It's of some concern that the blacklist of sites and newsgroups is to be maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an NGO with no legal requirement for transparency.
This is exactly like the situation in Sweden, where the major ISPs have signed a "volontary" agreement with the national police to redirect DNS requests for alleged child porn sites. This list is maintained by ECPAT, a non-governmental organisation with no requirement for transparency. Also, the list itself is secret. Coincidentally, former minister of justice Thomas Bodstrom is the chair of ECPAT Sweden.
The result? Several sites that had absolutely nothing to do with child pornography were blocked, among others a site about bonsai trees and an art project run by members of the copyright reform think tank Piratbyran. ECPAT/Bodstrom also wanted to add The Pirate Bay to the list, but that was leaked by an ISP employee and the police quickly stated that since TPB had removed the child porn torrents in question they would not be added. Which confused the TPB admins, since they had neither seen or removed any child porn, or received any notice about it from ECPAT or the national police.
Right, but none of that contradicts my statement. If you eat less energy thatn you expend you _will_ lose weight. Other factors may lead to people being unable to maintain that energy balance for any longer period of time (though many, many succeed), so just "try to eat less than you use" may not be the best advise to someone trying to lose weight. But if you can stick to it, it works.
That would depend on your definition of "diet". If you eat less energy than you expend you will obviously lose weight, and that's what "diet and exercise" is all about.
Install Freenet 0.7, give it a small bandwidth allotment and a huge datastore, hook it up to your router, and keep it running. You'll be helping people all over the world to communicate securely and anonymously.
In the case of file sharing, which is what's being discussed here, encryption doesn't really matter. The whole point with most file sharing on the net is that it's public - anyone can connect to a torrent and download and upload, thus anyone can connect and get a list of peers on the torrent. Trying to encrypt it while still letting anyone join isn't very different from DRM, and we know how well that works.
A system that is both encrypted and anonymous, on the other hand, would be pretty resilient against lawyer-parasites. Unfortunately most such systems (Freenet, BitTorrent over TOR etc) are still pretty slow, but they're getting there.
And, to further drive a nail into that proposal's coffin, the European Commission issued a directive specifically against such a "three strikes and you're out" policy.
It was the parliament, not the commission, and it was a non-binding resolution, not a directive.
Seriously, with the importance of the Internet in everyday life, is there a case that this actually infringes on a person's civil rights, or at least on their basic rights?
Yes. That is pretty much what the EU parliament declared in a recent report. It's non-binding, but it's still a fairly strong statement and a fuck-you to the French government.
I loved MacGyver when I was a kid, but when I watched a few reruns a year ago or so I was surprised by how bad it was. Poorly written, very badly acted, and extremely embarrassing bad guys (especially the foreign ones).
You may think that Saturday Night Live's "MacGruber" skits are satire, but they are pretty much identical to the original. Except that MacGyver always succeeded.
This argument is completely silly. Of course mathematical results exist before someone thought of them. Were there any integer solutions to x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2 before Wiles? Was there some weird rational polynomial with pi as a root before Lindemann?
Philosophers should stick to fluffy pointless subjects that no one cares about. When they start thinking about mathematics the results usually range from stupid to ridiculous.
Oh, now I get it. Jesus didn't rise from the dead. He was just beamed back to his mother ship. And the Star of Bethlehem was that ship arriving before they got the cloaking device ironed out.
That makes so much more sense. Actually, it does. Well, it doesn't actually make sense, but it makes more sense.
How sad is the attitude towards computing when "installing device drivers" is deemed to be an unsurmountable task for a human being of normal intelligence? Why is it that everything that has anything to do with computers is considered to be orders of magnitude harder than anything to do with, say, driving a car or cooking dinner?
If you can get hold of them, check the average highschool grades needed to get in at both programs. Having a class with twelve students would be great, if they are smart. Being stuck with twelve doofuses for 4 years would be less attractive.
asking someone for permission should happen BEFORE acting
Yeah, that is just so feasible when what you're doing is taking pictures of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING AND HOUSE IN A LARGE CITY. Well maybe not every single one, but you get my point..
I'm far from a fan of the current government but I must say they have an interesting take at the end of the article.
"To battle illegal filesharing it is required that affected branches takes their responsibility. If copyright is used to protect obsolete businessmodels then it will in the long run be impossible to defend it" Yes. "Interesting". Copyright has been used to protect obsolete business models for decades, and this is yet another step. Their long run must be a very long one indeed.
Where does TPB instruct you to host copyrighted material?
Also, one would think that the fact that Google indexes everything while TPB only indexes what their users put their would make Google more vulnerable to lawsuits of this type, not less.
The only reason some people prefer vinyl over CD is that in many cases vinyl recordings are mastered differently - more dynamics etc, since mostly audiophiles buy them. There is no way that anyone can hear any improvement in actual recording quality in vinyl compared to a CD recording (16 bits per sample, 44100 samples per second). Just because vinyl isn't as easily quantised as digital data doesn't mean that it has infinite resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly like the situation in Sweden, where the major ISPs have signed a "volontary" agreement with the national police to redirect DNS requests for alleged child porn sites. This list is maintained by ECPAT, a non-governmental organisation with no requirement for transparency. Also, the list itself is secret. Coincidentally, former minister of justice Thomas Bodstrom is the chair of ECPAT Sweden.
