I would like to point out this is in Canada. Are you trying to call Great Britain a bastion of liberty now?
From TFA:
The Plaintiff alleges that Uber X and Uber XL has created an enormous marketplace for illegal transportation in Toronto,
Here's a question for you, Mr. Lawyer: After you've gone through indictment, court proceedings, habeas corpus, public review, jury trial, appeals, evidence requirements, all the the other normal procedural due process, can you still be left with a verdict that is unfair and unjust, because the law itself is fundamentally unfair?
At least in the USA, the answer is yes, and that's known as violating substantive due process. It can also be an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection of the laws. Canada seems to call it fundamental justice.
tl;dr if it's even illegal at all, it's "illegal" the same way that not giving up your in front-of-bus seat, or marrying someone of a different race, is "illegal".
I'm not sure this is really equivalent: The purpose of self-defense is supposedly to minimize the use of force by both you and the aggressor. You're not causing more violence, you're trying to put an end to it. (You might also shun violence in all forms, as taught by turn the other cheek.)
I make the comparison like this: In a world without violence, self-defense would not be necessary. If we generalize to the set of universes where violence is an option, then self-defense becomes a way of minimizing the damage.
Likewise, if we generalize to a body of law with copyright law, a license to minimize the damaging effects would look something like "You are allowed to distribute this work only if derivative works are also licensed under this license, and you agree not to reserve any other rights, neither is there is no warranty for this software." Yet the GPL goes way far and away above this; the BSD or MIT license seems closer, though fails to contain the viral clause.
What regulations? My locale has virtually no laws applying to Uber, and I'm a happy customer. If what you say is true, how is this possible?
Uber has a set of uniform policies regardless of where you request a ride from. I've requested rides from numerous, very different regulatory schemes, and the experience is fairly uniform. (Or as uniform as you can get given the monopoly status of taxis in many regions.)
Even for people who've had bad experiences, Uber's response is fairly uniform.
There's nothing to be gained by reclassifying them, legally, as something else.
We once legally declared a person was 3/5ths a man based on their skin color.
There's nothing about this that's even a little bit true. You're presumably referring to the Constitution, which says:
Representative[s]... shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
So not only does the Constitution never mention race, but it's actually imposing a penalty on states that want to count slaves: No, you can't get full representation in Congress for slaves.
The northern states wanted to go further, they wanted the representation to be zero.
Also note this section has been replaced per the 14th Amendment.
Ok, I understand nobody on/. will RTFA, but to not even read the first sentence of the summary?
... it's the identity protection company whose CEO published his social security number and dared people to steal his identity. Predictably, 13 different people succeeded.
Also, you don't "accept" a copyright license. You distribute a copyrighted work; and either you're doing it under a license, or you're not. (Of course, sometimes it's the acceptance of a contracts that grants a license, e.g. possessing a CD or buying a license, but this isn't necessarily true, as seen in most F/OSS software. And sometimes we talk about "accepting the terms" to mean complying with the terms. But it's not the license that is accepted as such.)
If your act of distribution is neither licensed, nor fair use, then it becomes illegal.
All you're proposing is suing under fewer conditions. There's still the threat of a lawsuit if I use copyrighted (including copyleft) code in the "wrong way".
Conversely, if you're not going to ever sue someone for using your pastebin code on GitHub, or your project, you're essentially developing public domain, but not letting anyone enjoy the benefits of public domain code by putting it in writing. That's lose-lose for everyone.
When you say you're "pro-copyleft" you're implicitly saying you're pro-copyright, because you're necessarily using copyright law to say "we reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements (i.e. distribute the source)"
Well... two wrongs don't make a right. When you talk about getting sued by supposedly "free" software projects... it doesn't make you look too good.
To me, it's a great alternative to taxis, they certainly don't operate like a typical taxi company, except to the extent you can get a lift for cheap in short order. Maybe to the layperson they don't see a difference between hiring a taxi and Uber/Lyft, or whatever. I don't care. The point is, this is answering the wrong question.
