Railroads and other corporations don't have the power to take property on their own under eminent domain. In the railroad cases, the government specifically passed laws declaring railroads to be in the public interests and allowing them to take land to complete the railroad. The various lawsuits you mention merely said, yes the government can steal your property and give it to the railroad if they want.
But they can't do anything without Big Brother passing a law.
But notice whose giving these corporations the ridiculous IP -- the government.
And I agree with the bulk of what you're saying. Both government and corporations that seek special dispensations from said government are very dangerous to freedom and safety; far more than a stray bullet.
Stable democracies clearly don't murder civilians as often as other governments, but they do tend to murder civilians, though amost always not domestically. Rudy Rummel, who has made an exhaustive study of state-sponsored murder in the 20th century, estimates the U.S. murdered somewhere between 300,000 and 1.6 million people, mostly civilian killings during foreign wars (and his study concluded with 1987, so we don't have the numbers of illegal deaths from starving Iraqi children, etc.)
But even there crypto. is vital. One of the patterns Rummel notes in democracies that murder civilians is that they almost always murder only when they can plausibly deny to their citizens that such murders took place (i.e. they feel they can get away with lying).
The Internet and strong crypto. make such efforts to hide murders more difficult and further reduce the threat from stable democracies.
Are you high? Libel is difficult to prove in the UK? Give me a break -- the UK has some of the worst libel laws in the Western world. That crap McDonald's pulled a couple years ago would never occur in the U.S. Books are regularly available for sale outside the UK that are never printed in the UK due to the backward libel laws.
"The constitution does not protect lies or speech that incites riots."
This is not accurate.
Jon Katz is really a woman.
...is a lie but it is certainly protected by the Constitution (I doubt you'd get a civil jury to find this statement libelous because it doesn't exactly harm Katz's reputation).
It would be better to say the First Amendment doesn't protect libel nor slander, nor does it protect speech whose sole function is to create violence such as riots (saying "kill" to a trained attack dog could be a potentially criminal act).
I think the most hilarious claim I saw was on NBC that Netscape failed because of MS's dominance. BS. Netscape failed because their browser was inferior to IE and they failed to adopt standards as quickly as MS (MS didn't exactly rush to standards, but their browsers is more compliant than that Netscape garbage).
More business for the lawyers
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
This decision is, of course, the lawyer employment act for the next several years (unless Jackson just gives MS a slap on the wrist, which seems unlikely).
Isn't this pretty straightforward? You have to pay a nominal fee to have access to the Ethernet in the dorms. Rather than pay the nominal fee these folks simply took it upon themselves to install their own connection to their rooms.
Seems like the university's case is pretty straightforward.
Apparently/. and its supporters generally believe that anytime geeks are inconvenienced they're warranted in breaking rules and laws. I work at a university which has some really stupid rules re: Internet access, but the solution is not just to say "F--- you and the rules" which seems to be the/. approved methodology.
How soon they forget. TSR, AD&D and the Internet were also in the news a few years ago for different reasons -- at that time TSR was sic-ing its lawyers on anybody who dared post anything related to AD&D on the Internet.
It's amusing to see WOTC take it Open Source since TSR was the master of lock-in. These folks actually once produced an Indiana Jones game in which a character was described as a "Nazi(TM)." That's right, they put a TM next to the word Nazi (which pretty much summed up the company's attitude).
Personally even with Gygax back there, there's too much history to want to go near a TSR product.
There are a variety of RPGs available on line with generic-style rules and very liberal licensing regimens akin to this one that don't have the TSR taint associated with them.
Of course if Joy is correct that there are just some things that MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW (TM), why doesn't show the way for the rest of us by aborting JINI?
Microsoft's CTO was on point in a BBC article about Joy -- every generation you have current scientists saying, "Oh know, what's just over the horizon is *really* scary." I put as much stock in this Joy's prediction of the future as I do that idiot who spent his fortune from his tech. company on a web site claming some alien conspiracy.
That, however, is a problem for the LIBRARIES not the company that makes CyberPatrol.
If I make a list of books I don't think libraries should own that is completely separate from any decision by an actual library to use my list as a guide (especially if I encrypt my list and don't let anybody see what books are on it, but some government idiot is stupid enough to use plug it into his library purchasing system so none of the books on my list can be bought by the library).
"Welcome to America in the new millennium, where a corporation just made the decision to ban several documents from the World Wide Web."
Nobody banned any documents at all. If you're stupid enough to buy CyberPatrol or any of the other crapola out there passing as filter software, you get what you deserve.
