Besides, how is being asked to pay for your power a moral issue?
The moral issue is that you helped install a system that you stated very clearly is "childishly simple with little in the way of encryption or authentication" and these meters are responsible for a critical and potentially very expensive bill being sent to every person every month. Now a hacking framework is available, it is only a matter of time before smart meters will be hacked and people will get incorrect bills for far more than what they owed. It doesn't take a very good imagination to figure out even worse outcomes of having an easy to hack critical infrastructure. Someone could write a virus that could propagate through the smart meter network and then shut off power over a very wide area. When there are big power outages, sometimes people die.
So perhaps now the moral issue is a bit more clear? It is immoral to make critical infrastructure that is deliberately insecure.
Our product is designed to save clients money.
I can't imagine what utility you work for but it couldn't possibly be PG&E. The smart meters we have here are most decidedly NOT designed to save customers money. They were used as a backdoor way to implement "time of use" metering, so they can charge extra during peak hours. Many people I know with a smart meter have had their bill go up while their usage stayed the same. I often work from home so my bill went up fairly substantially. The other reason for the smart meters is that PG&E get to charge a percent markup for profit on "capital upgrades" so they decided "hey if we install a fancy expensive new meter on every single customer in the state we can make a huge extra pile of money!!!" So you can sell your "save the customer money" to a more gullible audience, but we aren't going to buy it here.
The Blitz disrupted England pretty heavily, but it didn't win the war for Germany did it? In fact it just taught the Brits just how important it was that they defeat the Nazis.
I wonder if the study took into account that dropping bombs onto wedding parties radicalizes a whole generation to despise us as the cowardly evil power that hides half a planet away and drops bombs from remote control airplanes on their families.
Actually you added "seeming random" to the definition of terrorism. The definition of terrorism is "The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims." Our political aims are to disable and weaken Al Qaeda. We use remote control airplanes to fire precision high explosive missiles at targets to assassinate particular people we think need to die. Very often these attack kill LOTS of non-combatants. The only difference I can see between this and driving a truck bomb into the embassy of a nation that is occupying your home is that when we do we don't have to send our people to their deaths, and our weapons are much more high tech and work better. Oh and our government subscribes to an idea they call "American Exceptionalism" which means the rules apply to everyone except us. So when we blow up a wedding party to get that Al Qaeda guy and kill 20 other men, women, and children at a wedding, it was collateral damage, but when they drive a car full of explosives into a crowd of men who are graduating from training to fight for an occupying force it is terrorism.
Both are despicable in the extreme, but my tax dollars pay to blow up the wedding party so that's the one that really pisses me off, because I contributed to that atrocity and I feel powerless to do anything about it. I mean I voted for the hope/change guy and now I've lost hope because there's been no real change.
It used to be if you added "internet" to any old obvious idea you could get a patent. Now you can throw "mobile" in there and any stupid, done a thousand times before, idea becomes patentable again.
You have a strange idea of what a 'verdict' is. Verdicts require unanimous agreement of the jury, 11-1 is as good as 1-11. Only 12-0 or 0-12 count.
This isn't really true. It is the case in a criminal trial, but in a civil trial there are different rules. I sat on the jury of an employment discrimination case and to reach a verdict on each of about 30 questions we had to find a majority of 9 of 12 either way.
For the judge to rule that "no reasonable jury" could rule for Novell immediately following an 11-1 jury decision for Novell is a bit of a stretch, and a slap in the face of those jurors.
That structure isn't even a real desert structure, its constructed out of cheap wood (which is not used in the desert as there are no trees), and plaster....it's not a 'real' house or building, its a SET PIECE. Wouldn't it have been more useful to rebuild it from scratch from cement blocks and then open it as a B&B?
Uhm... Duh. Movie sets aren't made to last. Most of the time they aren't made to look good up close either. They aren't made to code, and they aren't intended to be lived in. They are made of cheap wood and plaster, or whatever material are quickest, cheapest, and adequate for the planned shot. Sets are usually torn down the day after shooting on the set is finished.
If this guy had torn it all down and built it out of stone or cement, then the original set would be gone. His goal was to restore it. Using cheap wood and plaster was entirely appropriate, because he was doing a restoration. Now matching the colors to what was seen in the film would have been nice. Oh well.
