Well, for one thing, MS is primarily an OS and office vendor, not a maker of every kind of closed source software. So a better comparison might be MS versus, say, Ubuntu + Open Office.
For another, traditional wisdom (depending on how you define it, I guess) would say that the fact that Windows is entirely developed by one company should lead to greater project cohesion. Which it may have done; some might say this is why Windows has traditionally been easier to use. However, this illustrates why it would be a problem for it to degenerate into disconnected fiefdoms; it could lose an advantage.
Lastly, looking at Ubuntu, I think that open source developers are either beginning to figure out how to be cohesive despite being relatively disconnected people all over the world (they have after all been doing this for a while), or possibly Ubuntu is just paying people to do that part of the job that nobody else wants to.
I think it would be better viewed as "another Internet". Unless I misunderstand it, the Internet and Internet2 aren't connected at high levels, they only get connected in some sense because of "customers" like the one mentioned above that have a network that will route some of its traffic to Internet2 and some of it to the Internet. Think of it like having cable TV from two different companies, and having a switch that controls which one you're watching at any given time. The two cable companies aren't really connected per se, it's just your machine that can access either stream. Since internet is two-way, I assume someone with connections to both could of course run some kind of server to provide Internet2 access to the Internet or vice versa, but that's not like the two of them being networked together at many points, it's just some dude purchasing access to both and saying "hey, I'm going to connect these".
Hell, I'm in the "no patents at all" camp. I don't care how many people say it will, innovation is simply not going to die just because we remove a temporary exclusive right to profit from inventions.
You do a good job of describing one of the problems. I'm not normally one to advocate the crazy free-market everything approach, but I'm not positive that more regulation is the ideal approach here. Maybe patents aren't as necessary as everyone seems to think.
I am not necessarily agreeing with you, but you answered your own question: According to your post, this helps the State (they get more power and income), and to some extent MS (they can continue to pay the bribe for preferential treatment). Yes?
First of all, preventing someone from yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater not on fire is completely different. That is a situation where someone is knowingly (presumably, anyway) providing false information to people that did not ask for it and can reasonably be assumed to be there for the movie/play/whatever. In this case, the only people seeing the information are (presumably) people intending to see it by clicking on links from other pages, search engines, etc.
And as for inciting a riot, I think people should be allowed to do so. Unless you think "But he told me to" should be a valid legal defense.
Aside from that, nobody here said that there should be UNLIMITED freedoms. People were merely suggesting that Verizon should not be the censor, and furthermore that by playing censor here it may open itself up to legal issues for not playing censor with other such sites. Some, myself included, would go farther and say that even this speech should not be censored at all, by anyone. But even that is far less strong of a claim than the straw man of "unlimited freedoms" that you have set up.
I can see SOME uses of this, but there are a large number of people out there that would rather have a mouse connected with a cable than have to deal with batteries. And as the number of devices you want to connect grows, this effect will only become more pronounced. My verdict: useful, but not revolutionary.
Well, I would care about the unjustified and illegal expulsion from the neighbourhood, yes. But I'd say that's primarily the fault of the neighbours, and that the law works far more practically if you don't try to legislate speech.
"Your goal, then, is to lower the expected average truth value of all public statements." No, my goal is to have freedom of speech, and have the side benefit of helping people realize that, disincentives or not, public statements are not inherently trustable. Your argument is interesting, but I am skeptical that the best way to create trust is with legislation. Furthermore, it runs into many practical difficulties like having to decide "what is truth?"
"Your passion makes me wonder if you are not perhaps the victim of a prior, justified slander." To the best of my knowledge, nobody has publically maligned me, justified or otherwise.
1. Someone can do that anyway. A payphone and a friend with an unrecognized voice is likely plenty anonymous if they wish to avoid punishment. 2. Before an investigation is started, they should probably ask for evidence. 3. If this kind of speech was protected, they'd be MORE likely to ask for evidence than less since they'd (hopefully) realize that anyone can publically say anything about anyone, and that without evidence such a claim is worthless. 4. A public claim of child molestation should, IMHO, generally be ignored unless it is accompanied by an attempt to subject you to the law. If such an attempt is made, and deemed to be frivolous, then the claimant should be punished for making a frivolous claim.
So yes, I feel that this kind of speech should be protected, and that people should require evidence before believing controversial claims, and that protecting this kind of speech would encourage people to think a bit more.
Well, I'd be flattered if Google cared that much about me... But more importantly, if that protection didn't exist, perhaps more people wouldn't automatically assume everything they read in the media is true and would actually learn some level of critical thinking. In other words, you are correct, I don't want protection from that under the law.
