"Our country lived without cell phones for 200 years; I think people will survive for another 12 days without them in that area."
200 years ago, no one was dependant on them. Aside from the fact that this is an incredible inconvenience, there are several other problems here. First of all, is the government going to reimburse its cell-phone carrying citizens for their lost money during the blackout period? 12 days is nearly half a month, so the folks paying $70 and $80/mo are getting screwed out of about $40 every time they decide to do this.
Next we have the woman jogging in the park who is suddenly being chased by a man. She reaches for her cell phone to dial 911, but no signal. Why? HER government, the one that is supposed to be protecting her, has decided to jam the signal. She then has no way to call for help, and if no one hears here cries for help, she might be raped and/or killed by her attacker. Seem far-fetched? Call your nearest city's police and ask how many cell-phone 911 calls they receive in a month, then ask how many of those calls probably saved a life. I doubt the woman in this example could stop at a payphone, pick up the reciver, and dial 911, then talk to the person at 911 before her attacker reached her. People don't die from lack of cell phones, but you cannot possibly argue that cell phones don't save lives that would otherwise be lost.
Just yet another example of a government doing part of its job much worse (protecting the rights of citizens) to try to make up for where it's been lacking (protecting the security of its citizens.) The destruction and terror wrought by Al Qaida pales in comparison to that caused by politicians. To save life at the expense of liberty is the same as ending poverty by killing those who are impoverished.
Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, Israel has been a case study in how less freedom, less liberty, more laws, more soldiers, more guns, more walls, and more surveillance does *NOT* make you more secure. Freedom and security go hand in hand. Laws don't make you more secure, nor do guns; freedom does. Didn't anyone else feel a sense of pride at the shouting of the phrase, "They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!" ? Think about that phrase for a while.
"Now we must choose between safety and freedom, we must not flinch if freedom means anything." - Dennis Burke, USA Today
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." - Somerset Maugham
"My greatest fear is that too many members of the public will embrace the government's call to give up some freedom in return for greater safety, only to find that they have lost freedom without gaining safety." - Nadine Strossen, President ACLU
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
"Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Dolores Ibarruri
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression." - Thomas Paine
"I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death." - Patrick Henry
"When the rights of just one individual are denied, the rights of all are in jeopardy!" - Jo Ann Roach
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"i do have a problem with idiotically dangerous speech...i think shouting "fire" in a crowded theater should be illegal, which it is, "
The phrase you need here is: "clear and present danger". It's the phrase the Supreme Court of the United States came up with to describe one of only a couple of limits on 'free speech'. The other would, of course, be slander. Slander is obviously irrelevant to this discussion, so let's briefly look at the first idea. Clear and present danger describes a situation where your speech directly causes an atmosphere of immediate harm to others. Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre directly changes the environment from a safe, friendly atmosphere to a chaotic rush in which virtually everyone in the theatre could be injured or killed. The same situation exists for a person who declares they have a bomb on a bus or plane. Such speech can cause panic within the cabin, or perhaps cause the plane or bus to crash, possibly killing everyone on board.
If I had a website that said it's funny to yell 'bomb' while on a bus, or to yell 'fire' in a theatre, it's very doubtful the site would ever run into any trouble with the law. Why? Because there's no clear and present danger stemming from the existance of that site. If someone read my website, and then made the decision to go yell 'fire' in a theatre, they would be arrested, as their words caused the danger, not mine. This website is abouta bit more serious situation, yet the principle remains the same. If the website's existance caused people to be injured or to die directly and immediately, I would say it's illegal and needs to go. However, to this day, I do not believe I have ever heard of a "website-related death". If you wanted to make such a case, try going after the people who make spam ads that flash alot, and make the case of possible harm to epileptics. THAT would be an example of a website fitting the 'clear and present danger' formula; the website itself causes a situation where injury or death is likely. 100,000 people can view a website about de-railing trains and go "hmm, that's interesting" with no direct or indirect consequences. The website is not your problem, the guy de-railing the train is the problem. The person who reads the website and then commits the illegal act is the problem, not the knowledge itself. Lots of people have the knowledge to de-rail a train, yet the vast majority choose not to. Why? They know it's wrong to do so.
"The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March"
Survival of the fittest, and Gaak was run over by a car. Give him a Darwin award and move on; no reason to write an article about it.
"Gee, Bob, ever since we started streaming those NATO satellite images over the web, our traffic has increased over 700%!"
