I just don't see how telling people to do something which is not a crime is a crime.
Then you are amazingly short-sighted. Intentionally instructing people to perform small tasks that add up to a crime still amounts to orchestrating that crime, no matter how insignificant those tasks may seem on their own.
Of course, that's not what this kid did. He told people to do something that WAS a crime -- i.e., to crash the school's webserver. There was no hiding it. He didn't just say "hey, refresh this page a bunch of times and see what happens." He said, "Let's try to crash the school's webserver." As such, the people who helped him do it are accessories to the crime, and could reasonably be charged with conspiracy to commit a felony, as well.
You're trying to interpret the law by defining certain actions as legal or illegal. The problem is that the law makes it clear that the legality of an action is also defined by the intent. If you have a gun, you can shoot someone by accident, or in the heat of passion, or as part of a premeditated plan, or in self-defense, and every one of those instances will be treated differently by the law. The end result is the same -- you shot somebody. But how you got to that point is as important in determining the proper punishment (if any).
This kid orchestrated a denial-of-service attack on his school's website. He did it intentionally and he recruited others to help him. Slashdot likes to play scare-tactics by making you think, "*GASP*, all he did was refresh a webpage, that means refreshing a webpage is ILLEGAL!" But obviously it took a lot more than that to satisfy the legal requirements to charge him. He *didn't* just refresh a webpage. He did it with the expressed intention of causing damage to the school's computer equipment, and that makes all the difference in the world.
He encouraged others to do something which would harm the school district. So is organizing a massive write-in or phone-in campaign. It ties up resources for the target in all cases, but is still legal.
And that's exactly where the similarities end. A write-in or phone-in campaign is protected free speech, and has an explicit goal which is stated in the act itself. Your reference to "harm" being done to the district is dubious at best -- that is not the intended goal of such a campaign.
This kid's actions were not "speech" in any form, and did not have an explicit goal other than to directly harm the district. If another goal was intended, it is not stated in the act itself.
Grandparent poster is right. This kid pulled an easy denial-of-service attack. He SAID as much when he posted the link to the school's website and asked people to try to crash it.
You will find that most crime requires both execution and intent. That's why refreshing a webpage as a matter of course isn't illegal, but doing so in an attempt to take down a web server is. It's also why "manslaughter" and "homicide" are separate criminal acts.
I wouldn't quite put it like that, but religious promotion, education, and ritual *is* social conditioning of the most powerful sort. I don't think it's in most cases a bad thing, but your immersion in the culture prevents you from understanding the sorts of (willful, in your case) conditioning that goes on.
It really depends on the visible impact of the parent's beliefs. My parents were Christians, and so am I, and I will admit that this is due partly to their influence. But my parents also lived happy, principled, meaningful lives. My sister and I had happy childhoods, and saw first hand the positive impact of our parents' beliefs. So of course that had an effect, and why shouldn't it? But that doesn't mean we didn't make our own decisions -- it simply means that we factored those experiences into the decision. I've known plenty of people whose parents' religion had the opposite effect, and they chose not to follow in their parents' footsteps. As is often overlooked, it has a lot less to do with the religion itself than it does with the attitudes of those who practice it.
I went to a school that was a Church of England Foundation. Pupils that attended it did better because they first had to sit an entrance exam designed to select the top 20% of the population by intelligence. Of my classmates, about 5% had any kind of strong religious belief. This leads me to believe that this statistic may be slightly skewed. The majority described themselves as either atheist or agnostic, and hated the weekly chapel service.
Well, as long as we're throwing out anecdotal evidence... my first years of grade school I attended a private school run by a local Baptist church. The King James Bible was one of our textbooks. I attended until 3rd grade, after which my parents transferred my sister and me to a public school. For the next two years, everything I was taught in math, science, and English, I already knew. I finished tests in a fraction of the time, I ruined the curve, played the know-it-all. Not having to work for two years probably had an adverse affect on my secondary schooling, but that's beside the point. I hate that school because of much of the dogma it pushed on us, but I'm still a Christian, and the private school's effectiveness over the public school system was clearly illustrated in my life.
