When the cell phone company hands you a phone without up-front payment it's because the cost has been rolled into the service bill. They get their money; the phone is certainly not free.
Really? That's all it took to nullify the purpose of the appeals process?
In that case our system is even more screwed up than we thought, and we have far larger problems than the president lowering a man's sentence.
Fortunately, the nullification only happened in your own little imaginary world and the rest of the US legal system continues at its normal pace of mediocrity.
In any case, again, the prosecution proved its case to a prejudiced jury. It was very clear that various members were out for blood, seeking to "do their part" to harm the Bush administration. Some proof.
He lied to the investigators? Really? Let's see the proof.
Sure the prosecutors managed to convince the jury, but as I said they were looking to be convinced. The said as much themselves.
But the prosecution's case was weak; their witnesses made statements just as incorrect as Libby's, so I suppose we should send them all to jail! I mean, they were under oath as well, and if we demand that Libby have a perfect memory then they should be held by the same standard.
Libby was probably innocent of all wrongdoing. As far as I can tell from the prosecution's case, the man most likely did not lie. They certainly didn't prove for certain that he did; they certainly didn't bring out any smoking guns.
In the end it was all just a circus played up by the Democrats to distract from their own extreme shortcomings, and an innocent man had to pay the price.
It's about right: the guy caught up in a political witchhunt--and convicted by a jury that was very vocal about its anti-Bush bias--should probably not face jailtime for what might have sincerely been an honest lapse of memory.
And it's not as if Bush pardoned him. He's still being held accountable, and the jury's virdict, as questionable as it is, is still being accepted.
No business model has a right to succeed. They succeed or fail based on the reaction of the market, whether they fill a need and get people to fork over cash.
The thing is, a person who follows the news closely and actually looks into the issues will see that most of these "scandals" are either smoke and mirrors or sensationalized far beyond any reason.
Sure there are a few little things, but that's going to be true of any group, and they're dealt with. Heck, compared to the last president the Bush administration is angelic! The political atmosphere of the time wasn't the same, though: Clinton's detractors fought with different tactics (for better or worse).
So yeah: if you follow the stories in the news without delving deeper you WILL get the sense that the Republicans and the White House are evil and corrupt, and that the economy is in terrible shape but getting worse. It's simply a heavily, heavily distorted image (sometimes 180 out of phase) of what's actually going on.
It just wouldn't work for a variety of reasons, and in the end you'd have a situation where instead of encouraging research as intended it's just kept away from those not paying.
We're not talking about GSM. If you must go that direction, then what we're really talking about is a subset of GSM.
We're talking about the iPhone, which is not a normal GSM phone. It has a variety of features that aren't part of GSM, and with those features comes a higher level of integration between the phone and the service provider.
There is no reason to assume, and certainly no reason to insist, that the iPhone will work like a normal GSM phone, then. It's simply not.
Anyone who thought they could get an iPhone without "appropriate" cellular service will also be disappointed to find out that the iPhone will not grant super-human strength either.
The iPhone has always been presented as part of a platform that included the cellular service. It was always tied tightly to the network. I don't know why anyone is surprised, then, that purchase of an iPhone comes with the network as well.
Email is, at its heart, best effort. It's the way the system was engineered, and so no changing of the situation, no administrative controls, and no overriding agreement makes any difference. You can make all the agreements and contracts you want, it doesn't make the email system guaranteed.
The engineering of email involves trust. One server trusts another to deliver the messages. Once the transmitting server hands the message off to the receiving, the transmitter forgets about it. It doesn't follow up, seeking proof that the message was properly handled, resending if it wasn't. It's sent and forgotten.
To put it another way, if you're talking about a system with guaranteed delivery then you're not talking about the email system most people refer to when they use the word.
And to be blunt, this is one of those times when reality just doesn't really care that you've assumed it to be different. So you have no other way to reach them, the world doesn't change to make that work out; instead you're just in trouble.
This entire argument is based on the hypothetical situation where you couldn't (for sake of argument, right?) get ahold of your doctor or lawyer over the phone or any other way.
That is just a ridiculous argument to propose.
Based on that you could start naming all sorts of similar hypothetical situations: say you could only get to your doctor through your neighbor's house, shouldn't you be allowed to walk through? You could only send him a message through a McDonalds hamburger but you had no money; shouldn't you get that burger for free? You could only contact him through CNN; shouldn't you receive free ad time to deliver your message?
