I'm all for limiting the abuse of the word "censorship", but I think you're on the wrong track in this instance. Google is being given unique authority to make these texts available. That authority comes from the government; I think that blurs the lines a bit.
Your analogy is incorrect. If it were that simple, then a read-only code license would qualify as "free / open source"; it does not. RMS argues that you must not only be able to see what process is taking place, but also be able to modify that process.
Allowing inspections, even if we could get past all of the trust and deception issues that the real world imposes on such schemes, is not an analogue for FOSS.
Well, I'm not familiar with your particular examples of cuorse, but in general it's like this:
A class is defined, and if you conform to the definition, then you are by default part of the class. This means that once a settlement is reached, you cannot raise a separate action, and you are bound by any terms of the settlement that would impact your rights.
HOWEVER, if the settlement includes compensation for the class members, then receiving such compensation is usually opt-in. By default you get nothing, because someone is appointed to manage the settlement fund and to get anything you must make yourself known to that party.
So if you match the definition of a class, then by default you get screwed coming and going. Coincidentally, behavioral economics tells us there's a strong tendency to accept the default when presented with options that are (or are perceived to be) complicated.
My understanding is that they aren't claiming "copyright infringement", but rather DMCA anti-circumvention clause violations.
The anti-circumvention clause is the biggest problem with the DMCA. Issues of copyright term, severity of damages, etc. are all significant, but at least they make some kind of sense on the conceptual map of copyright law. Anti-circumvention says: you can't have, make, try to make, describe how to make, etc. anything for the purpose of breaking a copyright protection.
What's a copyright protection? Well, that's open to interpretation. How do we decide if something's purpose is to break a copyright protection? Also open to interpretation.
Apple seems to be saying that if you reverse-engineer their system to interoperate with other software, you can use that to violate someone's copyright - and that defeating some copyright protection in their system is the primary purpose for which you'd do it.
Filing a flight plan serves as notice to the city's officials?
So, part of the mayor's daily agenda should be to read through all flight plans filed with the FAA to see if anything is planned that maybe the citizens ought to know about?
If a person confines himself to writing philosophical works, maybe. When you look at the practical impact of someone taking this approach, I disagree that it helps form a middle-ground. I consider the rift over GPLv3 a perfect example of what I mean.
I was in disagree-with-RMS mode right up until I read your comment.
What motive? Money. They've shut services down before for exactly that reason. If a software service isn't profitable to its operator, it could go away. Or, the service's provider might decide it would be more profitable to change the subscription terms.
With SaaS, what you are getting is bounded by contract, ToS, and not much else. If you assume it's like a program on your computer, and don't understand the limitations -- if you say "what reason would they have to take away what they're giving me right now" -- then you are an audience that creates a need for a warning like RMS's.
(However, I still think his argument is driven too much by one-sided idealism and too little by pragmatism; and that the assertion toward never using a non-free service only hurts his credibility.)
I don't think it's exactly news that RMS has an extreme view of what "freedom" means in the context of software. If at any moment you don't control exactly what every computer does on your behalf, your freedom has been taken away? Well, ok, let's put this in perspective.
What's more important -- freedom in computing, or freedom in what you eat? What would it take to have RMS-style "freedom" with respect to your food? Do you know that when you buy agriculture-as-a-service, you don't control the growing practices, the chemicals used along the way (sure, they may label it as pesticide-free, but how do you know?), the method of harvesting, shipping, the treatment of the workers, the sanitation of the food along the way, etc. ad nausium?
You could go self-sufficient, if you have the skills and the up-front money to make that happen. Thoreau would advocate that. But the thing is, that's not the life most people would choose (and isn't that what freedom is about -- choice?). And interestingly enough, if everyone today decided to live that way, the population would be unsustainable.
So, yes, you're handing some control over to someone else. Yes, it's something you have to weigh as you exercise your freedom to choose when and how to use these services. And yes, that issue has been enough to keep me from using some services. But there's a world of difference between knowing that a service isn't the same product as traditional software, and saying that you "must never use" the former.
