Actually, things like cable, water, and power are often considered "natural monopolies". You can't blame the government for this.
One reason is that the barrier of entry is so high: it's not like opening a new restaurant or computer store where customers can choose to come to you. If you want to start a new cable company, you need to run wires all over the city first, or else make your potential customers wait for weeks or months to begin service. Running all those wires costs a ton of money.
Another reason is that we don't necessarily want a dozen parallel sets of wires running down every street. It's inefficient and ugly.
That's also true of other unlawful acts where all parties involved are consenting: drug use, prostitution, underage drinking and smoking, jaywalking, etc. No matter what the penalties are, people will still do them because the chances of getting caught are minuscule.
I don't know about that. I believe in Free software too... I just don't think requiring everyone to distribute source code is a necessary part of it. I think it's sufficient to let end users redistribute the proprietary version and reverse-engineer any proprietary changes.
RMS wants it to be convenient to modify and redistribute software. I don't mind if it's merely feasible.
Evidently, since people still do it. People still commit every crime. If your definition of an "adequate" penalty is one that's completely effective as a deterrent, then there is no such thing.
Sure.... if you can come up with some way of giving people an incentive to produce new works and receive due recognition for them without somebody else of possibly higher profile coming along and getting all the credit. Currently, that's what copyright does right now. Easy:
1. The incentive to produce new works is the same as the incentive to cut hair, write code, design bridges, or manage companies: getting paid for doing it. As long as there is demand for new works to be produced, there will be people willing to pay for their production. Selling copies is an indirect way to fund that production, but without copyright, it could still be funded directly.
2. Taking credit for someone else's work is fraud. If you say "I wrote this book" when in fact you didn't, that's a lie, and if you say it in a commercial context, it may already be illegal. If not, it could be made illegal on its own without involving copyright.
Multi-thousand dollar fines for sharing a handful of songs are "inadequate"? You must be joking.
Increasing the penalties won't help, because the risk of incurring that penalty is still exceedingly small. The average file sharer is more likely to die in an accidental fall than to be caught infringing.
Unchecked copyright infringement, even if only against one company, weakens the value of copyright, as a whole... since future publishers see that copyright may be inadequate to protect their work from being copied. The smart publishers already saw that the minute they first learned what copyright is. The idea that a law could actually be effective at restricting the flow of information from one individual who wants to share it to another who wants to receive it is absurd on its face.
Copyright is inadequate to prevent any works from being copied, and the sooner we realize that as a society and shift to a model that doesn't need to prevent copying, the better off we'll be.
What the bigger publishing firm could do is snatch the work and start distributing it (at no cost) online themselves [...] if file sharing of copyrighted material without permission wasn't criminal, somebody could take some GNU software and make changes and release those changes under whatever terms they wanted via filesharing You seem to have misunderstood the difference between criminal and civil law. "Criminalizing" something means making it a crime, the sort of thing that the police can arrest you for without anyone having to sue you first.
Copyright infringement is still a civil tort, and even though you won't be hauled off in handcuffs for trading songs, you can still be sued for it.
The fact that the EU decided not to criminalize file sharing doesn't mean they legalized it.
And by the way, since you brought up the GPL... those of us who are opposed to copyright in general (I don't believe infringement should be a crime or a civil tort) tend to believe that the main effect of the GPL is to give back the rights that copyright law takes away. If anyone could distribute any software without anyone else's permission, would it really matter if some of them didn't include the source code? RMS says yes, but I say no.
How is it any more misleading than your phone company telling you you can use your phone any day, any time of the day, despite the fact that if too many people try to use it at once, you start hitting limits on the number of simultaneous active circuits? (1) If I try to make more calls than the telephone network can handle, all I get is a recorded message telling me "All circuits are busy, please try again". I don't get kicked off the phone network for making too many calls. While I might not technically be able to make all the calls I want, the phone company's policy is to let me use the service I'm paying for to the full extent that the technology allows.
(2) The phone company recognizes that their network is there to serve their customers, not the other way around. If overall phone usage goes up, they build more lines. They don't start blocking certain numbers, or certain topics of conversation, for being too popular and tying up the network.
Maybe what we need is a hybrid payment system like cell phone plans, where you pay a flat rate for usage up to a certain point, and everything past that point is metered.
In fact, ISPs pretty much already do that -- it's just that the "certain point" isn't written down anywhere, and instead of charging you more once you pass it, they throttle your connections or terminate your account.
Imagine if we built roads to the specification that they had to carry the maximum possible number of vehicles in the area at once. We'd have 4 and 6 lane highways running through most every neighborhood. OK, but imagine if we handled overcrowding on the roads the same way some ISPs want to handle overcrowding on their networks.
