Hmm. Perhaps we should elect people who aren't idiots, then. I may have spoken too rashly regarding Senators doing what their constituents want... though there are plenty of examples of that happening, you're also correct about them ignoring constituents too.
My wife pointed out to me the other day that the people who run for office are usually the last people you actually want in office - they don't know enough about anything to be useful. The people who we need in office are the same people who want nothing to do with politics.
I didn't say it would stop bittorrent forever, I just said that blocking blacklisted ports was possible:P The whole idea of trying to filter p2p is fundamentally flawed, but that won't stop them from trying.
But when the connection is first established, you're connecting to a known port, and that is possible to block. All they have to do is block the connection if it is being established on a blacklisted port.
No, but they could block every connection to a port that's not on an approved list (or they could charge extra to each customer for each extra port they want opened). That would be scarier, in my opinion, than just trying to block certain protocols or content types.
Do you really think all Christians are ignorant idiots? I am Christian myself, and were I President one of the first things I would do would be to disabuse Congress of their idiocy regarding P2P and the internet in general. Virtually all of my Christian friends would do the same.
The "ignorant idiot" rate is not any higher among Christians than among any other segment of the population.
If they try to filter P2P based on the content of the files, then people are just going to enable encryption by default on all P2P connections (that will take all of two hours). Then what do you think they will do? Block P2P entirely. They'll have no choice - it will be the only way to save face.
Wait... you find it disturbing that they use torrent technology, even though using it makes downloads faster and saves them money? That doesn't make any sense.
Fileplanet's servers can be relatively fast, but only when their servers aren't overloaded. I've gotten 1MB/sec+ from Fileplanet in the middle of the night, but never during the day. (Yay for 15Mbps fiber!)
P2P, on the other hand, doesn't have that constraint.
It's not so much a question of affecting my daily life as one of being something I care about.
For example, I don't own a gun, nor do I currently intend to, but I am strongly in favor of the right to own guns - if not for the right to own guns, the U.S. would not exist - so the moment I hear proposals about guns being restricted, I'll be pestering my senators relentlessly. (This is one of the things about Obama that worries me; I am opposed to banning concealed weapons. If I have a pistol on me, why should I have to advertise that fact? Do they think criminals are going to obey the new law?)
The same is true of unreasonable searches; I don't mind going through an x-ray machine or metal detector, as I think those are reasonable measures (though I think it should be the airlines doing it, not the government). But if they pull me aside to search me, and I'm not with my wife (who wants to publicly embarrass their wife?), I'll refuse - they really have no right to search me without a warrant. The airline can refuse to allow me to board the plane, because on their property they make the rules, and I'll allow the airline to search me, but not the government.
The same goes for searching my laptop; I don't have anything disreputable on it, let alone anything illegal, so logically it doesn't matter if they search my hard drive, but the right to privacy trumps the "I have nothing to hide" argument. The same goes for traffic cops; if a cop asks to search my vehicle, I'll say no, despite not having anything to hide, because the law requires a warrant for searches.
That said, you do have a valid point; most people don't think much of anything affects their life.
Your parent post's point was that a law is a law, and if we have any respect for our country we should obey the law, and if the law is wrong we should change it.
Breaking the law is a disrespect for the system as a whole, not just the one law.
You didn't answer my question (though yes, most consumer software is crap). What are game developers supposed to do if everyone pirates their games?
And many professional organizations do, in fact, pirate software. A place I worked a few years ago had a single-machine license for a particular piece of software that was vital for running the business (as in, without the software the business would have no clients), but it was installed on at least fifteen machines. Oh, and they pirated MS Office, and I'm fairly sure some of their XP installs weren't legitimate. (On the other hand, their servers ran Linux.)
But if by "professional organization" you mean "companies whose net profit is greater than a million dollars a year", I'm sure there are plenty of people here on Slashdot that can regale you with tales of pirated software in the wealthiest of companies.
I'll be honest; I haven't written any letters to Senators. However, there haven't been any issues that actually bother me; sure, I think some of the ID card stuff they're doing is pointless, and the TSA is being idiotic, but it doesn't bother me right now, mostly because I don't travel much (read: less than once a year). I don't do drugs in any form, so I couldn't care less if they're legalized, though we could definitely use the tax revenue we'd get from legalizing drug sales...
