They're lamentable human trash with next to no resources and a whole lot of anger.
Um, other than large, oil-rich countries like Iran actively writing them large checks, shipping them truckloads of explosives, and giving them enormous moral support in the form of "democracy is a failure" and other "wiping off the face of the planet" type rhetoric from the elected governments of those countries (hint: Iran). If "no resources" is, to you, the same as "tons of money, government support, technology, weapons, and an active uranium enrichment program", then I'd hate to hear what you thing "having resources" would look like.
You're right that they're trash, but they're trash that are busy soliciting (and getting) major logistical and financial support from multiple sources, and busy cultivating shopping pipelines through east Asia to delightful places like North Korea.
They're not special, nor are they particularly impressive
Nope, and they don't have to be to blow themselves up on a train full of commuters in London or Madrid. Nothing special by your standards or mine - just mentally broken enough to think it's the right thing to do. And since the cheerleaders they listen to publicly embrace the pursuit and use of massively more destructive weapons as a holy mission, their un-specialness (from your point of view, or mine) doesn't really matter. Only actual results (or prevention of them) matter. I don't care about their character, or the richness/shallowness of their world view.
The only thing they can actually do to us is scare us, and if we're afraid, then they've won and we've lost.
Now, really. Would you be comfortable saying that exact same thing to any of the tens of thousands of direct parents/children/siblings of people actually killed by these "non-special" people in New York, Bali, Madrid, or London? Face to face?
And I can't believe people are actually fooled into thinking somehow terrorism is a major threat.
Gee, you're so right. A few hundred thousand people losing their jobs in 2001, an instant and painful economic blow to the investments (and retirements, and insurance policies) of millions of people, and the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly tied to the thousands that died (or lost family, or lost their life-long businesses, etc) are of no significance. Is it really your contention that if we had not acted in response to those attacks (and had instead focused on obesity), that the financial and communications networks that facilitated the attacks would not have been used again, despite the proclaimed intentions of the perpetrators to do exactly that?
If you didn't personally watch smoke rising from a pile of rubble containing dead people (some of them possibly not even obese!) that morning (did you? I did) maybe the reality of it would be a little more concrete to you. Being a tech guy, one of the first things I thought about that morning was how much of a trail the advance work for that attack must have left, and how completely irrelevent that is when the people you're after aren't ever going to be interested in defending themselves afterwards in a criminal prosecution. So what if "only" a few thousand people die in an attack like that, and only a few million are impacted in their wallets, in their ability to retire when they planned on doing so, and other little inconveniences? Does it occur to you that this isn't binary? Personally dying, or not, isn't the only consideration.
We're talking about Americans here. They're much better at rhetoric about how great and free they are than actually getting upset when their leaders turn out to be blatantly trampling rights enshrined in the constitution.
No, they're much better at using pundits on TV to bitch at the administration for not "connecting the dots" about people sitting in the country gearing up to kill a few thousand people, and using phones to chat with each other, keep their finances flowing, call their flight schools after getting off the phone with their buddy in Jordan (who just talked to his buddy in Germany, who earlier that day was talking to his buddy in Boston about renting that car that they left in the parking lot when they got on the plane).
People watch endless news and popular entertainment that involves cross referencing dumped telco records to see who someone talked to, the better to bust up a criminal relationship or follow some other money trail. Of course it's a lot harder when you have to dig up disparate data from multiple providers, but it's there, whenever prosecutors need it - always has been. The difference, right now, is that when some twit in, say, Madrid, decides to blow up his apartment rather than be caught... and one of the scraps of paper left over includes a phone number assigned to disposable phone bought near the Mexico border... well, there's a certain amount of urgency in having a quick way to at least see if there's a red-hot pattern of calls swirling around the related numbers.
I'm all for the privacy that requires judicial oversight on doing anything with that information. But what I don't want to hear is a bunch of witless complaining (from the same "We're talking about Americans here") about how the FBI (on Bush's watch! that lazy bastard!) didn't see an attack, an arms shipment, etc., coming... just like on 9/11! Because the phone records are going to be there. After-the-fact quarterbacking is always going to show that there were obvious signs of coordination between the groups of people it takes import/export mayhem. Pattern detection is a pretty damn obvious tool - it's what you DO with it that matters. I wonder how the people who bitch about this feel about the cops they're driving next to surfing their license plate numbers on their dash-mounted laptops in traffic. You know - the people that say that's intrusive, and then shout scathing complaints when they hear that someone wanted for something heinous has been driving through toll booths every day for a year.
Can't have it both ways, and while I'm inclined to err on the side of collecting and only judiciously (and judicially) using information, I'm really dis-inclined to later agree with anyone who complains that law enformcement didn't do enough to stop something that's otherise only obvious after the fact.
The scary thing is that a typical pro-big-business Republican would agree wholeheartedly with my paragraph, without sensing its sarcasm.
No, the scary thing is that people who are reflexively anti-business think they have the intellectual market cornered.
You are a shill for Big Sarcasm and their academic cronies, who are illegally attempting to muscle out the use of irony and satire by anyone who also happens to like things like antibiotics, refrigerated meat, large airplanes, high-speed video cards, MRI machines, WiFi-enabled every-freakin'-thing, and the ability to be sitting, right now, in front of nice shiny computer connected over an incredible network of industrial networks to a discussion board that ain't operating just because Taco is feeling warm, fuzzy, and charitable.
That you think comparing a regressive regulatory regime that punishes the very small businesses you would appear to prefer with, say, child labor and asbestos-based face powders... well, that's proof of either your rhetorical shallowness or the contempt with which you regard your audience. But then, that's the hallmark of Big Sarcasm, and those of us not falling all the way off left side of the page need to make sure that such a valuable tool of communication doesn't completely come under the influence of a Convicted Idealogical Monopolist. So come on, you libertarians, business owners, investors, and other non-socialistas: stop being so literal, reasonable, and direct. Start swapping some Open Source Satire. Think of the left-handed children!
First who cares about the spelling? Content is all that should be judged.
