TFA is wrong, there is NSFL (No Such F*cking Law) that prohibits "incitement to commit a crime" in Germany.
Fair enough. If TFA is wrong, then the entire discussion based on TFA is moot.
However, my point regarding speech stands. Banning speech is dangerous, even specific speech as obnoxious as [insert thing most vile to you here], as many unanticipated things can be made to fit the parameters of said banned speech depending on what [insert favorite powers-that-be here] want to silence.
This happens on occasion in the US, where there is very little speech that is banned outright (childporn being one, and it has had its issues. I've unfortunately lost the link to the case where an innocent, but unlikable, person was arrested and tried for childporn because of two files on his hard drive that he didn't realize were under 17. Happened in the mid-late 90's IIRC). The more specific the law, the better, but it remains a fundamentally ineffective way to address the problem.
So you've banned right wing jackasses. Believe me, with the jerks running the US right now I sometimes wish we could ban them here as well. I am extremely sympathetic with the sensitivities and desire to tell these destructive vile people to f*ck off and die, and muzzle their filthy mouths. But whose to say what comes next? Communists promoting an economic system we disagree with? Critics of Islam? How about critics of Islam's treatment of women? Or the treatment of women by the Catholic church? Once you deem it appropriate to ban one set of political speech, you open the door to banning all kinds of political speech. It may not happen this decade, or even this century, but by opening the door you can rest assured that, at some point, it will, because at some point it will behoove the interests of whatever powers are in place to do so, and the option will be available.
Despite the current trough in American politics, history has shown by and large that countering bad speech with good speech is far more effective than running the bad speech underground. Not just in protecting our civil liberties, but in addressing and solving the issue such hateful speech brings up. As another pointed out, if someone's a racist jackass, better that everyone know they are a racist jackass and can present counterarguments showing that said jackass is in fact an ass, than in silencing him, or more accurately, driving his speech underground where there is no counterargument.
A publicly despised jackass will have little or no influence on others. An underground leader of a movement that has not been publicly demonstrated to be an idiot can wield uncomfortable power. Censorship facilitates the latter, while open discussion will generally move an outspoken person in the latter group into the former, where they can do little real harm beyond offending our sensibilities.
Tell me, has censorship of child pornography in America have a crippling effect of the democratic process? If not, why not? And why is this different?
It actually is, though the effect is more subtle. Pretty much anyone browsing pr0n, of any kind, will occasionally stumble across child pr0n. Many people receive offensive SPAM, some of it containing childpr0n. Technically, as long as the browser cache or mailspool retains these images, a person is guilty of possessing child pornography. They usually don't even know it, not knowing how browser caches work, or perhaps not having read their email or deleted their SPAM yet.
The FBI uses this to selectively destroy people's lives, including in one case a pornographer who had absolutely nothing to do with child pornography, but who did traffic in legal pornography within his rights (as reaffirmed by the US supreme court in Flynt). In his case, there was one image of a girl under 17 in his browser cache... he hadn't been trafficking in childpr0n, nor had he been actively browsing it.
Nevertheless, he was arrested, convicted, and had his life destroyed.
There are better ways of dealing with child pr0n. One example: define it as "evidence of a crime" (it is, after all, pictorial evidence that a child has been harmed), confiscate it as such (and even include fines/jailtime for failing to inform the authorities of said crime). You get the same effect as banning it outright, without the need to begin creating an entire class of "illegal" data the mere possession of which leads to ruination, whether or not you knew you had it.
I won't bother to go into cases where the police or third parties have planeted "evidence," including one case where the Church of Scientology did so in order to shutdown funet.fi's anonymous service and destroy those who exposed some of that cult's internal documents, but suffice it to say they abound.
Banning speech, even terrible speech, not only doesn't work, it generally has much worse, often unintended consiquences. Furthermore, a little creative thought will generally reveal a more effective approach to dealing with the probel that doesn't require an erosion of civil liberties or fundamental rights (depending on which your particular society defines "freedom of speech" defines it to be).
Don't be a smartass. I mean the kind of crime TFA is talking about: Discriminating against other races/sexual orientations/whatever, killing, and molesting little kids.
TFL (The f*cking law) cited in TFA lists "incitement to commit a crime" separately from the other issues you mention. In other words, it's a catchall to censor speech deemed to incite "any crime," not just the ones you think should be censored.
What's going to happen? How's the censorship boogeyman going to bite us in the ass?
You sound remarkably like a troll, or a young teenager still so wrapped up in your own cultural bigotry and ethnocentrism that you believe yourself and your society to be above learning from anyone else in the world. As a citizen of a country whose president has the latter character trait, such characteristics are rather easy to identify.
To address your point, lest someone innocent reading this actually buy into your "nothing can happen, prove otherwise! Failure to prove otherwise proves it will never happen and anyone who suggests otherwise is an ass!" tripe:
Define A as illegal (may be a misdemeaner, may be a felony, or EU equivelent) (e.g. copyright violation).
Define B is inciting A. E.g. Criticizing copyright is an implicit incitement to commit copyright violation, which is a crime.
Apply law banning "incitement to commit a crime." E.g. "You may not critizie copyright, because to do so incites people to violate copyright, which is a crime."
No reform is possible, as no one may speak out against the existing law.
Apply this to pretty much any law the current powerholders have a vested interest in maintaining, irrespective of the public interests. Software patents might be a good example in another couple of years... though hopefully not.
Frankly, if Germans in particular, and Europeans in general, are unable to grasp this, you have a whole world of political hurt coming your way.
