"Vote early, vote often" has been practiced by a number of organizations, but labor unions are right in the middle of it, not to mention how they are especially so tied economically and politically to the Democratic Party in America.
That's kind of interesting that you mention how much unions are tied to the Democratic Party whereas in the UK and Ireland, they actually created their own political party.
Given the fact that US economy is being destroyed because of the huge monthly trade deficit, caused by the US labor force being uncompetitive, which all came around due to government regulations, taxation, wage laws, subsidies, monopoly creation, setting interest rates, printing of money, waging wars, destruction of competition etc.,
I'm going to stop you right there and ask how on God's green earth it is even remotely possible that Scandinavian countries have a functioning economy much less an unemployment rate below 25% if the case is that we have too high of taxes.
I look at this from a slightly different perspective.
If we step back and take a look at what's happening, we must remember that a patent is a government granted monopoly on an ostensibly "innovative" process or method of doing something. Patenting processes or methods and then stamping the patents on molds or whatever has become so commonplace because getting a patent has become so commonplace. Government-granted monopolies should not be given out lightly and yet a coffee cup lid has umpteen million patents covering it.
The law seems to be a little outdated, but what the molds and such hint at is that patents are being seen as rights rather privileges.
Three! All you need is three and you've got a well-functioning free market! And do you know how difficult it is to get authorization? Very, very easy.
I used to be part of an advisory board that dealt with the local charters back when we did have local franchise agreements. In Fairborn, OH all you had to do was negotiate a deal with the city to use their rights-of-way and you could offer service. We still had one cable company. There simply weren't enough people in Fairborn (about 30,000) to keep two franchises profitable.
The problem is that the people selling infrastructure are the same people selling service. Imagine if UPS and FedEx had to build their own roads. We'd have the same problem.
We need publicly owned infrastructure and privately owned businesses selling service over that infrastructure. Remember the good old days of dial-up? You didn't have to buy service from your phone company. You could choose any ISP in the world if you really wanted to. Of course, you were generally limited by the ISPs that had a local number you could dial, but there were more than three. I grew up in a town of about 7,000 residents and we had 5 choices.
I agree that the state of Internet access is a problem, and I'd like nothing more than to see some real competition, but you're not going to get competition until you remove the inherent conflict of interest that occurs when a company owns the infrastructure in a market that lends itself to a natural monopoly.
If there were "unrestricted access" in place in a major American city like, lets say, Columbus, OH, how many cable companies do you believe would be in operation?
Protip: We do have unrestricted access in Columbus, and there are 2.
They don't prevent use. They prevent redistribution as part of the whole.
I can download, build, and install fglrx (which is completely non-free) or this ZFS module. I just can't distribute either module linked into the kernel.
I'm not American so I don't have experience in that car-based society but I don't buy the argument that sometimes you just have to drive.
In rural America the only way to get around is by personal vehicle. Granted, that doesn't excuse a drunk driver, but there aren't always buses or trains or even taxi cabs out in the middle of nowhere. You must find a sober driver to get you home. A few years ago (and still may be true in some areas) it wasn't unheard of for a police officer to give drunks a ride home.
Doe suits over copyright infringement are legal action taken after the purported crime has taken place. They file the suit to compel the ISP to turn over the subscriber data related to an IP address which they have a suspicion has committed an act of infringement.
In this case, the crime has not even happened yet. It'd be as if they sued 100 people now for the infringement they are going to commit next week.
[quote]MGE sued, won, and has now lost on GE's appeal.[/quote]
TFA:
[quote]A jury awarded MGE more than $4.6 million in damages for copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, but the trial judge dismissed its Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim. MGE appealed, arguing that its dongles barred the kind of access to its software that the Act is meant to prevent.[/quote]
MGE appealed the trial judge throwing out the DMCA claim. The appeals court confirmed the ruling. GE didn't appeal anything.
You've hit on something very important there -- the idea of decoupling infrastructure with service.
It's really the only way to get data services to respond to the market model. Such decoupling would make net neutrality a moot point because someone, somewhere would give you exactly the service you wanted. Whomever owned the infrastructure wouldn't care because they're not in the business of selling service. Bits are bits to them.
