So that the folks in Alaska are not disadvantaged and there isn't another big reason not to live there
Why is that the problem of someone who lives in a condo in NYC, where one letter carrier can service 500 customers?
If you choose - for your own reasons - to live in an area were it costs you more to drive around, costs you more to heat your house, costs you more to drill a well for drinking water, and costs you more to get to a hospital because you need a boat or an aircraft... if you've made all of those choices already, which impact a typical person's budget in the thousands of dollars a year, is it really unreasonable to ask that they pay a rational amount for mail service to the remote outpost they've elected to call home?
If you want to live remotely, you take on substantial costs. If first class mail went up 500% for those people, it wouldn't come close to impacting them they way that the delta in fresh vegetable costs does.
Right, because what you want are legislators who have no need for pay from doing their job, but rather only people who are independently wealthy or able to cleverly live off of graft while not being caught in the act.
No. It's just fine to pay legislators. It's a job, and they're hired to do that job every few years.
You're right. It's high time that the administration that was responsible for that episode was finally voted out of office. It's hard to believe that - after all these decades - they're still setting such policies, and still running those sorts of tests.
Right. A country whose prosperity, historically, and even more now that it does less actual manufacturing, is hugely dependent on intellectual property does indeed not favor people who rip things off. The best solution there is to not rip things off.
then hold them without trial
Yes, unfortunately the Obama administration really did screw that up. But things are getting straightened out so that enemy combatants, terrorists, and the like who fit into the awkward space between domestic arrests and uniformed soldiers in combat elsewhere can go back to being tried in a military venue. In the meantime, your assertions about conditions in Guantanamo are, of course, made-up BS, and you know it. And endless parade of journalists, Red Cross people, and the like disagree with you, having been there themselves.
extrajudicial assassinations of foreign nationals inside foreign countries
Who cares where they are? If they're in the middle of plotting, executing, or supporting efforts to kill us, and the country in which they're hiding has no will or ability to do anything about it, it's exactly the right thing to do.
pepper spraying innocent protesters in the face at point blank range
Ah, I see. So when a campus cop goes ove the top dealing with people blocking the street, that's a sure sign of actual, nation-wide policy, right? Not to be confused, of course, with using machine guns on crowds, and sending snipers out to shoot at protesters day after day as a matter of centrally directed government policy, right? Kent State? Whose policy do you believe that to have been, following what sort of chain of command, under what circumstances? Are you capable of actually comparing that event with the sustained mass murders by governments in the middle east? Or of even one weekend's multiple, city-wide, actual-standing-orders killings during protests in Iran?
I don't think you understand what neutral means.
And you (deliberately, of course) are pretending to have absolutely no perspective or grip on the facts so that you can score lame, junior-high-school-quality rhetorical points that, of course, stand up to no examination whatsoever in this context.
Are you really unable to understand the difference in materials and workmanship between, say, an actual Rolex watch, and one that it costs $1.50 to manufacture?
Gucci was originally a sadle maker. Have you ever actually looked at the workmanship on one of their expensive bags, briefcases, or their shoes? Are you that unable to pick up a $5 knock-off and see cheesy, unfinished machine stitching instead of careful hand work?
MOST western countries violate human rights just as bad [as Iran]
Citation, please.
Iran's government policies include criminal enforcement of beard length, and the banning of words like "pizza" (legally, you must refer to them as "elastic loaves" in order to not be prosecuted by the religious dictatorship). It would be interesting to see your food-name-banning references and beard-length-police equivalents in "most" western countries. To say nothing of routinely gunning down people having protests. If "most of the west" were anything like Iran, there would be thousands dead in mass graves just from the whole "occupy" party-fest that's being held. Of course, you know that.
California is already over 2 billion short on the budget this year... Hope all the other states are taking notes on "what not to do"
What, you mean like not contribute their own citizens' cash, via federal taxes, to a mostly-paid-by-the-feds boondoggle project like this in California, which is itself nothing but a giant political gesture towards big union labor that will suck off of it like a tick for twenty five years? Yeah, I hope so, too. I never travel to California,but I'm sure glad they'll be spending at least a hundred billion dollars of largely other states' money on this.
If it's such a good idea for the California economy, they should swear off of any use of federal funds for it, right now.
Are you suggesting that UN is LESS neutral then USA
No, I'm saying that people who put countries like Iran in charge of UN commissions on human rights have no business dealing with freedom of speech issues like domain management. Of course you know that.