Not caring about whether or not what you're saying will actually be understood (because you're using non-English words in a primarily English-language forum/venue) is part of the content. Someone who doesn't bother to correctly spell the main word that captures (and hopefully conveys) their feelings about the subject at hand is saying more than they apparently know about their overall credibility. Obviously the poster is a nit-wit, but I have no problem pointing out to people like that that their poor communications skills are a big driver for the ridicule that they get when they irrationally rant. It speaks to their larger, more systemic case of lousy critical thinking skills, and that goes to whether or not the concept he was pushing has any merit. In short: pointing out gratuitous abuse of the language takes away just a little bit of cover behind which the person is indignantly hiding when they thrash around, intellectually, as that person did.
I'm not a spelling nazi. I'm a critical thinking crusader.
And before anyone makes a brain dead "leaving my house open does not give you the right to come in and snoop around" analogy, let's be clear that by virtue of having something published on the internet, you are inviting people to take a look.
Ahem. Having a gateway of some sort (normally locked, but stupidly not, in a case like this) through which you must gain access, and then poke around a file system his not the same as bumping into something "published" on the web. Surely you're not suggesting that this guy just pointed is browser at port 80 on a federal IP address, and presto, there was some stuff to look at? He's the one saying that he used desktop mirroring software, etc. That ain't catching site of "published" data on a happy-go-luck trip across the web. The effort he put in (or claims to! he is, as you say, a complete loon) removes the "I just bumped into it" line of defense entirely.
if there is a field in the middle of no where, with no locked gate, or no signs saying "dont go here" is it wrong to walk there?
It's only an analogy if the comparison resonates in some way, or sheds light on a situation because of an obvious parallel. In what way is a middle-of-nowhere, unmarked, empty field in any way like the inside of a government computer network housing data? To better frame an analogy for you:
"If a person walking down the street sees a building labled Government Science Info Warehouse, and every other building just like it has a locked door, and everyone in western civilization has a pretty good idea that warehouses like that are normally off limits to anonymous wanderers, but someone happened to leave a normally locked door open (and you were deliberately rattling doorknobs up and down the street looking for Official Loony UFO Nonsense), is it OK to go in and snoop around?"
Not as ridiculous as spelling ridiculous that way, though.
No country in the world should extract their citizens to U.S.A. because U.S. goverment says so.
Are you that uneducated, or are you just hoping that someone else will ratchet up their Amerika Is Teh Evil rating another notch based on your rant? There is no force involved in an extradition. That's the whole point of a treaty. The treaty governs the circumstances under which criminals in both countries may be extradited to the other country. It's a two-way street, and that's what the treaty covers. The whole point is that some US criminal that was (say) looting banks in the UK could just as easily be shipped to the UK for prosecution as the other way around. It's an agreement, subject to judicial review on both sides.
For as many people as spout about how hated the US is for things, I wonder how many of them have formed at least part of their opinion on completely uninformed, BS notions like this one. Incredible.
Could he potentially argue that he hadn't had a fair trial because his 'peers' do not understand what he was doing?
If that were true, we'd never be able to get convictions of people who orchestrated highly complex derivitives fraud or other securities shenanigans. Or convict a murderer who, though having chain-sawed a bus full of nuns in the US, is left-handed with one eye, and speaks only an obscure dialect of Swahili (or is in illiterate Romanian farmer's daughter who won a trip to New York and decided to burn down a nightclub that wouldn't serve her Balenka, etc).
"Of your peers" doesn't mean "exactly like you, with all of your experiences, biases, broken world views," but means "not all the same people from law enforcement who were also investigating and arrested you" and like that. And, of course, we're talking about things that happen to peopel here in the states, or under the coverage of a treaty that makes that equivalency. Hence this is not the same as handling someone who, egged on by his local A-Q franchise office, traveled from Jordan into Afghanistan to shoot up people driving US Army food trucks.
do the juries really understand what happened
That's what expert witnesses are for. Otherwise we'd also never see people convicted (or acquitted) when DNA evidence is the central issue in a trial. How many average jurors really understand DNA markers? Or, for that matter, can personally relate to having deliberately run down their ex-husband in a parking lot to kill him? It's a good thing that most of the people convicted of crimes don't have a lot of true "peers" in the sense that some might think to use that word.
BTW, the word is "precedent," (not "precident") from the word "precede," as in "having gone before."
kind of scary considering they're keeping them quiet via threat of lawsuit
But isn't this how a bank keeps its employees quiet about private data, or how a manufacturer keeps its trade secrets (spaghetti sauce recipe, engine tuning secrets, freight routing AI, etc)?
And why do they have have to? Because relying on personal integrity routinely fails. Don't even start with "if they'd only treat employees fairly, by paying every 21-year-old new hire mid six-figures, a corner office, two months off their first year and free food all day, they wouldn't ever have to worry about anyone every compromising anything!" That's total BS. There are broken people out there, people with totally twisted senses of propriety, and people who simply can't be made happy because they have a fundamental inability to have rational expectations (or, live beyond their means, or develop expensive drug/gambling habits, whatever).
Without some actually meaningful way to make both parties (employer and employee) abide by the actual terms of their agreement - especially such terms as those that govern the end of their relationship - then there's no point for either party to even sign such an agreement, and no ability for a lot of companies to engage in anything like high-stakes business development, research, and more.
How would YOU keep quiet someone that has some axe to grind, and had previously been trusted with your trade secrets? Just asking nicely, over and over again? And if your business is ruined, or your customers are lost? Or if a vulnerability that you're in the middle of fixing, and which is unknown to the outside world, is disclosed before your patch is out, and your customers get hacked... well, that's just the price that a small tech company has to pay for not making an absolutely perfect in every way product? Clue: very few tolerably priced customized, niche-market products would ever come into existence if absolute perfection were the only defense against someone with inside knowledge bent on causing your customers trouble. Note that I'm not commenting on the case in question, but on your notion that civil legal consequences are somehow inappropriate.