In any case, if there were something that bothered me, I would be writing my Senators about it. I suspect that's the case for some, though not all, of my fellow Slashdot people.
I know the box office numbers sound high, but most of a movie's revenues come from DVD sales.
Yes, musicians could do concerts more, that would certainly help them.
What do you propose software developers do? There isn't much money to be made in providing technical support for games.
(As a sibling post mentioned, there is little indication that piracy actually reduces sales; however I'm commenting based on the "information wants to be free, so it should all be free" philosophy.)
Oh, I agree with you. I was just saying that if everyone were to wait for the free torrent, then the product couldn't be made in the first place.
I brought it up because I've heard many people justify piracy by saying "well enough people are paying for it that it doesn't matter whether I pirate it." They have no intention of paying for it, of course, and they aren't really lost sales; it's not the piracy itself that's the problem, rather it's the justification.
If everyone tried to use the same justification, we'd have a problem.
Given what you've said about ISPs not having a clue about what information you're transmitting by encrypting your connections, I'm beginning to worry that ISPs are going to start blocking any connections to ports that aren't officially registered with them... Oh, that's not an http, https, or ftp connection? "That's too bad, we don't let that happen on our network." They may even charge extra to unblock certain ports just for you.... meaning every employee of company X that ever needs to log in remotely will need to pay the ISPs extra.
I know I'm getting ahead of myself; we're not really that close to the situation I've described. But honestly, is it that far-fetched that an ISP would get this idea?
We need to boycott those ISPs that try to filter the internet. I've already committed myself to boycotting Comcast for this reason...
Marijuana itself may not be addictive, but the endorphins it causes to be released in your brain are definitely addictive. Yes, there are dozens of other things that do the same thing; but that only makes my point for me. Why do something illegal to get an endorphin high when there are legal things that do the same thing?
Note however that addictions of any form are unhealthy; a person addicted to endorphins will do many of the same things (lie, steal, etc) to get their high that a person addicted to cocaine will do to get their next high.
Just because marijuana itself isn't addictive doesn't mean it is harmless. (On a side note, I remain unconvinced that marijuana smoke has no physical side effects, as some people claim.)
Agreed; any law legalizing drugs should not be retroactive, because that would encourage breaking other laws in the hope that they will be made legal at a later time (e.g. traffic laws or something).
Sibling post has a strong point; how do you expect movies to get made (paid for), if everyone just waits for the free torrent to come out before watching it? The same can be said of music, art, software, and so on.
Yes, the copyright system is broken. But making artists and moviemakers bankrupt is not the answer. For software... yes, there are open source games, but we won't see high-end games coming out every few years if the open source, community-driven model is the only one that survives.
When politicians push on with such blatantly unpopular schemes as ID cards, you know they ain't listening.
If 50% of a Senator's constituency wrote to him and said "We don't want ID cards", he wouldn't push ID cards anymore. Do you know why Senators push things like this? They have no idea what their constituency wants, so they just kind of go with whatever sounds like a good idea at the time. (Obviously there are exceptions, but that's not really my point.)
Contrary to popular belief, Senators will, in fact, do what their constituency wants, if their constituency bothers to tell them. So rather than waste your time complaining here on Slashdot, perhaps you should spend the same amount of time writing letters to your Senators and House Representatives.
I didn't change my ssh port to something that high, but I changed it to something above 1024, and the botnet attacks have stopped, so you can add my anecdote to yours...
Agreed. A friend of mine wrote a novel in Word; it's 161 pages (not including the title page and table of contents) and 111k words.
My own stories are more modest in size at the moment; one is 21k words and 32 pages, the other is 19k words and 35 pages.
Word has never had issues with any of the three documents (though I actually have them in.odt right now).
Quick question, if I may, Atlantis-Rising. If you use Word to merge multiple document files into one, will it update the main document correctly whenever you edit one of the other document files? Will the table of contents in the main document work correctly? (I ask these things because I suspect the answer is yes, but I don't want to go to the effort of trying it if I can't be sure...)
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Hmm. Perhaps we should elect people who aren't idiots, then. I may have spoken too rashly regarding Senators doing what their constituents want... though there are plenty of examples of that happening, you're also correct about them ignoring constituents too.
