So, you wouldn't mind it if ATI created some altered drivers that were intentionally tweaked to give higher values in certain benchmarks (that they made) for their cards? It's one thing to optimize your search engine to produce the results you want. It's quite another to drop the actual search engine use and use a specialized one just so you get the desired results for a group of test cases. If their search engine is incapable of automatically returning the most relevant results, then they should fix that, not institute a hack. To do otherwise is entirely disingenuous.
Yea, it was clearly a conspiracy that prevented Michael Badnarik from being elected. Oh, were you talking about Kerry?
I'm sorry, but some people (like, say me) think that election laws should be fair, not just tilted one way or another so that my/"our" candidate wins. Some of us just like to accurately know what happened even if it has no meaningful effect on the results. Crazy, eh?
I'm not sure on the originator of the quote, but, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner." If the majority of people are felons, then democracy by itself will likely be a failure, felonies are being handed out much too liberally (like oversalting in cooking), and such a government should be a democratic republic. Ie, government shouldn't be in a position to be a predator of people because you can't guarantee that enough "good" people will be in power. Having said that, I'd like to state three things I believe.
One, if felonies do in fact have the potential strip the right to vote from a person, then all felonies should be labelled life sentences and juries should be a part of decided to strip that right away; juries should be made plainly aware and responsible for the punishment they dishing out.
Two, lists of sex offenders in the simplest case is a filter on public records. I'd even say it's reasonable that people know about the past felonies of others so they may be informed. But forcing a person to go door-to-door to announce it seems beyond the reasonable point. Communities should be responsible and do their own detective work. And people who have been let out of jail should gain the opportunity to start a clean life. If a state/jury is unwilling to offer that to such a person, they should clearly put them in jail for life and lay the responsibility of such a charge on the jury.
Three, punishment should begin and end at the prison gates. I doubt people will every agree to this, and that's why I stated belief one. But, letting people out on "terms" is wishy-washy. Juries should know the exact terms of punishment and be assured that the whole term is carried out. And they should recognize just exactly what that punishment is (5 years of prison is a long time, for example). Parole, probation, and worker-release should not exist. It is a great punishment in itself to be cast out of prison and find a job. But the borderline where state directed punishment ends should be clear.
You know, I'm not sure Dvorak is like that. Dvorak reminds me sort of Stern or Bush. Ie, sometimes to a great extent all three are blissfully unaware that what they're saying is ridiculous, sensational, and sure to cause a lot of otherwise sane people to go batshit crazy trying to support/deny their stated position. Yes, I'm sure some of its intentional, but I really think more than anything it's the ignorance of the person and the backing of their company/party that allows them to remain where they are. The only main difference I see is that Bush is the only one that has ordered the dropping of bombs and the death of people (you can't drop a bomb and expect to only kill the bad people). At least, that's my main excuse for not just ignoring Bush. Dvorak and Stern are powerless, so much easier to ignore.
Books are "owned" by publishers more than anything. Ie, it's still about companies and not "artists" trying to express themselves. If you want to see/read the most vile things imaginable, go pick up a good hardcore book. Of course, you could just as well find the word "fuck" in the middle of a book just for shock value.
And that wardrobe malfunction was totally out of line.
If you mean it was amoral for Janet to expose her breast (and I'm certain that she was in on it), just do what I do and don't buy music from Janet or watch the Super Bowl (while we're at it, just don't want live TV so you can be sure such is censored).
You can not say that if you do not like it you don't have to watch it. It was totally out of the blue and unexpected.
To ironically quote The Chase, "That's the risk of live TV." Yes, it's unexpected. But if you really don't want the unexpected, don't watch anything that doesn't have a script or is recorded live.
Even the most liberal nut case should respect the right of people to control what watch!
Being a non-liberal, I can't state if that's true or not. I can state that as a quasi-libertarian, I realize that you can't very well force the filtering out of information you don't want, especially if you have to see it to realize you don't want it (yes, you could create a whitelist, but good luck watching anything with that; a complex whitelist will very likely end up allowing a contradiction of what you are willing to watch).
Having said that, I respect the right of people to *try to* control what they see so long as doing so doesn't interfere with the freedom of others. That means being proactive and not watching live TV shows where unexpected things can happen if one of those unexpected things is something you don't want to see and will probably not be filtered out in time (ie, you end up being unable to control what you watch). Expecting the rest of the world to just conform to your will so you don't have to see what you don't want is absurd. And that's the step necessary for you to "control what you watch".
While we're at it, why not go to the extreme of banning all religious material on TV? I mean, if sex and cigs are detrimental to young people (and that's the main argument, since adults are supposed to be responsible for themselves), then I can't see how religious content could be stated to not be detrimental as well. I mean, look at how many violent acts have occurred under the guise of religion? And if you want to say that "it's not religion's fault" and "they were just using religion's name", I'd point out the same is true for sexual explicit material not being actually related to teens doing detrimental things involving sex.
PS: You can have morality without religion, so that angle is covered as well.
>In many small towns, intrusion into people's private lives would be simple, undetectable and sometimes even politically advantagous. How would you prevent this.
The same way you prevent it now with private companies? Ie, you don't really except hope that someone catches the company/government is doing it, and then they're punished. If the problem is punishing the people in government who do such, that's one of the problems that needs to be fixed.
>Many small poor communities and those just outside of various limits would have no access at all. How would you prevent this. Would you rely on the competitive process picking up the scraps which is served by no community.
What's providing small poor communities with internet now? Companies? As a result of regulation? Why's that have to change because some municipalities start offering service as well?
>As telecomms, companies must match a certain quality of service, do you believe that this quality would be improved by allowing numerous small communities be the primary access points for a service which we need more every passing day.
