As an anarcho-capitalist, you're gonna hate this level of government involvement, but here I go anyway:
As a caveat, I'm drawing this from a USAdian background as the USA is where I'm from and seems to be the world's IP big dog, loose cannon, whatever.
What's under discussion here should not be called intellectual property. That's a name thought up by someone who held a bunch of copyrights and wanted to hold them forever. It's not property, it's a copyright or a patent or a trademark. It is not owned: It is held.
But the dream of corrupting the debate by introducing a biased term has come true, and even so-called anarcho-capitalists are now calling copyrighted material "intellectual property." Entertainment lawyers FTW.
The very first step in drawing back the madness, the very first one, is in a courtroom: The moment some suehappy company's lawyer says "intellectual property" in front of a judge, the defendant must object that the term has no real meaning and must be suppressed and never used in any court anywhere ever again and its use in the presence of a jury is grounds for a mistrial.
And if that doesn't work, hooray, because if it's intellectual property, then it's property, and property can be taxed.
So long as a company (or person) insists it "owns" an intellectual property, its value shall be assessed shall be taxed annually at a rate of one dollar plus a percentage of gross receipts the highest-grossing of the last five years. Make a billion dollars on it, be taxed on a billion-dollar estate. Tired of paying money on a billion-dollar estate? Place it in the public domain and it is now part of the creative commons. Forget to pay money on it? Public domain. It's been ninety years since it was published? Public domain -- and ninety years is simply insane. It should be fifty, or life plus twenty, max.
Copyrights and patents expire for a reason: By protecting materials for a period of time, the Constitution creates temporary monopolies as economic stimulus for creative efforts. By having copyrights and patents expire, The Constitution provides economic stimulus to the nation as a whole: copyrighted and patented materials become part of the pool from which new ideas and inventions can be derived.
We need to stop referring to these shenanigans with neutral or pragmatic names. We call these actions "modification" or "altering" or "injection" and it riles us, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the ISPs and Comcasts of the world are sitting around coming up with terms like "shaping" and "adapting" and "presentation opportunity."
Names are powerful.
If an ISP modifies a web page, they are tampering. Putting their own ads there is impersonation
If an ISP puts your IP at the top of a RST they generated, they are packet forging.
If an ISP examines the data portion of a packet they are reading your content.
If they change the header (other than decrementing TTL or doing NAT) they are packet tampering.
And if they say it's to enhance user experience they are lying
Even though I find the taxing of ones and zeros based on their
particular order rather silly, I think this may ultimately be a good
thing.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if it's taxed as
personal property, it strengthens consumer rights substantially: If
it's yours, you can resell it; if you have to crack the DRM in order to
transfer it, well, you're just protecting your rights as a consumer,
yes?
More significantly is how this fits in with the whole "intellectual
property" meme: if it's property, it can be taxed. If Time Warner
claims to "own" a series of ones and zeroes presented in a particular
order, well gee, that's something that's taxable. And the IRS, golly
gee, should have them list all of their taxable assets and its taxable
value. And ones and zeros don't rot, so there's no depreciation, right?
Computing the taxable value should be easy enough -- simply take what
they've earned off of it so far and multiply that by the time left in the
copyright term. Good thing they've made sure those are insanely long, eh?
If Time Warner doesn't want to pay taxes on a movie that's been rotting on
their shelves since 1943, then they can relinquish the property into the public
domain and get it off their books forever. I mean, hell, their 2007
financial statement says they own $47.2 billion in intangible assets and
$41.7 billion in "goodwill", so if that represents $88.9 billion in intellectual
property, why the hell aren't they paying property taxes on $88.9 billion?
More to the point, why the fuck are we paying taxes on something
they claim belongs to them?
If they have to declare every item in their portfolio as taxable property, there
may well be great balance restored in the creative commons, the entity
copyright law was designed to stimulate and protect.
I believe you were entirely within your rights to act as you did, Fyodor, but would be grateful if you'd take a moment to elaborate on why you chose your course of action.
From Securityfocus's account and your own it sounds like the FBI was trying to chase down a botnet that, as part of some process, downloaded Nmap 3.77. You emphasized that their requests were very narrowly crafted: a specific file requested via a specific user-agent within a specific five-minute window. It certainly didn't sound like a fishing expedition. If I had to guess, the requests were probably tied to the investigation of a specific criminal act or actor and they were trying to strengthen a case by establishing place-and-time.
My sleep-deprived analogy is this:
There's been a rash of burglaries recently where the perpetrators used a chainsaw to go straight through the side of the building. Yesterday morning a chainsaw burglary took place and the sheriff noticed a broken 16" Stihl chain near the hole. There was a second chainsaw burglary yesterday afternoon.
Meanwhile, you are the owner of Fyodor's Hardware, the busiest hardware store in three counties, and the tri-county area's only seller of Stihl chainsaws and accessories. You easily sell forty or fifty replacement chains a day.