Hmmm...so if I registered ripoffkatz.com and created my own little Katz web site featuring all of his articles and a scanned in PDF version of his book, I would expect Katz would have no objections because there really is no property cyberspace. yeah, right.
Katz is completely wrong when he writes, "Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments."
Huh? If I don't like the restrictions placed on me by RIAA-associated music sellers I have alternatives -- I can go elsewhere (made much easier by the Internet). Hell I can even go out and make an album myself and release it and say "screw RIAA -- do what you want with my album."
But if the government says "You can't do this with your album" then I'm stuck. If they mandate censorship or require me to have a warning sticker or whatever, there isn't even the possibility of getting around that.
The government is far more dangerous than corporate bloodsuckers (in fact the government is largely responsible for the creation of the corporate bloodsuckers.)
In fact, this would hamper free speech. We don't need more restricted TLDs.
I run a site, Overpopulation.Com, for example, that argues the world is not overpopulated. I get a lot of email from folks who think my domain name should be revoked because, they argue, only someone who thinks the world is overpopulated should have overpopulation.com
And that's clearly what CPT is aiming for here. If I read their press release correctly, if I applied for overpopulation.ecology, they're going to reject me as not being a legitimate environmental group because of my political views.
This is the problem with Holland schools -- nobody teaches critical thinking.
It is logically fallacious to assume that because record sales increased that therefore the record industry is not harmed by pirating.
Suppose I swiped SlashDot pages and put them up on my site attracing 20 or 30 page views a month. At the end of the month Slashdot lawyers contact me and ask me to cease and desist. I point out that Slashdot page views actually increased over the month, so therefore Slashdot suffered no losses.
I used to read 7 or 8 daily newspapers. Now I read only one and get the rest of my news information online.
The one poster was correct though -- the advantage of the newspaper is that I can read it over lunch. But if I could get a Palm-like appliance with very cheap access costs for the net, then I'd ditch the physical newspaper altogether.
In the long run, the newspaper business is almost certainly going to migrate completely to the net.
More Katz clue-lessness. Okay like many of you, I live on North America, but I hardly ever think of myself as a "North American". Similarly I rarely see these broad groups forming explicit separate areas of the Internet.
Take GodNet. Don't even try to tell me something like an extreme right wing site like GodHatesFags.Com, a mainstream Christian site, a Wiccan site, and maybe some Satanist wannabe site are all part of the same Internet bloc.
Much the same problem goes for the other attempted typologies.
Hasn't Katz learned anything? You just can't pigeonhole the web into the sort of neat little cubbyholes folks like Katz want to do.
"Why is it in this country that the only cost effective way to get health insurance in through your employer? Because it benefits the employers, it keeps us in our place as good little employees. It makes it just that much harder to strike out on your own and be an independant, or even just to seek out a better job."
This is ridiculous. It is most effective to get insurance from your employer because a) health insurance is expensive and b) insurance benefits are exempt from taxation. This translates into it being significantly cheaper for your employer to buy insurance rather than you.
The idea of giving tax exempt money in place of benefits has been around a long time but is generally derided by liberals and unions. Medical savings accounts, for example, is a proposal that would do this and has been opposed by liberals and unions.
"The best quote is from a corporate lawyer who redefines commercial speech to be speech about a corporation rather than speech by one: "Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech," said John Roberts, a Minneapolis attorney who specializes in cyberlaw. "You can't say whatever you want about a company." "
This is a clear implication of the idiotic distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech. If purely commercial speech doesn't have the same protection as non-commercial speech, then speech such as "Microsoft products suck" don't have the same protection as "Bill Bradley's policies suck."
The idea of "commercial speech" is an idiotic invention of the Supreme Court that thankfully it has moved away from in recent decades.
"Text only versions should not be overly expensive to produce."
As a single proprietor of several web sites, the costs of preparing alternative versions of the same content is often prohibitive. I try to keep my sites as Lynx-friendly as possible but the traffic isn't there to create a separate area or sacrifice a nice feature just to satisfy the small group of hardcore Lynx users.
If Netscape and IE would just fix the way they deal with the ALT tag, this wouldn't be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of interesting to see how many folks here can't distinguish between vaporware and actual shipping product.
Railroads and other corporations don't have the power to take property on their own under eminent domain. In the railroad cases, the government specifically passed laws declaring railroads to be in the public interests and allowing them to take land to complete the railroad. The various lawsuits you mention merely said, yes the government can steal your property and give it to the railroad if they want.