I think in some areas it'd improve and in others it'd not improve. The only way I see there being an innate worsening of quality of service is if telecomms are unable/unwilling to provide service to small communities because they can no longer rely on more densely packed municipalities to "subsidize" the cost to rural areas. Of course, telecomms could just charge more in rural areas. That's basically what you'd expect in the free market.
>how would you allow for a free and open intenet, when it would be so easy to implement 'community standards', both by actual blocking and by lowering the QOS to the point which it would be unusable.
I'm not sure. How are we holding it up now? So far there's been, I believe, three different obscenity censoring acts by Congress. As far as I'm aware, in the public and private sector the extent of all such acts has been overturning and content filtering at libraries and schools; as far as I'm aware, adults can request/demand the filtering be turned off but children cannot.
So, I'd begin to question why you believe that more public sector access would mean anything but maybe a law requiring that content filters be enabled by default unless an adult request them turned off. In fact, I'd assume that whether municipality ISPs are created or not, such regulation will be imposed on private ISPs at some point. Why? Because it's not like an ISP being a private company is going to slow down the crusade of "concerned parents" to force content filtering on as many people as they can. I don't see how the public sector will be any better except that there's a strong case for 4th amendment rights if a public sector ISP tries to do content filtering.
>Most of your solutions to the issues seem to include laywers, courts, and lawsuits. I agree that they will sue, and in the end communities will back off of these plans, leaving themselves to pay off huge legal bills, again with public money, not to mention the loss on much of the equipment. Are you a Lawyer, who's pocket isn't heavy enough, if not then do you believe that they need more money? Sometimes it's best to legislate before something becomes a problem.
Legislation is part of the problem. We legislate regulation to stop public ISPs. Then we legislate regulation to stop civil rights on private ISPs. I agree that all of this just leads to more lawyers being paid. And I don't see a solution to the problem, since we have idiots as politicians, elected by people who are obsessed with controlling what other people see. Short of a bloody revolt, the lawyers are going to be paid money one way or another. The only saving grace if it's a private ISP is that the only money from your pocket that goes through the ISP to laywers is either subsidies from taxes or whatever amount of money, if any, you pay them for service. So, choose a private ISP even if there is a public ISP available. And bitch if you're paying money to support the public ISP when not using it. Happy hunting with the lawsuits one way or another.
Sorry, I misread your original question. To answer your original question, there's no right answer.
Bypassing a technological measure is a crime in most cases, period. Bypassing a legal measure is called bribery. That's illegal too. I think the risk of getting caught for bribery is inversely related to the corruptness of a government. Assuming the US government as a basis, I'd say if I was able to bypass a legal measure, I'd almost certainly be in the position to not have to worry about further cases against me. Ie, I'd bribe the President and my state's governor. At worst, I'd be pardoned even if I somehow did manage to be charged. In fact, I'd probably intentionally try to get charged and the prosecutor would either be selected to ensure he'd fail to make his case, protecting me from double indemnity, or I'd still manage to be charged and somehow be pardoned.
Violation of the law, be it bypassing a technological measure or copyright infringement, and praying I don't get caught is obviously not at all involved. Sorry for going down that vein.
Legal measures. Copyright in the US doesn't stop piracy in the US or China. DRM at least takes some time to bypass (well, assuming you don't have an insider, which is sort of silly seeing how most piracy groups work).
Michael Badnarik, who was a Presidentical Candidate in 2004, was running under the Libertarian platform and specifically stated that he intended to remove the limited liability of corporations. Just an FYI.
Who owns the air, water, soil, etc? Everyone? Doesn't sound like the free market to me, where everything is owned and you're limited to only doing things which you own. Regulation is a midway point, trying to offer everyone the air, water, soil, etc at the cost of no one being allowed to misuse it in some excessive way, by either overuse or contamination. If the market was at work, I'd assume air, water, and soil would have been parceled out by now.
I would have included a line break if I had thought there was a good separation point. Sorry if that made my last post hard to read.
>>I'd guess that you could sue the government over the same basis >Make "government" plural, and times it by thousands, if not tens of thousands. Just the costs to the court systems would make the 'case' for regulation.
So, you're saying that in a competitive market with thousands, if not tends of thousands, of suppliers that court cases caused by them all being abusive will lead to regulation? I'm not sure exactly how you can jump to the conclusion that municipalities will be any different than every other ISP, except that municipalities will be locally elected and they may or may not be funded with tax dollars (almost all ISPs are funded by tax dollars thanks to the subsidies to lay down cable in the past).
>>This is, btw, one reason I believe that municipalities should have laid conduit long ago to let all sorts of companies lay their own wire, avoiding the need to dig up the ground every time a new company comes in to provide a new wire/service. >Have you ever seen a telephone pole? Cable, power, and yes telephone often run over these large outdoor 'conduits'.
Have you seen a telephone pole in Beijing? The use of telephones as a "conduit" plus the lax enforcement of requiring notification has resulted in a "rats nest" of wires with some drooping near all the way to the ground. The fact is, telephone poles really aren't that great as a conduit for this reason as well as the risks of damage by weather. Of course the argument could be said that underground conduits and fault zones don't mix, but fault zones are the exception throughout most municipalities.
So, I'd call telephone polls a weak conduit at best. They might make sense to connect municipalities together, but once you're in town it makes more sense to disperse whatever conglomerate signals you have into separate wires. Of course, maybe the answer is one wire to the door step then a box to split the wire into power, telephone, cable, etc. Even then, you'd likely want to be able to upgrade the conduits to homes from time to time. I'm just entirely sure if it's cheaper to lay down empty conduit now or to rely on replacing lines on telephone wires + the cost of repairing downed lines throughout the year.