So this morning the sheriff comes to you and asks if you sold or installed a 16" Stihl chain yesterday between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM, and if so who did you sell it to. In fact, you sold ten, just like any other day.
Not a perfect analogy, I know, but seriously, what do you do? I mean, you could make him come back with a subpoena, but let's skip that step and get to the crux of the matter: You sold ten new 16" Stihl chains yesterday and it's the sheriff's opinion that one of them probably went to the chainsaw burglar. You, he and every defense attorney and Slashdotter all know there's always the chance the burglar got the chain somewhere else and that at least nine of your sales were to honest customers. If you tell the sheriff about all ten sales, to what extent (if any) have you violated the rights of all the non-criminal chain buyers? If on the other hand you refuse to cooperate, how do you justify the social cost of the continued burglaries against the rights of ordinary chain buyers?
I think it's an interesting dilemma. As I said, I certainly respect that you took a principled stand (or at least stayed slippery enough that you didn't have to), but not everything that law enforcement -- even the FBI -- does is a sinister conspiracy against civil liberties. Sometimes they really are just trying to catch a bad guy.
Qwest. And shortly afterwards the U.S. government started finding excuses to (a) cancel existing contracts with Qwest, (b) declare them ineligible to for future no-bid contracts, and (c) preventing them from bidding on other contracts. Qwest alleges that hundreds of millions of dollars were routed around them to telcos more willing to play along. Good summary here.
The case started because he withdrew over $4,000 in cash to pay for the "service". Banks are required to report that kind of activity to the IRS, and maybe other departments (DEA seems likely) because it can indicate money laundering, tax fraud or other underground economic activity. It is also illegal to travel with large amounts of cash on you (I forget the amount, but don't sell your car for cash in another state).
What is remarkable is that the former Attorney General for the state of New York never thought that he might get caught. According to my tax attorney the reporting threshold is $5,000. It used to be $10,000. If there was a $4,000 withdrawal and they knew about it, they were already watching him.
It is not illegal to carry large amounts of cash, though there are numerous reports of it being confiscated on suspicion of drug trafficking, suspicion of income tax evasion, or suspicion of being a large amount of money and we no-knocked the wrong house and we need an excuse to be here. Getting it back can be hell -- all of a sudden you find yourself having to prove your innocence (e.g. documenting the income source behind every asset you have) instead of them proving your guilt. The war on drugs is the worst enemy the Fourth Amendment ever had.
I was a motorcycle salesman for a couple of years, and we had absolutely no problem selling to customers for cash, regardless of where they came from. If a customer spent over $10,000 in cash we had to fill out an IRS form because hey, large cash transaction. The only problem we had with out-of-state buyers was handling their registration. Located in Colorado, we had forms for our state, bordering states and Texas (damned Texans). I personally handled a customer from Georgia. For him we had to get forms FedEx'd to us from a dealership there.
If you're worried about selling your car out-of-state for cash, get a receipt for it so you can prove its origin. Or get a money order or go to the bank with the buyer and have them turn it into a cashier's check.
I'm reading about the Eliot Spitzer case, which all started with surveillance wiretap ordered by the justice department. Asking a prostitute to cross a state line is a federal crime, see.
Not being from New York I didn't know much about the man, so I checked, and it turns out he's a Democrat. So ever since yesterday I've been wondering if this was an attempt to bring down the Democratic Governor of a key state, like they did in Alabama. I'll be curious to see how much media complacency there is in the New York case.
I love people who simply parrot the words politicians bandy about. Do you actually KNOW how many 'lots and lots' actually is? How many more kids are killed on Halloween from traffic accidents? And I just love people who change definitions halfway through the argument to get the figures to support their claims. You mapped my "pedestrian struck by car" to some article's "pedestrian killed by car". Sloppy and rude.
Also, your fact-checking is incomplete: A 2005 study found that, in California alone, an average of 7.3 more children a year were struck by cars on Halloween than other November/December nights.
Despite your logical fallacy I will concede to you what I mentioned about politicians in the first place: that they use the safety of children to manipulate their peers and the public into supporting bills of dubious merit.
Whoever modded you funny needs to retake his Googling licence exam. The extension of DST was legislated in the "Halloween Safety Act of 2004."
Of course, the best way to get an American politician to vote for or against something is to tie it to child safety. Want to censor the Internet? Introduce a bill called the "Child Online Protection Act." Want to kill one? Rename it the "Whoever Votes for this Likes Rimming Little Boys Act."
Lots and lots of kids get run over crossing the street in the dark on Halloween. They really do. I'm sure there were not a few monied interests pushing this for their own reasons, and aside from keeping kids safe on Halloween they've got it dead wrong: It easily cost a few billion dollars to update all the software out there, and played merry hell with any devices that had DST info embedded in the firmware. And Outlook's calendar still breaks my meeting schedule at work.
