"I'm all for net neutrality, but with restrictions put on what the government can do"
Your point seems to miss two fundamental points:
1) we (the government, by virtue of those we elect; yes we often chose poorly) paid to have the internet invented
2) putting restrictions on the people to their own inventions so that rules can be set by third parties, with no accountability is just asking for trouble, since eventually these parties will exclude everyone else from the decision making process and then be free to charge whatever they want for "internet related services", which essentially means every aspect of human activity these days.
Better have a few basic rules like net-neutrality that essentially say, no you can not manipulate the system to give yourself an unfair advantage. I like the idea of requiring ISP and service providers to pay a larger "royalty" to the government each year so that certain essential services (free and fair exchange of political speech, free and fair elections, universal pricing for political advertising, free availability of laws and regulations be made available to all, etc. without third parties being able to inject their own self-serving "rules" into the process whereby they can charge differential costs to access such information.
Maybe we need some kind of "minimum delivered services laws" akin to minimum wage laws, if the principal of net-neutrality for IP packets is to abandoned to the free markets. Otherwise, a few will gain at everyone else's expense and that is not an equitable or useful social policy upon which to manage the sustainability of a fragile planet.
"why not loosen up that one and see what real competition does for the internet instead of the government-enfornced monopolies we have today?"
What you would see is exactly what you have seen in every other deregulated industry. A few big players continually stacking the deck against any realistic competition from much smaller competitors until as has occurred in banking, gasoline distribution, cable operations, news media business, etc. two or three large dominant players that are "too big to fail" and able to lobby or bypass government to maintain a monopoly that are NOT government enforced, but rather subject to no regulation as to price fixing schemes, privacy intrusion, special tax breaks, etc. Eliminating governmental regulation (shrinking government) to benefit a few private fifedoms has ALWAYS turned out badly for the public at large and actually threatens democracy itself.
Allowing private tiers would make it possible for a few ultra-wealthy non-regulated monopolies to control all political speech, including how much "alternative" candidates are charged for campaign advertisements (oh no we are preventing you from advertising, its just that if you don't pay more it will take 10 days for your webpage to load).
Why would you feel comfortable living in a society where the police watch everyone 24/7, particularly when the potential for corruption is so large?
Once this is in place its only a short step to using that data for corporations or governments to decide that some people aren't doing/going what/where they want them to do/go. Suddenly, your life becomes a constant challenge to follow the same pattern day in day out so as not to run afoul of the authorities. Yes, I want the police to have the tools they need to catch criminals, but society must be attentive enough to draw careful limits on such activities, lest it slip into an opportunity for abuse or worse a police state. You say its only a difference of price and magnitude. While that may be true, with both society becomes qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. Once we go down that road, there's a good change that we won't be coming back.
1) you will be arrested and charged with destroying government property and be required to pay for it plus fines. If it was bought via an expensive subcontractor and it was expensive enough that would upon conviction instantly make you a felon. 2) you would be arrested for willfully interfering with a police investigation also another felony 3) you will be arrested for calling the bomb squad without adequate reason and charged the $50,000 it costs for them to deploy the unit 4) you can expect to see your every move reported and sold to the highest bidder at public auction 5) you will assist in the election of Meg Whitman, who would appoint more such judges to further maximize her profits and help her recover the costs of her election campaign
Truth is you are f***ked, but just haven't figured it out yet.
In principle its not, but think of how different our society would be if the police could simultaneously track the whereabouts of everyone 24/7, sending out a squad car or two when they felt it necessary or selling that information to say improve police pay and morale, or just posting on facebook the fact that you have been going to the bathroom a little more regularly than usual just for fun.
Is that really the kind of society you would feel comfortable living in?
If the plastic contained an embedded cooper wire mesh it would effectively block transmissions, but it might make it rather easy for the police to spot your car. However, if it were built into the body or fiberglassed into the paint job drug dealers everywhere would rush to buy one.
I guess that's why Fox News made such a fuss about Acorn as they were advocates for the homeless poor and all the conservatives came to their assistance in the face of what proved to be totally fabricated and doctored recordings.
Why would they be illegal if you though you were protecting yourself from burglars who were tracking you so they would know when to strike, especially now that it has been made legal for them to step on to your property to attach it to your vehicle?
