"Although there's the problem for bandwidth (think baud) of being inversely proportional to frequency (the lower the freqency the longer the range but the less Mbytes/second you get), there are some techniques to overcome this and which the cell phone companies themselves use."
This doesn't make sense.
You are correct. It should have read "bandwidth proportional to frequency". Thank you. Bandwidth here meaning baud/sec. The faster I oscillate, the faster I can deliver information. As in morse code. The closer together the bits, the more info you get in a given time.
If Dvorak had taken about ten minutes to learn something about the differences in infrastructure between cell services and WiFi (hint, it has something to do with frequencies)...
Yes, that's right.
In physics there's measurement called "skin depth" which is the distance
a wave travels before it's power level drops by 1/e or about 1/3.
IIRC from my old physics 110A-B at Berkeley, it's something like wavelength/2*pi. So for higher frequencies (wavelength*freq=constant)
the power drop of is greater. 802.x devices don't have much of a range because the
FCC limits their frequencies in the GHz range.
A way to overcome this problem (partly) is to increase the power, but FCC
uses the old 'inteference' argument to prevent this.
The FCC allows 802.x devices only about 1mW/channel.
Cell phone companies on the other hand pay the FCC billions for the privilege of
having exclusive rights (in the form of licenses) to low frequency 'prime' prime parts of the spectrum
and with permission to
use orders of magnitude more power than than 802.x devices.
Although there's the problem for bandwidth (think baud) of being inversely proportional to frequency
(the lower the freqency the longer the range but the less Mbytes/second you get), there are
some techniques to overcome this and which the cell phone companies themselves use.
Now, if the FCC would only set aside a small part of that 'prime' spectrum for experimental
devices and allow those devices to use the same power as cell phone networks, then
perhaps we could begin to experiment with a new kind of network.
When you look at what some folks are doing with
mesh networking
and you combine that with higher power, lower frequency for 802.x-type devices,
you begin to realize the potential of having a different kind of network, one that is neutral,
one were you pay a wireless ISP for 'bandwidth' (just like you do for the wired Internet)
and you access that network, with a device of your own choosing and use the
bandwith you buy for voice, Internet, email, messages, video streaming, etc..
without any restrictions from the provider (unlike cell phone networks).
Of course, the cell phone companies are so influencial in Congress and
pay so much money to government, it's difficult to see how this could become a reaility
any time soon.
MPAA: "We must respond with out most powerful weapon: Ready the Lawyer Cannons."
Methinks ye meant canons as in:
(Eccl.) A law, or rule of doctrine or discipline, enacted
by a council and confirmed by the pope or the sovereign; a
decision, regulation, code, or constitution made by
ecclesiastical authority.
Thou shalt not circumvent this sacred AACS, nor be curious about it, nor shall thee seek to understand the inners of its secret workings lest thee be driven to infernal damnation. It be the ruling of this inquisition on pain of death that thee recant all allegiance to curiosity.
Okay, maybe I'll get modded down for this (or get modded up for writing that old cliche), but what exactly is wrong with this?
Well, I hope you don't get modded down because you express a popular view, though not necessarily one held by many slashdot readers.
Perhaps many of us here are just plain irritated by stupidity, some of us are even inconvenienced by it.
Let's be real, the Internet is the best content distribution system ever.
The Internet is a giant file-sharing network by definition.
For hundreds of years great works of art were produced with no copyright laws.
We live is a very small part of history. Obviously artists need to get paid for what they do.
But the costs of making quality recordings are greatly reduced compared to what they once were.
Most bands I know today have their own web sites and distribute their music freely with the aim of
making enough money to continue doing what they love by attracting enough people to see them perform live.
For most artists today, the era of the highly paid entertainer is dead.
It takes a new generation to realize this.
The problem with the RIAA is that they're out of touch, out of time, and out of their heads.
Deep down they must know they cannot possibly win in the end.
But they're like the old horse and buggy manufactures who cannot bring themselves to face the
reality of a new world.
All the lawsuits and threats of lawsuits in the whole world will never stop people from sharing music.
This is not an opinion or an emotional argument, it's a fact based on reality.
