Wow, it sounds like someone woke up a little butthurt this morning. "Koch-backed astroturf group." So?
Let's examine this:
(1) Marxists do think Net Neutrality is a good idea. (This, of course, doesn't mean Net Neutrality is right or wrong by itself, it is a statement of fact. Marxists tend to agree with civil libertarians on quite a lot, if the intention is to portray the policy badly by negative association.) (3) Net Neutrality means: Dropping packets (thereby manipulating congestion control and bandwidth negotiation) based on the source or destination of the packet. If you dropped a Wikipedia packet instead of a Facebook packet due to a policy configuration and nothing else (randomly due to too much load), that's a violation of Net Neutrality. (2) The issue is not over Net Neutrality, but over classifying the Internet as a "public utility". I'm not sure what that's supposed to accomplish - by any standard, it's a common service that gets hooked up to houses, residences, similarly to electricity. But if the intention is to legislate how people are supposed to connect their computers to each other - I have a problem with that.
I'm all for fair routing and engineering solutions to problems, but do we really want the FCC being the packet police? This is the same entity that gave us the Broadcast Flag. Their only job is supposed to be to regulate and assign airwave space, not meddle in the affairs of private, voluntary connections between nodes in a computer network, Internet or otherwise.
And there are other Republicans who do believe in the scientific method, and that global warming is at least in part manmade, but think the $100B price tag to delay the effects by just a decade or two could be better spent elsewhere.
Seriously, when's the last time a climatologist actually did a cost-benefit analysis to the proposed solutions?
I can't speak for "freedom" because it's not well defined, but in the typical use meaning "liberty", GPLv3 is definitely less liberal than GPLv2.
Liberty is defined in terms of what one can legally (or violence, etc) compel someone else to do. It doesn't distinguish between audiences. If license A and B are identical except that licence A has some additional condition where I can file a lawsuit to get you to stop doing something, license A is necessarily less liberal, i.e. less free.
The FSF's notion of "free" is kind of backwards like this.
billions of people the world over not only believe in them, but murder the holy living shit out of each other because of said belief.
I seriously doubt there's "billions" of murders on the planet, let alone potential murders, regardless of the reason. Many participants in wars have been religious, and will preach their beliefs in the course of doing so, but of course this is statistically to be expected, do not confuse correlation with causation. In contrast, communism is directly responsible for somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million deaths (by execution as an enemy of the state, starvation due to artificial shortage, etc; WW2 by contrast is likely 2/3rds this number, including disease, fatigue, and diversion of resources and labor away from home).
Minor problem: What if the master key is compromised? What if you want to change the identity you want to present to a website - just one website? You're screwed, and out of luck (respectively).
The proposal also assumes that the authority component of the URI (the hostname, usually) is the party you want to identify to - it doesn't.
It's not good enough for Web standards to work for 95% or 99% of people - they have to work for everyone, hence all of the back-and-forth of the standards development process.
I would point out WebID doesn't have these shortcomings.
You don't own a newspaper to deliver your opinion to the front steps of millions of people... Oh well?
That doesn't mean we can go around neutering newspapers. Now, I never said "money = speech", but that doesn't make the First Amendment implications any less relevant. You cannot enforce a law that has the effect of chilling speech. Period full stop.
Everything for Obamacare/PPACA, including the "penalty" tax and tax on medical devices, was introduced in the Senate. They could only pass the Senate version because it was the only version passed on either side of the Rotunda before Democrats lost their "super majority" in the Senate -- the House had to pass it second.
Again, you can't uphold a law that's unconstitutional. This means due process, and equal protection of the law. People have rights, and every time someone is allowed to exercise those rights in a way you don't like, you want to blame the Court. No thank you.
We also sent millions of Japanese Americans to detention centers, and continue to lock up people in Federal prison for completely consensual, non-violent "crimes", in the name of "the public good". When you have a completely subjective, flexible, term as "public good" you get the TSA, Homeland Security, USA PATRIOT Act, DEA, NSA, and you can protest it as much as you want but no court is going to agree with you on how their idea of public good is wrong, and your idea of public good is right. No thank you. We have rights that are above even every last person on Earth going to a poll station and checking the right box.