The result? Several sites that had absolutely nothing to do with child pornography were blocked, among others a site about bonsai trees and an art project run by members of the copyright reform think tank Piratbyran. ECPAT/Bodstrom also wanted to add The Pirate Bay to the list, but that was leaked by an ISP employee and the police quickly stated that since TPB had removed the child porn torrents in question they would not be added. Which confused the TPB admins, since they had neither seen or removed any child porn, or received any notice about it from ECPAT or the national police.
PS. Your UTF8 support is broken.
From what I've heard the snoops care more about who is talking to who than about what's actually being said. Mapping social networks and all that.
So in addition to encryption, we would all have to run anonymising proxies, such as Tor or Freenet.
The government is supposed to work for us. We have every right to be outraged when they instead turn against us.
That doesn't mean that we're surprised.
Dead, dead, dead. Good riddance.
Right, but none of that contradicts my statement. If you eat less energy thatn you expend you _will_ lose weight. Other factors may lead to people being unable to maintain that energy balance for any longer period of time (though many, many succeed), so just "try to eat less than you use" may not be the best advise to someone trying to lose weight. But if you can stick to it, it works.
That would depend on your definition of "diet". If you eat less energy than you expend you will obviously lose weight, and that's what "diet and exercise" is all about.
Install Freenet 0.7, give it a small bandwidth allotment and a huge datastore, hook it up to your router, and keep it running. You'll be helping people all over the world to communicate securely and anonymously.
In the case of file sharing, which is what's being discussed here, encryption doesn't really matter. The whole point with most file sharing on the net is that it's public - anyone can connect to a torrent and download and upload, thus anyone can connect and get a list of peers on the torrent. Trying to encrypt it while still letting anyone join isn't very different from DRM, and we know how well that works.
A system that is both encrypted and anonymous, on the other hand, would be pretty resilient against lawyer-parasites. Unfortunately most such systems (Freenet, BitTorrent over TOR etc) are still pretty slow, but they're getting there.
And, to further drive a nail into that proposal's coffin, the European Commission issued a directive specifically against such a "three strikes and you're out" policy.
It was the parliament, not the commission, and it was a non-binding resolution, not a directive.
Seriously, with the importance of the Internet in everyday life, is there a case that this actually infringes on a person's civil rights, or at least on their basic rights?
Yes. That is pretty much what the EU parliament declared in a recent report. It's non-binding, but it's still a fairly strong statement and a fuck-you to the French government.
I loved MacGyver when I was a kid, but when I watched a few reruns a year ago or so I was surprised by how bad it was. Poorly written, very badly acted, and extremely embarrassing bad guys (especially the foreign ones).
You may think that Saturday Night Live's "MacGruber" skits are satire, but they are pretty much identical to the original. Except that MacGyver always succeeded.
I don't think I'd want to see a MacGyver movie.
That in itself is perhaps not really a good argument for Platonism being wrong. One could also question the infallibility of modern science.
Well, yes - the whole point of science is that it is not infallible. Math, however, is not science.You got it all wrong. You can not patent a discovery, and you have no copyright to an invention. You can, however, patent an invention.
This argument is completely silly. Of course mathematical results exist before someone thought of them. Were there any integer solutions to x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2 before Wiles? Was there some weird rational polynomial with pi as a root before Lindemann?
Philosophers should stick to fluffy pointless subjects that no one cares about. When they start thinking about mathematics the results usually range from stupid to ridiculous.
How sad is the attitude towards computing when "installing device drivers" is deemed to be an unsurmountable task for a human being of normal intelligence? Why is it that everything that has anything to do with computers is considered to be orders of magnitude harder than anything to do with, say, driving a car or cooking dinner?
If you can get hold of them, check the average highschool grades needed to get in at both programs. Having a class with twelve students would be great, if they are smart. Being stuck with twelve doofuses for 4 years would be less attractive.
asking someone for permission should happen BEFORE acting
Yeah, that is just so feasible when what you're doing is taking pictures of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING AND HOUSE IN A LARGE CITY. Well maybe not every single one, but you get my point..
Then maybe they shouldn't do that?Have the USPTO also fired the incompetent patent officers who approved those patents in the first place?
The insane part here is that ISPs have some sort of "legal responsibility for file-sharing" in the first place.
How can someone "take and take" by publishing free software?
Where does TPB instruct you to host copyrighted material? Also, one would think that the fact that Google indexes everything while TPB only indexes what their users put their would make Google more vulnerable to lawsuits of this type, not less.
That is just silly.
The only reason some people prefer vinyl over CD is that in many cases vinyl recordings are mastered differently - more dynamics etc, since mostly audiophiles buy them. There is no way that anyone can hear any improvement in actual recording quality in vinyl compared to a CD recording (16 bits per sample, 44100 samples per second). Just because vinyl isn't as easily quantised as digital data doesn't mean that it has infinite resolution.