Actually, [...] polygamy makes sense as a triad-or-higher relationship is more likely to have at least one pair of parents after a divorce than a regular marriage.
This is a fair point to bring up, thank you.
I wouldn't bemoan lack of legal precedent for more than two people fighting over custody, either. Many a time have biological parents fought for custody back from adoptive parents, many a time have grandparents or other relatives entered the fray in custody battles.
Polygamy would not make such distinctions much harder. As TMBG once famously put it, families come in many different varieties already. So long as it leads to a stable home environment given the unique economic, social and personal requirements of everyone involved, why should third parties interfere?
I simply think many elements of our society fear diversity and heterogeneity. Yes, you heard me right. That means on some level, the Homophobes are all Heterophobes as well. x3
Refusing to give someone money that is rightfully theirs could be considered the equivalent of destroying their property.
Umm... no. (*)
It's equivalent when viewed only from the perspective of the customer. Customer was deprived of their possession. Customer is not particularly concerned with whether Paypal now enjoys the possession, or if it was obliterated — nor has that distinction been made clear in TFA.
Paypal froze the assets. Perhaps afterwards Paypal put all the money in a big pile and burned it up? Unlikely, but also immaterial to the impact upon the customer.
OP's analogy boiled down to "would you continue supporting Paypal if they deprived you of your goods in some legally immaterial but sensational fashion?"
Perhaps Paypal should be allowed to choose who they do business with: IANALFFS, but they sure do choose to stop doing business suddenly with lots of people who have large paypal balances that go forfeit, which I find unsettling.
Morally, I have no problem with polygomy. But when we're talking about legal contracts that bind financial assets, things can get really complicated really fast.
Wait, what? So.. legal contracts between more than two people that bind financial aspects are by definition an intractable problem? Er.. don't most corporate charters involve more than two owners or stockholders?
Many have said "Marriage is a contract", I think I'll buy that. So, why cannot Marriage also be a corporate charter? Your home is a residentially-flavored company. Polygamous households would just have more owners. Single people are sole-proprietorships. You can't marry your toaster in any legally binding sense since the toaster cannot legally participate in a contract.
There, has that solved all of the slippery-slope foolishness for everybody now? I'm seriously getting sick of all the "you can't do this because of [insert boogeyman here]" arguments. It's time for people to open the god damned closet and realize there is nothing of consequence lurking there, and go the fuck back to bed with their three wives, two husbands and a cardboard cut-out of Elvis.
Thank you Slashdot user alsaan for pointing this out farther down the comment stream.
For those who don't like to read the original, here is my inline summary combined with my opines on each point from the article:
== List of points addressed in article:
* "'open source' does not guarantee 'better'": While this is true from a technical standpoint, I believe it is important to keep ones destiny in ones own hands. In the (closely related) Theora vs h264 discussion, It is inadvisable to subscribe to a format monoculture under the legal control of a group with no observable vested interest aside from growing the userbase of people they will later gouge with fees. I am to understand that any dangers present in the transient patents pertaining to Theora and Vorbis have been legally neutralized. I do not know if this is true for the ogg container itself, more research is recommended.
* Generality: TFA criticizes OGG for ostensibly being able to handle any video or audio codec, while only in practice being able to easily handle Theora and Vorbis. A> I don't think anyone wants to use OGG to handle any other codecs, and B> TFA goes on to praise Matroska as a pan-galactic container format. I agree. To this end, does anyone know if Matroska is patent encumbered itself? Could it carry Theora/Vorbis payloads? Could this be a superior replacement or even alternative to popular support of OGG only in HTML 5 implementations?
* Overhead: OGG introduces an average of 1% bloat to your files. When one uses workarounds to reduce codec latency in realtime applications, this can climb to 7%. If only plastic packaging for consumer electronics were as unobtrusive as a 7% filesize increase.
* Latency: TFA bundles all of it's latency concerns into the fact that getting acceptable latency control drives overhead up to 7% of filesize. TFA then commences to soil itself over this measurement.
* Random Access: TFA states OGG is a bear to seek through. It doesn't provide any direct measurements or observations to quantify this point however, so unless someone in the crowd wants to test this (I'm too lazy xD), I'll consider this point up in the air.