What we must remember, is that when an article says "People from this or that group", they don't mean ALL the group...
...he exposed that the most powerful nation in the world has the weakest information security in the world
So, let me get this straight. You lecture people about making sweeping generalizations, and then make a completely baseless, ridiculous statement about how X is the most Y in the world. Do you really think that, say, Uganda or Croatia has a better overall level of IT expertise and security across its entire spectrum of government activities? Are you even listening to yourself?
If you really don't believe in the 12 families and think that wealth is equally distributed (cough)
Aren't you sort of glossing over the fact that history isn't evenly distributed? That work ethics, innovation, rule of law, democracy, and (among other things) craziness/laziness aren't evenly distributed? To the extent that there's even a millionth-of-a-percent of meaning/usefulness in anything you say, you're completely eclipsing it with the whole stark-raving-loony atmosphere you're projecting. Take a deep breath and think about how you sound/appear to rational people coming across your musings. It's not helping your "cause," not even a little. And it sure as hell doesn't make Mr. British Loon seem any more credible.
Well, I probably launch one rant like that per month, since I'm a glutton for punishment and have the karma for it. But really, I sometimes feel like I'm the only adult in the room when it comes to this topic... and that almost everyone else is just scrambling around trying a bunch of transparently embarassing sophistry to justify not wanting to pay for their entertainment. You can sure spot the people that get a salary and don't grasp the concept of producing in advance for a later audience as a form of income... but if no one did that, all of these people that like to rip the stuff off wouldn't have anything TO rip off. *beating my head against the wall*
So, thanks for being another voice in the wildnerness!
>>The RIAA (unlike, say, Standard Oil back in the day, etc) is just a trade association, acting on behalf of its member companies
Agreed. That isn't a monopoly; it's a cartel.
So, when a bunch of "indy" musicians get together to share resources, adopt a new download packaging standard, or do a collective concert to promote their idea of a new distribution scheme... that's just collective action, marketing, common intrests and people with something in common pooling resources, right?
From the dictionary, on "cartel": a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition
Except, among the hundreds of real-life music publishers that ferociously compete with each other and with non-RIAA members for new talent and distribution/promotion opportunities, competition has never been hotter.
The RIAA (unlike, say, Standard Oil back in the day, etc) is just a trade association, acting on behalf of its member companies, who in turn act on behalf of the people who hired them to handle a portion of their business affairs: the artists who want to publish their music and get paid for it. Your "robber barons" are Bono, KT Tunstall, Celine Dion, Slipknot, 50 Cent, and every other artist that uses an RIAA-member company to deal with the money side of their publishing.
Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Further, all you have to do is just not consume the music by these artists you obviously hate. After all, they are the ones that expressly chose to have a company handle their publishing, and to make use of their copyrights on the work they produce. OK, so you hate that... great! That means that you must also, if you have any intellectul honesty, have no interest in being entertained by someone who so annoys you with their business decisions. After all, from the tone of so many conversations one hears, there must by thousands of stellar musicians who have no interest in making a living from their recordings, or in protecting their rights... so, surely somewhere in that range of non-profit musicians (or, musicians willing to hope you'll send some money when you download a "free" copy of their work) that will replace, for you, the stupid, annoying, robber-baron musicians you don't really like anyway.
After all, music is a natural resource, just like oil, and it's being controlled by Evil Robber Barons! What? It's up to the musician to decide if they agree with you, and want to give their work away, or sell it through a different pricing model? How likely is it that you're rationally persuading the artist to see things differently when you're ripping them off, contrary to the very business model they've chosen to use to make a living? Don't like the choice your favorite new musician made? Choose another musician to amuse you since you're too cheap to spend a single damn dollar for a song. Really, "Robber Barons." Amazing.
All right, let's skip the road analogy... it's especially inappropriate because those roads are built with tax dollars (not counting toll roads, which are built with private funds or bonds, etc. and you pay to play... that's a much closer analogy, but I'll still leave it alone).
More to the point:
Anyone with the proper licensing can drive on the roads. Only the company that owns them can use the telephone or cable lines.
Only the company that paid for the copper/fiber gets to use it (or, whomever they lease to). Anyone that bothers to get a permit and demonstrate that they're not going to back-hoe a gas line can string up or bury their own copper/fiber right down the same public rights of way that any other telco or cable provider has. The utility "paths" in my neighborhood now have data-carrying lines run by two local telcos, two local cable providers, a trial service from the local power company, and a new fiber network from Verizon (who also provide DSL over their other copper, of course). If another company wants to come along and snake some conduit through, they're just as welcome to as the rest of the people in the party. That public right of way is just what it says it is, and the infrastructure that the various ISPs have run through my town are still very much the private facilities of those that spent money on the labor and materials to install them.
I'm suggesting that we the people have the right to control what is done with our land, that simple enough for you?
That's a simple enough concept, but in the context of the complex situation we're actually talking about, it's basically just a platitude.
We own the land, they are borrowing it.
Who is "we" and who is "they"? Am I, a tax-paying citizen just like (presumably) yourself, part of "we?" What about if I pay even more taxes and state, local, and federal fees in order to operate a truck on the same road you use when you run out to pick up a pizza. Now I'm no longer "we", but I'm "they" and you get to tell me what prices I can charge for the things I'm carrying in my truck? How did I lose the right to strike a deal with my own paying customers... maybe even including you... just because I'm using the same roads you are? Does the government get to have a say in the relative pricing of two pizza delivery companies when they bring the pizza to you, over the same roads?
Are you seriously advocating doing away with property rights?
Do you somehow have property rights, with respect to public roads, that I do not? Do your rights include the ability to set the prices for my merchandise or put a value on an hour of my time? If my use of public roads gives you that right, are you also comfortable with my having a say in what you get paid for an hour's work, just because you used "my" road on your way to work? Are you even listening to yourself?
What a bad analogy. It actually makes the point you are trying to argue against. Companies that use public roads are subject to regulation. They have to drive vehicles that meet certain requirements. They have to drive the speed limit and obey other traffic laws. They have to pay any tolls.