My parents divorced when I was 17 and, while it was not much fun for me (or my mother), I don't believe it had much impact on society as a whole
I think you're minimizing the importance of your own life as a part of the greater society. It's a logical fallacy known as the "argument of the beard." You're still part of society, and the event did have an impact. As the divorce rate goes up, the impact increases. Even though things turned out well in the end, I think we can generally agree that divorce isn't a good thing. Sure, sometimes it's necessary. But often times it's not as necessary as people would like to believe, and in the instances where it is, it's that necessity that makes it so painful.
If you limited these to violent crime, or theft, then I would concede the point. If the crimes are of the order of getting caught smoking pot, then I would contend that blunting the inquisitiveness of the children is not a worthwhile trade-off for a slightly more ordered society.
I don't see how this rebuts the GPP's point, though. In fact, if you concede the point in regards to violent crime and theft, then your minimization of the impact of lesser criminal offenses only supports his assertion.
So, by your twisted logic, the only choice available to me is to do something different from my parents. If I make any of the same choices they made, I'm brainwashed. And this is somehow insightful?
Let's be honest with ourselves. You're saying that all religion is brainwashing, and the slashbotters modded you up because they love anything that helps them maintain their smug sense of intellectual superiority.
Those of us who have made a concerted effort to research and experience the alternatives know better.
Actually, in regards to why SuprNova went offline, nothing actually happened. He just got nervous and took it down. The police didn't show up until afterwards. I suppose that technically means something did happen, but it wasn't a cause for SuprNova going offline. Dude got scared. I would too, were I in his position.
Oh, if you do something as a hobby, your work is not to be taken seriously? Try to explain that to genealogists, free software authors, and anyone else who puts pride into their hobbies.
Pride != Expertise
Seriously, Penny Arcade brought up a very valid point. The entire concept of wikipedia is severely flawed. A source of empirical knowledge needs to be both reliable and accountable. Wikipedia is neither. The entire premise of the project prevents that.
To be fair, I don't think it was his "disagreement" that bothered them as much as it was the mocking and insulting way he chose to deliver it. I'm no creationist either, but this guy was the department chair of religious studies, and he was using a course to make a political statement. That doesn't make his attackers right, and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but it damn sure doesn't make me sad to see him resign.
Indeed, I'm an Apple fanboy and I have to admit that Apple does this all the time. They're just not so blatant about it. Microsoft is new to this game, and their P.R. stinks, so they're not getting away with it as easy.
But you're right -- it's just simple marketing. There's nothing particularly wrong with this -- if they produce fewer units then fewer units will be sold. It's a gamble they're taking in an attempt to generate demand. If it backfires, the only one who gets hurt is Microsoft, because they don't sell as many from the outset. So I don't see much to complain about here... unless you really really wanted an Xbox on launch date and don't think you'll be able to get one.
To quote the shirt, "I HATE Jack Thompson" as much as anyone, but keep in mind that an investigation alone won't get him disbarred. I'd love to have that kind of P.R. weapon on the side of the games industry, but premature gloating isn't going to win any hearts on the Florida bar. In fact, it may have the opposite effect.
A better strategy would be to send correspondence to the bar alerting them to other infractions Jack has made besides those against Penny Arcade. For instance, his use of these same tactics on Lou Kerner of Bolt Media is my personal favorite.
Why do we keep wasting our time paying attention to Robertson's antics? He's not much of an innovator and he's a terrible businessman. He consistently makes the wrong decisions, both in business and in the legal gambits he inevitably gets himself entangled in.
mp3.com was his one true pioneering moment. The my.mp3.com site allowed you to put a CD in your drive and have mp3 versions of the music you owned instantly unlocked in their library. There was security to ensure that only one person was logged into any account, and that you had a physical copy of the disc you were unlocking. And of course, the RIAA sued them for it. And instead of sticking to his guns, Robertson settled, inviting even more lawsuits and eventually bankrupting the company and forcing him to sell it to Universal, who gutted and subsequently abandoned it.
LindowsOS had to be renamed Linspire -- again because Robertson wouldn't stand his ground after poking "the man" in the eye.
This is a man who consistently rocks the boat to garner attention, then steps down when anyone calls him on it. This is yet another move designed to make public waves without actually accomplishing anything. He's not one who makes sound business and legal decisions. I just hope he doesn't drag DVD-Jon down with him.