Dolt. The link you provided attempted to illustrate which regions are affected by the cyclical El Nino / La Nina patterns and how a dry/wet spring would affect the following fall. What I see in the pictures is that in both cases for Texas is that it is right in the middle. So the El Nino/La Nina doesn't have a big effect in Texas, and a wet spring isn't strongly correlated to a dry fall.
What happens when some mud splatters on a sensor? Does it suddenly go into catastrophic avoidance mode? What happens when sensor fails, or when a whole bank of sensors fail? My experience with cars is that when one item goes wonky (like a coilpack on a 2000-2004 VW 1.8 turbo motor) they all eventually go wonky.
Since these cars will be making life and death decisions, and interacting with other cars making life and death decisions, who decides if the programming between units is compatible? Does the government set standards for expect car behavior? If a kid, hell if my own kid, runs out in front of my car and I choose to swerve into a tree, does the computer override my decision? If it overrides me and kills my kid, is the car designer guilty of murder, manslaughter, is it merely exposed to possible lawsuit, or is it exempted from liability due to the EULA?
Here's an even trickier legal question, when someone makes a bad driving decision and the car takes over during the impending accident phase, but fails to avoid the accident, and I get pulverized, who is responsible? Does the dumb driver pay my medical and repair bills? Will he argue that Google or Ford is partially at fault and I have to sue them (good luck)?
The REAL Infrastructure Problems will be preventing the rising seas from inundating Bangladesh, Florida, various Pacific Islands, and the many other low lying parts of our civilization. The real infrastructure problems will be relocating our agriculture once our current breadbaskets begin to fail. The real infrastructure problems will be figuring out how to make our cities capable of withstanding massive flooding and extended droughts, sometimes one right after the other. We've passed the point where we could prevent it, the big challenge now will be surviving it.
I highly doubt in 25 years the average climate in your region has changes from highs of 80 to highs of 95-99. That would be a cataclysmically drastic climate shift. Even the most alarmist of IPCC scientists is looking at global warming on the scale of 2-3 degrees in 40-50 years. I really wish people would stop blaming hot days on global warming, it just makes us all look stupid. Keep this in mind the next time you have an unseasonably cold day:P
The 2-3 degrees increase is for the average global temperature. The sorts of changes of local seasonal high temperatures have already been seen in the 2003 and 2011 heat waves in Europe.
Yeah this has to be stopped. Not be prosecuting and harassing Kim Dotcom (which would do nothing other than turn him into a hero), but by providing legal means of getting media when needed.
Legal means for getting media when needed? Like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, AmazonMp3, Amazon, paid Pandora, and any other of a plethora of easy to use and economical means of legally "getting media"?
Undergraduates no longer need research, now that the net has provided search that even undergrads can use.
Although some may call it such (and in some contexts it might qualify), don't confuse searching the web with "research". At least not in the scientific sense.
So... if I'm starting a company with three of my buddies, we each need $50k a year, that's $200k a year every year right there... uh, oh, who will pay us that until we get up and running?
Write a business plan and go get a loan. If your startup biz happens to sell software don't whine and cry when I download the fruit of your labor and use it for free just because I can.
And of course this gets us back to a question I asked in a different post, do you really want bankers deciding what album will get to be recorded and distributed?
People like you fail to understand that big government isn't the only threat to our liberty. ANY big concentration of power is a threat to liberty. There is a REAL difference between government and corporate concentrations of power. Citizens have mechanisms for controlling government abuse of power. Without government regulation we are helpless in the face of corporate concentrations of power. Without regulation the guy with the is most willing to use his big gun it is the one who wins. That isn't a condition that I wish to live with. If that makes me a pussy, then meow.
I don’t expect businesses to “do the right thing”. I expect them to compete for my business. It’s you and I as consumers that decide which businesses fail or succeed. Rules and regulations would still exist but they would be decided by market forces, not ballot boxes. They would be enforced by boycotts, not violence.
And Union Carbide would have given a flying rat's ass about the people of Bhopal boycotting their products? (sure that's an extreme example, but a perfectly valid one) The seller and the buyer are not the only parties to most transactions. A lack of regulation allows corporations to externalize real costs onto communities or onto future generations.
