From my gut level impression of the current state of the net, I don't agree with you. Most of the major backbones for the global 'net go through the US (feel free to point out some backbone points which don't).
If all the US backbones collapsed, the net would break into many individual regional networks, with some very slow links between each region. Over time, the regions would rebuild high-speed links between each other, but given the level of investment that has been expended inside the US for the current network infrastructure, at least a few years to bring the net status back to its current state and performance.
I actually don't really mind if companies try to make a buck by going to an Application-Service-Provider model (providing application services over a network for a fee) - I think this is a legitimate business model which can benefit both the companies & the consumers (the companies can get a steady revenue stream & not worry about piracy, while the customers can get access to powerful servers, services & continual updates).
The point where I get annoyed, however, is if those companies try and make sure that their service is the ONLY service I can use - including the possibility of using standalone applications that OTHER people/companies have written, or stuff I've written myself. Especially if they are using the law to create artificial constraints on my usage of my own equipment.
From what I've read about it, the ADD (and ADHD) behavior is theorized to come because various parts of the brain are not providing the correct _inhibition_ behavior (treating the brain as a massive neural network of excitation & inhibition mechanisms).
The Ritalin actually stimulates the neurons in those parts of the brain which actively suppress activity in other parts of the brain, which causes the sufferer to have much more control over their attention & behavior.
I think having a small group of competent coders is probably the best way to keep a project from flying apart, but it's still good to have a million "monkeys" LOOKING & banging on the resultant product, although not necessarily being allowed to modify it (perhaps just giving "suggestions":).
There's a great deal of evidence that the memories of most untrained witnesses are basically worth crap - except as an emotional appeal for an equally untrained observer.
This is especially true if the witness's recollection has been "tainted" by watching a doctored video - after all, they're told this is a video of a real event, and they're used to believing what they see on the TV news as being an accurate depiction.
If I were on a jury, I wouldn't trust an "eyewitness" account, except for gross details (ones that it would be really hard to misremember), and if I had a suspicion that a videotape had been tampered with (for instance, if the defense showed some kind of inconsistency in the video which might indicate tampering), then I'd probably be inclined to distrust almost ALL of the evidence that the prosecution was presenting.
That's just me of course, I figure most people would probably let it ride. If you get a regular flow of stories about how easy it is to perfectly rewrite videotape, however, then eventually people are going to start ignoring it as an accurate depiction of anything.
Sounds like something an aggressive defense lawyer would use to bring doubt on a videotaped confession. It also sounds like there would be a requirement for use "confession" videotape equipment which uses a certified watermark-type technology designed to detect tampering with the resultant video.
On the other hand, it would be REALLY suspicious for a judge or jury to learn that an organization like a police department had the equipment to do "perfect" false-video-editing (I don't think the good equipment is going to have an insignificant cost compared to the usual cost of equipment requested by a typical police department).
I could see some "intelligence" agencies or criminal organizations using this kind of technology to frame people.
Ooo..that's convenient. It also makes it very difficult to trust somebody if they're not willing to provide more than lip service about their claims of "fair and impartial" treatment for whistleblowers.
As those of who work with computers know, memory is only part of a computer.
Actually, if the memory is fast enough, you could use individual memory bits as logic gates quite easily - which means that the only thing for a computer which WOULDN'T be memory, will be the connections inside the chip & the connections to the external world.
My only point is that Metallica should be able to have control of what *gets out*.
What do you mean? They have perfect control over what gets out - they just don't play what they don't want to get out to anyone with a recording instrument.
Once they play in a public venue, or burn millions of CDs & distribute them worldwide - well, they chose to let that performance OUT.
This is the 21st century. The only way this is going to end amicably is if techologists (you) and the industry meet and device a 21st century solution that keeps everyone's best interests in mind. Musicians want to be paid. Labels want to be paid.
So what? I don't have any obligation to make sure musicians or labels get money.
They'll only get paid if they either force me to pay them (which isn't going to make me feel too cooperative) or they do something that makes me feel like giving them money (probably some sort of service).
If they refuse to create music because they don't feel they're getting enough dough, fine - they don't have to.
There'll be a million musicians (worldwide) lined up behind them willing to put their music out for free just for the satisfaction of seeing other people listening to it. And it'll probably be a lot more interesting than the artificial "music" designed by focus groups & marketing surveys.