This is obviously a great advancement with enormous potential. But apart from aesthetics I would have thought four legs more practical than two in many circumstances.
DARPA (the US military research folks who helped bring us the Internet) is currently funding
Big Dog which I think is has far more potential, because however you calculate it, a quadruped has to have more stability than a biped. Though, in no way do I wish to detract from the achievements of Dexter.
Perhaps the problem with cell phone networks in general is that they
were designed in a closed environment with a need for profit.
Compare cell phone networks to the Internet which was designed mostly by scientists and engineers in an academic,
peer reviewed environment with the simple goal of building an efficient network.
If the Internet had been designed
phone companies,
you'd by your computer from you're ISP and it probably wouldn't work with any other ISP,
your ISP bill
would list every site you visited that month, overseas sites would be charged
at a higher rate, and
DNS would probably be sold as a 'white pages'
lookup service where they could charge you a penny for every click.
Phone systems are just plain dumb and the people who run them are concerned
more with nickel and diming you for every trivial service they can think of than they are in
building good network infrastructure.
The FCC is largely to blame for this because they choose to auction off the airways
to the highest bidder almost without regard as to how that bidder is going use the medium.
I'm no fan of big government but if we're going to have regulation, then let's
do the thing right. Let's require cell phone companies to provide mobile IP addresses
and let anybody access their network with the hardware and software of his
own choosing. Let the consumer buy *airtime*, nothing more, and let the consumer
decide whether he'll use voice, download music, stream video, text message, etc.,
just like we do with landline companies.
As long as "Linux" has the drivers for the hardware. That's all that matters.
It's my understanding that the dilema for Linux is that device manufactures are reluctant
to have their hardware designs exposed in Linux code, therefore
they usually don't give out their specs to Linux developers.
Even if OEMs were willing to offer the same non-disclosure agreements to Linux
developers as they offer to Windows developers, with the understanding that these developers distribute
binary-only drivers, you'd still have the
problem that Linus and the core kernel developers have said many times they're never going
to go out of their way to support backward compatibility of binary drivers.
Any such support would inhibit the free development of the kernel.
But apps in Linux depend not only on your kernel version but many other things:
what desktop you're using (some apps compile differently for gnome than they do for kde),
what libs you have, not only if you have gtk, but what version.
All this is great for a hacker like me. But the problem for Dell will
be in choosing from the gazillions of combinations that make GNU/Linux
what it is.
I say, good luck to them. But it's not going to be easy if your customers just
expect everything to be like it is in a Windows world.
The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.
You're not by any chance a lobbyist for the non net neut advocates are you?
i
Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in
computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are
those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP)
should occur at the end-points of the network.
This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and
it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.
It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone
owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him
and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too
(referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).
Compare with mobile carriers who don't follow the principle of network
neutraility where you pay more for cell phones that use a zero cost
medium (the airways) than you do for the Internet which uses an
expensive wired system. And where every service is separately billable. Is that the network of the future you're suggesting is better for
us?
I wouldn't be so opposed to your argument if I could be convinced the telcos weren't
running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.
The net has been so successful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists an
d engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
You want to give it over to the business folks because you think they can do a better job if they're involved in how the Internet continues to evolve?
Be careful what you wish for. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But what worries me the most about non net neut is that we're going to be giving companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.
It's a misnomer to associate the GPL with proletariat or Marxist ideology. That's not at all what it's about.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.
A lot of capitalists are making a lot of money off Linux. I work for an Internet company that runs on a +2000 Linux cluster. We were recently sold for $4 billion. Linux is not about socialism, it's *not* anti-capitalist anymore than Google or IBM is.
The GPL has nothing to do with social equality. It's purpose is to ensure that great software will continue to evolve. The main restriction it places on a programmer is that he must ensure his code stays open for others to improve upon. He can sell and profit from writing code, and be as much a capitalist as he wants. The GPL doesn't prevent that in the least.
Perhaps the debate about
BBC ads has some relevance to Wikipedia.
According to The British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA), showing adverts to non-UK readers of BBC websites would also undermine the BBC's "worldwide reputation for integrity and impartiality."
