1. When I first got the traffic control tunnels working, I noticed that my throughput was 1/2 of what it was supposed to be. A very hostile guy named "AxLaptop" in #freebsd on EFNet was not only a huge jerk, but also just pissed enough to through me the bone that you need to have "out" and "in" on your ipfw pipes. If you do not put those words in, you will get half bandwidth as it is going through each ipfw pipe twice -- one packet takes up twice the bandwidth = half bandwidth.
I don't get it. Doesn't the firewall process the traffic after it's been picked up off the network. Even if it did process it twice, it shouldn't make traffic twice as slow because the thruput on the motherboard bus on the computer is probably 100 times faster than on the network card anyhow.
Actually, I don't really care what the FCC does with the rest of it (other than I don't think I should be considered a criminal for using a frequency that they dont approve of). But unfortunately because specturm is a "limited natural public resource" in their eyes - that implies that they half to manage the content for the publics best interest. EG - regulations on the types and styles of music you can play in your FCC charter, or the types of programs you can broadcast. It also facilitates bad media, because once a company has a license it deprives someone else of one even if they have all the tecnology to do it anyhow.
The radio spectrum is a ''vital and limited national resource'' needed for economic growth, scientific research and homeland security, Bush said.
And that is the problem - right there. It is not a limited natural resource, it is limited by nothing in physics - only by the devices we've currently locked ourselves into using because the FCC tried to "allocate" frequencies to begin with. If we shut down the FCC and respect that people should have unrestricted use of airwaves, then these "limited" problems will magically start to go away, and so will the poor technology that we've all been locked into using.
It's more like IP is not free market
on
Latest SCO News
·
· Score: 1
If the government granted incentive monopolies in any other part of the economy - most people would see this as communisim, but when the do it with IP then all of a sudden people see it as capitalisim. Bullshit. Just because the government calls something a "property" does not mean it is (nor was it in 1850... damn you - you "stole" those slaves off my plantation - you must be anti-free market, I paid for those slaves dammit, I paid to train them dammit! You owe me!!!!)
Thankfully many of us naturally understand that free markets are not about phoney rights and phoney markets, but about freedoms and how we apply them to improve and better ourselves in a free society. Unfortunately SCO, Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA do not understand this and the sooner we make them pay the bitter price they deserve, the sooner we will all be able to enjoy the benefits that the information age has to offer.
Re:Goodbye and good riddance SCO
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
oh,and by the way... if you do a "strings" command on the SCO binaries - you'd be amazed at how closely it matches the Free-BSD binaries. You'd think that for all the BSD code that they used, they'd actully have some of the stability of BSD - NOT!!!! Not only are they liars, they are hypocrites - they never could have made it as far as they did without free software. Goodbye and good riddance to SCO, they pissed on the hands that fed them, no will miss them a bit.
Goodbye and good riddance SCO
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Several years ago I made a strong push to move my career from SCO to Linux. One of the main motivations for this was that I was so fed up with SCO, SCO support, SCO licenses (and policy daemons), and most of all SCO crashes. It was so bad - SCO eventually made the entire OS mirror a bunch of soft links to the real files, and changed their FSCK program so as not to do a real fsck on bootup. (which made things worse) They litterally had programs to undo the damage of their crashes like "fixmog".
I also got sick of people insisting that SCO was commercial quality UNIX while blowing off Linux, while I knew darn well that Linux was more trustworthy and stable, and the only way to get decent productivity out of a SCO box was to install tons of free software on it that was often better then the software you licensed out the nose for from SCO - they even licensed TCP/IP for chrisake. Anyhow, sometimes I still do SCO work, because I'm one of the few that know how to nowdays - but none the less I am so thankfull that this next generation will never need to deal with them. And I am so thankfull that many of the businesses that toiled under SCO now have the freedom to be productive with their computers. I am also thankfull that people no longer need to suffer under their lies, lies about quality, lies about stability, lies about being for the enterprise, and most of all lies that they were better than free software. They are so full of it. At home I tell my 4yr old daughter no-no, and in the enterprise I tell business men sco-no.
Goodbye and good-riddance SCO, I should have known you'd sue IBM. You maximized damage and harm to the computing industry for years, it only makes sense you'd do it on your death bed too. Goodbye and good riddance.
thats what people want. thats what sells. thats what share holders want.........
Honestly, buying SCO is probably not a bad price to get the dogs off our back, the problem is that you can never give into a bully just because he wants money. If you do, then you are just feeding the beast thats beating you down. In the long run, you are far better off duking it out and sending the mesasge that this kinda of behavior does not pay.
This is infinitely more so with SCO, because if you think SCO's causing problems - wait till Microsoft share holders start to hurt from Linux. Then the shit will realy fly. In fact SCO does not really bother me that much, IBM can deal with them, this is just a practice run for what's instore when it hits the fan with Microsoft. We would be doing ourselves a favor to go after SCO and not relent till every individual and company who ever supported them is bitter, broke, and sorry.
The title says it all. Watch how quickly they try to turn on us as they try to find excuses to regulate and shut down copy promoting technologies.
Ironically, until they let go of copyrights, the forces opposed to true internet security will be too great because they will always want the right to "verify" we have the correct content.
Well, I can agree that it's a lot harder to point to patents being bad when the whole system has gone to hell. If they had their act together... at least it would be easier to make conclusive observations. However, I think the patent office is bad because patents are bad - just like government tends to naturally go sour as soon as they get authorities that they shouldn't have, I see that as happening to the patent office also. Their failures are a symptom not the cause.
It's not bullshit that we wouldn't have this research done without commercial incentive, and patents are there to create commercial incentive. It simply costs a lot of money to do this stuff, and if you aren't motivated by capitalism, you have to have it be government-funded, and then you end up with socialism.