Joke or no, AOL's direct marketing is nothing to laugh at. If Google were to buy AOL, they'd have a jabber-based IM client (that ostensibly would hook into the number 1 IM network out there), Winamp (Google Video, perhaps?), and the Netscape browser, for accessing their other services. And AOL's CD distribution system (more importantly, its database of recipients) would be one way to get those tools into the hands of the unwashed masses. Sure, we can just download those things. But we've heard of them, and other folks may not have. Getting a CD in the mail is advertising and utility all in one.
The only ads I block are popups and Flash. Originally I only blocked popups, but eventually I started seeing popups caused by Flash, so I started blocking that, too. There are other benefits of this -- no sudden disrupting sounds coming from my computer, no giant flash ads blocking the rest of my screen.
But aside from that, I feel no need to block ads. I have no problem with ads on a site, and there have been ads that do catch my attention -- it's only when those ads intentionally get in the way of what I'm doing that I start looking for ways to block them.
. ..they're offering a service where you get a lot of movies. . .
Which in the agregate is a block of cheese.
That doesn't address the fact that the block of cheese is never given away for free. Your analogy still does not hold.
A clip is an ad, not a sample.
That's a funny distinction you make, since advertising's entire purpose is to whet a customer's appetite for a product or service in exactly the same manner you claim a "sample" is supposed to. You're splitting hairs because you didn't get a big enough sample. But hey, that doesn't mean you can't be accommodated. As others have mentioned, HBO has been sending out free DVDs of the entire first episode.
Now, you will argue that having a direct download is more convenient, and that may be. But the fact remains that you are confusing "getting a sample" with "taking the whole block of cheese" -- it has nothing to do with the issue at hand (i.e., HBO poisoning the BitTorrent downloads of those who try to take the whole block of cheese without paying).
The only way your analogy works is if you equate downloading the entire series via bittorrent with sampling the show before purchase. You know that's not true, and as such, your entire argument is intellectually dishonest.
Please stop playing word games. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Just because you can apply new vocabulary to an act doesn't make it any better. In fact, it makes it worse -- because you're trying to weasel your way out of accountability.
At least the grandparent poster was honest about his actions, and provided principled reasons for them.
There's a much simpler point you're missing: At some point, "good" and "free" have to intersect.
Right now, there's a fair amount of agreement that the "free" in "free software" contributes to it also being "good." Anyone who obtains GPL'd software is free to also obtain the source code and modify it. That's one of the GPL's primary strengths, and it's what makes free software good. You wouldn't use free software if you didn't think it was a good thing.
Closing this "loophole," as only an insane ideologue would refer to it, would cause massive problems, not the least of which is that it would lead to users abandoning software that required them to offer source code -- especially on a website that wasn't dedicated to that task. That's a sure-fire way to lose your users. What good is "free" software if no one wants to use it?
This is clearly a statement by someone who cares more about the freedom of software than about the freedom of the people who use that software. Users don't care about the ideology of a piece of software, they care about what they can do with it. This proposition would restrict their freedom, not enhance it. You'd be forcing users to become distributors. That's not freedom. It's slavery.
And you will find that many of us WILL go back to Windows, because it's far more free than what you're suggesting.
The UN is the ideal place to run the internet rules at the moment, its got the largest reach and global membership and a stated goal of being independent.
And a track record of utter failure in the execution of that stated goal.
A matter of national policy that cannot be negotiated? I don't seem to recall the 132nd ammendment stating that internet domain ownership is the right of every american citizen.
I don't seem to recall the 133rd amendment stating that the Constitution of the United States is all there is to national policy. Are you a retard? Seriously, you need some pointers on reading comprehension.
Because co-operation is bad eh?
Ten bucks says you get riled at the naming of a bill like the Patriot Act to make those who oppose it seem like they're unpatriotic. And here you are, playing the exact same con. Surprise, surprise.
The US Goverment does itself, or its citizens, no favours by continually persuing unilateral rather than multi-lateral approaches.
Right. Because we all know that those other countries aren't just jockeying for political and economic control too, right? Because the U.N. is totally neutral, right? I mean, sure there are slave traders on their human rights committees, but at least they're promoting multiculturalism, right? Who could it possibly hurt to give an organization like that control over the largest distributed network in the world?
Wow, not what I'd expect from California... it will be interesting to see how that goes now that the gay marriage bill has been vetoed in the name of public opinion. The populace continues to surprise.