"Hmm, looks like most of the traffic is coming from... Afghanistan, Serbia, Somalia, and Pakistan. In fact, that's where *all* of the traffic is coming from. What do you think it means, Phil?"
*Phil suddenly turns very pale and starts shaking and sweating*
"I..uh... think it means we'd better buy up m..m..mmore bandwidth... and pray the website doesn't go down."
Internet customer service is 888-793-9800. Internet customer service should be able to upgrade you directly over the phone if it's available in your area. If they ask what you need it for, just say you have a home office. If it's not available, talk to a supervisor and let them know you'd like it to be available, and you'd be willing to pay for it.
The funny thing is, the Comcast rep (for the store I work at) and I were talking about the subject of bandwidth the last time he was in a few months ago back in March or so. I had mentioned that I tend to upload alot of large database files to the servers at work, but that it takes forever. I said I'd be willing to pay around $90 or so per month for the extra upload. I have no idea if he brought the message to the big boys at Comcast, but I'll bet they'll offer anything that means more money for them so long as there's an established customer base in place; especially in this situation, where the extra bandwidth should be little more than a "flip of the switch" so to speak.
I'm on Comcast cable. I am not worried about this. Why? Simple; I switched to the Comcast professional service. I get lovely things like the right to run VPN's (which I take as a cancellation of the ToS section on running servers), more than 3 times the upload speed (around 400kbps instead of 125 - 130kbps), more than twice the download speed (went from 1.3 - 1.5mbps to around 3.3mbps -- actual speeds, advertised speeds are 1.5/128k and 3.5/384k respectively), and an even more stable connection (my ping times used to vary wildly and my connection died at least once a week or so). What do I have to pay for these privilages? $95/month, which includes all fees including the modem rental. Before, I was paying about $50/month. I consider this a perfectly fair price, and I pay it without bitching or complaining. What do I do with all this bandwidth? Well, I haven't used morpheus since it went south (horrid gnutella network), and I use kazaa for maybe an hour per week, if that. I do a limited amount of file sharing, limited primarily by my upload speed. As one who shares files, I will say only that the.edu's are the most useful folks, even though the firewalls now being set up to stop file sharing can be a mild pain.
As one who knows at least a little about how the ISP market works, I would say that the tier'd model is the best way for the broadband folks to go. Cap the speed and limit monthly bandwidth usage on the low end, with slow services starting at around $25/mo (for like 384k/64k) and at the higher end (around $100/month) don't bother with limiting the monthly transfers, just cap the upload at a reasonable rate so your network isn't getting hammered non-stop. Most people have limited storage, so downloads have some limit, but one person with a 1GB hard drive could send out 50GB of data per month with a fast connection simply by sending the same file or files hundreds of times. Think about it.
When I was at UMD, about 3 years ago, we had plenty of people telling us about the AUP. Yet none of this stopped the rampant err.. violations of the AUP. The closest thing they did to even attempting to stop people from downloading things illegally was to put a cap on our bandwidth. After the cap was put in place, we couldn't upload any more than about 2mbps over DCC, and our downloads outside of the campus network didn't go above 3mbps or so. This was the only effort I saw in my time there to curb the massive downloading. They didn't even bother monitoring the students' shared files, of which 90% were unprotected in terms of passwords and the like - and take a wild guess as to what was being shared. The funniest part about that is the fact that some CS students had written applications specifically designed to search shared files on the UMD network for specific files. I can honestly say that every single student there had plenty of downloads that would violate the AUP, if not a high number of laws. Windows 2000 was readily available the first day of classes in Feb. 2000. Within about 1 month, about 2/3s of the people I knew in the dorms were running Win2k, yet most didn't have much cash at all. There was always talk of monitoring, but my multiple GB/day of uploads and downloads never got me a phone call or message from anyone. They can advertise this program all they want, but in reality, they've been talking for years about stopping people from abusing their high speed line, and they've done virtually nothing about it. Using UMDCP as an example of a university curbing AUP violations is like using Brittain as an example of a totalitarian monarchy.
Now how in the fuck can I still get cool software and be a good Muslim? When my beloved religious leaders say bullshit like that, I just wanna beat the hell out of them.