This is already the case in many places in the country. The cable company doesn't have a statutory monopoly, yet there is only one cable company serving a city. There is most often a natural monopoly in the case of Internet access. Let's put it this way: my grandparents don't have cable. They can't get it even if they want it. Is that because the county passed a law stating that no one may have cable in rural areas or is it because no cable company thinks that they could ever profit by building infrastructure out that far?
There is this idea out here that Comcast is begging to be allowed to build infrastructure where Time Warner has lines and vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why would Comcast bother? They'd be spending tons of money up front to wire up the city and then they'd have to poach customers from Time Warner. When do you think they'd break even? A few years? A decade? Ever? I'd think they're pretty happy with their current arrangement.
The obvious question is why France or Germany has better value. Do they simply not value broadband as much as we do? If that were so, they wouldn't have the faster speeds.
If you didn't already know the answer, it's because they have placed a higher value on network infrastructure than we have. Socialism won this round.
The problem with our legislative system is that a good deal of our bills are diffs to laws that already exist. Any bill that deals with taxes almost certainly is a diff to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
When people complain about the thousand page bills that come out of committee, the size is due to a good deal of the bill striking other provisions and re-designating paragraphs or other sections.
That's a small reason why our processes are so opaque. Could you imagine if Linux Kernel updates were only released in diff form? It'd be impossible to see what the changes were without sitting down with the previous source and pouring over each page.
I don't know where you live, but in Ohio I'm reasonably sure cities are not allowed to sign exclusive franchises with a particular vendor.
I recall from my time on the technology advisory board in Fairborn, OH that our franchise agreement was not exclusive and at no time was it ever exclusive. Anyone, if they saw fit, could offer cable television, Internet access, etc. Guess how many cable companies we had? One. No one wanted to put in tons of money in infrastructure to compete against an already entrenched incumbent.
Now you might actually have a government-granted monopoly in your jurisdiction. I don't know. I do know that where I currently live (Columbus, OH) I have two choices for cable -- Insight and WOW. And let me tell you the prices aren't that much better.
If you really want a free market, you'll need the government to own the infrastructure and allow anyone to provide service over that infrastructure. It could work the same way dial-up worked. AT&T owned the lines, but you could get your access from whomever you want. Cable television, Internet, etc. should be the same way.
I work for a small software company (60 employees). We've got a contractor who does the main stuff, but day-to-day IT is handled by our software installation specialist. He reports to the "Director of Customer Support Services and Product Development".
She might be on decent legal footing. If robodials are legal in Colorado and illegal in California, whose law is controlling? I'm willing to bet federal law is controlling here.
Now she's got a tougher case because she is commissioning the calls, and she's a California citizen, but if she wasn't this could be a more interesting case.
The US system differs structurally from the UK system in only a few ways:
1) Their districts are drawn by an independent body. Ours are drawn by the state legislatures in almost all cases.
2) They have equal ballot access laws for all parties. We have various discriminatory treatment of independent and minor party candidates.
3) They have voters who aren't afraid to vote their conscience in the form of the Lib Dems even though they know that the Lib Dems aren't going to be the largest party anytime soon. We're a bunch of fools who vote for the least worst and wonder why we get worse politicians each election cycle.
The very obvious problem is that his vote for someone else didn't translate into any increased representation for his minority views. This is called the "wasted vote" problem and is one reason why FPTP voting systems suffer from lower turnout than do proportional systems. In a PR system, 10% of the vote for a particular party nets you 10% of the seats. In FTFP, 10% of the votes gives you 0% of the seats.
See you're moving hundreds of gigs of traffic per day regardless of how many people use it. To look at that the other way around, think of of many times a user crosses a peer point to download that movie or warez app or whatever and then realize you probably have it sitting on your hard drive already. If only they used USENET, that'd put a huge dent in your bandwidth bills.
Your average Joe has no idea how to use USENET or even that it exists and you can't really go around advertising that people fire up their favorite newsreader and download those same files. It's faster than bittorrent! Blazing speeds! That'll get you in real hot water.
I don't see how that would matter. MP3s are still ubiquitous, and the format was finalized in 1991. Of course, they weren't used in earnest until the mid-90s, but that's still almost 20 years of them being around.
Slashdot Mirror
That's kind of interesting that you mention how much unions are tied to the Democratic Party whereas in the UK and Ireland, they actually created their own political party.
