There is also no reason that I should need to make up for paying into taxes that put me into a position where I become "working poor" and can't qualify for the exact same programs that I'm paying taxes to fund. This, while still trying to keep myself and my family solvent. The whole problem here is that there are far too many people who think tax money is "free" money, and heavily taxing the citizenry and businesses has a money-generating effect. I'll tell you right now that it doesn't work that way for most people.
Even though I can't be considered wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, if a person in my community needs the kind of help I can offer, I'd normally have no problem helping as my resources allow once my family is taken care of. But when my resources are artificially reduced through taxes, and I can barely provide for my own household, I've lost the ability to help anybody else, and possibly require help myself. I'm not about to go out and work harder to earn less than I currently am so that someone else can be handed enough to afford a new TV and get more money worth of food assistance than my entire household would dare to dedicate to food as part of a responsible budget. I'm not about to go out and get a second job just so that I can continue to make the same housing payments that I would have had no problem with if I wasn't getting taxed so heavily. I wouldn't need to get a second job to earn enough to get taxed enough to offset the poor planning and wasteful spending habits of others.
So, the whole idea of higher taxes, and more tax-based spending, is basically telling those responsible people being taxed to "work yourself ragged to pay off the debts that others incurred because they constantly refuse to figure out how to act in a responsible manner when it comes to the resources (finances and incurred debt in this case) under their control." I'm sorry that people/companies can't figure out how to balance a checkbook and keep their debt under control, but it's not my responsibility to bail them out when they make poor decisions. I don't like to have my money taken at gun-point (through taxes; Yes, you *can* be fined and sent to prison for not paying what the government demands of you) to pay for the mistakes someone else made. I don't expect you to be punished for something I've done wrong, so why am I expected to be punished financially to pay for the poor management and financial decisions made by someone else entirely?
My household has a budget, and we are currently solvent, but only barely (our entire monthly "entertainment" budget (that money not taken up by the necessities) is somewhere in the $5 range, but the house is paid for for the month, the electricity is still on, the phone still works, and there's still food on the table. Why is it that the people who take responsibility for their own well-being are being told that they should also take responsibility for all of the people out there who can't or won't do the same? Would you like to pay for my housing costs if I were to refuse to? I'd let you as long as you were consistent about doing it. You seem to have no problem with calling me a whiner for not wanting you to have to do it, but you're still willing to push everyone to do it just the same.
Do you really believe that The Pirate Bay was set up for any purpose other than distributing copyrighted files?
Name me one file that is not in some way copyrighted. With the way that any reproducible content is automatically copyrighted in most jurisdictions, there is no possible way for anyone to differentiate such content with anything non-copyrighted without knowing: who made it, where they made it, who holds the copyright for it, who posted it, where the poster got it, where it's posted, where it was posted from, and whether or not is was posted with the intent to distribute by the copyright holder.
The ability to post a response while including a part of an originating comment is, itself, a form of copyright violation. It may be a protected form of it, but it's still a violation of that person's copyright if you didn't get their express permission to do so. So, by your own argument, there is no valid purpose for the links to other internet websites, since every page, every image, and every comment is considered to be under copyright, and you can't access it without becoming an accessory to violating that copyright. That is, unless you already know who posted the content, what laws it falls under, and whether it was posted with the creator's permission and intent to distribute or not.
So to say that the primary purpose of TPB is to infringe copyright, you're absolutely right, and so is slashdot and any other website on the Internet. We make assumptions based on what is most common, and that is that the copyright holder for any given piece of content was the one to make it ready for the particular distribution method used (may it be HTTP, FTP, P2P, sneaker-net, or embedded in/on a physical object) and has authorized that form of distribution. To do otherwise is to assume "guilty until proven innocent" rather than the other way around.
So, is there any significant legal use for a torrent of an infringing file?
The answer to this is the same as the answer to the following question: Is there any significant legal use for a link to a piece of information you can't confirm the copyright status of prior to following the link? If your answer to that question is "no", then you should quickly close your web browser and pretend you've never heard of the Internet for all the good your current opinion will do you.
The people who post whatever content they do to TPB are treated the same as the people who post to this and any other site, as the assumed copyright holder for the content. They are allowed to post whatever they please until it becomes too disruptive to the normal operations of the site or violates the laws in place for the site's host. That is what the case is all about, not whether or not they know about the issue, but whether or not the site owners are to be held responsible for the actions of their users.