I'm not sure YOU realize that a "pristine" audio signal isn't worth jack shit in a convertable going 70mph. It simply doesn't matter very much how clean your source is with 25db or so of white noise in the background.
That depends on how much you're able to amplify the signal your car's stereo system is given without distortion or hiss. Which was kinda the point of the reviewer's statement.
Indeed. Feature after feature is being removed from the next release of Windows, but somehow they've found time to introduce a whole new VoIP product? I don't buy it.
Call it trite, but I actually like this idea, at least in part. Because man, baby Elephants are so cute! Romping around, rolling in the dirt, squirting each other, chasing attractive French girls... ever seen Hatari?:)
You are right, to a degree. Most parents simply do not care what their kids see and hear in a video game. But this is not only due to laziness -- it is due also to ignorance. Many adults over 30 still consider video games to be "kid's entertainment." The idea that adult-oriented or even pornographic material could exist in a video game format is simply unfathomable to them.
And that is the reason why we still have politicians taking the stance that this stuff is bad for the children. In the collective mind of the older generation, video games are always for kids. Any rating system therefore exists inside that box -- In their minds, M isn't for adults, it's for mature children.
Personally, I think that parents ought to be able to decide for themselves whether their children are able to handle higher-rated content. Being discerning is what parenting is all about. But I'm not naive enough to think that's what's happening here.
There is a chain of grocery stores native to my home state which does this... years ago, in the sue-crazy early 90s, there was a rash of incidents in which folks were going into various grocery stores, pulling items from high shelves down on top of them, and suing for damages. Though the cases almost never went to court, there was usually a hefty settlement involved.
My local chain decided they would have none of this, and vowed to fight any such case brought against them in court. The frivolous lawsuits were curtailed pretty quickly, because the lawyers-for-hire figured out that this was no longer an easy way to make a quick buck.
Most businesses who have a lawsuit brought against them choose to settle because it is cheaper than fighting it out in court. Only the truly smart companies realize that this behavior just invites new lawsuits. Just look at what happened to mp3.com.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't see how telling people to do something which is not a crime is a crime.
Then you are amazingly short-sighted. Intentionally instructing people to perform small tasks that add up to a crime still amounts to orchestrating that crime, no matter how insignificant those tasks may seem on their own.
Of course, that's not what this kid did. He told people to do something that WAS a crime -- i.e., to crash the school's webserver. There was no hiding it. He didn't just say "hey, refresh this page a bunch of times and see what happens." He said, "Let's try to crash the school's webserver." As such, the people who helped him do it are accessories to the crime, and could reasonably be charged with conspiracy to commit a felony, as well.
You're trying to interpret the law by defining certain actions as legal or illegal. The problem is that the law makes it clear that the legality of an action is also defined by the intent. If you have a gun, you can shoot someone by accident, or in the heat of passion, or as part of a premeditated plan, or in self-defense, and every one of those instances will be treated differently by the law. The end result is the same -- you shot somebody. But how you got to that point is as important in determining the proper punishment (if any).
This kid orchestrated a denial-of-service attack on his school's website. He did it intentionally and he recruited others to help him. Slashdot likes to play scare-tactics by making you think, "*GASP*, all he did was refresh a webpage, that means refreshing a webpage is ILLEGAL!" But obviously it took a lot more than that to satisfy the legal requirements to charge him. He *didn't* just refresh a webpage. He did it with the expressed intention of causing damage to the school's computer equipment, and that makes all the difference in the world.
He encouraged others to do something which would harm the school district. So is organizing a massive write-in or phone-in campaign. It ties up resources for the target in all cases, but is still legal.
And that's exactly where the similarities end. A write-in or phone-in campaign is protected free speech, and has an explicit goal which is stated in the act itself. Your reference to "harm" being done to the district is dubious at best -- that is not the intended goal of such a campaign.
This kid's actions were not "speech" in any form, and did not have an explicit goal other than to directly harm the district. If another goal was intended, it is not stated in the act itself.
Grandparent poster is right. This kid pulled an easy denial-of-service attack. He SAID as much when he posted the link to the school's website and asked people to try to crash it.
You will find that most crime requires both execution and intent. That's why refreshing a webpage as a matter of course isn't illegal, but doing so in an attempt to take down a web server is. It's also why "manslaughter" and "homicide" are separate criminal acts.
