We already have evidence of at least one plane nearly crashing due to volcanic ashes. Is this guy saying that we should take the chance? Would he say that to the families of those who could die because of it?
We have evidence of planes crashing for a wide variety of reasons, some of which were never explained at all. Are you saying we should continue to allow planes to take off when we have reason to believe one will eventually crash? Should any family allow any of its members to ever fly again given that flying is a slightly risky endeavor?/sarcasm
Life has risks. Get over it.
So your argument is we can't eliminate all risks therefore we should just blindly ignore them all? I feel like the governments are missing an important voice on their regulation panels - the people on them at the moment seem to be applying intelligence to the problem when clearly what they need is poorly-thought-out soundbites...
Given that the penalties for obscuring your licence plate are more severe than those for speeding it might be better to employ something a little less obvious to other drivers.
the sourcecode was not stolen. a copy of the sourcecode was stolen. and this is a crucial distinction since "steal" means to deprive from another. and while google has been violated, they most absolutely have not been deprived of any code.
I think your post inadvertantly makes an interesting point about the silliness of the whole stealing vs copying debate. You write that "a copy of the sourcecode was stolen" - but it wasn't; a copy of the sourcecode was simply made. The copy never belonged to Google, Google didn't lose anything, and so - absolutely technically speaking - it wasn't stolen.
The point here is that despite the fact that you had the definitions of "to steal" and "to take" in front of you, and despite the fact that you were actively thinking about the difference between copying and stealing, you still used the word "stolen" to describe what happened. The fact of the matter is that even if they didn't lose any physical goods Google was deprived of something - the control they had over who saw their sourcecode and who didn't. This isn't a situation that comes up very often in the physical world (unless you're a spy - and even then they "steal secrets") so people turn to a metaphor that makes sense to them: stealing. And they do it, as shown by your post, even if they are trying to claim there's a qualitative difference between stealing and copying, which suggests that the metaphor fits our cognitive model of what's happened rather well.
An interesting (he says modestly!) thought experiment: consider the source code not as one copy but as an infinite number of copies that all currently occupy the same space. If I take one of those copies I don't actually deprive Google of anything - they have no fewer copies than they had before, for such is the nature of infinity - but it would still be a stolen copy. Perhaps this is an apt model to explain people are so quick to describe it as stealing, even when they are trying to avoid using the word: it seems fair to us that Google should be able to control the copies as well as the original (while they control the only copy, anyway), and by seeing the copies as existent, if unactualised, we can find a more familiar way of understanding why it is unfair to take a copy.
And the problem with the traffic fatality situation is that people get into car accidents, and the problem with heart disease is that hearts are not indestructible. True, but not helpful in terms of finding a solution.
On the contrary, I would argue that in the case of your first example that is the most important step toward finding a solution.
Now, of course, you weren't trying to disingenuously equate copyright infringement with theft, were you?
In this case I'm not really sure what's so disingenuous about it. I know all the arguments, but if you look at this particular example - someone who was going to buy it deciding to pirate it instead - it has more to make it seem like theft than to suggest that it isn't.
Look, for example, at the respective outcomes:
Theft:
-User has the game -Ubisoft doesn't get any money
Piracy:
-User has the game -Ubisoft doesn't get any money
It used to be the case that theft would mean Ubisoft losing a physical disc, but in the era of digital distribution can that still be taken as a necessary requirement for theft?
I know that there are technical requirements for something to be theft, but I'm responding more to your accusation that the GP was "disingenuous" than whether or not it was theft. Theft, in this instance, doesn't seem to be a wholly inappropriate metaphor.
"Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it"
No there is not! That is a lie. Korea and Europe do not have the same problems. The issue is these greedy monopolistic ISPs are keeping 10 year old routers and refusing to upgrade in order to boast their shareholder price for Goldman Sachs and others on wall street.
I read on slashdot that 90% of all fiber is dark on purpose in order to limit availability and raise prices.
If I pay $60 a month for x amount of bits to download a second then why can't I get the service I pay for. It doesn't matter if their business model is on averages. I refuse to sign any contract with capped downloads. Its a shame because I hate cable with a passion and prefer DSL but in rural Alaska I had to agree to caps. My wife plays wow and uses vent so she would exceed the cap in a matter of days.
World of warcraft has constant disconnects from players with Comcast. Gee I wonder why? We are thinking of being a DSL only guild and this is rediculous. 3 players from comcast get disconnected and cause wiped in every and I mean every battle with a raid boss.
I'm going to assume that you don't mean that there is literally an infinite amount of bandwidth available, since that is patently false, and take what you said to mean that there is a very large amount of bandwidth available that is not being offered. But here's the thing: it doesn't make any difference.
Imagine that all the ISPs, overnight, were able to upgrade their networks. The available bandwidth is now ten times what it was - problems solved? Not even close. If there's one thing that has been a constant in the history of the computer it is that software develops to use all the hardware available. We aren't sitting here using modern computers to run old programs with plenty of spare capacity - we're running new, more powerful programs that use the new capacity. When hard drives get bigger media files get bigger. And when the internet gets faster people find ways to use all that bandwidth. To return to our example, that ten times extra capacity isn't going to quietly absorb the traffic of today - it's going to get used up. Suddenly ideas like off-site video rendering for games would become possible, and 40 pixel-perfect 1920x1200 images per second will fill up all of that extra capacity. So maybe we increase it by another factor of 10? Surely now we're going to have enough capacity? Well no, because now Henry's family can all play, too, and screen resolution has gone up, and bandwidth is cheap so why not offload all the processing which adds even more data, and by the way did I mention he likes to download movies at the same time?