Get off your philosophical hobby horse. Societies everywhere are replete with instances of people having special privileges under the law. It permits them to do their job. However, in free society there need to be some limits that make sense so that society can continue to function effectively and hopefully fairly.
If I were a cop, I would not want to allow trespass to be permitted to catch criminals. Not because it doesn't make the job harder, certainly it would, bur rather it breeds further contempt and disrespect for the law that could at some point get policemen killed unnecessarily. If they had reasonable suspicion that this guy was a drug dealer it wouldn't have been all that difficult to obtain a warrant. They could have tailed the guy to get the evidence they needed but evidently political decisions were made to expand what is permissible police actions. Now we are just one step closer to a police state that will ultimately only increase disrespect for the police.
Since you are into historical parallels, don't forget the part about the previous administration starting unnecessary wars. Russian involvement in Afghanistan pre-Gorbachev was the straw that broke the camel's back.
It might be useful information if you were trying to establish if they were taking bribes or engaged in other illegal activity. Many judges have misused their authority in the past.
They can legally do it because the court says its legal. What part of the US judicial system don't you understand?
Thanks for all the platitudes, but the history of justice in the US is actually rather different from that you learned in grade school. You might want to brush up on an infamous character in the US southwest, Judge Roy Bean. His was a racket that enriched him at the expense of justice, all the while being perfectly legal. Keep in mind the tooth fairy is not actually real.
Right. Most cities are laying off cops and employees and you want them to institute a means where by possible criminals can monitor the location of the few policemen that are left.
I suppose you would also want them to be cutting your taxes while they did it right?
These things are small, about the size of a power supply on a notebook PC. Those used by the police are miniaturized to make them harder to detect for obvious reasons.
The guy was arrested by the police not the FBI, they are state employees operating under state laws. Lets face it, unless its interpreted well the US Consitution doesn't guarantee much. It doesn't for example say you have the right to breath, so presumably under the "if it ain't in the constitution" line of reasoning, you don't have a right to breath, unless it is granted to you by the state you live in. Should they pass a law that says you don't, you are up the creek without a paddle. Its for this kind of reason, judges should not interpret the constitution too literally. All these groups funded by the wealthy like Koch Industries are keen to push this kind of "if its not in the constitution, its not legal" arguments because rubes think such "liberal" arguments are bad and harmful, when they might actually be protecting you, if you are foolish enough to let some rich guy have the police monitor your location 24/7 so he can screw you on a real-time basis.
Do devices exist that would permit someone to detect if a GPS has been added to a vehicle, items of clothing, luggage, packpack, etc.? Seems as if the police have created a new market here.
I've heard of wives and husbands placing such devices with loggers on each other's cars to try to catch instances of infidelity and in cases where corporations are spying on one another, but clearly serious freedoms, lives and property are at stake if the government or anyone else readily begin to monitor people's location in real time with GPS, as such an ability would make it easy for criminals to break in to a home, if they new the owners were not there.
The solution seems simple enough. Create a registry for span at the US Justice Department that monitors spam activity categorizing it by the ISP's over which it travels. Then levy serious fines, say 10% of gross income, to those ISPs whose network traffic includes the top 10% of spam. The immediate response by the ISPs would be to disconnect/charge more for any machines/users/networks responsible. Make it easier in courts for ISP's to recoup their fines directly from spammers (those creating and/or posting spam). Yes it would be disruptive for a while, but in time efforts to snuff out spam would get better and better during each, say quarterly, fining period. Better networks would be able to boast that they have less spam and hence are more reliable. Cost of sending and posting spam would go up dramatically, eventually above the benefit obtained by spamming. Spamming would stop. Fines could be used for funding internet access to poor and places not yet served. Spam would only appear in WIKPEDIA history pages. All would be good.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm all for net neutrality, but with restrictions put on what the government can do"
Your point seems to miss two fundamental points:
1) we (the government, by virtue of those we elect; yes we often chose poorly) paid to have the internet invented
2) putting restrictions on the people to their own inventions so that rules can be set by third parties, with no accountability is just asking for trouble, since eventually these parties will exclude everyone else from the decision making process and then be free to charge whatever they want for "internet related services", which essentially means every aspect of human activity these days.