This ins't to defend the American idiocy of the last half decade in any respect. We have plenty of hurt coming our way, as a natural consiquence of our own stupidity. That, however, doesn't immunize Europe against the consiquences of its own failings as well, or legitimize the bigoted notion that because a non-European made an observation about the implications of a European law, it has no value.
How? What's the lesson we're going to learn, and who's going to teach it to us?
You're going to teach it to yourselves. Just as you did the lessons of world war II. Like any society, you'll probably come out of it in the end in one of two states: 1) with an extended period of darkness (e.g. the "dark ages", where it took more than a millenium to learn the lessons of dictatorship vs. democracy that the fall of the Roman Empire [shouhd have] taught) or 2) with a potent, unforgettable lesson in the crippling effects censorship almost invariably has on the democratic process.
Seems fair to me. I'm all for free speech, but not when it entices crime.
Define "crime."
Speeding is a crime. In many parts of the United States, for example, exceeding 65 MPH is a crime, and on most urban expressways, exceeding 55 MPH is a crime.
The song "I can't drive 55" (1980s crapola music, but nevertheless) arguably incites one to commit a crime. Under the law you just cited, that would be censorable material.
As would many discussions here on slashdot in opposition to existing copyright law, patent law, and in support of many peer-to-peer networking technologies.
I can understand why Germany finnds such speech annoying and offensive, but censorship isn't the answer, and I'm afraid Europe (and perhaps most of the western world) is about to get a lesson in just how bad an idea censorship, even of offensive material, really is, and exactly how much worse such a cure is than the disease it's intended to address.
There once was a time when I respected Slashdot for it's common-sense + Left'ish wing viewpoints. Now it looks like nothing more then an elementary school whine-fest.
The editorial board of slashdot is degenerating Fast. Not that its ever been particularly good at checking articles and correcting grammar, but in recent weeks there has been a significant increase in pro-microsoft, and now pro-cartel postings. This may only be a symptom of a misguided notion that a free software/open source forum and newssite should somehow be "unbiased" and give the enemies of their movement equal time and equal legitimacy (much like the misguided notion that Jewish leaders should debate whether or not the holocaust happened with right-wing revisionists, something the US media has actually tried to engineer, despite the inherent destructive effect of legitimizing very fring and demonstrably nonsensical notions in order to create an appearance of "balance").
Whether this is a symptom of misguided "appearance of balance at any cost," a gradual sellout of slashdot to its advertisers (Microsoft does advertise here, and who knows how much of its bottom line is being threatened if it doesn't post stories along certain political/philosophical grounds), or a shift in slashdot's targetting (moving away from us free software/opensource geeks to a more staid, corporate, proprietary audience) is hard to know. But there has definitely been a change in the tone of the site, and as someone who has been reading slashdot for many years, I can say that it is not a good change.
Spinning the banning of technology that makes recording a TV program a la a VCR as a "piracy device" takes the cake, that's for sure.
What's next, spinning the banning of general purpose computers as an attempt at banning a "piracy device" since computers can (and have been) used to violate the copyright of proprietary software (most commonly MS Windows, alas), music, or even *gasp* TV programs that were broadcast for free on television anyway?
Whoever did that writeup and/or vetted it for slashdot (if slashdot's laxidasical editing can be described as "vetting", a real stretch I grant you) should be fired.
You might be technically right. However, I don't see where the distinction actually changes anything. Lawsuits going forward certainly have referred to this suit as evidence of Microsoft's predatory nature. Also note that in this civil action, similar penalties could have been imposed as in a criminal case.
He's not even right "technically." There are civil as well as convictions, as 5 minutes with google will show. A vast amount of legal literature on civil law supports this use of terminology, as does the more common dictionary:
n. Law (knvkt)
1. A person found or declared guilty of an offense or crime.
What Microsoft did was a violation of the law. The court convicted them of said violation, i.e. offense. The method of redress involves civil law, but that does not change the fact that a court has convicted Microsoft of abusing its monopoly position, both in terms of common English parlence, and in terms of (at least) layperson's legal language. Perhaps a lawyer might parse it somewhat differently, but if Groklaw is any guide, it doesn't appear so.
What we have here are Microsoft apologists desperately trying to bluster and intimidate the rest of us into changing our correct usage of the language through ad homonim attacks and disparagements in an effort to redefine the very terminology and control the language used in any discussion of their beloved monopolist.
They would have us believe that our use of the term "convicted monopolist" with respect to Microsoft is incorrect, when in fact it is perfectly correct, both in laypersons' terms and in casual legal terms (at the very least).
First of all, there's no such thing as "convicted monopolist". That's an idiotic term in itself, since it's not illegal to be a monopoly.
Microsoft has been shown to be a monopolist, and judged so in the court's findings of fact.
Microsoft has been convicted of using their monopoly illegally to run competitors out of business.
Ergo, Microsoft is a "convicted monopolist."
Your weak attempt at pedantry misguided, the term parses perfectly fine in English, and is in common usage because it communicates exactly what is intended, in a tight and effeciant manner. I.e. instead of "Microsoft is a monopolis thas been convicted of abusing said monopoly to ruin the businesses of its competitors" we can and do say "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist." All of it is true, all of it parses correctly, and best of all, all of it makes the blood of Microsoft apologists like you boil.
Oh Good Lord what rock have you been under for the last 15 years.
Microsoft is a monopolist convicted of using that monopoly in unlawfully anti-competative ways to run competitors out of business. They've violated in spirit and letter numerous consent decrees, agreements with government, and even court orders, and gotten away with it because their cycle of business is orders of magnitude faster than the wheels of justice.