Wiki articles are supposed to be written in the neutral point of view and while ads may not compromise that goal, it may be difficult to convey neutrality when you're writing about a product and running a related advertisement at the same time.
The courts are only allowed to consider letter of the law and not intent.
I thought the courts were allowed to consider intent. If there's a difference between a hunting accident resulting in criminal negligence or attempted murder, isn't intent a determining factor?
Why not carry ads? Most high traffic sites are ad supported. Google AdSense [google.com] is almost a no-brainer as Google handles the contextualising and geotargetting.
The simple answer is neutrality. Wikipedia entries are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view. It might be difficult to convey a NPOV if you're running ads selling the product your writing about.
Also, with google ads you might have a situation where an article is critical of a product yet keywords place an ad for the same product within the article, so for example, an entry on the Microsoft anti-trust case might also contain an ad for Vista.
Viacom's action could establish a precedent and have serious consequences for YouTube...
There may be consequences for youtube but perhaps the proverbial cat is out of the figurative bag. The real problem here is that the Internet is such an effective and efficient distribution system. I find myself watching more and more news content on youtube simply because it's there when I want it. I don't have to read a program guide or program a TV. I don't even have to own a TV.
If what happened after Napster (as a file-sharing service) was shut-down is any indication, the forces of supply and demand combined with the ubiquity and amorphous characteristics of the Internet are unstoppable, even if youtube were shut down tomorrow, you could expect to see the Daily Show popping up more prevalently on P2P, BitTorrent, or some obscure Russian site.
And if the failure of all those DMCA P2P lawsuits to stop file-sharing from reaching an all-time high is any indication of the world in which we live, people are going to get the content one way or another, no matter what the copyright holders or the law says. All moral judgments aside, that just a fact based in reality.
I run Familiar Linux on an IPAQ pocket PC that has phone capabilities.
The problem with these devices is finding a decent carrier in the US. Cell phone markets tend to be anti-competitive in the sense that third party devices are often excluded. For example, I bought a Treo-650 from Sprint but when I switched to Cingular I had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingualr's network.
traditional cell carriers are launching dual-mode phones and services that run over the cellular networks, but switch to cheaper (for carriers), faster (for customers) Wi-Fi networks when one is available.
It would be nice if carriers just sold mobile IP addresses and let consumers choose their own devices, services, etc.. Many of us would think it odd if we bought our computer from our ISP and it didn't work with other ISPs, yet this is the norm for cell phone companies. Your ISP mostly doesn't know/care whether you use your network for data or voice, but with cell phone companies every protocol, text messaging, email, voice, Internet, etc. is a separately billable service. From a administrative point of view this is just dumb.
Perhaps, finally, cell phone companies are leaving the old 20th century telco-mindset behind and becoming part of the Internet.
No offense and I don't mean to be rude or come off as a flame but I don't think you understand how youtube works or what the underlying problems are:
YouTube is not making profits off this...
According to youtube, it's revenue model is advertising based. So it is making a profit off this.
YouTube will be paying for user-generated content -- which is less inclusive than user-uploaded content.
If I append ads to Stephen Colbert and upload it, that's user-generated content. Youtube really has no way to distinguish content. The reason it's so difficult for them is evident in the problem with your rebuttal to (c).
As for (c), it's pretty simple, really -- only vetted uploads (covered by a distribution agreement) will have ads appended to them. This protects YouTube from the extra damages you mention.
Nearly 2 million videos are uploaded to youtube every month. How exactly are you going to vet these? If you've ever followed any of the lawsuits against youtube you'll begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. Youtube doesn't want copyrighted material on its site because it's liable to lawsuits. Unfortunately youtube is incapable of policing such a large volume of content. Take the recent case of the Brazilian model who brought a legal case against youtube for hosting her video. Youtube made every effort to delete the video, but they couldn't keep up with the hundreds of users who kept uploading it under different names. Youtube cannot watch every video and form subject opinion as to its legality, that's why it's working on digital fingerprinting.
I'm from the UK, lived in the US for many years. This irks me a bit.