Closer to the actual topic on hand, there are only two ISPs where I live that provide broadband service, both would love to enact traffic shaping, and both would love to put data caps on internet usage. Both have terrible customer service, both have terrible reliability, both are terribly expensive, and both have built their business on the foundation of public research and public infrastructure. What is your magic invisible hand going to do for me here. Should I just go to the competition? I did that they suck too. This free-market nonsense is religion, not reality. The more free the markets the more unstable the economy. The more free the markets the bigger the wealth gap. The more free the markets the more exploitation of people for corporate profits. Deregulation leads to disaster almost every time. History is full of examples.
Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson.
Seriously? ANY OTHER country? There are American Nobel laureates every year, and they are not typically considered national heroes. I bet 98% of Americans can't name a single US Nobel laureate from the last ten years (without the aid of reference materials). I can't.
Look up Alan Turing and what he was prosecuted for by the SECULAR government.
The UK is a Christian nation with an official Christian Church and the law that Turning was prosecuted under, Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, was the very embodiment of Victorian Christian morals. You cannot really separate Christianity from Turing's persecution. The illegality of homosexuality and sodomy in the west derives directly from the violent condemnation of sodomy in the Old and New Testaments.
They innovated the idea of selling the OS separate from the hardware, which lead to the flowering of independent hardware makers that gave us the modern PC. They innovated using a graphical WYSISWG interface for office programs... no wait apple did that.
They innovated stealing the GUI from apple to... no wait apple did that by stealing from Xerox PARC
They innovated the buying of competitors to kill competition... no wait the car industry did that first.
They innovated using market dominance in one sector to gain dominance in another... no wait railroads and oil companies did that a century before.
Oh well, it was a good question and I tried.
Sounds like they want the same thing libertarians always want. Freedom for corporations to run roughshod over the rest of us without the burden of regulations designed to look after the interests of people.
"Internet collectivists are clever," the manifesto says, accusing their foes of series of Orwellian linguistic twists. "They are masters at hijacking the language of freedom and liberty to disingenuously pushfor more centralized control. 'Openness' means government control of privately owned infrastructure.'Net neutrality' means government acting as arbiter and enforcer of what it deems tobe 'neutral'."
The irony is that If he gets his way on this issue HE will be among the most likely to be stifled.
I have a bunch of Linux distros that I torrent continuously (debian, lubuntu, and ubuntu-studio at the moment). I don't code so I help out the Linux community as I can. Will the ISP systems be smart enough to figure out what's being torrented or just dumb and track if your line shows any torrent participation at all 'you must be a pirate'? I suspect they only look for the torrent header codes and cannot see inside so cue up all kinds of additional backlash for the ISPs/etc. What is in the torrent transfer codes to show reliably what's in the included file?
The only worthwhile comment/question in the entire discussion... and no response. Everybody else is complaining that their freeloading and lawbreaking is going to get harder. Boo hoo. They sound like Goldman Sachs when congress was proposing to regulate financial markets.
But here is the real relevant question, will legitimate uses of this legitimate technology be punished now that the due process has been removed?
People in any business need financing to get started with their business, if the costs are significant. The costs of starting a band are much lower today than they were in the past. But still, this is a service provided by banks; there isn't a market for dedicated companies just to finance bands.
Are you really proposing that you would prefer that BANKS choose which new band gets to record and go on tour? Seriously?
I work for a company with 32 years of perfect credit, with 32 years of making modest profits with 60 highly qualified and talented employees and we have trouble getting a line of credit. You think a BANK is going to loan money to four kids in weird clothes so they can make a record (that the banker doesn't even think sounds like music) and travel around staying in motels and playing in grubby bars to promote their record when the banker knows damn well that only 1 in 10 of their fans that gets their music is going to actually pay for it? Remember this isn't a loan for $2500 to record, but a loan for $100,000 to record, pay the four kids enough to buy food, stay in motels, drive around the country for 6 months, and advertise their record.
Get out of fantasy land dude and go buy a record instead of freeloading off the grownups.