For those of us who like to use the stereoscopic shutter glasses occasionally (at the risk of induced nausea), we need that 120Hz framerate so that we can get an effective 60Hz framerate/eye:)
Then maybe I'll finally get to see a six movie series of the Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever books.
Good Lord, you're a masochist. I made the mistake of reading that entire series while I was sick for a couple of weeks in high school. I'm afraid to say that it probably made me sicker, and caused me permanent emotional trauma.
When I was better, I tried to go back through the books & find out why I had gotten sucked into reading all 6 books. After about 100 pages, the book's constant & gratuitous angst drove me so nuts I became physically ill whenever I got near the books (ala Clockwork Orange?).
If they came out with movies covering that entire series, I'd probably end up being arrested for stalking the writer/producer/director/actors and trying to wrap that damn white gold ring around their necks.
Actually, the judicial concept of "conservative" can throw you a few screwballs, occasionally.
I got the impression that while, legislatively, "conservative" usually got attached to pro-money, pro-Christian individuals, "conservative" in the judicial sense tended to mean "narrow interpretation" of the law (including the Constitution).
This "narrow" interpretation usually means that they throw out laws which have vague or ambiguous wording, or tighten the definition to a very specific meaning.
So, just because the SC justices have been labeled "conservative", don't lump them into the same category as "conservative legislators".
On the other hand, if Bush DOES get to appoint a bunch of new SC justices, he could very well stack the court with justices who oare "conservative" in the partisan sense. In which case, since all three branches of the government would be partisan-conservative, I fully expect some sort of class conflict to raise its ugly head.
That's essentially the claim that most of the "information wants to be free" crowd uses though. They say it's mathematically/physically impossible to prevent people from copying the data, so there shouldn't be laws against it. In other words, "information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to [get it]". Yeah, they probably wouldn't use the term "break into" (like thge ruling), but rather somethiung that means the same thing but sounds more benign..
Actually, the thing that annoyed me about that statement is that it sounded like the judge was saying that the defendants were proposing breaking into other people's computer systems, stealing & publishing their data - instead of using their own purchased equipment & their own purchased piece of media and fiddling with the bits from that piece of media. I doubt the defendants were claiming that this was okay.
After reading WAY too many descriptions of this trial, it does kind of feel like the judge decided that the defendants were troublemakers and that he had a perfect right to make life as difficult as possible for them.
It was a pretty common joke at our college dorm to respond to subscription requests & other such forms by filling them out with information about "Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness" and other such fairly obvious non-names.
When I went back 5 years later, Lucifer had quite a stack of mail waiting for him...
This is actually a good description of how any law enforcement agency can incrementally become a force for totalitarianism. Step by step, becoming more isolated from the society they are supposed to be protecting, all in the name of trying to do their "job" effectively.
There is probably a good argument somewhere, that to try and limit the divergence, any law enforcement "agency" should structurally have some pretty strong feedback loops from the society back into the agency, even at the expense of some of the agency's efficiency.
On the other hand, it might not limit the efficiency much at all - a cooperative public with a great deal of trust in its law enforcement would probably provide a helluva lot more benefits than a public which distrusts its law enforcement and provides obstruction whereever it can get away with it (cases of which have been thoroughly documented between corrupt police departments & poor neighborhoods who don't have the power to change anything).
I wonder how much of this happens already (sans the voltage lowering that would actually save power) in RAM chips in systems with tons of it. If a cell hasn't been used yet, it should be set to zero, and shouldn't be producing much if any noise). Unless refresh gets in the way.
Actually, you don't want to set to zero unless it is already there - it's the act of causing a transition in a cell state which causes the noise.
Presumably, if you know that you're not using a bank of memory, you just turn off the power to that bank & let its contents dribble away through leakage w/o worrying about doing any DRAM refreshes on it.
We use a Tandem for matching all the trades that come into the exchange. That system can be (and is planned to be) ported to UNIX!
I hope Tandem has improved their mainframe hardware since I had to deal with them 5 or 6 years ago. We had a 8-CPU "fault-tolerant" system (each "CPU" had an enclosure the size of a refrigerator) - and the standard joke was that you had to be very fault-tolerant to deal with the system.
The system was _supposed_ to be 24/7 - but a CPU would go down every other day, and when one CPU went down, the resultant shuffling of system services to the other CPUs caused ALL of the CPUs to go down like dominos.
Granted, the company I was at was cranking the I/O throughput FAR beyond the rated spec. of the entire 8-CPU, but the failure mode was definitely not grateful!