The problem with RMS is, he divides the world into products that give you complete freedom, and products that have zero value.
I suppose I don't know how it is in Sweden, but I beileve in America for there to be 'destruction of evidence', the destruction has to occur in the context of an actual investigation.
In fact, this is why companies have "data retention" policies (which typically have more to do with which data to destroy than which to retain) -- when an investigation does come up, if you already don't have the information and it was destroyed in accordance with standing company policy, then there is normally no recourse against you.
That's what I'd say this ISP is doing -- adjusting its data retention policies. Sure, it's explicitely doing it in anticipation that the information might otherwise be evidence -- that's what data retention policies are about. This is maybe more specific since they're concerned about one law in particular, and you can agree or disagree with their moral position, but it's not destruction of evidence.
When a legal jurisdiction decides certain information needs to be around for potential investigations, they enact laws that require records of that particular information to be kept for some period of time. Will such a law follow WRT Swedish ISP customer recorsd? We'll see...
The majority of the energy is spent reading the spam and searching spam folders for legit mail, right?
So where is that energy coming from / going? Perhaps you're counting the energy of running my PC while I'm doing those things? But what's your "0 energy" baseline? Are you assuming that 30 secnods of me searching my email = 30 additional seconds before my computer gets to swtich to power-save mode? Because that's not always true -- it often means 30 seconds less of me playing some game before my ride shows up, and the computer goes to sleep at the same time it would've otherwise.
Maybe its the energy the server spends reading the email from disk that's significant. That might be a vaild concern...
My first thought was: "only" enough to power a 100W lightbulb for 6 months? Seems like rather quite a bit of energy... but then it does depend what scale you're thinking of.
Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math here. 100W x 1kW/1000W x 180day x 24hr/day = 432 kW hr
Say your home electric bill is $100/mo. That wuold maen you consume about 1000kWh per month, or under 35kWh per day.
So if you could capture all of the energy from a single lightning bolt (assuming the nubmers cited are correct), you'd be able to power 12 homes for a little over a day.
If I personally could economically track down thunderstorms often enough to capture a lightning bolt every 12 days on average (and could store and use that power efficiently), it might be a good deal compared to home solar cells, etc. But on a utility scale, this is a trivial amount of energy. A town with only 12,000 homes and nothing else would require 1000 bolts per day.
You can quibble with my starting assumptions -- maybe your electric bill is less than $100/mo -- but the orders of magnitude still aren't gonig to work out on a utility scale. And all of this math assumes you can capture all of the energy. If any energy escapes as a flash of light and a roar of sound, then that cuts into the energy you capture.
For the sake of argument, let's say you've got the facts exactly right.
How would that not be about free speech? That a position or view is at odds with facts -- even if it is at odds with facts known to the speaker -- does not make it "not a position or view", or "not experssion".
Certain lies are illegal even in countries with strong concepts of free speech; but not all iles. Fraud, defamation, reckless endangerment... these can all limit free speech. I'd question whether this blogger's contribution (if any) to financial decline should rise to that level.
Either way... nowhere I'm aware of is free speech unlimited, but if a case challenges whether speech should be inside or outside the limitations of free speech, then it is indeed a case about free speech.
Yesterday we learned that some people believe it is "censorship" when a private company chooses which results to return in its web site's search feature...
Yet now we have a true case of censorship -- a government using force of law to control what its citizens say -- and nobody seems to notice.
Reference this if ever you wonder why I (and others) argue for using terms according to their definition, rather than just picking the most inflammatory term for any disliked action.
I can't say one way or the other how those numbers will go, but there's also a long-term consideration.
If we can beam power from orbit to Earth, then we're a step closer to beaming power from points in space other than orbit, to orbit, and then to Earth.
And why would that matter? Well, what fraction of the Sun's power ever strikes the Earth's surface? (I'm not talking atmospheric loss; I'm talking geometry.)