CF is ok, and I'm experimenting with MySQL, which seems to be fairly nice. I need to do some side-by-side comparisons to be sure, but it looks as though on most things, it's much faster than M$ SQL. Anyway, there are plenty of jobs available for those who know SQL, so if you don't know it now, learn it. Have fun, folks:)
It's what every college student wants, and what 99.999% do not have. Dispense it over the length of the two semesters and your college-bound student will be thrilled.
Would be nice if spam companies such as this who periodically engage in widespread consumer fraud could, by court order, have all assets liquidated and the funds distributed to a state task force designed to root out further spam comanies. If this isn't serving the public, I don't know what is.
My Comcast Rep (for the place I work at) was in about 3 days ago and said nothing of this. He DID however, reveal plans to allow people with home offices and power users to SELECT a higher speed internet service with a 6 month IP lease and 5 ips for $95/mo. The higher speeds are 3.5Mbps downstream and 384k upstream. There was never any mention by him or by any materials of anyone being forced into this, and by our discussion, this is the only other tier Comcast is currently using. By the way, modem rental fee is included in your $95/mo, and installation is now $149, which won't matter for existing customers. Rollout in NJ should be done by June 1, 2002, and a phone call is all that's required to upgrade the service. Someone hears 95/mo for net service with higher caps and after it gets passed around 10 people, it suddenly makes it into a news story as being forced upgrades. Sleep well Comcast abusers, your service might suck, you'll still be overpaying, and your uploads will remain slow, but at least you shouldn't be subjected to any new pricing tiers against your will.
Re:Great thought...maybe the real fight is elsewhe
on
DeCSS' Continuing Saga
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· Score: 2
Commercial interests < public interests Free Speech > Financial welfare of any company/industry
Sorry the companies made a bad deal, but it isn't my problem and it isn't 2600's problem. It was reverse-engineered; no one is disputing this. It was poorly conceived, and now several companies will suffer for it. Better luck next time, but this is capitalism - the government isn't supposed to save your ass when you screw up. Take a look at Enron if you doubt me, or any other business that has ever gone under. Just because you're a large industry with alot of money doesn't mean you get to circumvent all of society because you banked on a flawed technology. If code is not free speech, and can be a trade secret, then I'm going to start a company that does nothing but encode famous speeches and quotes into c, and then have protection granted to them as my trade secret.
Re:How far do you want to extend this argument?
on
KaZaA Collapses
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You have to go after the users, its the only way that anythign will be accomplished.
And this got a score of 4 for insightful?
Think about this for a moment, we had roughly what, 50, 60 million people worldwide using Napster at its height? At any given time, Kazaa has a couple million on, so we can assume their average daily user list is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 - 30 million people. Morpheus/gnutella has good numbers, as do several other networks. Then we factor in IRC, usenet, etc.
So you, a large corporation, are going to begin suing some 20 - 60 million people? Ok, let's assume the RIAA and MPAA join up in some joint venture created specifically to pool all their resources for this.
Lawyers needed? Somewhere between 40 - 100 million. Assuming they'll work for a sum of $75/hr (a bargain) on average, that brings us to an approxamate cost of $5,250,000,000/hr. (yes, that's billion with a B) The newest star wars installment made about $130million on the first weekend, and that would cover your legal fees for about 9 minutes. So then you say, "well, silly, they wouldn't sue them all at once, they'd spread it out!" What a great idea. Assuming 70,000,000 lawsuits at 100 lawsuits filed each month, you would spend the next 58,000+ years prosecuting people. Now, I'm no doctor, but I don't think people live that long. In any event, the cost in legal fees for suing even 1% of the users is so astonomical that not even Bill Gates could fathom doing it in his wildest dreams. But there's more.
Two problems relating to one another: 1) Consumer backlash, 2) government backlash.
Now, when you and about half your friends are being sued by a major corporation, I don't think you'll be jumping to buy their product. The roughly 70 million people (a good 40 - 50 million are US citizens) that you're suing are going to be pretty pissed, and will start organizing to fight you. This brings us to our next problem. If I were running for office, (let's say... President?), I could get myself somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million votes simply by taking a strong stance against "the evil corporate empires" of the entertainment industry. And if I were going for re-election, I'd start issuing EO's (executive orders) like they were candy effectively putting an end to major media companies. But just in case you thought that might not do it, next we move to Congress. Same thing, they all want re-election, and with millions being sued, this becomes a major issue. Now, do you go to your district and tell people that it's all their fault and they shouldn't have been stealing content? Well sure, if you don't like your job. What will really happen? They'll take a firm stance against the media companies and legislation will be passed 10 times faster than the laws passed following Sept 11. The entertainment industry will be so incredibly screwed by the new laws that they won't be in business for long. No amount of money talks to a congressman when their constituents are up in arms about something.