When I first came to the US I was surprised at how much Americans get a real say in how their government runs.
In many states people vote on everything
from whether to build a dam to who's gonna be their sheriff and fire chief. In some places they even vote for judges. In the UK it seems the best they can ever do is a petition, which of course carries no real weight. When I lived in California I was amazed that people actually got to vote on medical marijuana. In the UK such a concept would be considered outrageous. I mean, a county in England, unlike a US state, couldn't even vote to extend pub opening hours. Tough decisions like that are always left to wise men in parliament.
While I think the idea of an e-petition is good, I'd much rather see some real democracy.
I don't remember a referendum ever in the UK about anything.
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but it had to be said.
When I was in college I had a professor who doubted that prizes in science bring about any new inventions or discoveries that wouldn't have been made anyway. He argued that progress in science usually comes about through cooperation, not competition, and that the most significant advances in science were all made by people with little of no financial incentive (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Flemming, etc.)
The article doesn't say whether the Ph.D. crystallographer who solved the pathology problem won a prize, but I wonder if a prize would have made a difference.
Yeah, they didn't base it on something like, say, robotics, because then the US would come out ahead. I've noticed that broadband deployment along with high school math quizzes seem to be popular with these 'the US is falling behind' studies and I'm not even American.
Don't spin the old "everyone in entertainment is a millionaire" nonsense.
Nor are they starving.
Perhaps we can all agree that infringement hurts content providers. But the so-called industry needs to face reality. 1) The Internet is a great distribution system. It's light years ahead of the old 'put it on plastic disks and distribute it by plane and truck' method. 2) No matter how many of these sites you shut down, others will pop up in accordance with the principle of supply and demand. (Shutting down Napster was an example of that.)
Perhaps GEMA needs to beat these sites at their own game by distributing the content themselves first and making their money by either pay-per-download or by selling advertising on content hosting sites.
Let's be real, the Internet is the best content distribution system ever. At some point there's going to be a realization that lawsuits are not the answer. All moral arguments aside, that's just a fact.
It almost seems like getting drunk and killing a child with your car is less of a crime that possessing pictures of them naked on your computer. I read a lot about people getting lengthy prison sentences for child porn, yet with DUI vehicular manslaughter people often get off with probation.
I might be misguided but frankly I don't trust the telcos.
Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him
and has indicated he's pissed off because everyone's making money off the Internet except him.
I can see his point. Afer all, he's the one that owns the pipes.
I wouldn't be so opposed to a non-net-neut world if I could be convinced the
telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.
The net has been so succesful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part,
not by private companies, but by scientists and engineers in an academic environment
who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
But if my cell phone company had developed the net, my ISP bill would probably
list every site I went to that month and I'd be charged extra for
things like email, SMS, MMS, streaming audio, etc., These would all be separately billable services.
Voice would be charged per minute, data would be per megabyte, and
I'd be nickel and dimmed for everything.
DARPA was not a business. They were not out to make money. The designed a system
for maximum efficiency and easy growth.
Look at how the telcos have handled communications. For example, phone systems don't even have, nor have they ever had any intention of having,
something as simple as DNS. If the telcos had had control over how the Internet evolved
you'd be typing in Internet IP addresses simply so they could sell you access to a white pages directory.
Maybe I have it all wrong but when I look at their history I really don't have much faith in telcos.
What worries me the most is that we're giving these companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.
Close observers of the file say all signs point to a new regime that will improve safeguards for major music, film and media companies and artists for unpaid use of their material, but neglect to make exemptions for personal use of copyrighted content.
Bullshit! You can reform copyright laws all you want, people are still gonna
record their favorite shows and share stuff on P2P. Sharing copyrighted content, for example, is at
an all time high, in spite of its illegality and all those *IAA lawsuits.
Remember the US
Betamax case? Yeah, if these guys had their way VCRs would be illegal.
The problem is that their business runs on a static model.
They seem incapable of seeing the world differently.
You can moralize all you want about the rights and wrongs of technology
but it doesn't alter the fact that it's here to stay and all the laws and lawsuits
in the world won't stop people from copying (and distributing).
