"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken
If I could magically trade the ability to pirate things for flawless DRM (impossible to circumvent but never infringes on any of your rights) and privacy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If anything, I'm more afraid that piracy is going to lead to the destruction of our privacy, which is worth far more to me.
Apple also created the Intellectual Property underlying Unix, allowing one of the greatest power players in the Unix community, SCO, to begin to take off and create quality products into the present day.
He claims his attempts to contact to Apple were ignored. Seriously, I would read the wired article. Sure it may just be the guy saying anything to get out of trouble, but if you trust him, it sounds like he has a halfway decent story.
His argument is that he has an obligation to get it back to the rightful owner ASAP but no obligation to keep quiet about it.
Personally, I think he did something wrong but wouldn't think prison fair.
Well the issue here is that digital copies are flawless. So what happens is, in the old days if someone copied your real goods that actually existed, no matter how good the copy was you could make a good argument it wasn't perfect and was therefore counterfeit.
However, for imaginary property, a flawless digital copy is identical to the legal item.
The copyright extortion industry wants to apply the harsh anti-counterfeiting rules to these intangible items by claiming the copies are not "genuine", but this argument is largely bullshit for movies and music.
Since most software contains anti-piracy measures however, it often requires modification to work illegally. Thus, the counterfeit argument makes a lot more sense for software. If you get a pirated copy of Windoze and it crashes due to modifications made to disable the DRM (something real windows never does), it would besmirch Microsoft's flawless reputation for making stable, secure products, so counterfeit makes a lot more sense as a label.
Mr Smith...what good is a phone call...if you are unable to speak...
Unfortunately, YouTube etc have decided to simply comply without listening to counterclaims against the misused DMCA takedowns. Until there is a penalty for filing a false DMCA takedown notice, the right to fair use is more or less worth nothing.
> I would say that it's only an addiction if it's actively interfering with your normal life. That is, your job, your education, your family, and your interpersonal relationships.
Probably because you don't have an agenda geared toward making alarmist figures and saying "we have to do something, think of the children.
Because clearly all regulation is precisely the same in both magnitude and direction. I'm surprised these kinds of blatant bullshit get any recognition outside the echo chamber in which they're conceived.
Not so much harder to make as fewer premade available. It is my opinion that deb is the superior format as it has a more transparent format and forces package designers to reduce reliance on custom scripts, thus simplifying removal, but in the end both formats do work.
Cross-distro packages are difficult because many distros are set up in incompatible ways with respect to locations, etc. Debian comes with alien which converts rpms to debs automatically, however the new packages don't always work quite right.
At work they run redhat, and it takes the sysadmins a lot of panicking to get packages installed I need to do my job (research programming). One line apt-get install for my Debian laptop or Ubuntu server (yes, I know I'm doing it wrong).
So I'm off programming instead of rolling rpms by hand.
These are all good points you guys are making. I apologize if I came off overly exasperated, it's just very frustrating to try to hold intelligent debate on AGW with all the I WAS COLD LAST WINTER and AL GORE MADE UP GLOBAL WARMING TO SERVE THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY crap that floods the internet, and, to a sad degree, the media.
Essentially, the denial of well known results gets in the way of the skepticism about less well established ones.
The problem isn't scientists playing politician but politicians playing scientist. Of course, lack of transparency is despicable and needs to be dealt with. It sickens me that the publications resulting from research paid for with my tax dollars is often locked behind paywalls.
That said, transparency is somewhat difficult. I have about 50 GB of test results from some research I should be working on at the moment. I can publish it online, but without the software that I use to read the file format it's useless. I wrote that too and could publish it, along with instructions on how to use it, but honestly it would still be very impenetrable to someone not an expert in the field. Now algorithms/ML research is a lot less controversial than AGW, but the point stands. Science is extremely difficult to do right, and to understand. I'd be hopelessly lost if I tried to interpret the CRU data, and I have a very good understanding of scientific and mathematical methods compared to the average person.
People spend years of their life to wrest the tiniest piece of information out of the universe. It's extraordinarily presumptuous to assume that someone can in an hour go through all that information and come up with a logical conclusion. We're talking about a lifetime of work here. Think about your life: could someone with no related knowledge really sift through all you've done in the past ten years and judge it, in the amount of time we're talking about here?