So where does this leave the entertainment industry? At an impasse. They have a few options here: 1) continue suing P2P networks, which after a while they'll start losing the cases, but no matter what, it will never end file sharing. 2) Come up with better digital rights management technology, which will cost millions in research and be broken by a 15 year old kid. 3) Sue ISPs, server owners, etc, whose legal teams in many cases match those of the RIAA and MPAA. 4) Lobby for legislation, which is getting less and less likely to work, seeing as tech savvy folks are now mainstream for the most part, and will fight things like the SSSCA whenever they come around. 5) Relinquish all rights to copyrighted works and go into immediate Chapter 13 liquidation, (just kidding). 6) Change their business models to use the internet for their benefit.
I'd like to take option 6 a little further for a moment. Assume this, the entertainment companies offer reasonable licensing terms to webcasters, somewhere around the middle between CARP's recommendations and what the webcasters asked for. They then set up internet sites with both streaming and downloadable music and movies, offering them in secured formats, but giving the OSS community access to the information about the formats required to build players and ask for their help in building secured players for Linux/*nix's. Offer these movies and music at either pay-per-use prices or as a straight download price. Say a dollar per song downloaded and $3 or $4 per movie downloaded, with the streaming PPV costs being mere fractions of that. Offer a complete linup of music, starting with the most popular and adding music as quickly as possible with easy to use searchs for song names, artists, and lyrics. Do something similar for movies, allowing searchs for movie titles, stars/co-stars, producers, etc. Offer the movie for download before it's even out on DVD, thus steering many people towards the internet service. Offer a simple web interface similar to P2P apps currently out, and use a simple account management system allowing for an easy download/stream of content. (ie. you point, click, watch) You'd instantly see a drop in piracy to the tune of probably 70% or better for music and movies. At the same time, the amount of money coming in would be incredible, and lawsuits against P2P networks etc could be dropped, thereby lowering legal costs. Easy to get, readily available, reasonably priced content is the way to stamp out piracy. Who the hell would search for 20 minutes to find the right version of a song they want to download when it's just $1 to get it from the music company, giving you a legitamate, high quality copy of the music? Who would spend 10 hours downloading a lousy copy of a movie when they can find and get what the want for $4, not have to worry about poor quality, and have it download much faster? Just an idea, but I think it's one that would make billions for the entertainment industry, and would silence most of their P2P-using critics.
Come on folks, let's try sticking with a position. Ridiculous patents like this need to be fought, even if by fighting them, we open ourselves up to the most annoying form of advertising online yet. Why? Because this type of trend opens us up to yet worse patent ideas. When someone can patent a small, simple bit of code like that and get away with it, what's to stop someone from patenting the 'cp' command? The US patent office doesn't appear to follow the guidlines for issuing patents, so there's not a whole lot to stem the tide of patents being issued for things that are extremely simple (ie one-click shopping.. duh), ubiquitous (ie palette bars - hello Adobe), or just plain ridiculous (ie the patent issued for 'inducing aerobic exercise' by pointing a laser pointer at a wall and moving it around).
We either fight all the patents we disagree with, or we fight none. When we pick and choose ("Well, this patent sucks, but maybe I'll get less spam on web pages") we appear weak. If our position truly is that we support patents issued for non patent-worthy things, then our position is weak.
Slashdot Mirror
"Our country lived without cell phones for 200 years; I think people will survive for another 12 days without them in that area."
200 years ago, no one was dependant on them. Aside from the fact that this is an incredible inconvenience, there are several other problems here. First of all, is the government going to reimburse its cell-phone carrying citizens for their lost money during the blackout period? 12 days is nearly half a month, so the folks paying $70 and $80/mo are getting screwed out of about $40 every time they decide to do this.