And how does that dictate the prices that the companies are allowed to charge for the goods they happen to have riding on those trucks? Two companies, each shipping flat-panel TVs from their warehouses to retailers. Are you seriously suggesting that their use of public roads (for which they pay substantial taxes, by the way) provides a regulatory angle for government price setting on the TVs they're delivering? That they shouldn't be able to compete with each other on price because they used a public road as a supporting part of their delivery network?
Do you think Google doesn't pay for it's traffic volume, in proportion to what I pay for my traffic volume?
No, they do not. They buy and use bandwidth in ways completely unlike a typical consumer or small business operation. The scales are different, the QOS is different, and the price they pay for shifting traffic patterns is completely different.
Fed Ex charges shipping by weight... They don't charge extra if the box contains video tapes, or shredded cheese.
Haven't spent much time in the retail/shipping business, have you? First, they charge by dimensional weight, if that suits them. Meaning, a very large, but very lightweight package gets charged as if it were heavier to make up for the space it occupies on the plane/truck. To say nothing of hazardous materials charges, extra fees for certain kinds of signature requirements, etc. But more importantly, they adjust their prices according to the type of business you're doing with them. People that ship a lot of a particular sized box, or frequently ship to certain areas (or ship mostly to commercial addresses, vs. residential) get completely different pricing schemes. UPS, DHL, and otherw work exactly the same way, and compete with each other vigorously on how each one will offer a better deal on certain sorts of "packets" (boxes) than the other guy. I have customers that seasonally ship enormous numbers of perishable items via FedEx and UPS. They get a different price - for that period of the year, for those boxes - than do other people. It's very similar to ISPs arriving at contractual arrangements based on the type of, and routes of the data the see they'll be carrying for certain customers. Not every packet is the same... because some types of packets only happen in the context of large, demanding streams of more of the same - and that changes the burst engineering and everything else related to managing the pipes.
ISP's charge per packet. If you use a lot of packets, you pay a lot. If you use a few packets, you pay less
Not necessarily. Larger users have contracts for base rates whether they use those packets or not. Exceeding the bandwidth quota might cause a huge spike in their monthly invoice. Underusing the quota can be a huge waste of money for everyone... including the ISP who has to set aside capacity that's going unused, so of course they have the users cover that risk, financially.
I can't believe people are so easily misled on this issue.
What I can't believe is how often people try to trot out brick-and-mortar analogies that aren't even true (let alone supportive of their argument). Talk to a FedEx rep before you compare dimensional weight and freight content to packets.
Your comments don't correspond to reality. Where I live, there are exactly two options for high-speed Internet (which is a virtual necessity these days)
My comments exactly reflect reality. Where I live, I have my choice of several providers. Their reps actually knock on doors explaining how much they'll drop their prices to get me to switch providers. I can choose from DSL, fiber, either of two cable providers... all of which already have laid their cable through our older neighborhood. And, of course, I've got multiple wireless access methods and satellite, if I'd rather go that route. As it happens, I'm going with not the cheapest guy, but with the fastest. Both voice phone lines, cable, and high-speed data. The people from Comcast keep knocking on my door offering a better deal (they say) but the network performance isn't as good (yet).
So, you want to regulate the competition in my neighborhood so that you can enjoy regulation in your neighborhood. That's a local utility issue, subject to local jurisdiction (or should be) since your situation is simply different than that of millions of other people. But it doesn't matter, since what you're talking about has nothing to do with the Net Neutrality issue this thread is actually addressing. Your issue revolves around the incentive (or lack thereof) for another player to get involved in providing more services in your area. How will they ever do that if the market is already regulated to the point of taking competition out of it?
So basically what you're saying is, "I'm redefining legislation to mean what I want it to mean at this particular moment." Brilliant.
No, I'm saying that the guy (to whom I responded) that said that people are prevented from hurting other people because of legislation such as the net neutrality bill in question was sure as hell not talking about the Constitution. I'm addressing it within the context of the conversation, and if you asked a 1000 random slashdotters whether or not they consider the Constitution to be a "piece of legislation" in the same way that they would a regulatory act, etc., you'd know exactly what to expect.
... Which is a piece of legislation. You can tell that, if nothing else, by who it is that changes it: it's not the Judiciary, and it isn't the Executive Branch.
We're talking, of course, about the foundational aspects of the thing. Sure, Congress (with a majority of the states, etc) can get their act together to amend it. I'm hoping that we don't amend it so far as to alter the relationship between the three branches, for example. Since the thread is about which branches do what (relative to things like defense, regulation, etc), I think it's safe to say that things cited (such as protection from external threats) aren't going to be fundamentally changed. We're using the term "legislation," here, in the more pedestrian sense (as opposed to including its most extreme variation: amending the Constitution).
So as for having access to the Internet from the company of my choice, that is a freedom they should be protecting.
What about your freedom so start your own internet company, aimed at a particular group of users, with prices set based on your own bottom line? ISPs are not public utilities or monopolies. There's plenty of competition. Legislation that dictates what price someone should charge for which type of customer is the opposite of freedom... both for you, and for the companies you're doing business with.
So what if some ISPs elect to tier pricing? That's not a bit different than a cardboard box manufacturer that charges less to customers that place very large orders. Should the government step in a tell all carboard box manufacturers that they have to use a large truck to deliver a single cardboard box to a single customer for the price that they deliver a 1000 at a time to customer that buys them every week? Burdensome legislation like that is designed to make whiny people feel good, and without fail raises prices for everyone, reduces the number of providers servicing each level of the market, and limits your choices. It reduces freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
They're lamentable human trash with next to no resources and a whole lot of anger.
Um, other than large, oil-rich countries like Iran actively writing them large checks, shipping them truckloads of explosives, and giving them enormous moral support in the form of "democracy is a failure" and other "wiping off the face of the planet" type rhetoric from the elected governments of those countries (hint: Iran). If "no resources" is, to you, the same as "tons of money, government support, technology, weapons, and an active uranium enrichment program", then I'd hate to hear what you thing "having resources" would look like.