* Timestamps/AV sync: TFA links to a whole nother article to complain about this one, which I can't access since the site is down. Back to the crowd: has anyone noticed ogg-related AV sync problems? yes/no? I haven't played enough ogg myself to know. :
* Complexity: OGG is apparently a bear to write encoders and decoders for. While not a customer-facing problem, devs are people too, so I feel your pain. But I think devs prefer freedom to create an encoder or decoder over convenience to get cornholed for creating one six years down the road.
TFA closes on the same point which I've actually been itching to suggest to the author since I began reading it:
* "If all the standard formats are indeed covered by patents, the only proper solution is to design a new, good format which is not, this time hopefully avoiding the old mistakes."
I agree wholeheartedly, and that's the beauty of open standards. If you don't like this format, why can you not create or advocate your own alternative? Is Matroska patented? (I've never heard such myself..) If it is, can author not hobble together his own patent-skirting alternative? People would rally behind it. If Matroska is free from patent encumbering, can we load it with Theora/Vorbis? Again, people are not championing the OGG container, simply trying to avoid h264's patents or anything similar. We'll take whatever format of roughly comparable properties comes our way.:P
Some stills cameras, e.g. on phones, are shutterless as well, but often have some interestingartefacts.
Ha, sweet; but that's not the most illustrative image from that set. I prefer This one.. you know, since hardware folk might mistake your linked image with some new, weed-whacker style floppy propeller system.:3
In the photo I linked, I love how the "pseudoblades" also have well-defined shadows xD
... e-books by authors can remain "in print" from their publication date until their copyright expires.
So.... not after, then?
I know I'm being nit-picky again, and it's just a poor choice of words, but there are tons of people who labor under the misapprehension that you cannot sell copies of things without the backing of copyright. Even after an authors copyright has expired (yes, half past hell freezing over these days) there is no reason not to continue keeping Ebook copies up for sale. Not everyone knows they can be had elsewhere for free then. Not everyone feels like hunting copies down elsewhere, and would rather ring through for a small fee and get it here, now.
I know exactly jack shit about cars, but I have a ticket for doing 93 in my 1988 Subaru Justy (ticket received in 2002). Stock engine and three people on board to boot.
Documentation aside, I've topped 105 down an even grade as well. Yes, the rig shakes like it will come apart at that speed. It's funner than shit. xD
Any time we sail above 88 the time travel jokes flow like wine.:P
Oh wait... I think I just confirmed your post and the article.
Well, TBH one reason I read slashdot is because crowdsourced comments are more difficult to bias than paid journalism. Perhaps we commenters come from a niche demographic to begin with, we're not perfect; I'm simply (lazy and) hard pressed to find a more stable journalistic platform.
Commenters reliably reflect most information from TFA and season it with their own personal perspectives (explaining why RTFA is so unpopular xD). Commenters misrepresenting TFA are regularly named and shamed. Many commenters even correct, clarify or expand upon summary and article alike. We demand references and citations from one another; sometimes we even get them.:P
It doesn't always work. It isn't always fair or informative. Oddly enough, if you serve up a genuinely high tech article about hard science, space or quantum physics the crowd starts sounding about as clueless as my grandmother on the topic. xD But you can usually tell when the discussion has gone off and browse on to the next topic. I get more usable, bias-corrected "news" here (sadly) than from any other source of which I am aware.
This is a very peculiar thing. Perhaps we should brainstorm methods to distill fact from biased noise to arrive at an untainted wellspring of current affairs intel we can all drink from. The data is there, we just need to cancel out the opposing non-factual chaff. Someone, get Luis Von Ahn in here, STAT!:3
Nice try but the postal services serves to deliver parcels from and to a person. A better example would be the illegal liquor runs during the US prohibition. They clearly delivered illegal goods but the vehicle used can also be used for the delivery of legal goods. Now if your roads are full of vehicles delivering illegal liquor because it is cheap and well invigorating, to the point that ambulances can't get to hospitals, you'll have to take action.
Hmm, illegal liquor delivery so intense it clogs the public thoroughfares? I'm not concerned that your analogy is a stretch, most are. What interests me is that your analogy is only stretched so thin because the original problem is too.:)
There is nothing in the nature of alcohol, nor in it's previous illegality, that would make the transporting of it fill all available (widening) thoroughfares until every street clogs. In a similar vein, there is nothing in the nature of file sharing, nor it's unsavory reputation in the media, that makes it inexorably expand to clog all available intertubes.