But they can't do anything without Big Brother passing a law.
But notice whose giving these corporations the ridiculous IP -- the government.
And I agree with the bulk of what you're saying. Both government and corporations that seek special dispensations from said government are very dangerous to freedom and safety; far more than a stray bullet.
Stable democracies clearly don't murder civilians as often as other governments, but they do tend to murder civilians, though amost always not domestically. Rudy Rummel, who has made an exhaustive study of state-sponsored murder in the 20th century, estimates the U.S. murdered somewhere between 300,000 and 1.6 million people, mostly civilian killings during foreign wars (and his study concluded with 1987, so we don't have the numbers of illegal deaths from starving Iraqi children, etc.)
But even there crypto. is vital. One of the patterns Rummel notes in democracies that murder civilians is that they almost always murder only when they can plausibly deny to their citizens that such murders took place (i.e. they feel they can get away with lying).
The Internet and strong crypto. make such efforts to hide murders more difficult and further reduce the threat from stable democracies.
Are you high? Libel is difficult to prove in the UK? Give me a break -- the UK has some of the worst libel laws in the Western world. That crap McDonald's pulled a couple years ago would never occur in the U.S. Books are regularly available for sale outside the UK that are never printed in the UK due to the backward libel laws.
"The constitution does not protect lies or speech that incites riots."
This is not accurate.
Jon Katz is really a woman.
...is a lie but it is certainly protected by the Constitution (I doubt you'd get a civil jury to find this statement libelous because it doesn't exactly harm Katz's reputation).
It would be better to say the First Amendment doesn't protect libel nor slander, nor does it protect speech whose sole function is to create violence such as riots (saying "kill" to a trained attack dog could be a potentially criminal act).
I think the most hilarious claim I saw was on NBC that Netscape failed because of MS's dominance. BS. Netscape failed because their browser was inferior to IE and they failed to adopt standards as quickly as MS (MS didn't exactly rush to standards, but their browsers is more compliant than that Netscape garbage).
This decision is, of course, the lawyer employment act for the next several years (unless Jackson just gives MS a slap on the wrist, which seems unlikely).
Uh oh -- don't they know this sort of thing is going to bring an end to the world?
Isn't this pretty straightforward? You have to pay a nominal fee to have access to the Ethernet in the dorms. Rather than pay the nominal fee these folks simply took it upon themselves to install their own connection to their rooms.
/. and its supporters generally believe that anytime geeks are inconvenienced they're warranted in breaking rules and laws. I work at a university which has some really stupid rules re: Internet access, but the solution is not just to say "F--- you and the rules" which seems to be the /. approved methodology.
Seems like the university's case is pretty straightforward.
Apparently
The British government detained former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet based on allegations of what Pinoceht did to Spanish citizens in Chile.
There are plenty of precedents for this sort of thing.
Thank you for correcting my error.
How soon they forget. TSR, AD&D and the Internet were also in the news a few years ago for different reasons -- at that time TSR was sic-ing its lawyers on anybody who dared post anything related to AD&D on the Internet.
It's amusing to see WOTC take it Open Source since TSR was the master of lock-in. These folks actually once produced an Indiana Jones game in which a character was described as a "Nazi(TM)." That's right, they put a TM next to the word Nazi (which pretty much summed up the company's attitude).
Personally even with Gygax back there, there's too much history to want to go near a TSR product.
There are a variety of RPGs available on line with generic-style rules and very liberal licensing regimens akin to this one that don't have the TSR taint associated with them.
Of course if Joy is correct that there are just some things that MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW (TM), why doesn't show the way for the rest of us by aborting JINI?
Microsoft's CTO was on point in a BBC article about Joy -- every generation you have current scientists saying, "Oh know, what's just over the horizon is *really* scary." I put as much stock in this Joy's prediction of the future as I do that idiot who spent his fortune from his tech. company on a web site claming some alien conspiracy.
That, however, is a problem for the LIBRARIES not the company that makes CyberPatrol.
If I make a list of books I don't think libraries should own that is completely separate from any decision by an actual library to use my list as a guide (especially if I encrypt my list and don't let anybody see what books are on it, but some government idiot is stupid enough to use plug it into his library purchasing system so none of the books on my list can be bought by the library).
So don't buy the damn program.
"Welcome to America in the new millennium, where a corporation just made the decision to ban several documents from the World Wide Web."
