I'm going to have to leave this now, but as a parting shot: The Washington post explicitly says that the FCC does indeed have the power to "preemt" state law (direct quote). (As I understand it without having to go via a court, though I assume that the state can sue the FCC if they want to appeal the decision).

Is this a mischaracterisation of the actual legal process?

I thought Sun's slogan was "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

That's not what I've read from the FCC ruling that nixed that law. I must confess that I haven't read it all, but can you cite that which supports your point? What I've read from i.e. the amicus briefs to the FCC the law prohibited the electric company from servicing someone that didn't get their electricity from same company (or wasn't "in the area serviced"), not that they did any of the things you mention. (And in either case the FCC didn't like that law and struck it down).

OK, I'll bite. What would be a fair characterisation then? Or isn't there a problem to begin with? (Again the FCC in their 2015 broadband report seems to think there is.)

And this is why I'm glad that I'm here, instead of over there. What purpose does the municipality serve other than to serve its inhabitants? And what better way to serve them than with infrastructure, especially that kind which succumbs to a natural monopoly anyway? (Running many different fibre networks is as dumb as running many different electricity lines, or roads, to a house).

Now, if you want to preserve the market, then by all means, do what we do here, and stipulate that the municipality can't offer service on said network, instead having to open it to all and sundry who want to do so. That provides the customer with both potentially high speed internet, even in out of the way places. If you look at the places where e.g. the local electric company rolled out fibre and was stopped by legislation (Tennessee?), these markets weren't served by anybody else, and still isn't), and you have a market for service where companies can offer there services. Legislating against the electric company pulling the fibre is just counter productive; legislating that they would have to open their network, now that would be another thing.

But as that would lead to real competition, at a lower total cost, not crony capitalism, I don't have high hopes for you...

No, its usually about twice that, with the rest in subsidies from the EU. But, the power of a co-op should not be underestimated. Since they can both do work and grant land (cheaply).

And when I check speedtest net, they list an average of $3.52/MBps which would give a much higher cost for 100/100. This article from the BBC also lists much higher prices; $90 for speeds over 45 Mbps on average. (Granted it's two years old).

Now, that rural infrastructure is subsidised is no surprise. Everyone does that, even you. Only problem is you only do it for phone service, which used to be important. We've said that internet service is equally important, while you don't. That's the gist of the problem.

And that's where your regulatory capture comes in. There have been numerous stories here on slasdot on states that have explicitly forbidden local municipalities to be involved in fibre/broadband, instead legislating that that can only be done by corporations. Who then don't actually deliver any infrastructure. Municipalities or co-ops are in most of these cases banned by law from addressing the problem. If that's not regulatory capture, I don't know what is...

Yes, sorry I meant co-op. As in "cooperative".

And of course I meant "oligopoly"...

And the subsidies are mainly EU, subsidies. Not Swedish per se. (And they're for rural areas. In the cities we have competition, which makes the market work.)

Myself, I pay $50 or so for 100/100Mbps including IP telephony. Fibre in an open city network (laid down by one of the utilities, district heating in my case), with my choice of ca eight different ISPs. I paid nothing for installation, but a more reasonable price would have been around $2500, which is what most people pay these days. In a rural setting you get about as much extra per drop in various (EU) subsidies.

Yes, that is true. However, even these parts of the country, at least in Sweden, have good broadband access. It's actually cheaper and easier for them than more urban areas, since there's more farmland/forest where digging is cheaper and easier. They're using national government money/legislative support to get a feed and then create co-ops to do the actual installation. It's been quite a thing for the past decade at least. (As a case in point a friend just got fibre to his farm, where his nearest neighbour is a kilometre away, at about the same time that his house, much more urban, was hooked up. Co-op in the country, and ISP in the burb.)

Now, when it comes to urbanisation, I would have always thought that the US was more urbanised than Sweden in particular (we're still in the process of urbanising), but according to Wikipedia you're less urbanised, by one measure at least. However, not by a lot. I'd say that the differences in degree of urbanisation does not explain the majority of the large differences in broadband access or price. My money is on other factors, chiefly unhampered oligopoly in the market combined with regulatory capture. Both of which we lack. (We even got the former government telecom company to start installing open fibre networks, i,e. where you have your choice of ISP, rather than being tied to just them. And we didn't even have to legislate, just compete... People realised a bad deal for a bad deal.)

