[brlug-general] Cox prepares to suck more.

[Will Hill]

It has taken me a while to sort through your last letter and I've at last 
found a few things worth writing about.  It was so confused that it was 
difficult to determine your intent.  I asked you what I thought was the most 
important question and got no answer.  Most of the rest seemed to be 
invective, which is not worth wasting much time with.   In reading the rest 
of it again, I noticed a mistake worth correcting for you.  You accuse me of 
hypocrisy though ideological zeal, but have ignorantly invented facts for a 
case to suit your own argument.  

I can't pretend that I understand your charge of hypocrisy based on my studies 
at LSU, but I can assure you my work is available to the public.  The main 
product of my employment at LSU was my thesis, which is available to anyone 
free of charge.  I was compensated for my work at the time and I'm happy that 
it is distributed freely.  I have also made the code I used available at 

http://phys.lsu.edu/~willhill

Similar work that I did for the Louisiana Transportation Research Center was 
also published, though I'm not sure where it is anymore.  You paid for it and 
you deserve to have it.  Research I do at private institutions will be 
published as well and those publications will be as free as I can make them.  
The point of publishing things is to share them, barriers defeat that 
purpose.

Your misunderstanding of the Comcast P2P attack is more informative of your 
misunderstandings and blindness to change.  The people who complained about 
their bible translations being blocked were the authors of the translation.  
They wanted people to have their work but Comcast's attack on P2P protocols 
got in their way.  The US federal government eventually agreed.  Your mind 
bent that story into the case you seem to be obsessed with - "piracy" of 
entertainment that might harm the profits of big publishers.  The straw man 
you present of me is that I've got a gun to someone's head and that I'm 
demanding, "Make me movies!  Make me music!" but I'm much less concerned with 
these things than you are.

Are you really afraid that people sharing music and TV shows will somehow 
diminish your entertainment?  Is that so much more important than access to  
knowledge and entertainment that free networks can bring?  

On Friday 30 January 2009, Andrew Baudouin wrote:
> Freedom of the press?  This really is a religious argument for you, isn't
> it?
>
> Why do you demand having information for free?  You are employed by LSU.
> Did you hand your last paycheck back because the research information you
> produced should have been free?
>
> I think that QOS is a legitimate way to ensure that high-bandwidth
> applications don't affect low latency ones.  It's a technical solution to a
> technical problem.
>
> Bible translations aren't free.  People do lots of work on translations and
> want to be fairly compensated for it, which is biblical by the way.
>