Then put your money where your mouth is and argue against the criminalization of murder. If murder is truly bad, then deregulating it should cause it to happen less, and if deregulating murder doesn't make it happen less, it can't have been bad because, evidently, people have decided for themselves that it isn't!
Well, sort of. Even if everyone was aware of the issues and did comprehensive speed tests to make sure the bandwidth they paid for was always available, bandwidth overcommitment would still be a viable business model because the average Joe doesn't spend 24/7 transferring their own bandwidth. Arguably, it's irresponsible for the company to not buy all the bandwidth you paid for because they're betting you won't use it, but when you're dealing with a customer base of thousands or tens of thousands all drawing bandwidth from the same resource pool, a quick glance at Bayes' theorem ought to be sufficient to convince you that the probability of them ever having to transfer their full bandwidth commitment ( = the number of customers X the per-user bandwidth allotment) is approximately zero.
Other than that, I like your idea but I find the idea of charging more for access at 3:00AM a little backwards; I'd expect to pay more for a gig of traffic transferred during peak hours than for a gig of traffic at 3AM. Sure, the 3AM traffic is delivered faster, making it "better service", but I think it makes more sense to incentivize people to make their big transfers at a time of day which is less disruptive to other users.
Of course, there's a whole 'nother/. article on the front page right now about dynamic time-of-day based pricing in the electrical power industry.
The point being, you are putting the cart before the horse by suggesting that "it wouldn't necessarily give the result you wish" is, normatively speaking, "just fine". It's almost as if you think that whatever the result of a libertarian policy would be, that's the best possible result by virtue of it having arisen from a libertarian policy!
That's not good enough. You actually have to show why that would be good for people. The pro-neutrality people have done quite a lot of work to show why their solution would be good for people, and you can't just hand-wave that away by clinging to the axiom that regulation is bad, and that anyone who has a problem with the results of deregulation is just failing to deal with reality as it is. That's backwards thinking.
Actually, the libertarian solution would work just fine. It just wouldn't necessarily give the result that you wish you could impose by force. If that's a "failure" then it's simply your failure to deal with reality as it is, instead of as you wish it could be, if you could impose your wishes by force.
This works equally well as an argument for legalizing murder. If the free market doesn't naturally give rise to a world where murders don't happen, well, tough shit! That's not a "failure", it's simply your failure to deal with a reality where it's most efficient for some people to get shanked!
do you have any idea the outcry that would happen if the government (especially in the case of the US) tried to take over a private enterprise (various ISP's and/or Telcos) and turn it into another state funded bureaucracy.
Actually, I think you just described exactly how the incumbent big telcos came into being. None of them were self-built, they were all the beneficiaries of massive state funding, not to mention right-of-way favours that only the state could grant. To turn around and treat them as if they're now a completely private enterprise which owes the public nothing is absurd.
If you pay for a given speed, but the ISP has more capacity than that, then they have to throttle you to the speed you paid for in order to guarantee their other customers the speed they paid for.
It's fixed on the other end, using a point-to-point tunnel. An HDMI cable constitutes a point-to-point network between 2 devices. A physical copy of the media is delivered, whether to a DVD player across the room or to an address in the city.
In both the traditional rental scenario and this one, both a "network transmission" and a "physical delivery" take place. The only variant is distance.
So, to distinguish between whether a movie was "distributed" to an audience of one or "performed" for an audience of one, we need only ask who pressed the play button?
If a DVD rental store lends their DVD to one customer, and then lends it to another, and then another, eventually they will have lent it to a substantial number of people too. I'm not seeing your point. If you're suggesting that this encryption can happen numerous times concurrently from one video source to multiple simultaneous viewers, well, OK, but that's not what Zediva's doing.
Can we stop using the word "broadcast" to refer to long-distance, point-to-point communications, please? If we keep using these terms wrong, we shouldn't be surprised when judges arrive at absurd conclusions about laws which are concerned with "broadcasting".
You're not getting it. If the lotto corporation's daughter wins the $50 million jackpot, you can call shenanigans without implying that the previous lotto winners must also have been related to the CEO in some way.
because we're here, and can take measurements, we assume it must be us causing a global disaster.
Actually, it's less about the fact that we're here taking measurements, and more about the fact of what those measurements are. It's odd that you're willing to use such back-of-the-envelope numbers to arrive at your conclusion - Water vapor's potency as a greenhouse gas vs. methane's, vs. CO2's, without any mention of the relative volumes of those substances we're pouring into the atmosphere (btw, we produce a fair amount of water and methane emissions too...) - but you figure atmospheric scientists with advanced degrees and lifetimes of study under their belts are being so informal with their data as to have missed one of the facts you tossed in here? Now that's egocentric.
The weather has been nice enough for an explosion of humankind for about 15,000 or 20,000 years now. Now, civilization takes some time to grow so I'm not proposing it could have happened all that early in the latest warm period and that may increase the odds by a factor of 2 or 4.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the property of being or not being an economic transaction relevant to the question of what is normatively good for people?
Then put your money where your mouth is and argue against the criminalization of murder. If murder is truly bad, then deregulating it should cause it to happen less, and if deregulating murder doesn't make it happen less, it can't have been bad because, evidently, people have decided for themselves that it isn't!
Joe doesn't spend 24/7 transferring their own bandwidth limit, that should read.