It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetically sad.
Slashdot Mirror
"Although there's the problem for bandwidth (think baud) of being inversely proportional to frequency (the lower the freqency the longer the range but the less Mbytes/second you get), there are some techniques to overcome this and which the cell phone companies themselves use."
This doesn't make sense.
You are correct. It should have read "bandwidth proportional to frequency". Thank you. Bandwidth here meaning baud/sec. The faster I oscillate, the faster I can deliver information. As in morse code. The closer together the bits, the more info you get in a given time.
If Dvorak had taken about ten minutes to learn something about the differences in infrastructure between cell services and WiFi (hint, it has something to do with frequencies) ...
Yes, that's right.
In physics there's measurement called "skin depth" which is the distance a wave travels before it's power level drops by 1/e or about 1/3. IIRC from my old physics 110A-B at Berkeley, it's something like wavelength/2*pi. So for higher frequencies (wavelength*freq=constant) the power drop of is greater. 802.x devices don't have much of a range because the FCC limits their frequencies in the GHz range.
A way to overcome this problem (partly) is to increase the power, but FCC uses the old 'inteference' argument to prevent this. The FCC allows 802.x devices only about 1mW/channel.
Cell phone companies on the other hand pay the FCC billions for the privilege of having exclusive rights (in the form of licenses) to low frequency 'prime' prime parts of the spectrum and with permission to use orders of magnitude more power than than 802.x devices.
Although there's the problem for bandwidth (think baud) of being inversely proportional to frequency (the lower the freqency the longer the range but the less Mbytes/second you get), there are some techniques to overcome this and which the cell phone companies themselves use.
Now, if the FCC would only set aside a small part of that 'prime' spectrum for experimental devices and allow those devices to use the same power as cell phone networks, then perhaps we could begin to experiment with a new kind of network.
When you look at what some folks are doing with mesh networking and you combine that with higher power, lower frequency for 802.x-type devices, you begin to realize the potential of having a different kind of network, one that is neutral, one were you pay a wireless ISP for 'bandwidth' (just like you do for the wired Internet) and you access that network, with a device of your own choosing and use the bandwith you buy for voice, Internet, email, messages, video streaming, etc.. without any restrictions from the provider (unlike cell phone networks).
Of course, the cell phone companies are so influencial in Congress and pay so much money to government, it's difficult to see how this could become a reaility any time soon.
MPAA: "We must respond with out most powerful weapon: Ready the Lawyer Cannons."
Methinks ye meant canons as in:
(Eccl.) A law, or rule of doctrine or discipline, enacted by a council and confirmed by the pope or the sovereign; a decision, regulation, code, or constitution made by ecclesiastical authority.
Thou shalt not circumvent this sacred AACS, nor be curious about it, nor shall thee seek to understand the inners of its secret workings lest thee be driven to infernal damnation. It be the ruling of this inquisition on pain of death that thee recant all allegiance to curiosity.
Okay, maybe I'll get modded down for this (or get modded up for writing that old cliche), but what exactly is wrong with this?
Well, I hope you don't get modded down because you express a popular view, though not necessarily one held by many slashdot readers.
Perhaps many of us here are just plain irritated by stupidity, some of us are even inconvenienced by it.
Let's be real, the Internet is the best content distribution system ever. The Internet is a giant file-sharing network by definition.
For hundreds of years great works of art were produced with no copyright laws. We live is a very small part of history. Obviously artists need to get paid for what they do. But the costs of making quality recordings are greatly reduced compared to what they once were. Most bands I know today have their own web sites and distribute their music freely with the aim of making enough money to continue doing what they love by attracting enough people to see them perform live. For most artists today, the era of the highly paid entertainer is dead. It takes a new generation to realize this.
The problem with the RIAA is that they're out of touch, out of time, and out of their heads. Deep down they must know they cannot possibly win in the end. But they're like the old horse and buggy manufactures who cannot bring themselves to face the reality of a new world.
All the lawsuits and threats of lawsuits in the whole world will never stop people from sharing music. This is not an opinion or an emotional argument, it's a fact based on reality.