"Prior restraint" is a silly and artificial distinction. Penalties, whether they are fines, jail, or execution, are always going to be after the fact unless governments start preemptively cutting out peoples' vocal cords.
Also, whether or not the Supreme Court has ruled that there are different levels of freedom in speech doesn't change anything about my argument one way or another.
What ISN'T a tricky issue is completely removing content-based censorship. It completely removes difficult questions like "what is truth?" and "what is obscene?" from the realm of the law.
"They refer to state coercion, particularly aimed at those who speak out against the state." The terms have multiple meanings. Granted, you are correct that if you define free speech as a lack of retaliation for speech against the state, we're doing pretty well. But, you have to grant me that if you define free speech as "the ability to say anything you want without courts imposing penalties", we're doing significantly worse.
"it is important to recognize that speech can cause quantifiable damage" I do recognize that. It is my feeling that if this damage was allowed to happen, the amount of damage it causes would go down quickly and far. It is important to recognize that preventing any kind of speech can cause damage too. Maybe it is not as easily quantifiable, but (IMHO, of course) it is plenty significant.
"If you object to all this, how would you do things differently?" I would remove all censorship laws except for cases where people tried not to hear the message and couldn't (in other words, I would try to prevent spam, telemarketing, and some guy following you around yelling loudly into a megaphone, but all content would be allowed).
Uh... Dude... Nobody is saying that any website was censoring posts, or that any business was censoring speech in its building. They can do what they please in that area.
What happened here is that the courts granted a libel judgement against someone who posted on third-party websites. In order to do this, that means there must have been a law preventing her from freely speaking in these posts. Specifically, that area of law is called libel. Now, I don't know much about the origin of libel law, for all I know it might somehow be constitutionally protected too. But based on 'Congress shall pass no law... abridging the freedom of speech' then libel law should be unconstitutional, yes?
Am I the only one that thinks "A right to free speech" should include a lack of monetary penalties? Damn. By that logic, Saudi Arabia has free speech. You can say anything you want, you'll just face prison or execution. Perfectly free...
As for taking down material, she apparently posted the info on sites, and presumably no longer had access to remove it. If that matters.
I wouldn't care, although in the legal environment we're in I may try to exploit the situation for financial gain. Anyone who hangs out with me should realize it's BS. Conversely, it might help weed out the stupid ones. Mind you, there are other reasons not to post my info online, so I'm not going to.
In other words, "free speech" is not something we really have. Libel, hate speech laws, laws to prevent bomb threats etc, lack of rights at the border, censorship of TV/movies/etc for swearing and content, politicians choosing which media to speak to based on who casts them in a good light, anti-fraudulent advertising laws, hell even anti-spam laws, anti-noise laws, the list goes on and on... I'm not saying these are necessarily things with no good side, but they are all somewhat contrary to free speech. And it seems a bit silly to me to trumpet our wonderful free speech when it's not really there. Sure we might be able to speak more freely than some, but really, that makes me imagine more accurate slogans like:
"America: Not as bad as Saudi Arabia"
or
"Canada: We can say SOME things you can't say in Cuba"
*I* say: fuck censorship. Let anyone say anything they please. Maybe it'll help force people to realize that everyone biases things, and that they need to develop filters to figure out who to trust and when to trust them.
Yeah, like every other group in the world, most Americans are idiots. As such, there are going to be SOME poor smart people in third-world places that will be willing to solve these for money as long as they exist.
Hell, anyone else think maybe it'd be a good idea to drastically change the global economy ANYWAY?
While you are correct, it is also a dangerous path if ISPs DON'T make decisions for their customers' own good. One example that I think most will agree is a very good thing is not being an open relay, requiring customers to authenticate on outgoing mail, and enforcing limits on them. Sure there are legitimate uses that are impaired by this, but overall I'd be upset with ISPs that didn't do this.
Heh. I wish there was a "+1 stating the obvious that everyone else seemed to miss".
Personally I can't come up with a good reason to EVER use an ISP's e-mail address unless you're a total newb or an idiot that requires their tech support to explain how to use e-mail. I can see using their outgoing mail server, but that's a different story altogether. People, wake up: the main reason ISPs provide e-mail addresses is to make it more annoying for you to leave their service.
Slashdot Mirror
They may have to remove half of these for legit users before anyone could tell the difference.
Well, for one thing, MS is primarily an OS and office vendor, not a maker of every kind of closed source software. So a better comparison might be MS versus, say, Ubuntu + Open Office.