I think that for every dollar we save in electricity we're losing a thousand in lost productivity and errors and accidents attributable to lost sleep. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, we're probably now losing on electricity, since coming home an hour earlier means cutting on your A/C for an extra hour of the hottest part of the day.
I've seen at least two instances personally (not counting the numerous anecdotes mention here on slashdot:) ) where consumers were confused that they needed a new player to watch HD DVD discs, since they owned a DVD player and an HD TV. So it's big advantage is that people are dumbasses?
Yay, business. Sony learned a long time ago that technical merits have nothing to do with market success.
It's a sure sign of bullshit when a document telling you what you can't do goes to great lengths to tell you why it's for your own good.
Compare:
Thou shalt not kill.
To:
If the company didn't manage its network, its customers would be subject to the negative effects of spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service.
One's from God. He made ten rules, and the first one is "Fuck you, I'm God." The other is from Comcast, which thinks it's God, but their version of "Fuck you, I'm Comcast" is written in hopes you'll be racing to get out the lubricant.
The Agreement says a whole lot of very slippery things, most of which boil down to (a) this is how it is, (b) you agree with us forever even if we change our minds, which (c) we can do whenever we want to without actively informing you, and (c) if you disobey we can either (1) kick you out (and sue you (you agreed we can)) or (2) upsell you to a faster and much more expensive Plan that may even do what we promised you this one would. Yep it even says it's binding after you cancel -- presumably even if you cancel because you refuse to abide by the Agreement. A lawyer could pick this apart very quickly in court. But you're not going to court, because you agreed to binding arbitration in a venue and format of their choosing.
The quote above is part of a bit about "part of managing our network is throttling bandwidth." It uses a special type of bullshit called equivocation. They're implying:
Bandwidth choking is part of network management, and
Spam, viruses, and security attacks are part of network management. Therefore
If we didn't choke bandwidth you'd be vulnerable to spam, viruses and security attacks.
The Agreement, which has never showed up in my Comcast e-mail, uses the word "reasonable" five times, including, most ominously, the term "reasonable attorney fees."
I especially like this whiney "But all the other cool ISPs are doing it" line:
The need to engage in network management is not limited to Comcast. In fact, all large Internet service providers manage their networks. Many of them use the same or similar tools that Comcast does.
There's that equivocation thing again:
Our network management includes choking your bandwidth, and
Other ISPs manage their networks. Therefore
Everybody does it.
The oily part is that the "similar tools" in question are hardware like routers and software like "ping," not hardware like Sandvine and software that sends forged RSTs over your signature.
And are you ready to suck up to the conformity police?
Comcast reserves the right to suspend or terminate Service accounts where bandwidth consumption is not characteristic of a typical residential user of the Service as determined by the company in its sole discretion.
IOW not only can the company attack you for not being like everybody else, they get to decide how everybody's supposed to be.
As an aside, every time I type "Comcast," Firefox says it's a mistake. I just wish these fucking fascists weren't the only game in town where I live.
I'm perfectly happy calling it mining because at least my toddler likes to mine the stream of words I use while driving for useful nuggets to repeat repeat to his mother the next time she's driving.
Every time a car pulls up next to us now he looks at it and says "Dear God!" And the last time his mom had to slam on brakes he giggled and said "What the fuck, huh?" And when she shrieked at him, that was just gasoline on the fire. For the rest of drive home all he could do was giggle and say "What the fuck, Mommy? Mommy? What the fuck, Mommy?"
Imagine if the people who developed and adopted Linux had said "It doesn't have 10% of the features that my current O/S has. Why should I bother with it?" That's more or less exactly what they said. A lot of people looked at that 10% number and breathed a sigh of relief because the 90% was mostly dross. Then they answered that "Why should I bother?" question with "So we can get it right this time.
Call him. Every single time something goes wrong, anywhere, for any member of the team, they call him. If something looks unusual, call him. If something looks perfectly normal, call him and let him know things are "back on track." He wants his shop running 24 hours a day? He's on call 24 hours a day. He doesn't answer the phone? Leave voice mail and stop working until he calls back. You ain't sleepin'? He ain't sleepin'.
Either he gets the message or at least you get to torment him until the moment you quit. Now if he's a skilled enough asshole you lose your next merit increase for requiring excessive supervision, you and your whole team. But that can be circumvented in many delightful ways, up to and including quitting en masse. I say en masse but don't do it at the exact same moment. One of you should quit every half hour, starting around midnight, and call him.
Correction: 99%. Please read the article. Over 99%, but yeah, I saw that, too, but with all the hassle the OP was getting over the "weary of their rights" thing I let it slide. But that rather weakens the justification for this sort of profiling: A 1% success rate is little better than random searches and is an even more frightening example of a government running amok. This is us going from "Better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man go free" to "Better to infringe on the civil liberties of 100 people than to let one college student with a dime bag in his backpack make it all the way back home."