Better have a few basic rules like net-neutrality that essentially say, no you can not manipulate the system to give yourself an unfair advantage. I like the idea of requiring ISP and service providers to pay a larger "royalty" to the government each year so that certain essential services (free and fair exchange of political speech, free and fair elections, universal pricing for political advertising, free availability of laws and regulations be made available to all, etc. without third parties being able to inject their own self-serving "rules" into the process whereby they can charge differential costs to access such information.
Maybe we need some kind of "minimum delivered services laws" akin to minimum wage laws, if the principal of net-neutrality for IP packets is to abandoned to the free markets. Otherwise, a few will gain at everyone else's expense and that is not an equitable or useful social policy upon which to manage the sustainability of a fragile planet.
"why not loosen up that one and see what real competition does for the internet instead of the government-enfornced monopolies we have today?"
What you would see is exactly what you have seen in every other deregulated industry. A few big players continually stacking the deck against any realistic competition from much smaller competitors until as has occurred in banking, gasoline distribution, cable operations, news media business, etc. two or three large dominant players that are "too big to fail" and able to lobby or bypass government to maintain a monopoly that are NOT government enforced, but rather subject to no regulation as to price fixing schemes, privacy intrusion, special tax breaks, etc. Eliminating governmental regulation (shrinking government) to benefit a few private fifedoms has ALWAYS turned out badly for the public at large and actually threatens democracy itself.
Allowing private tiers would make it possible for a few ultra-wealthy non-regulated monopolies to control all political speech, including how much "alternative" candidates are charged for campaign advertisements (oh no we are preventing you from advertising, its just that if you don't pay more it will take 10 days for your webpage to load).
Why would you feel comfortable living in a society where the police watch everyone 24/7, particularly when the potential for corruption is so large?
Once this is in place its only a short step to using that data for corporations or governments to decide that some people aren't doing/going what/where they want them to do/go. Suddenly, your life becomes a constant challenge to follow the same pattern day in day out so as not to run afoul of the authorities. Yes, I want the police to have the tools they need to catch criminals, but society must be attentive enough to draw careful limits on such activities, lest it slip into an opportunity for abuse or worse a police state. You say its only a difference of price and magnitude. While that may be true, with both society becomes qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. Once we go down that road, there's a good change that we won't be coming back.
What? Me Worry?
Wait till your next door neighbor the terrorist swaps the one on his care for yours Alfred.
Yes,
and
1) you will be arrested and charged with destroying government property and be required to pay for it plus fines. If it was bought via an expensive subcontractor and it was expensive enough that would upon conviction instantly make you a felon.
2) you would be arrested for willfully interfering with a police investigation also another felony
3) you will be arrested for calling the bomb squad without adequate reason and charged the $50,000 it costs for them to deploy the unit
4) you can expect to see your every move reported and sold to the highest bidder at public auction
5) you will assist in the election of Meg Whitman, who would appoint more such judges to further maximize her profits and help her recover the costs of her election campaign
Truth is you are f***ked, but just haven't figured it out yet.
They generate a log of GPS coordinates that can easily be downloaded via USB 2.0.
You obviously haven't been to Arizona recently.
In principle its not, but think of how different our society would be if the police could simultaneously track the whereabouts of everyone 24/7, sending out a squad car or two when they felt it necessary or selling that information to say improve police pay and morale, or just posting on facebook the fact that you have been going to the bathroom a little more regularly than usual just for fun.
Is that really the kind of society you would feel comfortable living in?
In that event, probably the cost of his lawyer would greatly exceed the cost of paying the penalties.
If the plastic contained an embedded cooper wire mesh it would effectively block transmissions, but it might make it rather easy for the police to spot your car. However, if it were built into the body or fiberglassed into the paint job drug dealers everywhere would rush to buy one.
I guess that's why Fox News made such a fuss about Acorn as they were advocates for the homeless poor and all the conservatives came to their assistance in the face of what proved to be totally fabricated and doctored recordings.
Why would they be illegal if you though you were protecting yourself from burglars who were tracking you so they would know when to strike, especially now that it has been made legal for them to step on to your property to attach it to your vehicle?
