We can still sue the fuckers, if they are found to be in violation of the Constitution.
The Constitution trumps contract law. They can put in as many clauses as they like, including "we reserve the right to come to your house uninvited, rifle through your things, drink all the beer in your fridge, and kill your dog, and in the event that we do, you immediately owe us $600 in Dog Killing Fees," but that clause would immediately be struck down by the courts if they ever exercised it.
Yeah, you're right. I overhyped the little guy there. I don't think you should have to subsidize him; there's nothing wrong with classes of service. But Joe isn't part of a peering agreement with a backbone, he's an end user purchasing access. Network Neutrality usually refers to neutrality between peers on the backbone, and the backbone shouldn't have classes of service.
But one of the other possibilities is that Joe is not a little guy, but another HugeISP. And let's also imagine (for the sake of argument of course) that both of you are also content providers, like... say... Comcast. Without network neutrality legislation, you would be able to actively slow down Joe's connection to your customers. So when DragonHawkTV streams faster than JoeTV for your customers, regardless of the capital Joe has poured into his TV service, how is that a fair market? Remember that laissez-faire markets also assume that the firms operate independently of one another. When they're all part of a giant mesh network, that doesn't happen.
It seems to me that there are really two mutually exclusive options for ISPs/backbone providers: either they are common carriers, or they aren't. If they are, they cannot differentiate their traffic based on provider and are network neutral. However, if they're not, then they are responsible for the data across their network (including all the nastiness that gets sent across the internet; a litigation nightmare). Right now the major backbone providers get the best of both worlds: they're not held to the standards of a common carrier because they're not classified as one, but they are also immune from prosecution for the data on their network. THAT'S the underlying problem with network neutrality. The ISPs are getting a free ride from litigation, they are allowed to operate as monopolists, they also own the backbone, and no one cries foul when they intentionally block traffic from their competitors (as an example, try using Vonage or Skype on Comcast and contrast with Comcast's own VOIP offering, which is much clearer). And that's not right.
I agree that regulation in general is bad, but not every situation can be solved with a free market. Several conditions need to apply, including the capability for competition and entry, which can't happen in the natural monopoly situation of wired networks.
I've explained my thoughts on this before, so I will point you to my previous post.
American public funds it, but placing it into public domain -- as GGP poster wants -- would make it automatically freely available to the rest of the world too. There are many parts of the rest of the world (in fact, many of the places where making things is easy) that don't give a rat's ass about American IP laws, and would just take it anyway. I don't think placing it in the public domain will change much globally.
Rarely we will receive an email from a doctor / researcher in Bumbletown, Argentina asking "Can you send me article from 1997 in X journal, they want $399 USD for an archive copy," I have a patient with this reported disease, etc.
They get a.pdf attachment in reply. Expect a call from the JIAA's lawyers shortly.
Yeah, they sure did purchase that property legally.
With a government-granted monopoly over a municipality, and with government-granted rights to bury their legally-purchased property under other people's legally-purchased property.
I think if you are going to be given special rights by the government, then your responsibilities to that government (and ultimately to the people who are governed) are much higher than someone in a standard free-market scenario. It seems that the politicians have forgotten that little point, choosing instead to champion The Almighty Free Market, when in this market there is no such thing.
If the ISPs want to buy all the land their fiber is buried under, and the local government wants to allow more than one provider to do the same in the area, then they have a right to say "we can do whatever the hell we please with our property". I will just give them the heave-ho and move to a provider that gives me what I want. But since there is no competition, the telcos have a much higher responsibility to society than someone without a government-granted monopoly.
If you want to look at it from a backbone perspective, consider this: all of these major telcos are interconnected in a giant mesh, and it is impossible to get access to "The Internet" without crossing over between these providers. The internet is an end-to-end network; the stuff in the middle shouldn't be providing much other than access. So if Google is hooked up to Comcast, and has paid Comcast for fast access, but you're hooked up to Quest, and Google has not paid Quest, then Google will still be slow for you, which is unacceptable. And if we make sure that everyone pays everyone else for every connection, then it's just a giant payola clusterfuck where all the money ends up in the middle, and the little guy is squeezed out of the market.
