While in general I agree with your evaluation of the bill's prospects, I still object to the entire enterprise on Constitutional grounds. What right does Congress have to tell anyone what they must include in computer software? We're not regulating automobile safety and mileage here, we're regulating speech. Can Congress tell novelists that they must include material describing the health risks of smoking whenever a character lights a cigar? What's the different between a book and Enhanced C Torrent? (Will command-line file-transfer programs like that or rsync have to add a "--Bonozo" switch constituting agreement with her proposed rules?)
Still, a bill introduced by a Republican with one Republican and one Democrat co-sponsor probably isn't going very far in this Congress.
Even better would be dropping the whole "Net Neutrality" meme and returning to the time-honored concept of "common carriage." The FCC created this problem when it bowed to the wishes of the telcos and created an entirely new regime ("enhanced services") not governed by common carriage. Internet services fall into this category along with directory assistance and dial-a-porn. The consequences of not enforcing a clear divide between content and carriage are now apparent, particularly in the case of cable operators who have an obvious conflict-of-interest when it comes to the distribution of video programming over the Internet.
This is exactly how cable and satellite TV works. They do not include DRM...
Well, most all programming that isn't broadcast over-the-air by television stations is encrypted. So, for instance, I can't record ESPN directly off my FiOS connection with a PC tuner card, though I can record VHF and UHF broadcasts. I can record ESPN on my DVR, but then I have to live with the extremely small disk storage I'm permitted (160 GB). It may not be "DRM," but it certainly restricts what you can record.
Encryption has become a fact of life in the cable and satellite industries since most programming networks won't let you distribute their material in the clear. Of course, behind them stand the program producers who require the networks to employ encryption.
Again the limitation of the Betamax decision to cover only advertiser-supported, broadcast programming provides the legal distinction between an ABC affiliate and ESPN.
It's the same part of fair use that permits you to videotape a TV show which is copyrighted material; you paid for the right by allowing them to inflict you with commercials.
In fact, these are the only programs which you can legally record under the "Betamax" decision. Stevens's ruling specifically excluded any form of pay television and strictly limited the argument to advertiser-supported programming. Moreover, if you read the decision carefully, the rationale for applying "fair use" principles in this case was that the studios could not demonstrate "harm." Since program producers can demand more compensation for shows that command larger audiences, Stevens ruled that VCRs didn't harm the producers but could actually benefit them by expanding the size of the audience.
None of this has any applicability to buying or renting DVDs where the economics of the licensing arrangements are very different from those governing advertiser-supported television. Slashdotters like to wave the Betamax decision and claim "fair use" in every instance, but the decision is actually extremely limited.
In your scenario you didn't PAY for the right to rip your friend's DVD; furthermore, he's actually NOT entitled under Fair Use to SHARE that DVD with you, for free or otherwise - it's simply a law they have no means of enforcing.
If he purchased the DVD, the "first-sale" doctrine applies. He can do whatever he wants with it except for making a copy. "Fair use" has no relevance here either. First-sale obviously doesn't apply to rentals, but again regardless of what other rules might apply, making a copy of the DVD is strictly illegal.
I largely agree with this post, but I also think the distinction between hardware and software will continue to wither as time goes on. Eventually we'll see integrated firmware with the OS and basic apps already in silicon. Which OS and which apps is obviously important to players like Microsoft, but the notion of computers with hard drives full of shrink-wrapped software will seem an anachronism in another decade or two.
I can't think of many functions that ordinary people use computers for that can't be incorporated into firmware or offered over the Internet. Even tough-nuts-to-crack like personal finance and income tax programs will continue to migrate to the web. I already can run my bank account through my bank's online services and do my taxes online as well. Photo albums? On the web. Document processing? On the web. My older generation will continue to worry about privacy, but the Facebook generation won't care.
People like appliances; general-purpose computers will be a minority taste in the future.
Offer plans at different speed/price points. For the email and occasional web browsing customers an entry-level tier of service at something like 128/512 or 384/1024 would cover all their requirements. According to what ISPs report, a substantial fraction of their customers' needs would be easily satisfied with a service like this.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people who want higher speeds to pay more. However if ISPs' claims are to be taken seriously, then we should see a substantial reduction in prices to that fraction of users who opt for these lower-speed plans. This has the secondary advantage of helping to protect the cable operators' TV programming service against Internet competition, since streaming wouldn't work well on the lower-speed tiers.