My point isn't that they did or didn't do anything wrong. My point is that neither I, nor Glen Beck, nor a court of law, is qualified to judge this question. To quote from TFA, I have no objection to climate skepticism, it's climate change denial that I oppose. It's very clear to someone with a scientific background to identify the common thread in science denial whether it's evolution, climate change, or the big bang: it's a refusal to even consider the possibility followed with spouting off some Aristotelian-style sophistry. A scientist says "maybe the climate isn't changing" and investigates by looking for arguments. A denier insists the climate can't possibly be changing and anyone who disagrees is part of a massive conspiracy and writes analogies and syllogisms and rhetoric. There are a few scientists who dispute AGW. They aren't the ones involved in fomenting this McScandal.
If my research were as controversial as theirs and anyone who bothered to look at my work in the same detail would be able to manufacture a scandal too, at least if the general public cared about optimizing information gathering. Scientific programming by its very nature results in impenetrable codebases that don't build and extremely complex data sets.
So I don't claim to be qualified to judge. But my sympathies are with the scientists involved because I have an in in science and I find the idea of an oil industry conspiracy far more plausible than a climate change conspiracy, if we really need conspiracy theories to explain ignorance.
Consider that it's pretty damn hard (and should be) to get a newspaper for libel, at least outside the UK, so it's not something you'd see often (and I'd expect, as you note, that it would be in the fact corrections area or letters to the editor)
More generally, requiring apologies in cases of slander/libel cases is standard, as it allows the guilty party to repair the victim's reputation, at least to some degree.
Consider that most of us in academia would rather be caught killing someone than forging data. Though in this case, the rest of the scientific community knows that the allegations are false anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H. L. Mencken
If I could magically trade the ability to pirate things for flawless DRM (impossible to circumvent but never infringes on any of your rights) and privacy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If anything, I'm more afraid that piracy is going to lead to the destruction of our privacy, which is worth far more to me.
So what? Copyright infringement costs the US economy over 9000 times that number every nanosecond.
I see your point but:
>> When Microsoft decides to stop spending money on lawyers.
Fixed that for you.
Apple also created the Intellectual Property underlying Unix, allowing one of the greatest power players in the Unix community, SCO, to begin to take off and create quality products into the present day.
When you agree as part of the transaction to either return the item to you or to its rightful owner as part of the process.
He claims his attempts to contact to Apple were ignored. Seriously, I would read the wired article. Sure it may just be the guy saying anything to get out of trouble, but if you trust him, it sounds like he has a halfway decent story.
His argument is that he has an obligation to get it back to the rightful owner ASAP but no obligation to keep quiet about it.
Personally, I think he did something wrong but wouldn't think prison fair.
Did anyone else read TFA? He didn't sell it, he sold exclusivity to a news story regarding it. Extremely different.
I started emailing all my problemsets smore year and never looked back.
No, I just can't resist a Matrix reference.
Well the issue here is that digital copies are flawless. So what happens is, in the old days if someone copied your real goods that actually existed, no matter how good the copy was you could make a good argument it wasn't perfect and was therefore counterfeit.
However, for imaginary property, a flawless digital copy is identical to the legal item.
The copyright extortion industry wants to apply the harsh anti-counterfeiting rules to these intangible items by claiming the copies are not "genuine", but this argument is largely bullshit for movies and music.
Since most software contains anti-piracy measures however, it often requires modification to work illegally. Thus, the counterfeit argument makes a lot more sense for software. If you get a pirated copy of Windoze and it crashes due to modifications made to disable the DRM (something real windows never does), it would besmirch Microsoft's flawless reputation for making stable, secure products, so counterfeit makes a lot more sense as a label.
Mr Smith...what good is a phone call...if you are unable to speak...
Unfortunately, YouTube etc have decided to simply comply without listening to counterclaims against the misused DMCA takedowns. Until there is a penalty for filing a false DMCA takedown notice, the right to fair use is more or less worth nothing.
> I would say that it's only an addiction if it's actively interfering with your normal life. That is, your job, your education, your family, and your interpersonal relationships.
Probably because you don't have an agenda geared toward making alarmist figures and saying "we have to do something, think of the children.
"The battle has left me scarred. But my resolve has never been stronger! We will reorganize the Church into the First Galactic Empire!"
