You *poor dears*. Really.
I can manage to make it through every month on 40GB... But then Americans aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
You wasteful slob! I managed to make it through most of my life in the 1970s and 80s on less than 40GB total! But then people from whatever country you are from aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
But seriously, bandwidth isn't a finite resource like food or water or oil. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to the stone-age because a handful of media-corporations wish to control the flow of information while raking in boatloads of cash. Your attitude only helps them.
I'm fine with schemes like this provided the ISP makes it perfectly clear and obvious when you sign up what your download limitations are and the costs of running over. This allows consumers to make an educated choice about which provider they want to use. Unfortunately, I see this being shoved in the fine print while still advertising "unlimited" internet access. I mean, we are dealing with telecom companies here. I know my bill is a surprise about every other month after all the "taxes and fees" are tacked on to the advertised base price...
That's all well and good in markets where customers actually have a choice. In the markets where the options are Cable Company A or dial-up, the heavy internet-usage customers lose out and end up paying the exorbitant price of $1 per gigabyte.
I would like to add my 0.02. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 about a month ago due to getting a new pc with an intel ich - 10 (or whatever) chipset where hardy (the great stable one) wouldn't recognise my hard drive (pain in the arse).
So I installed intrepid and in the beginning there were constant application crashes, nvidia issues, then my wireless card stopped working and I couldn't even compile serialmonkey's drivers!
But now I am siting pretty, new vlc, new gnome, new gimp, open office 3.0 (from a ppa repo), new deluge... its all great. Nvidia drivers work flawlessly and I even got 2 screens working (a 22 inch samsung and a CRT TV) without manually editting xorg.conf!! (amazing!). Virtualbox runs in seamless mode so I can use the few windows apps I can't live without (mostly for Uni) and... its really great!
So in conclusion, if you want the latest and greatest free software then I highly recommend that you try Ubuntu 8.10, it works fabulously for me. If you want a super stable free software OS then use 8.04.1.
Wow thanks for the tip, Captain Obvious!
To sum up your experience, the new Ubuntu release in pre-beta state is unstable and has some bugs, while the older officially released Ubuntu is stable and reliable. Shocking!
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation?;-)
A subtle "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" poke. Haha.
It doesn't matter what kind of pictures he takes with him on vacation. He doesn't want a bunch of random law enforcement officials looking at his private pictures. Understandably.
RTFA = what simon says is that because Australia has download caps it's not an issue.
Which is bullshit because net neutrality isn't really about bandwidth congestion; it's about money and control. The big telecoms want the internet to be more like cable television, and a "tiered" internet is their way of implementing it.
Never listen to Australians/New Zealanders when they start babbling about the internet and ISP policies. Their argument always boils down to this: We have crappy expensive internet service so therefore the rest of the world should too.
If they had their druthers everyone would be on dial-up with a download cap of 1 gig a month.
Also, if you guys have ten times as much bandwidth as us, you'll make websites loaded down with useless Flash and vidcasts which are ten times bigger, you'll write operating systems which are blithely unaware that Internet is not a free commodity for some of us and have no concept of restricting transmissions to the necessary, and we'll get locked out of the Web by all your bloat.
This is precisely the attitude I was talking about. You want less flash and vidcasts on the internet? Perhaps you'd like it if there were no pictures on the internet either? We could all ditch World of Warcraft type MMORPGs and start playing text-based adventure games again. Living within our means! Restraint! Progress is for losers, right?
I agree that it may be in the best interest for broadband speeds to be roughly the same worldwide, but here's an idea: instead of restricting the rest of the world to the pitiful rubber-banded system of tubes you have in Australia that you call the internet, how about you invest in some damn infrastructure and play a little catch up with the rest of us?!? Sheesh.
It's just basic fairness. You should pay for what you use. Don't sweep use costs under the carpet of hidden externalities. The same principle underlies good economics, good ecology, and good neighbourliness.
Ted Stevens was bought by Big Cable, but he was right, as far as he went, and it won't help to mock him. The Internet *is* a series of data pipes with finite bandwidth, and that needs to be paid by someone. Should really be local user-owned broadband cooperatives rather than profit-driven companies, but even then it'll cost you a nonzero amount to move packets, and it should.
Yes, because right now, all ISPs in the US and UK are operating at a tremendous loss. Oh wait, they're not. Packets are being moved and paid for in their giant tubes right now. There's no reason to limit everyone worldwide to Australia/NZ levels of dark-age connectivity.
250 GB is not "just greedy" if the infrastructure is in place and the bandwidth is otherwise going to sit there unused.
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
Seems like the same concept should apply here. You have a repository for storing things that is protected by a lock and key. Now, clearly they can get a warrant to open the safe by force, but that isn't always feasible when it comes to encryption. When it comes to a physical lock and key, can they compel you to cough up the key?