This is obviously a great advancement with enormous potential. But apart from aesthetics I would have thought four legs more practical than two in many circumstances.
DARPA (the US military research folks who helped bring us the Internet) is currently funding Big Dog which I think is has far more potential, because however you calculate it, a quadruped has to have more stability than a biped. Though, in no way do I wish to detract from the achievements of Dexter.
See Big Dog in action here.
Perhaps the problem with cell phone networks in general is that they were designed in a closed environment with a need for profit.
Compare cell phone networks to the Internet which was designed mostly by scientists and engineers in an academic, peer reviewed environment with the simple goal of building an efficient network.
If the Internet had been designed phone companies, you'd by your computer from you're ISP and it probably wouldn't work with any other ISP, your ISP bill would list every site you visited that month, overseas sites would be charged at a higher rate, and DNS would probably be sold as a 'white pages' lookup service where they could charge you a penny for every click.
Phone systems are just plain dumb and the people who run them are concerned more with nickel and diming you for every trivial service they can think of than they are in building good network infrastructure.
The FCC is largely to blame for this because they choose to auction off the airways to the highest bidder almost without regard as to how that bidder is going use the medium.
I'm no fan of big government but if we're going to have regulation, then let's do the thing right. Let's require cell phone companies to provide mobile IP addresses and let anybody access their network with the hardware and software of his own choosing. Let the consumer buy *airtime*, nothing more, and let the consumer decide whether he'll use voice, download music, stream video, text message, etc., just like we do with landline companies.
As long as "Linux" has the drivers for the hardware. That's all that matters.
It's my understanding that the dilema for Linux is that device manufactures are reluctant to have their hardware designs exposed in Linux code, therefore they usually don't give out their specs to Linux developers.
Even if OEMs were willing to offer the same non-disclosure agreements to Linux developers as they offer to Windows developers, with the understanding that these developers distribute binary-only drivers, you'd still have the problem that Linus and the core kernel developers have said many times they're never going to go out of their way to support backward compatibility of binary drivers. Any such support would inhibit the free development of the kernel.
But apps in Linux depend not only on your kernel version but many other things: what desktop you're using (some apps compile differently for gnome than they do for kde), what libs you have, not only if you have gtk, but what version.
All this is great for a hacker like me. But the problem for Dell will be in choosing from the gazillions of combinations that make GNU/Linux what it is.
I say, good luck to them. But it's not going to be easy if your customers just expect everything to be like it is in a Windows world.
The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.
e nd/endtoend.pdf
You're not by any chance a lobbyist for the non net neut advocates are you? i
Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.
See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endto
This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.
It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).
Compare with mobile carriers who don't follow the principle of network neutraility where you pay more for cell phones that use a zero cost medium (the airways) than you do for the Internet which uses an expensive wired system. And where every service is separately billable. Is that the network of the future you're suggesting is better for us?
I wouldn't be so opposed to your argument if I could be convinced the telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.
The net has been so successful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists an d engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal. You want to give it over to the business folks because you think they can do a better job if they're involved in how the Internet continues to evolve?
Be careful what you wish for. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But what worries me the most about non net neut is that we're going to be giving companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.
Microsoft was saying that it couldn't find the tapes and that it would take millions of man-hours to search for them ...
And Microsoft wants to be number one in search?
It's a misnomer to associate the GPL with proletariat or Marxist ideology. That's not at all what it's about.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.
A lot of capitalists are making a lot of money off Linux. I work for an Internet company that runs on a +2000 Linux cluster. We were recently sold for $4 billion. Linux is not about socialism, it's *not* anti-capitalist anymore than Google or IBM is.
The GPL has nothing to do with social equality. It's purpose is to ensure that great software will continue to evolve. The main restriction it places on a programmer is that he must ensure his code stays open for others to improve upon. He can sell and profit from writing code, and be as much a capitalist as he wants. The GPL doesn't prevent that in the least.
Perhaps the debate about BBC ads has some relevance to Wikipedia.
According to The British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA), showing adverts to non-UK readers of BBC websites would also undermine the BBC's "worldwide reputation for integrity and impartiality."