Just stop and think about it for a moment. You might argue that, by volume, copyright-infringing p2p makes up the vast majority of p2p traffic, and further that copyright infringing p2p makes up the vast majority of data transfer for all residential users. But what in the nature of ripped DVDs causes them to hog so much room? Is it the scandal? The illegality? Nope. It's just because audio-visual media is larger than todays simple web pages and email. That's all.
However, thanks to Youtube and niko niko douga users are coming to realize that what they want from the internet is in fact rich, social multimedia; instead of the text and static image mainstay trappings of the 20th century.
Major ISP's fighting against p2p and network neutrality are not fighting for the sanctity of copyright, they are actually fighting to prevent end-users from using their internet connections to consume multimedia offerings of any kind. They do this because many of these same ISP's try to sell media via cable TV, and you won't buy their cable TV service if you can get your media from the web. They don't care if it's pirated media (downloaded once, uploaded 1.X times, and then viewed repeatedly from archive) or Hulu / Netflix (downloaded inefficiently, streamed, and ISP called and bitched at if the frames ever skip). That is where their true motivation lies. The sanctity of copyright means diddly to ISP's of any size unless or until they get bullied by the content mafia. These ISP's want to kill all remote IPTV options in order to gain an anti-competitive edge for their own wares.
So please try not to fall in line with Ted Stevens thinking that ambulances won't be able to get anywhere due to "all the illicit traffic". Or, in case your point was intended as humorous hyperbole, understand that this actually is the party line at big ISPs: the "bandwidth hogs" are keeping all the senators from getting their email on time. This, of course, only makes sense until the senator's email contains video from last weeks filibuster as an attachment.
The real consequence to keep in mind is that the Internet is not a public/government thoroughfare. It is a homogeneous, teaming market of connected network providers. By that token, it is not the Federal Government's mandate to fairly apportion backbone bandwidth. I find this perfectly acceptable, because at no point in this infrastructure do p2p or fat media downloads of any kind cause traffic snarls save in the badly maintained networks of the residential duopolies. They now have the technology to support last-mile speeds as high as 150mbit at vaguely residential rates, but then they fail at second-to-last-mile aggregation, since they cannot allow more than 1 in 50,000 of their customers to actually make use of that speed at any given time. Furthermore, you'll never get 150mbit to any single target out their he
I think it's important to note that just because competing nations abuse human rights and erode their own foundations is no call for us to do the same.
We believe that an individual's freedom to choose their own destiny is the heart of what makes our nation great and powerful. This is how we founded our nation. If we really believe this we should fight to maintain this standard. Rolling over to government corruption or multinational corporate rape does nothing to strengthen our nation.
So far as the constitution being a living document, yes it is. Yes, many things change relevance in 230 years. When that happens, we should have a reliable system for upgrading the document. Maintain the standard, and then stick to it. Our government at present is simply ignoring the standard which defeats the entire purpose. See George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Correct me if I'm wrong (but I do have a CCNA cert) Why not block the access ports that get opened, unless it's port 80 and then filter the traffic.
Ah, CCNA.;D
Most users, if they have a router at all, have a SOHO router with minimal firewalling ability, just NAT/PAT.
The simplest worm I could think of that would drink your milkshake would just dial home via SSL port 443. Client-initiated connection, redialed as needed: what on earth could your fancy firewall do about that?:3
It needs to be tested, it needs to be reviewed if it changes or breaks any other tools that rely on a sloppy API or tricky "feature", and it needs to pass regression testing. When you're running core servers, worldwide, and stand to lose millions of dollars if you accidentally break something critical, you'd better test it well.
This entire line of reasoning is merely another call for open source software. Browser makers should not be in a position where they are somehow personally responsible for complex, demonstrably unstable business installations. If the code is open, then the business clients who stack complicated houses of cards on the software (be it browser, OS, or wherever) can take their own responsibility for their non-standard decisions, and the software vendors can focus on meeting generic standards and keeping security up to date for everyone.
Luckily, we don't have to expend any effort in this fight. The market will clean the mess up for us nicely.:)
What I am saying is that art can have just as large of an impact of our understanding of the world - not in increasing our understanding of how the universe fundamentally works, but by increasing our understanding of the human condition. Art can be just as thought provoking as science. They're similar but not the same.
I don't see any slashdotters in this thread asking to throttle government subsidies for the arts. What I see are people asking for free access to art, and to either reform or abolish (I'm in the "abolish" camp) a copyright system that — under the guise of funding the arts — instead tries to hold art hostage from the very audience that gives it the meaning you name here.