>>It's just like the discussion of forcing proprietary/open source software on government by banning the opponent software. >How?
Municipalities are fundamentally about group efforts to do things. They're a community, just like the OSS community. At the same time, proprietary service companies are not owned by companies. So, the actors are analogous. The objective in question is providing a service instead of software, and how one group (proprietary) wants to ban the other (community) for their own benefit.
>Why?
Because banning something outright doesn't make sense. Forcing municipalities to compete with other proprietary firms sounds fine. But it doesn't sound like that's what's being discussed.
>the arguements for closed source software don't make any sense, while I believe that the agruments against direct government control of internet access do hold up.
Why doesn't the arguments for closed source software make sense? Well, fundamentally it has to do with cost/benefit. In most cases, the long term aspect of government means that they will continue to rely on the same thing for ages and thereby become dependent on software which they may or may not be updatable in the future. Even with open software, the cost to continuously update software can be prohibitive. The real objective then should be to find software that does its job well and doesn't need to be updated. When a new task arises, a new tools should be found. So, that adds on the requirement of flexible access to the raw data of any other tool used. So long as those requirements are met, OSS and CSS are able to adequately c
The real answer is to cut copyright to a much shorter term so that "abandonware" is no longer copyrighted. That way there's no question if it's "wrong" or not to be d/ling games created 5 years ago. This isn't to say I believe that with copyrights only lasting 5 years there'd be an end to piracy. But if copyright was 5 years, we wouldn't be having this sort of discussion for old games.
While I agree with your claim that "local decency groups" would likely try to censor such internet access, the fact is that the 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, and competing ISPs may or may not make this point moot. While the FCC may control broadcasting of shows over public airwaves, internet access is as much broadcasting as any other private communication is which means you're still stuck to the issue of the 1st Amendment not protecting "obscene material" (which is based on "community standards"). The 4th Amendment means that the government run ISP can't monitor your internet access without a warrant (private ISPs can at the risk of being sued over stuff they *don't* block; the logic is that if you check on anyone, you're responsible for checking on everyone, so you're liable for all the stuff you don't catch; I'd guess that you could sue the government over the same basis). Finally, just because the government is giving away free internet access doesn't mean people won't spend money on a more convenient/"free" access, just like municipalities providing water hasn't meant an end to bottled water or various soft drinks. It's just like the discussion of forcing proprietary/open source software on government by banning the opponent software. The best answer is to find the best solution, not try to ban competition so that one side exploits the law to their benefit while the other side suffers. Banning things should be a last resort, for natural competition solves a lot of problems. This is, btw, one reason I believe that municipalities should have laid conduit long ago to let all sorts of companies lay their own wire, avoiding the need to dig up the ground every time a new company comes in to provide a new wire/service. The wire might cost a lot, but getting the permission to dig up thousands to hundreds of thousands of peoples yards and just moving all that dirt costs a lot more.
Semi-wrong. You're charged $17.99 if you rent out 0 to 3 movies. There's no bearing on if/when you rented any one of those movies. The only real deceptions possible are not mentioning the rent-out limit or that movies are only available to you while you pay the monthly fee. I don't think I've clearly followed their ad campaign, but you're possibly right that some deception is going on. It's just a lie about late fees.
Sometimes, customers would call and bitch about it, but really, do you expect to be able to upload 100+ GB a month for CDN $40?
When it says "unlimited connection time", sure. It's not the job of the consumer to guarantee that Shaw Cable makes a profit or does anything economically sound. Or are you going to say that if a company decided to give away cars to 200 people they'd have some automatic right to later come demanding money after realizing that giving away 200 cars wasn't economically sound? If Shaw wasn't to bitch and moan so that people upgrade to a business package (which I'm guessing from the tone of things, is something for businesses which these people you're talking about aren't), then they can bug people all they want.
The truth is that Shaw, et al are monopolies or dualopolies (some areas have Cable and DSL, so there is at least some competition) to their areas, so they can push whatever Draconian service contracts they want such that Shaw can basically revoke service at its own discretion even when users are clearly falling within the scope of the spirit of the agreement. So, while the advertising might very well be fraud of some nature, the actual service agreement lets them do as they please. Personally, I just wish Shaw, Verizon, et al wouldn't lie and admit to users that there are limits, which probably only a handful of people are going to go over and for which Shaw, Verizon, et al will either revoke the account or cap it to fall within their defined guidelines. No, such an advertisement wouldn't be as "pretty", but then the truth often isn't pretty. That's no excuse to claim "common sense" lets you lie.
I think you're sort of missing the point. This "ideal world" as you put it is capitalism. The statement is being made under the understanding that Gates claims to be pro-capitalism and anti-communism (statements made by Gates or by Microsoft while he was CEO imply, if not directly state, these positions). Clearly, you intrinsically realize that such a system would not be beneficial to Microsoft. The post then is purely a statement of the hypocracy of being pro-capitalism when clearly Microsoft survives on a form of non-capitalism -- anti-piracy acts that enshrine copyright infringement as a criminal act is what, I would say, push copyright to being a form of communism.
Of course, maybe the poster really does want to dissolve copyright and have a purely capitalistic system. If that was the real intention, I'd state that Windows exists now, just as Bach's music exists now even though it's no longer copyrighted. While it may be the case that an absolvement would stop the development of Windows, I find that hard to believe given that computers are currently near everywhere and useless without software. So, development will be funded by someone (and probably several someones) until the point that operating systems, be it Windows or others, everyone needs are basically free (aka, commodity software).