Except that I think you heavily overestimate how much money is really needed. I can rent a professional studio for several hours at a cost of a couple thousand dollars. I can also buy consumer grade recording equipment that sounds on par with the professional grade to the ear, for far less then the millions they front.
Except that you're leaving out some very substantial expenses. Band A has four members. They each need to eat, pay rent, and pay bills JUST LIKE THE REST OF US. So for basics lets say $50,000 a year each. There is $200,000 per year every year right there. Now they need to promote their music so that people will buy it on iTunes, Amazon, or the local record store. That means advertising. That means touring. You may not know this but touring is not a money making enterprise for 95% of bands. Sure the Stones make money at it but most don't. Can you see how this might add up? Now throw into the mix the new fact that only a small fraction of the people who like your music are going to bother to pay a paltry buck a song for it. The rest are going to acquire it and listen to it completely for free out of some infantile sense of entitlement.
So if you want a world where musically talented people produce new music for you to listen to you need an economic system that actually can support bands while they make the music. It doesn't cost much. About half the cost of a Tall Coffee at Starbucks will get you that great track in a format that you can keep for the rest of your life (doesn't wear out like tapes or LPs), listen to on any number of devices, back up without encumbrance. That seems pretty damn reasonable to me. It seems to me like the music biz has hit on a very fair and workable business model, but a generation of spoiled brats who got used to getting their music for free isn't willing to pay a buck a track for music (less if you but the album). Sad.
I remember getting an Atari 400 for Christmas in 79 or 80. It had two rom cartridges, BASIC and a games called something like Starcommander. I remember turning it on with the BASIC cartridge, a blue screen with the word READY in the top right. That was a bit of a letdown. It took me about an hour and a half to copy a 20 line program into it. I eventually learned to program my own simple games on that computer. I loved the way you could draw graphics in atari basic, it was so easy and intuitive. Next Christmas I got a full stroke keyboard to replace the membrane nightmare keyboard.
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Besides, how is being asked to pay for your power a moral issue?
The moral issue is that you helped install a system that you stated very clearly is "childishly simple with little in the way of encryption or authentication" and these meters are responsible for a critical and potentially very expensive bill being sent to every person every month. Now a hacking framework is available, it is only a matter of time before smart meters will be hacked and people will get incorrect bills for far more than what they owed. It doesn't take a very good imagination to figure out even worse outcomes of having an easy to hack critical infrastructure. Someone could write a virus that could propagate through the smart meter network and then shut off power over a very wide area. When there are big power outages, sometimes people die.
So perhaps now the moral issue is a bit more clear? It is immoral to make critical infrastructure that is deliberately insecure.
Our product is designed to save clients money.
I can't imagine what utility you work for but it couldn't possibly be PG&E. The smart meters we have here are most decidedly NOT designed to save customers money. They were used as a backdoor way to implement "time of use" metering, so they can charge extra during peak hours. Many people I know with a smart meter have had their bill go up while their usage stayed the same. I often work from home so my bill went up fairly substantially. The other reason for the smart meters is that PG&E get to charge a percent markup for profit on "capital upgrades" so they decided "hey if we install a fancy expensive new meter on every single customer in the state we can make a huge extra pile of money!!!" So you can sell your "save the customer money" to a more gullible audience, but we aren't going to buy it here.
The Blitz disrupted England pretty heavily, but it didn't win the war for Germany did it? In fact it just taught the Brits just how important it was that they defeat the Nazis.
I wonder if the study took into account that dropping bombs onto wedding parties radicalizes a whole generation to despise us as the cowardly evil power that hides half a planet away and drops bombs from remote control airplanes on their families.
Actually you added "seeming random" to the definition of terrorism. The definition of terrorism is "The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims." Our political aims are to disable and weaken Al Qaeda. We use remote control airplanes to fire precision high explosive missiles at targets to assassinate particular people we think need to die. Very often these attack kill LOTS of non-combatants. The only difference I can see between this and driving a truck bomb into the embassy of a nation that is occupying your home is that when we do we don't have to send our people to their deaths, and our weapons are much more high tech and work better. Oh and our government subscribes to an idea they call "American Exceptionalism" which means the rules apply to everyone except us. So when we blow up a wedding party to get that Al Qaeda guy and kill 20 other men, women, and children at a wedding, it was collateral damage, but when they drive a car full of explosives into a crowd of men who are graduating from training to fight for an occupying force it is terrorism.