As a convicted monopolist, Microsoft must play by a different set of rules than everyone else, like, say, Google, which has never been convicted of anything in the US (and quite IMHO bugus trademark violations in France).
You might as well say "Joe's Computers get away with what Microsoft Couldn't." Damn straight. Joe's Computers, like Google, haven't been shown to even be a monopoly, much less convicted of abusing such a position if they had it. Microsoft has, on all counts.
It's a classic scenario. What we really have to worry about is going back in time and accidentally doing something that makes us cease to exist.
That appears to have already happened, and then been corrected. Unfortunatley, we now have Biff in charge of the world, so things are even worse off in this timeline than they were in both the original timeline, and the one where we don't exist. God damn that delorian and misguided science!
I follow up only because I know there are people out there who will actually believe this as a serious point.
I really can't wait till they levy (higher) taxes on all alcohol products (especially wine) because those products also raise the cost of health care for everyone.
One glass of red wine per evening has been demonstrated in numerous scientific studies to lower the risk of heart disease and stroke. Your "sin" tax (the kind of thing a Mormon would propose) would penalize people who are living healthier than teetotelers and reducing the cost to the health care system.
"It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax."
That state law is a violation of federal law and of the constitution. States may not regulate interstate commerce. Cigarettes can only be illegal to import into Michigan if they are illegal to possess in Michigan (like, for example, marijuana). They obviously are not illegal to possess, so the Michigan law is unconstitutional and won't hold up to a legal challenge. Which, if someone sent me a bill for $2500, would be exactly what I would do: join with everyone else who also received these rediculous bills and sue the state in federal court, getting the law overturned and maybe a little pocket money in punitive damages as well.
The EU is a corporate plutacracy massquerading as a democracy (the US isn't very different in this regard, though here the causes are more political and less structural).
I still don't understand the point of the Parliament, if the Comission wields the veto power. If the comission can completely ignore the recommendation of Parliment, then why bother even having the Parliment, or the council of presidents?
To lull the people into believing they live in a democracy when in fact a corporate plutocracy, in the form of the European Union, is usurping the sovereignty of their national, democratically elected governments.
Otherwise millions would be in the streets, demanding an end to plutocracy. The longer the corporations can keep the European public fooled, the more time they have to structure the defacto "business-as-usual" policy setting at the European Union level to be more like that in the US, in terms of corporations calling all the shots and the will of the consumer masses being irrelevant.
If the fight against software patents in Europe does nothing else, it will make plain to the people what the corporate structure of the EU is all about... with any luck, in time for Europeans to address than and form a democracy at the European level before uniting further. Not that that is any guarantee, after all, prior to the oil cartel's coup in 2000 the US was a democracy at the federal level, and was still taken over by corporate interests years, perhaps decades, earlier.
Right now there is little motivation for jamming GPS signals. The occasional terrorist, or the army, might decide to interfere with the signal, but otherwise I suspect there haven't been too many buyers of the GPS jamming system that was being marketed in Russia a few years ago.
That could all change.
Certainly by tracking citizens in their cars with GPS (ostensibly for taxation purposes, but anyone with any technical knowhow knows you can read an odometer for tax purposes... the only reason to use GPS is to know where people are whenever one wants) or by tracking parollees with GPS, we've just given a large population of people a really big incentive to jam GPS signals.
As a pilot who uses GPL in both IFR and VFR flight, this worries me. Not because I can't fly without it (I can, and have the equipment to do so, though it certainly adds to the workload), but because I may be in the middle of a busy procedure when some jackass decides to jam the signal so he can see his girlfriend in the "forbidden zone", and the odds of losing my signal have just gone up by orders of magnitude thanks to a (perhaps well meaning, but certainly) intrusive big-brother application of the same technology.
I don't argue that tracking convicted criminals with GPS is a legitimate idea. I do argue, however, that it isn't a very good idea, and the unintended consiquences are worrisome.
OBTW - Technically, when one pays a speeding fine, one is "convicted" of the "crime" of "speeding." Does that make GPS monitoring of their car for all future driving a legitimate idea. How many people are going to start jamming the signal simply as a matter of asserting their privacy, and screwing up boat/air navigation at the same time?
This is a boneheaded idea, even if the intention is good.
Sure, they're going to award the inventor of SMTP next, for their great security consciousness...
Why not? They're letting Bill Gates give a keynote speech at the RSA security conference... and people there are taking him seriously, apparently ignorning his well-deserved notoriety and widely-known incompetence in the area.
Just goes to show that money will, in fact, buy you anything, and even well educated people will grovel at the ass of the wealthy. Next he'll buy a Turing award of his very own, for his "contribution in (redacted: stifling the) technology", first through illegal anti-competative activities, then later through abuse of software patents. And we'll laud him for it, because he made money stifling the technology and holding the progress of the entire species in abayance.
if they were starting out now, slashdotters would be cursing their names because its clear that they were trying to foist a proprietary standard over the completely open, free-software friendly, OSI infrastructure, probably with a view to "Embrace and Extend"
Some slashdotters might. This is hardly a unified group, much less a group consciousness.
OTOH if it were Microsoft introducing the standard, those expressing worry probably would be correct in their concerns, if history is any judge at all.
Now a real question : If Baran and Davies had been granted a patent on packet switching networks in 1964, what would the internet look like now?
There probably wouldn't be an internet now. OSI defines a vague 7-level abstraction for which AFAIK no unencumbered implimentation exists.
The patents for TCP/IP might have expired by now (or might not, since other nuances of the protocol could be patented, effectively extending the existing patent an iteration or two, as is common with other patents which have been granted), but the internet would probably still not be created because too many existing "island-nets" (like compuserve, genie et al once were) would exist, and the Department of Defense (the creators of our Internet) would have no interest in persuing or deploying dated technology (which is what TCP/IP would be considered today, given their proprietary rivals, e.g. TCP/IP v6 which would no doubt still be under patent).