So in short, the post is not advocating time travel and rewriting history. Windows in capitalism would be sold at commodity prices. And development would continue in some fashion because hardware is rather useless without software. Now, whether there'd be all sorts of economic collapse because Microsoft and more niche industries no longer have monopolistic government protection to insure repayment of development costs is a good point. To that end, I'd say that there's always the wealthy, be them individuals or companies, who fund projects for their own amusement that end up trickling down to everyone. And places on the internet, rare as they are, have shown that it's possible to barely skimp by on the revenue of ads when your copyrighted works are not reasonably sellable directly to customers (www.penny-arcade.com, et al).
People will probably still pay for the convenience of getting software/games on CD without copyright. So companies/people that want to be profitable with marketing to the mass media have to develop cheaply and create the loyalty that means not buying the "ripped off" CD for the $1-2 less. And I think I'll stop this little rant because I think you get the idea of how the world might change in the future from the abolishment of copyright.
Since I haven't heard the mp3 yet and only read the transcript, you can possibly take my suggestions on your comments with a grain of salt, as inflection is obviously left out of the transcripts.
Rob asks Martin about a pop-up blocker, and Martin talks about a pop-up blocker *and* how to override the pop-up blocker. I'd guess Roblimo took that as a jab at blocking all pop-ups blindly, since clearly not all pop-ups are ads. Ie, I got the impression Roblimo was saying that Firefox (IE's main competitor) has the feature too. The fact that IE was the first to have it as a bar wasn't mentioned or what Martin was apparently trying to point out. Ie, Rob just sounds a bit paranoid on how the statement could be misconstrued that Firefox lacked such a feature (yes, rather paranoid).
It was where Martin was going, if only to make a casual mention of. Roblimo saw an opportunity to consolidate another question into the discussion. I agree that cutting him off was bad especially when he was told that's not where he was going. Roblimo should have waited for him to finish his thought before asking the TCO question.
It sounds like you're being paranoid. While it's possible that's what Roblimo meant by the zero cost. I personally took it to mean that he didn't feel that an errant tagline he just thought up to be witty is worth any real monetary compensation. Short witty comments should probably be public domained because they didn't involve a lot of thought, and trying to horde them for personal gain seems rather amoral. Perhaps that's the whole fundamental basis for a lot of OSS?
"... They specifically avow that they are not fit for any purpose. So what's up with that?" is clearly part of the question. While Martin does explain that they've changed the EULA such that since November MS provides further indemnification (though my understanding is that it doesn't apply to small businesses or home users; if this is entirely untrue, I'd love to hear it), he tries to avoid the "Not fit for any purpose" clause of the EULA trying to claim that Windows isn't fit for *all* purposes. Maybe the EULA is just heavy legalize without any firm basis in reality, as would probably be proven if someone tried to sue over the "Not fit for any purpose" clause to get their money back, but all and any are two very different things. And you're right that the practice is industry wide, including OSS. But Microsoft was one of the pioneers of using EULAs at a time when the question of software copyright was still being debated. So, clearly Microsoft was one of the trend setters of trying to claim their product legally was not responsible of doing anything. Maybe Martin in particular wouldn't be the best person to take MS to task for this (someone in MS legal would be a better person), but the fact that Roblimo got him to finally admit that such an EULA claim is ludicrous and that some expectation should be legally required did finally get Martin to answer that part of the original question.
I agree, Roblimo's comment about Debian Linux is a bit snide. But, the claim that "many sites do charge these days" seems a bit silly. Few sites, by volume, require you to pay money for the service of blogging. The internet is still heavily funded by advertising and personal funding. I'd assume Martin was just joking about the cost. However, if/. were actually charging for accounts, then it's very probably that the demographic of/. would be quite different. In at least my perspective,/. is somewhat of a hippy playground (this is not an insult). I don't think it a stretch to say most people on/. agree that paying for a service isn't unreasonable, even if they're Free Software diehards who think paying for software is amoral. So, to me, it's somewhat of a jab of the whole culture of "free" everything (both the beer and speech kind, which is where I draw the hippy reference). But the truth is that the foundation of the inte
It sounds like this is just another implementation of an analog processor, which is far from a new idea. Really simple analog processors are just a bit of plastic foam used as a manifold. There's even the idea of having 0, 1, and 1/2 (where 1/2 is seen as uncertain) in something called a Lukasiewicz Logic Array. Anyways, I wish the guy good luck with it, though it might be a good idea if he did some more reading on ideas already presented on the subject.
When you know a vasectomy wouldn't work, you don't get one then go out and buy condoms. You go out and get another procedure that *does* work. It's just a shame that more people aren't demanding to know why Windows keeps getting exploited. I'm sure it doesn't help that there's a lot of MS apologists who basically lie to the user and explain it's all the user's fault for being ignorant..
The grandparent post is wrong. The internet is more than "access to information". It's access to information and the ability to provide information to others. In that regard, providing internet access is basically equivalent to the subsidizing of phone lines and the requirement that local calls are free. There's certainly room to believe that phones have saved many lives. Is there not room to believe the same will not be said of a local internet that's available everywhere one walks?
And to go a little off this topic, I believe that municipals should own their own phone lines, just like they should own their own streets. Phone lines, like internet access, is a utility. It should be available to anyone with a reasonable investment in money. And it should continue to be in control of the people for whom it provides service. This is true, I believe, of all natural monopolies. Government is a natural monopoly. Don't you think that it too should not be owned by companies?
Here's a wacky suggestion. Why not instead just send money (preferably converted to yen) to the publishing house along with a typed up order form for all the fan subbings you d/led. If for example the asking price is $150 in the US, pay them around $148-$149 (ie, subtract the cost of the DVDs used to archive the fansubs).