Those ISPs want to block or throttle connections to services that use a lot of bandwidth. That's like your city government responding to traffic by noticing that, say, 50% of the cars on the road are traveling to/from the beach, and then closing the beach in order to reduce traffic by 50%.
That's ridiculous, right? The roads are there to serve the people, not the other way around. If all those people want to go to the beach, then the roads just have to be built bigger to compensate.
The network doesn't need to be built to carry the theoretical peak traffic, just like not every road needs to be expanded to hold all the cars that might conceivably drive down it at once. But it should be built to carry the average amount of traffic, and -- here's the important part -- expanded to keep up with the average as usage patterns change.
The network is there to serve users, not the other way around. When users decide en masse that they want to start using higher-bandwidth applications like streaming video, the network needs to adapt to suit the new level of demand. ISPs who try to prevent customers from using any more bandwidth today than they did five years ago are being unreasonable.
Well, right, it's not really meant to compete with NAS. I think the performance problems are caused by the USB link. There is an attachment you can use to connect it to a network, but it's also expensive and doesn't improve performance.
But if someone could convince them to put their technology to use in a professional storage array instead of a consumer-level RAID For Dummies...
Drobo does this. There's an LED gauge showing how full the array is, and when a drive needs replacing, the light next to it turns red. You can mix and match different sized drives, too - when it gets full, you can pop out a 250 GB and put in a 1 TB.
The downside is it only has 4 bays and connects via USB 2.
consider this, if you're $5,000 into the next tax bracket, and you donate $10,000 to drop you down to the next lower tax bracket, and dropping yourself down to the next lower tax bracket saves you from paying $20,000 in taxes total, you would do it in a heart beat. That's not how it works. Tax brackets mean the first X dollars of your income are taxed at A%, the next Y dollars are taxed at B%, the next Z dollars after that are taxed at C%, and so on.
If you have $5000 of your income in the C% bracket, and you donate $10,000 to drop down to the B% bracket, your net income after taxes will decrease, not increase -- because the higher C% rate only applied to that last $5000, not your entire income.
I think it is unfair for the government to take away a higher percentage of your income just because you made more money. Unfortunately for flat tax supporters, that's a fringe minority view. Most people believe a progressive tax is more fair.
I mean, you could just as easily argue that it's unfair for the government to take away a higher dollar amount just because you made more money - that everyone should pay the same number of dollars in tax. There is no objective definition of "fairness". There are only subjective ones, and the most common one seems to be that fairness means equalizing the real-world impact of a tax on taxpayers' ability to buy the necessities of life, not just equalizing the numbers.
They will "build job-creating factories, finance research and development to create new products, or fund charitable activities"(from the faq). Even if they don't do that and they really do keep the cash in a savings account someday someone will spend that cash. Maybe it is a child, or a grandchild. Either way that money will be taxed when it is spent. If they don't spend it until later, then the government is effectively giving them an interest-free loan until they decide to spend it. Meanwhile, the government still needs to pay for stuff in the present, and if they don't have enough tax revenue (because so much of it has been pushed into the future) then they'll have to borrow the money and pay interest. Also, the taxes those people do pay will be worth less in the future anyway.
The result is that if you spend later, you effectively get taxed at a lower rate than if you spend today. Do you really want to encourage people not to spend their money? That doesn't seem like it'd be a good thing for the economy.
I also have a very simple test to identify true love. A friend of mine explained that all three of a set of easily observable indicators will be present IFF true love. Again, this test is consistent with my experience, and for most of the happily married people I've asked. Well, come on, don't be shy. What are they?
At that point if you're still single, you're disconnected from a major port of the interests of a large part of your peer group. Still, finding new peers at that point seems like a better plan than going through all the stress, annoyance, and expense of having kids just to keep up with the peers you already have.
I mean, it's one thing to spend $300 on an Xbox so you can join in the conversations about Halo. It's quite another to spend tens of thousands of dollars, give up most of your free time, and restructure your entire life so you can join in the conversations about little league and braces.
Encrypting is not patching. Snowi fully contains Snow White. With XOR encryption, every suitably large block of data fully contains Snow White - as long as you have the right key to decrypt it.
See also Count-Pointercount, from the Kentucky Fried Movie around the same time:
John Fitzsimmons: Well Sheila, I guess even you and your liberal cronies have found the light at the end of love with our beloved president. The intellectuals have been much agitated and now, having gotten the presidency by exploiting the problems they themselves have manufactured, he has done his best to fuel their anxieties about him. Sheila. Will you and your pack of bleeding heart liberals never learn that expanding welfare roles only accelerate inflation and inevitably hurt most those they purport to help?