Regardless of whether they're a taxi company or not, the sole purpose of the question is political ends: to classify them under regulatory schemes that are almost certainly bad for the industry and bad for customers (good, however, for the small number of taxi and medallion owners who unfairly profit from this scheme).
That's a creative argument, but the problem is, the law doesn't make that distinction.
In both cases, you're peering with another person and exchanging packets with them.
Wikipedia exchanging packets with an ISP isn't any different than me exchanging packets with my ISP.
Indeed, such an assertion would fly in the face of Net Neutrality that says all packets are equal. Wikipedia exchanging packets with me, isn't any different than Wikipedia exchanging packets with Cogent, isn't any different than Cogent exchanging packets with me.
The EFF and other privacy groups immediately requested that the FCC stay its order. The FCC declined to do so.
Wait a second, the EFF was just telling me the Internet is a Telecommunications Service, not an Information Service, in order to get the Title II regulations they were cheerleading for.
When the FCC contorts CALEA, something only supposed to apply to telecommunications, against cryptography on the Internet, it's the end of days, the Internet is dead,...
When the FCC contorts Title II, something only supposed to apply to telecommunications, against your local ISP, praise the state! It's a miracle! It's justice!
Please. Repeat after me: The FCC is not your friend. The EFF, or the FCC for that matter, can't even identify a single, concrete action by an ISP that Title II would have stopped. It's a pure power grab.
Either the Internet is an Information Service (meaning Title II and CALEA don't apply), or it isn't (so it's a telecommunication service, and CALEA does apply), but you can't have it both ways.
Consult any economics textbook. I throughly recommend it.
GP is (also) totally correct, and doesn't appear to be disagreeing with me, except to the extent we're classifying which set of rules of economics this is falling under exactly.
In fact, it reaffirms my point that costs aren't 'passed along' to customers.
There's so many variables involved we can't really cover it in a Slashdot comments section, so we're highlighting the interesting and most significant bits.
It's not quite accurate to say the money "comes from customers". Where do customers get their money? From their employers! Or their sole proprietorship, or whatever. And so on in a cycle. This description makes it seem like a positive feedback loop, but it's not.
If costs increase for a producer, that will shift the supply curve up, causing a new equilibrium price that, while indeed higher, isn't proportionally higher: The corporation will also take some losses in the form of reduced (accounting) profit, maybe even taking a loss, if that's the best they can do.
Technically he is an ape, but anyway... It's not racist because there is no historical racist context for calling while people monkeys, only black people. That's just the way history is. It's hurtful though, sure.
So again, why are we letting people who are trying to be hurtful dictate to us what we're supposed to consider hurtful?
An algorithm mistakenly calls a person an ape, and that's racist and hurtful. Even though it knows nothing about racism and is just doing its job.
A person calls George W. Bush a monkey, and that's not racist or hurtful. Even though they're deliberately trying to be... racist and hurtful.
Help, stop, the double standard is killing me.
And second of all, why are we letting white people from a century ago tell us what is 'racist'? That the most stupid (and racist) thing I've heard all month.
The Civil War started April 12, 1861. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. If the Civil War wasn't about slavery, then what the hell were they fighting over for nearly half the time of the war?
Second, if you were to show me an arbitrary person and tell me they were from the Confederacy, I could more likely than not correctly guess their opinion on race. So what if the designer shares in this opinion?
The only part of the argument I find persuasive is that states started flying it around the time of the civil rights movement. You offer no evidence that the correlation is causal; my only objection is that there was really no good reason to start flying it in the first place, regardless of time period. "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance around the same time, do you wish to imply that was also added in protest of civil rights?
As others have pointed out, Lincoln was a tyrant of the worst degree, imposing unconstitutional taxes, an income tax, deploying the military to enforce it, and jailing anyone who disagreed with him, without recognition of habeas corpus. I don't suppose you're trying to defend this!