Let's say you implemented the scheme you proposed to YouTube, and the content providers are happily paying you more money for faster pipes. The money is rolling in, and your profits are at an all-time high. Your shareholders rejoice. Champagne and caviar for everyone!
Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load. But the Microsoft site, which has a similar but inferior offering, loads almost instantly because Microsoft bought your fat pipe.
Joe could have been the next Larry/Sergey, but he was never given the chance. Suddenly, internet access is only the domain of the rich and powerful, and the little guy (who actually innovates, you understand) is squeezed out of the picture. The forces of market competition have given way to artificially high barriers to entry.
(Keep in mind, this is totally different from tiered service, which has "classes" of service based on datatype, not based on provider. So, for example, VOIP packets would be given a much higher priority than streaming video packets, which would be given a higher priority than HTTP packets. However, *everyone's* VOIP packets would get higher priority, not just Skype. And *everyone's* HTTP packets would be lower priority, instead of Everyone Except Yahoo and YouTube.)
Re:French cooking is like this too
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Chefs As Chemists
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· Score: 2, Informative
That story is actually attributed to the famous G.E. Electrical Engineer Charles Steinmetz, and the story was told by Charles Vest as part of the 1999 MIT commencement address.
I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.
You are absolutely right that there is a place for the type of service that Napster offers, and that they are being disingenuous with their marketing of it.
They need to emphasize in their marketing that people are not paying for the music, but rather for access to the music. Full-text article databases like EBSCOhost provide this same service: sign up for a monthly fee, and read any article in the database at any time, as much as you want. When you stop paying the subscription, you no longer have access to the articles. (Most people get their access through universities, so their payment is rolled into tuition, but that fact is orthogonal to the success of the business model, since lots of people pay for individual professional subscriptions as well.)
The difference in this case is that most of those full-text article databases offer their articles in plain text, html, or pdf format, all of which are very easily downloaded to a local copy, and which don't expire when you stop paying for access. This model works because a) new articles are coming out all the time and it's worth it to the subscribers to have access to the new stuff as well as the archives, and b) the article distributors are not nutjob control freaks who think their revenue stream will immediately dry up if they don't lock down the content Fort Knox-style. They give the subscribers what they want, how they want it.
I think Napster would do better if they copied the full-text database model, which has worked for years. This means no DRM, clearer advertising, and maybe bulk deals with universities or employers. If you stop worrying about the people who take your stuff and wouldn't have paid for it anyway, your revenues don't change and your blood pressure goes down.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2003 (check the userid). In my sophomore year, one of the cartoonists for the school newspaper wrote a couple of strips in which two of his characters, Gordon the Gnome and Hale the Snail, ran for student body president and vice president, respectively. The joke became an instant success since his strip included some very clever commentary and satire, and the jokes about a gnome and a snail winning an election hit home. Several other students picked up the torch and started posting campaign flyers around the school, and the whole thing picked up some steam. During the election itself, Gordon and Hale were written in as candidates by a large percentage of the voters, although not enough to win the election. I voted for 'em.
The next year, the cartoonist (Shachar Meron) and his buddy (Brian DePriest) actually signed up and got their names on the ballot as bona fide candidates, and were listed as "Gordon T. Gnome Meron" and "Hale T. Snail DePriest". They ran a full campaign, with the message "a vote for us is a vote for apathy", and that if they were elected they would immediately step down because they want no part of the ineffective student government resume-padding nonsense. They featured a campaign slogan of "C'mon. How much would it rule if we actually won?" There were 3 other candidates for president and 2 other candidates for vice president, most of whom were part of the established parties and who were angry at these upstart write-in candidates.