The Court's first responsibility is to uphold the law -- not the law as they or anyone else wants it. This includes the Constitution, the "supreme law of the land" - they can't uphold a law that Congress has no authority to pass in the first place.
From this viewpoint, let's take a look at those decisions:
Bad decision: Calling the ACA a "tax". The ACA originated in the Senate, even though the Constitution requires that new taxes originate in the House. Furthermore, you can't compel people to buy something, and you can't compel a company to sell something - that's outright slavery, if it was ever recently legalized.
Good decision: Upholding the free speech of individuals, whether representing a corporation or themselves. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." No exemptions are listed. (And the Constitution, mind you, has numerous exemptions to various things - not in this amendment, though.) You might say "But money isn't speech!" which is technically, literally true, but doesn't make the First Amendment implications any less relevant. It costs money to publish speech, and this applies to newspapers, websites, and bloggers; in addition to advertisers. Additionally, the Federal government doesn't have the power to legislate intrastate exchange; it only has some power over interstate trade, the power to regulate (which does not include prohibition).
It sounds like all you want to do is force some people to behave the way you want them to behave, without considering that they might have a right to do so even when you disagree with them on the matter.
Um, remember the Broadcast Flag? The FCC claiming “ancillary” authority under the 1996 Tellecommunications Act to Regulate the Internet?
The FCC only exists to allocate RF spectrum and limit interference in it -- THE FCC IS NOT YOUR FRIEND (nor do you want them to be). They do not exist to make Internet providers do your bidding - if they're violating a contract (i.e. "unlimited" Internet), that's the proper role of the courts to enforce.
Why would you have to have city council approval to start a new ISP? How dare they kill competition, stifle innovat... Oh, it was going to be a taxpayer funded, government run ISP?
My local DMV can't even keep their computers running for more than a few hours at a time. Seriously, good riddance!
Code implementing software patents can still be Free/Open Source Software. I mean, isn't that what x264 and VLC is? The un-FOSS-like restriction is one enforced by the government and patent trolls, not the software project.
Just because one country makes it illegal means you should, or even have to, spread it all around the world.
Mozilla isn't even offering people the option to enable h.264 in some alternative fashion (maybe a user could provide it themselves, maybe Firefox searches the OS or hardware for an h.264 implementation) - which they could legally do - no, they're just saying "Haha, screw you".
If the manufacturer loses revenue for mispricing their product, that's their problem, not the developer's, or anyone else's.
The warm fuzzy feeling of sending your money to the manufacturer instead of someone who helped you get the product in your hands in the first place is worth exactly $0.00.
The market for dev kits can't expand in time to meet consumer demand, nor would it be cost-effective to try to do so. It takes a lot of capital to ramp up to full consumer production capacities. And, any dev kit taken out of the hands of actual developers will tend to limit eventual dev support at launch time. It's crucial to get those devices into the hands of actual developers in order to ensure there is actual support for the product at launch time. There's no need to expand access to this particular product, because it's not a consumer product.
All these are reasons to continue selling the product, at a higher price, and to resellers (if they'll still buy).
Higher market prices expand access to a product... period. That's called the law of supply.
The amount of capital consumer production would take is irrelevant. They're selling one product, it's designed for developers, and at the manufacturer price, there's a shortage.
If the kit is being resold, it's still getting into the hands of someone who wants one, and it ensures that they have guaranteed access to one, which is something Occulus isn't doing! (And if discriminating between developers vs. others is a stated goal, they've already completely failed at it. However, who else but a developer would pay the higher price for hardware that's supported by no games?)
So do you want to ensure that developers can get their hands on this, but you don't want to expand access? That's mutually contradictory.
If Oculus wanted to collect that revenue, they'd have raised the prices on day one. Most markets work perfectly fine without auctions...
That's not to say that reselling adds "no value." It ensures that someone willing to pay the higher price gets one, whereas they might not get one at all otherwise. That certainly adds value! Profit, by definition, means taking scarce, valuable, resources; and selling it as something more valuable.