Well, sort of. Even if everyone was aware of the issues and did comprehensive speed tests to make sure the bandwidth they paid for was always available, bandwidth overcommitment would still be a viable business model because the average Joe doesn't spend 24/7 transferring their own bandwidth. Arguably, it's irresponsible for the company to not buy all the bandwidth you paid for because they're betting you won't use it, but when you're dealing with a customer base of thousands or tens of thousands all drawing bandwidth from the same resource pool, a quick glance at Bayes' theorem ought to be sufficient to convince you that the probability of them ever having to transfer their full bandwidth commitment ( = the number of customers X the per-user bandwidth allotment) is approximately zero.
Other than that, I like your idea but I find the idea of charging more for access at 3:00AM a little backwards; I'd expect to pay more for a gig of traffic transferred during peak hours than for a gig of traffic at 3AM. Sure, the 3AM traffic is delivered faster, making it "better service", but I think it makes more sense to incentivize people to make their big transfers at a time of day which is less disruptive to other users.
Of course, there's a whole 'nother /. article on the front page right now about dynamic time-of-day based pricing in the electrical power industry.
The point being, you are putting the cart before the horse by suggesting that "it wouldn't necessarily give the result you wish" is, normatively speaking, "just fine". It's almost as if you think that whatever the result of a libertarian policy would be, that's the best possible result by virtue of it having arisen from a libertarian policy!
That's not good enough. You actually have to show why that would be good for people. The pro-neutrality people have done quite a lot of work to show why their solution would be good for people, and you can't just hand-wave that away by clinging to the axiom that regulation is bad, and that anyone who has a problem with the results of deregulation is just failing to deal with reality as it is. That's backwards thinking.
The fallacy of Is-ism
Actually, the libertarian solution would work just fine. It just wouldn't necessarily give the result that you wish you could impose by force.
If that's a "failure" then it's simply your failure to deal with reality as it is, instead of as you wish it could be, if you could impose your wishes by force.
This works equally well as an argument for legalizing murder. If the free market doesn't naturally give rise to a world where murders don't happen, well, tough shit! That's not a "failure", it's simply your failure to deal with a reality where it's most efficient for some people to get shanked!
do you have any idea the outcry that would happen if the government (especially in the case of the US) tried to take over a private enterprise (various ISP's and/or Telcos) and turn it into another state funded bureaucracy.
Actually, I think you just described exactly how the incumbent big telcos came into being. None of them were self-built, they were all the beneficiaries of massive state funding, not to mention right-of-way favours that only the state could grant. To turn around and treat them as if they're now a completely private enterprise which owes the public nothing is absurd.
If you pay for a given speed, but the ISP has more capacity than that, then they have to throttle you to the speed you paid for in order to guarantee their other customers the speed they paid for.
would have, could have.
It's fixed on the other end, using a point-to-point tunnel. An HDMI cable constitutes a point-to-point network between 2 devices. A physical copy of the media is delivered, whether to a DVD player across the room or to an address in the city.
In both the traditional rental scenario and this one, both a "network transmission" and a "physical delivery" take place. The only variant is distance.
So, to distinguish between whether a movie was "distributed" to an audience of one or "performed" for an audience of one, we need only ask who pressed the play button?
If a DVD rental store lends their DVD to one customer, and then lends it to another, and then another, eventually they will have lent it to a substantial number of people too. I'm not seeing your point. If you're suggesting that this encryption can happen numerous times concurrently from one video source to multiple simultaneous viewers, well, OK, but that's not what Zediva's doing.
If that is illegal then so is every managed-server facility in the world.
What is that difference, and why is it legally relevant? Please expand.
Translation: the 1991 court ruling was absurd for the same reason this one is.
I also "rebroadcast" content from my DVD player to my TV using an HDMI cable. Just saying.
Can we stop using the word "broadcast" to refer to long-distance, point-to-point communications, please? If we keep using these terms wrong, we shouldn't be surprised when judges arrive at absurd conclusions about laws which are concerned with "broadcasting".
broadcast != unicast.
i have to wonder...is this how Rome fell?
It's definitely what happened in France.
On-topic: http://pics.livejournal.com/spaz_own_joo/pic/0000h5ew
Really? 90% of the wealth, but only 38% of the income tax?
That is heavily nonlinear in the rich folks' favour, if you're keeping track.
Pardon me - the lotto corporation CEO's daughter.
You're not getting it. If the lotto corporation's daughter wins the $50 million jackpot, you can call shenanigans without implying that the previous lotto winners must also have been related to the CEO in some way.
because we're here, and can take measurements, we assume it must be us causing a global disaster.
Actually, it's less about the fact that we're here taking measurements, and more about the fact of what those measurements are. It's odd that you're willing to use such back-of-the-envelope numbers to arrive at your conclusion - Water vapor's potency as a greenhouse gas vs. methane's, vs. CO2's, without any mention of the relative volumes of those substances we're pouring into the atmosphere (btw, we produce a fair amount of water and methane emissions too...) - but you figure atmospheric scientists with advanced degrees and lifetimes of study under their belts are being so informal with their data as to have missed one of the facts you tossed in here? Now that's egocentric.
Am I the only one who misses the old days when a post like this would reliably contain an obfuscated Goatse link within the first three comments?
The weather has been nice enough for an explosion of humankind for about 15,000 or 20,000 years now. Now, civilization takes some time to grow so I'm not proposing it could have happened all that early in the latest warm period and that may increase the odds by a factor of 2 or 4.
But you've got 3 more powers of ten to explain.