Luckilly for us patents didn't abort the internet. However, they are aborting the next generation breakthrough even as I type this, and half the people here won't care less as long as this quarter's profits aren't flat.
Would stricter rules not force the RIAA (and their ilk) to produce stronger evidence against defendants in copyright violation lawsuits?
I doubt it. Rules for whistleblowing will have one standard, rules corporations can use against individuals will have another.
It won't be phrased that blatently. Instead it will be one set of rules for submitting confidential data (internal memos, emails, chatroom logs) and another, much laxer set of rules, for accusations of copyright infringement.
Be assured, the end result will almost certainly mean less corporate accountability, and less protection of individuals against corporate whichhunts.
I'm not so convinced. I saw him speak a couple of times. He always spoke like he was reading (and not reading well). It was quite disturbing actually to hear someone so praised come across sounding so much like a kid in junior high who couldn't lift their eyes off of the page to look at their audience.
The saddest part is just how angry this guy always comes across. I really hope it's just an act, otherwise he'll probably have a heart attack by the time he's 40.
You could be right. I don't know anything about this particular guy, nor have I bothered to read any of his stuff yet (I'm strapped for time as it is, despite posting here to slashdot). I was speaking more generally, from my own experience (my writing is improving with practice, and while it isn't where I'd like it to to be, it's a lot better than when I first started) and from my observations of others (I've read early drafts and writings by some of my favorite authors, and compared them to their later stuff, and the early stuff is rough by comparison).
As for the anger thing... most of us do chill out in time. Maybe not completely, but even stuff which still gets me angry today (monopoly entitlements stifling our culture, creativity, and inventiveness vis-a-vis copyright and patent law, for example, or the religious right's usurpation of our once-democratic government) doesn't leave me enraged the way it would have when I was sixteen. No one can maintain rage on a 24/7 basis, and time tends to mellow one's perspective.
If the war on terrorism is to continue then decreasing our reliance on oil (which comes from the Middle East) should be a priority.
There is no denying that oil revenue undoubtably finds its way into the hands of those that wish evil against the US. Clean technologies reduce our need to funnel more money into that part of the world.
Yes, but the oil companies are not run by fools or idiots, unfortunately. Why do you think they staged a coup d'etat in the United States in 2000, and possibly again in 2004?
Sane public policy would have us moving away from oil (and not cancelling vialbe programs that would have given us tangible results in three to five years, and replacing them with grandios programs that probably won't deliver in ten to fifteen years... said programs of course to be cancelled and replaced again a couple of years before delivery with something else, rinse, wash, and repeat until the oil reserves have gone completely dry). That is something the oil plutocrats simply cannot abide, and, having seized control of the United States government, will not allow.
So no, we won't be joining Kyoto anytime soon. Sorry, folks.
It may mortify me personally as an American to see what my government is doing, but as the odds of my vote even counting continue to decline I don't see much I can do about it, except gripe here on slashdot and send letters for my representatives to ignore.
I do like the way he's dissected some of the ideas in Asimov.
It's just a shame his writing style is stilted and ungainly.
I've liked bit of his writing, and a fair few of his ideas, but a great writer he aint.
Give him time. He may not be a [insert your favorite author here], but writing styles do tend to improve with time and practice. Try reading some of the early drafts of famouse authors' early works, and you get the idea.
Yeah, disagree with you and I'm a troll. Why do facts hate America so much? And you resort to ad hominem atttacks, because you have no facts, and you're an anonymous coward as well. Gosh I sure have been put in my place.
Actually, I think he was replying to my post (unless he called you a troll elsewhere, which is entirely possible). But as another pointed out, he made my point for me, qed.:-)
"Everyone's a Democrat until they get a little money."
Of course, that's demonstrably a crock of shit, in as much as Bill Gate's father (a multi-millinaire in his own right) has been very rich for a very long time, and is consistently a democrat. Other examples include Donald Trump (rags->riches->rags->riches, with a few more iterations ahead of him it seems), and of course the Kennedy's (except Schreiber, but every family has its black sheep).
Not everyone sells out their ideals when they achieve a little success. Many do, and we as a culture have deified such things, and the greed and avarice that causes such things, but there are many good people who choose not to succumb to greed, who do place the greater good above their own, and who think this toxic neo-libertarian self-centeredness is in fact the single greatest contributer to the decline of our civilization.
But of course, the apologists for such thinking will find someone richer than the examples I cited, and raise their definition of "a little money" to be greater than that of those I cited, thereby shuffling definitions until they think their hypothesis holds.
It still doesn't. There are a few good people in this world who do not sell out for a quick buck... thankfully, as they are all that stand between us and the abyss.
Right, and what I'm saying, is that once the info's out there, and as long as it's got a important enough value to the people, it's likely to get to them one way or another.
I used to believe that.
Now I no longer do.
There is all kinds of information on the Bush administration that people, including those that served in his first administration, were desperate to get out to the American public, including specifics on his incompetence with respect to guarding against terror, the war on terror, the misinformation on Iraq, etc.
Yet we reelected him, and over half the people in the country believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, despite proof to the contrary that hasn't only been bandied about on the internet, but has been reported in "mainstream" media news outlets as well.
The information may get out, but misinformation from "official" sources is clearly more potent in the perceptions of the mindless masses. The evidence of that is nowhere as clear (or discouraging) as here in America.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is wrong, there is NSFL (No Such F*cking Law) that prohibits "incitement to commit a crime" in Germany.