Except now nobody in China is buying one. How is that better? That sounds worse!
If there's a limited quantity, there's a limited quantity, it doesn't matter who buys or resells, the same number of people are getting one. The higher price simply ensures those who want it the most get one: you don't "wait" for a scalped unit, the whole purpose of reselling so that people who want one now can get one now guaranteed, without risking losing out or waiting.
Yes they're developer kits, and nearly everything in the world is limited in supply, how does this change the situation? Secondary markets like this expand access to the product to those who want it, not limit it. It encourages people who have one to sell it, and it makes it possible for those who need one now to get it now.
There's nothing wrong with "scalping, plain and simple." It's just a secondary market for goods - the very kind we like when we talk about books or music. You have a right to resell things.
If there's a very active secondary market for something, that suggests people are having a hard time getting it from the primary source, or there's just not enough to go around to everyone who wants one, so a higher market price forms. It encourages people who have one to sell it for the new, higher price (increasing supply); and it ensures that those who most urgently want one can get one if they so choose.
HTML is accessible and portable. Any device can read it. The most common use-case by far is graphically rendering it in a Web browser, which can be done on a desktop or mobile device; also rendering to printed pages, or multi-channel audio. And of course, spiders/robots.
In short, Web browsers are only one kind of user-agent. HTML is accessible and satisfies the needs of all user-agents.
If you don't use the features of HTML that allow you to do this (such as link relations), you may as well just publish from Photoshop to a JPEG.
A distinction has to be made between passive intercepting and decoding of transmissions - which arguably could go under military - and forcing companies to install wiretapping devices against their will, under threat of force.
The former is something that any old person could legally do, given enough money.
The latter, no. Or at least not without a warrant.
Slashdot Mirror
[Citation Needed]
Wow, it sounds like someone woke up a little butthurt this morning. "Koch-backed astroturf group." So?
Let's examine this:
(1) Marxists do think Net Neutrality is a good idea. (This, of course, doesn't mean Net Neutrality is right or wrong by itself, it is a statement of fact. Marxists tend to agree with civil libertarians on quite a lot, if the intention is to portray the policy badly by negative association.)
(3) Net Neutrality means: Dropping packets (thereby manipulating congestion control and bandwidth negotiation) based on the source or destination of the packet. If you dropped a Wikipedia packet instead of a Facebook packet due to a policy configuration and nothing else (randomly due to too much load), that's a violation of Net Neutrality.
(2) The issue is not over Net Neutrality, but over classifying the Internet as a "public utility". I'm not sure what that's supposed to accomplish - by any standard, it's a common service that gets hooked up to houses, residences, similarly to electricity. But if the intention is to legislate how people are supposed to connect their computers to each other - I have a problem with that.
I'm all for fair routing and engineering solutions to problems, but do we really want the FCC being the packet police? This is the same entity that gave us the Broadcast Flag. Their only job is supposed to be to regulate and assign airwave space, not meddle in the affairs of private, voluntary connections between nodes in a computer network, Internet or otherwise.
And there are other Republicans who do believe in the scientific method, and that global warming is at least in part manmade, but think the $100B price tag to delay the effects by just a decade or two could be better spent elsewhere.
Seriously, when's the last time a climatologist actually did a cost-benefit analysis to the proposed solutions?
I can't speak for "freedom" because it's not well defined, but in the typical use meaning "liberty", GPLv3 is definitely less liberal than GPLv2.
Liberty is defined in terms of what one can legally (or violence, etc) compel someone else to do. It doesn't distinguish between audiences. If license A and B are identical except that licence A has some additional condition where I can file a lawsuit to get you to stop doing something, license A is necessarily less liberal, i.e. less free.
The FSF's notion of "free" is kind of backwards like this.
Military surplus makes such tyranny especially cheap, cheaper than it would otherwise be. Also something about the law of demand.
billions of people the world over not only believe in them, but murder the holy living shit out of each other because of said belief.