No. They can't force you to divulge the location of the key. They can search all they want, but they can't force you to tell them where it is.
Judge is an idiot, not the point of the fith amendment. To protect you from FORCED FALSE testimony, that is why we have the fith ammendment. Testimony under duress was not to be trusted, and people could be forced (or even signatures forged) to sign confession documents that are false. When FALSE testimony can be ruled out, for example if the encryption key works or not,the fith ammendment should not apply. The Judicial branch is lucky the executive and legislative branch have not used a creative interpetation of "treason" to target activist judges.
Good lord, I hope you are too young to vote. Since you dislike "activist judges" I assume you prefer judges who are strict constructionalists. How in the hell would you interpret this in any other way than a defendant doesn't have testify in his own trial?
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
The ruling had tipped the balance in the opposite extreme, allowing the exploitation and abuse of real children to achieve legal profitability online through a technicality.
In the latest SCOTUS case that we are referring to, US v. Williams, Souter mentions in his dissent that the government was unable to come up with one example of this actually occurring in the real world. It's a scare tactic Congress used to expand the definition of child pornography. In Souters own words:
Although Congress found that child pornography defendants
"almost universally rais[e]" the defense that the alleged
child pornography could be simulated or virtual, 501(10),
117 Stat. 677, neither Congress nor this Court has been
given the citation to a single case in which a defendant's
acquittal is reasonably attributable to that defense.
You're stilling missing the point about the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act. The pandering provision states that if you believe, or intend to make another believe that you possess child pornography, even if you do not possess that child pornography, or if its fake or virtual or nonexistent you violate federal law (I believe with a mandatory minimum of five years). Whether or not there are real child involved is irrelevant. US v. Williams was about the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act, and the court upheld it.
You are consistently missing the point. I'll try to make this as simple as possible.
It used to be: possession of pornography involving children was illegal.
It is now: possession of anything which is claimed to be pornography involving children is illegal.
See the difference? Now insert virtual pornography into the new definition. Suddenly it's illegal. It's the same trick, i.e. making material not involving actual children illegal, with a new twist. Suddenly the burden is on the possessor/distributor to correctly describe material as not involving children, rather than on the government to prove that the material involves real children.
It's dicta, not a "ruling" or a holding. I'll repeat: the Supreme Court did not overturn any portion of the PROTECT Act. In fact, they overruled the 11th Circuit which had found the pandering provision to be unconstitutional.
My original point remains correct: you can draw an "obscene" picture of minors and go to prison for it in the United States. In fact, it's even worse than that.
You should read the whole opinion and pay particular attention to what the court is saying with the pandering provision. There doesn't need to be any actual child pornography involved for a person to be put in prison; they simply have to believe, and make another person believe, that they possess child pornography. You can't get much closer to thought crime than that.
And that still doesn't bother you? That people could be thrown into prison because they possess drawn lolicon which they claim is real child pornography (who the hell knows the definition of that anymore), even though no actual children are involved? And all of this sanctioned and approved by the constitutional last line of defense, the supreme court? Some wingbat can be convicted on child porn charges even though he never actually possessed any child porn?!?
Don't let your desire for a perfect world interfere with recognizing reality. There's a big difference between "this should be struck down" and "this will be struck down".
This seems to be a common reaction to outrageous and common-sense-defying pornography and obscenity laws. People don't like to think it can actually be illegal to possess a drawing or computer-generated image, so they argue that it must not be true. People don't like to believe that it could actually be illegal to possess an image of a clothed child or illegal for a child to possess a sexually explicit image of themselves so they argue that it can't be true and ignore all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile the wheels of justice roll on.
Uh no, congress did not do that. Even if congress did do that you don't overturn a supreme court decision by writing another law. What congress did was more narrowly define what kind of child pornography is banned. It is now "such visual depiction is a computer image or computer-generated image that is, or appears virtually indistinguishable from that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." So if someone developed a image metrics child pornography, that might meet the standard of "virtually indistinguishable" and therefore be banned. A simple animation would not be.
Unless that simple animation was deemed obscene, which would still be illegal under the PROTECT Act.
It's already referenced a bit farther back in this slashdot article. By now it's modded up so it should be visible in your browser unless you've hacked your settings. So use your browser's find function to look for "Ashcroft".
Did you even read my post? Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition invalidated portions of the COPA Act in 2002. The PROTECT Act was passed in 2003 and again made certain drawings or computer-generated images of minors illegal in the United States.
The prohibition of virtual child pornography was overturned in the United States with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002). It is still illegal in the European Union however.