Well, tax laws can apparently be used to punish you for something you did before the law was passed (see AIG bonuses), so why would the Constitution apply in this case?
I don't find restatement of one's own position without reference to the opponent's argument all that compelling, but whatever floats your boat.
If you want to imagine that "lend the money at market rates" is amongst the options for what the government would've done if not for bailout loans, that's your business. I challenge you to point out when government has done such a thing.
The rest of your argument seems to be about whether government intervention is a good idea at all. I haven't stated a position on that matter, so maybe you should stop making assumptions.
"If the government makes the loan, they don't make $4, they lose $6. Instead of loaning it to Tesla at below market rates, they could have entered the debt market and lent it to others at 10%. When they loan the money to Tesla, they lose $6, and Tesla gains $6."
As I said, the mistake is in thinking of the government as "like a company" in its economic behavior. If the government weren't engaged in bail-out loans, they would not be loaning that same money out at market rates. They would either be spending it the way a government spends money, or they would be not raising / borrowing it in the first place. (In fact, if you catch your government lending at market rates, it might be a good time to elect different representatives. That's not what tax money is for.)
The only way the government loses $6 is if they borrow the money at 10% in order to lend it to tesla at 4%.
"The lender doesn't net $10. The government has to recoup the $6 it spent through taxes, and some of that will come from the lender"
I don't measure the effects of relativity when I estimate time to walk down the street. The lender's contribution to that $6 will be much, much, much less than a penny.
But yes, every taxpayer could be said to pay a bit toward the subsidy, to the extent that taxes track losslessly to government spending.
"the government is out $6"
I think fundamentally we disagree on the premise that the government "has" money in the way a private entity does.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for limiting the abuse of the word "censorship", but I think you're on the wrong track in this instance. Google is being given unique authority to make these texts available. That authority comes from the government; I think that blurs the lines a bit.
Your analogy is incorrect. If it were that simple, then a read-only code license would qualify as "free / open source"; it does not. RMS argues that you must not only be able to see what process is taking place, but also be able to modify that process.
Allowing inspections, even if we could get past all of the trust and deception issues that the real world imposes on such schemes, is not an analogue for FOSS.
Well, I'm not familiar with your particular examples of cuorse, but in general it's like this:
A class is defined, and if you conform to the definition, then you are by default part of the class. This means that once a settlement is reached, you cannot raise a separate action, and you are bound by any terms of the settlement that would impact your rights.
HOWEVER, if the settlement includes compensation for the class members, then receiving such compensation is usually opt-in. By default you get nothing, because someone is appointed to manage the settlement fund and to get anything you must make yourself known to that party.
So if you match the definition of a class, then by default you get screwed coming and going. Coincidentally, behavioral economics tells us there's a strong tendency to accept the default when presented with options that are (or are perceived to be) complicated.
Funny thing about class action... are you sure you aren't a party to the lawsuit?
My understanding is that they aren't claiming "copyright infringement", but rather DMCA anti-circumvention clause violations.
The anti-circumvention clause is the biggest problem with the DMCA. Issues of copyright term, severity of damages, etc. are all significant, but at least they make some kind of sense on the conceptual map of copyright law. Anti-circumvention says: you can't have, make, try to make, describe how to make, etc. anything for the purpose of breaking a copyright protection.
What's a copyright protection? Well, that's open to interpretation. How do we decide if something's purpose is to break a copyright protection? Also open to interpretation.
Apple seems to be saying that if you reverse-engineer their system to interoperate with other software, you can use that to violate someone's copyright - and that defeating some copyright protection in their system is the primary purpose for which you'd do it.
Filing a flight plan serves as notice to the city's officials?
So, part of the mayor's daily agenda should be to read through all flight plans filed with the FAA to see if anything is planned that maybe the citizens ought to know about?
Not buying it.
No, no, in Soviet Russia mail addresses you...
If a person confines himself to writing philosophical works, maybe. When you look at the practical impact of someone taking this approach, I disagree that it helps form a middle-ground. I consider the rift over GPLv3 a perfect example of what I mean.