Fair enough. If TFA is wrong, then the entire discussion based on TFA is moot.
However, my point regarding speech stands. Banning speech is dangerous, even specific speech as obnoxious as [insert thing most vile to you here], as many unanticipated things can be made to fit the parameters of said banned speech depending on what [insert favorite powers-that-be here] want to silence.
This happens on occasion in the US, where there is very little speech that is banned outright (childporn being one, and it has had its issues. I've unfortunately lost the link to the case where an innocent, but unlikable, person was arrested and tried for childporn because of two files on his hard drive that he didn't realize were under 17. Happened in the mid-late 90's IIRC). The more specific the law, the better, but it remains a fundamentally ineffective way to address the problem.
So you've banned right wing jackasses. Believe me, with the jerks running the US right now I sometimes wish we could ban them here as well. I am extremely sympathetic with the sensitivities and desire to tell these destructive vile people to f*ck off and die, and muzzle their filthy mouths. But whose to say what comes next? Communists promoting an economic system we disagree with? Critics of Islam? How about critics of Islam's treatment of women? Or the treatment of women by the Catholic church? Once you deem it appropriate to ban one set of political speech, you open the door to banning all kinds of political speech. It may not happen this decade, or even this century, but by opening the door you can rest assured that, at some point, it will, because at some point it will behoove the interests of whatever powers are in place to do so, and the option will be available.
Despite the current trough in American politics, history has shown by and large that countering bad speech with good speech is far more effective than running the bad speech underground. Not just in protecting our civil liberties, but in addressing and solving the issue such hateful speech brings up. As another pointed out, if someone's a racist jackass, better that everyone know they are a racist jackass and can present counterarguments showing that said jackass is in fact an ass, than in silencing him, or more accurately, driving his speech underground where there is no counterargument.
A publicly despised jackass will have little or no influence on others. An underground leader of a movement that has not been publicly demonstrated to be an idiot can wield uncomfortable power. Censorship facilitates the latter, while open discussion will generally move an outspoken person in the latter group into the former, where they can do little real harm beyond offending our sensibilities.
Tell me, has censorship of child pornography in America have a crippling effect of the democratic process? If not, why not? And why is this different?
... he hadn't been trafficking in childpr0n, nor had he been actively browsing it.
It actually is, though the effect is more subtle. Pretty much anyone browsing pr0n, of any kind, will occasionally stumble across child pr0n. Many people receive offensive SPAM, some of it containing childpr0n. Technically, as long as the browser cache or mailspool retains these images, a person is guilty of possessing child pornography. They usually don't even know it, not knowing how browser caches work, or perhaps not having read their email or deleted their SPAM yet.
The FBI uses this to selectively destroy people's lives, including in one case a pornographer who had absolutely nothing to do with child pornography, but who did traffic in legal pornography within his rights (as reaffirmed by the US supreme court in Flynt). In his case, there was one image of a girl under 17 in his browser cache
Nevertheless, he was arrested, convicted, and had his life destroyed.
There are better ways of dealing with child pr0n. One example: define it as "evidence of a crime" (it is, after all, pictorial evidence that a child has been harmed), confiscate it as such (and even include fines/jailtime for failing to inform the authorities of said crime). You get the same effect as banning it outright, without the need to begin creating an entire class of "illegal" data the mere possession of which leads to ruination, whether or not you knew you had it.
I won't bother to go into cases where the police or third parties have planeted "evidence," including one case where the Church of Scientology did so in order to shutdown funet.fi's anonymous service and destroy those who exposed some of that cult's internal documents, but suffice it to say they abound.
Banning speech, even terrible speech, not only doesn't work, it generally has much worse, often unintended consiquences. Furthermore, a little creative thought will generally reveal a more effective approach to dealing with the probel that doesn't require an erosion of civil liberties or fundamental rights (depending on which your particular society defines "freedom of speech" defines it to be).
Don't be a smartass. I mean the kind of crime TFA is talking about: Discriminating against other races/sexual orientations/whatever, killing, and molesting little kids.
TFL (The f*cking law) cited in TFA lists "incitement to commit a crime" separately from the other issues you mention. In other words, it's a catchall to censor speech deemed to incite "any crime," not just the ones you think should be censored.
What's going to happen? How's the censorship boogeyman going to bite us in the ass?
... though hopefully not.
You sound remarkably like a troll, or a young teenager still so wrapped up in your own cultural bigotry and ethnocentrism that you believe yourself and your society to be above learning from anyone else in the world. As a citizen of a country whose president has the latter character trait, such characteristics are rather easy to identify.
To address your point, lest someone innocent reading this actually buy into your "nothing can happen, prove otherwise! Failure to prove otherwise proves it will never happen and anyone who suggests otherwise is an ass!" tripe:
Define A as illegal (may be a misdemeaner, may be a felony, or EU equivelent) (e.g. copyright violation).
Define B is inciting A. E.g. Criticizing copyright is an implicit incitement to commit copyright violation, which is a crime.
Apply law banning "incitement to commit a crime." E.g. "You may not critizie copyright, because to do so incites people to violate copyright, which is a crime."
No reform is possible, as no one may speak out against the existing law.
Apply this to pretty much any law the current powerholders have a vested interest in maintaining, irrespective of the public interests. Software patents might be a good example in another couple of years
Frankly, if Germans in particular, and Europeans in general, are unable to grasp this, you have a whole world of political hurt coming your way.