Both are despicable in the extreme, but my tax dollars pay to blow up the wedding party so that's the one that really pisses me off, because I contributed to that atrocity and I feel powerless to do anything about it. I mean I voted for the hope/change guy and now I've lost hope because there's been no real change.
It used to be if you added "internet" to any old obvious idea you could get a patent. Now you can throw "mobile" in there and any stupid, done a thousand times before, idea becomes patentable again.
You have a strange idea of what a 'verdict' is. Verdicts require unanimous agreement of the jury, 11-1 is as good as 1-11. Only 12-0 or 0-12 count.
This isn't really true. It is the case in a criminal trial, but in a civil trial there are different rules. I sat on the jury of an employment discrimination case and to reach a verdict on each of about 30 questions we had to find a majority of 9 of 12 either way.
For the judge to rule that "no reasonable jury" could rule for Novell immediately following an 11-1 jury decision for Novell is a bit of a stretch, and a slap in the face of those jurors.
That structure isn't even a real desert structure, its constructed out of cheap wood (which is not used in the desert as there are no trees), and plaster....it's not a 'real' house or building, its a SET PIECE. Wouldn't it have been more useful to rebuild it from scratch from cement blocks and then open it as a B&B?
Uhm... Duh. Movie sets aren't made to last. Most of the time they aren't made to look good up close either. They aren't made to code, and they aren't intended to be lived in. They are made of cheap wood and plaster, or whatever material are quickest, cheapest, and adequate for the planned shot. Sets are usually torn down the day after shooting on the set is finished.
If this guy had torn it all down and built it out of stone or cement, then the original set would be gone. His goal was to restore it. Using cheap wood and plaster was entirely appropriate, because he was doing a restoration. Now matching the colors to what was seen in the film would have been nice. Oh well.
Dolt. The link you provided attempted to illustrate which regions are affected by the cyclical El Nino / La Nina patterns and how a dry/wet spring would affect the following fall. What I see in the pictures is that in both cases for Texas is that it is right in the middle. So the El Nino/La Nina doesn't have a big effect in Texas, and a wet spring isn't strongly correlated to a dry fall.
So what's your point?
What happens when some mud splatters on a sensor? Does it suddenly go into catastrophic avoidance mode? What happens when sensor fails, or when a whole bank of sensors fail? My experience with cars is that when one item goes wonky (like a coilpack on a 2000-2004 VW 1.8 turbo motor) they all eventually go wonky. Since these cars will be making life and death decisions, and interacting with other cars making life and death decisions, who decides if the programming between units is compatible? Does the government set standards for expect car behavior? If a kid, hell if my own kid, runs out in front of my car and I choose to swerve into a tree, does the computer override my decision? If it overrides me and kills my kid, is the car designer guilty of murder, manslaughter, is it merely exposed to possible lawsuit, or is it exempted from liability due to the EULA?
Here's an even trickier legal question, when someone makes a bad driving decision and the car takes over during the impending accident phase, but fails to avoid the accident, and I get pulverized, who is responsible? Does the dumb driver pay my medical and repair bills? Will he argue that Google or Ford is partially at fault and I have to sue them (good luck)?
The REAL Infrastructure Problems will be preventing the rising seas from inundating Bangladesh, Florida, various Pacific Islands, and the many other low lying parts of our civilization. The real infrastructure problems will be relocating our agriculture once our current breadbaskets begin to fail. The real infrastructure problems will be figuring out how to make our cities capable of withstanding massive flooding and extended droughts, sometimes one right after the other. We've passed the point where we could prevent it, the big challenge now will be surviving it.
I highly doubt in 25 years the average climate in your region has changes from highs of 80 to highs of 95-99. That would be a cataclysmically drastic climate shift. Even the most alarmist of IPCC scientists is looking at global warming on the scale of 2-3 degrees in 40-50 years. I really wish people would stop blaming hot days on global warming, it just makes us all look stupid. Keep this in mind the next time you have an unseasonably cold day :P
The 2-3 degrees increase is for the average global temperature. The sorts of changes of local seasonal high temperatures have already been seen in the 2003 and 2011 heat waves in Europe.