As others have argued, tiering by packet traffic is unwieldy and would be opaque to most customers. Tiering by speed would be something everyone understands.
I use a subdomain of my primary domain when I sign up for accounts online with a unique address like amazon@sub.example.com. I've never received a message from one of these sites that wasn't legitimate. A quick scan of my logs doesn't show any illegitimate messages sent to these addresses that were filtered as spam either.
Lots of people would be just fine with a 512K service, even with a reasonable transfer cap, if they could pay $10-20/month for it. The problem with plans like TWC's is that they institute tiering and caps without lowering the base price of the service. If 80% of the people use 20% of the bandwidth, why aren't they being offered a "basic" tier at a basic price well below the current price that's averaged over all users?
Sadly, not only are they not "regulated heavily," in most cases they're not regulated at all. Municipalities used to have a lot of regulatory authority over cable operators, but a variety of deregulatory actions by the FCC and Congress have eroded most municipal control. Internet service isn't regulated either; it's considered an "enhanced information service" and thus exempt from the common-carrier regime that applies to services like telephony.
I don't see many options other than re-estabishing common-carriage as the dominant regulatory model for these services. The carriers will argue that they can't make enough money under this model to justify the investments required to maintain and upgrade their network facilities. Perhaps a workable model is to give operators a fixed time limit (twenty years after the initial license perhaps) after which they must convert to common carriage. You'd have to write the rules carefully to make sure ownership changes of existing plant doesn't restart the time period.
Considering the number of ads that naturally fit into a baseball game broadcast, it should still be profitable to broadcast it for free.
With only 500,000 subscribers I'm not sure this is true. While that's not an insignificant number, it's not obvious to me you'll be generating the same $15-20/subscriber/month MLB gets now from advertising revenues alone. Then there are the costs involved of negotiating advertising contracts, presumably with national advertisers, to reach this small market.
There's another issue that's not so obvious when it comes to national services like MLB's. Teams in weaker markets (Milwaukee, for instance) are perenially concerned about competition from stronger teams with a national reputation like the Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs, or Dodgers. Revenues from league telecasts on the networks or services like MLB.TV are distributed equally across all the teams; teams naturally get to keep all their local television revenues. Having something akin to a YouTube channel with all games available in real time poses a serious threat to this business model. Making it a pay service targeted at the most devout fans limits the threat it poses to revenues for teams like the Brewers.
MLB executives' number-one concern is protection of their intellectual property. Whichever vendor promised MLB better security for their content probably won out. The NCAA probably takes the same point of view as does The Masters.
Sports leagues worry about a number of things when expanded distribution of their contests is proposed. One is the protection of home team revenues against competition from televised out-of-market games. Leagues are also concerned about rights fees from the resale of live materials for use as highlights or in sports documentary productions. Unlike my hypothetical executives, I don't think making material available in Flash really threatens the League's ability to collect hundreds of times over for Carleton Fisk's home run or Tiger's ball teetering then falling into the cup at the Masters. Most of the revenues shots like these generate come from entities that use these materials under license and pay rights fees. Sharing on YouTube won't affect much of that at all, I'd wager. Perhaps those executives now feel the same way.
Distributors like CBS share their concerns but have a more pertinent issue of their own -- how well these proposed platforms enhance advertising sales. Look at this year's NCAA "netcasts" by CBS. In the past you'd see just a few inserted ads from a couple of companies like Marriott. This year we saw the full panoply of advertising. To me, it looked like we were being shown the ads on the remote game's telecast just as they were shown to viewers in the coverage region. And as I said elsewhere, the Silverlight application prohibited switching between games during commercials. So I'm guessing that CBS negotiated with its national advertisers for the additional revenues generated by the online exposures and might have even collected a premium from its use of the technology.