I did, however, hear envious comments from my teammembers about the capability of IBM mainframes to pump vast amounts of data w/o blinking an eye (even when overly stressed). I never got to play on one, so I dunno what I missed. I never want to play on another Tandem, however, UNIX or not!
Where do you get frozen Carbon Dioxide? And isn't that a little dangerous to handle?
I like to buy it from Basket-Robbins ice cream parlors - they sell it by the pound. They stock up just before Halloween, since it's apparently quite popular for putting into punch bowls at Halloween parties.
I like to buy a pound on the way back from lunch, crack it into small pieces with a rock, then drop the little chunks in my coworkers' coffee when they're not looking. I was surprised by how many people didn't realize what I had done to their coffee - I thought EVERY ex-high school/college student had played with dry ice at some point.
You seem to have a permanent case of individuals-are-more-important-than-society, and a strong unwillingness to even think about any other viewpoint.
Let's bring this down to primal force. There is no such thing in nature as a "right". Nature lets you keep what you have the power to defend. If someone or something more powerful than you comes along and wants your stuff, they'll take it from you. That's the only kind of "right" that nature gives you.
In a SOCIETY, you've got a bunch of people cooperating with each other who have decided that they'll help each other keep their own stuff. If someone tries to take their stuff away from one member of society, then the other members of the society will help that person keep their stuff.
You only get the "right of personal property" because the society has agreed to help you keep your stuff. If the society DIDN'T agree to help you keep your stuff, then nature says the first person who came along who was stronger than you could take it away from, and your "right" would be worth diddly-squat.
That's THE problem with our society.. people believe they are entitled to what other people have.. rediculous! You have NO RIGHT to anything my company has or myself for that matter!
Bullshit. Who has the power determines who gets what. You or your company only gets to keep what has gained because the SOCIETY as a whole has decided that it's good to allow people or companies to keep what they have gained. You don't have any "right" except what the society chooses to grant you. The only reason behind this is because the society-as-a-whole is stronger than you, and can kick your butt.
Companies are created and owned by people.. the government is a "legal entity" and it has ALL the rights it wants.
The government is SUPPOSED to be an agent of the society as a whole, and has those "rights" which the society grants it. If the society decides that it doesn't want the government to have those rights, then the government won't have them.
Of course, this breaks down if the government ceases to be an agent of the WHOLE society, and instead becomes an agent of a small group of people IN the society.
What's the point of running a business if society has the "right" to destroy what you build and TAKE your property?
Why bother?
Well DUH - if you provide a service to the society, then the society will reward you for that service. There's no such thing as a "right" to run a business or make a profit though. If you do something that severely hurts the society, then its going to use its collective might (possibly operating through its agent the government) to kick your ass. And all your whining about "rights" will be treated like the fertilizer that it is.
If what ever it is that's being sold belongs to the company... then I dont care if millions die because they can't afford it... what the hell.. just because you have a bottle of water and I'm dying of thirst does NOT put you under ANY obligation to give me a drink. And in the case of companies.. we can live without what they are selling.
Heh - your response almost provides a blatant example of why society SHOULD slap down greedy bastards.
Try and make your examples fit the argument. If I had the only access to water in town, and 20,000 other people are going to die if they don't get access to that water, but I don't want to sell them the water unless they hand over all their property, is it in the best interests of the town to pay up? Hell no - they're going to shoot me, then take the water anyway! I'd be an idiot to think I could make the outcome any different.
Similarly, only an idiot would think that a company has some kind of fundamental right to "property". The society defines what "property" is - NOT any company.
If a society can't take care of it's self because a company charges high prices... that society should probably die off... give me a break!
But they CAN take care of themselves - by destroying the company which is blocking them from the resources they want. The company only exists, and is profitable, at the whim of the society - and any organization that forgets that is just ASKING to be destroyed.
I don't even know why you're so defensive of companies - they don't even exist as real people, just legal entities! If you want to talk individual vs. societal rights, then talk about that - don't pretend that a "legal entity" has any kind of rights equivalent to a real human being.
Sure.. and if a company wants to sell products at a loss.. that is their right... as is charging high prices.. In todays global economy this is much harder and there is almost always an alternative. I still dont see why the government needs to get involved.
Argh - get a cluestick why don't you! Sure, if a company wants to sell products at a loss - it's their right - up until the point where they're hurting the society, then it's the right of the SOCIETY to use an agent (the government) to slap the greedy bastards back into primordial ooze.