Actually, they have, and some towns actually implement such a scheme. Mine does. There's one, single, machine that you put your own ballot into and it electronically tallies the votes (likely a Scantron-style thing), while the big bin underneath it stores the black-marker-filled ballot for later checking/recounting as necessary. With a larger town or city, all it would take is a larger number of these machines to handle the amount of voter traffic.
The only potential drawbacks are that the pre-printed forms could potentially be misprinted (hard to do without someone noticing) or (with multiple batches) the listings get re-ordered (easy to manage with a machine-readable print-code), and that during the time you travel between the little bench/booth used to fill out the ballot and the scanning machine, someone might be able to see how you voted by looking at the physical piece of paper (having 20/5 vision can sometimes cause an unintentional breach of privacy).
Nowhere in the article did it say that touch-screen units ceased to function... I don't know where this information came from, but that's what the majority of the posts I've read are quoting.
The article stated "workers had problems connecting with a live database that is used to verify that a voter is properly registered in the county"... this does not mean that the voting units stopped working. The actual voting units aren't even supposed to contain voter-specific information, just internal ballot numbers. In fact, the actual voting consoles don't even connect to the internet for any reason and probably aren't even networked, but the laptops that are used to verify a voter's registration probably are.
It was the online database connection that failed to work for whatever reason ("Salas said it was not yet known what went wrong to cause the glitch."). And "In Orange County, the computers went down for about 10 minutes shortly after voting began, said Margaret Dunn, the senior deputy elections supervisor. She said she did not know what caused the problem, but speculated a faulty Internet connection may have been to blame." doesn't specify anything (beyond suspicious timing) because far too many people (some even in computer-related fields) assume "a network" is the same as "the internet", and thus don't try make any differentiation between the two, not to mention the fact that the often misleading term "speculated" was used (denoting an assumption), instead of "stated" (which would have denoted the information came from some form of expertise or other knowledgeable information source).
The thing that frightens me the most is the apparent willingness that so many people seem to have to want to accept such offhand and baseless connections, all because it's all in the same article, or the article tends to promote a sense of urgency or panic (it's News people, if you're not panicking or getting the warm-fuzzies, the ratings/readership might disappear). It's so often the progression of "there were problems with a part of the new process" becomes "people don't like the new process" becomes "the whole idea of the new process is flawed and therefore should be scrapped or avoided".
In this case, apparently there was a problem with the connection(s) between the registration database server(s) and some of the laptops used to access them, this brings about a comment of "Sally Zwanger, a poll watcher for the Kerry campaign, claimed the problems reflected the inability of Gov. Jeb Bush's administration to fix voting problems left over from the 2000 election" -- who apparently happens to be the only 'honest' person there because "She also said waiting voters were told at 8:30 a.m. that every voting location in Broward County was closed. But she found out after calling the Broward County Elections Office headquarters that the Plantation location and four others were still open." (you'd think that there would be a list of negligent Officials who were spreading the information, which there is, suspiciously, no mention of) -- sparked off a statement by an apparent voter (""They had all the time from when they said the voting machines will be used, all the time to perfect them, and here we are, up the creek,""... as though the voting machines themselves were at fault... she apparently didn't even get that far due to the initial issue) which started a bunch of other voter comments about the situation being ridiculous and frustrating. This in turn rolls into complaints of incomplete absentee ballots being handed out (see http://election.dos.state.fl.us/absenteevoting.sht ml for more information on Florida absentee voting procedures) when voters don't want to use the touch-screen machines. Next comes a list of other states allowing early voting, and even a comment on the ease of us
This is generally not the case, most geeks may not get as much exercise as non-geeks, but we also tend to eat only when we're hungry. For example: once I went 2 days without eating because I never felt hungry enough to bother making/getting anything. Where I work, it's only when someone else asks "Are you going to lunch?" that we geeks eat at regular intervals. And the availability of an all-you-can-eat cafeteria is the only thing that has kept our weight up. We also tend to care for our bodies, we know when we're overweight, and we know when we need to bathe. In fact, you may never realize it if saw a geek walking down the street, as they tend to look like everyone else, they just have different skills.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also no reason that I should need to make up for paying into taxes that put me into a position where I become "working poor" and can't qualify for the exact same programs that I'm paying taxes to fund. This, while still trying to keep myself and my family solvent. The whole problem here is that there are far too many people who think tax money is "free" money, and heavily taxing the citizenry and businesses has a money-generating effect. I'll tell you right now that it doesn't work that way for most people.