There is probably a point at which this would stop being true, but we're not even nearly there at the moment. You say 90% of the capacity is not being used? That only multiplies bandwidth by 10 - there's not going to be any problem at all filling that. So there's still going to be congestion, and there's still going to need to be a way of stopping the very heaviest users - the ones whose use will expand to fill whatever is available - from making the internet unusable for other subscribers.
You say you don't want an ISP whose business model is based on averages, but that's absurd - you're basically saying you don't want an ISP whose business model is in touch with reality. If it's not based on averages what should it be based on? Absolute maximum usage? That means that you're going to be paying for a whole load of capacity that is barely ever used, and making provision for 100% of possible use is vastly more expensive than making provision for 99% because that last 1% is literally everyone downloading all at once, and if that happens the sites are going to be down anyway because no-one budgets for that last 1%.
You talk about download caps - but notice that I didn't. I was trying to propose a way for the available bandwidth to be
Let's throw out your entire bullshit argument and replace it with one that makes sense: How about companies don't over sell their lines? False advertising is illegal. The end. There isn't a "debate" here. If you pay for XkB/s then god damnit you should get X kB/s. PERIOD.
Well, I suppose blindly ignoring what I wrote and then being abusive is one way of debating. Let's try a different one.
In my original post I wrote:
The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
Let me expand on this a little. There's almost nothing in the world that can cope with everyone using it maximally at the same time; everything is oversold. We all pay taxes to build the roads, but we can't all drive on them at once - they'd get full. Everyone with an airline ticket paid, but if they all turn up they can't all get on. Municipal transport, parks, museums, art galleries - all of these are funded, at least in part, through taxation, but if everyone who had paid to build them tried to use them at once they would find they couldn't. Heck, even grocery stores and supermarkets are oversold: the land they are built on, the roads that run to them, the infrastructure that lets them run - all these thing were, at some point, sold by the state, which means that everyone paid toward building the store. But can everyone buy things at once? Of course not.
Overselling is an eminently sensible economic plan. The alternative is to build an enormous amount of unnecessary capacity, wasting everyone's money: we could build enough roads for everyone to use them maximally, but then the Pan-American highway would have to be the width of Washington State, and that's just stupid. Similarly we could give everyone a dedicated, 100% guaranteed high speed line straight to their home, no overselling - but it would mean putting in an enormous amount of capacity that would just sit dormant. And putting in that extra, largely unnecessary capacity is expensive, which is why it costs five times as much to get a dedicated line as a shared, over-sold one.
False advertising is an entirely separate matter which, as I tried to indicate, I have deliberately not dealt with. Clearly ISPs should be upfront about what they're selling. But given the impossibility of building a system that cannot possibly be saturated a 100% guaranteed speed is not realistic.
I hope that's cleared things up. If you have anything you want to actually disagree with rather than just calling my argument "bullshit" I'd be more than happy to respond.
One more thing: can I suggest that you stop saying things like "The end" and "PERIOD"? Clearly there is a debate here; what's more, I think you'll find that there almost always is a debate about pretty much everything - rational, intelligent people can legitimately disagree and the discussion is made easier if you don't resort to silliness.
All your points are totally valid and seem to be well thought out. The issue for "leeches" like DragonTHC (and myself-- I do my fair share of Netflix, XBox live, and web dev work at all hours of the day and -- suprise -- I don't even HAVE a torrent client installed on my gear) is that what Comcast is selling takes none of that into account.
Anyone here could have predicted that the asymmetrical use of internet by many customers with different needs would result in less than optimal service for everyone-- and the solution to mysteriously throttle usage and inject "man-in-the-middle" attacks to disconnect the "bad" customers is a bad call on Comcast's part.
Tiered pricing? I would pay for that. Being treated like a criminal for eating all I can eat at the ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET is a breach of contract.
Thanks for the compliment, and I can't say I disagree on the fact that Comcast in this case has behaved disgracefully.
A tiered pricing structure where you could pay to be given higher priority would seem like it would make things fairer, since it would mean that heavy users were paying for the privilege. But traffic shaping is, to some extent, still going to be necessary, since the use of some heavy-users would still be more than enough to interfere with other peoples' internet connections. My worry is that it would really just function like an extra charge: if you don't pay for the highest priority broadband package then your connection won't be usable when Henry Heavyuser starts up his download manager. This all starts to sound like a bit of a protection racket...
Of course, it doesn't have to work like that. Rather than guaranteeing you higher priority the premium package could discount your transfer to a certain extent, so that (for example) Polly Premiumuser counted all her traffic at half rate for the purposes of priority assignment. This would give her a greater share of bandwidth than non-premium heavy users when there was contention, but would still allow light users to get higher priority than her if she was using a disproportionate amount of the bandwidth.
Absolutely true - although a little out of date. At least over here I would be surprised if there are any ISPs that haven't been writing throttling and transfer caps into the contracts and adverts for at least a year now.
The problem of some people using all the resources available isn't new; it's as old as the world. If ISPs want to offer (and people want to buy) cheap, over-sold connections then they will have to protect those connections from being used to capacity by a few heavy users. If people absolutely must have that guaranteed speed then they can get it; if they want a fast connection for little money then they will have to put up with some restriction. Although the ISPs in this case have been incredibly dishonest the problem wouldn't be any different if they hadn't.
Why should I be throttled for legally consuming content?
Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it. Ignoring the particular facts of this case - Comcast's underhanded methods and deception - would it really be unfair to say, for example, that those people that use the most bandwidth have their speed capped when other people want to use that bandwidth? Let's briefly look at the alternatives:
- The bandwidth is divided equally between all subscribers at all times, meaning that if Lucy Lightuser and Henry Heavyuser are online at the same time Lucy gets the same amount of bandwidth as Henry. This seems fair if you analyze it only over the times when both of them are trying to use the internet, but it doesn't take into account the fact that one Henry can disrupt the internet use for a lot of Lucys; if Henry spends all day downloading media, for example, then every Lucy that goes online will have her download speed reduced because Henry is always using as much as possible. This means that the ISP has to provide extra headroom to allow for Henry, headroom that the large number of Lucys are effectively subsidizing.
- The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
So if "naive-sharing" is unfair and speed guarantees are prohibitively expensive, what can we do?
A rule that would seem fair to me would be that when a number of people are competing for the same bandwidth, the amount that each of them gets should be inversely proportional to the amount of data they have already transferred that day/week; i.e. if you use your internet twice as much as me then when we are both trying to use the internet, and there is not enough bandwidth to serve both of us fully, I would have access to 2/3 of the contended bandwidth while you would be restricted to 1/3. In this case the heavy users and light users both get a fair deal: the heavy user gets greater total transfer, while the light users get faster connections when they use them. No one subsidizes anyone else.
In order to encourage heavy users to download things when it causes less congestion you could also discount off-peak usage, so that, for example, every 2MB transferred on a home connection before 6PM would count as 1MB for the purposes of bandwidth apportionment.
A system like that would allow a heavy user like yourself to download as much as you want, on the condition that if someone who only rarely uses the internet wants to download something they get priority.
Nice FUD. the new DB will break it anyways.. and YES microsoft does this.
They crafted a DB update that used that bug to deliver a message so the logs showed you what happened instead of a "seg fault - error in line 45867"
While that's true it's not like they couldn't have avoided this situation: the newer, larger updates could easily have been furnished from a different source, thereby avoiding the problem.
But as I've posted further up, that's not really the point; when the virus definitions got bigger the old versions would go out of date and not provide the protection people thought they had. The choice they were making was between causing people temporary annoyance - and I don't mean to trivialise, I fully accept that this was probably really, really annoying - or letting those peoples networks lose their virus protection without anyone noticing, which could (would?) lead to much more annoying and expensive consequences.
Personally I think it was the right thing to do, but then that's easy for me to say - I don't administer a mail server.
...and guess what! I'm almost sure I have had enough of free software.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
Heck! Is this the "freedom" you want?
For six months their web site, the clamav-announce mailing list and your log files have over and over again explained that the version was out of date and would be discontinued; it's not like this just happened overnight. But that's not even the point.
The point is that this was in your best interests, although it may not seem like it now. Given that you hadn't updated for six months they could be pretty sure you weren't going to upgrade now; most likely you don't check the log files or the mailing lists because you probably aren't a full-time server admin and don't have time to check every package you use. So they could have continued to alert you every few days through the log files and the mailing lists, and updated the newer versions from a different source, but then you most likely wouldn't have realized when your virus protection silently slipped further and further out of date until it provided no protection at all and the virus scanning became totally useless.
At the end of the day they were making a choice between two options: leave you, without you realizing anything had changed, with no real virus protection, or bring it to your attention more forcefully than through the log files and mailing lists. While I can sympathise with your position, especially if you had to come into work specially to fix it, it's much less work than if you had to clean up a virus that got through later on.
This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!
Well, over time, no, there isn't. But in the short term the limit is effectively what we have now; under the private academy scheme in the UK (where I live and therefore what I'm familiar with) the average cost of an "academy" - a privately financed school - was £35m (~$53m), with an average lead time of 4 years from planning to creation, not including finding the teachers and staff you need to operate it. You can't just conjure a new school, so if you consign a school to failure you also consign all its students to a bad education, either because they have to stay in a school that is being phased out or because they are crammed into over-sized classes at a school that hasn't got the capacity to accomodate them.
The problem with school vouchers is that the choice is a fallacy. We've had similar schemes tried over here - parents would get to send their children to whichever school they wanted, sick people would be treated at whichever hospital they wanted and so on. The problem, though, is that not everyone can go to the best schools or the best hospitals; they only have a limited number of places. Where I grew up - Coventry - the best school was a place called Finham; Finham was big and well-funded and in the nicer part of town, and so everyone wanted to send their kids there. Could every child go to Finham? No, of course not, the school wasn't big enough, and so the kids just went to the schools near them, just like always. There's no way around this. In another post you point to homeschooling, but having homeschooling as your solution is the ultimate in discrimination: you can only be homeschooled if one of your parents can afford to stay at home, meaning that, as an option, it's available only to the well-off. It's also a complete abandonment of social mobility: if your parents are poorly educated then you will be, too, because they're your teachers, and they can't teach you English and maths and science and everything else on the curriculum if they dropped out of school at 13. And that's to say nothing of the fact that even the best home schooling lacks an awful lot of the resources available to well-funded actual school: no science labs, no CAD/CAM, no library, no gym, no media centre, no darkroom, and so on - again, the availability of these outside the school system is determined by wealth.
Vouchers are a solution for a world that doesn't exist, where poor schools can be closed without consequences for the students who go there and new schools can be created overnight. You don't need to send all your students to the best schools - that just means making the best schools worse. You need to make the bad schools into good schools, but unfortunately there's no gimmick that does that.
I don't know whether the same is true in the US, but I would guess that Australia operates under a law similar to that here in the UK, which grants absolute privilege to parliamentary proceedings - i.e. nothing that happens in them could be used as evidence against the people involved - as long as the things are said as part of their government duties, and in good faith, i.e. you can't use the fact that you're speaking in Parliament to protect you if your intent is to commit criminal acts.