In the current system, even if I want to make my own art and provide all of my own funding, I can't. Have you considered that this Copyright incentive you are trying to defend (or reform, it wouldn't make a difference) quashes more original creative work than it encourages?
All canned content that can be had can be had digitally at (virtually) no cost. Criminalizing this basic fact of digital information to fabricate artificial scarcity is not a form of incentive, simply extortion. Thus those who make the most profit are not the best authors, but the best extortionists. This system is a 300 year experiment in failed policy (2010 marks the tricentenial of the Statute of Anne, so I'm not just rounding here), and among the least optimal incentives that are available to us. It's time to end it.
Many slashdotters are speaking up in this thread to discuss business models that authors (or even publishers) can use to finance and incentivize their creative works without abridging the public's right to share, reproduce or derive from the work once it's released. I am sorry if you mistake this for hypocrisy, we are not limiting the ways in which authors can be incentivized. At least not beyond the trampling of globally beneficial rights to freedom of information exchange.
Feel free to throw in your own suggestions for incentive, be they government subsidies or.. well, whatever else you were going to add. Every clever idea helps!:)
It seems rather silly to think that large publishing companies won't sponsor people, regardless of the distribution medium, if they think they're going to get large return on investment. That's good economics, regardless of the medium.
Mod parent up. I don't write enough myself to get mod points any more.:3
Or.. maybe I just need an advance.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Alt+227 Alt+105
Alt+58 Alt+80
Actually, [...] polygamy makes sense as a triad-or-higher relationship is more likely to have at least one pair of parents after a divorce than a regular marriage.
This is a fair point to bring up, thank you.
I wouldn't bemoan lack of legal precedent for more than two people fighting over custody, either. Many a time have biological parents fought for custody back from adoptive parents, many a time have grandparents or other relatives entered the fray in custody battles.
Polygamy would not make such distinctions much harder. As TMBG once famously put it, families come in many different varieties already. So long as it leads to a stable home environment given the unique economic, social and personal requirements of everyone involved, why should third parties interfere?
I simply think many elements of our society fear diversity and heterogeneity. Yes, you heard me right. That means on some level, the Homophobes are all Heterophobes as well. x3
Refusing to give someone money that is rightfully theirs could be considered the equivalent of destroying their property.
Umm... no. (*)
It's equivalent when viewed only from the perspective of the customer. Customer was deprived of their possession. Customer is not particularly concerned with whether Paypal now enjoys the possession, or if it was obliterated — nor has that distinction been made clear in TFA.
Paypal froze the assets. Perhaps afterwards Paypal put all the money in a big pile and burned it up? Unlikely, but also immaterial to the impact upon the customer.
OP's analogy boiled down to "would you continue supporting Paypal if they deprived you of your goods in some legally immaterial but sensational fashion?"
Perhaps Paypal should be allowed to choose who they do business with: IANALFFS, but they sure do choose to stop doing business suddenly with lots of people who have large paypal balances that go forfeit, which I find unsettling.
Morally, I have no problem with polygomy. But when we're talking about legal contracts that bind financial assets, things can get really complicated really fast.
Wait, what? So.. legal contracts between more than two people that bind financial aspects are by definition an intractable problem? Er.. don't most corporate charters involve more than two owners or stockholders?
Many have said "Marriage is a contract", I think I'll buy that. So, why cannot Marriage also be a corporate charter? Your home is a residentially-flavored company. Polygamous households would just have more owners. Single people are sole-proprietorships. You can't marry your toaster in any legally binding sense since the toaster cannot legally participate in a contract.
There, has that solved all of the slippery-slope foolishness for everybody now? I'm seriously getting sick of all the "you can't do this because of [insert boogeyman here]" arguments. It's time for people to open the god damned closet and realize there is nothing of consequence lurking there, and go the fuck back to bed with their three wives, two husbands and a cardboard cut-out of Elvis.
Nuuuuuuuuuuu!
It's a trap, Felisa Wolfe-Simon just wants to sell you Head and Shoulders!
I'm rerouting auxiliary power through the lateral sensor array, but it's not having any effect.
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.. :P
TFA is slashdotted, so those who wish to read it can see Google's cache:
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:http://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/&hl=en&strip=1
Thank you Slashdot user alsaan for pointing this out farther down the comment stream.