In the end if you put yourself in a position where the only way to deliver a critical, "absolutely positively must go through" message is through a non-guaranteed medium such as email, you may be in trouble. Just don't do that.
According to the investigators, Clinton's closet was so full of skeletons that they couldn't figure out which to go after. They spent years trying to sort through the illegal activities trying to decide which subset to actually prosecute. The reams of paperwork they produced showed a man who had no respect for the law and who relied on his charm and political position to skirt regulators.
The actual prosecution came down to a matter of strategy: what would be the easiest to prosecute, most likely to win, and, frankly, damage the country the least. The prosecutors held back and made a bargain with Clinton and the other interested parties.
So no, the fact that they tried him for "just" lying shouldn't be taken as evidence that that's all he did. Even today new evidence and suggestions of past illicit behavior of Bill Clinton still come up from time to time.
The discussion is about whether there should be a right to exclude, and you tried to take the negative on that by bringing in the concept of scarcity
I did nothing of the sort. I jumped into a discussion about scarcity. If you want to talk to someone else about the right to exclude be my guest, but don't try to change it away from scarcity where it was always while I was in it.
Scarcity. Houses have real scarcity; music can only have the artificial scarcity attempted to be imposed upon it by politicians. It's that simple.
FIRST, this discussion is not about claiming the right to exclude. That is a separate issue entirely. The discussion is about the nature of the scarcity of ideas; whatever privileges arise from that scarcity is a different matter.
So no, I'm not claiming the right to exclude people from my house because such a claim is irrelevant. For you to assert that I AM making such a claim indicates that you fail to understand the matter at hand.
SECOND, you've set your entire argument around a insignificant analogy. Congrats! You've identified a similarity between the cases! That doesn't however, mean the analogy is relevant or telling. In this case, for example, it's neither. Analogies are tools to illustrate points but rarely points themselves.
THIRD, you're completely and utterly factually wrong in your last sentence. Appeals to scarcity can EASILY differentiate IP from real property. For proof you need look no further than the simple case of a house being used by one person at once versus a song being used by many at once. THAT is scarcity differentiating IP from real property.
Regardless of whether I'm using my house or not, there's only one of them and you and fifteen of your friends can't each have your own instantiation (for lack of a better term) of it at the same time.
Similarly, you and fifteen of your friends CAN each have your own instantiation of a movie regardless of whether I'm currently watching it as well.
Moral of the story? Whether or not I'm using something is a red herring.
I'd propose that such a right wouldn't be so much economically scarce but rather politically scarce.
Politicians create the scarcity of ideas, after all.
The contrast between scarcities rooted in the reality and those rooted in abstract political decree is the basis for the IP-related crap we're going through as a society.
IIRC it was using transactions and everying. A number of python- and database-experienced people took cracks at the codebase, but nobody could find anything that was being done wrong.
The spinning up of laptop harddrives at every chat message was a huge deal to some users, so they searched through the SQLite access options to see if some buffering was disabled or something.
They found articles and messages from the SQLite developers talking about how SQLite intentionally flushes Linux's disk buffers and how this was absolutely the right way to do things. It was weird. Very weird.
As for the thrashing, it was as if some huge library was being unloaded and reloaded into memory at every access. Perhaps it was something to do with the python SQLite library, I don't know, but again nobody could figure out anything that was being done wrong.
Eventually people started hacking their private copies to yank that functionality out of there.
As the example that's most burned into my brain, take the python jabber client.
The developers of the program, which was meant to be very lightweight, decided they needed SQLite to manage chatlogs. I mean, it's lightweight, right? And it gets such glowing reviews from EVERYONE. How could this go wrong? They put a good deal of work into setting this all up, and once they started making releases with SQLite various users started reporting problems.
Aside from the usability issues with people no longer being able to access their plaintext log files as they wanted to, many started finding basic performance of the client to be completely unacceptable. There were major memory use issues (I got to watch one computer thrash for ten seconds for every single message received) and, very irritatingly, a problem where the harddrive would be accessed every time anything was added to the database--a deal breaker for many laptop users.
This was all traced directly back to the use of SQLite, and it was determined that it wasn't a mistake on the part of the client's developers. The SQLite devs verified that it was SUPPOSED to act that way! They cited some weird, half-baked philosophical grounds for their design decisions.