I wish judges were a little more liberal with SLAPP summary judgments against litigious corporations.
As far as I am aware there is no SLAPP protection that would allow a judge to dismiss this out of hand; even the most comprehensive protections only extend to constitutionally-protected activities, which would not cover FB Purity.
Given the renaming my guess would be that the problem was with the name "FaceBook Purity". This would seem a difficult case to bring, since (subject to the standard "I am not a US lawyer and this is not legal advice" disclaimer) a suit for trademark infringement or passing off would require them to prove actual confusion, i.e. that someone had intended to deal with Facebook but had instead dealt with this chap, under the belief that he was Facebook. In court his counsel is just going to say "you're a well-educated person; are you really telling me that you looked at this page, with a dodgy logo, spelling and grammar mistakes you honestly could not tell that it was the website of some young man and not of a huge multi-national corporation?", the witness is going to say "well I could tell, but I knew it was a rip-off" and the counsel will get the case dismissed. And even if they showed actual confusion - which seems astronomically implausible - they would have to show that there was damage to their trademark, which again seems incredibly unlikely.
So my judgement would be that while there is no statutory protection for him, if they are actually threatening legal action he should get a consultation with a legal firm offering no-win-no-fee IP representation; given that he is almost certain to win they will take it on and reclaim costs from Facebook if it goes to court.
The studies I have seen put American and European survival rates at about the same level, with normally a slight advantage to the Americans, although critics point out that reporting differences (for example, in Great Britain anyone diagnosed with cancer is included in the survival figures, while in America deaths that may not be related are not counted, plus many American hospitals publish only estimated survival percentages rather than actual counts), differing access to treatment (if you don't go to the hospital you won't get counted, which could stack the deck against socialised healthcare) and uncontrolled variables (incidence of cancers is lower across much of Europe, possibly because of differences in the health care systems) make comparisons contrived at best.
Well, if a huge bank goes bankrupt potentially millions of people are suddenly destitute, vast swathes of businesses have to find a new way to take payments, and the economy suffers enormously. My point is that a pure capitalist model only works for banks if we are willing to accept that every so often we will inevitably lose massively. It's not the only model, and in this case I think it is clearly worth even fairly large trade-offs to avoid the very worst consequences.
There have been a lot of attempts to compete with PayPal, but becoming "viable" is rather difficult; PayPal is already integrated with thousands of sites, including eBay, and used by millions of people. That's a huge advantage, meaning that anyone wanting to compete has to be willing to operate at a loss for a long time while trying to tempt people away from PayPal. The fact that no-one has succeeded in dethroning PayPal despite its terrible reputation and despite numerous services offering substantial cost reductions just shows how much of an advantage they have.
I saw a rather nice quotation regarding this some time ago. To paraphrase from memory:
The financial crash shows that capitalism does work to regulate banks; if they take too much risk they eventually lose out, lose all their money and go bankrupt, exactly what is meant to happen to companies that are poorly run in a capitalist economy.
Pure capitalism works, as long as you are willing to accept that the way it regulates itself is through disaster.
For anyone that doesn't speak Russian, the allegation in the press release is that the UK scientists cherry-picked 1500 out of the 5000 stations available in order to get the conclusions they wanted.
I haven't read all the way to the end, so I don't know what results they give instead.
Firstly, it's difficult to make any meaningful comparison between the development of powered flight and the development of space travel. Firstly because the complexity involved is unimaginably higher; secondly because outside putting things in orbit there is no financial incentive for space travel; thirdly because the cost of development and of launch are so high as to make development and testing prohibitively expensive unless you already have a working design.
But even ignoring all that, it took almost 300 years from the first independent attempt at powered flight to a successful test. In contrast, Kennedy was able to announce in 1961 that NASA would put a man on the moon in ten years - and they did. In 1969, eight years after the first human in space, NASA landed a man on the moon.
And even if you reject the idea that private business would never have achieved what NASA has managed, wasn't it worth it just for that? In 1960 no human had ever left the Earth. By 1969, humans had walked on the moon. Isn't that something to be proud of?
Maybe my experience is atypical, but Google doesn't seem to translate pages very well. I can only imagine how bad it will be having a phone do this. "Did that guy's phone just call me what I think it did?"
If you haven't used it recently, try it now. Speaking as a linguist I am incredibly impressed by the speed of their progress.
And, just to add a shameless plug in there, sign the DigitalWrong letter!. You write what you want to say to Mandelson they get it printed up on some big paper with everyone else's and go and try to give it to him. More effective than writing a letter and you don't even have to pay for a stamp.
Seems the way to beat this copyright cabal is to keep on sharing
Unfortunately this is the sort of quotation that plays right into their hands.
It's been a very easy ride for the copyright holders so far - opposition to their plans has come either from ISPs (who are motivated by saving money) or file-sharing advocates; this means it's been very easy for them to dismiss the opposition as greedy, self-interested pirates. The point I'm trying to get across is that it's possible to support copyright and copyright enforcement without supporting these ridiculous measures and without giving complete power to record companies.
Copyright itself is not a bad thing. Nor is copyright enforcement - disregarding the exacting definitions that are popular on Slashdot, file sharing is, in one important way, very like stealing - you get something you want without having to pay for it. What is wrong is the idea that people should be punished based only on the accusations of the copyright holders. The fact that it is nearly impossible to get anywhere through the courts isn't representative of file-sharers being cunning and impossible to find, it's representative of the fact that it is difficult to establish, on balance of probabilities, that they have actually infringed on your copyright. Changing the law to allow those people to be punished doesn't get round the fundamental unfairness of punishing people you can't prove have done anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
We already have evidence of at least one plane nearly crashing due to volcanic ashes. Is this guy saying that we should take the chance? Would he say that to the families of those who could die because of it?