For those who don't like to read the original, here is my inline summary combined with my opines on each point from the article:
== List of points addressed in article:
* "'open source' does not guarantee 'better'": While this is true from a technical standpoint, I believe it is important to keep ones destiny in ones own hands. In the (closely related) Theora vs h264 discussion, It is inadvisable to subscribe to a format monoculture under the legal control of a group with no observable vested interest aside from growing the userbase of people they will later gouge with fees. I am to understand that any dangers present in the transient patents pertaining to Theora and Vorbis have been legally neutralized. I do not know if this is true for the ogg container itself, more research is recommended.
* Generality: TFA criticizes OGG for ostensibly being able to handle any video or audio codec, while only in practice being able to easily handle Theora and Vorbis. A> I don't think anyone wants to use OGG to handle any other codecs, and B> TFA goes on to praise Matroska as a pan-galactic container format. I agree. To this end, does anyone know if Matroska is patent encumbered itself? Could it carry Theora/Vorbis payloads? Could this be a superior replacement or even alternative to popular support of OGG only in HTML 5 implementations?
* Overhead: OGG introduces an average of 1% bloat to your files. When one uses workarounds to reduce codec latency in realtime applications, this can climb to 7%. If only plastic packaging for consumer electronics were as unobtrusive as a 7% filesize increase.
* Latency: TFA bundles all of it's latency concerns into the fact that getting acceptable latency control drives overhead up to 7% of filesize. TFA then commences to soil itself over this measurement.
* Random Access: TFA states OGG is a bear to seek through. It doesn't provide any direct measurements or observations to quantify this point however, so unless someone in the crowd wants to test this (I'm too lazy xD), I'll consider this point up in the air.
* Timestamps/AV sync: TFA links to a whole nother article to complain about this one, which I can't access since the site is down. Back to the crowd: has anyone noticed ogg-related AV sync problems? yes/no? I haven't played enough ogg myself to know. :
* Complexity: OGG is apparently a bear to write encoders and decoders for. While not a customer-facing problem, devs are people too, so I feel your pain. But I think devs prefer freedom to create an encoder or decoder over convenience to get cornholed for creating one six years down the road.
TFA closes on the same point which I've actually been itching to suggest to the author since I began reading it:
* "If all the standard formats are indeed covered by patents, the only proper solution is to design a new, good format which is not, this time hopefully avoiding the old mistakes."
I agree wholeheartedly, and that's the beauty of open standards. If you don't like this format, why can you not create or advocate your own alternative? Is Matroska patented? (I've never heard such myself..) If it is, can author not hobble together his own patent-skirting alternative? People would rally behind it. If Matroska is free from patent encumbering, can we load it with Theora/Vorbis? Again, people are not championing the OGG container, simply trying to avoid h264's patents or anything similar. We'll take whatever format of roughly comparable properties comes our way. :P
Baal belonged to a pantheon and therefore could not be "the all-powerful God".
Sure, but it turned out he was secretly working for Anubis all along.</spoilers>
mod insightful, I haven't had points in a coons age :3
Some stills cameras, e.g. on phones, are shutterless as well, but often have some interesting artefacts.
Ha, sweet; but that's not the most illustrative image from that set. I prefer This one.. you know, since hardware folk might mistake your linked image with some new, weed-whacker style floppy propeller system. :3
In the photo I linked, I love how the "pseudoblades" also have well-defined shadows xD
... e-books by authors can remain "in print" from their publication date until their copyright expires.
So.... not after, then?
I know I'm being nit-picky again, and it's just a poor choice of words, but there are tons of people who labor under the misapprehension that you cannot sell copies of things without the backing of copyright. Even after an authors copyright has expired (yes, half past hell freezing over these days) there is no reason not to continue keeping Ebook copies up for sale. Not everyone knows they can be had elsewhere for free then. Not everyone feels like hunting copies down elsewhere, and would rather ring through for a small fee and get it here, now.
(just as candles are now almost a 'niche' product to provide lighting).
"Almost"? So when do they get used outside the "niche"'s of setting a mood or backup lighting for power failures?
PS: Not confrontational, just feel nit-picky ;3
"No-one makes jokes in base 13".
Um, yeah. Really? Is that a quote from somewhere? :3
- - Jesse Thompson
Atomic Bong Triscadecimal Industrial Solutions (founded 2000Q3)
"We've got you covered, from 123 to ABC!
(Nobody stipulated that the jokes had to be good, right?)
There are more gopher servers online now than there were a few years ago so worth having a peek in gopher://gopher.floodgap.com if you are bored.