Gordon and Hale won with an astounding 40% of the vote each, and record voter turnout.
Fearing that the system had been roundly mocked (which, of course, it had), the school administration sprung into action to invalidate the election. They cited a rule limiting the amount of money a candidate could spend on campaigning, then calculated the advertising cost of all the column inches that the cartoon in the school paper used (which was following the election campaign closely, of course, since the characters were running). The administrators announced the day after the election that the theoretical cost of the comic strip space exceeded the amount of money a candidate could spend, and disqualified the cartoonist and his buddy. (In fact, the pair had claimed these column inches at a rate of $7/inch, a standard rate their competitors were paying, but the elections committee estimated the rate as $11/inch after the election, which put them over the $300 limit.)
The runners-up smugly took office and added a line to their resume, and life went on.
Gordon and Hale, we, the students of the University of Illinois, salute you as the holders of the shortest-lived presidential term in school history.
Edward Norton: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. That quote always bothered me, because it didn't reflect the real formula companies use.
The real formula has two more variables:
Then add the odds that not doing this recall will result in a national scandal, D, times the amount of money such a scandal will cost the company in lost sales, lost goodwill, and legal fees, E. A times B times C plus D times E equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. Like, for instance, if that lady when public as an anonymous source to the New York Times.
You need to take economics again. Inflation is defined as a devaluation of currency, which can happen by either price increases or money supply increases, or both. When the talking heads on CNN talk about "inflation", though, they are usually referring to changes in the Consumer Price Index.
Why would you pay for a program like that? Couldn't IT just hack up a perl script that pings a company server with a bunch of relevant data (traceroute, dns lookup results, whois data, whatever)? The script would run on network start and the server just logs the info somewhere until you grep for the stolen laptop id. Make it part of the standard company disk images.
Today an article may say "XYZ". Tomorrow it maybe, "AQY". So if I went to check the figure or fact a student placed in a paper... ...which is why style guides will tell you to add a "date accessed" section to your citation. You can also use the Permanent Link feature of Wikipedia. Print encyclopedias are version controlled with Edition numbers.
But what am I saying? When writing a research paper you would never, ever cite a single encyclopedia entry as a source for a fact or tidbit of information, right? *snicker, snicker*
Encyclopedias are a great way to point you in the right direction in your research. They are not, in fact, sources. This shouldn't even be an issue.
No one, of course, is going to discuss the idea that maybe your neighbor deserves to be able to check his e-mail without you clogging up the connection and that maybe the ISP has the obligation to ensure a good level of service for all of their users. Nope, none of that. Instead we've already decided that blocking any traffic for any reason is bad and is of course just like Chinese censorship and so Comcast must be the devil. Typical group think. That's not what most of us think.
I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass if Comcast limits BitTorrent use, filters anything they want, and generally cuts the balls off my connection. But they better goddamn well tell me ahead of time. And they better have a good reason other than "you filthy pirates are using up our bandwidth!"
Their advertisement states "You will get X Mbps of Unlimited Bandwidth!" When I don't get X Mbps of unlimited bandwidth, but instead get less because Comcast can't handle so many concurrent connections using up all X Mbps, then that's not my problem, it's Comcast's problem. They oversold. Boo-friggin'-hoo. (Truth-in-advertising laws make this illegal in most jurisdictions.)
Additionally, Comcast is a state-sponsored monopoly in most areas, and is trusted with promoting public good. Limiting people's connections on a whim instead of addressing the root problem (overselling bandwidth) is not in the public's interest.
Don't promise a certain speed and unlimited download if that's not really the case, and don't avoid monopoly infrastructure improvements to improve your bottom line. It's not breach of contract, and it's not censorship, but it's still illegal.
Let me try to lend you a hand: it's like already being on a phone call and having it dropped in the middle of your conversation. Over and over and over. Comcast doesn't do this.
But if you carefully tracked all instances of your almost accidents and actively worked to reduce their number and frequency by modifying your driving style, then statistically, your frequency of actual accidents would also decrease.