The TFA says they "referred" 70,000 people "for secondary screening" to make between 600 and 700 arrests (that is, between 0.86 and 1.0 percent), and many of those were for drug possession or outstanding warrants (e.g. failure to appear for a traffic ticket). I'll bet there wasn't a single fucking terrorist among them. And no, I don't count terror "suspects," because you can pick up that label by buying pool cleaning chemicals or speaking a foreign language at the wrong diner. Unless they can name someone successfully convicted in an open court of charges directly related to a terrorist attack or conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack, the program is not just a failure but an affront to everything America used to be the symbol of.
...[O]nly about 10% of the people pulled over actually committed anything, they know that. The Orwellian method is if the person is suspicious then they go to jail. So 90% of the people stopped and detained for questioning, subjected to additional searches and have their travel plans upset didn't do anything?
Orwellian is when they have power over you based on secret laws you can't contest, when they can restrict your freedom without due process -- without even telling you why -- when they have infinite power over you and you have none, when they can take you away and put you somewhere indefinitely, can keep you incommunicado and torment you for years, until you find yourself being shoved out the back of a van in the middle of a city you've never been to. Seriously, this is a running contest between the Orwellian and the Kafkaesque.
Every time I've been in an airport since 2002 you better fucking believe I've had a scowl on my face and a pissy attitude, caused exclusively by the security theater and all its invasive horseshit. When I'm subjected to additional searches -- which has happened twice -- I go all Sambo on them so they, with their infinite power, will let me, with none, get on with my life.
Nothing says "freedom" like having a gloved stranger put their hand on your crotch because you made a poor choice in belt buckles that morning.
Farms owned directly by corporations are still most definitely in the minority, but corporations have inserted themselves into the process to a frightening degree. In pig farming, for example, about fifteen years ago only about five percent of the pigs on family farms were being raised on contract -- the rest went straight to market. In 2005, though, we went from five percent to sixty-five percent.
The same thing is happening with corn and other crops. Farmers selling directly to market are in a rapidly shinking minority. Instead, they sell the corn to ADM or another big agricorp.
And big corps aren't just standing between the product and the customer: when you look at hybrid seed and terminator GM seed you'll see that they're also working very hard to be the only way to get a plant into the ground in the first place. From these companies' point of view the farmer -- family or otherwise -- is simply somebody who provides land and labor -- and pays the taxes on both.
Between agribusiness subsidies for corn and wheat growers (73% of which is done by a dozen companies and families) and now coupons to let people continue watching television (80% of which is controlled by a half-dozen companies), it's finally happened: The American Empire has entered its "Bread and Circuses" stage, and tax money is going directly into making its citizens sit on their asses watching television and eating Twinkies.
And a quick poll: How many of you think that the government issuing $40 coupons for converter boxes is going to raise the price of converter boxes by $40?
This is really, really bad news for the RIAA, not for how their actual and punitive damages might get capped, but for how it exposes real cost numbers to the artists. And that's going to affect royalties.
It's somewhat redundant to point out what greedy bastards the record companies are. But when some of their techniques get exposed, well, that puts them at risk. Traditional record and CD sales resulted in a royalty check to artists based on the number of units sold, minus per-unit costs all sorts of things: manufacturing costs, packaging costs, shipping costs, breakage, returns and so forth. When record companies started colluding with iTunes etc. to get their music sold electronically, what do you think the royalty invoices looked like? Pretty much the same: "We sold this many units, and now that you've paid of the unbelievably high fees we charged you to record it in the first place, you get ten cents per unit, minus maufacturing, packaging, shipping, breakage and returns."
Breakage? I kid you not.
In reality the record companies have no per-unit costs. Those are eaten by iTunes or whoever. Their total distribution cost for a song is the salary of one bored intern dragging and dropping and clicking "send." That's their total cost per song. Their total cost per download rapidly approaches zero.
So now the RIAA members are being forced to disclose, in open court, how much it really costs them to do business online. That's going to play merry hell with their ability to lie to artists about how expensive it is to act as their agents.
There's lots of press recently about Iran==bogeyman that sound an awful lot like the Iraq==bogeyman articles from five years ago.
A bunch of Air Force recently guys got busted for "accidentally" shipping nuclear weapons to the military base we just happen use as a major staging area for Middle East deployment.
Suddenly here's an article about "radiation from nuclear fallout is no biggie."