You're right that they're trash, but they're trash that are busy soliciting (and getting) major logistical and financial support from multiple sources, and busy cultivating shopping pipelines through east Asia to delightful places like North Korea.
They're not special, nor are they particularly impressive
Nope, and they don't have to be to blow themselves up on a train full of commuters in London or Madrid. Nothing special by your standards or mine - just mentally broken enough to think it's the right thing to do. And since the cheerleaders they listen to publicly embrace the pursuit and use of massively more destructive weapons as a holy mission, their un-specialness (from your point of view, or mine) doesn't really matter. Only actual results (or prevention of them) matter. I don't care about their character, or the richness/shallowness of their world view.
The only thing they can actually do to us is scare us, and if we're afraid, then they've won and we've lost.
Now, really. Would you be comfortable saying that exact same thing to any of the tens of thousands of direct parents/children/siblings of people actually killed by these "non-special" people in New York, Bali, Madrid, or London? Face to face?
And I can't believe people are actually fooled into thinking somehow terrorism is a major threat.
Gee, you're so right. A few hundred thousand people losing their jobs in 2001, an instant and painful economic blow to the investments (and retirements, and insurance policies) of millions of people, and the hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly tied to the thousands that died (or lost family, or lost their life-long businesses, etc) are of no significance. Is it really your contention that if we had not acted in response to those attacks (and had instead focused on obesity), that the financial and communications networks that facilitated the attacks would not have been used again, despite the proclaimed intentions of the perpetrators to do exactly that?
If you didn't personally watch smoke rising from a pile of rubble containing dead people (some of them possibly not even obese!) that morning (did you? I did) maybe the reality of it would be a little more concrete to you. Being a tech guy, one of the first things I thought about that morning was how much of a trail the advance work for that attack must have left, and how completely irrelevent that is when the people you're after aren't ever going to be interested in defending themselves afterwards in a criminal prosecution. So what if "only" a few thousand people die in an attack like that, and only a few million are impacted in their wallets, in their ability to retire when they planned on doing so, and other little inconveniences? Does it occur to you that this isn't binary? Personally dying, or not, isn't the only consideration.
We're talking about Americans here. They're much better at rhetoric about how great and free they are than actually getting upset when their leaders turn out to be blatantly trampling rights enshrined in the constitution.
... just like on 9/11! Because the phone records are going to be there. After-the-fact quarterbacking is always going to show that there were obvious signs of coordination between the groups of people it takes import/export mayhem. Pattern detection is a pretty damn obvious tool - it's what you DO with it that matters. I wonder how the people who bitch about this feel about the cops they're driving next to surfing their license plate numbers on their dash-mounted laptops in traffic. You know - the people that say that's intrusive, and then shout scathing complaints when they hear that someone wanted for something heinous has been driving through toll booths every day for a year.
No, they're much better at using pundits on TV to bitch at the administration for not "connecting the dots" about people sitting in the country gearing up to kill a few thousand people, and using phones to chat with each other, keep their finances flowing, call their flight schools after getting off the phone with their buddy in Jordan (who just talked to his buddy in Germany, who earlier that day was talking to his buddy in Boston about renting that car that they left in the parking lot when they got on the plane).
People watch endless news and popular entertainment that involves cross referencing dumped telco records to see who someone talked to, the better to bust up a criminal relationship or follow some other money trail. Of course it's a lot harder when you have to dig up disparate data from multiple providers, but it's there, whenever prosecutors need it - always has been. The difference, right now, is that when some twit in, say, Madrid, decides to blow up his apartment rather than be caught... and one of the scraps of paper left over includes a phone number assigned to disposable phone bought near the Mexico border... well, there's a certain amount of urgency in having a quick way to at least see if there's a red-hot pattern of calls swirling around the related numbers.
I'm all for the privacy that requires judicial oversight on doing anything with that information. But what I don't want to hear is a bunch of witless complaining (from the same "We're talking about Americans here") about how the FBI (on Bush's watch! that lazy bastard!) didn't see an attack, an arms shipment, etc., coming
Can't have it both ways, and while I'm inclined to err on the side of collecting and only judiciously (and judicially) using information, I'm really dis-inclined to later agree with anyone who complains that law enformcement didn't do enough to stop something that's otherise only obvious after the fact.
The scary thing is that a typical pro-big-business Republican would agree wholeheartedly with my paragraph, without sensing its sarcasm.
No, the scary thing is that people who are reflexively anti-business think they have the intellectual market cornered.
You are a shill for Big Sarcasm and their academic cronies, who are illegally attempting to muscle out the use of irony and satire by anyone who also happens to like things like antibiotics, refrigerated meat, large airplanes, high-speed video cards, MRI machines, WiFi-enabled every-freakin'-thing, and the ability to be sitting, right now, in front of nice shiny computer connected over an incredible network of industrial networks to a discussion board that ain't operating just because Taco is feeling warm, fuzzy, and charitable.
That you think comparing a regressive regulatory regime that punishes the very small businesses you would appear to prefer with, say, child labor and asbestos-based face powders... well, that's proof of either your rhetorical shallowness or the contempt with which you regard your audience. But then, that's the hallmark of Big Sarcasm, and those of us not falling all the way off left side of the page need to make sure that such a valuable tool of communication doesn't completely come under the influence of a Convicted Idealogical Monopolist. So come on, you libertarians, business owners, investors, and other non-socialistas: stop being so literal, reasonable, and direct. Start swapping some Open Source Satire. Think of the left-handed children!
First who cares about the spelling? Content is all that should be judged.