There's every indication his position on slavery was 100% political: He needed the support of foreign powers and anti-war abolitionists; and there is still, today, active before the states, a Constitutional amendment that would permit slavery in individual states, approved as a measure to end the Civil War (North states signed on, but the South didn't bite, refuting both the notion the war was about slavery and the notion that Lincon was 100% principled on this issue).
Yes, both sides had absolutely despicable qualities, and even today, we do horrible things to foreign countries under the US flag. That doesn't make me ashamed of the flag!
I know we talk about it sometimes as if you can, but you cannot, in fact, measure utility. You're making no sense.
Supply and demand deals with exchange. For as long as an apple is more valuable than the price you're selling it for, I'll buy apples; AND for as long as $2 is more valuable than the apples I'm selling it for, you'll keep buying $2; and as long as the two previous conditions are true, we'll perform that exchange.
This neglects the price mechanism, but hopefully this clarifies something.
Oh yes, the old "there's no such thing as a right triangle in real life, only in mathematics" argument.
I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for that, but I'm curious, how ever do you manage to use a tape measure?/s
----
Your demand curve has less to do with price than it does with whether or not you've seen a billboard for ice cream or it happens to be a hot day and your kids are in the back seat screaming for ice cream.
Economists call that a change in demand.
Also consider that cost includes not just the $5, but the drive to the store, tolerating screaming kids, etc. $5+(drive to store) is much more expensive than $8+(right next to you while inside a movie theater).
Most of the time, it's accurate enough to combine these costs into the price and call it a day.
Why do you think they're able to sell so much premium ice cream at $6/cone?
This is totally possible if some people have a demand curve above $6/cone. That doesn't even sound unreasonable, my last purchase of an ice cream cone from a retail storefront was 8USD after tax.
People go to Starbucks when they can get a coffee at McDonalds.
The nature of a good is well-defined in economics. If there's any reason to distinguish between two instances of a good, then they're not the same good. Any other conclusion is a violation of ceteris paribus.
For simplicity's sake, unless there's a need to talk about competition, substitute goods, etc, we talk about one kind of coffee, one kind of ice cream. Same thing as neglecting the gravitational pull of the sun in physics.
Is it because there is a smaller supply of Starbucks coffee?
Dunno. Different sellers will have different supply curves.
The argument is based on a notion of cardinal and/or ordinal utility of commodities, but neither the cardinal nor ordinal utility can be measured (or even observed).
Yes, utility is ordinal. But we're not measuring utility, we're measuring price, which is objective exchange ratio: I give up $6, you give me an ice cream cone, the price is $6/cone. (A cost is also a ratio, but the usage is slightly different.)
The circularity of the argument can be described as "Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility".
Utility has to do with the satisfaction of a person's inherent, subjective wants (including needs), irrespective of goods/services. Sitting on my couch right now, not trading with anyone, has utility. Yet in a little bit, going to the store hopefully before it closes will have more utility.
You don't need utility to apply the law of supply and demand, however.
The law of supply and demand is a mathematical theorem.
Surely you're familiar with mathematical theorems: If A is the length of one side of a right triangle, and B is the length of another side, then the length of the hypotenuse = Sqrt(A*A + B*B)
Supply and demand is the same thing. If I'm willing to buy two ice cream cones at $2/piece, one at $4/piece, and none at $6/piece; that forms a demand curve.
If you're willing to sell up to 100 ice cream cones at $2/piece, and up to 200 ice cream cones at $4/piece; that forms a supply curve
If the two above statements are true, then other things being equal, the law of supply and demand says I'll purchase somewhere between 0 and 2 ice cream cones from you - that's where the curves intersect.
It's only about as complex as the pythagorean theorem -- though far fewer people are familiar with it. In fact, I had to sketch this out on paper to make sure the numbers were correct.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to point out this is in Canada. Are you trying to call Great Britain a bastion of liberty now?
From TFA:
Here's a question for you, Mr. Lawyer: After you've gone through indictment, court proceedings, habeas corpus, public review, jury trial, appeals, evidence requirements, all the the other normal procedural due process, can you still be left with a verdict that is unfair and unjust, because the law itself is fundamentally unfair?