My wife pointed out to me the other day that the people who run for office are usually the last people you actually want in office - they don't know enough about anything to be useful. The people who we need in office are the same people who want nothing to do with politics.
Like I said to your sibling post, I didn't claim that blacklisting ports would do what they want, I just said that it's possible...
I didn't say it would stop bittorrent forever, I just said that blocking blacklisted ports was possible :P The whole idea of trying to filter p2p is fundamentally flawed, but that won't stop them from trying.
But when the connection is first established, you're connecting to a known port, and that is possible to block. All they have to do is block the connection if it is being established on a blacklisted port.
No, but they could block every connection to a port that's not on an approved list (or they could charge extra to each customer for each extra port they want opened). That would be scarier, in my opinion, than just trying to block certain protocols or content types.
Do you really think all Christians are ignorant idiots? I am Christian myself, and were I President one of the first things I would do would be to disabuse Congress of their idiocy regarding P2P and the internet in general. Virtually all of my Christian friends would do the same.
The "ignorant idiot" rate is not any higher among Christians than among any other segment of the population.
If they try to filter P2P based on the content of the files, then people are just going to enable encryption by default on all P2P connections (that will take all of two hours). Then what do you think they will do? Block P2P entirely. They'll have no choice - it will be the only way to save face.
Wait... you find it disturbing that they use torrent technology, even though using it makes downloads faster and saves them money? That doesn't make any sense.
Fileplanet's servers can be relatively fast, but only when their servers aren't overloaded. I've gotten 1MB/sec+ from Fileplanet in the middle of the night, but never during the day. (Yay for 15Mbps fiber!)
P2P, on the other hand, doesn't have that constraint.
Why do you think they're trying to control guns?
It's not so much a question of affecting my daily life as one of being something I care about.
For example, I don't own a gun, nor do I currently intend to, but I am strongly in favor of the right to own guns - if not for the right to own guns, the U.S. would not exist - so the moment I hear proposals about guns being restricted, I'll be pestering my senators relentlessly. (This is one of the things about Obama that worries me; I am opposed to banning concealed weapons. If I have a pistol on me, why should I have to advertise that fact? Do they think criminals are going to obey the new law?)
The same is true of unreasonable searches; I don't mind going through an x-ray machine or metal detector, as I think those are reasonable measures (though I think it should be the airlines doing it, not the government). But if they pull me aside to search me, and I'm not with my wife (who wants to publicly embarrass their wife?), I'll refuse - they really have no right to search me without a warrant. The airline can refuse to allow me to board the plane, because on their property they make the rules, and I'll allow the airline to search me, but not the government.
The same goes for searching my laptop; I don't have anything disreputable on it, let alone anything illegal, so logically it doesn't matter if they search my hard drive, but the right to privacy trumps the "I have nothing to hide" argument. The same goes for traffic cops; if a cop asks to search my vehicle, I'll say no, despite not having anything to hide, because the law requires a warrant for searches.
That said, you do have a valid point; most people don't think much of anything affects their life.
Your parent post's point was that a law is a law, and if we have any respect for our country we should obey the law, and if the law is wrong we should change it.
Breaking the law is a disrespect for the system as a whole, not just the one law.
You didn't answer my question (though yes, most consumer software is crap). What are game developers supposed to do if everyone pirates their games?
And many professional organizations do, in fact, pirate software. A place I worked a few years ago had a single-machine license for a particular piece of software that was vital for running the business (as in, without the software the business would have no clients), but it was installed on at least fifteen machines. Oh, and they pirated MS Office, and I'm fairly sure some of their XP installs weren't legitimate. (On the other hand, their servers ran Linux.)
But if by "professional organization" you mean "companies whose net profit is greater than a million dollars a year", I'm sure there are plenty of people here on Slashdot that can regale you with tales of pirated software in the wealthiest of companies.
Sorry, I just assumed you were from the U.S. ;) Silly me.
I'm not particularly familiar with the U.K.'s government, so perhaps your "screw it, I'll do whatever I want" attitude actually comes from somewhere ;)
I'll be honest; I haven't written any letters to Senators. However, there haven't been any issues that actually bother me; sure, I think some of the ID card stuff they're doing is pointless, and the TSA is being idiotic, but it doesn't bother me right now, mostly because I don't travel much (read: less than once a year). I don't do drugs in any form, so I couldn't care less if they're legalized, though we could definitely use the tax revenue we'd get from legalizing drug sales...
