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[François]

Of course not! As ordained by fate, someone will come up with a wonderful communication technology that will topple the big internet providers just like the gravity gun toppled the Combine presence on Earth.

[Classic]

Guild, could you honestly imagine anyone that wanted to make money attempt to compete as a hard-line based ISP provider? The technologies needed to go mostly wireless are present and being implemented, but can you actually conceive of anyone trying to compete with an ISP being able to without a revolutionary technology?
And even if you had a revolutionary technology, why should you believe that the owning independent company will be able to finance the creation of the necessary infrastructure to make this technology work?

[Detonator]

I think I'll try to help Guild's point along since he can't make a legitimate argument to save his life.

If it were not for government interference, we would still be using Napster as our P2P client.  Things like Kazaa and BitTorrent would never have taken hold.

We mentioned in the Securom thread that no anti-piracy software is unbreakable.  Even as software companies try to top themselves, crackers become more and more savvy and are able to adapt regardless of restrictions.

I think what Guild is TRYING to say is that Net Neutrality restrictions will be overcome in the same way, so it's not worth worrying about.  Either the free market will let worthwhile sites quickly raise their bandwidth to match their traffic, or someone will invent the Internet 2 which makes it all moot.  I guess in Guild's personal version of capitalism, this is what must happen or his worldview will crumble into dust.

[Guild]

Det's making my point for me better than I can: I'm an artist, not a computer guy, but I know a thing or two about how the world works, and he's right. The Napster/bittorrent example is EXACTLY the kind of thing I was talking about. It's impossible to keep technology suppressed. Tesla/water engine myths aside, you really can't stop humanity from exploiting the shit out of anything and everything right under the noses of whatever governing system they'd previously group-approved. All this paranoia over omg net neutrality loss seems silly to me.

P.S. If I had one complaint about this community, it would be that some of you take differing opinions WAY too personally.

[TA]

There were two men selling hats. One was told he must put chinstraps on his hats so that they did not fly off customer's heads during gusty weather. The second, because he lived over the border, did not have to do this.

Now, many customers liked the chinstraps, while others thought they were unfashionable. Regardless of which was more in style, however, the strapless haberdasher made more money, for his hats frequently blew off and sailed down the river, lost forever. With his extra money the haberdasher invented new kinds of hats... hats that could keep you cool in hot weather and hats with soft linings. The other haberdasher kept selling his chinstrap hats until the market was flooded, and his out-of-style, can't-keep-you-cool-in-the-sun hats doomed him to a life of poverty.

Thankfully the strapless haberdasher was around, and now we have many kinds of interesting hats.

This is, in fact, a good parable of what happens with an unregulated, truly free market.

Specifically, in that the only business to win out is the one most willing to fuck over its customer base to maximize their profits.  The guy who makes his hats to last, so you get more value for your money?  Run out of business.  The guy who makes a hat that looks really tempting, but which you have to replace daily because it keeps getting blown off?  Rapidly becomes only game in town.

It's a good parable, it just demonstrates the opposite of your point.

[Guild]

Actually that was exactly the point of the parable. My point was that regulation (the chinstrapless man was unregulated business) destroys businesses.

[Detonator]

The argument is what's best for consumers, not businesses.  Stop changing the subject.

[Guild]

My original point, the one I've maintained from the beginning, was that net neutrality is a silly idea, the enforcement of which is detrimental to us all. Nowhere in the post above your last one did I say "And fuck consumers."

[A²]

Except that if you know anything about how people with lots of money work, they'll do anything to A) make more money, B) keep anyone else from making money, and C) Do anything to keep all that money (See: the RIAA)

As great as your happy gumdrops sugar rainbow fantasy land would be, Guild, ISPs will fuck us hard if they have the opportunity to make us pay out the nose for internet. Unless you can purge greedy fucks with the push of a button, net neutrality is needed.

[Detonator]

Nowhere in the post above your last one did I say "And fuck consumers."

This is, in fact, a good parable of what happens with an unregulated, truly free market.

Specifically, in that the only business to win out is the one most willing to fuck over its customer base to maximize their profits.
...
It's a good parable, it just demonstrates the opposite of your point.

Actually that was exactly the point of the parable.

 

[A²]

is guild just trolling now?

[Detonator]

That would imply he wasn't trolling before.

[A²]

Why is he still here, in that case.

[Classic]

 

[Thad]

If it were not for government interference, we would still be using Napster as our P2P client.  Things like Kazaa and BitTorrent would never have taken hold.

Bullshit.

Suggesting that BitTorrent exists only because Napster was shut down is utter nonsense.  BitTorrent is simply an evolution of a concept, taking the notion of peer-to-peer to its logical conclusion.  It was designed to move large amounts of data quickly and in a non-distributed fashion, and exists independently of its obvious uses for piracy.  If Napster still existed, BT still would have taken hold, because BT is BETTER.  You want evidence of this?  Well, there are still plenty of peer-to-peer networks in the Napster mold -- Gnutella, eD2k, and Soulseek, to name a few -- and they didn't stop BT from taking hold.

(Now, saying people only used Kazaa because Napster was shut down is totally accurate...but hardly a fucking ringing endorsement, given that Kazaa pretty much started the cottage industry of spyware and the world would have been a fuck of a lot better off without it.)

P.S. If I had one complaint about this community, it would be that some of you take differing opinions WAY too personally.

Guild,

I will explain this one final time.

I could give a fuck that you have a different opinion from mine.  The problem is that, by your own admission, you do not wish to have a conversation, you simply wish to state opinions which are unsupported by facts and then cry when anyone disagrees with you.

[...]

I have been over all this on repeated occasion over the past half-decade, and at least weekly since the beginning of April.  I'm not going to explain it again.  The next time you whine about how I am persecuting you for having a difference of opinion, I will simply quote this post -- or one of the many, many others which say the same thing in different words --, possibly with some bolded text.

In summation: That's stupid.  You're stupid.

[A²]

So can we just call Guild a dumbass dickmissile each time he speaks from now on?

[Thad]

No, because then he'll spend the next two weeks whining about name-calling.

Anyway.  IMO he's been much more tolerable in this thread; hence my responding to him.  Yes, he's still posting incomprehensible gibberish to the point that every post he writes requires him to write three more to explain it, and he's still (I assume deliberately) constantly using words incorrectly, and he's still playing the vague "I know how the world works, therefore I know more than the people in this thread who actually have experience and a technical understanding of the subject at hand" game, and he's still doing the "I GUARANTEE things will magically fix themselves even though I have no working idea of how that could possibly happen" dance, and...where was I going with this?

Oh yeah.  All that's still an improvement.  Give the man a cookie.

[Brentai]

I can't, my ISP restricted cookies.

[A²]

* rimshot

[Detonator]

and he's still doing the "I GUARANTEE things will magically fix themselves even though I have no working idea of how that could possibly happen" dance

  We have a word for that now.