For another, traditional wisdom (depending on how you define it, I guess) would say that the fact that Windows is entirely developed by one company should lead to greater project cohesion. Which it may have done; some might say this is why Windows has traditionally been easier to use. However, this illustrates why it would be a problem for it to degenerate into disconnected fiefdoms; it could lose an advantage.
Lastly, looking at Ubuntu, I think that open source developers are either beginning to figure out how to be cohesive despite being relatively disconnected people all over the world (they have after all been doing this for a while), or possibly Ubuntu is just paying people to do that part of the job that nobody else wants to.
I think it would be better viewed as "another Internet". Unless I misunderstand it, the Internet and Internet2 aren't connected at high levels, they only get connected in some sense because of "customers" like the one mentioned above that have a network that will route some of its traffic to Internet2 and some of it to the Internet. Think of it like having cable TV from two different companies, and having a switch that controls which one you're watching at any given time. The two cable companies aren't really connected per se, it's just your machine that can access either stream. Since internet is two-way, I assume someone with connections to both could of course run some kind of server to provide Internet2 access to the Internet or vice versa, but that's not like the two of them being networked together at many points, it's just some dude purchasing access to both and saying "hey, I'm going to connect these".
Hell, I'm in the "no patents at all" camp. I don't care how many people say it will, innovation is simply not going to die just because we remove a temporary exclusive right to profit from inventions.
Excellent reference, but the uninitiated need a link. Heh. The hair. So funny.
You do a good job of describing one of the problems. I'm not normally one to advocate the crazy free-market everything approach, but I'm not positive that more regulation is the ideal approach here. Maybe patents aren't as necessary as everyone seems to think.
I am not necessarily agreeing with you, but you answered your own question: According to your post, this helps the State (they get more power and income), and to some extent MS (they can continue to pay the bribe for preferential treatment). Yes?
First of all, preventing someone from yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater not on fire is completely different. That is a situation where someone is knowingly (presumably, anyway) providing false information to people that did not ask for it and can reasonably be assumed to be there for the movie/play/whatever. In this case, the only people seeing the information are (presumably) people intending to see it by clicking on links from other pages, search engines, etc.
And as for inciting a riot, I think people should be allowed to do so. Unless you think "But he told me to" should be a valid legal defense.
Aside from that, nobody here said that there should be UNLIMITED freedoms. People were merely suggesting that Verizon should not be the censor, and furthermore that by playing censor here it may open itself up to legal issues for not playing censor with other such sites. Some, myself included, would go farther and say that even this speech should not be censored at all, by anyone. But even that is far less strong of a claim than the straw man of "unlimited freedoms" that you have set up.
I can see SOME uses of this, but there are a large number of people out there that would rather have a mouse connected with a cable than have to deal with batteries. And as the number of devices you want to connect grows, this effect will only become more pronounced. My verdict: useful, but not revolutionary.
Well, I would care about the unjustified and illegal expulsion from the neighbourhood, yes. But I'd say that's primarily the fault of the neighbours, and that the law works far more practically if you don't try to legislate speech.
"Your goal, then, is to lower the expected average truth value of all public statements."
No, my goal is to have freedom of speech, and have the side benefit of helping people realize that, disincentives or not, public statements are not inherently trustable. Your argument is interesting, but I am skeptical that the best way to create trust is with legislation. Furthermore, it runs into many practical difficulties like having to decide "what is truth?"
"Your passion makes me wonder if you are not perhaps the victim of a prior, justified slander."
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has publically maligned me, justified or otherwise.
I'd call it frivolous claims, myself, but whatever floats your boat. :)
1. Someone can do that anyway. A payphone and a friend with an unrecognized voice is likely plenty anonymous if they wish to avoid punishment.
2. Before an investigation is started, they should probably ask for evidence.
3. If this kind of speech was protected, they'd be MORE likely to ask for evidence than less since they'd (hopefully) realize that anyone can publically say anything about anyone, and that without evidence such a claim is worthless.
4. A public claim of child molestation should, IMHO, generally be ignored unless it is accompanied by an attempt to subject you to the law. If such an attempt is made, and deemed to be frivolous, then the claimant should be punished for making a frivolous claim.
So yes, I feel that this kind of speech should be protected, and that people should require evidence before believing controversial claims, and that protecting this kind of speech would encourage people to think a bit more.
Well, I'd be flattered if Google cared that much about me... But more importantly, if that protection didn't exist, perhaps more people wouldn't automatically assume everything they read in the media is true and would actually learn some level of critical thinking. In other words, you are correct, I don't want protection from that under the law.