Next we have the woman jogging in the park who is suddenly being chased by a man. She reaches for her cell phone to dial 911, but no signal. Why? HER government, the one that is supposed to be protecting her, has decided to jam the signal. She then has no way to call for help, and if no one hears here cries for help, she might be raped and/or killed by her attacker. Seem far-fetched? Call your nearest city's police and ask how many cell-phone 911 calls they receive in a month, then ask how many of those calls probably saved a life. I doubt the woman in this example could stop at a payphone, pick up the reciver, and dial 911, then talk to the person at 911 before her attacker reached her. People don't die from lack of cell phones, but you cannot possibly argue that cell phones don't save lives that would otherwise be lost.
Just yet another example of a government doing part of its job much worse (protecting the rights of citizens) to try to make up for where it's been lacking (protecting the security of its citizens.) The destruction and terror wrought by Al Qaida pales in comparison to that caused by politicians. To save life at the expense of liberty is the same as ending poverty by killing those who are impoverished.
Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, Israel has been a case study in how less freedom, less liberty, more laws, more soldiers, more guns, more walls, and more surveillance does *NOT* make you more secure. Freedom and security go hand in hand. Laws don't make you more secure, nor do guns; freedom does. Didn't anyone else feel a sense of pride at the shouting of the phrase, "They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!" ? Think about that phrase for a while.
Feel 'free' to add to these. (pardon my pun)
"Now we must choose between safety and freedom, we must not flinch if freedom means anything." - Dennis Burke, USA Today
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." - Somerset Maugham
"My greatest fear is that too many members of the public will embrace the government's call to give up some freedom in return for greater safety, only to find that they have lost freedom without gaining safety." - Nadine Strossen, President ACLU
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
"Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Dolores Ibarruri
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression." - Thomas Paine
"I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death." - Patrick Henry
"When the rights of just one individual are denied, the rights of all are in jeopardy!" - Jo Ann Roach
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"i do have a problem with idiotically dangerous speech...i think shouting "fire" in a crowded theater should be illegal, which it is, "
The phrase you need here is: "clear and present danger". It's the phrase the Supreme Court of the United States came up with to describe one of only a couple of limits on 'free speech'. The other would, of course, be slander. Slander is obviously irrelevant to this discussion, so let's briefly look at the first idea. Clear and present danger describes a situation where your speech directly causes an atmosphere of immediate harm to others. Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre directly changes the environment from a safe, friendly atmosphere to a chaotic rush in which virtually everyone in the theatre could be injured or killed. The same situation exists for a person who declares they have a bomb on a bus or plane. Such speech can cause panic within the cabin, or perhaps cause the plane or bus to crash, possibly killing everyone on board.
If I had a website that said it's funny to yell 'bomb' while on a bus, or to yell 'fire' in a theatre, it's very doubtful the site would ever run into any trouble with the law. Why? Because there's no clear and present danger stemming from the existance of that site. If someone read my website, and then made the decision to go yell 'fire' in a theatre, they would be arrested, as their words caused the danger, not mine. This website is abouta bit more serious situation, yet the principle remains the same. If the website's existance caused people to be injured or to die directly and immediately, I would say it's illegal and needs to go. However, to this day, I do not believe I have ever heard of a "website-related death". If you wanted to make such a case, try going after the people who make spam ads that flash alot, and make the case of possible harm to epileptics. THAT would be an example of a website fitting the 'clear and present danger' formula; the website itself causes a situation where injury or death is likely. 100,000 people can view a website about de-railing trains and go "hmm, that's interesting" with no direct or indirect consequences. The website is not your problem, the guy de-railing the train is the problem. The person who reads the website and then commits the illegal act is the problem, not the knowledge itself. Lots of people have the knowledge to de-rail a train, yet the vast majority choose not to. Why? They know it's wrong to do so.
"The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March"
Survival of the fittest, and Gaak was run over by a car. Give him a Darwin award and move on; no reason to write an article about it.
by quantaman on Tuesday June 18, @03:25PM (#3723838)
Dang it's Monday, you're right Disney should be evil today.
What? It's Tuesday. Tuesday and Friday, Disney's good. Wednesday , Disney is 'ok'. Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, Disney is evil.
Didn't you get the new schedule?
"Gee, Bob, ever since we started streaming those NATO satellite images over the web, our traffic has increased over 700%!"
..uh... think it means we'd better buy up m..m..mmore bandwidth... and pray the website doesn't go down."
"Hmm, looks like most of the traffic is coming from... Afghanistan, Serbia, Somalia, and Pakistan. In fact, that's where *all* of the traffic is coming from. What do you think it means, Phil?"