(Interestingly Norway is much worse off, relatively speaking. Mainly due to a lack of government support. Instead choosing to leave it to the market, which means the telecom incumbent(s). Guess what the results are? Yepp, much more like the US. Lack of access, and where you can get it, more expensive.)

While I agree that places like Hong Kong are an anomaly, you also lag countries like Sweden and Finland...

Well, I wasn't the one using it, but in late 1998, I was working at a printer -- a big industrial one, with huge lithographic presses. The prepress department there was transitioning to using Macintosh G3s for DTP work, and I was there to help with that. The reason for the transition was that their old DTP needs had been served by some sort of DEC minicomputer.

It was about the size of a fridge, with dual 8" floppy drives, so I'm hoping it was a MicroVAX, but I don't recall. Each workstation wired into it had a VTerm, as well as a Barco graphics monitor and a mouse. You'd type in commands to their DTP software on the VTerm, then view the work as a line drawing on the Barco (all it was capable of -- photos had to be pasted in by hand) and adjust it with the mouse.

They'd been using the thing since the early 80s, but apparently it was breaking down and they were having trouble pulling people out of retirement to fix it, and that, plus the new digital press they were building, forced the transition to Macs.

The company got bought some years later, but is still in operation, so I guess things more or less worked out.

You make a lot of interesting points, the intersection of contracted forces and pregnancy is an interesting one that I haven't put much thought into, but I'd thought I'd just limit myself to this one point.

The main difference between police and fire fighting I would say is that the former has physical requirements they're based on a situation that will never arise. I.e. police (like most soldiers to tell the truth) train and prepare for a situation that will never come. The overwhelming majority of police never draw their service weapon in the line of duty for example. And comforting crying children after a traffic accident, or filling in the umpteenth burglary report can of course be fulfilled with a minimum of physical prowess. (OK, most uniformed police in "outer" service do a bit of impromptu wrestling during their stint, so there's that. But we also know that this is where WPCs fair the worst. And in Sweden we've seen an up-tick in police brutality reports as we've had more WPCs. They have to go for the Mace/pepper spray instead of wrestling...)

With fire fighting it's different in that they actually train for what they'll do. Fire fighting does actually involve the hard physical work that the requirements are put there to ensure that they can perform. OK, they don't do a lot of dragging their downed comrades to safety, but there's plenty of other stuff (i.e. smoke diving) that actually is as tough as it looks.

So with that in mind, it's not at all surprising that we'll see more female police than fire fighters. The jobs are different in that with police you can get away with skirting requirements due to whatever pressure or other consideration as those requirements are there to ensure performance during an emergency. In fire fighting, those requirements are there to ensure you can manage to do your regular duties.

So, it depends on whether you're training to train, or training to fight...

P.S. In the Swedish army we were taught that the Israeli experience was that while women soldiers in combat postings did fine, the men around them didn't. The "cave man reflex" (not my terminology) made men expose themselves far to much when women were in danger, to the detriment of the mission. But perhaps that's the sort of macho behaviour that training and indoctrination can deal with, and I don't know how large this effect was in either case. It's just a point of interest.

While that is a laudable sentiment, and one that I can get behind, don't be surprised if you end up with approximately no women in your battalions.

We've seen the exact same thing happen in Sweden. Female fire fighters (well, not necessarily them per se, but other's speaking for them) complained about the macho culture that prevented women from being fire fighters. The had the numbers to support their arguments, there were very few females that were deemed to pass muster.

So, instead of the somewhat arbitrary previous hiring process, that did contain standards but also left room for judgement, quite a lot of work was put into defining what the actual requirements that had to be met to be a passable fire fighter were researched, tested and put into practice in the major fire departments in the larger cities.

The results were quite telling. At the smaller departments that kept the old process in the interim, the same abysmally small number of female applicants were hired, but in the cities, with their brand spanking new, objective, doesn't-leave-anything-to-subjective-judgement, not a single female fire fighter was hired after. Not one. *)

And if you look at the statistics that's not really that surprising. When you have strength, endurance, and psychological requirements that only a relatively small portion of the male population can pass, the number of females who could pass it in the general population becomes close to zero to begin with. And when you combine that with the small number of women who could see themselves in that line of work and even apply, it becomes a once-in-a-blue-moon even that the stars have aligned so that you will get a woman who both can pass the requirements, and would be interested and willing to do so.