Sheila Hamilton: Why John, you old stick in the mud. I've been listening to that horse shit of yours for months, and you can take that crap and blow it out your ass. And for good measure, sit on THIS [flips the bird], John.
USB uses an antiquated SCSI command set, unfortunately. That's why, even though you can fit 4 TB or more into a Drobo, it has to be split up into 2 TB volumes.
Sure. So criminals bring guns in from elsewhere, but the LAW-ABIDING citizens of Wash.D.C. are defenseless, thus easy targets. Right, but that's not really an argument against gun control in general. It just means you can't expect to have a gun-free zone right next door to a gun shop.
Dallas has as much density and poverty, yet a lower gun crimes rate. Dallas allows concealed carry. Hmm.... The UK also has a lower gun crimes rate, and guns are banned there. Hmm indeed!
My gun is why I am here typing this today, and not pushing up daisies. I'm sure that'll come as a great comfort to the families of all the people who are pushing up daisies because of guns.
Right... so how do you explain Washington D.C., with the strongest anti-gun laws in the U.S., and also the highest rate of violent/gun-enforced crime?? (by which I mean where the gun is used to enforce compliance on the victim) 1. Easy access to guns in neighboring states. A ban is worthless if you can just drive 30 minutes away to buy a gun.
2. Density and poverty, which tend to lead to high crime with or without guns.
Conversely, various cities with easy-to-get concealed-carry permits have much lower violent crime rates. Gee, wonder why that is? Because they're usually in rural areas where crime is low anyway?
I'll bet there are big chunks of London where as a good citizen you'd sure as hell not go walking at night, because the resident thugs KNOW you're not armed.... And I'll bet that never happens here in the US. The thugs themselves are never armed, and certainly they don't have a lot of free time to spend practicing (while the rest of us are at work), so a gun always gives you the upper hand in any face-off against a thug. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting definition of "decrease the size of government", considering that government spending (and debt) increased under Reagan.
Actually, things like cable, water, and power are often considered "natural monopolies". You can't blame the government for this.
One reason is that the barrier of entry is so high: it's not like opening a new restaurant or computer store where customers can choose to come to you. If you want to start a new cable company, you need to run wires all over the city first, or else make your potential customers wait for weeks or months to begin service. Running all those wires costs a ton of money.
Another reason is that we don't necessarily want a dozen parallel sets of wires running down every street. It's inefficient and ugly.
If physical access is what matters, then it should be possible for anyone to burn CDs as long as they're logged in at the console.
If some blank paper is in the printer, and a program writes to it without authorization from the owner of the paper, the paper becomes unusable.
But do you have to enter your root password every time you print? I think not.
That's also true of other unlawful acts where all parties involved are consenting: drug use, prostitution, underage drinking and smoking, jaywalking, etc. No matter what the penalties are, people will still do them because the chances of getting caught are minuscule.
I don't know about that. I believe in Free software too... I just don't think requiring everyone to distribute source code is a necessary part of it. I think it's sufficient to let end users redistribute the proprietary version and reverse-engineer any proprietary changes.
RMS wants it to be convenient to modify and redistribute software. I don't mind if it's merely feasible.
1. The incentive to produce new works is the same as the incentive to cut hair, write code, design bridges, or manage companies: getting paid for doing it. As long as there is demand for new works to be produced, there will be people willing to pay for their production. Selling copies is an indirect way to fund that production, but without copyright, it could still be funded directly.
2. Taking credit for someone else's work is fraud. If you say "I wrote this book" when in fact you didn't, that's a lie, and if you say it in a commercial context, it may already be illegal. If not, it could be made illegal on its own without involving copyright.
Multi-thousand dollar fines for sharing a handful of songs are "inadequate"? You must be joking.
Increasing the penalties won't help, because the risk of incurring that penalty is still exceedingly small. The average file sharer is more likely to die in an accidental fall than to be caught infringing.
Copyright is inadequate to prevent any works from being copied, and the sooner we realize that as a society and shift to a model that doesn't need to prevent copying, the better off we'll be.
if file sharing of copyrighted material without permission wasn't criminal, somebody could take some GNU software and make changes and release those changes under whatever terms they wanted via filesharing You seem to have misunderstood the difference between criminal and civil law. "Criminalizing" something means making it a crime, the sort of thing that the police can arrest you for without anyone having to sue you first.
Copyright infringement is still a civil tort, and even though you won't be hauled off in handcuffs for trading songs, you can still be sued for it.
The fact that the EU decided not to criminalize file sharing doesn't mean they legalized it.