Not being available in offices was probably another big strike against Silverlight. It's an open secret that the sports leagues and telecasters have a substantial audience of office workers. If use of Silverlight restricts viewing of events in offices, that alone might have been a compelling reason to switch to Flash. Maybe it's no coincidence that this announcement came just after the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament and just before Opening Day and The Masters.
Any MLB users want to tell us about how advertising is handled on the new Flash platform?
If you watched any of the NCAA Basketball Tourney in Silverlight, you'll have observed that the interface was specifically designed to block you from switching to another game when the ads were shown. It's as if your cable set-top box could disable the channel tuner and remote during commercials.
Earlier someone posted that he knew of no one who used Silverlight. I'll bet he doesn't know anyone who's a college basketball fan. Millions of us had to install Silverlight to enable us to watch out-of-market games, and no, Moonlight was not an option. It only supports version 1 of the Silverlight standard; the games were shown using Version 2. I ended up installing a Win7 build in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu just for this purpose.
I'm curious why Microsoft feels the need to port things like Silverlight to the Apple platform but apparently feels no such need to port to Linux. Market share certainly plays a role, but it makes me wonder which platform MS considers the greater long-term threat to their monopoly?
I haven't really looked into Canvas or other native browser approaches. Do they enable encryption and other DRM features that many content providers consider a minimum requirement?
Verizon isn't stringing fiberoptic cable along poles for the simple reason that a break in the fiberoptic is not anywhere near as easy to patch as a break in telephone lines. They are trenching.
No, they're using poles when they can. My FiOS service comes off the pole. They're not going to dig trenches or pull wire through conduit unless conditions (including regulatory ones) require it.
We had quite a bit of snow this winter here in New England; I never lost service.
The figures quoted are really rather incomparable, I suspect. In the Japanese case it appears that that fiber structure was already in place, and the $20/HH figure is an "upgrade" cost, most of which is probably concentrated at the provider's end (routers, switches, etc.)
The figures for Verizon include the cost of installing the fiber networks themselves on poles, through conduits, etc. $716/HH passed seems like a very reasonable investment for something that will be paying off for decades.
Then we have the in-home installation costs. Verizon is usually installing a combination phone/video/Internet service, not just the latter. Much of the time the installers spend in peoples' homes comes from installing cable television services throughout the home. (VZ will install cable as many as three TVs as part of the free initial installation package.) Sometimes they can reuse the home's existing cable plant; sometimes they have to pull new cable. I will say that my experience with FiOS, a bit over a year ago, suggests that some of these costs reflect managerial incompetence. In my case they failed to show up for two scheduled installations of my residential service apparently because they were stunned to discover I already had a fiber drop for my business Internet service. The third time around I ended up with two techs, and the installation still took perhaps 6-8 hours. I'd guess they're better at installations now than they were, though. My friend just added cable television to his existing FiOS phone/Internet package, and the installer was there for only two hours. Of course the ONT was already installed, and the home had been previously wired for cable.
The installers themselves were quite competent and professional; it was their managers who couldn't figure out what to do in my case.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised.viagra domain, you will find that the owner of the.viagra gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
AFAIK, ICANN has defended trademark owners' efforts to protect their marks in domain names. Any.viagra domain is going to be owned by Pfizer.
Just a clarification. I used the term "networks" in the last sentence meaning the large conglomerates that now control both television programming and distribution like NBC/Universal or Disney/ABC. It wasn't always so.
Television programming is distributed across the world in a complex staged operation. Producers like Universal have contracts with broadcasters around the world for the carriage of their programming. Most US shows are not available overseas for months or even years after their initial telecasts in the States.
The global perspective of the Internet does not extend to the long-standing business practices developed by the television industry over decades. Just the fact that television programming is available on websites owned by the networks themselves is a revolutionary change in the industry. Since the inception of broadcast television in America, network-affiliated stations relied on a combination of their monopoly over network content and local news programming to remain profitable. Now the networks have decided to compete directly against those very affiliates by abolishing their monopoly over distribution. For this to occur on a global basis, the networks will have to compete against their distributors across the world. I'd guess we're talking just a few years, but it could take a decade.
Tor was not designed for the type and levels of traffic BitTorrent generates. Using it for torrents squeezes out people who actually need to remain anonymous. Widespread use of Tor for torrents would be a disaster for freedom.