Wiki articles are supposed to be written in the neutral point of view and while ads may not compromise that goal, it may be difficult to convey neutrality when you're writing about a product and running a related advertisement at the same time.
The courts are only allowed to consider letter of the law and not intent.
I thought the courts were allowed to consider intent. If there's a difference between a hunting accident resulting in criminal negligence or attempted murder, isn't intent a determining factor?
Why not carry ads? Most high traffic sites are ad supported. Google AdSense [google.com] is almost a no-brainer as Google handles the contextualising and geotargetting.
The simple answer is neutrality. Wikipedia entries are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view. It might be difficult to convey a NPOV if you're running ads selling the product your writing about.
Also, with google ads you might have a situation where an article is critical of a product yet keywords place an ad for the same product within the article, so for example, an entry on the Microsoft anti-trust case might also contain an ad for Vista.
Viacom's action could establish a precedent and have serious consequences for YouTube ...
There may be consequences for youtube but perhaps the proverbial cat is out of the figurative bag. The real problem here is that the Internet is such an effective and efficient distribution system. I find myself watching more and more news content on youtube simply because it's there when I want it. I don't have to read a program guide or program a TV. I don't even have to own a TV.
If what happened after Napster (as a file-sharing service) was shut-down is any indication, the forces of supply and demand combined with the ubiquity and amorphous characteristics of the Internet are unstoppable, even if youtube were shut down tomorrow, you could expect to see the Daily Show popping up more prevalently on P2P, BitTorrent, or some obscure Russian site.
And if the failure of all those DMCA P2P lawsuits to stop file-sharing from reaching an all-time high is any indication of the world in which we live, people are going to get the content one way or another, no matter what the copyright holders or the law says. All moral judgments aside, that just a fact based in reality.
I run Familiar Linux on an IPAQ pocket PC that has phone capabilities. The problem with these devices is finding a decent carrier in the US. Cell phone markets tend to be anti-competitive in the sense that third party devices are often excluded. For example, I bought a Treo-650 from Sprint but when I switched to Cingular I had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingualr's network.
traditional cell carriers are launching dual-mode phones and services that run over the cellular networks, but switch to cheaper (for carriers), faster (for customers) Wi-Fi networks when one is available.
It would be nice if carriers just sold mobile IP addresses and let consumers choose their own devices, services, etc.. Many of us would think it odd if we bought our computer from our ISP and it didn't work with other ISPs, yet this is the norm for cell phone companies. Your ISP mostly doesn't know/care whether you use your network for data or voice, but with cell phone companies every protocol, text messaging, email, voice, Internet, etc. is a separately billable service. From a administrative point of view this is just dumb.
Perhaps, finally, cell phone companies are leaving the old 20th century telco-mindset behind and becoming part of the Internet.
No offense and I don't mean to be rude or come off as a flame but I don't think you understand how youtube works or what the underlying problems are:
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YouTube is not making profits off this
According to youtube, it's revenue model is advertising based. So it is making a profit off this.
YouTube will be paying for user-generated content -- which is less inclusive than user-uploaded content.
If I append ads to Stephen Colbert and upload it, that's user-generated content. Youtube really has no way to distinguish content. The reason it's so difficult for them is evident in the problem with your rebuttal to (c).
As for (c), it's pretty simple, really -- only vetted uploads (covered by a distribution agreement) will have ads appended to them. This protects YouTube from the extra damages you mention.
Nearly 2 million videos are uploaded to youtube every month. How exactly are you going to vet these? If you've ever followed any of the lawsuits against youtube you'll begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. Youtube doesn't want copyrighted material on its site because it's liable to lawsuits. Unfortunately youtube is incapable of policing such a large volume of content. Take the recent case of the Brazilian model who brought a legal case against youtube for hosting her video. Youtube made every effort to delete the video, but they couldn't keep up with the hundreds of users who kept uploading it under different names. Youtube cannot watch every video and form subject opinion as to its legality, that's why it's working on digital fingerprinting.
I'm from the UK, lived in the US for many years. This irks me a bit. When I first came to the US I was surprised at how much Americans get a real say in how their government runs.
