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Not very good excuse! Most of
the US is plain nothingness..... And the population is concentrated into relatively small areas. Petri worms wrote: Japan is able to reach such high levels of broadband saturation because of the extremely small land mass and high population density.On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Will Hill <[email protected]> wrote:What you say is more depressing than it is "gasoline." You are confused about the purpose of copyright and basic networking facts. I hope that "most other people" do not have the same kinds of missconceptions you do but I hesitate to project one way or another. Windows is a menace to networks everywhere. W32 botnets are responsible for the vast majority of the world's spam and are used to launch all sorts of other malice. This is because Windows has both systematic and accidental flaws and each machine is essentially identical. M$ and many third parties have been working forever to "patch" these problems and Bill Gates promissed everyone that Spam would be a thing of the past by now. The cure has often been worse than the dissease, to strip people of network freedom as if the problem were users or the internet not Windows. This has greatly reduced the utility of networks for everyone directly and indirectly. People who use and recommend Windows are usually ignorant or deny this because it suits them somehow. US Copyright is a created right that violates people's natural right to free press. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 gives congress the power to do this, but only if it furthers the public knowledge and the state of the arts. The founding fathers of this country despised exclusive franchises as tools of tyranny and control and copyrights were originally limited and sensible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause Many aspects of modern copyright law betray the public. Attacks on network freedom for the benefit of a few big publishers harms society in more important ways than a missed sitcom. One of the first to object to Comcast's throttling was a group that used P2P to distribute bible translations. Scientific research is greatly hampered by people's inability to create digital libraries, and I can assure you that scientists all seek the widest possible audience for their publications without the kinds of rewards that MAFIAA pretend to offer people. Laws that keep people from sharing their own material with each other are UnAmerican and laws that prevent private, non commercial copy are universally offensive and immoral. Companies and business models which can't survive in freedom deserve to fail, we will all be better off without them. Finally, you seem blissfully unaware of the shameful place US networks hold in the world. The US is the most powerful country in the world but more than 20 other countries do better than we do and places like Japan do dramatically better. Instead of investing in a network that could provide everyone with universal access to human knowledge, we have spent out time and money on wiretaps that would make Erich Honecker blush, fighting P2P, which is one of the most efficient ways to distribute popular content, and writing stupid laws like this: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000030&ct=1&SESSID=f246fced5098a13180e242e58f10e1db Several people have pointed to Lafayette as an example of how things can be, but it will take a lot more than fiber to make networks serve the public instead of a few vested interests. People like you need to be taught to demand what's right for you or science, the state of the arts, freedom of press and your privacy will be lost to the next version of cable TV. Please help yourself to my pictures, classnotes code and other projects that I offer. Cox has yet to complain about my bandwith use because most people are not that interested in my stuff. They also seem to tolerate other "servers" such as IM and P2P clients which are far more popular and consume almost as much bandwith as the W32 botnet spam flood. On Thursday 29 January 2009, Andrew Baudouin wrote: -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. |
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