And while it is difficult to blame particular weather events on climate change it is clear that the last decade of very extreme outlier weather events is attributable to climate change. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22037-climate-change-boosted-odds-of-texas-drought.html
Yeah this has to be stopped. Not be prosecuting and harassing Kim Dotcom (which would do nothing other than turn him into a hero), but by providing legal means of getting media when needed.
Legal means for getting media when needed? Like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, AmazonMp3, Amazon, paid Pandora, and any other of a plethora of easy to use and economical means of legally "getting media"?
Seriously, it would rather put dampers on the belief that we're somehow His special favorites, wouldn't it?
But we already know we aren't particular favorites Jesus/Aslan likes Narnia too!
Undergraduates no longer need research, now that the net has provided search that even undergrads can use.
Although some may call it such (and in some contexts it might qualify), don't confuse searching the web with "research". At least not in the scientific sense.
I think you left your irony detector at home.
So... if I'm starting a company with three of my buddies, we each need $50k a year, that's $200k a year every year right there... uh, oh, who will pay us that until we get up and running?
Write a business plan and go get a loan. If your startup biz happens to sell software don't whine and cry when I download the fruit of your labor and use it for free just because I can.
And of course this gets us back to a question I asked in a different post, do you really want bankers deciding what album will get to be recorded and distributed?
People like you fail to understand that big government isn't the only threat to our liberty. ANY big concentration of power is a threat to liberty. There is a REAL difference between government and corporate concentrations of power. Citizens have mechanisms for controlling government abuse of power. Without government regulation we are helpless in the face of corporate concentrations of power. Without regulation the guy with the is most willing to use his big gun it is the one who wins. That isn't a condition that I wish to live with. If that makes me a pussy, then meow.
I don’t expect businesses to “do the right thing”. I expect them to compete for my business. It’s you and I as consumers that decide which businesses fail or succeed. Rules and regulations would still exist but they would be decided by market forces, not ballot boxes. They would be enforced by boycotts, not violence.
And Union Carbide would have given a flying rat's ass about the people of Bhopal boycotting their products? (sure that's an extreme example, but a perfectly valid one) The seller and the buyer are not the only parties to most transactions. A lack of regulation allows corporations to externalize real costs onto communities or onto future generations.
Closer to the actual topic on hand, there are only two ISPs where I live that provide broadband service, both would love to enact traffic shaping, and both would love to put data caps on internet usage. Both have terrible customer service, both have terrible reliability, both are terribly expensive, and both have built their business on the foundation of public research and public infrastructure. What is your magic invisible hand going to do for me here. Should I just go to the competition? I did that they suck too. This free-market nonsense is religion, not reality. The more free the markets the more unstable the economy. The more free the markets the bigger the wealth gap. The more free the markets the more exploitation of people for corporate profits. Deregulation leads to disaster almost every time. History is full of examples.
Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson.
Seriously? ANY OTHER country? There are American Nobel laureates every year, and they are not typically considered national heroes. I bet 98% of Americans can't name a single US Nobel laureate from the last ten years (without the aid of reference materials). I can't.
Look up Alan Turing and what he was prosecuted for by the SECULAR government.
The UK is a Christian nation with an official Christian Church and the law that Turning was prosecuted under, Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, was the very embodiment of Victorian Christian morals. You cannot really separate Christianity from Turing's persecution. The illegality of homosexuality and sodomy in the west derives directly from the violent condemnation of sodomy in the Old and New Testaments.
Innovator in what, exactly?
They innovated the idea of selling the OS separate from the hardware, which lead to the flowering of independent hardware makers that gave us the modern PC.
They innovated using a graphical WYSISWG interface for office programs... no wait apple did that.
They innovated stealing the GUI from apple to... no wait apple did that by stealing from Xerox PARC
They innovated the buying of competitors to kill competition... no wait the car industry did that first.
They innovated using market dominance in one sector to gain dominance in another... no wait railroads and oil companies did that a century before.
Oh well, it was a good question and I tried.