Okay, so I got this idea before my morning coffee has fully kicked in. But two years ago I read a brilliant article by Paul Graham about the relationship between the press and the Big Public Relations Machine. Graham pointed out a New York Times article about the "return" of the business suit that looked a lot like ones in USA Today, CNN.com, Business Week and other outlets. He played Follow the Money for a little while and wouldn't you know it, the articles' "facts" came from an industry trade association. And ain't it weird how all these "industry experts" were suddenly available at the same time? Ever since then, when the media start trumpeting "evidence" that just happens to match somebody's financial or political profits, I get nervous.
Look at what Western mainstream media was saying about Iraq before we invaded. Gosh-oh-golly, don't it look a lot less like investigative journalism than a conduit for somebody's press releases?
And now we see an article where "industry experts" are telling us the radiation from Hiroshima didn't have long-term effects. Are we seeing some preventative PR in advance of a nuclear strike?
Like I said, tinfoil-had-grade paranoia. It's probably bullshit, but maybe that'll teach me not to take my meds on an empty stomach.
Why do Stormtroopers wear armor if it cannot help the occupant survive:
A.) Blaster fire
B.) Spears
C.) Blunt Objects such as rocks Yes, but it's the wrong sort of blaster fire, innit? And as for spears, well, who in their right mind carries a spear into battle in this day and age, am I right, guv'?
A car analogy is sort of like a car, in that it's bogus. Remember that "you wouldn't steal a car" thing they force you to watch at the beginning of DVDs? Also bogus.
It's bogus because it equates the taking of a thing by one with the loss of a thing by another. It may apply in the physical world, but it's all a bit different in the realm of data and data services. If I were to completely hijack your home network and deprive you of its use -- or if I use up so much of your bandwidth that you're deprived of its use that may be fodder for a "you wouldn't steal a car" analogy.
Here's a car analogy that may suit better: An open WAP with a broadcast beacon is like a car that drives down your street every once in a while. Whenever you stand out on the sidewalk the driver pulls over and says "You need a ride? Hop in."
Of course, my open WAP is like a plain white van with tinted windows that drives down your street every once in a while. Whenever you stand outside I pull over and say "You need a ride? I have candy." I know so much stuff about my neighbors.
Slashdot Mirror
As a caveat, I'm drawing this from a USAdian background as the USA is where I'm from and seems to be the world's IP big dog, loose cannon, whatever.
What's under discussion here should not be called intellectual property. That's a name thought up by someone who held a bunch of copyrights and wanted to hold them forever. It's not property, it's a copyright or a patent or a trademark. It is not owned: It is held.
But the dream of corrupting the debate by introducing a biased term has come true, and even so-called anarcho-capitalists are now calling copyrighted material "intellectual property." Entertainment lawyers FTW.
The very first step in drawing back the madness, the very first one, is in a courtroom: The moment some suehappy company's lawyer says "intellectual property" in front of a judge, the defendant must object that the term has no real meaning and must be suppressed and never used in any court anywhere ever again and its use in the presence of a jury is grounds for a mistrial.
And if that doesn't work, hooray, because if it's intellectual property, then it's property, and property can be taxed.
So long as a company (or person) insists it "owns" an intellectual property, its value shall be assessed shall be taxed annually at a rate of one dollar plus a percentage of gross receipts the highest-grossing of the last five years. Make a billion dollars on it, be taxed on a billion-dollar estate. Tired of paying money on a billion-dollar estate? Place it in the public domain and it is now part of the creative commons. Forget to pay money on it? Public domain. It's been ninety years since it was published? Public domain -- and ninety years is simply insane. It should be fifty, or life plus twenty, max.
Copyrights and patents expire for a reason: By protecting materials for a period of time, the Constitution creates temporary monopolies as economic stimulus for creative efforts. By having copyrights and patents expire, The Constitution provides economic stimulus to the nation as a whole: copyrighted and patented materials become part of the pool from which new ideas and inventions can be derived.
What a lame video. They should Rickroll it.
Names are powerful.
If an ISP modifies a web page, they are tampering. Putting their own ads there is impersonation
If an ISP puts your IP at the top of a RST they generated, they are packet forging.
If an ISP examines the data portion of a packet they are reading your content.
If they change the header (other than decrementing TTL or doing NAT) they are packet tampering.
And if they say it's to enhance user experience they are lying
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if it's taxed as personal property, it strengthens consumer rights substantially: If it's yours, you can resell it; if you have to crack the DRM in order to transfer it, well, you're just protecting your rights as a consumer, yes?
More significantly is how this fits in with the whole "intellectual property" meme: if it's property, it can be taxed. If Time Warner claims to "own" a series of ones and zeroes presented in a particular order, well gee, that's something that's taxable. And the IRS, golly gee, should have them list all of their taxable assets and its taxable value. And ones and zeros don't rot, so there's no depreciation, right?
Computing the taxable value should be easy enough -- simply take what they've earned off of it so far and multiply that by the time left in the copyright term. Good thing they've made sure those are insanely long, eh?