At least in the USA, the answer is yes, and that's known as violating substantive due process. It can also be an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection of the laws. Canada seems to call it fundamental justice.
tl;dr if it's even illegal at all, it's "illegal" the same way that not giving up your in front-of-bus seat, or marrying someone of a different race, is "illegal".
I'm not sure this is really equivalent: The purpose of self-defense is supposedly to minimize the use of force by both you and the aggressor. You're not causing more violence, you're trying to put an end to it. (You might also shun violence in all forms, as taught by turn the other cheek.)
I make the comparison like this: In a world without violence, self-defense would not be necessary. If we generalize to the set of universes where violence is an option, then self-defense becomes a way of minimizing the damage.
Likewise, if we generalize to a body of law with copyright law, a license to minimize the damaging effects would look something like "You are allowed to distribute this work only if derivative works are also licensed under this license, and you agree not to reserve any other rights, neither is there is no warranty for this software." Yet the GPL goes way far and away above this; the BSD or MIT license seems closer, though fails to contain the viral clause.
What regulations? My locale has virtually no laws applying to Uber, and I'm a happy customer. If what you say is true, how is this possible?
Uber has a set of uniform policies regardless of where you request a ride from. I've requested rides from numerous, very different regulatory schemes, and the experience is fairly uniform. (Or as uniform as you can get given the monopoly status of taxis in many regions.)
Even for people who've had bad experiences, Uber's response is fairly uniform.
There's nothing to be gained by reclassifying them, legally, as something else.
We once legally declared a person was 3/5ths a man based on their skin color.
There's nothing about this that's even a little bit true. You're presumably referring to the Constitution, which says:
So not only does the Constitution never mention race, but it's actually imposing a penalty on states that want to count slaves: No, you can't get full representation in Congress for slaves.
The northern states wanted to go further, they wanted the representation to be zero.
Also note this section has been replaced per the 14th Amendment.
Ok, I understand nobody on /. will RTFA, but to not even read the first sentence of the summary?
Also, you don't "accept" a copyright license. You distribute a copyrighted work; and either you're doing it under a license, or you're not. (Of course, sometimes it's the acceptance of a contracts that grants a license, e.g. possessing a CD or buying a license, but this isn't necessarily true, as seen in most F/OSS software. And sometimes we talk about "accepting the terms" to mean complying with the terms. But it's not the license that is accepted as such.)
If your act of distribution is neither licensed, nor fair use, then it becomes illegal.
All you're proposing is suing under fewer conditions. There's still the threat of a lawsuit if I use copyrighted (including copyleft) code in the "wrong way".
Conversely, if you're not going to ever sue someone for using your pastebin code on GitHub, or your project, you're essentially developing public domain, but not letting anyone enjoy the benefits of public domain code by putting it in writing. That's lose-lose for everyone.
Hey, mods: "-1 Overrated" isn't your personal "-1 Disagree" button. That's what comments are for.
You're being needlessly pedantic.
"We reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements" How do you do that? With a license.
How do you enforce said license? With copyright law.
When you say you're "pro-copyleft" you're implicitly saying you're pro-copyright, because you're necessarily using copyright law to say "we reserve the authority to restrict distribution and sue you if you don't follow our requirements (i.e. distribute the source)"
Well... two wrongs don't make a right. When you talk about getting sued by supposedly "free" software projects... it doesn't make you look too good.
So what?
To me, it's a great alternative to taxis, they certainly don't operate like a typical taxi company, except to the extent you can get a lift for cheap in short order. Maybe to the layperson they don't see a difference between hiring a taxi and Uber/Lyft, or whatever. I don't care. The point is, this is answering the wrong question.
Regardless of whether they're a taxi company or not, the sole purpose of the question is political ends: to classify them under regulatory schemes that are almost certainly bad for the industry and bad for customers (good, however, for the small number of taxi and medallion owners who unfairly profit from this scheme).