Not caring about whether or not what you're saying will actually be understood (because you're using non-English words in a primarily English-language forum/venue) is part of the content. Someone who doesn't bother to correctly spell the main word that captures (and hopefully conveys) their feelings about the subject at hand is saying more than they apparently know about their overall credibility. Obviously the poster is a nit-wit, but I have no problem pointing out to people like that that their poor communications skills are a big driver for the ridicule that they get when they irrationally rant. It speaks to their larger, more systemic case of lousy critical thinking skills, and that goes to whether or not the concept he was pushing has any merit. In short: pointing out gratuitous abuse of the language takes away just a little bit of cover behind which the person is indignantly hiding when they thrash around, intellectually, as that person did.
I'm not a spelling nazi. I'm a critical thinking crusader.
Everyone using "rediculous" was starting to get old.
Well, at least it wasn't ridiculu's
As for "re"-diculous, I reserve that for when something is so diculous that it's diculous twice. It's RE-diculous.
Ok, it's been a long day.
And before anyone makes a brain dead "leaving my house open does not give you the right to come in and snoop around" analogy, let's be clear that by virtue of having something published on the internet, you are inviting people to take a look.
Ahem. Having a gateway of some sort (normally locked, but stupidly not, in a case like this) through which you must gain access, and then poke around a file system his not the same as bumping into something "published" on the web. Surely you're not suggesting that this guy just pointed is browser at port 80 on a federal IP address, and presto, there was some stuff to look at? He's the one saying that he used desktop mirroring software, etc. That ain't catching site of "published" data on a happy-go-luck trip across the web. The effort he put in (or claims to! he is, as you say, a complete loon) removes the "I just bumped into it" line of defense entirely.
if there is a field in the middle of no where, with no locked gate, or no signs saying "dont go here" is it wrong to walk there?
It's only an analogy if the comparison resonates in some way, or sheds light on a situation because of an obvious parallel. In what way is a middle-of-nowhere, unmarked, empty field in any way like the inside of a government computer network housing data? To better frame an analogy for you:
"If a person walking down the street sees a building labled Government Science Info Warehouse, and every other building just like it has a locked door, and everyone in western civilization has a pretty good idea that warehouses like that are normally off limits to anonymous wanderers, but someone happened to leave a normally locked door open (and you were deliberately rattling doorknobs up and down the street looking for Official Loony UFO Nonsense), is it OK to go in and snoop around?"
This is ridiculus!
Not as ridiculous as spelling ridiculous that way, though.
No country in the world should extract their citizens to U.S.A. because U.S. goverment says so.
Are you that uneducated, or are you just hoping that someone else will ratchet up their Amerika Is Teh Evil rating another notch based on your rant? There is no force involved in an extradition. That's the whole point of a treaty. The treaty governs the circumstances under which criminals in both countries may be extradited to the other country. It's a two-way street, and that's what the treaty covers. The whole point is that some US criminal that was (say) looting banks in the UK could just as easily be shipped to the UK for prosecution as the other way around. It's an agreement, subject to judicial review on both sides.
For as many people as spout about how hated the US is for things, I wonder how many of them have formed at least part of their opinion on completely uninformed, BS notions like this one. Incredible.
Could he potentially argue that he hadn't had a fair trial because his 'peers' do not understand what he was doing?
If that were true, we'd never be able to get convictions of people who orchestrated highly complex derivitives fraud or other securities shenanigans. Or convict a murderer who, though having chain-sawed a bus full of nuns in the US, is left-handed with one eye, and speaks only an obscure dialect of Swahili (or is in illiterate Romanian farmer's daughter who won a trip to New York and decided to burn down a nightclub that wouldn't serve her Balenka, etc).
"Of your peers" doesn't mean "exactly like you, with all of your experiences, biases, broken world views," but means "not all the same people from law enforcement who were also investigating and arrested you" and like that. And, of course, we're talking about things that happen to peopel here in the states, or under the coverage of a treaty that makes that equivalency. Hence this is not the same as handling someone who, egged on by his local A-Q franchise office, traveled from Jordan into Afghanistan to shoot up people driving US Army food trucks.
do the juries really understand what happened
That's what expert witnesses are for. Otherwise we'd also never see people convicted (or acquitted) when DNA evidence is the central issue in a trial. How many average jurors really understand DNA markers? Or, for that matter, can personally relate to having deliberately run down their ex-husband in a parking lot to kill him? It's a good thing that most of the people convicted of crimes don't have a lot of true "peers" in the sense that some might think to use that word.
BTW, the word is "precedent," (not "precident") from the word "precede," as in "having gone before."
kind of scary considering they're keeping them quiet via threat of lawsuit
But isn't this how a bank keeps its employees quiet about private data, or how a manufacturer keeps its trade secrets (spaghetti sauce recipe, engine tuning secrets, freight routing AI, etc)?
And why do they have have to? Because relying on personal integrity routinely fails. Don't even start with "if they'd only treat employees fairly, by paying every 21-year-old new hire mid six-figures, a corner office, two months off their first year and free food all day, they wouldn't ever have to worry about anyone every compromising anything!" That's total BS. There are broken people out there, people with totally twisted senses of propriety, and people who simply can't be made happy because they have a fundamental inability to have rational expectations (or, live beyond their means, or develop expensive drug/gambling habits, whatever).
Without some actually meaningful way to make both parties (employer and employee) abide by the actual terms of their agreement - especially such terms as those that govern the end of their relationship - then there's no point for either party to even sign such an agreement, and no ability for a lot of companies to engage in anything like high-stakes business development, research, and more.
How would YOU keep quiet someone that has some axe to grind, and had previously been trusted with your trade secrets? Just asking nicely, over and over again? And if your business is ruined, or your customers are lost? Or if a vulnerability that you're in the middle of fixing, and which is unknown to the outside world, is disclosed before your patch is out, and your customers get hacked... well, that's just the price that a small tech company has to pay for not making an absolutely perfect in every way product? Clue: very few tolerably priced customized, niche-market products would ever come into existence if absolute perfection were the only defense against someone with inside knowledge bent on causing your customers trouble. Note that I'm not commenting on the case in question, but on your notion that civil legal consequences are somehow inappropriate.
What we must remember, is that when an article says "People from this or that group", they don't mean ALL the group...