My local library only buys 10% of the books that it bought 8 years ago. And why would they have to, when the digital age has made tracking and requesting books through inter-library loan easier than ever?
I'll bet the collection at your local library is better than you think, when you compensate for the books that can be requested from other libraries in the network.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations! You're a moderate.
Welcome to the majority. Now if we could just get a majority of the majority to vote...
We can still sue the fuckers, if they are found to be in violation of the Constitution.
The Constitution trumps contract law. They can put in as many clauses as they like, including "we reserve the right to come to your house uninvited, rifle through your things, drink all the beer in your fridge, and kill your dog, and in the event that we do, you immediately owe us $600 in Dog Killing Fees," but that clause would immediately be struck down by the courts if they ever exercised it.
Contracts are only enforcable if they are legal.
Actually, it's an undead-serious story.
Yeah, you're right. I overhyped the little guy there. I don't think you should have to subsidize him; there's nothing wrong with classes of service. But Joe isn't part of a peering agreement with a backbone, he's an end user purchasing access. Network Neutrality usually refers to neutrality between peers on the backbone, and the backbone shouldn't have classes of service.
... say ... Comcast. Without network neutrality legislation, you would be able to actively slow down Joe's connection to your customers. So when DragonHawkTV streams faster than JoeTV for your customers, regardless of the capital Joe has poured into his TV service, how is that a fair market? Remember that laissez-faire markets also assume that the firms operate independently of one another. When they're all part of a giant mesh network, that doesn't happen.
But one of the other possibilities is that Joe is not a little guy, but another HugeISP. And let's also imagine (for the sake of argument of course) that both of you are also content providers, like
It seems to me that there are really two mutually exclusive options for ISPs/backbone providers: either they are common carriers, or they aren't. If they are, they cannot differentiate their traffic based on provider and are network neutral. However, if they're not, then they are responsible for the data across their network (including all the nastiness that gets sent across the internet; a litigation nightmare). Right now the major backbone providers get the best of both worlds: they're not held to the standards of a common carrier because they're not classified as one, but they are also immune from prosecution for the data on their network. THAT'S the underlying problem with network neutrality. The ISPs are getting a free ride from litigation, they are allowed to operate as monopolists, they also own the backbone, and no one cries foul when they intentionally block traffic from their competitors (as an example, try using Vonage or Skype on Comcast and contrast with Comcast's own VOIP offering, which is much clearer). And that's not right.
I agree that regulation in general is bad, but not every situation can be solved with a free market. Several conditions need to apply, including the capability for competition and entry, which can't happen in the natural monopoly situation of wired networks.
I've explained my thoughts on this before, so I will point you to my previous post.
They get a
Yeah, they sure did purchase that property legally.
With a government-granted monopoly over a municipality, and with government-granted rights to bury their legally-purchased property under other people's legally-purchased property.
I think if you are going to be given special rights by the government, then your responsibilities to that government (and ultimately to the people who are governed) are much higher than someone in a standard free-market scenario. It seems that the politicians have forgotten that little point, choosing instead to champion The Almighty Free Market, when in this market there is no such thing.
If the ISPs want to buy all the land their fiber is buried under, and the local government wants to allow more than one provider to do the same in the area, then they have a right to say "we can do whatever the hell we please with our property". I will just give them the heave-ho and move to a provider that gives me what I want. But since there is no competition, the telcos have a much higher responsibility to society than someone without a government-granted monopoly.
If you want to look at it from a backbone perspective, consider this: all of these major telcos are interconnected in a giant mesh, and it is impossible to get access to "The Internet" without crossing over between these providers. The internet is an end-to-end network; the stuff in the middle shouldn't be providing much other than access. So if Google is hooked up to Comcast, and has paid Comcast for fast access, but you're hooked up to Quest, and Google has not paid Quest, then Google will still be slow for you, which is unacceptable. And if we make sure that everyone pays everyone else for every connection, then it's just a giant payola clusterfuck where all the money ends up in the middle, and the little guy is squeezed out of the market.