This will just push people toward less centralized systems; Tor hidden services come to my mind as does Freenet, but there are others out there.
Really? You really think that someone who Googles for discount ("cheap") versions of otherwise somewhat costly software for automotive use, or who are looking for logo-oriented things like NFL jerseys are going to be sing Tor to do their buying of counterfeit goods? When they want to pull out a credit card and get a brand-name purse or shoe at a tenth of the normal price (and are dumb enough to not consider the fact that they're buying a poorly made rip-off of the actual item), you think they'll be looking to a ghost network of proxies and hidden networks?
Or is it possible that it's just a lot simpler than that. That, just as mentioned in the fine article, you're dealig with web sites run by scam artists and counterfeiters who are hoping that average consumers looking to place an online order won't recognize that they're dealing with criminals. Sites being run by plainly obvious counterfeiters got shut down, just like their warehouses are shut down if they're within the jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies that see what they're doing and have the mandate to stop them.
Yet another example of the 1% Overlords only using their money to build 1-acre hot tubs, drink 100-year-old Scotch from disposable diamand shot glasses, and keep other people poor because that's what makes them happy.
If that were true, the business model would pay out based on how much is created. Instead, it is based on how much is distributed.
No. How much is distributed (purchased) is based on the market demand for the items that were created for sale. This depends on successful (as in, successfully targeted) creation to meet a market demand. The distribution, which is just part of the plumbing that connects the supply to the demand, isn't the business model. It's just a tool used by the creator and the consumer to get the job done, and to allow such things to scale.
Why do you think copyright keeps getting extended?
Because life is different. People and their immediate heirs are living decades longer than they used to.
Creating content is not the business model, distributing it is.
No, creating content for distribution is the business model. Being hired to do the distribution is secondary to that. Without people choosing to create things that they are seeking to sell, there would be no need for publishers to do the legwork.
How is it that we're still not clear on the idea that the content (creating it, using a publisher to find a market for it, charging for it, and making money from that process) is the business model. People who create content for the pleasure of doing so give their work away all the time. There's plenty where that came from. Mechanisms to prevent people from ripping off content don't matter to people who don't have an interest in the content-selling business model.
Creative people who deliberately join up with a publisher, label, studio or other partner to handle their business affairs while they go about continuing to write, record, film and whatnot - they have decided to embrace a particular business model: not doing it for free. Whether or not every or any DRM tool is ideal or practical is beside the point. The issue is that there are people who create things (books, games, movies, music) for a living if they can find an audience, and charging for copies of what they create is the business model. If they can't find anyone to buy it, that's too bad for them. They need to work harder or choose better partners. But if people simply rip them off because it's fairly easy to do so, that's not a comment on the creative people, it's a comment on the people who like to make little entertainment slaves out them.
The submitter's silly implication - that DRM is ever used for any reason other than because being ripped off isn't part of the business model - is, well, silly.
But people do the parts of that larger collaboration that we refer to as "the internet," and nobody has an inalienable "right" to use any one part of it. No more than they have the inalienable right to park in your driveway or drive across your front yard as part of the "the road system."
There is no internet. There is only a bunch of separate networks run by various people and organizations from tiny to huge who happen to agree to allow other people's traffic on, off, and through them with varying levels of priority and speed. They willingly establish peering connections between them, and come up with varying approaches to covering the huge costs of doing so. Nobody owns the internet because there is no internet. There are only adjoining networks and agreements between them (thousands of them) about how to interact with each other. Which is why some of them have off-limits areas, and some don't. Which is why some are faster than others, and some give special treatment to their own paying customers or partners with whom they have special agreements. Which is completely reasonable.
But, being low on electrolytes or low on blood sugar are not the same things as being dehydrated. For most people, the last thing they need to reach for, most of the time, is a salty, carbo-loaded drink, when water will do just fine. That's not Eeeeeeevil Corporate Speak, it's the simple truth.
beat them all to it years ago with Occupy Afghanistan in 2001
No, the Taliban was doing that before we were, and Al Queda was occupying them. Which is why we are there now. Because the Taliban, much like Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy Oakland, has a higher than averate asshat quotient.
If couples went to such lengths to listen to each other while they're still together, divorces just might become a rarity again.
No, if couples actually took time to really get to know someone and understand their thinking, they might actually skip over the whole getting married part in the first place (which would, indeed, reduce the divorce rate, but more indirectly). And it would save a lot of misery.