I wouldn't quite put it like that, but religious promotion, education, and ritual *is* social conditioning of the most powerful sort. I don't think it's in most cases a bad thing, but your immersion in the culture prevents you from understanding the sorts of (willful, in your case) conditioning that goes on.
It really depends on the visible impact of the parent's beliefs. My parents were Christians, and so am I, and I will admit that this is due partly to their influence. But my parents also lived happy, principled, meaningful lives. My sister and I had happy childhoods, and saw first hand the positive impact of our parents' beliefs. So of course that had an effect, and why shouldn't it? But that doesn't mean we didn't make our own decisions -- it simply means that we factored those experiences into the decision. I've known plenty of people whose parents' religion had the opposite effect, and they chose not to follow in their parents' footsteps. As is often overlooked, it has a lot less to do with the religion itself than it does with the attitudes of those who practice it.
I went to a school that was a Church of England Foundation. Pupils that attended it did better because they first had to sit an entrance exam designed to select the top 20% of the population by intelligence. Of my classmates, about 5% had any kind of strong religious belief. This leads me to believe that this statistic may be slightly skewed. The majority described themselves as either atheist or agnostic, and hated the weekly chapel service.
Well, as long as we're throwing out anecdotal evidence... my first years of grade school I attended a private school run by a local Baptist church. The King James Bible was one of our textbooks. I attended until 3rd grade, after which my parents transferred my sister and me to a public school. For the next two years, everything I was taught in math, science, and English, I already knew. I finished tests in a fraction of the time, I ruined the curve, played the know-it-all. Not having to work for two years probably had an adverse affect on my secondary schooling, but that's beside the point. I hate that school because of much of the dogma it pushed on us, but I'm still a Christian, and the private school's effectiveness over the public school system was clearly illustrated in my life.
My parents divorced when I was 17 and, while it was not much fun for me (or my mother), I don't believe it had much impact on society as a whole
I think you're minimizing the importance of your own life as a part of the greater society. It's a logical fallacy known as the "argument of the beard." You're still part of society, and the event did have an impact. As the divorce rate goes up, the impact increases. Even though things turned out well in the end, I think we can generally agree that divorce isn't a good thing. Sure, sometimes it's necessary. But often times it's not as necessary as people would like to believe, and in the instances where it is, it's that necessity that makes it so painful.
If you limited these to violent crime, or theft, then I would concede the point. If the crimes are of the order of getting caught smoking pot, then I would contend that blunting the inquisitiveness of the children is not a worthwhile trade-off for a slightly more ordered society.
I don't see how this rebuts the GPP's point, though. In fact, if you concede the point in regards to violent crime and theft, then your minimization of the impact of lesser criminal offenses only supports his assertion.
So, by your twisted logic, the only choice available to me is to do something different from my parents. If I make any of the same choices they made, I'm brainwashed. And this is somehow insightful?
Let's be honest with ourselves. You're saying that all religion is brainwashing, and the slashbotters modded you up because they love anything that helps them maintain their smug sense of intellectual superiority.
Those of us who have made a concerted effort to research and experience the alternatives know better.
And those of us who are Christians and do not take part in the bashing of other religions do appreciate it.
Actually, in regards to why SuprNova went offline, nothing actually happened. He just got nervous and took it down. The police didn't show up until afterwards. I suppose that technically means something did happen, but it wasn't a cause for SuprNova going offline. Dude got scared. I would too, were I in his position.
Oh, if you do something as a hobby, your work is not to be taken seriously? Try to explain that to genealogists, free software authors, and anyone else who puts pride into their hobbies.
Pride != Expertise
Seriously, Penny Arcade brought up a very valid point. The entire concept of wikipedia is severely flawed. A source of empirical knowledge needs to be both reliable and accountable. Wikipedia is neither. The entire premise of the project prevents that.
To be fair, I don't think it was his "disagreement" that bothered them as much as it was the mocking and insulting way he chose to deliver it. I'm no creationist either, but this guy was the department chair of religious studies, and he was using a course to make a political statement. That doesn't make his attackers right, and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but it damn sure doesn't make me sad to see him resign.
Indeed, I'm an Apple fanboy and I have to admit that Apple does this all the time. They're just not so blatant about it. Microsoft is new to this game, and their P.R. stinks, so they're not getting away with it as easy.