This ins't to defend the American idiocy of the last half decade in any respect. We have plenty of hurt coming our way, as a natural consiquence of our own stupidity. That, however, doesn't immunize Europe against the consiquences of its own failings as well, or legitimize the bigoted notion that because a non-European made an observation about the implications of a European law, it has no value.
How? What's the lesson we're going to learn, and who's going to teach it to us?
You're going to teach it to yourselves. Just as you did the lessons of world war II. Like any society, you'll probably come out of it in the end in one of two states: 1) with an extended period of darkness (e.g. the "dark ages", where it took more than a millenium to learn the lessons of dictatorship vs. democracy that the fall of the Roman Empire [shouhd have] taught) or 2) with a potent, unforgettable lesson in the crippling effects censorship almost invariably has on the democratic process.
Seems fair to me. I'm all for free speech, but not when it entices crime.
Define "crime."
Speeding is a crime. In many parts of the United States, for example, exceeding 65 MPH is a crime, and on most urban expressways, exceeding 55 MPH is a crime.
The song "I can't drive 55" (1980s crapola music, but nevertheless) arguably incites one to commit a crime. Under the law you just cited, that would be censorable material.
As would many discussions here on slashdot in opposition to existing copyright law, patent law, and in support of many peer-to-peer networking technologies.
I can understand why Germany finnds such speech annoying and offensive, but censorship isn't the answer, and I'm afraid Europe (and perhaps most of the western world) is about to get a lesson in just how bad an idea censorship, even of offensive material, really is, and exactly how much worse such a cure is than the disease it's intended to address.
There once was a time when I respected Slashdot for it's common-sense + Left'ish wing viewpoints. Now it looks like nothing more then an elementary school whine-fest.
The editorial board of slashdot is degenerating Fast. Not that its ever been particularly good at checking articles and correcting grammar, but in recent weeks there has been a significant increase in pro-microsoft, and now pro-cartel postings. This may only be a symptom of a misguided notion that a free software/open source forum and newssite should somehow be "unbiased" and give the enemies of their movement equal time and equal legitimacy (much like the misguided notion that Jewish leaders should debate whether or not the holocaust happened with right-wing revisionists, something the US media has actually tried to engineer, despite the inherent destructive effect of legitimizing very fring and demonstrably nonsensical notions in order to create an appearance of "balance").
Whether this is a symptom of misguided "appearance of balance at any cost," a gradual sellout of slashdot to its advertisers (Microsoft does advertise here, and who knows how much of its bottom line is being threatened if it doesn't post stories along certain political/philosophical grounds), or a shift in slashdot's targetting (moving away from us free software/opensource geeks to a more staid, corporate, proprietary audience) is hard to know. But there has definitely been a change in the tone of the site, and as someone who has been reading slashdot for many years, I can say that it is not a good change.
Spinning the banning of technology that makes recording a TV program a la a VCR as a "piracy device" takes the cake, that's for sure.
What's next, spinning the banning of general purpose computers as an attempt at banning a "piracy device" since computers can (and have been) used to violate the copyright of proprietary software (most commonly MS Windows, alas), music, or even *gasp* TV programs that were broadcast for free on television anyway?
Whoever did that writeup and/or vetted it for slashdot (if slashdot's laxidasical editing can be described as "vetting", a real stretch I grant you) should be fired.
ahem.
Nice try, troll.
He's not even right "technically." There are civil as well as convictions, as 5 minutes with google will show. A vast amount of legal literature on civil law supports this use of terminology, as does the more common dictionary:
What Microsoft did was a violation of the law. The court convicted them of said violation, i.e. offense. The method of redress involves civil law, but that does not change the fact that a court has convicted Microsoft of abusing its monopoly position, both in terms of common English parlence, and in terms of (at least) layperson's legal language. Perhaps a lawyer might parse it somewhat differently, but if Groklaw is any guide, it doesn't appear so.
What we have here are Microsoft apologists desperately trying to bluster and intimidate the rest of us into changing our correct usage of the language through ad homonim attacks and disparagements in an effort to redefine the very terminology and control the language used in any discussion of their beloved monopolist.
They would have us believe that our use of the term "convicted monopolist" with respect to Microsoft is incorrect, when in fact it is perfectly correct, both in laypersons' terms and in casual legal terms (at the very least).
First of all, there's no such thing as "convicted monopolist". That's an idiotic term in itself, since it's not illegal to be a monopoly.
Microsoft has been shown to be a monopolist, and judged so in the court's findings of fact.
Microsoft has been convicted of using their monopoly illegally to run competitors out of business.
Ergo, Microsoft is a "convicted monopolist."
Your weak attempt at pedantry misguided, the term parses perfectly fine in English, and is in common usage because it communicates exactly what is intended, in a tight and effeciant manner. I.e. instead of "Microsoft is a monopolis thas been convicted of abusing said monopoly to ruin the businesses of its competitors" we can and do say "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist." All of it is true, all of it parses correctly, and best of all, all of it makes the blood of Microsoft apologists like you boil.
Google gets away with what Microsoft couldn't
Oh Good Lord what rock have you been under for the last 15 years.
Microsoft is a monopolist convicted of using that monopoly in unlawfully anti-competative ways to run competitors out of business. They've violated in spirit and letter numerous consent decrees, agreements with government, and even court orders, and gotten away with it because their cycle of business is orders of magnitude faster than the wheels of justice.
As a convicted monopolist, Microsoft must play by a different set of rules than everyone else, like, say, Google, which has never been convicted of anything in the US (and quite IMHO bugus trademark violations in France).
You might as well say "Joe's Computers get away with what Microsoft Couldn't." Damn straight. Joe's Computers, like Google, haven't been shown to even be a monopoly, much less convicted of abusing such a position if they had it. Microsoft has, on all counts.