...he exposed that the most powerful nation in the world has the weakest information security in the world
So, let me get this straight. You lecture people about making sweeping generalizations, and then make a completely baseless, ridiculous statement about how X is the most Y in the world. Do you really think that, say, Uganda or Croatia has a better overall level of IT expertise and security across its entire spectrum of government activities? Are you even listening to yourself?
If you really don't believe in the 12 families and think that wealth is equally distributed (cough)
Aren't you sort of glossing over the fact that history isn't evenly distributed? That work ethics, innovation, rule of law, democracy, and (among other things) craziness/laziness aren't evenly distributed? To the extent that there's even a millionth-of-a-percent of meaning/usefulness in anything you say, you're completely eclipsing it with the whole stark-raving-loony atmosphere you're projecting. Take a deep breath and think about how you sound/appear to rational people coming across your musings. It's not helping your "cause," not even a little. And it sure as hell doesn't make Mr. British Loon seem any more credible.
Friended. Best post I've seen in ages :D
Well, I probably launch one rant like that per month, since I'm a glutton for punishment and have the karma for it. But really, I sometimes feel like I'm the only adult in the room when it comes to this topic... and that almost everyone else is just scrambling around trying a bunch of transparently embarassing sophistry to justify not wanting to pay for their entertainment. You can sure spot the people that get a salary and don't grasp the concept of producing in advance for a later audience as a form of income... but if no one did that, all of these people that like to rip the stuff off wouldn't have anything TO rip off. *beating my head against the wall*
So, thanks for being another voice in the wildnerness!
>>The RIAA (unlike, say, Standard Oil back in the day, etc) is just a trade association, acting on behalf of its member companies
Agreed. That isn't a monopoly; it's a cartel.
So, when a bunch of "indy" musicians get together to share resources, adopt a new download packaging standard, or do a collective concert to promote their idea of a new distribution scheme... that's just collective action, marketing, common intrests and people with something in common pooling resources, right?
From the dictionary, on "cartel": a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition
Except, among the hundreds of real-life music publishers that ferociously compete with each other and with non-RIAA members for new talent and distribution/promotion opportunities, competition has never been hotter.
RIAA = New entourage of robber barons
The RIAA (unlike, say, Standard Oil back in the day, etc) is just a trade association, acting on behalf of its member companies, who in turn act on behalf of the people who hired them to handle a portion of their business affairs: the artists who want to publish their music and get paid for it. Your "robber barons" are Bono, KT Tunstall, Celine Dion, Slipknot, 50 Cent, and every other artist that uses an RIAA-member company to deal with the money side of their publishing.
Are you really comparing a relative monopoly on, say, energy distribution, mining, or rail transport with a trade association made up of hundreds of publishing companies representing thousands of artists?
Further, all you have to do is just not consume the music by these artists you obviously hate. After all, they are the ones that expressly chose to have a company handle their publishing, and to make use of their copyrights on the work they produce. OK, so you hate that... great! That means that you must also, if you have any intellectul honesty, have no interest in being entertained by someone who so annoys you with their business decisions. After all, from the tone of so many conversations one hears, there must by thousands of stellar musicians who have no interest in making a living from their recordings, or in protecting their rights... so, surely somewhere in that range of non-profit musicians (or, musicians willing to hope you'll send some money when you download a "free" copy of their work) that will replace, for you, the stupid, annoying, robber-baron musicians you don't really like anyway.
After all, music is a natural resource, just like oil, and it's being controlled by Evil Robber Barons! What? It's up to the musician to decide if they agree with you, and want to give their work away, or sell it through a different pricing model? How likely is it that you're rationally persuading the artist to see things differently when you're ripping them off, contrary to the very business model they've chosen to use to make a living? Don't like the choice your favorite new musician made? Choose another musician to amuse you since you're too cheap to spend a single damn dollar for a song. Really, "Robber Barons." Amazing.
Most of the US still get's it's power from Gas run power plants.
Maybe we could convert to burning extraneous apostrophes, at the rate of two per clause.
It's good to see improvement in the tech though
Oops, you just lowered the overall efficiency of the new system.
All right, let's skip the road analogy... it's especially inappropriate because those roads are built with tax dollars (not counting toll roads, which are built with private funds or bonds, etc. and you pay to play... that's a much closer analogy, but I'll still leave it alone).
More to the point:
Anyone with the proper licensing can drive on the roads. Only the company that owns them can use the telephone or cable lines.
Only the company that paid for the copper/fiber gets to use it (or, whomever they lease to). Anyone that bothers to get a permit and demonstrate that they're not going to back-hoe a gas line can string up or bury their own copper/fiber right down the same public rights of way that any other telco or cable provider has. The utility "paths" in my neighborhood now have data-carrying lines run by two local telcos, two local cable providers, a trial service from the local power company, and a new fiber network from Verizon (who also provide DSL over their other copper, of course). If another company wants to come along and snake some conduit through, they're just as welcome to as the rest of the people in the party. That public right of way is just what it says it is, and the infrastructure that the various ISPs have run through my town are still very much the private facilities of those that spent money on the labor and materials to install them.
I'm suggesting that we the people have the right to control what is done with our land, that simple enough for you?
That's a simple enough concept, but in the context of the complex situation we're actually talking about, it's basically just a platitude.
We own the land, they are borrowing it.
Who is "we" and who is "they"? Am I, a tax-paying citizen just like (presumably) yourself, part of "we?" What about if I pay even more taxes and state, local, and federal fees in order to operate a truck on the same road you use when you run out to pick up a pizza. Now I'm no longer "we", but I'm "they" and you get to tell me what prices I can charge for the things I'm carrying in my truck? How did I lose the right to strike a deal with my own paying customers... maybe even including you... just because I'm using the same roads you are? Does the government get to have a say in the relative pricing of two pizza delivery companies when they bring the pizza to you, over the same roads?
Are you seriously advocating doing away with property rights?