The so-called RIGHT of a small group of people (the owners of a company, for instance) to make money does NOT trump the right of a society to take care of themselves!
Left alone people find alternatives to monopoly services and goods.
Unless the monopolist arranges matters so that people have great difficulty in finding or knowing about such alternatives, or by using their own resources to prevent any alternatives from being implemented.
Of course, if you TRULY got the government out of the way, then there would be no such thing as "intellectual property", so no company would be able to hold onto a government-sponsored monopoly on such information.
Well, on the one hand they probably don't mind selling @ a higher price as long as everyone else has to sell at that price - on the other hand, it prevents them from using business tactics like selling below cost in order to drive out their smaller competitors, which is kind of annoying when you don't want any competition...
This is yet another prime example of Americans surrendering just a little bit more freedom to make the world a vaguely safer place.
Hmmm...maybe we can turn this around and create a volunteer organization which uses these things to track the movements & behaviors of all of our law enforcement & political leaders (and post the results on a public web site:)?
Slashdot Mirror
From my gut level impression of the current state of the net, I don't agree with you. Most of the major backbones for the global 'net go through the US (feel free to point out some backbone points which don't).
If all the US backbones collapsed, the net would break into many individual regional networks, with some very slow links between each region. Over time, the regions would rebuild high-speed links between each other, but given the level of investment that has been expended inside the US for the current network infrastructure, at least a few years to bring the net status back to its current state and performance.
I actually don't really mind if companies try to make a buck by going to an Application-Service-Provider model (providing application services over a network for a fee) - I think this is a legitimate business model which can benefit both the companies & the consumers (the companies can get a steady revenue stream & not worry about piracy, while the customers can get access to powerful servers, services & continual updates).
The point where I get annoyed, however, is if those companies try and make sure that their service is the ONLY service I can use - including the possibility of using standalone applications that OTHER people/companies have written, or stuff I've written myself. Especially if they are using the law to create artificial constraints on my usage of my own equipment.
From what I've read about it, the ADD (and ADHD) behavior is theorized to come because various parts of the brain are not providing the correct _inhibition_ behavior (treating the brain as a massive neural network of excitation & inhibition mechanisms).
The Ritalin actually stimulates the neurons in those parts of the brain which actively suppress activity in other parts of the brain, which causes the sufferer to have much more control over their attention & behavior.
I think having a small group of competent coders is probably the best way to keep a project from flying apart, but it's still good to have a million "monkeys" LOOKING & banging on the resultant product, although not necessarily being allowed to modify it (perhaps just giving "suggestions" :).
There's a great deal of evidence that the memories of most untrained witnesses are basically worth crap - except as an emotional appeal for an equally untrained observer.
This is especially true if the witness's recollection has been "tainted" by watching a doctored video - after all, they're told this is a video of a real event, and they're used to believing what they see on the TV news as being an accurate depiction.
If I were on a jury, I wouldn't trust an "eyewitness" account, except for gross details (ones that it would be really hard to misremember), and if I had a suspicion that a videotape had been tampered with (for instance, if the defense showed some kind of inconsistency in the video which might indicate tampering), then I'd probably be inclined to distrust almost ALL of the evidence that the prosecution was presenting.
That's just me of course, I figure most people would probably let it ride. If you get a regular flow of stories about how easy it is to perfectly rewrite videotape, however, then eventually people are going to start ignoring it as an accurate depiction of anything.
Sounds like something an aggressive defense lawyer would use to bring doubt on a videotaped confession. It also sounds like there would be a requirement for use "confession" videotape equipment which uses a certified watermark-type technology designed to detect tampering with the resultant video.
On the other hand, it would be REALLY suspicious for a judge or jury to learn that an organization like a police department had the equipment to do "perfect" false-video-editing (I don't think the good equipment is going to have an insignificant cost compared to the usual cost of equipment requested by a typical police department).
I could see some "intelligence" agencies or criminal organizations using this kind of technology to frame people.
Ooo..that's convenient. It also makes it very difficult to trust somebody if they're not willing to provide more than lip service about their claims of "fair and impartial" treatment for whistleblowers.
Actually, if the memory is fast enough, you could use individual memory bits as logic gates quite easily - which means that the only thing for a computer which WOULDN'T be memory, will be the connections inside the chip & the connections to the external world.
What do you mean? They have perfect control over what gets out - they just don't play what they don't want to get out to anyone with a recording instrument.