Even though I can't be considered wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, if a person in my community needs the kind of help I can offer, I'd normally have no problem helping as my resources allow once my family is taken care of. But when my resources are artificially reduced through taxes, and I can barely provide for my own household, I've lost the ability to help anybody else, and possibly require help myself. I'm not about to go out and work harder to earn less than I currently am so that someone else can be handed enough to afford a new TV and get more money worth of food assistance than my entire household would dare to dedicate to food as part of a responsible budget. I'm not about to go out and get a second job just so that I can continue to make the same housing payments that I would have had no problem with if I wasn't getting taxed so heavily. I wouldn't need to get a second job to earn enough to get taxed enough to offset the poor planning and wasteful spending habits of others.
So, the whole idea of higher taxes, and more tax-based spending, is basically telling those responsible people being taxed to "work yourself ragged to pay off the debts that others incurred because they constantly refuse to figure out how to act in a responsible manner when it comes to the resources (finances and incurred debt in this case) under their control." I'm sorry that people/companies can't figure out how to balance a checkbook and keep their debt under control, but it's not my responsibility to bail them out when they make poor decisions. I don't like to have my money taken at gun-point (through taxes; Yes, you *can* be fined and sent to prison for not paying what the government demands of you) to pay for the mistakes someone else made. I don't expect you to be punished for something I've done wrong, so why am I expected to be punished financially to pay for the poor management and financial decisions made by someone else entirely?
My household has a budget, and we are currently solvent, but only barely (our entire monthly "entertainment" budget (that money not taken up by the necessities) is somewhere in the $5 range, but the house is paid for for the month, the electricity is still on, the phone still works, and there's still food on the table. Why is it that the people who take responsibility for their own well-being are being told that they should also take responsibility for all of the people out there who can't or won't do the same? Would you like to pay for my housing costs if I were to refuse to? I'd let you as long as you were consistent about doing it. You seem to have no problem with calling me a whiner for not wanting you to have to do it, but you're still willing to push everyone to do it just the same.
Do you really believe that The Pirate Bay was set up for any purpose other than distributing copyrighted files?
Name me one file that is not in some way copyrighted. With the way that any reproducible content is automatically copyrighted in most jurisdictions, there is no possible way for anyone to differentiate such content with anything non-copyrighted without knowing: who made it, where they made it, who holds the copyright for it, who posted it, where the poster got it, where it's posted, where it was posted from, and whether or not is was posted with the intent to distribute by the copyright holder.
The ability to post a response while including a part of an originating comment is, itself, a form of copyright violation. It may be a protected form of it, but it's still a violation of that person's copyright if you didn't get their express permission to do so. So, by your own argument, there is no valid purpose for the links to other internet websites, since every page, every image, and every comment is considered to be under copyright, and you can't access it without becoming an accessory to violating that copyright. That is, unless you already know who posted the content, what laws it falls under, and whether it was posted with the creator's permission and intent to distribute or not.
So to say that the primary purpose of TPB is to infringe copyright, you're absolutely right, and so is slashdot and any other website on the Internet. We make assumptions based on what is most common, and that is that the copyright holder for any given piece of content was the one to make it ready for the particular distribution method used (may it be HTTP, FTP, P2P, sneaker-net, or embedded in/on a physical object) and has authorized that form of distribution. To do otherwise is to assume "guilty until proven innocent" rather than the other way around.
So, is there any significant legal use for a torrent of an infringing file?
The answer to this is the same as the answer to the following question: Is there any significant legal use for a link to a piece of information you can't confirm the copyright status of prior to following the link? If your answer to that question is "no", then you should quickly close your web browser and pretend you've never heard of the Internet for all the good your current opinion will do you.
The people who post whatever content they do to TPB are treated the same as the people who post to this and any other site, as the assumed copyright holder for the content. They are allowed to post whatever they please until it becomes too disruptive to the normal operations of the site or violates the laws in place for the site's host. That is what the case is all about, not whether or not they know about the issue, but whether or not the site owners are to be held responsible for the actions of their users.