If Time Warner doesn't want to pay taxes on a movie that's been rotting on their shelves since 1943, then they can relinquish the property into the public domain and get it off their books forever. I mean, hell, their 2007 financial statement says they own $47.2 billion in intangible assets and $41.7 billion in "goodwill", so if that represents $88.9 billion in intellectual property, why the hell aren't they paying property taxes on $88.9 billion?
More to the point, why the fuck are we paying taxes on something they claim belongs to them?
If they have to declare every item in their portfolio as taxable property, there may well be great balance restored in the creative commons, the entity copyright law was designed to stimulate and protect.
I believe you were entirely within your rights to act as you did, Fyodor, but would be grateful if you'd take a moment to elaborate on why you chose your course of action.
From Securityfocus's account and your own it sounds like the FBI was trying to chase down a botnet that, as part of some process, downloaded Nmap 3.77. You emphasized that their requests were very narrowly crafted: a specific file requested via a specific user-agent within a specific five-minute window. It certainly didn't sound like a fishing expedition. If I had to guess, the requests were probably tied to the investigation of a specific criminal act or actor and they were trying to strengthen a case by establishing place-and-time.
My sleep-deprived analogy is this:
There's been a rash of burglaries recently where the perpetrators used a chainsaw to go straight through the side of the building. Yesterday morning a chainsaw burglary took place and the sheriff noticed a broken 16" Stihl chain near the hole. There was a second chainsaw burglary yesterday afternoon.Meanwhile, you are the owner of Fyodor's Hardware, the busiest hardware store in three counties, and the tri-county area's only seller of Stihl chainsaws and accessories. You easily sell forty or fifty replacement chains a day.
So this morning the sheriff comes to you and asks if you sold or installed a 16" Stihl chain yesterday between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM, and if so who did you sell it to. In fact, you sold ten, just like any other day.
Not a perfect analogy, I know, but seriously, what do you do? I mean, you could make him come back with a subpoena, but let's skip that step and get to the crux of the matter: You sold ten new 16" Stihl chains yesterday and it's the sheriff's opinion that one of them probably went to the chainsaw burglar. You, he and every defense attorney and Slashdotter all know there's always the chance the burglar got the chain somewhere else and that at least nine of your sales were to honest customers. If you tell the sheriff about all ten sales, to what extent (if any) have you violated the rights of all the non-criminal chain buyers? If on the other hand you refuse to cooperate, how do you justify the social cost of the continued burglaries against the rights of ordinary chain buyers?
I think it's an interesting dilemma. As I said, I certainly respect that you took a principled stand (or at least stayed slippery enough that you didn't have to), but not everything that law enforcement -- even the FBI -- does is a sinister conspiracy against civil liberties. Sometimes they really are just trying to catch a bad guy.
Qwest. And shortly afterwards the U.S. government started finding excuses to (a) cancel existing contracts with Qwest, (b) declare them ineligible to for future no-bid contracts, and (c) preventing them from bidding on other contracts. Qwest alleges that hundreds of millions of dollars were routed around them to telcos more willing to play along. Good summary here.
What is remarkable is that the former Attorney General for the state of New York never thought that he might get caught. According to my tax attorney the reporting threshold is $5,000. It used to be $10,000. If there was a $4,000 withdrawal and they knew about it, they were already watching him.
It is not illegal to carry large amounts of cash, though there are numerous reports of it being confiscated on suspicion of drug trafficking, suspicion of income tax evasion, or suspicion of being a large amount of money and we no-knocked the wrong house and we need an excuse to be here. Getting it back can be hell -- all of a sudden you find yourself having to prove your innocence (e.g. documenting the income source behind every asset you have) instead of them proving your guilt. The war on drugs is the worst enemy the Fourth Amendment ever had.
I was a motorcycle salesman for a couple of years, and we had absolutely no problem selling to customers for cash, regardless of where they came from. If a customer spent over $10,000 in cash we had to fill out an IRS form because hey, large cash transaction. The only problem we had with out-of-state buyers was handling their registration. Located in Colorado, we had forms for our state, bordering states and Texas (damned Texans). I personally handled a customer from Georgia. For him we had to get forms FedEx'd to us from a dealership there.
If you're worried about selling your car out-of-state for cash, get a receipt for it so you can prove its origin. Or get a money order or go to the bank with the buyer and have them turn it into a cashier's check.
Not being from New York I didn't know much about the man, so I checked, and it turns out he's a Democrat. So ever since yesterday I've been wondering if this was an attempt to bring down the Democratic Governor of a key state, like they did in Alabama. I'll be curious to see how much media complacency there is in the New York case.
Also, your fact-checking is incomplete: A 2005 study found that, in California alone, an average of 7.3 more children a year were struck by cars on Halloween than other November/December nights.
Despite your logical fallacy I will concede to you what I mentioned about politicians in the first place: that they use the safety of children to manipulate their peers and the public into supporting bills of dubious merit.