You want this sort of thing to stop? Address the fear, not the symptom.
As much as I might agree with you, fear sells. Education does not.
Look at how we've treated the question of missing children for a few decades now. Most studies show that children are abducted by people they know, often by one or another parent after a marital breakup. Yet most parents I've spoken with over the years fear that their children will be snatched off street corners by strangers. As a single father I heard no end of these concerns from hysterical relatives who were convinced my daughter was inevitably going to be snatched from cars or stores or my front lawn.
Another poster made the important point that we don't see any media coverage of the investigation and prosecution of the people who actually produce child pornography. The focus is always on the "sinful" consumer of pornography because it's often easier to find those people than to invest in the hard work of uncovering the actual producers. Now it seems we've just made it easier to define the producers as the kids themselves.
One can hope that public exposure of the idiocy of current efforts to limit child pornography might help educate people into the actual nature of the crime and illuminate the motives of grandstanding prosecutors. I'm not optimistic.
If you're willing to play with the command line a bit, here's a way to see what's happening behind the scenes.
Install Kubuntu 8.10. Now open a Terminal window and at the $ prompt type "sudo apt-get install nautilus" and enter your password when prompted. Nautilus is the GNOME file browser, the equivalent application to KDE's Dolphin. You'll see the installer download dozens of additional files besides nautilus itself. That's the "infrastructure" (libraries) needed to run GNOME applications.
You can see the same process in reverse by running "sudo apt-get install dolphin" on a plain Ubuntu (8.10+) installation.
Once the libraries are available, you can run either set of applications on either desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
While in general I agree with your evaluation of the bill's prospects, I still object to the entire enterprise on Constitutional grounds. What right does Congress have to tell anyone what they must include in computer software? We're not regulating automobile safety and mileage here, we're regulating speech. Can Congress tell novelists that they must include material describing the health risks of smoking whenever a character lights a cigar? What's the different between a book and Enhanced C Torrent? (Will command-line file-transfer programs like that or rsync have to add a "--Bonozo" switch constituting agreement with her proposed rules?)
Still, a bill introduced by a Republican with one Republican and one Democrat co-sponsor probably isn't going very far in this Congress.
Perhaps because they might want to sell these items in the US, EU, or other jurisdictions where the patent laws do apply?
Even better would be dropping the whole "Net Neutrality" meme and returning to the time-honored concept of "common carriage." The FCC created this problem when it bowed to the wishes of the telcos and created an entirely new regime ("enhanced services") not governed by common carriage. Internet services fall into this category along with directory assistance and dial-a-porn. The consequences of not enforcing a clear divide between content and carriage are now apparent, particularly in the case of cable operators who have an obvious conflict-of-interest when it comes to the distribution of video programming over the Internet.
This is exactly how cable and satellite TV works. They do not include DRM...
Well, most all programming that isn't broadcast over-the-air by television stations is encrypted. So, for instance, I can't record ESPN directly off my FiOS connection with a PC tuner card, though I can record VHF and UHF broadcasts. I can record ESPN on my DVR, but then I have to live with the extremely small disk storage I'm permitted (160 GB). It may not be "DRM," but it certainly restricts what you can record.
Encryption has become a fact of life in the cable and satellite industries since most programming networks won't let you distribute their material in the clear. Of course, behind them stand the program producers who require the networks to employ encryption.
Again the limitation of the Betamax decision to cover only advertiser-supported, broadcast programming provides the legal distinction between an ABC affiliate and ESPN.
It's the same part of fair use that permits you to videotape a TV show which is copyrighted material; you paid for the right by allowing them to inflict you with commercials.
In fact, these are the only programs which you can legally record under the "Betamax" decision. Stevens's ruling specifically excluded any form of pay television and strictly limited the argument to advertiser-supported programming. Moreover, if you read the decision carefully, the rationale for applying "fair use" principles in this case was that the studios could not demonstrate "harm." Since program producers can demand more compensation for shows that command larger audiences, Stevens ruled that VCRs didn't harm the producers but could actually benefit them by expanding the size of the audience.