America often has been a backward "conservative" nation for much of its history. Aside from a few generations at the very beginning of America's modern history, the tolerance for risk has been decreasing rapidly. Without real risk you can't have real gain.
You're confusing things. The risk aversion is coming from the left. It's the Nanny-statists, the entitlement culture, and those that tell every kid that they're just as successful as everyone else for having shown up and remembered to breath... all of that stuff stunts any sort of risk-taking creative impulse. You want to scold someone? Scold the people who have a vested interest in defining society as requiring nannies: it's the professional nanny-like academic layers, the income-confiscation-ists/re-distributionists, and the central-planning, we-know-best-ists that are insisting that creative risk taking is best avoided unless it's in the form of a minor revisoin to the plot of a teenage vampire movie or a new angle on the professional self esteem boosting industry.
In this area, liberals are the conservatives. They want to be paid to be in charge of the tyrannical embrace of state coddling, and need to enslave the handful of actually creative and productive people in order to fund that whole approach. And, of course, they have finally all but smothered the fire that makes the engine run. And what to they propose? Stamping out any remaining embers (successful businesses are evil!) to make the people with absolutely no personal drive not feel bad about themselves. Nauseating.
And what do the collectivists with executive power do to make this all seem not true? Loan (and, of course, lose) half a billion tax payer dollars to a wrong-headed "green" tech business affiliated with their big political donors, and call it innovation. They're willing to take risks with money earned by the minority of people in the country that actually pay taxes, but they write tax law that punishes people who personally risk the loss of money when they invest in businesses directly, without involving government bureaucracy and cronyism.
Your problem is that you think in terms of a fixed amount of prosperity being distributed by some system. That's a false premise, and leads to your incorrect conclusions.
If you mental model were correct, the fixed amount of available prosperity would have everyone in the country living like cavemen, because we'd be dividing up the prosperity available 200 years ago amount many times more people. Wealth is created, not distributed. Which is why the working class today lives like kings compared to the working class of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
So that the folks in Alaska are not disadvantaged and there isn't another big reason not to live there
Why is that the problem of someone who lives in a condo in NYC, where one letter carrier can service 500 customers?
If you choose - for your own reasons - to live in an area were it costs you more to drive around, costs you more to heat your house, costs you more to drill a well for drinking water, and costs you more to get to a hospital because you need a boat or an aircraft... if you've made all of those choices already, which impact a typical person's budget in the thousands of dollars a year, is it really unreasonable to ask that they pay a rational amount for mail service to the remote outpost they've elected to call home?
If you want to live remotely, you take on substantial costs. If first class mail went up 500% for those people, it wouldn't come close to impacting them they way that the delta in fresh vegetable costs does.
if it got rid of congressional pay
Right, because what you want are legislators who have no need for pay from doing their job, but rather only people who are independently wealthy or able to cleverly live off of graft while not being caught in the act.
No. It's just fine to pay legislators. It's a job, and they're hired to do that job every few years.
Three words: Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
You're right. It's high time that the administration that was responsible for that episode was finally voted out of office. It's hard to believe that - after all these decades - they're still setting such policies, and still running those sorts of tests.
where sharing a few files ...
Right. A country whose prosperity, historically, and even more now that it does less actual manufacturing, is hugely dependent on intellectual property does indeed not favor people who rip things off. The best solution there is to not rip things off.
then hold them without trial
Yes, unfortunately the Obama administration really did screw that up. But things are getting straightened out so that enemy combatants, terrorists, and the like who fit into the awkward space between domestic arrests and uniformed soldiers in combat elsewhere can go back to being tried in a military venue. In the meantime, your assertions about conditions in Guantanamo are, of course, made-up BS, and you know it. And endless parade of journalists, Red Cross people, and the like disagree with you, having been there themselves.
extrajudicial assassinations of foreign nationals inside foreign countries
Who cares where they are? If they're in the middle of plotting, executing, or supporting efforts to kill us, and the country in which they're hiding has no will or ability to do anything about it, it's exactly the right thing to do.
pepper spraying innocent protesters in the face at point blank range
Ah, I see. So when a campus cop goes ove the top dealing with people blocking the street, that's a sure sign of actual, nation-wide policy, right? Not to be confused, of course, with using machine guns on crowds, and sending snipers out to shoot at protesters day after day as a matter of centrally directed government policy, right? Kent State? Whose policy do you believe that to have been, following what sort of chain of command, under what circumstances? Are you capable of actually comparing that event with the sustained mass murders by governments in the middle east? Or of even one weekend's multiple, city-wide, actual-standing-orders killings during protests in Iran?