"Internet collectivists are clever," the manifesto says, accusing their foes of series of Orwellian linguistic twists. "They are masters at hijacking the language of freedom and liberty to disingenuously pushfor more centralized control. 'Openness' means government control of privately owned infrastructure.'Net neutrality' means government acting as arbiter and enforcer of what it deems tobe 'neutral'."
The irony is that If he gets his way on this issue HE will be among the most likely to be stifled.
As Bugs Bunny used to say, "What a maroon!"
I have a bunch of Linux distros that I torrent continuously (debian, lubuntu, and ubuntu-studio at the moment). I don't code so I help out the Linux community as I can. Will the ISP systems be smart enough to figure out what's being torrented or just dumb and track if your line shows any torrent participation at all 'you must be a pirate'? I suspect they only look for the torrent header codes and cannot see inside so cue up all kinds of additional backlash for the ISPs/etc. What is in the torrent transfer codes to show reliably what's in the included file?
The only worthwhile comment/question in the entire discussion... and no response. Everybody else is complaining that their freeloading and lawbreaking is going to get harder. Boo hoo. They sound like Goldman Sachs when congress was proposing to regulate financial markets.
But here is the real relevant question, will legitimate uses of this legitimate technology be punished now that the due process has been removed?
People in any business need financing to get started with their business, if the costs are significant. The costs of starting a band are much lower today than they were in the past. But still, this is a service provided by banks; there isn't a market for dedicated companies just to finance bands.
Are you really proposing that you would prefer that BANKS choose which new band gets to record and go on tour? Seriously?
I work for a company with 32 years of perfect credit, with 32 years of making modest profits with 60 highly qualified and talented employees and we have trouble getting a line of credit. You think a BANK is going to loan money to four kids in weird clothes so they can make a record (that the banker doesn't even think sounds like music) and travel around staying in motels and playing in grubby bars to promote their record when the banker knows damn well that only 1 in 10 of their fans that gets their music is going to actually pay for it? Remember this isn't a loan for $2500 to record, but a loan for $100,000 to record, pay the four kids enough to buy food, stay in motels, drive around the country for 6 months, and advertise their record.
Get out of fantasy land dude and go buy a record instead of freeloading off the grownups.
Except that I think you heavily overestimate how much money is really needed. I can rent a professional studio for several hours at a cost of a couple thousand dollars. I can also buy consumer grade recording equipment that sounds on par with the professional grade to the ear, for far less then the millions they front.
Except that you're leaving out some very substantial expenses. Band A has four members. They each need to eat, pay rent, and pay bills JUST LIKE THE REST OF US. So for basics lets say $50,000 a year each. There is $200,000 per year every year right there. Now they need to promote their music so that people will buy it on iTunes, Amazon, or the local record store. That means advertising. That means touring. You may not know this but touring is not a money making enterprise for 95% of bands. Sure the Stones make money at it but most don't. Can you see how this might add up? Now throw into the mix the new fact that only a small fraction of the people who like your music are going to bother to pay a paltry buck a song for it. The rest are going to acquire it and listen to it completely for free out of some infantile sense of entitlement.
So if you want a world where musically talented people produce new music for you to listen to you need an economic system that actually can support bands while they make the music. It doesn't cost much. About half the cost of a Tall Coffee at Starbucks will get you that great track in a format that you can keep for the rest of your life (doesn't wear out like tapes or LPs), listen to on any number of devices, back up without encumbrance. That seems pretty damn reasonable to me. It seems to me like the music biz has hit on a very fair and workable business model, but a generation of spoiled brats who got used to getting their music for free isn't willing to pay a buck a track for music (less if you but the album). Sad.
I remember getting an Atari 400 for Christmas in 79 or 80. It had two rom cartridges, BASIC and a games called something like Starcommander. I remember turning it on with the BASIC cartridge, a blue screen with the word READY in the top right. That was a bit of a letdown. It took me about an hour and a half to copy a 20 line program into it. I eventually learned to program my own simple games on that computer. I loved the way you could draw graphics in atari basic, it was so easy and intuitive. Next Christmas I got a full stroke keyboard to replace the membrane nightmare keyboard.