Here's the evil:
Let's say you implemented the scheme you proposed to YouTube, and the content providers are happily paying you more money for faster pipes. The money is rolling in, and your profits are at an all-time high. Your shareholders rejoice. Champagne and caviar for everyone!
Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load. But the Microsoft site, which has a similar but inferior offering, loads almost instantly because Microsoft bought your fat pipe.
Joe could have been the next Larry/Sergey, but he was never given the chance. Suddenly, internet access is only the domain of the rich and powerful, and the little guy (who actually innovates, you understand) is squeezed out of the picture. The forces of market competition have given way to artificially high barriers to entry.
(Keep in mind, this is totally different from tiered service, which has "classes" of service based on datatype, not based on provider. So, for example, VOIP packets would be given a much higher priority than streaming video packets, which would be given a higher priority than HTTP packets. However, *everyone's* VOIP packets would get higher priority, not just Skype. And *everyone's* HTTP packets would be lower priority, instead of Everyone Except Yahoo and YouTube.)
That story is actually attributed to the famous G.E. Electrical Engineer Charles Steinmetz, and the story was told by Charles Vest as part of the 1999 MIT commencement address.
I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.
You are absolutely right that there is a place for the type of service that Napster offers, and that they are being disingenuous with their marketing of it.
They need to emphasize in their marketing that people are not paying for the music, but rather for access to the music. Full-text article databases like EBSCOhost provide this same service: sign up for a monthly fee, and read any article in the database at any time, as much as you want. When you stop paying the subscription, you no longer have access to the articles. (Most people get their access through universities, so their payment is rolled into tuition, but that fact is orthogonal to the success of the business model, since lots of people pay for individual professional subscriptions as well.)
The difference in this case is that most of those full-text article databases offer their articles in plain text, html, or pdf format, all of which are very easily downloaded to a local copy, and which don't expire when you stop paying for access. This model works because a) new articles are coming out all the time and it's worth it to the subscribers to have access to the new stuff as well as the archives, and b) the article distributors are not nutjob control freaks who think their revenue stream will immediately dry up if they don't lock down the content Fort Knox-style. They give the subscribers what they want, how they want it.
I think Napster would do better if they copied the full-text database model, which has worked for years. This means no DRM, clearer advertising, and maybe bulk deals with universities or employers. If you stop worrying about the people who take your stuff and wouldn't have paid for it anyway, your revenues don't change and your blood pressure goes down.
I have a similar story.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2003 (check the userid). In my sophomore year, one of the cartoonists for the school newspaper wrote a couple of strips in which two of his characters, Gordon the Gnome and Hale the Snail, ran for student body president and vice president, respectively. The joke became an instant success since his strip included some very clever commentary and satire, and the jokes about a gnome and a snail winning an election hit home. Several other students picked up the torch and started posting campaign flyers around the school, and the whole thing picked up some steam. During the election itself, Gordon and Hale were written in as candidates by a large percentage of the voters, although not enough to win the election. I voted for 'em.
The next year, the cartoonist (Shachar Meron) and his buddy (Brian DePriest) actually signed up and got their names on the ballot as bona fide candidates, and were listed as "Gordon T. Gnome Meron" and "Hale T. Snail DePriest". They ran a full campaign, with the message "a vote for us is a vote for apathy", and that if they were elected they would immediately step down because they want no part of the ineffective student government resume-padding nonsense. They featured a campaign slogan of "C'mon. How much would it rule if we actually won?" There were 3 other candidates for president and 2 other candidates for vice president, most of whom were part of the established parties and who were angry at these upstart write-in candidates.
Gordon and Hale won with an astounding 40% of the vote each, and record voter turnout.