I agree.
I'm not one to buy a bunch of books, but until they figure out a way to DRM dead trees, I'm going to reach for the paper version every time.
I'm going to stop you right there and ask how on God's green earth it is even remotely possible that Scandinavian countries have a functioning economy much less an unemployment rate below 25% if the case is that we have too high of taxes.
The local police department sounds like a great idea. This was the PA Department of Homeland Security.
I look at this from a slightly different perspective.
If we step back and take a look at what's happening, we must remember that a patent is a government granted monopoly on an ostensibly "innovative" process or method of doing something. Patenting processes or methods and then stamping the patents on molds or whatever has become so commonplace because getting a patent has become so commonplace. Government-granted monopolies should not be given out lightly and yet a coffee cup lid has umpteen million patents covering it.
The law seems to be a little outdated, but what the molds and such hint at is that patents are being seen as rights rather privileges.
Three! All you need is three and you've got a well-functioning free market! And do you know how difficult it is to get authorization? Very, very easy.
I used to be part of an advisory board that dealt with the local charters back when we did have local franchise agreements. In Fairborn, OH all you had to do was negotiate a deal with the city to use their rights-of-way and you could offer service. We still had one cable company. There simply weren't enough people in Fairborn (about 30,000) to keep two franchises profitable.
The problem is that the people selling infrastructure are the same people selling service. Imagine if UPS and FedEx had to build their own roads. We'd have the same problem.
We need publicly owned infrastructure and privately owned businesses selling service over that infrastructure. Remember the good old days of dial-up? You didn't have to buy service from your phone company. You could choose any ISP in the world if you really wanted to. Of course, you were generally limited by the ISPs that had a local number you could dial, but there were more than three. I grew up in a town of about 7,000 residents and we had 5 choices.
I agree that the state of Internet access is a problem, and I'd like nothing more than to see some real competition, but you're not going to get competition until you remove the inherent conflict of interest that occurs when a company owns the infrastructure in a market that lends itself to a natural monopoly.
If there were "unrestricted access" in place in a major American city like, lets say, Columbus, OH, how many cable companies do you believe would be in operation?
Protip: We do have unrestricted access in Columbus, and there are 2.
They don't prevent use. They prevent redistribution as part of the whole.
I can download, build, and install fglrx (which is completely non-free) or this ZFS module. I just can't distribute either module linked into the kernel.
In rural America the only way to get around is by personal vehicle. Granted, that doesn't excuse a drunk driver, but there aren't always buses or trains or even taxi cabs out in the middle of nowhere. You must find a sober driver to get you home. A few years ago (and still may be true in some areas) it wasn't unheard of for a police officer to give drunks a ride home.
Not quite, friend.
Doe suits over copyright infringement are legal action taken after the purported crime has taken place. They file the suit to compel the ISP to turn over the subscriber data related to an IP address which they have a suspicion has committed an act of infringement.
In this case, the crime has not even happened yet. It'd be as if they sued 100 people now for the infringement they are going to commit next week.
Big difference.
And I forgot Slashdot doesn't do bbcode. I'm too used to posting at theforvm.
[quote]MGE sued, won, and has now lost on GE's appeal.[/quote]
TFA:
[quote]A jury awarded MGE more than $4.6 million in damages for copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, but the trial judge dismissed its Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim. MGE appealed, arguing that its dongles barred the kind of access to its software that the Act is meant to prevent.[/quote]
MGE appealed the trial judge throwing out the DMCA claim. The appeals court confirmed the ruling. GE didn't appeal anything.
You've hit on something very important there -- the idea of decoupling infrastructure with service.
It's really the only way to get data services to respond to the market model. Such decoupling would make net neutrality a moot point because someone, somewhere would give you exactly the service you wanted. Whomever owned the infrastructure wouldn't care because they're not in the business of selling service. Bits are bits to them.
This is already the case in many places in the country. The cable company doesn't have a statutory monopoly, yet there is only one cable company serving a city. There is most often a natural monopoly in the case of Internet access. Let's put it this way: my grandparents don't have cable. They can't get it even if they want it. Is that because the county passed a law stating that no one may have cable in rural areas or is it because no cable company thinks that they could ever profit by building infrastructure out that far?