In many states people vote on everything from whether to build a dam to who's gonna be their sheriff and fire chief. In some places they even vote for judges. In the UK it seems the best they can ever do is a petition, which of course carries no real weight. When I lived in California I was amazed that people actually got to vote on medical marijuana. In the UK such a concept would be considered outrageous. I mean, a county in England, unlike a US state, couldn't even vote to extend pub opening hours. Tough decisions like that are always left to wise men in parliament.
While I think the idea of an e-petition is good, I'd much rather see some real democracy. I don't remember a referendum ever in the UK about anything.
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but it had to be said.
When I was in college I had a professor who doubted that prizes in science bring about any new inventions or discoveries that wouldn't have been made anyway. He argued that progress in science usually comes about through cooperation, not competition, and that the most significant advances in science were all made by people with little of no financial incentive (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Flemming, etc.)
The article doesn't say whether the Ph.D. crystallographer who solved the pathology problem won a prize, but I wonder if a prize would have made a difference.
Yeah, they didn't base it on something like, say, robotics, because then the US would come out ahead. I've noticed that broadband deployment along with high school math quizzes seem to be popular with these 'the US is falling behind' studies and I'm not even American.
Don't spin the old "everyone in entertainment is a millionaire" nonsense.
Nor are they starving.
Perhaps we can all agree that infringement hurts content providers. But the so-called industry needs to face reality. 1) The Internet is a great distribution system. It's light years ahead of the old 'put it on plastic disks and distribute it by plane and truck' method. 2) No matter how many of these sites you shut down, others will pop up in accordance with the principle of supply and demand. (Shutting down Napster was an example of that.)
Perhaps GEMA needs to beat these sites at their own game by distributing the content themselves first and making their money by either pay-per-download or by selling advertising on content hosting sites.
Let's be real, the Internet is the best content distribution system ever. At some point there's going to be a realization that lawsuits are not the answer. All moral arguments aside, that's just a fact.
I think Jon Stewart sums it up pretty well. Some things are so absurd they're actually funny.
It almost seems like getting drunk and killing a child with your car is less of a crime that possessing pictures of them naked on your computer. I read a lot about people getting lengthy prison sentences for child porn, yet with DUI vehicular manslaughter people often get off with probation.
I might be misguided but frankly I don't trust the telcos. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and has indicated he's pissed off because everyone's making money off the Internet except him. I can see his point. Afer all, he's the one that owns the pipes.
I wouldn't be so opposed to a non-net-neut world if I could be convinced the telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.
The net has been so succesful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists and engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
But if my cell phone company had developed the net, my ISP bill would probably list every site I went to that month and I'd be charged extra for things like email, SMS, MMS, streaming audio, etc., These would all be separately billable services. Voice would be charged per minute, data would be per megabyte, and I'd be nickel and dimmed for everything.
DARPA was not a business. They were not out to make money. The designed a system for maximum efficiency and easy growth.
Look at how the telcos have handled communications. For example, phone systems don't even have, nor have they ever had any intention of having, something as simple as DNS. If the telcos had had control over how the Internet evolved you'd be typing in Internet IP addresses simply so they could sell you access to a white pages directory.
Maybe I have it all wrong but when I look at their history I really don't have much faith in telcos. What worries me the most is that we're giving these companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.
Close observers of the file say all signs point to a new regime that will improve safeguards for major music, film and media companies and artists for unpaid use of their material, but neglect to make exemptions for personal use of copyrighted content.
Bullshit! You can reform copyright laws all you want, people are still gonna record their favorite shows and share stuff on P2P. Sharing copyrighted content, for example, is at an all time high, in spite of its illegality and all those *IAA lawsuits.
Remember the US Betamax case? Yeah, if these guys had their way VCRs would be illegal. The problem is that their business runs on a static model. They seem incapable of seeing the world differently.
You can moralize all you want about the rights and wrongs of technology but it doesn't alter the fact that it's here to stay and all the laws and lawsuits in the world won't stop people from copying (and distributing). It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetically sad.