Actually, they have, and some towns actually implement such a scheme. Mine does. There's one, single, machine that you put your own ballot into and it electronically tallies the votes (likely a Scantron-style thing), while the big bin underneath it stores the black-marker-filled ballot for later checking/recounting as necessary. With a larger town or city, all it would take is a larger number of these machines to handle the amount of voter traffic.
The only potential drawbacks are that the pre-printed forms could potentially be misprinted (hard to do without someone noticing) or (with multiple batches) the listings get re-ordered (easy to manage with a machine-readable print-code), and that during the time you travel between the little bench/booth used to fill out the ballot and the scanning machine, someone might be able to see how you voted by looking at the physical piece of paper (having 20/5 vision can sometimes cause an unintentional breach of privacy).
"In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed."
Nowhere in the article did it say that touch-screen units ceased to function... I don't know where this information came from, but that's what the majority of the posts I've read are quoting.
The article stated "workers had problems connecting with a live database that is used to verify that a voter is properly registered in the county"... this does not mean that the voting units stopped working. The actual voting units aren't even supposed to contain voter-specific information, just internal ballot numbers. In fact, the actual voting consoles don't even connect to the internet for any reason and probably aren't even networked, but the laptops that are used to verify a voter's registration probably are.
It was the online database connection that failed to work for whatever reason ("Salas said it was not yet known what went wrong to cause the glitch."). And "In Orange County, the computers went down for about 10 minutes shortly after voting began, said Margaret Dunn, the senior deputy elections supervisor. She said she did not know what caused the problem, but speculated a faulty Internet connection may have been to blame." doesn't specify anything (beyond suspicious timing) because far too many people (some even in computer-related fields) assume "a network" is the same as "the internet", and thus don't try make any differentiation between the two, not to mention the fact that the often misleading term "speculated" was used (denoting an assumption), instead of "stated" (which would have denoted the information came from some form of expertise or other knowledgeable information source).
The thing that frightens me the most is the apparent willingness that so many people seem to have to want to accept such offhand and baseless connections, all because it's all in the same article, or the article tends to promote a sense of urgency or panic (it's News people, if you're not panicking or getting the warm-fuzzies, the ratings/readership might disappear). It's so often the progression of "there were problems with a part of the new process" becomes "people don't like the new process" becomes "the whole idea of the new process is flawed and therefore should be scrapped or avoided".
In this case, apparently there was a problem with the connection(s) between the registration database server(s) and some of the laptops used to access them, this brings about a comment of "Sally Zwanger, a poll watcher for the Kerry campaign, claimed the problems reflected the inability of Gov. Jeb Bush's administration to fix voting problems left over from the 2000 election" -- who apparently happens to be the only 'honest' person there because "She also said waiting voters were told at 8:30 a.m. that every voting location in Broward County was closed. But she found out after calling the Broward County Elections Office headquarters that the Plantation location and four others were still open." (you'd think that there would be a list of negligent Officials who were spreading the information, which there is, suspiciously, no mention of) -- sparked off a statement by an apparent voter (""They had all the time from when they said the voting machines will be used, all the time to perfect them, and here we are, up the creek,""... as though the voting machines themselves were at fault... she apparently didn't even get that far due to the initial issue) which started a bunch of other voter comments about the situation being ridiculous and frustrating. This in turn rolls into complaints of incomplete absentee ballots being handed out (see http://election.dos.state.fl.us/absenteevoting.sht ml for more information on Florida absentee voting procedures) when voters don't want to use the touch-screen machines. Next comes a list of other states allowing early voting, and even a comment on the ease of us
- Life is what you make of it.
For example: once I went 2 days without eating because I never felt hungry enough to bother making/getting anything.
Where I work, it's only when someone else asks "Are you going to lunch?" that we geeks eat at regular intervals. And the availability of an all-you-can-eat cafeteria is the only thing that has kept our weight up.
We also tend to care for our bodies, we know when we're overweight, and we know when we need to bathe. In fact, you may never realize it if saw a geek walking down the street, as they tend to look like everyone else, they just have different skills.
- Life is what you make of it.