Er, how does one Google the gopherspace to find what one is after? :>
Documentation aside, I've topped 105 down an even grade as well. Yes, the rig shakes like it will come apart at that speed. It's funner than shit. xD
Any time we sail above 88 the time travel jokes flow like wine. :P
I don't read boring news, I read slashdot!
Oh wait... I think I just confirmed your post and the article.
Well, TBH one reason I read slashdot is because crowdsourced comments are more difficult to bias than paid journalism. Perhaps we commenters come from a niche demographic to begin with, we're not perfect; I'm simply (lazy and) hard pressed to find a more stable journalistic platform.
Commenters reliably reflect most information from TFA and season it with their own personal perspectives (explaining why RTFA is so unpopular xD). Commenters misrepresenting TFA are regularly named and shamed. Many commenters even correct, clarify or expand upon summary and article alike. We demand references and citations from one another; sometimes we even get them. :P
It doesn't always work. It isn't always fair or informative. Oddly enough, if you serve up a genuinely high tech article about hard science, space or quantum physics the crowd starts sounding about as clueless as my grandmother on the topic. xD But you can usually tell when the discussion has gone off and browse on to the next topic. I get more usable, bias-corrected "news" here (sadly) than from any other source of which I am aware.
This is a very peculiar thing. Perhaps we should brainstorm methods to distill fact from biased noise to arrive at an untainted wellspring of current affairs intel we can all drink from. The data is there, we just need to cancel out the opposing non-factual chaff. Someone, get Luis Von Ahn in here, STAT! :3
Nice try but the postal services serves to deliver parcels from and to a person. A better example would be the illegal liquor runs during the US prohibition. They clearly delivered illegal goods but the vehicle used can also be used for the delivery of legal goods. Now if your roads are full of vehicles delivering illegal liquor because it is cheap and well invigorating, to the point that ambulances can't get to hospitals, you'll have to take action.
Hmm, illegal liquor delivery so intense it clogs the public thoroughfares? I'm not concerned that your analogy is a stretch, most are. What interests me is that your analogy is only stretched so thin because the original problem is too. :)
There is nothing in the nature of alcohol, nor in it's previous illegality, that would make the transporting of it fill all available (widening) thoroughfares until every street clogs. In a similar vein, there is nothing in the nature of file sharing, nor it's unsavory reputation in the media, that makes it inexorably expand to clog all available intertubes.
Just stop and think about it for a moment. You might argue that, by volume, copyright-infringing p2p makes up the vast majority of p2p traffic, and further that copyright infringing p2p makes up the vast majority of data transfer for all residential users. But what in the nature of ripped DVDs causes them to hog so much room? Is it the scandal? The illegality? Nope. It's just because audio-visual media is larger than todays simple web pages and email. That's all.
However, thanks to Youtube and niko niko douga users are coming to realize that what they want from the internet is in fact rich, social multimedia; instead of the text and static image mainstay trappings of the 20th century.
Major ISP's fighting against p2p and network neutrality are not fighting for the sanctity of copyright, they are actually fighting to prevent end-users from using their internet connections to consume multimedia offerings of any kind. They do this because many of these same ISP's try to sell media via cable TV, and you won't buy their cable TV service if you can get your media from the web. They don't care if it's pirated media (downloaded once, uploaded 1.X times, and then viewed repeatedly from archive) or Hulu / Netflix (downloaded inefficiently, streamed, and ISP called and bitched at if the frames ever skip). That is where their true motivation lies. The sanctity of copyright means diddly to ISP's of any size unless or until they get bullied by the content mafia. These ISP's want to kill all remote IPTV options in order to gain an anti-competitive edge for their own wares.
So please try not to fall in line with Ted Stevens thinking that ambulances won't be able to get anywhere due to "all the illicit traffic". Or, in case your point was intended as humorous hyperbole, understand that this actually is the party line at big ISPs: the "bandwidth hogs" are keeping all the senators from getting their email on time. This, of course, only makes sense until the senator's email contains video from last weeks filibuster as an attachment.