Only because the law was expanded in 2005: https://www.eff.org/issues/cal...
The law still makes a distinction between ISPs (information services) and telecom: https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
That's a creative argument, but the problem is, the law doesn't make that distinction.
In both cases, you're peering with another person and exchanging packets with them.
Wikipedia exchanging packets with an ISP isn't any different than me exchanging packets with my ISP.
Indeed, such an assertion would fly in the face of Net Neutrality that says all packets are equal. Wikipedia exchanging packets with me, isn't any different than Wikipedia exchanging packets with Cogent, isn't any different than Cogent exchanging packets with me.
Wait a second, the EFF was just telling me the Internet is a Telecommunications Service, not an Information Service, in order to get the Title II regulations they were cheerleading for.
When the FCC contorts CALEA, something only supposed to apply to telecommunications, against cryptography on the Internet, it's the end of days, the Internet is dead, ...
When the FCC contorts Title II, something only supposed to apply to telecommunications, against your local ISP, praise the state! It's a miracle! It's justice!
Please. Repeat after me: The FCC is not your friend. The EFF, or the FCC for that matter, can't even identify a single, concrete action by an ISP that Title II would have stopped. It's a pure power grab.
Either the Internet is an Information Service (meaning Title II and CALEA don't apply), or it isn't (so it's a telecommunication service, and CALEA does apply), but you can't have it both ways.
AC. No. Just. No. That's a perverse incentive to do even nastier things.
When you elevate a crime to the level of murder, criminals tend to become murderers.
Because, I mean, if you're going to be executed anyways, why bother keeping witnesses around?
Consult any economics textbook. I throughly recommend it.
GP is (also) totally correct, and doesn't appear to be disagreeing with me, except to the extent we're classifying which set of rules of economics this is falling under exactly.
In fact, it reaffirms my point that costs aren't 'passed along' to customers.
There's so many variables involved we can't really cover it in a Slashdot comments section, so we're highlighting the interesting and most significant bits.
It's not quite accurate to say the money "comes from customers". Where do customers get their money? From their employers! Or their sole proprietorship, or whatever. And so on in a cycle. This description makes it seem like a positive feedback loop, but it's not.
If costs increase for a producer, that will shift the supply curve up, causing a new equilibrium price that, while indeed higher, isn't proportionally higher: The corporation will also take some losses in the form of reduced (accounting) profit, maybe even taking a loss, if that's the best they can do.
Technically he is an ape, but anyway... It's not racist because there is no historical racist context for calling while people monkeys, only black people. That's just the way history is. It's hurtful though, sure.
So again, why are we letting people who are trying to be hurtful dictate to us what we're supposed to consider hurtful?
That's stupid.
So let me get this straight:
An algorithm mistakenly calls a person an ape, and that's racist and hurtful. Even though it knows nothing about racism and is just doing its job.
A person calls George W. Bush a monkey, and that's not racist or hurtful. Even though they're deliberately trying to be... racist and hurtful.
Help, stop, the double standard is killing me.
And second of all, why are we letting white people from a century ago tell us what is 'racist'? That the most stupid (and racist) thing I've heard all month.
The Civil War started April 12, 1861. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. If the Civil War wasn't about slavery, then what the hell were they fighting over for nearly half the time of the war?
Second, if you were to show me an arbitrary person and tell me they were from the Confederacy, I could more likely than not correctly guess their opinion on race. So what if the designer shares in this opinion?
The only part of the argument I find persuasive is that states started flying it around the time of the civil rights movement. You offer no evidence that the correlation is causal; my only objection is that there was really no good reason to start flying it in the first place, regardless of time period. "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance around the same time, do you wish to imply that was also added in protest of civil rights?
As others have pointed out, Lincoln was a tyrant of the worst degree, imposing unconstitutional taxes, an income tax, deploying the military to enforce it, and jailing anyone who disagreed with him, without recognition of habeas corpus. I don't suppose you're trying to defend this!