And by the way, since you brought up the GPL... those of us who are opposed to copyright in general (I don't believe infringement should be a crime or a civil tort) tend to believe that the main effect of the GPL is to give back the rights that copyright law takes away. If anyone could distribute any software without anyone else's permission, would it really matter if some of them didn't include the source code? RMS says yes, but I say no.
(2) The phone company recognizes that their network is there to serve their customers, not the other way around. If overall phone usage goes up, they build more lines. They don't start blocking certain numbers, or certain topics of conversation, for being too popular and tying up the network.
Maybe what we need is a hybrid payment system like cell phone plans, where you pay a flat rate for usage up to a certain point, and everything past that point is metered.
In fact, ISPs pretty much already do that -- it's just that the "certain point" isn't written down anywhere, and instead of charging you more once you pass it, they throttle your connections or terminate your account.
Those ISPs want to block or throttle connections to services that use a lot of bandwidth. That's like your city government responding to traffic by noticing that, say, 50% of the cars on the road are traveling to/from the beach, and then closing the beach in order to reduce traffic by 50%.
That's ridiculous, right? The roads are there to serve the people, not the other way around. If all those people want to go to the beach, then the roads just have to be built bigger to compensate.
The network doesn't need to be built to carry the theoretical peak traffic, just like not every road needs to be expanded to hold all the cars that might conceivably drive down it at once. But it should be built to carry the average amount of traffic, and -- here's the important part -- expanded to keep up with the average as usage patterns change.
The network is there to serve users, not the other way around. When users decide en masse that they want to start using higher-bandwidth applications like streaming video, the network needs to adapt to suit the new level of demand. ISPs who try to prevent customers from using any more bandwidth today than they did five years ago are being unreasonable.
Well, right, it's not really meant to compete with NAS. I think the performance problems are caused by the USB link. There is an attachment you can use to connect it to a network, but it's also expensive and doesn't improve performance.
But if someone could convince them to put their technology to use in a professional storage array instead of a consumer-level RAID For Dummies...
Drobo does this. There's an LED gauge showing how full the array is, and when a drive needs replacing, the light next to it turns red. You can mix and match different sized drives, too - when it gets full, you can pop out a 250 GB and put in a 1 TB.
The downside is it only has 4 bays and connects via USB 2.
If you have $5000 of your income in the C% bracket, and you donate $10,000 to drop down to the B% bracket, your net income after taxes will decrease, not increase -- because the higher C% rate only applied to that last $5000, not your entire income.
I mean, you could just as easily argue that it's unfair for the government to take away a higher dollar amount just because you made more money - that everyone should pay the same number of dollars in tax. There is no objective definition of "fairness". There are only subjective ones, and the most common one seems to be that fairness means equalizing the real-world impact of a tax on taxpayers' ability to buy the necessities of life, not just equalizing the numbers. They will "build job-creating factories, finance research and development to create new products, or fund charitable activities"(from the faq). Even if they don't do that and they really do keep the cash in a savings account someday someone will spend that cash. Maybe it is a child, or a grandchild. Either way that money will be taxed when it is spent. If they don't spend it until later, then the government is effectively giving them an interest-free loan until they decide to spend it. Meanwhile, the government still needs to pay for stuff in the present, and if they don't have enough tax revenue (because so much of it has been pushed into the future) then they'll have to borrow the money and pay interest. Also, the taxes those people do pay will be worth less in the future anyway.
The result is that if you spend later, you effectively get taxed at a lower rate than if you spend today. Do you really want to encourage people not to spend their money? That doesn't seem like it'd be a good thing for the economy.
A friend of mine explained that all three of a set of easily observable indicators will be present IFF true love.
Again, this test is consistent with my experience, and for most of the happily married people I've asked. Well, come on, don't be shy. What are they?
I mean, it's one thing to spend $300 on an Xbox so you can join in the conversations about Halo. It's quite another to spend tens of thousands of dollars, give up most of your free time, and restructure your entire life so you can join in the conversations about little league and braces.
USB uses an antiquated SCSI command set, unfortunately. That's why, even though you can fit 4 TB or more into a Drobo, it has to be split up into 2 TB volumes.
2. Density and poverty, which tend to lead to high crime with or without guns. Conversely, various cities with easy-to-get concealed-carry permits have much lower violent crime rates. Gee, wonder why that is? Because they're usually in rural areas where crime is low anyway? I'll bet there are big chunks of London where as a good citizen you'd sure as hell not go walking at night, because the resident thugs KNOW you're not armed.... And I'll bet that never happens here in the US. The thugs themselves are never armed, and certainly they don't have a lot of free time to spend practicing (while the rest of us are at work), so a gun always gives you the upper hand in any face-off against a thug. Right?