Of course, I assume they already legally exclusively licensed the content to the US publisher, so the money really isn't buying a legal right to possess the fansubs. But, it's the idea of showing support that's important, right? So, what better support than to cut out the middleman, who's doing a crappy job, and paying the whole sum of money to those who deserve the money most? The best way of doing this, of course, would be if fansub groups were to just license a series themselves and they could choose how to collect the money to pay for said license.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though, since one of the best parts about fansubbing now is the competition between fansub groups, especially if the translation is done horribly by one group. Of course, that could just mean that the Japanese houses could offer the licenses *after* all subbing has been done to the most successful group, for which they could decide how to pay for the license. Then people could directly support the fansubbers *and* the Japanese publishers/animators instead of using questionable US publishers.
I'm just not sure that enough people would be willing to actually pay for fansubs just to get them shipped on DVD (even with extras) to make it work. US publishers seem to be better at distribution, if not quality. You'd think capitalism would have resolved this by now to create a merger of fansubbers with US publishers.
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So, you wouldn't mind it if ATI created some altered drivers that were intentionally tweaked to give higher values in certain benchmarks (that they made) for their cards? It's one thing to optimize your search engine to produce the results you want. It's quite another to drop the actual search engine use and use a specialized one just so you get the desired results for a group of test cases. If their search engine is incapable of automatically returning the most relevant results, then they should fix that, not institute a hack. To do otherwise is entirely disingenuous.
Yea, it was clearly a conspiracy that prevented Michael Badnarik from being elected. Oh, were you talking about Kerry?
I'm sorry, but some people (like, say me) think that election laws should be fair, not just tilted one way or another so that my/"our" candidate wins. Some of us just like to accurately know what happened even if it has no meaningful effect on the results. Crazy, eh?
I'm not sure on the originator of the quote, but, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner." If the majority of people are felons, then democracy by itself will likely be a failure, felonies are being handed out much too liberally (like oversalting in cooking), and such a government should be a democratic republic. Ie, government shouldn't be in a position to be a predator of people because you can't guarantee that enough "good" people will be in power. Having said that, I'd like to state three things I believe.
One, if felonies do in fact have the potential strip the right to vote from a person, then all felonies should be labelled life sentences and juries should be a part of decided to strip that right away; juries should be made plainly aware and responsible for the punishment they dishing out.
Two, lists of sex offenders in the simplest case is a filter on public records. I'd even say it's reasonable that people know about the past felonies of others so they may be informed. But forcing a person to go door-to-door to announce it seems beyond the reasonable point. Communities should be responsible and do their own detective work. And people who have been let out of jail should gain the opportunity to start a clean life. If a state/jury is unwilling to offer that to such a person, they should clearly put them in jail for life and lay the responsibility of such a charge on the jury.
Three, punishment should begin and end at the prison gates. I doubt people will every agree to this, and that's why I stated belief one. But, letting people out on "terms" is wishy-washy. Juries should know the exact terms of punishment and be assured that the whole term is carried out. And they should recognize just exactly what that punishment is (5 years of prison is a long time, for example). Parole, probation, and worker-release should not exist. It is a great punishment in itself to be cast out of prison and find a job. But the borderline where state directed punishment ends should be clear.
You know, I'm not sure Dvorak is like that. Dvorak reminds me sort of Stern or Bush. Ie, sometimes to a great extent all three are blissfully unaware that what they're saying is ridiculous, sensational, and sure to cause a lot of otherwise sane people to go batshit crazy trying to support/deny their stated position. Yes, I'm sure some of its intentional, but I really think more than anything it's the ignorance of the person and the backing of their company/party that allows them to remain where they are. The only main difference I see is that Bush is the only one that has ordered the dropping of bombs and the death of people (you can't drop a bomb and expect to only kill the bad people). At least, that's my main excuse for not just ignoring Bush. Dvorak and Stern are powerless, so much easier to ignore.
We are not talking about books.
Books are "owned" by publishers more than anything. Ie, it's still about companies and not "artists" trying to express themselves. If you want to see/read the most vile things imaginable, go pick up a good hardcore book. Of course, you could just as well find the word "fuck" in the middle of a book just for shock value.
And that wardrobe malfunction was totally out of line.
If you mean it was amoral for Janet to expose her breast (and I'm certain that she was in on it), just do what I do and don't buy music from Janet or watch the Super Bowl (while we're at it, just don't want live TV so you can be sure such is censored).
You can not say that if you do not like it you don't have to watch it. It was totally out of the blue and unexpected.
To ironically quote The Chase, "That's the risk of live TV." Yes, it's unexpected. But if you really don't want the unexpected, don't watch anything that doesn't have a script or is recorded live.
Even the most liberal nut case should respect the right of people to control what watch!
Being a non-liberal, I can't state if that's true or not. I can state that as a quasi-libertarian, I realize that you can't very well force the filtering out of information you don't want, especially if you have to see it to realize you don't want it (yes, you could create a whitelist, but good luck watching anything with that; a complex whitelist will very likely end up allowing a contradiction of what you are willing to watch).
Having said that, I respect the right of people to *try to* control what they see so long as doing so doesn't interfere with the freedom of others. That means being proactive and not watching live TV shows where unexpected things can happen if one of those unexpected things is something you don't want to see and will probably not be filtered out in time (ie, you end up being unable to control what you watch). Expecting the rest of the world to just conform to your will so you don't have to see what you don't want is absurd. And that's the step necessary for you to "control what you watch".
