"...figure out which Usenet posts were infringing and which weren't. Not surprisingly, that's impossible, and NSE has announced that it's just shutting down entirely instead."
Complete bullshit. Just stop spreading alt.binaries.* and you stop 99% of all illegal materials on Usenet. Why is that so hard?
Let's face it, to read email, browse the web, and print word documents, a 10 year old computer is sufficient. And for most people, that is all they do. Unless you are doing graphs or games, you just don't need the power in modern computers.
The problem with forced upgrades isn't Moore's law's fault, it's Microsoft. That 10 year old computer can really only run Windows 98. Vista would kill it. But of course 98 isn't supported anymore, with Windows 2000 and XP soon to follow. New software won't run on it, and bugs and security holes don't get fixed. MS is in business to sell operating systems, and obsoleting old systems is the only was for them to sell new ones.
As AOL members begun to realize that this is *their* data, and they start reading some of the things that are being pulled from them, like http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4016 , and the realize that anyone can go through them with tools like the one at http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/index.php , the suits are going to start rolling in. This is going to be very very costly for AOL, both in terms of users and actual settlements.
I have always thought the network neutraility debate was kind of a self-correcting problem. If some Telco decided to degrade performance of a certain website, all the victim website would have to do is detect if it the customer is coming in from that domain and put a big banner ad on the top of the page saying "Your ISP is slowing our site down on purpose. Please contact them at 1-800-555-8284 and ask them to stop".
All this hype is for this old idea? It's an encrypted proxy, nothing less and nothing more. I set up an encrypted proxy on my home machine once, for my dad who was living at the time in the United Arab Emerites, a country that also performs country wide filtering. They found it and blocked within 3 days. I am pretty sure the Great Firewall is just as, if not a lot more, effective than the U.A.E.'s offering. You are a fool if you think this won't get blocked just as fast.
People complain about Wkipedia because they say they can't trust the information. Anyone who blindly trusts any information is a fool in today's world. Everything has biases, hidden or otherwise, everything skews information one or another. It can't be helped, it's human nature.
I don't trust Wikipedia, but it's still a useful tool as I take it's biases into account. I don't trust Britannica either, they have their own biases which they try, but ultimately can't, remove. I don't trust Nature magazine, and even less now when I have seen the lengths which they basically lied about this study of theirs.
And I don't trust Techdirt, because you have your own serious biases. Again, I take that into account when reading and add it to my collection of interesting and useful resources.
But, that being said, you writeup on this article is pretty bad. Britannica is defensive because Nature magazine just straight up lied and misrepresented the facts. And the reason they waited so long is because Nature didn't release the actual study and notes on the article until well after the article was published.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Alex Hagen.
"...figure out which Usenet posts were infringing and which weren't. Not surprisingly, that's impossible, and NSE has announced that it's just shutting down entirely instead."
Complete bullshit. Just stop spreading alt.binaries.* and you stop 99% of all illegal materials on Usenet. Why is that so hard?
10 Cents
Let's face it, to read email, browse the web, and print word documents, a 10 year old computer is sufficient. And for most people, that is all they do. Unless you are doing graphs or games, you just don't need the power in modern computers.
The problem with forced upgrades isn't Moore's law's fault, it's Microsoft. That 10 year old computer can really only run Windows 98. Vista would kill it. But of course 98 isn't supported anymore, with Windows 2000 and XP soon to follow. New software won't run on it, and bugs and security holes don't get fixed. MS is in business to sell operating systems, and obsoleting old systems is the only was for them to sell new ones.
The decline of AOL continues
As AOL members begun to realize that this is *their* data, and they start reading some of the things that are being pulled from them, like http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4016 , and the realize that anyone can go through them with tools like the one at http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/index.php , the suits are going to start rolling in. This is going to be very very costly for AOL, both in terms of users and actual settlements.
Of course
I have always thought the network neutraility debate was kind of a self-correcting problem. If some Telco decided to degrade performance of a certain website, all the victim website would have to do is detect if it the customer is coming in from that domain and put a big banner ad on the top of the page saying "Your ISP is slowing our site down on purpose. Please contact them at 1-800-555-8284 and ask them to stop".
Problem solved.
Don't Underestimate the Great Firewall
All this hype is for this old idea? It's an encrypted proxy, nothing less and nothing more. I set up an encrypted proxy on my home machine once, for my dad who was living at the time in the United Arab Emerites, a country that also performs country wide filtering. They found it and blocked within 3 days. I am pretty sure the Great Firewall is just as, if not a lot more, effective than the U.A.E.'s offering. You are a fool if you think this won't get blocked just as fast.
Biases
People complain about Wkipedia because they say they can't trust the information. Anyone who blindly trusts any information is a fool in today's world. Everything has biases, hidden or otherwise, everything skews information one or another. It can't be helped, it's human nature.
I don't trust Wikipedia, but it's still a useful tool as I take it's biases into account. I don't trust Britannica either, they have their own biases which they try, but ultimately can't, remove. I don't trust Nature magazine, and even less now when I have seen the lengths which they basically lied about this study of theirs.
And I don't trust Techdirt, because you have your own serious biases. Again, I take that into account when reading and add it to my collection of interesting and useful resources.
But, that being said, you writeup on this article is pretty bad. Britannica is defensive because Nature magazine just straight up lied and misrepresented the facts. And the reason they waited so long is because Nature didn't release the actual study and notes on the article until well after the article was published.