And congress went right ahead and prohibited it again in 2003 with the PROTECT Act.
Slashdot Mirror
I get 20GB here in New Zealand, for $40 USD~ per month... where do i sign up
In the US.
You *poor dears*. Really. I can manage to make it through every month on 40GB... But then Americans aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
You wasteful slob! I managed to make it through most of my life in the 1970s and 80s on less than 40GB total! But then people from whatever country you are from aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
But seriously, bandwidth isn't a finite resource like food or water or oil. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to the stone-age because a handful of media-corporations wish to control the flow of information while raking in boatloads of cash. Your attitude only helps them.
I'm fine with schemes like this provided the ISP makes it perfectly clear and obvious when you sign up what your download limitations are and the costs of running over. This allows consumers to make an educated choice about which provider they want to use. Unfortunately, I see this being shoved in the fine print while still advertising "unlimited" internet access. I mean, we are dealing with telecom companies here. I know my bill is a surprise about every other month after all the "taxes and fees" are tacked on to the advertised base price...
That's all well and good in markets where customers actually have a choice. In the markets where the options are Cable Company A or dial-up, the heavy internet-usage customers lose out and end up paying the exorbitant price of $1 per gigabyte.
Wow thanks for the tip, Captain Obvious! To sum up your experience, the new Ubuntu release in pre-beta state is unstable and has some bugs, while the older officially released Ubuntu is stable and reliable. Shocking!
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation? ;-)
A subtle "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" poke. Haha.
It doesn't matter what kind of pictures he takes with him on vacation. He doesn't want a bunch of random law enforcement officials looking at his private pictures. Understandably.
RTFA = what simon says is that because Australia has download caps it's not an issue.
Which is bullshit because net neutrality isn't really about bandwidth congestion; it's about money and control. The big telecoms want the internet to be more like cable television, and a "tiered" internet is their way of implementing it.
Never listen to Australians/New Zealanders when they start babbling about the internet and ISP policies. Their argument always boils down to this: We have crappy expensive internet service so therefore the rest of the world should too.
If they had their druthers everyone would be on dial-up with a download cap of 1 gig a month.
Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers
That's about the only "improvement" that KDE4 offers.
Also, if you guys have ten times as much bandwidth as us, you'll make websites loaded down with useless Flash and vidcasts which are ten times bigger, you'll write operating systems which are blithely unaware that Internet is not a free commodity for some of us and have no concept of restricting transmissions to the necessary, and we'll get locked out of the Web by all your bloat.
This is precisely the attitude I was talking about. You want less flash and vidcasts on the internet? Perhaps you'd like it if there were no pictures on the internet either? We could all ditch World of Warcraft type MMORPGs and start playing text-based adventure games again. Living within our means! Restraint! Progress is for losers, right?
I agree that it may be in the best interest for broadband speeds to be roughly the same worldwide, but here's an idea: instead of restricting the rest of the world to the pitiful rubber-banded system of tubes you have in Australia that you call the internet, how about you invest in some damn infrastructure and play a little catch up with the rest of us?!? Sheesh.
Yes, because right now, all ISPs in the US and UK are operating at a tremendous loss. Oh wait, they're not. Packets are being moved and paid for in their giant tubes right now. There's no reason to limit everyone worldwide to Australia/NZ levels of dark-age connectivity.
250 GB is not "just greedy" if the infrastructure is in place and the bandwidth is otherwise going to sit there unused.
you are complaining about 250Gb?!? jeez, In Aus I have to pay $120/month (~$100US) for 25gb onpeak, 40gb offpeak ( that's 65gb/month for those of you who suck at math). I WISH I was in a position to bitch about 250gb/month.
Here we go... here come the Australians who inevitably pop into internet usage cap threads with their "In Australia we pay $500 a day for 10 mb up and down transfer... you should be happy with the restrictions your ISP is placing on you."
Dammit Australia, just because you have crap internet, the rest of the world shouldn't have to accept it!
Seems like the same concept should apply here. You have a repository for storing things that is protected by a lock and key. Now, clearly they can get a warrant to open the safe by force, but that isn't always feasible when it comes to encryption. When it comes to a physical lock and key, can they compel you to cough up the key?
No. They can't force you to divulge the location of the key. They can search all they want, but they can't force you to tell them where it is.
Judge is an idiot, not the point of the fith amendment. To protect you from FORCED FALSE testimony, that is why we have the fith ammendment. Testimony under duress was not to be trusted, and people could be forced (or even signatures forged) to sign confession documents that are false. When FALSE testimony can be ruled out, for example if the encryption key works or not,the fith ammendment should not apply. The Judicial branch is lucky the executive and legislative branch have not used a creative interpetation of "treason" to target activist judges.