While we're at it, why not go to the extreme of banning all religious material on TV? I mean, if sex and cigs are detrimental to young people (and that's the main argument, since adults are supposed to be responsible for themselves), then I can't see how religious content could be stated to not be detrimental as well. I mean, look at how many violent acts have occurred under the guise of religion? And if you want to say that "it's not religion's fault" and "they were just using religion's name", I'd point out the same is true for sexual explicit material not being actually related to teens doing detrimental things involving sex.
PS: You can have morality without religion, so that angle is covered as well.
I think it goes "With a name so nice, they bought it twice."
To at least answer your questions:
>In many small towns, intrusion into people's private lives would be simple, undetectable and sometimes even politically advantagous. How would you prevent this.
The same way you prevent it now with private companies? Ie, you don't really except hope that someone catches the company/government is doing it, and then they're punished. If the problem is punishing the people in government who do such, that's one of the problems that needs to be fixed.
>Many small poor communities and those just outside of various limits would have no access at all. How would you prevent this. Would you rely on the competitive process picking up the scraps which is served by no community.
What's providing small poor communities with internet now? Companies? As a result of regulation? Why's that have to change because some municipalities start offering service as well?
>As telecomms, companies must match a certain quality of service, do you believe that this quality would be improved by allowing numerous small communities be the primary access points for a service which we need more every passing day.
I think in some areas it'd improve and in others it'd not improve. The only way I see there being an innate worsening of quality of service is if telecomms are unable/unwilling to provide service to small communities because they can no longer rely on more densely packed municipalities to "subsidize" the cost to rural areas. Of course, telecomms could just charge more in rural areas. That's basically what you'd expect in the free market.
>how would you allow for a free and open intenet, when it would be so easy to implement 'community standards', both by actual blocking and by lowering the QOS to the point which it would be unusable.
I'm not sure. How are we holding it up now? So far there's been, I believe, three different obscenity censoring acts by Congress. As far as I'm aware, in the public and private sector the extent of all such acts has been overturning and content filtering at libraries and schools; as far as I'm aware, adults can request/demand the filtering be turned off but children cannot.
So, I'd begin to question why you believe that more public sector access would mean anything but maybe a law requiring that content filters be enabled by default unless an adult request them turned off. In fact, I'd assume that whether municipality ISPs are created or not, such regulation will be imposed on private ISPs at some point. Why? Because it's not like an ISP being a private company is going to slow down the crusade of "concerned parents" to force content filtering on as many people as they can. I don't see how the public sector will be any better except that there's a strong case for 4th amendment rights if a public sector ISP tries to do content filtering.
>Most of your solutions to the issues seem to include laywers, courts, and lawsuits. I agree that they will sue, and in the end communities will back off of these plans, leaving themselves to pay off huge legal bills, again with public money, not to mention the loss on much of the equipment. Are you a Lawyer, who's pocket isn't heavy enough, if not then do you believe that they need more money? Sometimes it's best to legislate before something becomes a problem.
Legislation is part of the problem. We legislate regulation to stop public ISPs. Then we legislate regulation to stop civil rights on private ISPs. I agree that all of this just leads to more lawyers being paid. And I don't see a solution to the problem, since we have idiots as politicians, elected by people who are obsessed with controlling what other people see. Short of a bloody revolt, the lawyers are going to be paid money one way or another. The only saving grace if it's a private ISP is that the only money from your pocket that goes through the ISP to laywers is either subsidies from taxes or whatever amount of money, if any, you pay them for service. So, choose a private ISP even if there is a public ISP available. And bitch if you're paying money to support the public ISP when not using it. Happy hunting with the lawsuits one way or another.
Sorry, I misread your original question. To answer your original question, there's no right answer.
Bypassing a technological measure is a crime in most cases, period. Bypassing a legal measure is called bribery. That's illegal too. I think the risk of getting caught for bribery is inversely related to the corruptness of a government. Assuming the US government as a basis, I'd say if I was able to bypass a legal measure, I'd almost certainly be in the position to not have to worry about further cases against me. Ie, I'd bribe the President and my state's governor. At worst, I'd be pardoned even if I somehow did manage to be charged. In fact, I'd probably intentionally try to get charged and the prosecutor would either be selected to ensure he'd fail to make his case, protecting me from double indemnity, or I'd still manage to be charged and somehow be pardoned.
Violation of the law, be it bypassing a technological measure or copyright infringement, and praying I don't get caught is obviously not at all involved. Sorry for going down that vein.
Legal measures. Copyright in the US doesn't stop piracy in the US or China. DRM at least takes some time to bypass (well, assuming you don't have an insider, which is sort of silly seeing how most piracy groups work).
What if you're carjacked on the state line? :)
Michael Badnarik, who was a Presidentical Candidate in 2004, was running under the Libertarian platform and specifically stated that he intended to remove the limited liability of corporations. Just an FYI.
Who owns the air, water, soil, etc? Everyone? Doesn't sound like the free market to me, where everything is owned and you're limited to only doing things which you own. Regulation is a midway point, trying to offer everyone the air, water, soil, etc at the cost of no one being allowed to misuse it in some excessive way, by either overuse or contamination. If the market was at work, I'd assume air, water, and soil would have been parceled out by now.
I would have included a line break if I had thought there was a good separation point. Sorry if that made my last post hard to read.
>>I'd guess that you could sue the government over the same basis
>Make "government" plural, and times it by thousands, if not tens of thousands. Just the costs to the court systems would make the 'case' for regulation.
So, you're saying that in a competitive market with thousands, if not tends of thousands, of suppliers that court cases caused by them all being abusive will lead to regulation? I'm not sure exactly how you can jump to the conclusion that municipalities will be any different than every other ISP, except that municipalities will be locally elected and they may or may not be funded with tax dollars (almost all ISPs are funded by tax dollars thanks to the subsidies to lay down cable in the past).
