Wal-Mart caters to: people who want their shiny right this very second, and damn the fact that they could do better than their "always low prices" elsewhere or that the goods they buy will quite likely fall apart into dust, figuratively at least, the day after the warranty expires.
Some other commenter mentioned that all he buys there is plastic tubs and such. That's Wal-Mart's area of expertise all right: cheap plastic crap.
Oh, very nice. "Accept that the kernel is unstable and distro maintainers now have to do a lot of work to make it otherwise, or do a technological time-warp back to 2003."
You know, I remember when Red Hat's deep-dicking the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels was frowned upon and made fun of and the first thing a lot of people did to get a sane kernel you could add patches to was compile a stock kernel from kernel.org. So now everybody is required to use distro-custom kernels or expect random half-assery, and that's a good thing?
No, but the odds of every single HR person ever randomly happening upon her site and recognizing her on it are pretty slim. It's more likely that they tied the site to her through records involving her real name, but unless she did something really daft that shouldn't be possible in the way the parent to my post claimed.
I'm a little slow today. If she never used her real name online, how did they identify her site from the information they had about her? Presumably if she used an alias on her site, she made sure never to give it to them.
You generally have to be able to confirm the request through the address you used to post the article, but then again if an address is so old you no longer have access to it, it's probably not likely to come up in the first few pages of results if you've been active on USENET since then.
There's also simple deniability. If the address is so old you can't use it any more, you can probably deny it was ever yours if the subject comes up. The odds of them asking before they kick your resume to the curb are pretty small, though.
B doesn't naturally follow from A. The idea there would be to make it follow from A by saying "Currently, you enjoy certain legal protections from liability by virtue of being in the service class you're in. If you begin to manipulate the service you provide to discriminate against particular entities, you will lose those protections." Then the government has to make it stick by zealously going after those ISPs who elect to operate in an unprotected regime.
I think it's a viable outcome -- back when the CDA looked like it might make ISPs liable for their users' actions, they were falling all over themselves to back away from any semblance of monitoring or manipulation, because the political capital to block such liability was only there if they could justifiably claim "we don't know anything about it, we just pass bits back and forth." If ISPs begin to dip a toe into the stream of data for purposes of traffic-shaping against certain online entities, they disturb that status quo.
You're right that they might opt for walled-garden status, but that's essentially suicide. Walled gardens like the old AOL really aren't viable any more. It's also a legal quagmire -- AOL in those days had major concerns with the legality of TOS enforcement (probably still do, because they still run a "gated garden" of sorts). So the choice for ISPs comes down to accepting the unsurvivably high legal liability and customer annoyance that would come with traffic-shaping, or giving up traffic-shaping for legal immunity and staying in business and profitable.
It's time to start calling these kinds of schemes (selectively degrading Internet service to companies the ISP dislikes) by some kind of simple name that encapsulates the negative impact to the customer. I suggest "Internet Minus". It's the Internet, minus the sites and services people really want.
This has got to be the most ass-backward wrong thing I've heard on Slashdot in some time... Do you really want your ISP breathing down your neck about what you do with the bandwidth you paid for b/c they're afraid that they'll be sued for what you do? What you suggest will have the exact opposite effect from what you seem to think.
No, it will have exactly the effect I think -- ISPs will either quit messing with packets to and from their customers, or customers will become so harassed by ISPs that do so and fear lawsuits that they'll leave in droves. It's a tough cure, I'll grant you.
I suspect that perhaps you don't understand what common carrier status actually means. (Your choice of the word "legal theory" to describe it seems to back up that suspicion).
"A common carrier is an organization that transports a product or service using its facilities, or those of other carriers, and offers its services to the general public." We all know about Wikipedia, I think.
What's wrong with the term "legal theory" to describe "common carrier" and similar concepts? It's an idea that's arisen through legal practice -- it's not really a natural concept like "freedom of speech".
In any case the idea of common carrier status as applied to utilities and particularly to telecommunications is still being formed (see key FCC decisions as late as 1998, together with the fact that we're still debating the proper role of ISPs in relation to providing service to the public). So no one really "knows what it means" in any kind of absolute sense.
In any case, the business operations of Comcast and other cable companies depend on monopoly franchises granted by local governments. That means they have a responsibility beyond maximizing their own profit if they want to keep the monopoly that enables that profit. It's not "common-carrier" status, exactly, but it means they have a similar responsibility to provide service to customers on non-discriminatory terms if that's what the locality decides to require.
According to the FCC, Internet service providers are "information services", not common carriers. They exist under a different but related set of legal regulations (see In re Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, 13 FCC Rcd. 11501 (1998)).