In any case, if there were something that bothered me, I would be writing my Senators about it. I suspect that's the case for some, though not all, of my fellow Slashdot people.
I know the box office numbers sound high, but most of a movie's revenues come from DVD sales.
Yes, musicians could do concerts more, that would certainly help them.
What do you propose software developers do? There isn't much money to be made in providing technical support for games.
(As a sibling post mentioned, there is little indication that piracy actually reduces sales; however I'm commenting based on the "information wants to be free, so it should all be free" philosophy.)
Oh, I agree with you. I was just saying that if everyone were to wait for the free torrent, then the product couldn't be made in the first place.
I brought it up because I've heard many people justify piracy by saying "well enough people are paying for it that it doesn't matter whether I pirate it." They have no intention of paying for it, of course, and they aren't really lost sales; it's not the piracy itself that's the problem, rather it's the justification.
If everyone tried to use the same justification, we'd have a problem.
Given what you've said about ISPs not having a clue about what information you're transmitting by encrypting your connections, I'm beginning to worry that ISPs are going to start blocking any connections to ports that aren't officially registered with them... Oh, that's not an http, https, or ftp connection? "That's too bad, we don't let that happen on our network." They may even charge extra to unblock certain ports just for you.... meaning every employee of company X that ever needs to log in remotely will need to pay the ISPs extra.
I know I'm getting ahead of myself; we're not really that close to the situation I've described. But honestly, is it that far-fetched that an ISP would get this idea?
We need to boycott those ISPs that try to filter the internet. I've already committed myself to boycotting Comcast for this reason...
Marijuana itself may not be addictive, but the endorphins it causes to be released in your brain are definitely addictive. Yes, there are dozens of other things that do the same thing; but that only makes my point for me. Why do something illegal to get an endorphin high when there are legal things that do the same thing?
Note however that addictions of any form are unhealthy; a person addicted to endorphins will do many of the same things (lie, steal, etc) to get their high that a person addicted to cocaine will do to get their next high.
Just because marijuana itself isn't addictive doesn't mean it is harmless. (On a side note, I remain unconvinced that marijuana smoke has no physical side effects, as some people claim.)
Agreed; any law legalizing drugs should not be retroactive, because that would encourage breaking other laws in the hope that they will be made legal at a later time (e.g. traffic laws or something).
Sibling post has a strong point; how do you expect movies to get made (paid for), if everyone just waits for the free torrent to come out before watching it? The same can be said of music, art, software, and so on.
Yes, the copyright system is broken. But making artists and moviemakers bankrupt is not the answer. For software... yes, there are open source games, but we won't see high-end games coming out every few years if the open source, community-driven model is the only one that survives.
When politicians push on with such blatantly unpopular schemes as ID cards, you know they ain't listening.
If 50% of a Senator's constituency wrote to him and said "We don't want ID cards", he wouldn't push ID cards anymore. Do you know why Senators push things like this? They have no idea what their constituency wants, so they just kind of go with whatever sounds like a good idea at the time. (Obviously there are exceptions, but that's not really my point.)
Contrary to popular belief, Senators will, in fact, do what their constituency wants, if their constituency bothers to tell them. So rather than waste your time complaining here on Slashdot, perhaps you should spend the same amount of time writing letters to your Senators and House Representatives.
It's people like you that make it hard for people like the parent to change laws. It's kind of sad, really.
I didn't change my ssh port to something that high, but I changed it to something above 1024, and the botnet attacks have stopped, so you can add my anecdote to yours...
Agreed. A friend of mine wrote a novel in Word; it's 161 pages (not including the title page and table of contents) and 111k words.
My own stories are more modest in size at the moment; one is 21k words and 32 pages, the other is 19k words and 35 pages.
Word has never had issues with any of the three documents (though I actually have them in .odt right now).
Quick question, if I may, Atlantis-Rising. If you use Word to merge multiple document files into one, will it update the main document correctly whenever you edit one of the other document files? Will the table of contents in the main document work correctly? (I ask these things because I suspect the answer is yes, but I don't want to go to the effort of trying it if I can't be sure...)