None of this has any applicability to buying or renting DVDs where the economics of the licensing arrangements are very different from those governing advertiser-supported television. Slashdotters like to wave the Betamax decision and claim "fair use" in every instance, but the decision is actually extremely limited.
In your scenario you didn't PAY for the right to rip your friend's DVD; furthermore, he's actually NOT entitled under Fair Use to SHARE that DVD with you, for free or otherwise - it's simply a law they have no means of enforcing.
If he purchased the DVD, the "first-sale" doctrine applies. He can do whatever he wants with it except for making a copy. "Fair use" has no relevance here either. First-sale obviously doesn't apply to rentals, but again regardless of what other rules might apply, making a copy of the DVD is strictly illegal.
I largely agree with this post, but I also think the distinction between hardware and software will continue to wither as time goes on. Eventually we'll see integrated firmware with the OS and basic apps already in silicon. Which OS and which apps is obviously important to players like Microsoft, but the notion of computers with hard drives full of shrink-wrapped software will seem an anachronism in another decade or two.
I can't think of many functions that ordinary people use computers for that can't be incorporated into firmware or offered over the Internet. Even tough-nuts-to-crack like personal finance and income tax programs will continue to migrate to the web. I already can run my bank account through my bank's online services and do my taxes online as well. Photo albums? On the web. Document processing? On the web. My older generation will continue to worry about privacy, but the Facebook generation won't care.
People like appliances; general-purpose computers will be a minority taste in the future.
And how many of those people running Photoshop actually paid for it?
How about
(e) tier by speed not by traffic
Offer plans at different speed/price points. For the email and occasional web browsing customers an entry-level tier of service at something like 128/512 or 384/1024 would cover all their requirements. According to what ISPs report, a substantial fraction of their customers' needs would be easily satisfied with a service like this.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people who want higher speeds to pay more. However if ISPs' claims are to be taken seriously, then we should see a substantial reduction in prices to that fraction of users who opt for these lower-speed plans. This has the secondary advantage of helping to protect the cable operators' TV programming service against Internet competition, since streaming wouldn't work well on the lower-speed tiers.
As others have argued, tiering by packet traffic is unwieldy and would be opaque to most customers. Tiering by speed would be something everyone understands.
I use a subdomain of my primary domain when I sign up for accounts online with a unique address like amazon@sub.example.com. I've never received a message from one of these sites that wasn't legitimate. A quick scan of my logs doesn't show any illegitimate messages sent to these addresses that were filtered as spam either.
Lots of people would be just fine with a 512K service, even with a reasonable transfer cap, if they could pay $10-20/month for it. The problem with plans like TWC's is that they institute tiering and caps without lowering the base price of the service. If 80% of the people use 20% of the bandwidth, why aren't they being offered a "basic" tier at a basic price well below the current price that's averaged over all users?
Sadly, not only are they not "regulated heavily," in most cases they're not regulated at all. Municipalities used to have a lot of regulatory authority over cable operators, but a variety of deregulatory actions by the FCC and Congress have eroded most municipal control. Internet service isn't regulated either; it's considered an "enhanced information service" and thus exempt from the common-carrier regime that applies to services like telephony.
I don't see many options other than re-estabishing common-carriage as the dominant regulatory model for these services. The carriers will argue that they can't make enough money under this model to justify the investments required to maintain and upgrade their network facilities. Perhaps a workable model is to give operators a fixed time limit (twenty years after the initial license perhaps) after which they must convert to common carriage. You'd have to write the rules carefully to make sure ownership changes of existing plant doesn't restart the time period.
Considering the number of ads that naturally fit into a baseball game broadcast, it should still be profitable to broadcast it for free.
With only 500,000 subscribers I'm not sure this is true. While that's not an insignificant number, it's not obvious to me you'll be generating the same $15-20/subscriber/month MLB gets now from advertising revenues alone. Then there are the costs involved of negotiating advertising contracts, presumably with national advertisers, to reach this small market.