I don't think you understand what neutral means.
And you (deliberately, of course) are pretending to have absolutely no perspective or grip on the facts so that you can score lame, junior-high-school-quality rhetorical points that, of course, stand up to no examination whatsoever in this context.
Are you really unable to understand the difference in materials and workmanship between, say, an actual Rolex watch, and one that it costs $1.50 to manufacture? Gucci was originally a sadle maker. Have you ever actually looked at the workmanship on one of their expensive bags, briefcases, or their shoes? Are you that unable to pick up a $5 knock-off and see cheesy, unfinished machine stitching instead of careful hand work?
MOST western countries violate human rights just as bad [as Iran]
Citation, please.
Iran's government policies include criminal enforcement of beard length, and the banning of words like "pizza" (legally, you must refer to them as "elastic loaves" in order to not be prosecuted by the religious dictatorship). It would be interesting to see your food-name-banning references and beard-length-police equivalents in "most" western countries. To say nothing of routinely gunning down people having protests. If "most of the west" were anything like Iran, there would be thousands dead in mass graves just from the whole "occupy" party-fest that's being held. Of course, you know that.
California is already over 2 billion short on the budget this year ... Hope all the other states are taking notes on "what not to do"
What, you mean like not contribute their own citizens' cash, via federal taxes, to a mostly-paid-by-the-feds boondoggle project like this in California, which is itself nothing but a giant political gesture towards big union labor that will suck off of it like a tick for twenty five years? Yeah, I hope so, too. I never travel to California,but I'm sure glad they'll be spending at least a hundred billion dollars of largely other states' money on this.
If it's such a good idea for the California economy, they should swear off of any use of federal funds for it, right now.
Are you suggesting that UN is LESS neutral then USA
No, I'm saying that people who put countries like Iran in charge of UN commissions on human rights have no business dealing with freedom of speech issues like domain management. Of course you know that.
It would be best for everyone if the things ICANN handles would be moved under neutral party, like UN
That's a very funny joke you just made there.
This will just push people toward less centralized systems; Tor hidden services come to my mind as does Freenet, but there are others out there.
Really? You really think that someone who Googles for discount ("cheap") versions of otherwise somewhat costly software for automotive use, or who are looking for logo-oriented things like NFL jerseys are going to be sing Tor to do their buying of counterfeit goods? When they want to pull out a credit card and get a brand-name purse or shoe at a tenth of the normal price (and are dumb enough to not consider the fact that they're buying a poorly made rip-off of the actual item), you think they'll be looking to a ghost network of proxies and hidden networks?
Or is it possible that it's just a lot simpler than that. That, just as mentioned in the fine article, you're dealig with web sites run by scam artists and counterfeiters who are hoping that average consumers looking to place an online order won't recognize that they're dealing with criminals. Sites being run by plainly obvious counterfeiters got shut down, just like their warehouses are shut down if they're within the jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies that see what they're doing and have the mandate to stop them.
Actually, I was being sarcastic. Too subtly, apparently.
Yet another example of the 1% Overlords only using their money to build 1-acre hot tubs, drink 100-year-old Scotch from disposable diamand shot glasses, and keep other people poor because that's what makes them happy.
If that were true, the business model would pay out based on how much is created. Instead, it is based on how much is distributed.
No. How much is distributed (purchased) is based on the market demand for the items that were created for sale. This depends on successful (as in, successfully targeted) creation to meet a market demand. The distribution, which is just part of the plumbing that connects the supply to the demand, isn't the business model. It's just a tool used by the creator and the consumer to get the job done, and to allow such things to scale.
Why do you think copyright keeps getting extended?
Because life is different. People and their immediate heirs are living decades longer than they used to.
Creating content is not the business model, distributing it is.
No, creating content for distribution is the business model. Being hired to do the distribution is secondary to that. Without people choosing to create things that they are seeking to sell, there would be no need for publishers to do the legwork.
How is it that we're still not clear on the idea that the content (creating it, using a publisher to find a market for it, charging for it, and making money from that process) is the business model. People who create content for the pleasure of doing so give their work away all the time. There's plenty where that came from. Mechanisms to prevent people from ripping off content don't matter to people who don't have an interest in the content-selling business model.