*Phil suddenly turns very pale and starts shaking and sweating*
"I
Internet customer service is 888-793-9800. Internet customer service should be able to upgrade you directly over the phone if it's available in your area. If they ask what you need it for, just say you have a home office. If it's not available, talk to a supervisor and let them know you'd like it to be available, and you'd be willing to pay for it.
The funny thing is, the Comcast rep (for the store I work at) and I were talking about the subject of bandwidth the last time he was in a few months ago back in March or so. I had mentioned that I tend to upload alot of large database files to the servers at work, but that it takes forever. I said I'd be willing to pay around $90 or so per month for the extra upload. I have no idea if he brought the message to the big boys at Comcast, but I'll bet they'll offer anything that means more money for them so long as there's an established customer base in place; especially in this situation, where the extra bandwidth should be little more than a "flip of the switch" so to speak.
I'm on Comcast cable. I am not worried about this. Why? Simple; I switched to the Comcast professional service. I get lovely things like the right to run VPN's (which I take as a cancellation of the ToS section on running servers), more than 3 times the upload speed (around 400kbps instead of 125 - 130kbps), more than twice the download speed (went from 1.3 - 1.5mbps to around 3.3mbps -- actual speeds, advertised speeds are 1.5/128k and 3.5/384k respectively), and an even more stable connection (my ping times used to vary wildly and my connection died at least once a week or so). What do I have to pay for these privilages? $95/month, which includes all fees including the modem rental. Before, I was paying about $50/month. I consider this a perfectly fair price, and I pay it without bitching or complaining. What do I do with all this bandwidth? Well, I haven't used morpheus since it went south (horrid gnutella network), and I use kazaa for maybe an hour per week, if that. I do a limited amount of file sharing, limited primarily by my upload speed. As one who shares files, I will say only that the .edu's are the most useful folks, even though the firewalls now being set up to stop file sharing can be a mild pain.
As one who knows at least a little about how the ISP market works, I would say that the tier'd model is the best way for the broadband folks to go. Cap the speed and limit monthly bandwidth usage on the low end, with slow services starting at around $25/mo (for like 384k/64k) and at the higher end (around $100/month) don't bother with limiting the monthly transfers, just cap the upload at a reasonable rate so your network isn't getting hammered non-stop. Most people have limited storage, so downloads have some limit, but one person with a 1GB hard drive could send out 50GB of data per month with a fast connection simply by sending the same file or files hundreds of times. Think about it.
When I was at UMD, about 3 years ago, we had plenty of people telling us about the AUP. Yet none of this stopped the rampant err.. violations of the AUP. The closest thing they did to even attempting to stop people from downloading things illegally was to put a cap on our bandwidth. After the cap was put in place, we couldn't upload any more than about 2mbps over DCC, and our downloads outside of the campus network didn't go above 3mbps or so. This was the only effort I saw in my time there to curb the massive downloading. They didn't even bother monitoring the students' shared files, of which 90% were unprotected in terms of passwords and the like - and take a wild guess as to what was being shared. The funniest part about that is the fact that some CS students had written applications specifically designed to search shared files on the UMD network for specific files. I can honestly say that every single student there had plenty of downloads that would violate the AUP, if not a high number of laws. Windows 2000 was readily available the first day of classes in Feb. 2000. Within about 1 month, about 2/3s of the people I knew in the dorms were running Win2k, yet most didn't have much cash at all. There was always talk of monitoring, but my multiple GB/day of uploads and downloads never got me a phone call or message from anyone. They can advertise this program all they want, but in reality, they've been talking for years about stopping people from abusing their high speed line, and they've done virtually nothing about it. Using UMDCP as an example of a university curbing AUP violations is like using Brittain as an example of a totalitarian monarchy.
Distributed.net
We get a client, we'll have the password in a couple days. No sweat.
All your Mars base are belong to us.
Now how in the fuck can I still get cool software and be a good Muslim? When my beloved religious leaders say bullshit like that, I just wanna beat the hell out of them.
CF is ok, and I'm experimenting with MySQL, which seems to be fairly nice. I need to do some side-by-side comparisons to be sure, but it looks as though on most things, it's much faster than M$ SQL. Anyway, there are plenty of jobs available for those who know SQL, so if you don't know it now, learn it. Have fun, folks :)
"We're sorry, please try your call again later."
... is not valid. Press 0 if you need assistance."
.. has been changed .. to an unpublished number."