Good lord, I hope you are too young to vote. Since you dislike "activist judges" I assume you prefer judges who are strict constructionalists. How in the hell would you interpret this in any other way than a defendant doesn't have testify in his own trial?
The ruling had tipped the balance in the opposite extreme, allowing the exploitation and abuse of real children to achieve legal profitability online through a technicality.
In the latest SCOTUS case that we are referring to, US v. Williams, Souter mentions in his dissent that the government was unable to come up with one example of this actually occurring in the real world. It's a scare tactic Congress used to expand the definition of child pornography. In Souters own words:
You're stilling missing the point about the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act. The pandering provision states that if you believe, or intend to make another believe that you possess child pornography, even if you do not possess that child pornography, or if its fake or virtual or nonexistent you violate federal law (I believe with a mandatory minimum of five years). Whether or not there are real child involved is irrelevant. US v. Williams was about the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act, and the court upheld it.
Seriously, read the case, or at least a summary.
You are consistently missing the point. I'll try to make this as simple as possible.
It used to be: possession of pornography involving children was illegal.
It is now: possession of anything which is claimed to be pornography involving children is illegal.
See the difference? Now insert virtual pornography into the new definition. Suddenly it's illegal. It's the same trick, i.e. making material not involving actual children illegal, with a new twist. Suddenly the burden is on the possessor/distributor to correctly describe material as not involving children, rather than on the government to prove that the material involves real children.
clearer now?
It's dicta, not a "ruling" or a holding. I'll repeat: the Supreme Court did not overturn any portion of the PROTECT Act. In fact, they overruled the 11th Circuit which had found the pandering provision to be unconstitutional.
My original point remains correct: you can draw an "obscene" picture of minors and go to prison for it in the United States. In fact, it's even worse than that.
You should read the whole opinion and pay particular attention to what the court is saying with the pandering provision. There doesn't need to be any actual child pornography involved for a person to be put in prison; they simply have to believe, and make another person believe, that they possess child pornography. You can't get much closer to thought crime than that.
You also realize the Supreme Court upheld the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act and didn't overturn anything, right? Looks like you were wrong.
And that still doesn't bother you? That people could be thrown into prison because they possess drawn lolicon which they claim is real child pornography (who the hell knows the definition of that anymore), even though no actual children are involved? And all of this sanctioned and approved by the constitutional last line of defense, the supreme court? Some wingbat can be convicted on child porn charges even though he never actually possessed any child porn?!?
Does that seem acceptable to you?
Don't let your desire for a perfect world interfere with recognizing reality. There's a big difference between "this should be struck down" and "this will be struck down".
This seems to be a common reaction to outrageous and common-sense-defying pornography and obscenity laws. People don't like to think it can actually be illegal to possess a drawing or computer-generated image, so they argue that it must not be true. People don't like to believe that it could actually be illegal to possess an image of a clothed child or illegal for a child to possess a sexually explicit image of themselves so they argue that it can't be true and ignore all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile the wheels of justice roll on.
Yes, you can. Of course, it must be a depictation of an actual existing minor. A made up one doesn't count and is protected under the first amendment.
And where pray tell, did you get this information from? I see that no where in the PROTECT Act language.
Regardless, do you think it's acceptable that if I draw Britney Spear's younger sister in a sexual situation I should face criminal penalties?
Do you want to be the test case? Sitting in federal prison for a few years hoping it will reach the SCOTUS?
Uh no, congress did not do that. Even if congress did do that you don't overturn a supreme court decision by writing another law. What congress did was more narrowly define what kind of child pornography is banned. It is now "such visual depiction is a computer image or computer-generated image that is, or appears virtually indistinguishable from that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." So if someone developed a image metrics child pornography, that might meet the standard of "virtually indistinguishable" and therefore be banned. A simple animation would not be.
Unless that simple animation was deemed obscene, which would still be illegal under the PROTECT Act.
It's already referenced a bit farther back in this slashdot article. By now it's modded up so it should be visible in your browser unless you've hacked your settings. So use your browser's find function to look for "Ashcroft".
Did you even read my post? Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition invalidated portions of the COPA Act in 2002. The PROTECT Act was passed in 2003 and again made certain drawings or computer-generated images of minors illegal in the United States.
The prohibition of virtual child pornography was overturned in the United States with Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002). It is still illegal in the European Union however.
And congress went right ahead and prohibited it again in 2003 with the PROTECT Act.
Maybe you should read the case finding that provision unconstitutional?
How about you find it for us. I bet you can't.
You're mixing up your "think of the children" laws. You're thinking of COPA.