Do you somehow have property rights, with respect to public roads, that I do not? Do your rights include the ability to set the prices for my merchandise or put a value on an hour of my time? If my use of public roads gives you that right, are you also comfortable with my having a say in what you get paid for an hour's work, just because you used "my" road on your way to work? Are you even listening to yourself?
What a bad analogy. It actually makes the point you are trying to argue against. Companies that use public roads are subject to regulation. They have to drive vehicles that meet certain requirements. They have to drive the speed limit and obey other traffic laws. They have to pay any tolls.
And how does that dictate the prices that the companies are allowed to charge for the goods they happen to have riding on those trucks? Two companies, each shipping flat-panel TVs from their warehouses to retailers. Are you seriously suggesting that their use of public roads (for which they pay substantial taxes, by the way) provides a regulatory angle for government price setting on the TVs they're delivering? That they shouldn't be able to compete with each other on price because they used a public road as a supporting part of their delivery network?
Do you think Google doesn't pay for it's traffic volume, in proportion to what I pay for my traffic volume?
No, they do not. They buy and use bandwidth in ways completely unlike a typical consumer or small business operation. The scales are different, the QOS is different, and the price they pay for shifting traffic patterns is completely different.
Fed Ex charges shipping by weight... They don't charge extra if the box contains video tapes, or shredded cheese.
Haven't spent much time in the retail/shipping business, have you? First, they charge by dimensional weight, if that suits them. Meaning, a very large, but very lightweight package gets charged as if it were heavier to make up for the space it occupies on the plane/truck. To say nothing of hazardous materials charges, extra fees for certain kinds of signature requirements, etc. But more importantly, they adjust their prices according to the type of business you're doing with them. People that ship a lot of a particular sized box, or frequently ship to certain areas (or ship mostly to commercial addresses, vs. residential) get completely different pricing schemes. UPS, DHL, and otherw work exactly the same way, and compete with each other vigorously on how each one will offer a better deal on certain sorts of "packets" (boxes) than the other guy. I have customers that seasonally ship enormous numbers of perishable items via FedEx and UPS. They get a different price - for that period of the year, for those boxes - than do other people. It's very similar to ISPs arriving at contractual arrangements based on the type of, and routes of the data the see they'll be carrying for certain customers. Not every packet is the same... because some types of packets only happen in the context of large, demanding streams of more of the same - and that changes the burst engineering and everything else related to managing the pipes.
ISP's charge per packet. If you use a lot of packets, you pay a lot. If you use a few packets, you pay less
Not necessarily. Larger users have contracts for base rates whether they use those packets or not. Exceeding the bandwidth quota might cause a huge spike in their monthly invoice. Underusing the quota can be a huge waste of money for everyone... including the ISP who has to set aside capacity that's going unused, so of course they have the users cover that risk, financially.
I can't believe people are so easily misled on this issue.
What I can't believe is how often people try to trot out brick-and-mortar analogies that aren't even true (let alone supportive of their argument). Talk to a FedEx rep before you compare dimensional weight and freight content to packets.
Your comments don't correspond to reality. Where I live, there are exactly two options for high-speed Internet (which is a virtual necessity these days)
My comments exactly reflect reality. Where I live, I have my choice of several providers. Their reps actually knock on doors explaining how much they'll drop their prices to get me to switch providers. I can choose from DSL, fiber, either of two cable providers... all of which already have laid their cable through our older neighborhood. And, of course, I've got multiple wireless access methods and satellite, if I'd rather go that route. As it happens, I'm going with not the cheapest guy, but with the fastest. Both voice phone lines, cable, and high-speed data. The people from Comcast keep knocking on my door offering a better deal (they say) but the network performance isn't as good (yet).
So, you want to regulate the competition in my neighborhood so that you can enjoy regulation in your neighborhood. That's a local utility issue, subject to local jurisdiction (or should be) since your situation is simply different than that of millions of other people. But it doesn't matter, since what you're talking about has nothing to do with the Net Neutrality issue this thread is actually addressing. Your issue revolves around the incentive (or lack thereof) for another player to get involved in providing more services in your area. How will they ever do that if the market is already regulated to the point of taking competition out of it?
So basically what you're saying is, "I'm redefining legislation to mean what I want it to mean at this particular moment." Brilliant.
No, I'm saying that the guy (to whom I responded) that said that people are prevented from hurting other people because of legislation such as the net neutrality bill in question was sure as hell not talking about the Constitution. I'm addressing it within the context of the conversation, and if you asked a 1000 random slashdotters whether or not they consider the Constitution to be a "piece of legislation" in the same way that they would a regulatory act, etc., you'd know exactly what to expect.
... Which is a piece of legislation. You can tell that, if nothing else, by who it is that changes it: it's not the Judiciary, and it isn't the Executive Branch.
We're talking, of course, about the foundational aspects of the thing. Sure, Congress (with a majority of the states, etc) can get their act together to amend it. I'm hoping that we don't amend it so far as to alter the relationship between the three branches, for example. Since the thread is about which branches do what (relative to things like defense, regulation, etc), I think it's safe to say that things cited (such as protection from external threats) aren't going to be fundamentally changed. We're using the term "legislation," here, in the more pedestrian sense (as opposed to including its most extreme variation: amending the Constitution).
So as for having access to the Internet from the company of my choice, that is a freedom they should be protecting.
What about your freedom so start your own internet company, aimed at a particular group of users, with prices set based on your own bottom line? ISPs are not public utilities or monopolies. There's plenty of competition. Legislation that dictates what price someone should charge for which type of customer is the opposite of freedom... both for you, and for the companies you're doing business with.
So what if some ISPs elect to tier pricing? That's not a bit different than a cardboard box manufacturer that charges less to customers that place very large orders. Should the government step in a tell all carboard box manufacturers that they have to use a large truck to deliver a single cardboard box to a single customer for the price that they deliver a 1000 at a time to customer that buys them every week? Burdensome legislation like that is designed to make whiny people feel good, and without fail raises prices for everyone, reduces the number of providers servicing each level of the market, and limits your choices. It reduces freedom.