Creative people who deliberately join up with a publisher, label, studio or other partner to handle their business affairs while they go about continuing to write, record, film and whatnot - they have decided to embrace a particular business model: not doing it for free. Whether or not every or any DRM tool is ideal or practical is beside the point. The issue is that there are people who create things (books, games, movies, music) for a living if they can find an audience, and charging for copies of what they create is the business model. If they can't find anyone to buy it, that's too bad for them. They need to work harder or choose better partners. But if people simply rip them off because it's fairly easy to do so, that's not a comment on the creative people, it's a comment on the people who like to make little entertainment slaves out them.
The submitter's silly implication - that DRM is ever used for any reason other than because being ripped off isn't part of the business model - is, well, silly.
And it's a concept that nobody owns.
But people do the parts of that larger collaboration that we refer to as "the internet," and nobody has an inalienable "right" to use any one part of it. No more than they have the inalienable right to park in your driveway or drive across your front yard as part of the "the road system."
Who owns the internet, genius?
There is no internet. There is only a bunch of separate networks run by various people and organizations from tiny to huge who happen to agree to allow other people's traffic on, off, and through them with varying levels of priority and speed. They willingly establish peering connections between them, and come up with varying approaches to covering the huge costs of doing so. Nobody owns the internet because there is no internet. There are only adjoining networks and agreements between them (thousands of them) about how to interact with each other. Which is why some of them have off-limits areas, and some don't. Which is why some are faster than others, and some give special treatment to their own paying customers or partners with whom they have special agreements. Which is completely reasonable.
Which is exactly what you'd expect someone who prefers to rip off entertainment to say.
But, being low on electrolytes or low on blood sugar are not the same things as being dehydrated. For most people, the last thing they need to reach for, most of the time, is a salty, carbo-loaded drink, when water will do just fine. That's not Eeeeeeevil Corporate Speak, it's the simple truth.
Right, because the Lunar Snail Darters are at risk, and the view from the Kennedy Lunar Compound might be bothered.
beat them all to it years ago with Occupy Afghanistan in 2001
No, the Taliban was doing that before we were, and Al Queda was occupying them. Which is why we are there now. Because the Taliban, much like Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy Oakland, has a higher than averate asshat quotient.
If couples went to such lengths to listen to each other while they're still together, divorces just might become a rarity again.
No, if couples actually took time to really get to know someone and understand their thinking, they might actually skip over the whole getting married part in the first place (which would, indeed, reduce the divorce rate, but more indirectly). And it would save a lot of misery.
America often has been a backward "conservative" nation for much of its history. Aside from a few generations at the very beginning of America's modern history, the tolerance for risk has been decreasing rapidly. Without real risk you can't have real gain.
You're confusing things. The risk aversion is coming from the left. It's the Nanny-statists, the entitlement culture, and those that tell every kid that they're just as successful as everyone else for having shown up and remembered to breath ... all of that stuff stunts any sort of risk-taking creative impulse. You want to scold someone? Scold the people who have a vested interest in defining society as requiring nannies: it's the professional nanny-like academic layers, the income-confiscation-ists/re-distributionists, and the central-planning, we-know-best-ists that are insisting that creative risk taking is best avoided unless it's in the form of a minor revisoin to the plot of a teenage vampire movie or a new angle on the professional self esteem boosting industry.
In this area, liberals are the conservatives. They want to be paid to be in charge of the tyrannical embrace of state coddling, and need to enslave the handful of actually creative and productive people in order to fund that whole approach. And, of course, they have finally all but smothered the fire that makes the engine run. And what to they propose? Stamping out any remaining embers (successful businesses are evil!) to make the people with absolutely no personal drive not feel bad about themselves. Nauseating.
And what do the collectivists with executive power do to make this all seem not true? Loan (and, of course, lose) half a billion tax payer dollars to a wrong-headed "green" tech business affiliated with their big political donors, and call it innovation. They're willing to take risks with money earned by the minority of people in the country that actually pay taxes, but they write tax law that punishes people who personally risk the loss of money when they invest in businesses directly, without involving government bureaucracy and cronyism.
Or do you belong to that religion called Atheism
I see that you belong to a group that thinks not collecting stamps is a nice hobby.
Your problem is that you think in terms of a fixed amount of prosperity being distributed by some system. That's a false premise, and leads to your incorrect conclusions.
If you mental model were correct, the fixed amount of available prosperity would have everyone in the country living like cavemen, because we'd be dividing up the prosperity available 200 years ago amount many times more people. Wealth is created, not distributed. Which is why the working class today lives like kings compared to the working class of the past.