There is this idea out here that Comcast is begging to be allowed to build infrastructure where Time Warner has lines and vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why would Comcast bother? They'd be spending tons of money up front to wire up the city and then they'd have to poach customers from Time Warner. When do you think they'd break even? A few years? A decade? Ever? I'd think they're pretty happy with their current arrangement.
The obvious question is why France or Germany has better value. Do they simply not value broadband as much as we do? If that were so, they wouldn't have the faster speeds.
If you didn't already know the answer, it's because they have placed a higher value on network infrastructure than we have. Socialism won this round.
The problem with our legislative system is that a good deal of our bills are diffs to laws that already exist. Any bill that deals with taxes almost certainly is a diff to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
When people complain about the thousand page bills that come out of committee, the size is due to a good deal of the bill striking other provisions and re-designating paragraphs or other sections.
That's a small reason why our processes are so opaque. Could you imagine if Linux Kernel updates were only released in diff form? It'd be impossible to see what the changes were without sitting down with the previous source and pouring over each page.
I don't know where you live, but in Ohio I'm reasonably sure cities are not allowed to sign exclusive franchises with a particular vendor.
I recall from my time on the technology advisory board in Fairborn, OH that our franchise agreement was not exclusive and at no time was it ever exclusive. Anyone, if they saw fit, could offer cable television, Internet access, etc. Guess how many cable companies we had? One. No one wanted to put in tons of money in infrastructure to compete against an already entrenched incumbent.
Now you might actually have a government-granted monopoly in your jurisdiction. I don't know. I do know that where I currently live (Columbus, OH) I have two choices for cable -- Insight and WOW. And let me tell you the prices aren't that much better.
If you really want a free market, you'll need the government to own the infrastructure and allow anyone to provide service over that infrastructure. It could work the same way dial-up worked. AT&T owned the lines, but you could get your access from whomever you want. Cable television, Internet, etc. should be the same way.
I work for a small software company (60 employees). We've got a contractor who does the main stuff, but day-to-day IT is handled by our software installation specialist. He reports to the "Director of Customer Support Services and Product Development".
She might be on decent legal footing. If robodials are legal in Colorado and illegal in California, whose law is controlling? I'm willing to bet federal law is controlling here.
Now she's got a tougher case because she is commissioning the calls, and she's a California citizen, but if she wasn't this could be a more interesting case.
I read commerce clause bolstered by necessary and proper. Necessary and proper doesn't stand on its own. It has to point back to one of the others.
It is unconstitutional because Congress has no enumerated power to do this sort of thing. Arguably the states may be able to do it, but not the feds.
The 7-2 majority upheld the law under the freakin' commerce clause. That would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
The US system differs structurally from the UK system in only a few ways:
1) Their districts are drawn by an independent body. Ours are drawn by the state legislatures in almost all cases.
2) They have equal ballot access laws for all parties. We have various discriminatory treatment of independent and minor party candidates.
3) They have voters who aren't afraid to vote their conscience in the form of the Lib Dems even though they know that the Lib Dems aren't going to be the largest party anytime soon. We're a bunch of fools who vote for the least worst and wonder why we get worse politicians each election cycle.
The very obvious problem is that his vote for someone else didn't translate into any increased representation for his minority views. This is called the "wasted vote" problem and is one reason why FPTP voting systems suffer from lower turnout than do proportional systems. In a PR system, 10% of the vote for a particular party nets you 10% of the seats. In FTFP, 10% of the votes gives you 0% of the seats.
It's a catch-22.
See you're moving hundreds of gigs of traffic per day regardless of how many people use it. To look at that the other way around, think of of many times a user crosses a peer point to download that movie or warez app or whatever and then realize you probably have it sitting on your hard drive already. If only they used USENET, that'd put a huge dent in your bandwidth bills.
Your average Joe has no idea how to use USENET or even that it exists and you can't really go around advertising that people fire up their favorite newsreader and download those same files. It's faster than bittorrent! Blazing speeds! That'll get you in real hot water.
I don't see how that would matter. MP3s are still ubiquitous, and the format was finalized in 1991. Of course, they weren't used in earnest until the mid-90s, but that's still almost 20 years of them being around.