I seriously doubt there's "billions" of murders on the planet, let alone potential murders, regardless of the reason. Many participants in wars have been religious, and will preach their beliefs in the course of doing so, but of course this is statistically to be expected, do not confuse correlation with causation. In contrast, communism is directly responsible for somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million deaths (by execution as an enemy of the state, starvation due to artificial shortage, etc; WW2 by contrast is likely 2/3rds this number, including disease, fatigue, and diversion of resources and labor away from home).
Minor problem: What if the master key is compromised? What if you want to change the identity you want to present to a website - just one website? You're screwed, and out of luck (respectively).
The proposal also assumes that the authority component of the URI (the hostname, usually) is the party you want to identify to - it doesn't.
It's not good enough for Web standards to work for 95% or 99% of people - they have to work for everyone, hence all of the back-and-forth of the standards development process.
I would point out WebID doesn't have these shortcomings.
s/profit/revenue/
Two totally different things.
You don't own a newspaper to deliver your opinion to the front steps of millions of people... Oh well?
That doesn't mean we can go around neutering newspapers. Now, I never said "money = speech", but that doesn't make the First Amendment implications any less relevant. You cannot enforce a law that has the effect of chilling speech. Period full stop.
Everything for Obamacare/PPACA, including the "penalty" tax and tax on medical devices, was introduced in the Senate. They could only pass the Senate version because it was the only version passed on either side of the Rotunda before Democrats lost their "super majority" in the Senate -- the House had to pass it second.
Again, you can't uphold a law that's unconstitutional. This means due process, and equal protection of the law. People have rights, and every time someone is allowed to exercise those rights in a way you don't like, you want to blame the Court. No thank you.
We also sent millions of Japanese Americans to detention centers, and continue to lock up people in Federal prison for completely consensual, non-violent "crimes", in the name of "the public good". When you have a completely subjective, flexible, term as "public good" you get the TSA, Homeland Security, USA PATRIOT Act, DEA, NSA, and you can protest it as much as you want but no court is going to agree with you on how their idea of public good is wrong, and your idea of public good is right. No thank you. We have rights that are above even every last person on Earth going to a poll station and checking the right box.
The Court's first responsibility is to uphold the law -- not the law as they or anyone else wants it. This includes the Constitution, the "supreme law of the land" - they can't uphold a law that Congress has no authority to pass in the first place.
From this viewpoint, let's take a look at those decisions:
Bad decision: Calling the ACA a "tax". The ACA originated in the Senate, even though the Constitution requires that new taxes originate in the House. Furthermore, you can't compel people to buy something, and you can't compel a company to sell something - that's outright slavery, if it was ever recently legalized.
Good decision: Upholding the free speech of individuals, whether representing a corporation or themselves. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." No exemptions are listed. (And the Constitution, mind you, has numerous exemptions to various things - not in this amendment, though.) You might say "But money isn't speech!" which is technically, literally true, but doesn't make the First Amendment implications any less relevant. It costs money to publish speech, and this applies to newspapers, websites, and bloggers; in addition to advertisers. Additionally, the Federal government doesn't have the power to legislate intrastate exchange; it only has some power over interstate trade, the power to regulate (which does not include prohibition).
It sounds like all you want to do is force some people to behave the way you want them to behave, without considering that they might have a right to do so even when you disagree with them on the matter.
Um, remember the Broadcast Flag? The FCC claiming “ancillary” authority under the 1996 Tellecommunications Act to Regulate the Internet?
The FCC only exists to allocate RF spectrum and limit interference in it -- THE FCC IS NOT YOUR FRIEND (nor do you want them to be). They do not exist to make Internet providers do your bidding - if they're violating a contract (i.e. "unlimited" Internet), that's the proper role of the courts to enforce.
It's not so much "right to be forgotten" as it is "obligation for you to shut up," is it?
And here I was thinking that the NSA was a bad thing.
Why would you have to have city council approval to start a new ISP? How dare they kill competition, stifle innovat... Oh, it was going to be a taxpayer funded, government run ISP?
My local DMV can't even keep their computers running for more than a few hours at a time. Seriously, good riddance!