... and the fix was worse than the problem.
It's a classic scenario. What we really have to worry about is going back in time and accidentally doing something that makes us cease to exist.
That appears to have already happened, and then been corrected. Unfortunatley, we now have Biff in charge of the world, so things are even worse off in this timeline than they were in both the original timeline, and the one where we don't exist. God damn that delorian and misguided science!
Heh! I'm assuming you meant that as a joke.
I follow up only because I know there are people out there who will actually believe this as a serious point.
I really can't wait till they levy (higher) taxes on all alcohol products (especially wine) because those products also raise the cost of health care for everyone.
One glass of red wine per evening has been demonstrated in numerous scientific studies to lower the risk of heart disease and stroke. Your "sin" tax (the kind of thing a Mormon would propose) would penalize people who are living healthier than teetotelers and reducing the cost to the health care system.
"It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax."
That state law is a violation of federal law and of the constitution. States may not regulate interstate commerce. Cigarettes can only be illegal to import into Michigan if they are illegal to possess in Michigan (like, for example, marijuana). They obviously are not illegal to possess, so the Michigan law is unconstitutional and won't hold up to a legal challenge. Which, if someone sent me a bill for $2500, would be exactly what I would do: join with everyone else who also received these rediculous bills and sue the state in federal court, getting the law overturned and maybe a little pocket money in punitive damages as well.
US, on the other hand, do benefit even if they (US) passed the law since the M$ is in US itself thus also paying tax to the US.
Microsoft, through creative bookkeeping, doesn't pay any corporate taxes.
The EU is a corporate plutacracy massquerading as a democracy (the US isn't very different in this regard, though here the causes are more political and less structural).
... with any luck, in time for Europeans to address than and form a democracy at the European level before uniting further. Not that that is any guarantee, after all, prior to the oil cartel's coup in 2000 the US was a democracy at the federal level, and was still taken over by corporate interests years, perhaps decades, earlier.
I still don't understand the point of the Parliament, if the Comission wields the veto power. If the comission can completely ignore the recommendation of Parliment, then why bother even having the Parliment, or the council of presidents?
To lull the people into believing they live in a democracy when in fact a corporate plutocracy, in the form of the European Union, is usurping the sovereignty of their national, democratically elected governments.
Otherwise millions would be in the streets, demanding an end to plutocracy. The longer the corporations can keep the European public fooled, the more time they have to structure the defacto "business-as-usual" policy setting at the European Union level to be more like that in the US, in terms of corporations calling all the shots and the will of the consumer masses being irrelevant.
If the fight against software patents in Europe does nothing else, it will make plain to the people what the corporate structure of the EU is all about
Right now there is little motivation for jamming GPS signals. The occasional terrorist, or the army, might decide to interfere with the signal, but otherwise I suspect there haven't been too many buyers of the GPS jamming system that was being marketed in Russia a few years ago.
... the only reason to use GPS is to know where people are whenever one wants) or by tracking parollees with GPS, we've just given a large population of people a really big incentive to jam GPS signals.
That could all change.
Certainly by tracking citizens in their cars with GPS (ostensibly for taxation purposes, but anyone with any technical knowhow knows you can read an odometer for tax purposes
As a pilot who uses GPL in both IFR and VFR flight, this worries me. Not because I can't fly without it (I can, and have the equipment to do so, though it certainly adds to the workload), but because I may be in the middle of a busy procedure when some jackass decides to jam the signal so he can see his girlfriend in the "forbidden zone", and the odds of losing my signal have just gone up by orders of magnitude thanks to a (perhaps well meaning, but certainly) intrusive big-brother application of the same technology.
I don't argue that tracking convicted criminals with GPS is a legitimate idea. I do argue, however, that it isn't a very good idea, and the unintended consiquences are worrisome.
OBTW - Technically, when one pays a speeding fine, one is "convicted" of the "crime" of "speeding." Does that make GPS monitoring of their car for all future driving a legitimate idea. How many people are going to start jamming the signal simply as a matter of asserting their privacy, and screwing up boat/air navigation at the same time?
This is a boneheaded idea, even if the intention is good.
Sure, they're going to award the inventor of SMTP next, for their great security consciousness ...
... and people there are taking him seriously, apparently ignorning his well-deserved notoriety and widely-known incompetence in the area.
Why not? They're letting Bill Gates give a keynote speech at the RSA security conference
Just goes to show that money will, in fact, buy you anything, and even well educated people will grovel at the ass of the wealthy. Next he'll buy a Turing award of his very own, for his "contribution in (redacted: stifling the) technology", first through illegal anti-competative activities, then later through abuse of software patents. And we'll laud him for it, because he made money stifling the technology and holding the progress of the entire species in abayance.
if they were starting out now, slashdotters would be cursing their names because its clear that they were trying to foist a proprietary standard over the completely open, free-software friendly, OSI infrastructure, probably with a view to "Embrace and Extend"
Some slashdotters might. This is hardly a unified group, much less a group consciousness.
OTOH if it were Microsoft introducing the standard, those expressing worry probably would be correct in their concerns, if history is any judge at all.
Now a real question : If Baran and Davies had been granted a patent on packet switching networks in 1964, what would the internet look like now?
There probably wouldn't be an internet now. OSI defines a vague 7-level abstraction for which AFAIK no unencumbered implimentation exists.