We have evidence of planes crashing for a wide variety of reasons, some of which were never explained at all. Are you saying we should continue to allow planes to take off when we have reason to believe one will eventually crash? Should any family allow any of its members to ever fly again given that flying is a slightly risky endeavor? /sarcasm
Life has risks. Get over it.
So your argument is we can't eliminate all risks therefore we should just blindly ignore them all? I feel like the governments are missing an important voice on their regulation panels - the people on them at the moment seem to be applying intelligence to the problem when clearly what they need is poorly-thought-out soundbites...
Given that the penalties for obscuring your licence plate are more severe than those for speeding it might be better to employ something a little less obvious to other drivers.
the sourcecode was not stolen. a copy of the sourcecode was stolen. and this is a crucial distinction since "steal" means to deprive from another. and while google has been violated, they most absolutely have not been deprived of any code.
I think your post inadvertantly makes an interesting point about the silliness of the whole stealing vs copying debate. You write that "a copy of the sourcecode was stolen" - but it wasn't; a copy of the sourcecode was simply made. The copy never belonged to Google, Google didn't lose anything, and so - absolutely technically speaking - it wasn't stolen.
The point here is that despite the fact that you had the definitions of "to steal" and "to take" in front of you, and despite the fact that you were actively thinking about the difference between copying and stealing, you still used the word "stolen" to describe what happened. The fact of the matter is that even if they didn't lose any physical goods Google was deprived of something - the control they had over who saw their sourcecode and who didn't. This isn't a situation that comes up very often in the physical world (unless you're a spy - and even then they "steal secrets") so people turn to a metaphor that makes sense to them: stealing. And they do it, as shown by your post, even if they are trying to claim there's a qualitative difference between stealing and copying, which suggests that the metaphor fits our cognitive model of what's happened rather well.
An interesting (he says modestly!) thought experiment: consider the source code not as one copy but as an infinite number of copies that all currently occupy the same space. If I take one of those copies I don't actually deprive Google of anything - they have no fewer copies than they had before, for such is the nature of infinity - but it would still be a stolen copy. Perhaps this is an apt model to explain people are so quick to describe it as stealing, even when they are trying to avoid using the word: it seems fair to us that Google should be able to control the copies as well as the original (while they control the only copy, anyway), and by seeing the copies as existent, if unactualised, we can find a more familiar way of understanding why it is unfair to take a copy.
And the problem with the traffic fatality situation is that people get into car accidents, and the problem with heart disease is that hearts are not indestructible. True, but not helpful in terms of finding a solution.
On the contrary, I would argue that in the case of your first example that is the most important step toward finding a solution.
Now, of course, you weren't trying to disingenuously equate copyright infringement with theft, were you?
In this case I'm not really sure what's so disingenuous about it. I know all the arguments, but if you look at this particular example - someone who was going to buy it deciding to pirate it instead - it has more to make it seem like theft than to suggest that it isn't.
Look, for example, at the respective outcomes:
Theft:
-User has the game
-Ubisoft doesn't get any money
Piracy:
-User has the game
-Ubisoft doesn't get any money
It used to be the case that theft would mean Ubisoft losing a physical disc, but in the era of digital distribution can that still be taken as a necessary requirement for theft?
I know that there are technical requirements for something to be theft, but I'm responding more to your accusation that the GP was "disingenuous" than whether or not it was theft. Theft, in this instance, doesn't seem to be a wholly inappropriate metaphor.
"Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it"
No there is not! That is a lie. Korea and Europe do not have the same problems. The issue is these greedy monopolistic ISPs are keeping 10 year old routers and refusing to upgrade in order to boast their shareholder price for Goldman Sachs and others on wall street.
I read on slashdot that 90% of all fiber is dark on purpose in order to limit availability and raise prices.
If I pay $60 a month for x amount of bits to download a second then why can't I get the service I pay for. It doesn't matter if their business model is on averages. I refuse to sign any contract with capped downloads. Its a shame because I hate cable with a passion and prefer DSL but in rural Alaska I had to agree to caps. My wife plays wow and uses vent so she would exceed the cap in a matter of days.
World of warcraft has constant disconnects from players with Comcast. Gee I wonder why? We are thinking of being a DSL only guild and this is rediculous. 3 players from comcast get disconnected and cause wiped in every and I mean every battle with a raid boss.
I'm going to assume that you don't mean that there is literally an infinite amount of bandwidth available, since that is patently false, and take what you said to mean that there is a very large amount of bandwidth available that is not being offered. But here's the thing: it doesn't make any difference.
Imagine that all the ISPs, overnight, were able to upgrade their networks. The available bandwidth is now ten times what it was - problems solved? Not even close. If there's one thing that has been a constant in the history of the computer it is that software develops to use all the hardware available. We aren't sitting here using modern computers to run old programs with plenty of spare capacity - we're running new, more powerful programs that use the new capacity. When hard drives get bigger media files get bigger. And when the internet gets faster people find ways to use all that bandwidth. To return to our example, that ten times extra capacity isn't going to quietly absorb the traffic of today - it's going to get used up. Suddenly ideas like off-site video rendering for games would become possible, and 40 pixel-perfect 1920x1200 images per second will fill up all of that extra capacity. So maybe we increase it by another factor of 10? Surely now we're going to have enough capacity? Well no, because now Henry's family can all play, too, and screen resolution has gone up, and bandwidth is cheap so why not offload all the processing which adds even more data, and by the way did I mention he likes to download movies at the same time?