Because clearly all regulation is precisely the same in both magnitude and direction. I'm surprised these kinds of blatant bullshit get any recognition outside the echo chamber in which they're conceived.
Not so much harder to make as fewer premade available. It is my opinion that deb is the superior format as it has a more transparent format and forces package designers to reduce reliance on custom scripts, thus simplifying removal, but in the end both formats do work.
Cross-distro packages are difficult because many distros are set up in incompatible ways with respect to locations, etc. Debian comes with alien which converts rpms to debs automatically, however the new packages don't always work quite right.
At work they run redhat, and it takes the sysadmins a lot of panicking to get packages installed I need to do my job (research programming). One line apt-get install for my Debian laptop or Ubuntu server (yes, I know I'm doing it wrong).
So I'm off programming instead of rolling rpms by hand.
These are all good points you guys are making. I apologize if I came off overly exasperated, it's just very frustrating to try to hold intelligent debate on AGW with all the I WAS COLD LAST WINTER and AL GORE MADE UP GLOBAL WARMING TO SERVE THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY crap that floods the internet, and, to a sad degree, the media.
Essentially, the denial of well known results gets in the way of the skepticism about less well established ones.
It's not possible to teach those who refuse to learn.
I think that all people in poverty would wet themselves to get out of it is the take-home lesson here. But I'm sure there's at least one exception.
The problem isn't scientists playing politician but politicians playing scientist. Of course, lack of transparency is despicable and needs to be dealt with. It sickens me that the publications resulting from research paid for with my tax dollars is often locked behind paywalls.
That said, transparency is somewhat difficult. I have about 50 GB of test results from some research I should be working on at the moment. I can publish it online, but without the software that I use to read the file format it's useless. I wrote that too and could publish it, along with instructions on how to use it, but honestly it would still be very impenetrable to someone not an expert in the field. Now algorithms/ML research is a lot less controversial than AGW, but the point stands. Science is extremely difficult to do right, and to understand. I'd be hopelessly lost if I tried to interpret the CRU data, and I have a very good understanding of scientific and mathematical methods compared to the average person.
People spend years of their life to wrest the tiniest piece of information out of the universe. It's extraordinarily presumptuous to assume that someone can in an hour go through all that information and come up with a logical conclusion. We're talking about a lifetime of work here. Think about your life: could someone with no related knowledge really sift through all you've done in the past ten years and judge it, in the amount of time we're talking about here?
My point isn't that they did or didn't do anything wrong. My point is that neither I, nor Glen Beck, nor a court of law, is qualified to judge this question. To quote from TFA, I have no objection to climate skepticism, it's climate change denial that I oppose. It's very clear to someone with a scientific background to identify the common thread in science denial whether it's evolution, climate change, or the big bang: it's a refusal to even consider the possibility followed with spouting off some Aristotelian-style sophistry. A scientist says "maybe the climate isn't changing" and investigates by looking for arguments. A denier insists the climate can't possibly be changing and anyone who disagrees is part of a massive conspiracy and writes analogies and syllogisms and rhetoric. There are a few scientists who dispute AGW. They aren't the ones involved in fomenting this McScandal.
If my research were as controversial as theirs and anyone who bothered to look at my work in the same detail would be able to manufacture a scandal too, at least if the general public cared about optimizing information gathering. Scientific programming by its very nature results in impenetrable codebases that don't build and extremely complex data sets.
So I don't claim to be qualified to judge. But my sympathies are with the scientists involved because I have an in in science and I find the idea of an oil industry conspiracy far more plausible than a climate change conspiracy, if we really need conspiracy theories to explain ignorance.
Consider that it's pretty damn hard (and should be) to get a newspaper for libel, at least outside the UK, so it's not something you'd see often (and I'd expect, as you note, that it would be in the fact corrections area or letters to the editor)
More generally, requiring apologies in cases of slander/libel cases is standard, as it allows the guilty party to repair the victim's reputation, at least to some degree.
Consider that most of us in academia would rather be caught killing someone than forging data. Though in this case, the rest of the scientific community knows that the allegations are false anyway.
The problem is that truth has a liberal bias;P
Isn't this somewhat routine in libel cases?
Could this end up as an effective ban on bittorrent or other protocols? Or does it need to be less vague than that.