Once they play in a public venue, or burn millions of CDs & distribute them worldwide - well, they chose to let that performance OUT.
So what? I don't have any obligation to make sure musicians or labels get money.
They'll only get paid if they either force me to pay them (which isn't going to make me feel too cooperative) or they do something that makes me feel like giving them money (probably some sort of service).
If they refuse to create music because they don't feel they're getting enough dough, fine - they don't have to.
There'll be a million musicians (worldwide) lined up behind them willing to put their music out for free just for the satisfaction of seeing other people listening to it. And it'll probably be a lot more interesting than the artificial "music" designed by focus groups & marketing surveys.
For those of us who like to use the stereoscopic shutter glasses occasionally (at the risk of induced nausea), we need that 120Hz framerate so that we can get an effective 60Hz framerate/eye :)
Good Lord, you're a masochist. I made the mistake of reading that entire series while I was sick for a couple of weeks in high school. I'm afraid to say that it probably made me sicker, and caused me permanent emotional trauma.
When I was better, I tried to go back through the books & find out why I had gotten sucked into reading all 6 books. After about 100 pages, the book's constant & gratuitous angst drove me so nuts I became physically ill whenever I got near the books (ala Clockwork Orange?).
If they came out with movies covering that entire series, I'd probably end up being arrested for stalking the writer/producer/director/actors and trying to wrap that damn white gold ring around their necks.
Actually, the judicial concept of "conservative" can throw you a few screwballs, occasionally.
I got the impression that while, legislatively, "conservative" usually got attached to pro-money, pro-Christian individuals, "conservative" in the judicial sense tended to mean "narrow interpretation" of the law (including the Constitution).
This "narrow" interpretation usually means that they throw out laws which have vague or ambiguous wording, or tighten the definition to a very specific meaning.
So, just because the SC justices have been labeled "conservative", don't lump them into the same category as "conservative legislators".
On the other hand, if Bush DOES get to appoint a bunch of new SC justices, he could very well stack the court with justices who oare "conservative" in the partisan sense. In which case, since all three branches of the government would be partisan-conservative, I fully expect some sort of class conflict to raise its ugly head.
Actually, the thing that annoyed me about that statement is that it sounded like the judge was saying that the defendants were proposing breaking into other people's computer systems, stealing & publishing their data - instead of using their own purchased equipment & their own purchased piece of media and fiddling with the bits from that piece of media. I doubt the defendants were claiming that this was okay.
After reading WAY too many descriptions of this trial, it does kind of feel like the judge decided that the defendants were troublemakers and that he had a perfect right to make life as difficult as possible for them.
It was a pretty common joke at our college dorm to respond to subscription requests & other such forms by filling them out with information about "Lucifer, the Lord of Darkness" and other such fairly obvious non-names.
When I went back 5 years later, Lucifer had quite a stack of mail waiting for him...
This is actually a good description of how any law enforcement agency can incrementally become a force for totalitarianism. Step by step, becoming more isolated from the society they are supposed to be protecting, all in the name of trying to do their "job" effectively.
There is probably a good argument somewhere, that to try and limit the divergence, any law enforcement "agency" should structurally have some pretty strong feedback loops from the society back into the agency, even at the expense of some of the agency's efficiency.
On the other hand, it might not limit the efficiency much at all - a cooperative public with a great deal of trust in its law enforcement would probably provide a helluva lot more benefits than a public which distrusts its law enforcement and provides obstruction whereever it can get away with it (cases of which have been thoroughly documented between corrupt police departments & poor neighborhoods who don't have the power to change anything).
Actually, you don't want to set to zero unless it is already there - it's the act of causing a transition in a cell state which causes the noise.
Presumably, if you know that you're not using a bank of memory, you just turn off the power to that bank & let its contents dribble away through leakage w/o worrying about doing any DRAM refreshes on it.
I hope Tandem has improved their mainframe hardware since I had to deal with them 5 or 6 years ago. We had a 8-CPU "fault-tolerant" system (each "CPU" had an enclosure the size of a refrigerator) - and the standard joke was that you had to be very fault-tolerant to deal with the system.
The system was _supposed_ to be 24/7 - but a CPU would go down every other day, and when one CPU went down, the resultant shuffling of system services to the other CPUs caused ALL of the CPUs to go down like dominos.
Granted, the company I was at was cranking the I/O throughput FAR beyond the rated spec. of the entire 8-CPU, but the failure mode was definitely not grateful!