The real consequence to keep in mind is that the Internet is not a public/government thoroughfare. It is a homogeneous, teaming market of connected network providers. By that token, it is not the Federal Government's mandate to fairly apportion backbone bandwidth. I find this perfectly acceptable, because at no point in this infrastructure do p2p or fat media downloads of any kind cause traffic snarls save in the badly maintained networks of the residential duopolies. They now have the technology to support last-mile speeds as high as 150mbit at vaguely residential rates, but then they fail at second-to-last-mile aggregation, since they cannot allow more than 1 in 50,000 of their customers to actually make use of that speed at any given time. Furthermore, you'll never get 150mbit to any single target out their he
I think it's important to note that just because competing nations abuse human rights and erode their own foundations is no call for us to do the same.
We believe that an individual's freedom to choose their own destiny is the heart of what makes our nation great and powerful. This is how we founded our nation. If we really believe this we should fight to maintain this standard. Rolling over to government corruption or multinational corporate rape does nothing to strengthen our nation.
So far as the constitution being a living document, yes it is. Yes, many things change relevance in 230 years. When that happens, we should have a reliable system for upgrading the document. Maintain the standard, and then stick to it. Our government at present is simply ignoring the standard which defeats the entire purpose. See George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Correct me if I'm wrong (but I do have a CCNA cert) Why not block the access ports that get opened, unless it's port 80 and then filter the traffic.
Ah, CCNA. ;D
Most users, if they have a router at all, have a SOHO router with minimal firewalling ability, just NAT/PAT.
The simplest worm I could think of that would drink your milkshake would just dial home via SSL port 443. Client-initiated connection, redialed as needed: what on earth could your fancy firewall do about that? :3
Moral of story: Don't get rooted. :(
It needs to be tested, it needs to be reviewed if it changes or breaks any other tools that rely on a sloppy API or tricky "feature", and it needs to pass regression testing. When you're running core servers, worldwide, and stand to lose millions of dollars if you accidentally break something critical, you'd better test it well.
This entire line of reasoning is merely another call for open source software. Browser makers should not be in a position where they are somehow personally responsible for complex, demonstrably unstable business installations. If the code is open, then the business clients who stack complicated houses of cards on the software (be it browser, OS, or wherever) can take their own responsibility for their non-standard decisions, and the software vendors can focus on meeting generic standards and keeping security up to date for everyone.
Luckily, we don't have to expend any effort in this fight. The market will clean the mess up for us nicely. :)
The internets provide This Explanation for the phenomenon. :P
What I am saying is that art can have just as large of an impact of our understanding of the world - not in increasing our understanding of how the universe fundamentally works, but by increasing our understanding of the human condition. Art can be just as thought provoking as science. They're similar but not the same.
I don't see any slashdotters in this thread asking to throttle government subsidies for the arts. What I see are people asking for free access to art, and to either reform or abolish (I'm in the "abolish" camp) a copyright system that — under the guise of funding the arts — instead tries to hold art hostage from the very audience that gives it the meaning you name here.
In the current system, even if I want to make my own art and provide all of my own funding, I can't. Have you considered that this Copyright incentive you are trying to defend (or reform, it wouldn't make a difference) quashes more original creative work than it encourages?
All canned content that can be had can be had digitally at (virtually) no cost. Criminalizing this basic fact of digital information to fabricate artificial scarcity is not a form of incentive, simply extortion. Thus those who make the most profit are not the best authors, but the best extortionists. This system is a 300 year experiment in failed policy (2010 marks the tricentenial of the Statute of Anne, so I'm not just rounding here), and among the least optimal incentives that are available to us. It's time to end it.
Many slashdotters are speaking up in this thread to discuss business models that authors (or even publishers) can use to finance and incentivize their creative works without abridging the public's right to share, reproduce or derive from the work once it's released. I am sorry if you mistake this for hypocrisy, we are not limiting the ways in which authors can be incentivized. At least not beyond the trampling of globally beneficial rights to freedom of information exchange.
Feel free to throw in your own suggestions for incentive, be they government subsidies or .. well, whatever else you were going to add. Every clever idea helps! :)
It seems rather silly to think that large publishing companies won't sponsor people, regardless of the distribution medium, if they think they're going to get large return on investment. That's good economics, regardless of the medium.
Mod parent up. I don't write enough myself to get mod points any more. :3 .. maybe I just need an advance. :P
Or
I would just say that porn is not the same as information.
Umm...... Information exists though, right? So... rule #34. QED.
Am I the only one who has noticed that Cartman coerced a malfunctioning censorship chip to electrocute people by invoking the name of Barbara Streisand 4 years before she managed to do something completely different in order to put her name on the very idea of backfiring censorship? Matt and Trey really need to stop being so god-damned right all the time. ;D