Anyway, I left that Jabber client behind, as did many others, because the simple inclusion of SQLite had made it unusable. The devs had invested a lot of effort in moving to the SQLite backend, and last I heard they were still trying to dig their way out.
Take it for what it's worth and all, but I have NEVER seen an SQLite installation that actually improved the project. If you really need an SQL database, bite the bullet and insist on a real one. Just think hard ahead of time about whether you actually need SQL in the first place. Lots of projects seem to be applying SQLite as a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Unfortunately I don't have moderator points at the moment; the troll moderation you received is completely unwarranted.
As you can see, SQLite is one of those darlings of the open source movement that aren't open to criticism. I HAVE used SQLite many times, and your concerns are certainly warranted whether or not they turn out to be significant. As the replies to your comment and moderation on it indicate, you're just not supposed to bring it up at all.
I know of three or four projects clinging to SQLite despite various problems it causes, some of which are deemed features. In these cases the DB has caused far more harm than good, but since the since has such a religious following it's simply not an option to drop it.
Firstly you've presented a gross oversimplification of the relationship between marketing, companies, and consumers while not actually saying anything in contradiction of his point.
More interestingly, though: you chose VISTA as your example? A product that, despite a huge marketing effort, is going nowhere?
The fundamental issue that I've never seen addressed concerns the security of the voter himself. Everyone is focused on encryption and security of the vote once it's been placed, but what I never see any discussion of is the following:
One major reason to have polling places is to attempt to guarantee a situation where a voter can go into a little room and cast his ballot without any threat and with deniability. There's nobody in the booth with him ensuring that he's voted the way he's been told or paid to vote.
Allowing people to vote from wherever they want MAY still grant anonymity, but we'll never be sure of the circumstances behind the vote. There could be a man with a gun or a checkbook watching the ballot being cast.
Even if all of the engineering and political challenges are overcome, this sort of voting has more fundamental issues that may not be solvable.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a hint: you don't get any phones for free.
When the cell phone company hands you a phone without up-front payment it's because the cost has been rolled into the service bill. They get their money; the phone is certainly not free.
Really? That's all it took to nullify the purpose of the appeals process?
In that case our system is even more screwed up than we thought, and we have far larger problems than the president lowering a man's sentence.
Fortunately, the nullification only happened in your own little imaginary world and the rest of the US legal system continues at its normal pace of mediocrity.
Actually I followed the trial pretty closely.
In any case, again, the prosecution proved its case to a prejudiced jury. It was very clear that various members were out for blood, seeking to "do their part" to harm the Bush administration. Some proof.
Ah, I see, you're looking for arguments that aren't being made.
Congrats! Now I'll go away and let you argue with yourself.
He lied to the investigators? Really? Let's see the proof.
Sure the prosecutors managed to convince the jury, but as I said they were looking to be convinced. The said as much themselves.
But the prosecution's case was weak; their witnesses made statements just as incorrect as Libby's, so I suppose we should send them all to jail! I mean, they were under oath as well, and if we demand that Libby have a perfect memory then they should be held by the same standard.
Libby was probably innocent of all wrongdoing. As far as I can tell from the prosecution's case, the man most likely did not lie. They certainly didn't prove for certain that he did; they certainly didn't bring out any smoking guns.
In the end it was all just a circus played up by the Democrats to distract from their own extreme shortcomings, and an innocent man had to pay the price.
It's about right: the guy caught up in a political witchhunt--and convicted by a jury that was very vocal about its anti-Bush bias--should probably not face jailtime for what might have sincerely been an honest lapse of memory.
And it's not as if Bush pardoned him. He's still being held accountable, and the jury's virdict, as questionable as it is, is still being accepted.
The Slashdot model? No.
No business model has a right to succeed. They succeed or fail based on the reaction of the market, whether they fill a need and get people to fork over cash.
The thing is, a person who follows the news closely and actually looks into the issues will see that most of these "scandals" are either smoke and mirrors or sensationalized far beyond any reason.
Sure there are a few little things, but that's going to be true of any group, and they're dealt with. Heck, compared to the last president the Bush administration is angelic! The political atmosphere of the time wasn't the same, though: Clinton's detractors fought with different tactics (for better or worse).
So yeah: if you follow the stories in the news without delving deeper you WILL get the sense that the Republicans and the White House are evil and corrupt, and that the economy is in terrible shape but getting worse. It's simply a heavily, heavily distorted image (sometimes 180 out of phase) of what's actually going on.