Nobody banned any documents at all. If you're stupid enough to buy CyberPatrol or any of the other crapola out there passing as filter software, you get what you deserve.
Hmmm...so if I registered ripoffkatz.com and created my own little Katz web site featuring all of his articles and a scanned in PDF version of his book, I would expect Katz would have no objections because there really is no property cyberspace. yeah, right.
Katz is completely wrong when he writes, "Corporatists are the biggest modern menace to free speech and individualism, more powerful and predatory than most governments."
Huh? If I don't like the restrictions placed on me by RIAA-associated music sellers I have alternatives -- I can go elsewhere (made much easier by the Internet). Hell I can even go out and make an album myself and release it and say "screw RIAA -- do what you want with my album."
But if the government says "You can't do this with your album" then I'm stuck. If they mandate censorship or require me to have a warning sticker or whatever, there isn't even the possibility of getting around that.
The government is far more dangerous than corporate bloodsuckers (in fact the government is largely responsible for the creation of the corporate bloodsuckers.)
In fact, this would hamper free speech. We don't need more restricted TLDs.
I run a site, Overpopulation.Com, for example, that argues the world is not overpopulated. I get a lot of email from folks who think my domain name should be revoked because, they argue, only someone who thinks the world is overpopulated should have overpopulation.com
And that's clearly what CPT is aiming for here. If I read their press release correctly, if I applied for overpopulation.ecology, they're going to reject me as not being a legitimate environmental group because of my political views.
Very very bad idea.
This is the problem with Holland schools -- nobody teaches critical thinking.
It is logically fallacious to assume that because record sales increased that therefore the record industry is not harmed by pirating.
Suppose I swiped SlashDot pages and put them up on my site attracing 20 or 30 page views a month. At the end of the month Slashdot lawyers contact me and ask me to cease and desist. I point out that Slashdot page views actually increased over the month, so therefore Slashdot suffered no losses.
Yeah, I bet that would get far (if unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works is so great, how about removing all of the "© 1997-2000 Andover.Net." message at the bottom of each screen.)
I used to read 7 or 8 daily newspapers. Now I read only one and get the rest of my news information online.
The one poster was correct though -- the advantage of the newspaper is that I can read it over lunch. But if I could get a Palm-like appliance with very cheap access costs for the net, then I'd ditch the physical newspaper altogether.
In the long run, the newspaper business is almost certainly going to migrate completely to the net.
More Katz clue-lessness. Okay like many of you, I live on North America, but I hardly ever think of myself as a "North American". Similarly I rarely see these broad groups forming explicit separate areas of the Internet.
Take GodNet. Don't even try to tell me something like an extreme right wing site like GodHatesFags.Com, a mainstream Christian site, a Wiccan site, and maybe some Satanist wannabe site are all part of the same Internet bloc.
Much the same problem goes for the other attempted typologies.
Hasn't Katz learned anything? You just can't pigeonhole the web into the sort of neat little cubbyholes folks like Katz want to do.
"Why is it in this country that the only cost effective way to get health insurance in through your employer? Because it benefits the employers, it keeps us in our place as good little employees. It makes it just that much harder to strike out on your own and be an independant, or even just to seek out a better job."
This is ridiculous. It is most effective to get insurance from your employer because a) health insurance is expensive and b) insurance benefits are exempt from taxation. This translates into it being significantly cheaper for your employer to buy insurance rather than you.
The idea of giving tax exempt money in place of benefits has been around a long time but is generally derided by liberals and unions. Medical savings accounts, for example, is a proposal that would do this and has been opposed by liberals and unions.
"The best quote is from a corporate lawyer who redefines commercial speech to be speech about a corporation rather than speech by one: "Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech," said John Roberts, a Minneapolis attorney who specializes in cyberlaw. "You can't say whatever you want about a company." "
This is a clear implication of the idiotic distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech. If purely commercial speech doesn't have the same protection as non-commercial speech, then speech such as "Microsoft products suck" don't have the same protection as "Bill Bradley's policies suck."
The idea of "commercial speech" is an idiotic invention of the Supreme Court that thankfully it has moved away from in recent decades.
"Text only versions should not be overly expensive to produce."
As a single proprietor of several web sites, the costs of preparing alternative versions of the same content is often prohibitive. I try to keep my sites as Lynx-friendly as possible but the traffic isn't there to create a separate area or sacrifice a nice feature just to satisfy the small group of hardcore Lynx users.
If Netscape and IE would just fix the way they deal with the ALT tag, this wouldn't be a problem.