There is probably a point at which this would stop being true, but we're not even nearly there at the moment. You say 90% of the capacity is not being used? That only multiplies bandwidth by 10 - there's not going to be any problem at all filling that. So there's still going to be congestion, and there's still going to need to be a way of stopping the very heaviest users - the ones whose use will expand to fill whatever is available - from making the internet unusable for other subscribers.
You say you don't want an ISP whose business model is based on averages, but that's absurd - you're basically saying you don't want an ISP whose business model is in touch with reality. If it's not based on averages what should it be based on? Absolute maximum usage? That means that you're going to be paying for a whole load of capacity that is barely ever used, and making provision for 100% of possible use is vastly more expensive than making provision for 99% because that last 1% is literally everyone downloading all at once, and if that happens the sites are going to be down anyway because no-one budgets for that last 1%.
You talk about download caps - but notice that I didn't. I was trying to propose a way for the available bandwidth to be
Let's throw out your entire bullshit argument and replace it with one that makes sense:
How about companies don't over sell their lines? False advertising is illegal. The end. There isn't a "debate" here. If you pay for XkB/s then god damnit you should get X kB/s. PERIOD.
Well, I suppose blindly ignoring what I wrote and then being abusive is one way of debating. Let's try a different one.
In my original post I wrote:
The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
Let me expand on this a little. There's almost nothing in the world that can cope with everyone using it maximally at the same time; everything is oversold. We all pay taxes to build the roads, but we can't all drive on them at once - they'd get full. Everyone with an airline ticket paid, but if they all turn up they can't all get on. Municipal transport, parks, museums, art galleries - all of these are funded, at least in part, through taxation, but if everyone who had paid to build them tried to use them at once they would find they couldn't. Heck, even grocery stores and supermarkets are oversold: the land they are built on, the roads that run to them, the infrastructure that lets them run - all these thing were, at some point, sold by the state, which means that everyone paid toward building the store. But can everyone buy things at once? Of course not.
Overselling is an eminently sensible economic plan. The alternative is to build an enormous amount of unnecessary capacity, wasting everyone's money: we could build enough roads for everyone to use them maximally, but then the Pan-American highway would have to be the width of Washington State, and that's just stupid. Similarly we could give everyone a dedicated, 100% guaranteed high speed line straight to their home, no overselling - but it would mean putting in an enormous amount of capacity that would just sit dormant. And putting in that extra, largely unnecessary capacity is expensive, which is why it costs five times as much to get a dedicated line as a shared, over-sold one.
False advertising is an entirely separate matter which, as I tried to indicate, I have deliberately not dealt with. Clearly ISPs should be upfront about what they're selling. But given the impossibility of building a system that cannot possibly be saturated a 100% guaranteed speed is not realistic.
I hope that's cleared things up. If you have anything you want to actually disagree with rather than just calling my argument "bullshit" I'd be more than happy to respond.
One more thing: can I suggest that you stop saying things like "The end" and "PERIOD"? Clearly there is a debate here; what's more, I think you'll find that there almost always is a debate about pretty much everything - rational, intelligent people can legitimately disagree and the discussion is made easier if you don't resort to silliness.
All your points are totally valid and seem to be well thought out. The issue for "leeches" like DragonTHC (and myself-- I do my fair share of Netflix, XBox live, and web dev work at all hours of the day and -- suprise -- I don't even HAVE a torrent client installed on my gear) is that what Comcast is selling takes none of that into account.
Anyone here could have predicted that the asymmetrical use of internet by many customers with different needs would result in less than optimal service for everyone-- and the solution to mysteriously throttle usage and inject "man-in-the-middle" attacks to disconnect the "bad" customers is a bad call on Comcast's part.
Tiered pricing? I would pay for that. Being treated like a criminal for eating all I can eat at the ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET is a breach of contract.
Thanks for the compliment, and I can't say I disagree on the fact that Comcast in this case has behaved disgracefully.
A tiered pricing structure where you could pay to be given higher priority would seem like it would make things fairer, since it would mean that heavy users were paying for the privilege. But traffic shaping is, to some extent, still going to be necessary, since the use of some heavy-users would still be more than enough to interfere with other peoples' internet connections. My worry is that it would really just function like an extra charge: if you don't pay for the highest priority broadband package then your connection won't be usable when Henry Heavyuser starts up his download manager. This all starts to sound like a bit of a protection racket...
Of course, it doesn't have to work like that. Rather than guaranteeing you higher priority the premium package could discount your transfer to a certain extent, so that (for example) Polly Premiumuser counted all her traffic at half rate for the purposes of priority assignment. This would give her a greater share of bandwidth than non-premium heavy users when there was contention, but would still allow light users to get higher priority than her if she was using a disproportionate amount of the bandwidth.
Absolutely true - although a little out of date. At least over here I would be surprised if there are any ISPs that haven't been writing throttling and transfer caps into the contracts and adverts for at least a year now.
The problem of some people using all the resources available isn't new; it's as old as the world. If ISPs want to offer (and people want to buy) cheap, over-sold connections then they will have to protect those connections from being used to capacity by a few heavy users. If people absolutely must have that guaranteed speed then they can get it; if they want a fast connection for little money then they will have to put up with some restriction. Although the ISPs in this case have been incredibly dishonest the problem wouldn't be any different if they hadn't.
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Why should I be throttled for legally consuming content?
Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it. Ignoring the particular facts of this case - Comcast's underhanded methods and deception - would it really be unfair to say, for example, that those people that use the most bandwidth have their speed capped when other people want to use that bandwidth? Let's briefly look at the alternatives:
- The bandwidth is divided equally between all subscribers at all times, meaning that if Lucy Lightuser and Henry Heavyuser are online at the same time Lucy gets the same amount of bandwidth as Henry. This seems fair if you analyze it only over the times when both of them are trying to use the internet, but it doesn't take into account the fact that one Henry can disrupt the internet use for a lot of Lucys; if Henry spends all day downloading media, for example, then every Lucy that goes online will have her download speed reduced because Henry is always using as much as possible. This means that the ISP has to provide extra headroom to allow for Henry, headroom that the large number of Lucys are effectively subsidizing.
- The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
So if "naive-sharing" is unfair and speed guarantees are prohibitively expensive, what can we do?
A rule that would seem fair to me would be that when a number of people are competing for the same bandwidth, the amount that each of them gets should be inversely proportional to the amount of data they have already transferred that day/week; i.e. if you use your internet twice as much as me then when we are both trying to use the internet, and there is not enough bandwidth to serve both of us fully, I would have access to 2/3 of the contended bandwidth while you would be restricted to 1/3. In this case the heavy users and light users both get a fair deal: the heavy user gets greater total transfer, while the light users get faster connections when they use them. No one subsidizes anyone else.
In order to encourage heavy users to download things when it causes less congestion you could also discount off-peak usage, so that, for example, every 2MB transferred on a home connection before 6PM would count as 1MB for the purposes of bandwidth apportionment.
A system like that would allow a heavy user like yourself to download as much as you want, on the condition that if someone who only rarely uses the internet wants to download something they get priority.
Nice FUD. the new DB will break it anyways.. and YES microsoft does this.
They crafted a DB update that used that bug to deliver a message so the logs showed you what happened instead of a "seg fault - error in line 45867"
While that's true it's not like they couldn't have avoided this situation: the newer, larger updates could easily have been furnished from a different source, thereby avoiding the problem.
But as I've posted further up, that's not really the point; when the virus definitions got bigger the old versions would go out of date and not provide the protection people thought they had. The choice they were making was between causing people temporary annoyance - and I don't mean to trivialise, I fully accept that this was probably really, really annoying - or letting those peoples networks lose their virus protection without anyone noticing, which could (would?) lead to much more annoying and expensive consequences.
Personally I think it was the right thing to do, but then that's easy for me to say - I don't administer a mail server.
...and guess what! I'm almost sure I have had enough of free software.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
Heck! Is this the "freedom" you want?
For six months their web site, the clamav-announce mailing list and your log files have over and over again explained that the version was out of date and would be discontinued; it's not like this just happened overnight. But that's not even the point.
The point is that this was in your best interests, although it may not seem like it now. Given that you hadn't updated for six months they could be pretty sure you weren't going to upgrade now; most likely you don't check the log files or the mailing lists because you probably aren't a full-time server admin and don't have time to check every package you use. So they could have continued to alert you every few days through the log files and the mailing lists, and updated the newer versions from a different source, but then you most likely wouldn't have realized when your virus protection silently slipped further and further out of date until it provided no protection at all and the virus scanning became totally useless.
At the end of the day they were making a choice between two options: leave you, without you realizing anything had changed, with no real virus protection, or bring it to your attention more forcefully than through the log files and mailing lists. While I can sympathise with your position, especially if you had to come into work specially to fix it, it's much less work than if you had to clean up a virus that got through later on.
This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!
Well, over time, no, there isn't. But in the short term the limit is effectively what we have now; under the private academy scheme in the UK (where I live and therefore what I'm familiar with) the average cost of an "academy" - a privately financed school - was £35m (~$53m), with an average lead time of 4 years from planning to creation, not including finding the teachers and staff you need to operate it. You can't just conjure a new school, so if you consign a school to failure you also consign all its students to a bad education, either because they have to stay in a school that is being phased out or because they are crammed into over-sized classes at a school that hasn't got the capacity to accomodate them.
The problem with school vouchers is that the choice is a fallacy. We've had similar schemes tried over here - parents would get to send their children to whichever school they wanted, sick people would be treated at whichever hospital they wanted and so on. The problem, though, is that not everyone can go to the best schools or the best hospitals; they only have a limited number of places. Where I grew up - Coventry - the best school was a place called Finham; Finham was big and well-funded and in the nicer part of town, and so everyone wanted to send their kids there. Could every child go to Finham? No, of course not, the school wasn't big enough, and so the kids just went to the schools near them, just like always.
There's no way around this. In another post you point to homeschooling, but having homeschooling as your solution is the ultimate in discrimination: you can only be homeschooled if one of your parents can afford to stay at home, meaning that, as an option, it's available only to the well-off. It's also a complete abandonment of social mobility: if your parents are poorly educated then you will be, too, because they're your teachers, and they can't teach you English and maths and science and everything else on the curriculum if they dropped out of school at 13. And that's to say nothing of the fact that even the best home schooling lacks an awful lot of the resources available to well-funded actual school: no science labs, no CAD/CAM, no library, no gym, no media centre, no darkroom, and so on - again, the availability of these outside the school system is determined by wealth.
Vouchers are a solution for a world that doesn't exist, where poor schools can be closed without consequences for the students who go there and new schools can be created overnight. You don't need to send all your students to the best schools - that just means making the best schools worse. You need to make the bad schools into good schools, but unfortunately there's no gimmick that does that.
I don't know whether the same is true in the US, but I would guess that Australia operates under a law similar to that here in the UK, which grants absolute privilege to parliamentary proceedings - i.e. nothing that happens in them could be used as evidence against the people involved - as long as the things are said as part of their government duties, and in good faith, i.e. you can't use the fact that you're speaking in Parliament to protect you if your intent is to commit criminal acts.
I wish judges were a little more liberal with SLAPP summary judgments against litigious corporations.