.. mailbox number 2,942,213. At the tone, please leave your name and telephone number."
... "3rd ring of Jupiter."
"The number you are trying to reach, 3-0-5-1-3-4-5-2-3-5-2-4-6-2-1-6-3-7-4-4-8
"We're sorry, the number you are trying to call has been disconnected."
"All circuts are busy, please try your call again later."
"Please wait... while the NASA subsciber you are trying to reach is located..."
"That number, 5-4-7-2-7-1-0-8-6-2-3
"You have reached
"Your call could not be completed as dialed, please check the number and try again."
"Hello, Verizon information. What City and State please?"
Money.
It's what every college student wants, and what 99.999% do not have. Dispense it over the length of the two semesters and your college-bound student will be thrilled.
Hell, running an open relay would rapidly go from moronic to profitable :).
You're only half right. I would describe this as profitable stupidity - getting paid to be stupid.
Would be nice if spam companies such as this who periodically engage in widespread consumer fraud could, by court order, have all assets liquidated and the funds distributed to a state task force designed to root out further spam comanies. If this isn't serving the public, I don't know what is.
My Comcast Rep (for the place I work at) was in about 3 days ago and said nothing of this. He DID however, reveal plans to allow people with home offices and power users to SELECT a higher speed internet service with a 6 month IP lease and 5 ips for $95/mo. The higher speeds are 3.5Mbps downstream and 384k upstream. There was never any mention by him or by any materials of anyone being forced into this, and by our discussion, this is the only other tier Comcast is currently using. By the way, modem rental fee is included in your $95/mo, and installation is now $149, which won't matter for existing customers. Rollout in NJ should be done by June 1, 2002, and a phone call is all that's required to upgrade the service. Someone hears 95/mo for net service with higher caps and after it gets passed around 10 people, it suddenly makes it into a news story as being forced upgrades. Sleep well Comcast abusers, your service might suck, you'll still be overpaying, and your uploads will remain slow, but at least you shouldn't be subjected to any new pricing tiers against your will.
Thank God they shit-canned that idea.
Commercial interests < public interests
Free Speech > Financial welfare of any company/industry
Sorry the companies made a bad deal, but it isn't my problem and it isn't 2600's problem. It was reverse-engineered; no one is disputing this. It was poorly conceived, and now several companies will suffer for it. Better luck next time, but this is capitalism - the government isn't supposed to save your ass when you screw up. Take a look at Enron if you doubt me, or any other business that has ever gone under. Just because you're a large industry with alot of money doesn't mean you get to circumvent all of society because you banked on a flawed technology. If code is not free speech, and can be a trade secret, then I'm going to start a company that does nothing but encode famous speeches and quotes into c, and then have protection granted to them as my trade secret.
You have to go after the users, its the only way that anythign will be accomplished.
And this got a score of 4 for insightful?
Think about this for a moment, we had roughly what, 50, 60 million people worldwide using Napster at its height? At any given time, Kazaa has a couple million on, so we can assume their average daily user list is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 - 30 million people. Morpheus/gnutella has good numbers, as do several other networks. Then we factor in IRC, usenet, etc.
So you, a large corporation, are going to begin suing some 20 - 60 million people? Ok, let's assume the RIAA and MPAA join up in some joint venture created specifically to pool all their resources for this.
Lawyers needed? Somewhere between 40 - 100 million. Assuming they'll work for a sum of $75/hr (a bargain) on average, that brings us to an approxamate cost of $5,250,000,000/hr. (yes, that's billion with a B) The newest star wars installment made about $130million on the first weekend, and that would cover your legal fees for about 9 minutes. So then you say, "well, silly, they wouldn't sue them all at once, they'd spread it out!" What a great idea. Assuming 70,000,000 lawsuits at 100 lawsuits filed each month, you would spend the next 58,000+ years prosecuting people. Now, I'm no doctor, but I don't think people live that long. In any event, the cost in legal fees for suing even 1% of the users is so astonomical that not even Bill Gates could fathom doing it in his wildest dreams. But there's more.
Two problems relating to one another: 1) Consumer backlash, 2) government backlash.