The solution to these kinds of games by telcos and cable companies is to remove whatever legal protections the perpetrators may enjoy under common-carrier or similar legal theories. When they suddenly become criminally liable for the unsavory activities of their users they'll rethink this idea.
"Sorry guys, it looks like a really nasty program wiped out everything. And then it melted the hard drives down. So there's nothing to give you access to or hand over any more. Have a nice day. And don't worry, the steel spikes you see descending from the ceiling in the man-trap where you are, are completely harmless, and the armored exit doors are locked for your convenience."
...specifically, the MITS Altair 8800. There's a wonderful section in Steven Levy's Hackers about it and how baffled the company was at the intense demand for such a thing; from the link above, "...results of a program were indicated by the pattern of flashing lights on the front panel." That wasn't a status display, it was the output.
I will stop taking my child's deduction at age 16. she will have to start putting in her own tax forms every year and when she hit's 18 she will qualify for every financial aid benefit as she will look extremely poor.
You can choose not to take the deduction yourself but that doesn't automatically entitle her to do so. Your child is still legally required to file on her forms that someone else can (as in "is allowed to", whether anyone actually does or not) claim her as a dependent. So her tax forms are going to reflect her actual dependent status. She might get away with self-deducting as long as you don't, but a minor claiming herself with a pittance (if any) income and listing your address on the return is quite likely to be a red flag for an audit.
What you could conceivably do is charge her a token "rent" with board included. Make sure she keeps receipts, they will be questioned and she probably will have to endure at least one audit. And the IRS will probably rule that it's an abusive tax dodge (because you're still effectively paying her way by implicitly subsidizing her living expenses whether or not you actually put money in her hands) and disallow her claiming herself, and you're back to square one.
When I was trying to get recognized as an independent adult back in 1994, the school financial aid officer started by asking for proof that I had actually paid the majority of my own living expenses for the previous year. (I eventually got recognized on other grounds.)
You mean well, but risking jail time for your daughter and yourself on charges of conspiracy to commit tax evasion is probably not a good way to start her off in life.
If it had said at the front page "Y Combinator funds shoestring technology startups run by recent grads -- click here to apply!" I wouldn't have looked past that and just gone blissfully on my way.
If I had to pick one thing I thought Y Combinator ought to change that would bring it more and better-quality teams, it would be to add that they would assist with job (re)placement (in a meaningful sense, not just "here's a random recruiter's business card" like a previous job did to me) for teams they accept that do not continue past the end of the boot camp. For one thing a lot of VCs carry a stable of "session geeks" and these people would be the perfect pool for such talent in a lot of ways.
Either that, or just drop the relocation requirement.
The government may be able to make soldiers and other employees swear to secrecy, but if a civilian gets ahold of information there is no legitimate state power to prevent them from speaking or writing about it.
Wasn't this part of what the Pentagon Papers case was about? Once info has escaped the classified arena, the government has to meet a much heavier burden of proof than "that's classified" to enjoin its further dissemination.
See also the case where Tom Clancy claims he was visited by men with very thin watches after printing a photo of a foreign installation of some sort in Cardinal of the Kremlin. The photo in question was obtained through a foreign commercial satellite service (which at the time basically meant the French one, whose name I forget -- SPOT?) The spooks (allegedly) got the same photo (presumably from the same place) and someone unaware of its provenance marked it "classified". Came the day he published CotK, they were Not Amused that this "classified data" had been "leaked" to the best-seller list by an unclassified civilian.
Why? Their boot camps require everyone involved to move to either Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA, find their own office and living space (in two of the most expensive markets in the US for both!) and then code up a prototype in some number of weeks. After that, if you don't get funded, you're done and you go back home... assuming you have a home and a job left to go back to. Yes, they offer assistance with all this, but the whole idea isn't really practical on its face for the people they purport to be trying to serve: small-timers with big ideas trying to work on a shoestring. I can't afford to just drop my middle-income tech job, leave my wife behind while I go haring off hundreds or thousands of miles away, on a chance that my team may successfully code a prototype and get funded. Neither could any of the other people I'm thinking of going in with... except one guy. (And he already lives in Brighton, ironically enough.)
Y Combinator works if you're a single, highly employable geek with no obligations, but most of the people I know with the skill to accomplish things worth investing in are either married, have broad skills but relatively specialized job experience (= smaller market with correspondingly smaller proportion of available jobs), or have things like family and financial obligations they can't just drop and leave behind on a whim. So where's financing that's friendly to our situation?