I'm bored with you now.
Of course, the best way to get an American politician to vote for or against something is to tie it to child safety. Want to censor the Internet? Introduce a bill called the "Child Online Protection Act." Want to kill one? Rename it the "Whoever Votes for this Likes Rimming Little Boys Act."
Lots and lots of kids get run over crossing the street in the dark on Halloween. They really do. I'm sure there were not a few monied interests pushing this for their own reasons, and aside from keeping kids safe on Halloween they've got it dead wrong: It easily cost a few billion dollars to update all the software out there, and played merry hell with any devices that had DST info embedded in the firmware. And Outlook's calendar still breaks my meeting schedule at work.
I think that for every dollar we save in electricity we're losing a thousand in lost productivity and errors and accidents attributable to lost sleep. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, we're probably now losing on electricity, since coming home an hour earlier means cutting on your A/C for an extra hour of the hottest part of the day.
So it's big advantage is that people are dumbasses?
Yay, business. Sony learned a long time ago that technical merits have nothing to do with market success.
Compare:
Thou shalt not kill.To:
If the company didn't manage its network, its customers would be subject to the negative effects of spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service.One's from God. He made ten rules, and the first one is "Fuck you, I'm God." The other is from Comcast, which thinks it's God, but their version of "Fuck you, I'm Comcast" is written in hopes you'll be racing to get out the lubricant.
The Agreement says a whole lot of very slippery things, most of which boil down to (a) this is how it is, (b) you agree with us forever even if we change our minds, which (c) we can do whenever we want to without actively informing you, and (c) if you disobey we can either (1) kick you out (and sue you (you agreed we can)) or (2) upsell you to a faster and much more expensive Plan that may even do what we promised you this one would. Yep it even says it's binding after you cancel -- presumably even if you cancel because you refuse to abide by the Agreement. A lawyer could pick this apart very quickly in court. But you're not going to court, because you agreed to binding arbitration in a venue and format of their choosing.
The quote above is part of a bit about "part of managing our network is throttling bandwidth." It uses a special type of bullshit called equivocation. They're implying:
The Agreement, which has never showed up in my Comcast e-mail, uses the word "reasonable" five times, including, most ominously, the term "reasonable attorney fees."
I especially like this whiney "But all the other cool ISPs are doing it" line:
The need to engage in network management is not limited to Comcast. In fact, all large Internet service providers manage their networks. Many of them use the same or similar tools that Comcast does.There's that equivocation thing again:
- Our network management includes choking your bandwidth, and
- Other ISPs manage their networks. Therefore
- Everybody does it.
The oily part is that the "similar tools" in question are hardware like routers and software like "ping," not hardware like Sandvine and software that sends forged RSTs over your signature.And are you ready to suck up to the conformity police?
Comcast reserves the right to suspend or terminate Service accounts where bandwidth consumption is not characteristic of a typical residential user of the Service as determined by the company in its sole discretion.IOW not only can the company attack you for not being like everybody else, they get to decide how everybody's supposed to be.
As an aside, every time I type "Comcast," Firefox says it's a mistake. I just wish these fucking fascists weren't the only game in town where I live.
Every time a car pulls up next to us now he looks at it and says "Dear God!" And the last time his mom had to slam on brakes he giggled and said "What the fuck, huh?" And when she shrieked at him, that was just gasoline on the fire. For the rest of drive home all he could do was giggle and say "What the fuck, Mommy? Mommy? What the fuck, Mommy?"
This is not improving my sex life.
Now I juggle constantly between Linux, Tru64, Windows XP, and OS/X, and my theological outlook has changed significantly: now I
Call him. Every single time something goes wrong, anywhere, for any member of the team, they call him. If something looks unusual, call him. If something looks perfectly normal, call him and let him know things are "back on track." He wants his shop running 24 hours a day? He's on call 24 hours a day. He doesn't answer the phone? Leave voice mail and stop working until he calls back. You ain't sleepin'? He ain't sleepin'. Either he gets the message or at least you get to torment him until the moment you quit. Now if he's a skilled enough asshole you lose your next merit increase for requiring excessive supervision, you and your whole team. But that can be circumvented in many delightful ways, up to and including quitting en masse. I say en masse but don't do it at the exact same moment. One of you should quit every half hour, starting around midnight, and call him.
In other news, the anus is just the hole at end of a long tube. Absorption would happen through the colon.
The TFA says they "referred" 70,000 people "for secondary screening" to make between 600 and 700 arrests (that is, between 0.86 and 1.0 percent), and many of those were for drug possession or outstanding warrants (e.g. failure to appear for a traffic ticket). I'll bet there wasn't a single fucking terrorist among them. And no, I don't count terror "suspects," because you can pick up that label by buying pool cleaning chemicals or speaking a foreign language at the wrong diner. Unless they can name someone successfully convicted in an open court of charges directly related to a terrorist attack or conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack, the program is not just a failure but an affront to everything America used to be the symbol of.
