DISQUS

I don't believe they will die. The for-profit newspaper will die as a business model. Communities though do get benefits from newspapers, such as exposing corruption, providing a community forum, and providing a local institution with a moral voice (=high moral connectivity)

Those combination of elements caused me to predict that newspapers would be re-imagined as not for profits, which is exactly what has in fact started to happen:

http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/r...
http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/a...

Jerry, since you habitually erase my comments whenever you are unable to respond to them, I am quite sure you're an liar and a scoundrel.

So I'll be a character witness..!

Adam:
Ed Felten rebutted this whole line of thinking a while back at freedom to tinker, thus:

One of the standard claims about privacy is that people say they value their privacy but behave as if they don't value it. The standard example involves people trading away private information for something of relatively little value. This argument is often put forth to rebut the notion that privacy is an important policy value. Alternatively, it is posed as a "what could they be thinking" puzzle.
I used to be impressed by this argument, but lately I have come to doubt its power. Let me explain why.
Suppose you offer to buy a piece of information about me, such as my location at this moment. I'll accept the offer if the payment you offer me is more than the harm I would experience due to disclosing the information. What matters here is the marginal harm, defined as amount of privacy-goodness I would have if I withheld the information, minus the amount I would have if I disclosed it.
The key word here is marginal. If I assume that my life would be utterly private, unless I gave this one piece of information to you, then I might require a high price from you. But if I assume that I have very little privacy to start with, then selling this one piece of information to you makes little difference, and I might as well sell it cheaply. Indeed, the more I assume that my privacy is lost no matter what I do, the lower a price I'll demand from you. In the limit, where I expect you can get the information for free elsewhere even if I withhold if from you, I'll be willing to sell you the information for a penny.
Viewed this way, the price I charge you tells you at least as much about how well I think my privacy is protected, as it does about how badly I want to keep my location private. So the answer to "what could they be thinking" is "they could be thinking they have no privacy in the first place".

"Consumers don't have a RIGHT to use more rights than they purchase, any more than you have a right to keep your Hertz rental car."

First that's note correct: the content providers have tried to paint purchases as a license, but the courts have ruled that it is actually a purchase, and therefore consumers do have the right to time shift and format shift. Get some basic knowledge of the case law before you post, pixelm.

Second, if you want to try to take the right to format shift and time shift away, go ahead, make my day. It should be clear those trying lock down freedom will lose that fight.

Third, stop bellyaching: just download open SuSE and then go here:


http://opensuse-community.org/Multimedia#Restri...

So what does this have to do with technology policy? To start with, this figure comes from Congressional Budget Office estimates, which “don’t account for the huge economic stimulus bill Obama is expected to propose soon to try to jolt the economy.” So, while the Obama team has talked about big “public works” and ”infrastructure” spending (which used to be called, variously, “make-work,” ”pork barrel” and “corporate welfare”)

You are conflating several very different items here:

- corporate welfare, basically the policy of the previous administration, in providing massive subsidies to favored indstries (almost always very large corporations; can it really be an accident that ExoonMobils record profits occurred under Bush's watch?)

- pork barrel, usually meaning earmarks for special pet projects,

there’s sure to be huge pressure not to waste more taxpayer money on top of this staggering figure. Whatever blame Bush deserves, Obama probably doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who finally caused the U.S. government to default on its unmanageable debt burden.

Well, all though you make a sideways passing reference to Bush's malfeasance, you really don't come close to giving the Bush Administration the blame for the present economic mess. They ran the country into the ground, destroyed the USA's image across the owrld, destroyed the economy that Clinton had managed with such care (remember the surplus's he had, there was actually rational hope the the national debt would begin to shrink?

Now, after 8 years of mismanagement during which the TLF hadn't criticized Bush very much at all, esp. on the deficit spending that Bush advocated, suddenly TLF decides to criticize Obama before he even takes office, blaming him for the deficits that will be required to get the country out of the giant Republican-created mess.

Well it won't wash. The fault for these deficits lies with GWB administration.

Hopefully, though, due to the many war crimes commited by the presented administration, we will live to see many of them prosecuted for the crimes they have commited.

That's just a small comfort though, and it would be a luxury except that it is imperative to demonstrate exactly what will happen to those who espouse those failed neo-liberal policies, lest another administration in the future dare to contemplate similar policies.

You may doubt now that the Bush administration will be vigourously prosecuted; I doubt though that such a judgment fully accounts for the reality of the pain that the unfolding economic disaster will create, however. Such pain, suffering and dashing of the hopes of millions will demand justice, and justice it will see.

With that said, a music tax would have some short-term benefits. An effective collective licensing scheme would create a much more fertile environment for entrepreneurs to build innovative technologies on top of peer-to-peer technologies, so maybe a music tax is a price worth paying for the benefits of a peer-to-peer friendly legal environment.

Never. The innovation of a group such as radiohead, shows that such a tax is unneeded.

And I am enjoying very much seeing the large labels destroyed. They created the anti-freedom group known as the RIAA, and you will not use my tax dollars to deny me the very high value entertainment of watching them destroyed.

“firestorm of controversy would… be unleashed if a major network owner embarked on a systematic campaign of censorship on its network.”

Good job Adam, you have firmly convinced me that there exists strong public support for the principle of network neutrality (Gold Star!) Now, why exactly should that principle, which you have just documented is popular, not be enacted into law?

One thing you need to address is that you assume that a violation of net neutrality would be quickly detected, and that is not at all a given. It is conceivable that there exists forms of network neutrality that would not be quickly detected, and, if that were to happen shortly before, say a major election in which the internet plays a role as a public forum, that those who could cause the outcome of the election to be affected.

This is a problem that government has a clear duty to protect society from.

Well, as usual the pro-TLF camp takes the high road, call someone a turd. What intelligence!

I'd like to participate in such a project, however Jerry Brito's track recordd of repeatedly deleting my posts because he disagrees with them causes me to question whether any input into this project would be similarly "filtered"

To create a community you need credibility and moral connectivity. Jerry, by his own actions, has cast himself outside of any community with common goals and destroyed his own credibility.

Outside of Jerry brito's own issues, this website has a clear political agenda, and is deeply mired in anti-social actions of its corporate paymasters. Examples: denial of global warming, and acting as apologists for Microsoft's many repressive actions.

eee_eff

Wrong.

Obama's victory, while containing certain entrepreneurial elements was fundamentally about community and the shared goals that society can achieve--a reduction in poverty, for example, and access to healthcare for all--by acting in concert. An example of acting in concert is a progressive income tax. Get over it.

To avoid the Constitutional issues surrounding racial quotas, eligibility for SDB classification would be based on economic status, rather than the racial composition of would-be station owners.

So equity is wrong. It should be self-evident that those monied classes have greater access to the media than those without money, right?

The S-Class proposal, like other media reform proposals, falsely assumes that current owners of media outlets are failing to meet the demands of their audience for a diverse range of content.

OK, so I suppose you would rather have the stations nationalized, and taken over by the government? Because that it exactly what will happen if you corporate power folks keep pushing around the have-nots. Is that what you want?

If self-driving software can be shown to be at least as safe as the average human driver, it should be allowed on the road.

Why pray tell do you set your standards so low? If we can achieve more safety, at a reasonable expense why not require that?

The rational approach would be to maximize the good that accrues to society by this new technology by requiring that it be a safe as it can possibly be, while still being affordable.

If this attitude prevailed, Hospitals of today would be just as unsafe as they were in Victorian London.

Progress is what happens when people demand it; to accept the status quo just because it was 'good enough' in the past is a fundamental pessimism...