But you're right -- it's just simple marketing. There's nothing particularly wrong with this -- if they produce fewer units then fewer units will be sold. It's a gamble they're taking in an attempt to generate demand. If it backfires, the only one who gets hurt is Microsoft, because they don't sell as many from the outset. So I don't see much to complain about here... unless you really really wanted an Xbox on launch date and don't think you'll be able to get one.
To quote the shirt, "I HATE Jack Thompson" as much as anyone, but keep in mind that an investigation alone won't get him disbarred. I'd love to have that kind of P.R. weapon on the side of the games industry, but premature gloating isn't going to win any hearts on the Florida bar. In fact, it may have the opposite effect.
A better strategy would be to send correspondence to the bar alerting them to other infractions Jack has made besides those against Penny Arcade. For instance, his use of these same tactics on Lou Kerner of Bolt Media is my personal favorite.
Or you could cite his threats against the author of VGCats.
Or even the latest vague legal threats against Dave Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family.
One of these can be overlooked, but if the Bar knows about all of these, perhaps Jack will be out of the game for good.
Why do we keep wasting our time paying attention to Robertson's antics? He's not much of an innovator and he's a terrible businessman. He consistently makes the wrong decisions, both in business and in the legal gambits he inevitably gets himself entangled in.
mp3.com was his one true pioneering moment. The my.mp3.com site allowed you to put a CD in your drive and have mp3 versions of the music you owned instantly unlocked in their library. There was security to ensure that only one person was logged into any account, and that you had a physical copy of the disc you were unlocking. And of course, the RIAA sued them for it. And instead of sticking to his guns, Robertson settled, inviting even more lawsuits and eventually bankrupting the company and forcing him to sell it to Universal, who gutted and subsequently abandoned it.
LindowsOS had to be renamed Linspire -- again because Robertson wouldn't stand his ground after poking "the man" in the eye.
This is a man who consistently rocks the boat to garner attention, then steps down when anyone calls him on it. This is yet another move designed to make public waves without actually accomplishing anything. He's not one who makes sound business and legal decisions. I just hope he doesn't drag DVD-Jon down with him.
Joke or no, AOL's direct marketing is nothing to laugh at. If Google were to buy AOL, they'd have a jabber-based IM client (that ostensibly would hook into the number 1 IM network out there), Winamp (Google Video, perhaps?), and the Netscape browser, for accessing their other services. And AOL's CD distribution system (more importantly, its database of recipients) would be one way to get those tools into the hands of the unwashed masses. Sure, we can just download those things. But we've heard of them, and other folks may not have. Getting a CD in the mail is advertising and utility all in one.
The only ads I block are popups and Flash. Originally I only blocked popups, but eventually I started seeing popups caused by Flash, so I started blocking that, too. There are other benefits of this -- no sudden disrupting sounds coming from my computer, no giant flash ads blocking the rest of my screen.
But aside from that, I feel no need to block ads. I have no problem with ads on a site, and there have been ads that do catch my attention -- it's only when those ads intentionally get in the way of what I'm doing that I start looking for ways to block them.
. . .they're offering a service where you get a lot of movies. . .
Which in the agregate is a block of cheese.
That doesn't address the fact that the block of cheese is never given away for free. Your analogy still does not hold.
A clip is an ad, not a sample.
That's a funny distinction you make, since advertising's entire purpose is to whet a customer's appetite for a product or service in exactly the same manner you claim a "sample" is supposed to. You're splitting hairs because you didn't get a big enough sample. But hey, that doesn't mean you can't be accommodated. As others have mentioned, HBO has been sending out free DVDs of the entire first episode.
Now, you will argue that having a direct download is more convenient, and that may be. But the fact remains that you are confusing "getting a sample" with "taking the whole block of cheese" -- it has nothing to do with the issue at hand (i.e., HBO poisoning the BitTorrent downloads of those who try to take the whole block of cheese without paying).
The only way your analogy works is if you equate downloading the entire series via bittorrent with sampling the show before purchase. You know that's not true, and as such, your entire argument is intellectually dishonest.
Please stop playing word games. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Just because you can apply new vocabulary to an act doesn't make it any better. In fact, it makes it worse -- because you're trying to weasel your way out of accountability.
At least the grandparent poster was honest about his actions, and provided principled reasons for them.
There's a much simpler point you're missing: At some point, "good" and "free" have to intersect.