I was in disagree-with-RMS mode right up until I read your comment.
What motive? Money. They've shut services down before for exactly that reason. If a software service isn't profitable to its operator, it could go away. Or, the service's provider might decide it would be more profitable to change the subscription terms.
With SaaS, what you are getting is bounded by contract, ToS, and not much else. If you assume it's like a program on your computer, and don't understand the limitations -- if you say "what reason would they have to take away what they're giving me right now" -- then you are an audience that creates a need for a warning like RMS's.
(However, I still think his argument is driven too much by one-sided idealism and too little by pragmatism; and that the assertion toward never using a non-free service only hurts his credibility.)
I don't think it's exactly news that RMS has an extreme view of what "freedom" means in the context of software. If at any moment you don't control exactly what every computer does on your behalf, your freedom has been taken away? Well, ok, let's put this in perspective.
What's more important -- freedom in computing, or freedom in what you eat? What would it take to have RMS-style "freedom" with respect to your food? Do you know that when you buy agriculture-as-a-service, you don't control the growing practices, the chemicals used along the way (sure, they may label it as pesticide-free, but how do you know?), the method of harvesting, shipping, the treatment of the workers, the sanitation of the food along the way, etc. ad nausium?
You could go self-sufficient, if you have the skills and the up-front money to make that happen. Thoreau would advocate that. But the thing is, that's not the life most people would choose (and isn't that what freedom is about -- choice?). And interestingly enough, if everyone today decided to live that way, the population would be unsustainable.
So, yes, you're handing some control over to someone else. Yes, it's something you have to weigh as you exercise your freedom to choose when and how to use these services. And yes, that issue has been enough to keep me from using some services. But there's a world of difference between knowing that a service isn't the same product as traditional software, and saying that you "must never use" the former.
The problem with RMS is, he divides the world into products that give you complete freedom, and products that have zero value.
First the seize ships off the coast of Somalia, and then it's on to giving people who want books the names of other people who have them...
Global warming.
I suppose I don't know how it is in Sweden, but I beileve in America for there to be 'destruction of evidence', the destruction has to occur in the context of an actual investigation.
In fact, this is why companies have "data retention" policies (which typically have more to do with which data to destroy than which to retain) -- when an investigation does come up, if you already don't have the information and it was destroyed in accordance with standing company policy, then there is normally no recourse against you.
That's what I'd say this ISP is doing -- adjusting its data retention policies. Sure, it's explicitely doing it in anticipation that the information might otherwise be evidence -- that's what data retention policies are about. This is maybe more specific since they're concerned about one law in particular, and you can agree or disagree with their moral position, but it's not destruction of evidence.
When a legal jurisdiction decides certain information needs to be around for potential investigations, they enact laws that require records of that particular information to be kept for some period of time. Will such a law follow WRT Swedish ISP customer recorsd? We'll see...
The majority of the energy is spent reading the spam and searching spam folders for legit mail, right?
So where is that energy coming from / going? Perhaps you're counting the energy of running my PC while I'm doing those things? But what's your "0 energy" baseline? Are you assuming that 30 secnods of me searching my email = 30 additional seconds before my computer gets to swtich to power-save mode? Because that's not always true -- it often means 30 seconds less of me playing some game before my ride shows up, and the computer goes to sleep at the same time it would've otherwise.
Maybe its the energy the server spends reading the email from disk that's significant. That might be a vaild concern...
My first thought was: "only" enough to power a 100W lightbulb for 6 months? Seems like rather quite a bit of energy... but then it does depend what scale you're thinking of.
Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math here. 100W x 1kW/1000W x 180day x 24hr/day = 432 kW hr
Say your home electric bill is $100/mo. That wuold maen you consume about 1000kWh per month, or under 35kWh per day.
So if you could capture all of the energy from a single lightning bolt (assuming the nubmers cited are correct), you'd be able to power 12 homes for a little over a day.