Code implementing software patents can still be Free/Open Source Software. I mean, isn't that what x264 and VLC is? The un-FOSS-like restriction is one enforced by the government and patent trolls, not the software project.
Just because one country makes it illegal means you should, or even have to, spread it all around the world.
Mozilla isn't even offering people the option to enable h.264 in some alternative fashion (maybe a user could provide it themselves, maybe Firefox searches the OS or hardware for an h.264 implementation) - which they could legally do - no, they're just saying "Haha, screw you".
Who the hell are you to tell other people which movies, or any products for that matter, they must and must not like?
If the manufacturer loses revenue for mispricing their product, that's their problem, not the developer's, or anyone else's.
The warm fuzzy feeling of sending your money to the manufacturer instead of someone who helped you get the product in your hands in the first place is worth exactly $0.00.
The price wouldn't be as high if it weren't for them in the first place.
That's a good thing though. A higher price encourages people who have one to sell it, ensuring that they don't just sit around idle.
If a low price were an end unto itself, why not just hand them out for free?
The market for dev kits can't expand in time to meet consumer demand, nor would it be cost-effective to try to do so. It takes a lot of capital to ramp up to full consumer production capacities. And, any dev kit taken out of the hands of actual developers will tend to limit eventual dev support at launch time. It's crucial to get those devices into the hands of actual developers in order to ensure there is actual support for the product at launch time. There's no need to expand access to this particular product, because it's not a consumer product.
All these are reasons to continue selling the product, at a higher price, and to resellers (if they'll still buy).
Higher market prices expand access to a product... period. That's called the law of supply.
The amount of capital consumer production would take is irrelevant. They're selling one product, it's designed for developers, and at the manufacturer price, there's a shortage.
If the kit is being resold, it's still getting into the hands of someone who wants one, and it ensures that they have guaranteed access to one, which is something Occulus isn't doing! (And if discriminating between developers vs. others is a stated goal, they've already completely failed at it. However, who else but a developer would pay the higher price for hardware that's supported by no games?)
So do you want to ensure that developers can get their hands on this, but you don't want to expand access? That's mutually contradictory.
If Oculus wanted to collect that revenue, they'd have raised the prices on day one. Most markets work perfectly fine without auctions...
That's not to say that reselling adds "no value." It ensures that someone willing to pay the higher price gets one, whereas they might not get one at all otherwise. That certainly adds value! Profit, by definition, means taking scarce, valuable, resources; and selling it as something more valuable.
Except now nobody in China is buying one. How is that better? That sounds worse!
If there's a limited quantity, there's a limited quantity, it doesn't matter who buys or resells, the same number of people are getting one. The higher price simply ensures those who want it the most get one: you don't "wait" for a scalped unit, the whole purpose of reselling so that people who want one now can get one now guaranteed, without risking losing out or waiting.
Yes they're developer kits, and nearly everything in the world is limited in supply, how does this change the situation? Secondary markets like this expand access to the product to those who want it, not limit it. It encourages people who have one to sell it, and it makes it possible for those who need one now to get it now.
There's nothing wrong with "scalping, plain and simple." It's just a secondary market for goods - the very kind we like when we talk about books or music. You have a right to resell things.
If there's a very active secondary market for something, that suggests people are having a hard time getting it from the primary source, or there's just not enough to go around to everyone who wants one, so a higher market price forms. It encourages people who have one to sell it for the new, higher price (increasing supply); and it ensures that those who most urgently want one can get one if they so choose.
HTML is accessible and portable. Any device can read it. The most common use-case by far is graphically rendering it in a Web browser, which can be done on a desktop or mobile device; also rendering to printed pages, or multi-channel audio. And of course, spiders/robots.
In short, Web browsers are only one kind of user-agent. HTML is accessible and satisfies the needs of all user-agents.
If you don't use the features of HTML that allow you to do this (such as link relations), you may as well just publish from Photoshop to a JPEG.
A distinction has to be made between passive intercepting and decoding of transmissions - which arguably could go under military - and forcing companies to install wiretapping devices against their will, under threat of force.
The former is something that any old person could legally do, given enough money.
The latter, no. Or at least not without a warrant.