As far as I am aware there is no SLAPP protection that would allow a judge to dismiss this out of hand; even the most comprehensive protections only extend to constitutionally-protected activities, which would not cover FB Purity.
Given the renaming my guess would be that the problem was with the name "FaceBook Purity". This would seem a difficult case to bring, since (subject to the standard "I am not a US lawyer and this is not legal advice" disclaimer) a suit for trademark infringement or passing off would require them to prove actual confusion, i.e. that someone had intended to deal with Facebook but had instead dealt with this chap, under the belief that he was Facebook. In court his counsel is just going to say "you're a well-educated person; are you really telling me that you looked at this page, with a dodgy logo, spelling and grammar mistakes you honestly could not tell that it was the website of some young man and not of a huge multi-national corporation?", the witness is going to say "well I could tell, but I knew it was a rip-off" and the counsel will get the case dismissed. And even if they showed actual confusion - which seems astronomically implausible - they would have to show that there was damage to their trademark, which again seems incredibly unlikely.
So my judgement would be that while there is no statutory protection for him, if they are actually threatening legal action he should get a consultation with a legal firm offering no-win-no-fee IP representation; given that he is almost certain to win they will take it on and reclaim costs from Facebook if it goes to court.
The studies I have seen put American and European survival rates at about the same level, with normally a slight advantage to the Americans, although critics point out that reporting differences (for example, in Great Britain anyone diagnosed with cancer is included in the survival figures, while in America deaths that may not be related are not counted, plus many American hospitals publish only estimated survival percentages rather than actual counts), differing access to treatment (if you don't go to the hospital you won't get counted, which could stack the deck against socialised healthcare) and uncontrolled variables (incidence of cancers is lower across much of Europe, possibly because of differences in the health care systems) make comparisons contrived at best.
Having private health insurance and then not letting people make use of it seems to be the worst of both worlds...
So what if they go bankrupt?
Well, if a huge bank goes bankrupt potentially millions of people are suddenly destitute, vast swathes of businesses have to find a new way to take payments, and the economy suffers enormously. My point is that a pure capitalist model only works for banks if we are willing to accept that every so often we will inevitably lose massively. It's not the only model, and in this case I think it is clearly worth even fairly large trade-offs to avoid the very worst consequences.
There have been a lot of attempts to compete with PayPal, but becoming "viable" is rather difficult; PayPal is already integrated with thousands of sites, including eBay, and used by millions of people. That's a huge advantage, meaning that anyone wanting to compete has to be willing to operate at a loss for a long time while trying to tempt people away from PayPal. The fact that no-one has succeeded in dethroning PayPal despite its terrible reputation and despite numerous services offering substantial cost reductions just shows how much of an advantage they have.
I saw a rather nice quotation regarding this some time ago. To paraphrase from memory:
The financial crash shows that capitalism does work to regulate banks; if they take too much risk they eventually lose out, lose all their money and go bankrupt, exactly what is meant to happen to companies that are poorly run in a capitalist economy.
Pure capitalism works, as long as you are willing to accept that the way it regulates itself is through disaster.
For anyone that doesn't speak Russian, the allegation in the press release is that the UK scientists cherry-picked 1500 out of the 5000 stations available in order to get the conclusions they wanted.
I haven't read all the way to the end, so I don't know what results they give instead.
Firstly, it's difficult to make any meaningful comparison between the development of powered flight and the development of space travel. Firstly because the complexity involved is unimaginably higher; secondly because outside putting things in orbit there is no financial incentive for space travel; thirdly because the cost of development and of launch are so high as to make development and testing prohibitively expensive unless you already have a working design.
But even ignoring all that, it took almost 300 years from the first independent attempt at powered flight to a successful test. In contrast, Kennedy was able to announce in 1961 that NASA would put a man on the moon in ten years - and they did. In 1969, eight years after the first human in space, NASA landed a man on the moon.
And even if you reject the idea that private business would never have achieved what NASA has managed, wasn't it worth it just for that? In 1960 no human had ever left the Earth. By 1969, humans had walked on the moon. Isn't that something to be proud of?
Maybe my experience is atypical, but Google doesn't seem to translate pages very well. I can only imagine how bad it will be having a phone do this. "Did that guy's phone just call me what I think it did?"
If you haven't used it recently, try it now. Speaking as a linguist I am incredibly impressed by the speed of their progress.
And, just to add a shameless plug in there, sign the DigitalWrong letter!. You write what you want to say to Mandelson they get it printed up on some big paper with everyone else's and go and try to give it to him. More effective than writing a letter and you don't even have to pay for a stamp.
Seems the way to beat this copyright cabal is to keep on sharing
Unfortunately this is the sort of quotation that plays right into their hands.
It's been a very easy ride for the copyright holders so far - opposition to their plans has come either from ISPs (who are motivated by saving money) or file-sharing advocates; this means it's been very easy for them to dismiss the opposition as greedy, self-interested pirates. The point I'm trying to get across is that it's possible to support copyright and copyright enforcement without supporting these ridiculous measures and without giving complete power to record companies.
Copyright itself is not a bad thing. Nor is copyright enforcement - disregarding the exacting definitions that are popular on Slashdot, file sharing is, in one important way, very like stealing - you get something you want without having to pay for it. What is wrong is the idea that people should be punished based only on the accusations of the copyright holders. The fact that it is nearly impossible to get anywhere through the courts isn't representative of file-sharers being cunning and impossible to find, it's representative of the fact that it is difficult to establish, on balance of probabilities, that they have actually infringed on your copyright. Changing the law to allow those people to be punished doesn't get round the fundamental unfairness of punishing people you can't prove have done anything wrong.