There's every indication his position on slavery was 100% political: He needed the support of foreign powers and anti-war abolitionists; and there is still, today, active before the states, a Constitutional amendment that would permit slavery in individual states, approved as a measure to end the Civil War (North states signed on, but the South didn't bite, refuting both the notion the war was about slavery and the notion that Lincon was 100% principled on this issue).
Yes, both sides had absolutely despicable qualities, and even today, we do horrible things to foreign countries under the US flag. That doesn't make me ashamed of the flag!
Sure, they can restrict it. But we, using our freedom of speech, are saying they shouldn't.
I know we talk about it sometimes as if you can, but you cannot, in fact, measure utility. You're making no sense.
Supply and demand deals with exchange. For as long as an apple is more valuable than the price you're selling it for, I'll buy apples; AND for as long as $2 is more valuable than the apples I'm selling it for, you'll keep buying $2; and as long as the two previous conditions are true, we'll perform that exchange.
This neglects the price mechanism, but hopefully this clarifies something.
Ok Mr. Econ Professor, enlighten me. If not an exchange ratio, then what is a price?
Oh yes, the old "there's no such thing as a right triangle in real life, only in mathematics" argument.
I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for that, but I'm curious, how ever do you manage to use a tape measure? /s
----
Your demand curve has less to do with price than it does with whether or not you've seen a billboard for ice cream or it happens to be a hot day and your kids are in the back seat screaming for ice cream.
Economists call that a change in demand.
Also consider that cost includes not just the $5, but the drive to the store, tolerating screaming kids, etc. $5+(drive to store) is much more expensive than $8+(right next to you while inside a movie theater).
Most of the time, it's accurate enough to combine these costs into the price and call it a day.
Why do you think they're able to sell so much premium ice cream at $6/cone?
This is totally possible if some people have a demand curve above $6/cone. That doesn't even sound unreasonable, my last purchase of an ice cream cone from a retail storefront was 8USD after tax.
People go to Starbucks when they can get a coffee at McDonalds.
The nature of a good is well-defined in economics. If there's any reason to distinguish between two instances of a good, then they're not the same good. Any other conclusion is a violation of ceteris paribus.
For simplicity's sake, unless there's a need to talk about competition, substitute goods, etc, we talk about one kind of coffee, one kind of ice cream. Same thing as neglecting the gravitational pull of the sun in physics.
Is it because there is a smaller supply of Starbucks coffee?
Dunno. Different sellers will have different supply curves.
The argument is based on a notion of cardinal and/or ordinal utility of commodities, but neither the cardinal nor ordinal utility can be measured (or even observed).
Yes, utility is ordinal. But we're not measuring utility, we're measuring price, which is objective exchange ratio: I give up $6, you give me an ice cream cone, the price is $6/cone. (A cost is also a ratio, but the usage is slightly different.)
The circularity of the argument can be described as "Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility".
Utility has to do with the satisfaction of a person's inherent, subjective wants (including needs), irrespective of goods/services. Sitting on my couch right now, not trading with anyone, has utility. Yet in a little bit, going to the store hopefully before it closes will have more utility.
You don't need utility to apply the law of supply and demand, however.
The law of supply and demand is a mathematical theorem.
Surely you're familiar with mathematical theorems: If A is the length of one side of a right triangle, and B is the length of another side, then the length of the hypotenuse = Sqrt(A*A + B*B)
Supply and demand is the same thing. If I'm willing to buy two ice cream cones at $2/piece, one at $4/piece, and none at $6/piece; that forms a demand curve.
If you're willing to sell up to 100 ice cream cones at $2/piece, and up to 200 ice cream cones at $4/piece; that forms a supply curve
If the two above statements are true, then other things being equal, the law of supply and demand says I'll purchase somewhere between 0 and 2 ice cream cones from you - that's where the curves intersect.
It's only about as complex as the pythagorean theorem -- though far fewer people are familiar with it. In fact, I had to sketch this out on paper to make sure the numbers were correct.