Of course it's a group. A group whose main agitprop is that they "aren't" a group lol. We get all that. Um, they're a "loose movement that trades images" *cough*. They always appear and manifest and operate the same way. There is a core of known and indeed findable quantities some of whom victory dance and brag about their exploits. They have hangers-on and fanboyz and wannabees some of whom hold out. Then they have an exo-layer of gawkers. But it's a group. It's X quantity with Y features and Z actions. Always. And everywhere. And the same people. Close down 4chan.org, call in Huffpo's new (highly-paid?) advisor Christopher Poole to the police, and what it all concentrate their little minds wonderfully. The rage machine would die down in fear in 24 hours. The chief feature of the script kiddies is that they don't want to go to jailed; they don't even want to get b&. A generation not breastfed by their moms and neglected by their dads.

Oh, don't be silly. Of course they're a group. Group, group, group. A group of very definite people who aren't anonymous and who commit deliberate deeds. Under the law, they are a conspiracy, i.e. a group of people planning and executing crimes. They don't have to know anything more than each others' nicknames for that. They are a group. They sa And the media is whitewashing them terribly -- and so are many of you. http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/12/major-media-white-washing-4chan-anonglobalpr-agitprop.html

Um, those users don't pay their ISPs for the use of their bandwidth. Google won't pay for it and claims it doesn't have to, even though they exploit this free bandwidth to show their ads, so...who is supposed to pay? The government/taxpayer? Seriously, your opensource gnu nonsense crap has to take some accountability sooner or later and decide who pays, and stop pretending it's all endlessly free. Bandwidth is a scarce and expensive resource. No, google does NOT pay for all its use. The ISPs don't -- except when they do, like Comcast, either by charging more or blocking overusage -- and then we hear all you freetards screeching. Well, how is that expensive resource supposed to be paid for? Google isn't making content available. What's happening is Google is paying for its pipe up to the backbone; you're paying peanuts to your ISP for your line up to the Internet, and the usage of bandwidth between these two pipes is not getting paid for. It is a grabbed, free space that Google exploits to push its ads on your content. Don't confuse the overgrazing of the public commons with planting grass. You're not paying ENOUGH for your "fat pipe". Your $37 or whatever isn't sufficient for your usage or my usage. And SOMEBODY has to pay for this, and it is unfair to force telecoms to shoulder the burden or whine to Congress to take it out of the public coffers. Your business doesn't pay anywhere near enough of the cost given the usage, either. The telecomes aren't "losing money"; you and the other bandwidth hoges are stealing from them and trying to shift the burden of maintenance of the public commons back on them. Unfair, and criminal. No,uh, they're not happy. Watch what happens to content made available on YouTube. The lawsuits will continue to come, the content will continue to be pulled. It's not a viable model. You live in a land of confusion and illusion, imagining these resources are "free" and that socialism must be made available to you and your bandwidth hog buddies, but capitalism forced on telecoms to eat your costs. There's the John Gott, right there. Telecoms cannot charge "the same" for you, WoW kiddies, and World Vision, anymore than Con Edison can charge everybody a flat rate even if some of them run 10 servers and 10 heaters in their house and the others only run a lamp. The Internet is not special. It's energy. It has to be metered.

Er, I don't need to download porn, hon. I think people should pay for their considerable downloads, however.

Well...don't. Because they're not. Which services owns virtually the entire world's teenage instant messaging? AIM. From AOL. That company you said was closed, and therefore a "closed system" that made it stupid, dead, useless, blah blah blah. Some closed things might die. Some might not. Some might morph into other things. Others might gain value because they stay closed instead of opening up to mindless freetard opensourceniks who suck out value and copyleft all the content. Who says parallels and patterns repeat lock-step in history, over and over again, as if history is some kind of precoded computer system? I mean, come on, someone like yourself who doesn't believe in creation can't believe that. There is absolutely no law in the universe everywhere that says because something happened in a pattern once (some closed proprietary systems failed in the creation of the Internet) that it will happen again (some closed proprietary systems will fail in the next iteration or level of the Internet). Geeks don't rule. Geeks may have ruled at the beginning, but then companies and regular people took over. Bye-bye geeks, too bad, so sad. They then grasped and clawed and bullied again for Web 2.0 but oops, consumers bypassed them as going on the Internet and doing things with user-generated content got easier and easier and they were less and less needed. Porn was not a big factor in the early Internet, that's another common fallacy. Mostly, it was pictures of people's cats.

Um, well, gosh. I have a GREAT solution for this. Since there is such a low density of people per land, let's *take away the land from those paying customers who pay for maintenance fees for their server space to do what they like with* and let's *forcibly turn it over to people on free accounts*. Would that work for you? It's called "Bolshevism".

So wait, if you're sick, you get to break the law with impunity? If you're sick, it's ok to plagiarize? If you're sick, you can do what you want and get a moral pass? why? Justice is blind. If you want help for sick people, see Charity, not Justice, wrong window. Record companies are not charities. They have to pay for artists and advertising. That means you have to pay, too.

Geeks hate Second Life because no one requires them to use it. It's great : ) Reuters didn't leave SL, their island is still in place. They seem to have lost interst, and Eric, a cub reporter just out of j-school, found a real job. But before that, he got a girlfriend, who probably hated him being on Second Life. http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/eric-reuters-got-a-girlfriend.html

No, not true. Google's users *with websites with AdSense on them* use bandwidth, so Google gets to be in the ad business without having to pay the cost of doing business sufficiently, and forcing others to shoulder it. Time for that to end. Google gets a lot of its content for free. Somebody always pays. If you get the traffic, pay the price. If the consumer can't be persuaded to pay it, and you can't develop a subscription model, be prepared to find content migrating away in the end.

Good! This is a good discussion to have, even if started by a paid hack. The gamerz and script kiddies here need to realize that the general public cannot go on paying for their WoW patch downloads and pirated video downloads and YouTubes and whatnot. Bandwidth is a scarce resource and has to be paid for, just like electricity -- come to think of it, it *is* electricity at the end of the day. I fail to see why telecoms have to shoulder more of the load, or "the government" (i.e. taxpayers) have to pay for people's Bittorent habit. If there isn't a feasible pay-to-play model, then let's look at how Google might pay more of its share for the *traffic*, not just the path to the backbone. After all, those websites that it says are all user-paid and on somebody else's dimes are hosting their AdSense, duh, so they are getting paid without paying for the cost of doing business. I see an enormous amount of aggressive insolence on Slashdot by geeks who don't seem to grasp that we are not required endlessly to pay for their energy consumption. The Internet is a form of energy, not merely a media. The entire Net Neutrality fandango should be renamed Net Congestion. It's not about free speech, it's about *consumption*. http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/net-congestion.html