There's another issue that's not so obvious when it comes to national services like MLB's. Teams in weaker markets (Milwaukee, for instance) are perenially concerned about competition from stronger teams with a national reputation like the Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs, or Dodgers. Revenues from league telecasts on the networks or services like MLB.TV are distributed equally across all the teams; teams naturally get to keep all their local television revenues. Having something akin to a YouTube channel with all games available in real time poses a serious threat to this business model. Making it a pay service targeted at the most devout fans limits the threat it poses to revenues for teams like the Brewers.
MLB executives' number-one concern is protection of their intellectual property. Whichever vendor promised MLB better security for their content probably won out. The NCAA probably takes the same point of view as does The Masters.
Sports leagues worry about a number of things when expanded distribution of their contests is proposed. One is the protection of home team revenues against competition from televised out-of-market games. Leagues are also concerned about rights fees from the resale of live materials for use as highlights or in sports documentary productions. Unlike my hypothetical executives, I don't think making material available in Flash really threatens the League's ability to collect hundreds of times over for Carleton Fisk's home run or Tiger's ball teetering then falling into the cup at the Masters. Most of the revenues shots like these generate come from entities that use these materials under license and pay rights fees. Sharing on YouTube won't affect much of that at all, I'd wager. Perhaps those executives now feel the same way.
Distributors like CBS share their concerns but have a more pertinent issue of their own -- how well these proposed platforms enhance advertising sales. Look at this year's NCAA "netcasts" by CBS. In the past you'd see just a few inserted ads from a couple of companies like Marriott. This year we saw the full panoply of advertising. To me, it looked like we were being shown the ads on the remote game's telecast just as they were shown to viewers in the coverage region. And as I said elsewhere, the Silverlight application prohibited switching between games during commercials. So I'm guessing that CBS negotiated with its national advertisers for the additional revenues generated by the online exposures and might have even collected a premium from its use of the technology.
Not being available in offices was probably another big strike against Silverlight. It's an open secret that the sports leagues and telecasters have a substantial audience of office workers. If use of Silverlight restricts viewing of events in offices, that alone might have been a compelling reason to switch to Flash. Maybe it's no coincidence that this announcement came just after the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament and just before Opening Day and The Masters.
Any MLB users want to tell us about how advertising is handled on the new Flash platform?
Most people aren't going to know how to do these things with HTML5, just like most people don't know how to do them with Flash.
Right-click, "Save Video As..." perhaps?
If you watched any of the NCAA Basketball Tourney in Silverlight, you'll have observed that the interface was specifically designed to block you from switching to another game when the ads were shown. It's as if your cable set-top box could disable the channel tuner and remote during commercials.
Earlier someone posted that he knew of no one who used Silverlight. I'll bet he doesn't know anyone who's a college basketball fan. Millions of us had to install Silverlight to enable us to watch out-of-market games, and no, Moonlight was not an option. It only supports version 1 of the Silverlight standard; the games were shown using Version 2. I ended up installing a Win7 build in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu just for this purpose.
I'm curious why Microsoft feels the need to port things like Silverlight to the Apple platform but apparently feels no such need to port to Linux. Market share certainly plays a role, but it makes me wonder which platform MS considers the greater long-term threat to their monopoly?
I haven't really looked into Canvas or other native browser approaches. Do they enable encryption and other DRM features that many content providers consider a minimum requirement?
Verizon isn't stringing fiberoptic cable along poles for the simple reason that a break in the fiberoptic is not anywhere near as easy to patch as a break in telephone lines. They are trenching.
No, they're using poles when they can. My FiOS service comes off the pole. They're not going to dig trenches or pull wire through conduit unless conditions (including regulatory ones) require it.
We had quite a bit of snow this winter here in New England; I never lost service.
You sure they're not renting her the new modem? Check her monthly bill.
The figures quoted are really rather incomparable, I suspect. In the Japanese case it appears that that fiber structure was already in place, and the $20/HH figure is an "upgrade" cost, most of which is probably concentrated at the provider's end (routers, switches, etc.)
The figures for Verizon include the cost of installing the fiber networks themselves on poles, through conduits, etc. $716/HH passed seems like a very reasonable investment for something that will be paying off for decades.