If I personally could economically track down thunderstorms often enough to capture a lightning bolt every 12 days on average (and could store and use that power efficiently), it might be a good deal compared to home solar cells, etc. But on a utility scale, this is a trivial amount of energy. A town with only 12,000 homes and nothing else would require 1000 bolts per day.
You can quibble with my starting assumptions -- maybe your electric bill is less than $100/mo -- but the orders of magnitude still aren't gonig to work out on a utility scale. And all of this math assumes you can capture all of the energy. If any energy escapes as a flash of light and a roar of sound, then that cuts into the energy you capture.
...???
Shuttles blowing up "regularly"?
Forget it folks, WHBT.
Or perhaps the objection is that it's something that Microsoft is doing.
For the sake of argument, let's say you've got the facts exactly right.
How would that not be about free speech? That a position or view is at odds with facts -- even if it is at odds with facts known to the speaker -- does not make it "not a position or view", or "not experssion".
Certain lies are illegal even in countries with strong concepts of free speech; but not all iles. Fraud, defamation, reckless endangerment... these can all limit free speech. I'd question whether this blogger's contribution (if any) to financial decline should rise to that level.
Either way... nowhere I'm aware of is free speech unlimited, but if a case challenges whether speech should be inside or outside the limitations of free speech, then it is indeed a case about free speech.
Yesterday we learned that some people believe it is "censorship" when a private company chooses which results to return in its web site's search feature...
Yet now we have a true case of censorship -- a government using force of law to control what its citizens say -- and nobody seems to notice.
Reference this if ever you wonder why I (and others) argue for using terms according to their definition, rather than just picking the most inflammatory term for any disliked action.
I can't say one way or the other how those numbers will go, but there's also a long-term consideration.
If we can beam power from orbit to Earth, then we're a step closer to beaming power from points in space other than orbit, to orbit, and then to Earth.
And why would that matter? Well, what fraction of the Sun's power ever strikes the Earth's surface? (I'm not talking atmospheric loss; I'm talking geometry.)
I'm not arguing whether it's good or bad what Amazon is doing. To me that's a matter of opinion in which I have no interest in swaying others.
I'm arguing whether it's censorship. As I said before, it may be a lot of things, but it is not censorship.
I don't think it's possible to use the words "Stephen Colbert" and "Serenity" in the same sentence. ...
I stand corrected.
Well, tax laws can apparently be used to punish you for something you did before the law was passed (see AIG bonuses), so why would the Constitution apply in this case?
I don't find restatement of one's own position without reference to the opponent's argument all that compelling, but whatever floats your boat.
If you want to imagine that "lend the money at market rates" is amongst the options for what the government would've done if not for bailout loans, that's your business. I challenge you to point out when government has done such a thing.
The rest of your argument seems to be about whether government intervention is a good idea at all. I haven't stated a position on that matter, so maybe you should stop making assumptions.
"If the government makes the loan, they don't make $4, they lose $6. Instead of loaning it to Tesla at below market rates, they could have entered the debt market and lent it to others at 10%. When they loan the money to Tesla, they lose $6, and Tesla gains $6."
As I said, the mistake is in thinking of the government as "like a company" in its economic behavior. If the government weren't engaged in bail-out loans, they would not be loaning that same money out at market rates. They would either be spending it the way a government spends money, or they would be not raising / borrowing it in the first place. (In fact, if you catch your government lending at market rates, it might be a good time to elect different representatives. That's not what tax money is for.)
The only way the government loses $6 is if they borrow the money at 10% in order to lend it to tesla at 4%.
"The lender doesn't net $10. The government has to recoup the $6 it spent through taxes, and some of that will come from the lender"
I don't measure the effects of relativity when I estimate time to walk down the street. The lender's contribution to that $6 will be much, much, much less than a penny.
But yes, every taxpayer could be said to pay a bit toward the subsidy, to the extent that taxes track losslessly to government spending.
"the government is out $6"
I think fundamentally we disagree on the premise that the government "has" money in the way a private entity does.