*) A few years after two women actually managed to pass the physical requirements test by having been coached specifically. So out of 1000 fire fighters in my city there are now two women that are qualified for actual fire fighting (including "smoke diving"). The first time they tried coaching four women from neighbouring cities that already worked as fire fighters, but none of them passed... And just for reference, the physical requirements aren't completely over the top: Being able to run 3000 meters below 13:15, 30 kg bench press 35 times in under one minute, or lifting a 15 kg bar to the chin 40 times, etc. etc. These are requirements I myself would have had a shot at 25 years ago before I got old, slow, weak and fat, and I was no prime specimen of the male gender, far from it.

The physical differences between the sexes, at least in modern societies, are just that large. And if you say that "Women are OK, but you know, given the requirements there won't actually be any women," have you then actually opened up the position to women?

It gets even better. In project management terms we also actually try and quantify the "unknown unknowns", not just the "known unknowns". Rather, at the outset we try to get a feel for the risk that things will crop up that we didn't or couldn't foresee or plan for. This is based on things like; Have we done something similar in the past? (i.e. our degree of experience) What is the state of knowledge in the world about this task? What's the state of science? How good have we been at dealing with unforeseen consequences in the past? Can we limit the impact of any unknown unknown to a part of the system/project? (i.e. were are the risks the largest, can we do without those parts in a pinch?) etc. etc.

Any project manager that doesn't deal with the unknown and unknowable unknowns isn't doing their job. Its called risk management...

And neither do you. And that's my main point.

You then go on about avoiding a well known danger and how GM might be safer in that respect.

But that's not the point. It's the unknown unknown, that's the danger.

And with GM you open up whole vistas of unknown, unknown. The computer analogy is very apt. Even in the "deliberately designed world of computer programming" we can't foresee the consequences, and our experience is quite clearly on the side of outright manipulation being more dangerous than random chance change. The risks from the known unknown is readily dealt with in both situations, you have to check for known dangerous compounds using both methods, so your "you can be certain since you didn't fiddle with that" (paraphrase) doesn't fly in that case either. (Also a well known result from the complex systems that are computer programmes, "But that couldn't possibly affect that..." Famous last words.

But in either case, your characterisation of mine in particular, and our in general, concerns aren't about "unsafe" GMO's in the sense of knowingly "directly harmful to humans", it's "letting known psychopath organisations play with fire". We, well I specifically, don't distrust science and technology, we distrust you (in the "ya'll" sense of "you"). We didn't trust Dow Chemical when they said "trust us, our chemicals are completely safe", and we don't trust Monsanto now, when they're doing and saying the exact same thing. And the risk isn't really that we're afraid that they'll poison us outright (not that we hold them above such behaviour, just witness the British when they realised that scrapie had jumped the species boundary to cows and decided against saying anything lest they harm the British beef industry), we believe them to be smarter than that, no, its basically everything else, including the rest of the ecosystem, economy, and laying their grubby hands on a strategic resource...

Note that here in Sweden we don't just ban GMO, we also ban Belgian Blue, because we don't believe in the concept of breeding for what is a genetic disorder in animals just to make beef $0.10 cheaper by the pound. Banning the use of artificial growth hormones in animal husbandry, and the use of antibiotics to promote growth in same, is just plain common sense (esp. the latter).

We note that you don't care one way or the other about any of these. So that you don't care about GMO, and the risks with said, isn't surprising in the least, but also not very much of an endorsement... Especially since our farmers, even though we've "hamstrung" them instead of letting red blooded american capitalism be our guiding star, still manage to overproduce themselves into an unsustainable market situation, almost just as bad as yours. We don't actually need them to be more efficient, and we can't afford them to be anyway...

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society by increasing the number of works which are created and published, while imposing the fewest and shortest restrictions on the public. It operates by providing some temporary benefits (whose actual value is determined by the market) to authors, but this is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. If copyright were actually meant to benefit authors, it's clear that it has never done a good job of it at all. The stereotype of the starving author exists for a reason.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software). The reason is that when we had renewal terms, many rights holders failed to renew, evidencing a lack of desire for longer copyright on their part, and getting works into the public domain faster through their inaction. Since everyone winds up as happy as they wanted to be in that scenario, I see no reason not to return to it.

Regarding maximum lengths, you may be interested to read the following paper on the subject: http://rufuspollock.org/papers...

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)