...[O]nly about 10% of the people pulled over actually committed anything, they know that. The Orwellian method is if the person is suspicious then they go to jail. So 90% of the people stopped and detained for questioning, subjected to additional searches and have their travel plans upset didn't do anything?Orwellian is when they have power over you based on secret laws you can't contest, when they can restrict your freedom without due process -- without even telling you why -- when they have infinite power over you and you have none, when they can take you away and put you somewhere indefinitely, can keep you incommunicado and torment you for years, until you find yourself being shoved out the back of a van in the middle of a city you've never been to. Seriously, this is a running contest between the Orwellian and the Kafkaesque.
Every time I've been in an airport since 2002 you better fucking believe I've had a scowl on my face and a pissy attitude, caused exclusively by the security theater and all its invasive horseshit. When I'm subjected to additional searches -- which has happened twice -- I go all Sambo on them so they, with their infinite power, will let me, with none, get on with my life.
Nothing says "freedom" like having a gloved stranger put their hand on your crotch because you made a poor choice in belt buckles that morning.
The same thing is happening with corn and other crops. Farmers selling directly to market are in a rapidly shinking minority. Instead, they sell the corn to ADM or another big agricorp.
And big corps aren't just standing between the product and the customer: when you look at hybrid seed and terminator GM seed you'll see that they're also working very hard to be the only way to get a plant into the ground in the first place. From these companies' point of view the farmer -- family or otherwise -- is simply somebody who provides land and labor -- and pays the taxes on both.
And a quick poll: How many of you think that the government issuing $40 coupons for converter boxes is going to raise the price of converter boxes by $40?
It's somewhat redundant to point out what greedy bastards the record companies are. But when some of their techniques get exposed, well, that puts them at risk. Traditional record and CD sales resulted in a royalty check to artists based on the number of units sold, minus per-unit costs all sorts of things: manufacturing costs, packaging costs, shipping costs, breakage, returns and so forth. When record companies started colluding with iTunes etc. to get their music sold electronically, what do you think the royalty invoices looked like? Pretty much the same: "We sold this many units, and now that you've paid of the unbelievably high fees we charged you to record it in the first place, you get ten cents per unit, minus maufacturing, packaging, shipping, breakage and returns."
Breakage? I kid you not.
In reality the record companies have no per-unit costs. Those are eaten by iTunes or whoever. Their total distribution cost for a song is the salary of one bored intern dragging and dropping and clicking "send." That's their total cost per song. Their total cost per download rapidly approaches zero.
So now the RIAA members are being forced to disclose, in open court, how much it really costs them to do business online. That's going to play merry hell with their ability to lie to artists about how expensive it is to act as their agents.
Okay, so I got this idea before my morning coffee has fully kicked in. But two years ago I read a brilliant article by Paul Graham about the relationship between the press and the Big Public Relations Machine. Graham pointed out a New York Times article about the "return" of the business suit that looked a lot like ones in USA Today, CNN.com, Business Week and other outlets. He played Follow the Money for a little while and wouldn't you know it, the articles' "facts" came from an industry trade association. And ain't it weird how all these "industry experts" were suddenly available at the same time? Ever since then, when the media start trumpeting "evidence" that just happens to match somebody's financial or political profits, I get nervous.
Look at what Western mainstream media was saying about Iraq before we invaded. Gosh-oh-golly, don't it look a lot less like investigative journalism than a conduit for somebody's press releases?
And now we see an article where "industry experts" are telling us the radiation from Hiroshima didn't have long-term effects. Are we seeing some preventative PR in advance of a nuclear strike?
Like I said, tinfoil-had-grade paranoia. It's probably bullshit, but maybe that'll teach me not to take my meds on an empty stomach.
A.) Blaster fire
B.) Spears
C.) Blunt Objects such as rocks
Yes, but it's the wrong sort of blaster fire, innit? And as for spears, well, who in their right mind carries a spear into battle in this day and age, am I right, guv'?
It's bogus because it equates the taking of a thing by one with the loss of a thing by another. It may apply in the physical world, but it's all a bit different in the realm of data and data services. If I were to completely hijack your home network and deprive you of its use -- or if I use up so much of your bandwidth that you're deprived of its use that may be fodder for a "you wouldn't steal a car" analogy.
Here's a car analogy that may suit better: An open WAP with a broadcast beacon is like a car that drives down your street every once in a while. Whenever you stand out on the sidewalk the driver pulls over and says "You need a ride? Hop in."
Of course, my open WAP is like a plain white van with tinted windows that drives down your street every once in a while. Whenever you stand outside I pull over and say "You need a ride? I have candy." I know so much stuff about my neighbors.