Then we have the in-home installation costs. Verizon is usually installing a combination phone/video/Internet service, not just the latter. Much of the time the installers spend in peoples' homes comes from installing cable television services throughout the home. (VZ will install cable as many as three TVs as part of the free initial installation package.) Sometimes they can reuse the home's existing cable plant; sometimes they have to pull new cable. I will say that my experience with FiOS, a bit over a year ago, suggests that some of these costs reflect managerial incompetence. In my case they failed to show up for two scheduled installations of my residential service apparently because they were stunned to discover I already had a fiber drop for my business Internet service. The third time around I ended up with two techs, and the installation still took perhaps 6-8 hours. I'd guess they're better at installations now than they were, though. My friend just added cable television to his existing FiOS phone/Internet package, and the installer was there for only two hours. Of course the ONT was already installed, and the home had been previously wired for cable.
The installers themselves were quite competent and professional; it was their managers who couldn't figure out what to do in my case.
And then when you try to determine who the bastard is that is behind the spamvertised .viagra domain, you will find that the owner of the .viagra gTLD is selling domains without requiring anything vaguely resembling valid registration data.
AFAIK, ICANN has defended trademark owners' efforts to protect their marks in domain names. Any .viagra domain is going to be owned by Pfizer.
Remember Lotus Symphony? It's vying for a comeback.
It's not your dad's Lotus Symphony, though. This version was dubbed OpenOffice in Eclipse Clothing.
Just a clarification. I used the term "networks" in the last sentence meaning the large conglomerates that now control both television programming and distribution like NBC/Universal or Disney/ABC. It wasn't always so.
They don't block these sites in Sweden do they?
Yes, they do.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081003030102AATdW2Q
http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/06/access-hulu-from-outside-the-united-states/
Television programming is distributed across the world in a complex staged operation. Producers like Universal have contracts with broadcasters around the world for the carriage of their programming. Most US shows are not available overseas for months or even years after their initial telecasts in the States.
The global perspective of the Internet does not extend to the long-standing business practices developed by the television industry over decades. Just the fact that television programming is available on websites owned by the networks themselves is a revolutionary change in the industry. Since the inception of broadcast television in America, network-affiliated stations relied on a combination of their monopoly over network content and local news programming to remain profitable. Now the networks have decided to compete directly against those very affiliates by abolishing their monopoly over distribution. For this to occur on a global basis, the networks will have to compete against their distributors across the world. I'd guess we're talking just a few years, but it could take a decade.
Tor was not designed for the type and levels of traffic BitTorrent generates. Using it for torrents squeezes out people who actually need to remain anonymous. Widespread use of Tor for torrents would be a disaster for freedom.
Please don't recommend Tor.
You want this sort of thing to stop? Address the fear, not the symptom.
As much as I might agree with you, fear sells. Education does not.
Look at how we've treated the question of missing children for a few decades now. Most studies show that children are abducted by people they know, often by one or another parent after a marital breakup. Yet most parents I've spoken with over the years fear that their children will be snatched off street corners by strangers. As a single father I heard no end of these concerns from hysterical relatives who were convinced my daughter was inevitably going to be snatched from cars or stores or my front lawn.
Another poster made the important point that we don't see any media coverage of the investigation and prosecution of the people who actually produce child pornography. The focus is always on the "sinful" consumer of pornography because it's often easier to find those people than to invest in the hard work of uncovering the actual producers. Now it seems we've just made it easier to define the producers as the kids themselves.
One can hope that public exposure of the idiocy of current efforts to limit child pornography might help educate people into the actual nature of the crime and illuminate the motives of grandstanding prosecutors. I'm not optimistic.
If you're willing to play with the command line a bit, here's a way to see what's happening behind the scenes.
Install Kubuntu 8.10. Now open a Terminal window and at the $ prompt type "sudo apt-get install nautilus" and enter your password when prompted. Nautilus is the GNOME file browser, the equivalent application to KDE's Dolphin. You'll see the installer download dozens of additional files besides nautilus itself. That's the "infrastructure" (libraries) needed to run GNOME applications.
You can see the same process in reverse by running "sudo apt-get install dolphin" on a plain Ubuntu (8.10+) installation.
Once the libraries are available, you can run either set of applications on either desktop.