It just wouldn't work for a variety of reasons, and in the end you'd have a situation where instead of encouraging research as intended it's just kept away from those not paying.
We're not talking about GSM.
If you must go that direction, then what we're really talking about is a subset of GSM.
We're talking about the iPhone, which is not a normal GSM phone. It has a variety of features that aren't part of GSM, and with those features comes a higher level of integration between the phone and the service provider.
There is no reason to assume, and certainly no reason to insist, that the iPhone will work like a normal GSM phone, then. It's simply not.
This is old news and entirely expected.
Anyone who thought they could get an iPhone without "appropriate" cellular service will also be disappointed to find out that the iPhone will not grant super-human strength either.
The iPhone has always been presented as part of a platform that included the cellular service. It was always tied tightly to the network. I don't know why anyone is surprised, then, that purchase of an iPhone comes with the network as well.
Email is, at its heart, best effort. It's the way the system was engineered, and so no changing of the situation, no administrative controls, and no overriding agreement makes any difference. You can make all the agreements and contracts you want, it doesn't make the email system guaranteed.
The engineering of email involves trust. One server trusts another to deliver the messages. Once the transmitting server hands the message off to the receiving, the transmitter forgets about it. It doesn't follow up, seeking proof that the message was properly handled, resending if it wasn't. It's sent and forgotten.
To put it another way, if you're talking about a system with guaranteed delivery then you're not talking about the email system most people refer to when they use the word.
And to be blunt, this is one of those times when reality just doesn't really care that you've assumed it to be different. So you have no other way to reach them, the world doesn't change to make that work out; instead you're just in trouble.
This entire argument is based on the hypothetical situation where you couldn't (for sake of argument, right?) get ahold of your doctor or lawyer over the phone or any other way.
That is just a ridiculous argument to propose.
Based on that you could start naming all sorts of similar hypothetical situations: say you could only get to your doctor through your neighbor's house, shouldn't you be allowed to walk through? You could only send him a message through a McDonalds hamburger but you had no money; shouldn't you get that burger for free? You could only contact him through CNN; shouldn't you receive free ad time to deliver your message?
In the end if you put yourself in a position where the only way to deliver a critical, "absolutely positively must go through" message is through a non-guaranteed medium such as email, you may be in trouble. Just don't do that.
Ha.
According to the investigators, Clinton's closet was so full of skeletons that they couldn't figure out which to go after. They spent years trying to sort through the illegal activities trying to decide which subset to actually prosecute. The reams of paperwork they produced showed a man who had no respect for the law and who relied on his charm and political position to skirt regulators.
The actual prosecution came down to a matter of strategy: what would be the easiest to prosecute, most likely to win, and, frankly, damage the country the least. The prosecutors held back and made a bargain with Clinton and the other interested parties.
So no, the fact that they tried him for "just" lying shouldn't be taken as evidence that that's all he did. Even today new evidence and suggestions of past illicit behavior of Bill Clinton still come up from time to time.
Or unless you're spewing anti-Bush rhetoric that the Senators (and the media) salivate to hear...
The discussion is about whether there should be a right to exclude, and you tried to take the negative on that by bringing in the concept of scarcity
I did nothing of the sort. I jumped into a discussion about scarcity. If you want to talk to someone else about the right to exclude be my guest, but don't try to change it away from scarcity where it was always while I was in it.
Scarcity. Houses have real scarcity; music can only have the artificial scarcity attempted to be imposed upon it by politicians. It's that simple.
And for that matter how do you make a grilled cheese sandwich?
Your argument is flawed for a variety of reasons.
FIRST, this discussion is not about claiming the right to exclude. That is a separate issue entirely. The discussion is about the nature of the scarcity of ideas; whatever privileges arise from that scarcity is a different matter.
So no, I'm not claiming the right to exclude people from my house because such a claim is irrelevant. For you to assert that I AM making such a claim indicates that you fail to understand the matter at hand.
SECOND, you've set your entire argument around a insignificant analogy. Congrats! You've identified a similarity between the cases! That doesn't however, mean the analogy is relevant or telling. In this case, for example, it's neither. Analogies are tools to illustrate points but rarely points themselves.