I did, however, hear envious comments from my teammembers about the capability of IBM mainframes to pump vast amounts of data w/o blinking an eye (even when overly stressed). I never got to play on one, so I dunno what I missed. I never want to play on another Tandem, however, UNIX or not!
I like to buy it from Basket-Robbins ice cream parlors - they sell it by the pound. They stock up just before Halloween, since it's apparently quite popular for putting into punch bowls at Halloween parties.
I like to buy a pound on the way back from lunch, crack it into small pieces with a rock, then drop the little chunks in my coworkers' coffee when they're not looking. I was surprised by how many people didn't realize what I had done to their coffee - I thought EVERY ex-high school/college student had played with dry ice at some point.
You seem to have a permanent case of individuals-are-more-important-than-society, and a strong unwillingness to even think about any other viewpoint.
Let's bring this down to primal force. There is no such thing in nature as a "right". Nature lets you keep what you have the power to defend. If someone or something more powerful than you comes along and wants your stuff, they'll take it from you. That's the only kind of "right" that nature gives you.
In a SOCIETY, you've got a bunch of people cooperating with each other who have decided that they'll help each other keep their own stuff. If someone tries to take their stuff away from one member of society, then the other members of the society will help that person keep their stuff.
You only get the "right of personal property" because the society has agreed to help you keep your stuff. If the society DIDN'T agree to help you keep your stuff, then nature says the first person who came along who was stronger than you could take it away from, and your "right" would be worth diddly-squat.
Bullshit. Who has the power determines who gets what. You or your company only gets to keep what has gained because the SOCIETY as a whole has decided that it's good to allow people or companies to keep what they have gained. You don't have any "right" except what the society chooses to grant you. The only reason behind this is because the society-as-a-whole is stronger than you, and can kick your butt.
The government is SUPPOSED to be an agent of the society as a whole, and has those "rights" which the society grants it. If the society decides that it doesn't want the government to have those rights, then the government won't have them.
Of course, this breaks down if the government ceases to be an agent of the WHOLE society, and instead becomes an agent of a small group of people IN the society.
Well DUH - if you provide a service to the society, then the society will reward you for that service. There's no such thing as a "right" to run a business or make a profit though. If you do something that severely hurts the society, then its going to use its collective might (possibly operating through its agent the government) to kick your ass. And all your whining about "rights" will be treated like the fertilizer that it is.
Heh - your response almost provides a blatant example of why society SHOULD slap down greedy bastards.
Try and make your examples fit the argument. If I had the only access to water in town, and 20,000 other people are going to die if they don't get access to that water, but I don't want to sell them the water unless they hand over all their property, is it in the best interests of the town to pay up? Hell no - they're going to shoot me, then take the water anyway! I'd be an idiot to think I could make the outcome any different.
Similarly, only an idiot would think that a company has some kind of fundamental right to "property". The society defines what "property" is - NOT any company.
But they CAN take care of themselves - by destroying the company which is blocking them from the resources they want. The company only exists, and is profitable, at the whim of the society - and any organization that forgets that is just ASKING to be destroyed.
I don't even know why you're so defensive of companies - they don't even exist as real people, just legal entities! If you want to talk individual vs. societal rights, then talk about that - don't pretend that a "legal entity" has any kind of rights equivalent to a real human being.
Argh - get a cluestick why don't you! Sure, if a company wants to sell products at a loss - it's their right - up until the point where they're hurting the society, then it's the right of the SOCIETY to use an agent (the government) to slap the greedy bastards back into primordial ooze.
The so-called RIGHT of a small group of people (the owners of a company, for instance) to make money does NOT trump the right of a society to take care of themselves!
Unless the monopolist arranges matters so that people have great difficulty in finding or knowing about such alternatives, or by using their own resources to prevent any alternatives from being implemented.
Of course, if you TRULY got the government out of the way, then there would be no such thing as "intellectual property", so no company would be able to hold onto a government-sponsored monopoly on such information.
Well, on the one hand they probably don't mind selling @ a higher price as long as everyone else has to sell at that price - on the other hand, it prevents them from using business tactics like selling below cost in order to drive out their smaller competitors, which is kind of annoying when you don't want any competition...
Hmmm...maybe we can turn this around and create a volunteer organization which uses these things to track the movements & behaviors of all of our law enforcement & political leaders (and post the results on a public web site :)?