Right now, there's a fair amount of agreement that the "free" in "free software" contributes to it also being "good." Anyone who obtains GPL'd software is free to also obtain the source code and modify it. That's one of the GPL's primary strengths, and it's what makes free software good. You wouldn't use free software if you didn't think it was a good thing.
Closing this "loophole," as only an insane ideologue would refer to it, would cause massive problems, not the least of which is that it would lead to users abandoning software that required them to offer source code -- especially on a website that wasn't dedicated to that task. That's a sure-fire way to lose your users. What good is "free" software if no one wants to use it?
This is clearly a statement by someone who cares more about the freedom of software than about the freedom of the people who use that software. Users don't care about the ideology of a piece of software, they care about what they can do with it. This proposition would restrict their freedom, not enhance it. You'd be forcing users to become distributors. That's not freedom. It's slavery.
And you will find that many of us WILL go back to Windows, because it's far more free than what you're suggesting.
The UN is the ideal place to run the internet rules at the moment, its got the largest reach and global membership and a stated goal of being independent.
And a track record of utter failure in the execution of that stated goal.
A matter of national policy that cannot be negotiated? I don't seem to recall the 132nd ammendment stating that internet domain ownership is the right of every american citizen.
I don't seem to recall the 133rd amendment stating that the Constitution of the United States is all there is to national policy. Are you a retard? Seriously, you need some pointers on reading comprehension.
Because co-operation is bad eh?
Ten bucks says you get riled at the naming of a bill like the Patriot Act to make those who oppose it seem like they're unpatriotic. And here you are, playing the exact same con. Surprise, surprise.
The US Goverment does itself, or its citizens, no favours by continually persuing unilateral rather than multi-lateral approaches.
Right. Because we all know that those other countries aren't just jockeying for political and economic control too, right? Because the U.N. is totally neutral, right? I mean, sure there are slave traders on their human rights committees, but at least they're promoting multiculturalism, right? Who could it possibly hurt to give an organization like that control over the largest distributed network in the world?
Wow, not what I'd expect from California... it will be interesting to see how that goes now that the gay marriage bill has been vetoed in the name of public opinion. The populace continues to surprise.
I'm not sure YOU realize that a "pristine" audio signal isn't worth jack shit in a convertable going 70mph. It simply doesn't matter very much how clean your source is with 25db or so of white noise in the background.
That depends on how much you're able to amplify the signal your car's stereo system is given without distortion or hiss. Which was kinda the point of the reviewer's statement.
Indeed. Feature after feature is being removed from the next release of Windows, but somehow they've found time to introduce a whole new VoIP product? I don't buy it.
Call it trite, but I actually like this idea, at least in part. Because man, baby Elephants are so cute! Romping around, rolling in the dirt, squirting each other, chasing attractive French girls... ever seen Hatari? :)
You are right, to a degree. Most parents simply do not care what their kids see and hear in a video game. But this is not only due to laziness -- it is due also to ignorance. Many adults over 30 still consider video games to be "kid's entertainment." The idea that adult-oriented or even pornographic material could exist in a video game format is simply unfathomable to them.
And that is the reason why we still have politicians taking the stance that this stuff is bad for the children. In the collective mind of the older generation, video games are always for kids. Any rating system therefore exists inside that box -- In their minds, M isn't for adults, it's for mature children.
Personally, I think that parents ought to be able to decide for themselves whether their children are able to handle higher-rated content. Being discerning is what parenting is all about. But I'm not naive enough to think that's what's happening here.
You make a good point. I would wager it's related to that line from Mel Brooks's 1000-year-old man:
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die."
There is a chain of grocery stores native to my home state which does this... years ago, in the sue-crazy early 90s, there was a rash of incidents in which folks were going into various grocery stores, pulling items from high shelves down on top of them, and suing for damages. Though the cases almost never went to court, there was usually a hefty settlement involved.
My local chain decided they would have none of this, and vowed to fight any such case brought against them in court. The frivolous lawsuits were curtailed pretty quickly, because the lawyers-for-hire figured out that this was no longer an easy way to make a quick buck.
Most businesses who have a lawsuit brought against them choose to settle because it is cheaper than fighting it out in court. Only the truly smart companies realize that this behavior just invites new lawsuits. Just look at what happened to mp3.com.