>>This is, btw, one reason I believe that municipalities should have laid conduit long ago to let all sorts of companies lay their own wire, avoiding the need to dig up the ground every time a new company comes in to provide a new wire/service.
>Have you ever seen a telephone pole? Cable, power, and yes telephone often run over these large outdoor 'conduits'.
Have you seen a telephone pole in Beijing? The use of telephones as a "conduit" plus the lax enforcement of requiring notification has resulted in a "rats nest" of wires with some drooping near all the way to the ground. The fact is, telephone poles really aren't that great as a conduit for this reason as well as the risks of damage by weather. Of course the argument could be said that underground conduits and fault zones don't mix, but fault zones are the exception throughout most municipalities.
So, I'd call telephone polls a weak conduit at best. They might make sense to connect municipalities together, but once you're in town it makes more sense to disperse whatever conglomerate signals you have into separate wires. Of course, maybe the answer is one wire to the door step then a box to split the wire into power, telephone, cable, etc. Even then, you'd likely want to be able to upgrade the conduits to homes from time to time. I'm just entirely sure if it's cheaper to lay down empty conduit now or to rely on replacing lines on telephone wires + the cost of repairing downed lines throughout the year.
>>It's just like the discussion of forcing proprietary/open source software on government by banning the opponent software.
>How?
Municipalities are fundamentally about group efforts to do things. They're a community, just like the OSS community. At the same time, proprietary service companies are not owned by companies. So, the actors are analogous. The objective in question is providing a service instead of software, and how one group (proprietary) wants to ban the other (community) for their own benefit.
>Why?
Because banning something outright doesn't make sense. Forcing municipalities to compete with other proprietary firms sounds fine. But it doesn't sound like that's what's being discussed.
>the arguements for closed source software don't make any sense, while I believe that the agruments against direct government control of internet access do hold up.
Why doesn't the arguments for closed source software make sense? Well, fundamentally it has to do with cost/benefit. In most cases, the long term aspect of government means that they will continue to rely on the same thing for ages and thereby become dependent on software which they may or may not be updatable in the future. Even with open software, the cost to continuously update software can be prohibitive. The real objective then should be to find software that does its job well and doesn't need to be updated. When a new task arises, a new tools should be found. So, that adds on the requirement of flexible access to the raw data of any other tool used. So long as those requirements are met, OSS and CSS are able to adequately c
The real answer is to cut copyright to a much shorter term so that "abandonware" is no longer copyrighted. That way there's no question if it's "wrong" or not to be d/ling games created 5 years ago. This isn't to say I believe that with copyrights only lasting 5 years there'd be an end to piracy. But if copyright was 5 years, we wouldn't be having this sort of discussion for old games.
While I agree with your claim that "local decency groups" would likely try to censor such internet access, the fact is that the 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, and competing ISPs may or may not make this point moot. While the FCC may control broadcasting of shows over public airwaves, internet access is as much broadcasting as any other private communication is which means you're still stuck to the issue of the 1st Amendment not protecting "obscene material" (which is based on "community standards"). The 4th Amendment means that the government run ISP can't monitor your internet access without a warrant (private ISPs can at the risk of being sued over stuff they *don't* block; the logic is that if you check on anyone, you're responsible for checking on everyone, so you're liable for all the stuff you don't catch; I'd guess that you could sue the government over the same basis). Finally, just because the government is giving away free internet access doesn't mean people won't spend money on a more convenient/"free" access, just like municipalities providing water hasn't meant an end to bottled water or various soft drinks. It's just like the discussion of forcing proprietary/open source software on government by banning the opponent software. The best answer is to find the best solution, not try to ban competition so that one side exploits the law to their benefit while the other side suffers. Banning things should be a last resort, for natural competition solves a lot of problems. This is, btw, one reason I believe that municipalities should have laid conduit long ago to let all sorts of companies lay their own wire, avoiding the need to dig up the ground every time a new company comes in to provide a new wire/service. The wire might cost a lot, but getting the permission to dig up thousands to hundreds of thousands of peoples yards and just moving all that dirt costs a lot more.
Semi-wrong. You're charged $17.99 if you rent out 0 to 3 movies. There's no bearing on if/when you rented any one of those movies. The only real deceptions possible are not mentioning the rent-out limit or that movies are only available to you while you pay the monthly fee. I don't think I've clearly followed their ad campaign, but you're possibly right that some deception is going on. It's just a lie about late fees.
Sometimes, customers would call and bitch about it, but really, do you expect to be able to upload 100+ GB a month for CDN $40?
When it says "unlimited connection time", sure. It's not the job of the consumer to guarantee that Shaw Cable makes a profit or does anything economically sound. Or are you going to say that if a company decided to give away cars to 200 people they'd have some automatic right to later come demanding money after realizing that giving away 200 cars wasn't economically sound? If Shaw wasn't to bitch and moan so that people upgrade to a business package (which I'm guessing from the tone of things, is something for businesses which these people you're talking about aren't), then they can bug people all they want.
The truth is that Shaw, et al are monopolies or dualopolies (some areas have Cable and DSL, so there is at least some competition) to their areas, so they can push whatever Draconian service contracts they want such that Shaw can basically revoke service at its own discretion even when users are clearly falling within the scope of the spirit of the agreement. So, while the advertising might very well be fraud of some nature, the actual service agreement lets them do as they please. Personally, I just wish Shaw, Verizon, et al wouldn't lie and admit to users that there are limits, which probably only a handful of people are going to go over and for which Shaw, Verizon, et al will either revoke the account or cap it to fall within their defined guidelines. No, such an advertisement wouldn't be as "pretty", but then the truth often isn't pretty. That's no excuse to claim "common sense" lets you lie.