Now, when you and about half your friends are being sued by a major corporation, I don't think you'll be jumping to buy their product. The roughly 70 million people (a good 40 - 50 million are US citizens) that you're suing are going to be pretty pissed, and will start organizing to fight you. This brings us to our next problem. If I were running for office, (let's say... President?), I could get myself somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million votes simply by taking a strong stance against "the evil corporate empires" of the entertainment industry. And if I were going for re-election, I'd start issuing EO's (executive orders) like they were candy effectively putting an end to major media companies. But just in case you thought that might not do it, next we move to Congress. Same thing, they all want re-election, and with millions being sued, this becomes a major issue. Now, do you go to your district and tell people that it's all their fault and they shouldn't have been stealing content? Well sure, if you don't like your job. What will really happen? They'll take a firm stance against the media companies and legislation will be passed 10 times faster than the laws passed following Sept 11. The entertainment industry will be so incredibly screwed by the new laws that they won't be in business for long. No amount of money talks to a congressman when their constituents are up in arms about something.
So where does this leave the entertainment industry? At an impasse. They have a few options here: 1) continue suing P2P networks, which after a while they'll start losing the cases, but no matter what, it will never end file sharing. 2) Come up with better digital rights management technology, which will cost millions in research and be broken by a 15 year old kid. 3) Sue ISPs, server owners, etc, whose legal teams in many cases match those of the RIAA and MPAA. 4) Lobby for legislation, which is getting less and less likely to work, seeing as tech savvy folks are now mainstream for the most part, and will fight things like the SSSCA whenever they come around. 5) Relinquish all rights to copyrighted works and go into immediate Chapter 13 liquidation, (just kidding). 6) Change their business models to use the internet for their benefit.
I'd like to take option 6 a little further for a moment. Assume this, the entertainment companies offer reasonable licensing terms to webcasters, somewhere around the middle between CARP's recommendations and what the webcasters asked for. They then set up internet sites with both streaming and downloadable music and movies, offering them in secured formats, but giving the OSS community access to the information about the formats required to build players and ask for their help in building secured players for Linux/*nix's. Offer these movies and music at either pay-per-use prices or as a straight download price. Say a dollar per song downloaded and $3 or $4 per movie downloaded, with the streaming PPV costs being mere fractions of that. Offer a complete linup of music, starting with the most popular and adding music as quickly as possible with easy to use searchs for song names, artists, and lyrics. Do something similar for movies, allowing searchs for movie titles, stars/co-stars, producers, etc. Offer the movie for download before it's even out on DVD, thus steering many people towards the internet service. Offer a simple web interface similar to P2P apps currently out, and use a simple account management system allowing for an easy download/stream of content. (ie. you point, click, watch) You'd instantly see a drop in piracy to the tune of probably 70% or better for music and movies. At the same time, the amount of money coming in would be incredible, and lawsuits against P2P networks etc could be dropped, thereby lowering legal costs. Easy to get, readily available, reasonably priced content is the way to stamp out piracy. Who the hell would search for 20 minutes to find the right version of a song they want to download when it's just $1 to get it from the music company, giving you a legitamate, high quality copy of the music? Who would spend 10 hours downloading a lousy copy of a movie when they can find and get what the want for $4, not have to worry about poor quality, and have it download much faster? Just an idea, but I think it's one that would make billions for the entertainment industry, and would silence most of their P2P-using critics.
Method for aquiring monetary gains via trade for goods and services.
In other words, making money by selling things.
Come on folks, let's try sticking with a position. Ridiculous patents like this need to be fought, even if by fighting them, we open ourselves up to the most annoying form of advertising online yet. Why? Because this type of trend opens us up to yet worse patent ideas. When someone can patent a small, simple bit of code like that and get away with it, what's to stop someone from patenting the 'cp' command? The US patent office doesn't appear to follow the guidlines for issuing patents, so there's not a whole lot to stem the tide of patents being issued for things that are extremely simple (ie one-click shopping.. duh), ubiquitous (ie palette bars - hello Adobe), or just plain ridiculous (ie the patent issued for 'inducing aerobic exercise' by pointing a laser pointer at a wall and moving it around).
We either fight all the patents we disagree with, or we fight none. When we pick and choose ("Well, this patent sucks, but maybe I'll get less spam on web pages") we appear weak. If our position truly is that we support patents issued for non patent-worthy things, then our position is weak.
asta la vista, baby.
It's not so much that everyone wants 'XXX' content for free, it's just that who the hell has to SEARCH for porn on the internet?
If you need a search engine to find porn online, you shouldn't be allowed to own a computer.