Fearing that the system had been roundly mocked (which, of course, it had), the school administration sprung into action to invalidate the election. They cited a rule limiting the amount of money a candidate could spend on campaigning, then calculated the advertising cost of all the column inches that the cartoon in the school paper used (which was following the election campaign closely, of course, since the characters were running). The administrators announced the day after the election that the theoretical cost of the comic strip space exceeded the amount of money a candidate could spend, and disqualified the cartoonist and his buddy. (In fact, the pair had claimed these column inches at a rate of $7/inch, a standard rate their competitors were paying, but the elections committee estimated the rate as $11/inch after the election, which put them over the $300 limit.)
The runners-up smugly took office and added a line to their resume, and life went on.
Gordon and Hale, we, the students of the University of Illinois, salute you as the holders of the shortest-lived presidential term in school history.
The real formula has two more variables: Then add the odds that not doing this recall will result in a national scandal, D, times the amount of money such a scandal will cost the company in lost sales, lost goodwill, and legal fees, E. A times B times C plus D times E equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. Like, for instance, if that lady when public as an anonymous source to the New York Times.
And it might not be Vista, or even Windows, but Microsoft is also getting into the wristwatch game.
You need to take economics again. Inflation is defined as a devaluation of currency, which can happen by either price increases or money supply increases, or both. When the talking heads on CNN talk about "inflation", though, they are usually referring to changes in the Consumer Price Index.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
Why would you pay for a program like that? Couldn't IT just hack up a perl script that pings a company server with a bunch of relevant data (traceroute, dns lookup results, whois data, whatever)? The script would run on network start and the server just logs the info somewhere until you grep for the stolen laptop id. Make it part of the standard company disk images.
Seems pretty simple to me.
grunka-lunka-dunkity-donopolistic-practices...
Shut the hell up!
Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like "leveraging monopoly control in a market to increase marketshare in other markets".
That's illegal. Ask Microsoft.
But what am I saying? When writing a research paper you would never, ever cite a single encyclopedia entry as a source for a fact or tidbit of information, right? *snicker, snicker*
Encyclopedias are a great way to point you in the right direction in your research. They are not, in fact, sources. This shouldn't even be an issue.
I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass if Comcast limits BitTorrent use, filters anything they want, and generally cuts the balls off my connection. But they better goddamn well tell me ahead of time. And they better have a good reason other than "you filthy pirates are using up our bandwidth!"
Their advertisement states "You will get X Mbps of Unlimited Bandwidth!" When I don't get X Mbps of unlimited bandwidth, but instead get less because Comcast can't handle so many concurrent connections using up all X Mbps, then that's not my problem, it's Comcast's problem. They oversold. Boo-friggin'-hoo. (Truth-in-advertising laws make this illegal in most jurisdictions.)
Additionally, Comcast is a state-sponsored monopoly in most areas, and is trusted with promoting public good. Limiting people's connections on a whim instead of addressing the root problem (overselling bandwidth) is not in the public's interest.
Don't promise a certain speed and unlimited download if that's not really the case, and don't avoid monopoly infrastructure improvements to improve your bottom line. It's not breach of contract, and it's not censorship, but it's still illegal.
You have to go to Verizon for cell phone service.
But the government is working really hard on automobile safety!
They only get paid $100 if you don't wear your seatbelt, and a lousy $75 if you exceed the arbitrary speed limit. They're making sacrifices, dammit!
But if you carefully tracked all instances of your almost accidents and actively worked to reduce their number and frequency by modifying your driving style, then statistically, your frequency of actual accidents would also decrease.
That's why.
I'll bet the collection at your local library is better than you think, when you compensate for the books that can be requested from other libraries in the network.
Source code != documentation.
Go ahead, go check out a recent snapshot of the OpenOffice.org codebase, and use it to try and work out how to write a plugin for it.
Then go read the Developer's Guide [PDF warning!] and see how much easier it is.
Anyone who thinks the code alone is sufficient documentation has never contributed to a large project.