I think you're sort of missing the point. This "ideal world" as you put it is capitalism. The statement is being made under the understanding that Gates claims to be pro-capitalism and anti-communism (statements made by Gates or by Microsoft while he was CEO imply, if not directly state, these positions). Clearly, you intrinsically realize that such a system would not be beneficial to Microsoft. The post then is purely a statement of the hypocracy of being pro-capitalism when clearly Microsoft survives on a form of non-capitalism -- anti-piracy acts that enshrine copyright infringement as a criminal act is what, I would say, push copyright to being a form of communism.
Of course, maybe the poster really does want to dissolve copyright and have a purely capitalistic system. If that was the real intention, I'd state that Windows exists now, just as Bach's music exists now even though it's no longer copyrighted. While it may be the case that an absolvement would stop the development of Windows, I find that hard to believe given that computers are currently near everywhere and useless without software. So, development will be funded by someone (and probably several someones) until the point that operating systems, be it Windows or others, everyone needs are basically free (aka, commodity software).
So in short, the post is not advocating time travel and rewriting history. Windows in capitalism would be sold at commodity prices. And development would continue in some fashion because hardware is rather useless without software. Now, whether there'd be all sorts of economic collapse because Microsoft and more niche industries no longer have monopolistic government protection to insure repayment of development costs is a good point. To that end, I'd say that there's always the wealthy, be them individuals or companies, who fund projects for their own amusement that end up trickling down to everyone. And places on the internet, rare as they are, have shown that it's possible to barely skimp by on the revenue of ads when your copyrighted works are not reasonably sellable directly to customers (www.penny-arcade.com, et al).
People will probably still pay for the convenience of getting software/games on CD without copyright. So companies/people that want to be profitable with marketing to the mass media have to develop cheaply and create the loyalty that means not buying the "ripped off" CD for the $1-2 less. And I think I'll stop this little rant because I think you get the idea of how the world might change in the future from the abolishment of copyright.
Maybe the EULA is just heavy legalize without any firm basis in reality, as would probably be proven if someone tried to sue over the "Not fit for any purpose" clause to get their money back, but all and any are two very different things. And you're right that the practice is industry wide, including OSS. But Microsoft was one of the pioneers of using EULAs at a time when the question of software copyright was still being debated. So, clearly Microsoft was one of the trend setters of trying to claim their product legally was not responsible of doing anything. Maybe Martin in particular wouldn't be the best person to take MS to task for this (someone in MS legal would be a better person), but the fact that Roblimo got him to finally admit that such an EULA claim is ludicrous and that some expectation should be legally required did finally get Martin to answer that part of the original question.
However, if
It sounds like this is just another implementation of an analog processor, which is far from a new idea. Really simple analog processors are just a bit of plastic foam used as a manifold. There's even the idea of having 0, 1, and 1/2 (where 1/2 is seen as uncertain) in something called a Lukasiewicz Logic Array. Anyways, I wish the guy good luck with it, though it might be a good idea if he did some more reading on ideas already presented on the subject.
Obvious google search link:
Google Search for "lukasiewicz analog"
After the first kid you'd think they'd sue for malpractice and go to another doctor.
When you know a vasectomy wouldn't work, you don't get one then go out and buy condoms. You go out and get another procedure that *does* work. It's just a shame that more people aren't demanding to know why Windows keeps getting exploited. I'm sure it doesn't help that there's a lot of MS apologists who basically lie to the user and explain it's all the user's fault for being ignorant..
The grandparent post is wrong. The internet is more than "access to information". It's access to information and the ability to provide information to others. In that regard, providing internet access is basically equivalent to the subsidizing of phone lines and the requirement that local calls are free. There's certainly room to believe that phones have saved many lives. Is there not room to believe the same will not be said of a local internet that's available everywhere one walks?
And to go a little off this topic, I believe that municipals should own their own phone lines, just like they should own their own streets. Phone lines, like internet access, is a utility. It should be available to anyone with a reasonable investment in money. And it should continue to be in control of the people for whom it provides service. This is true, I believe, of all natural monopolies. Government is a natural monopoly. Don't you think that it too should not be owned by companies?
Here's a wacky suggestion. Why not instead just send money (preferably converted to yen) to the publishing house along with a typed up order form for all the fan subbings you d/led. If for example the asking price is $150 in the US, pay them around $148-$149 (ie, subtract the cost of the DVDs used to archive the fansubs).
Of course, I assume they already legally exclusively licensed the content to the US publisher, so the money really isn't buying a legal right to possess the fansubs. But, it's the idea of showing support that's important, right? So, what better support than to cut out the middleman, who's doing a crappy job, and paying the whole sum of money to those who deserve the money most? The best way of doing this, of course, would be if fansub groups were to just license a series themselves and they could choose how to collect the money to pay for said license.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though, since one of the best parts about fansubbing now is the competition between fansub groups, especially if the translation is done horribly by one group. Of course, that could just mean that the Japanese houses could offer the licenses *after* all subbing has been done to the most successful group, for which they could decide how to pay for the license. Then people could directly support the fansubbers *and* the Japanese publishers/animators instead of using questionable US publishers.
I'm just not sure that enough people would be willing to actually pay for fansubs just to get them shipped on DVD (even with extras) to make it work. US publishers seem to be better at distribution, if not quality. You'd think capitalism would have resolved this by now to create a merger of fansubbers with US publishers.