Get off your philosophical hobby horse. Societies everywhere are replete with instances of people having special privileges under the law. It permits them to do their job. However, in free society there need to be some limits that make sense so that society can continue to function effectively and hopefully fairly.
If I were a cop, I would not want to allow trespass to be permitted to catch criminals. Not because it doesn't make the job harder, certainly it would, bur rather it breeds further contempt and disrespect for the law that could at some point get policemen killed unnecessarily. If they had reasonable suspicion that this guy was a drug dealer it wouldn't have been all that difficult to obtain a warrant. They could have tailed the guy to get the evidence they needed but evidently political decisions were made to expand what is permissible police actions. Now we are just one step closer to a police state that will ultimately only increase disrespect for the police.
Yes, evidently you were born with your balls tied around your neck rather than your umbilical cord. A well-hung marvel, but not too smart.
This is a no-brainer. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, will be for it as implanting GPS units is not expressly forbidden for members of the STATE police.
Try telling that to the neighbor kids.
You must be talking about the US Senate.
Since you are into historical parallels, don't forget the part about the previous administration starting unnecessary wars. Russian involvement in Afghanistan pre-Gorbachev was the straw that broke the camel's back.
It might be useful information if you were trying to establish if they were taking bribes or engaged in other illegal activity. Many judges have misused their authority in the past.
They can legally do it because the court says its legal. What part of the US judicial system don't you understand?
Thanks for all the platitudes, but the history of justice in the US is actually rather different from that you learned in grade school. You might want to brush up on an infamous character in the US southwest, Judge Roy Bean. His was a racket that enriched him at the expense of justice, all the while being perfectly legal. Keep in mind the tooth fairy is not actually real.
Right. Most cities are laying off cops and employees and you want them to institute a means where by possible criminals can monitor the location of the few policemen that are left.
I suppose you would also want them to be cutting your taxes while they did it right?
These things are small, about the size of a power supply on a notebook PC. Those used by the police are miniaturized to make them harder to detect for obvious reasons.
Your spouse could be using one on you now.
The guy was arrested by the police not the FBI, they are state employees operating under state laws. Lets face it, unless its interpreted well the US Consitution doesn't guarantee much. It doesn't for example say you have the right to breath, so presumably under the "if it ain't in the constitution" line of reasoning, you don't have a right to breath, unless it is granted to you by the state you live in. Should they pass a law that says you don't, you are up the creek without a paddle. Its for this kind of reason, judges should not interpret the constitution too literally. All these groups funded by the wealthy like Koch Industries are keen to push this kind of "if its not in the constitution, its not legal" arguments because rubes think such "liberal" arguments are bad and harmful, when they might actually be protecting you, if you are foolish enough to let some rich guy have the police monitor your location 24/7 so he can screw you on a real-time basis.
Do devices exist that would permit someone to detect if a GPS has been added to a vehicle, items of clothing, luggage, packpack, etc.? Seems as if the police have created a new market here.
I've heard of wives and husbands placing such devices with loggers on each other's cars to try to catch instances of infidelity and in cases where corporations are spying on one another, but clearly serious freedoms, lives and property are at stake if the government or anyone else readily begin to monitor people's location in real time with GPS, as such an ability would make it easy for criminals to break in to a home, if they new the owners were not there.
The solution seems simple enough. Create a registry for span at the US Justice Department that monitors spam activity categorizing it by the ISP's over which it travels. Then levy serious fines, say 10% of gross income, to those ISPs whose network traffic includes the top 10% of spam. The immediate response by the ISPs would be to disconnect/charge more for any machines/users/networks responsible. Make it easier in courts for ISP's to recoup their fines directly from spammers (those creating and/or posting spam). Yes it would be disruptive for a while, but in time efforts to snuff out spam would get better and better during each, say quarterly, fining period. Better networks would be able to boast that they have less spam and hence are more reliable. Cost of sending and posting spam would go up dramatically, eventually above the benefit obtained by spamming. Spamming would stop. Fines could be used for funding internet access to poor and places not yet served. Spam would only appear in WIKPEDIA history pages. All would be good.