The patents for TCP/IP might have expired by now (or might not, since other nuances of the protocol could be patented, effectively extending the existing patent an iteration or two, as is common with other patents which have been granted), but the internet would probably still not be created because too many existing "island-nets" (like compuserve, genie et al once were) would exist, and the Department of Defense (the creators of our Internet) would have no interest in persuing or deploying dated technology (which is what TCP/IP would be considered today, given their proprietary rivals, e.g. TCP/IP v6 which would no doubt still be under patent).
Luckilly for us patents didn't abort the internet. However, they are aborting the next generation breakthrough even as I type this, and half the people here won't care less as long as this quarter's profits aren't flat.
Would stricter rules not force the RIAA (and their ilk) to produce stronger evidence against defendants in copyright violation lawsuits?
I doubt it. Rules for whistleblowing will have one standard, rules corporations can use against individuals will have another.
It won't be phrased that blatently. Instead it will be one set of rules for submitting confidential data (internal memos, emails, chatroom logs) and another, much laxer set of rules, for accusations of copyright infringement.
Be assured, the end result will almost certainly mean less corporate accountability, and less protection of individuals against corporate whichhunts.
I'm not so convinced. I saw him speak a couple of times. He always spoke like he was reading (and not reading well). It was quite disturbing actually to hear someone so praised come across sounding so much like a kid in junior high who couldn't lift their eyes off of the page to look at their audience.
... most of us do chill out in time. Maybe not completely, but even stuff which still gets me angry today (monopoly entitlements stifling our culture, creativity, and inventiveness vis-a-vis copyright and patent law, for example, or the religious right's usurpation of our once-democratic government) doesn't leave me enraged the way it would have when I was sixteen. No one can maintain rage on a 24/7 basis, and time tends to mellow one's perspective.
The saddest part is just how angry this guy always comes across. I really hope it's just an act, otherwise he'll probably have a heart attack by the time he's 40.
You could be right. I don't know anything about this particular guy, nor have I bothered to read any of his stuff yet (I'm strapped for time as it is, despite posting here to slashdot). I was speaking more generally, from my own experience (my writing is improving with practice, and while it isn't where I'd like it to to be, it's a lot better than when I first started) and from my observations of others (I've read early drafts and writings by some of my favorite authors, and compared them to their later stuff, and the early stuff is rough by comparison).
As for the anger thing
If the war on terrorism is to continue then decreasing our reliance on oil (which comes from the Middle East) should be a priority.
... said programs of course to be cancelled and replaced again a couple of years before delivery with something else, rinse, wash, and repeat until the oil reserves have gone completely dry). That is something the oil plutocrats simply cannot abide, and, having seized control of the United States government, will not allow.
There is no denying that oil revenue undoubtably finds its way into the hands of those that wish evil against the US. Clean technologies reduce our need to funnel more money into that part of the world.
Yes, but the oil companies are not run by fools or idiots, unfortunately. Why do you think they staged a coup d'etat in the United States in 2000, and possibly again in 2004?
Sane public policy would have us moving away from oil (and not cancelling vialbe programs that would have given us tangible results in three to five years, and replacing them with grandios programs that probably won't deliver in ten to fifteen years
So no, we won't be joining Kyoto anytime soon. Sorry, folks.
It may mortify me personally as an American to see what my government is doing, but as the odds of my vote even counting continue to decline I don't see much I can do about it, except gripe here on slashdot and send letters for my representatives to ignore.
I do like the way he's dissected some of the ideas in Asimov.
It's just a shame his writing style is stilted and ungainly.
I've liked bit of his writing, and a fair few of his ideas, but a great writer he aint.
Give him time. He may not be a [insert your favorite author here], but writing styles do tend to improve with time and practice. Try reading some of the early drafts of famouse authors' early works, and you get the idea.
Yeah, disagree with you and I'm a troll. Why do facts hate America so much? And you resort to ad hominem atttacks, because you have no facts, and you're an anonymous coward as well. Gosh I sure have been put in my place.
:-)
Actually, I think he was replying to my post (unless he called you a troll elsewhere, which is entirely possible). But as another pointed out, he made my point for me, qed.
"Everyone's a Democrat until they get a little money."
... thankfully, as they are all that stand between us and the abyss.
Of course, that's demonstrably a crock of shit, in as much as Bill Gate's father (a multi-millinaire in his own right) has been very rich for a very long time, and is consistently a democrat. Other examples include Donald Trump (rags->riches->rags->riches, with a few more iterations ahead of him it seems), and of course the Kennedy's (except Schreiber, but every family has its black sheep).
Not everyone sells out their ideals when they achieve a little success. Many do, and we as a culture have deified such things, and the greed and avarice that causes such things, but there are many good people who choose not to succumb to greed, who do place the greater good above their own, and who think this toxic neo-libertarian self-centeredness is in fact the single greatest contributer to the decline of our civilization.
But of course, the apologists for such thinking will find someone richer than the examples I cited, and raise their definition of "a little money" to be greater than that of those I cited, thereby shuffling definitions until they think their hypothesis holds.
It still doesn't. There are a few good people in this world who do not sell out for a quick buck
Right, and what I'm saying, is that once the info's out there, and as long as it's got a important enough value to the people, it's likely to get to them one way or another.
I used to believe that.
Now I no longer do.
There is all kinds of information on the Bush administration that people, including those that served in his first administration, were desperate to get out to the American public, including specifics on his incompetence with respect to guarding against terror, the war on terror, the misinformation on Iraq, etc.
Yet we reelected him, and over half the people in the country believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, despite proof to the contrary that hasn't only been bandied about on the internet, but has been reported in "mainstream" media news outlets as well.
The information may get out, but misinformation from "official" sources is clearly more potent in the perceptions of the mindless masses. The evidence of that is nowhere as clear (or discouraging) as here in America.