What part of "I wouldn't care" don't you understand?
"Prior restraint" is a silly and artificial distinction. Penalties, whether they are fines, jail, or execution, are always going to be after the fact unless governments start preemptively cutting out peoples' vocal cords.
Also, whether or not the Supreme Court has ruled that there are different levels of freedom in speech doesn't change anything about my argument one way or another.
What ISN'T a tricky issue is completely removing content-based censorship. It completely removes difficult questions like "what is truth?" and "what is obscene?" from the realm of the law.
"They refer to state coercion, particularly aimed at those who speak out against the state."
The terms have multiple meanings. Granted, you are correct that if you define free speech as a lack of retaliation for speech against the state, we're doing pretty well. But, you have to grant me that if you define free speech as "the ability to say anything you want without courts imposing penalties", we're doing significantly worse.
"it is important to recognize that speech can cause quantifiable damage"
I do recognize that. It is my feeling that if this damage was allowed to happen, the amount of damage it causes would go down quickly and far. It is important to recognize that preventing any kind of speech can cause damage too. Maybe it is not as easily quantifiable, but (IMHO, of course) it is plenty significant.
"If you object to all this, how would you do things differently?"
I would remove all censorship laws except for cases where people tried not to hear the message and couldn't (in other words, I would try to prevent spam, telemarketing, and some guy following you around yelling loudly into a megaphone, but all content would be allowed).
As I said in my previous post:
'I'm not saying these are necessarily things with no good side'
and
'Sure we might be able to speak more freely than some, but really, that makes me imagine more accurate slogans like:
"America: Not as bad as Saudi Arabia"'
Uh... Dude... Nobody is saying that any website was censoring posts, or that any business was censoring speech in its building. They can do what they please in that area.
... abridging the freedom of speech' then libel law should be unconstitutional, yes?
What happened here is that the courts granted a libel judgement against someone who posted on third-party websites. In order to do this, that means there must have been a law preventing her from freely speaking in these posts. Specifically, that area of law is called libel. Now, I don't know much about the origin of libel law, for all I know it might somehow be constitutionally protected too. But based on 'Congress shall pass no law
Am I the only one that thinks "A right to free speech" should include a lack of monetary penalties? Damn. By that logic, Saudi Arabia has free speech. You can say anything you want, you'll just face prison or execution. Perfectly free...
As for taking down material, she apparently posted the info on sites, and presumably no longer had access to remove it. If that matters.
I wouldn't care, although in the legal environment we're in I may try to exploit the situation for financial gain. Anyone who hangs out with me should realize it's BS. Conversely, it might help weed out the stupid ones. Mind you, there are other reasons not to post my info online, so I'm not going to.
In other words, "free speech" is not something we really have. Libel, hate speech laws, laws to prevent bomb threats etc, lack of rights at the border, censorship of TV/movies/etc for swearing and content, politicians choosing which media to speak to based on who casts them in a good light, anti-fraudulent advertising laws, hell even anti-spam laws, anti-noise laws, the list goes on and on... I'm not saying these are necessarily things with no good side, but they are all somewhat contrary to free speech. And it seems a bit silly to me to trumpet our wonderful free speech when it's not really there. Sure we might be able to speak more freely than some, but really, that makes me imagine more accurate slogans like:
"America: Not as bad as Saudi Arabia"
or
"Canada: We can say SOME things you can't say in Cuba"
*I* say: fuck censorship. Let anyone say anything they please. Maybe it'll help force people to realize that everyone biases things, and that they need to develop filters to figure out who to trust and when to trust them.
Yeah, like every other group in the world, most Americans are idiots. As such, there are going to be SOME poor smart people in third-world places that will be willing to solve these for money as long as they exist.
Hell, anyone else think maybe it'd be a good idea to drastically change the global economy ANYWAY?
While you are correct, it is also a dangerous path if ISPs DON'T make decisions for their customers' own good. One example that I think most will agree is a very good thing is not being an open relay, requiring customers to authenticate on outgoing mail, and enforcing limits on them. Sure there are legitimate uses that are impaired by this, but overall I'd be upset with ISPs that didn't do this.
Heh. I wish there was a "+1 stating the obvious that everyone else seemed to miss".
Personally I can't come up with a good reason to EVER use an ISP's e-mail address unless you're a total newb or an idiot that requires their tech support to explain how to use e-mail. I can see using their outgoing mail server, but that's a different story altogether. People, wake up: the main reason ISPs provide e-mail addresses is to make it more annoying for you to leave their service.