THIRD, you're completely and utterly factually wrong in your last sentence. Appeals to scarcity can EASILY differentiate IP from real property. For proof you need look no further than the simple case of a house being used by one person at once versus a song being used by many at once. THAT is scarcity differentiating IP from real property.
Economically.
Regardless of whether I'm using my house or not, there's only one of them and you and fifteen of your friends can't each have your own instantiation (for lack of a better term) of it at the same time.
Similarly, you and fifteen of your friends CAN each have your own instantiation of a movie regardless of whether I'm currently watching it as well.
Moral of the story? Whether or not I'm using something is a red herring.
I'd propose that such a right wouldn't be so much economically scarce but rather politically scarce.
Politicians create the scarcity of ideas, after all.
The contrast between scarcities rooted in the reality and those rooted in abstract political decree is the basis for the IP-related crap we're going through as a society.
IIRC it was using transactions and everying. A number of python- and database-experienced people took cracks at the codebase, but nobody could find anything that was being done wrong.
The spinning up of laptop harddrives at every chat message was a huge deal to some users, so they searched through the SQLite access options to see if some buffering was disabled or something.
They found articles and messages from the SQLite developers talking about how SQLite intentionally flushes Linux's disk buffers and how this was absolutely the right way to do things. It was weird. Very weird.
As for the thrashing, it was as if some huge library was being unloaded and reloaded into memory at every access. Perhaps it was something to do with the python SQLite library, I don't know, but again nobody could figure out anything that was being done wrong.
Eventually people started hacking their private copies to yank that functionality out of there.
As the example that's most burned into my brain, take the python jabber client.
The developers of the program, which was meant to be very lightweight, decided they needed SQLite to manage chatlogs. I mean, it's lightweight, right? And it gets such glowing reviews from EVERYONE. How could this go wrong? They put a good deal of work into setting this all up, and once they started making releases with SQLite various users started reporting problems.
Aside from the usability issues with people no longer being able to access their plaintext log files as they wanted to, many started finding basic performance of the client to be completely unacceptable. There were major memory use issues (I got to watch one computer thrash for ten seconds for every single message received) and, very irritatingly, a problem where the harddrive would be accessed every time anything was added to the database--a deal breaker for many laptop users.
This was all traced directly back to the use of SQLite, and it was determined that it wasn't a mistake on the part of the client's developers. The SQLite devs verified that it was SUPPOSED to act that way! They cited some weird, half-baked philosophical grounds for their design decisions.
Anyway, I left that Jabber client behind, as did many others, because the simple inclusion of SQLite had made it unusable. The devs had invested a lot of effort in moving to the SQLite backend, and last I heard they were still trying to dig their way out.
Take it for what it's worth and all, but I have NEVER seen an SQLite installation that actually improved the project. If you really need an SQL database, bite the bullet and insist on a real one. Just think hard ahead of time about whether you actually need SQL in the first place. Lots of projects seem to be applying SQLite as a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Unfortunately I don't have moderator points at the moment; the troll moderation you received is completely unwarranted.
As you can see, SQLite is one of those darlings of the open source movement that aren't open to criticism. I HAVE used SQLite many times, and your concerns are certainly warranted whether or not they turn out to be significant. As the replies to your comment and moderation on it indicate, you're just not supposed to bring it up at all.
I know of three or four projects clinging to SQLite despite various problems it causes, some of which are deemed features. In these cases the DB has caused far more harm than good, but since the since has such a religious following it's simply not an option to drop it.
Sorry, man.
Firstly you've presented a gross oversimplification of the relationship between marketing, companies, and consumers while not actually saying anything in contradiction of his point.
More interestingly, though: you chose VISTA as your example? A product that, despite a huge marketing effort, is going nowhere?
Good job.
The fundamental issue that I've never seen addressed concerns the security of the voter himself. Everyone is focused on encryption and security of the vote once it's been placed, but what I never see any discussion of is the following:
One major reason to have polling places is to attempt to guarantee a situation where a voter can go into a little room and cast his ballot without any threat and with deniability. There's nobody in the booth with him ensuring that he's voted the way he's been told or paid to vote.
Allowing people to vote from wherever they want MAY still grant anonymity, but we'll never be sure of the circumstances behind the vote. There could be a man with a gun or a checkbook watching the ballot being cast.
Even if all of the engineering and political challenges are overcome, this sort of voting has more fundamental issues that may not be solvable.