Arrgh!, this is exactly the kind of nonsense I'm talking about. Patents are not free market any more than any other artificial government imposed monopoly. Is it free market if the government gives some company a monopoly on making cars? Maybe (insert big3 auto maker here) does not have an incentive to make (insert great feature here) unless the government marches in the troops to shut down all the competition. So what! It's plainly stupid and so are patents.
This is a classic micocausim of why all patents are bad in general, and why arguments like the "inventor has no inventive"... and arguments like nobody "would invest in such and such research" and "no pharmacutical would spend R&D for cures" without a patent, are bullshit. (excuse the language, but I'm tired of being spoonfeed this garbage) People just assume it's true without even thinking about the range of consequences patents cause, and then try and ram them down everyones throat.
I think a very easy solution would be to have an email server accept email by invitation only. Any unknown senders would be rejected with the SMTP message "please see site www.mysite.com to send email to this account..." then all they would half to do is take a turing number test that would take 15 seconds to complete and type in their email address.
A minor distraction for someone who wanted to contact you, but a nightmare for someone trying to send out 9 million emails per day. It wouldn't stop unsolicited email completely, just slow it down enough so it can be managed like telemarketers, door to door salesman, and regular junk mail, because now a persons time would be associated with the cost of sending email.
A large fortune 100 company I worked for in 98 ordered an expensive gartner report about the future of Linux in the enterprise. Needless to say it did NOT paint a pretty picture and even implied that disputes between KDE and Gnome could be it's undoing. They were full of it then, and they are full of it now. The only difference being, now several years after the fact I know just how full of it they were, but since then they have covered it up with a bunch of newer reports that suggest that they knew Linux would storm the enterprise all along. WHAT A CROCK!!
If you want to know what has already happened, you get a Gartner report, but if you want to know what's going to happen, toss em in the trash and go talk to some of the people on the front line who use the technology to get results. 5 years ago I suggested tossing SCO because Linux was going to take over the enterprise - to this day I still can't believe how people so stubbornly refused to consider the facts not to mention their best interests.
I've seen people come to blows over 5 bucks, but when there's trillions at stake, and copyrights are pretty much dead and unenforcable, you can bet that option is not off their list. Perhaps they'll do it under the table, perhaps they already are in some way we haven't heard about. Perhaps they'll coax the government to do it for them. I don't know, but I do know that they're bullies and thugs by nature, they are not just going to back off.
...If copyright really were a temporary thing, lasting, at most, 28 years, like it is supposed to, we would be able to freely trade almost everything ever recorded by The Beatles, The Doors, Buddy Holly, Elvis, etc.
It is not me that has made this an "all or nothing" game. Like the plantation masters of the 1850's who believed that the entire purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited controll and profit. Many in holywood believe that the entire purpose of the information age is to use the internet to leverage their copyright holdings to the corners of the earth. With logic like this, easing off on the defiance will not pacify them, nor help society.
I'm sorry, but there can't be a middle ground. Information is so easy to copy and manipulate that you either half to controll all of it or none of it. The people in hollywood know this very well, and it is at the core of why they have made such a desperate push to impose copy controlls even on technologies that have so many other uses. They are the ones that have made it an all or nothing game, and the truth is that is a good thing. After all, anyone who looses X copyrights is likely to gain thousands of times that information when copyrights go away. Copyrights simply restrict and hinder alot more than they help.
Also, I am not ignoring copyrights. I think we all know very well they are there, and had better take wise precautions to protect ourselves from the wich hunt. But I refuse to pay token homage to their worthless arguments, and cheezy guilt trips that those who copy are "pirates" who are hurting "poor artists". The blazing hypocracy is amazing.
PS: Don't forget those in the 1850's who thought that the slave states could peacefully coexist with the free states. They were being dishonest with themselves, they didn't get it.
I was attacking the logic of "incentive" so commonly spewed in our face about copyrights, not making an analogy between the physical and unphysical world.
If I said I didn't have an incentive to grow oranges uness I could plant a tree in your yard, or if I said I didn't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I could own slaves on the plantation, most people would see this is these as the worthless shallow arguments that they are. But if I said I didn't have an incentive to to make beneficial or creative works without a copyright monopoly, then all of a sudden people just take it on faith, they don't even question it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. In my humble opinion, this is intellectually dishonest, especially considering that the entire Renassance happened without copyrights.
The simple fact is, there is no equivalency relationship between copyrights and property rights - incentive does not a right make. The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the fact that property has physical limits, while the foundation of copyrights dervives from kings who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. The history of Copyrights is not one of rights, but controll of sharing and restricting the open use of knowledge.
That is why people who copy are not criminals, thiefs, or akin to pirates who board ships and murder people. No, infact they are really victims of a cruel deception. A deception that copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are litterally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
However, this is not the only failure of copyrights - it is just one in many issues related to copyrighrts that are just blown off ignored, or glossed over. Like the failures of Hollywood culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust behavior in the software industry to name a few.
While the problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable 20 years ago when the biggist issue was Xerox machines, today we are entering into the information age where information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society will either half to controll all of it or none of it. Our communications will either half to be monitored or free, our privacy to be either contunuiously probed or protected
In that sense, copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms until we cut it off at the root. The DMCA, infinite extensions, billion dollar lawsiuts, are all just symptoms of a poor belief system - not the cause. So the efforts to find a "middle ground" on copyrights are a failure because they do not address the core issue. That contrary to copyrights, the right to copy and distribute creative works and knowledge is a right!
Like freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, the right to copy things is a right that exists above government. It is a moral right, it is an inherent right, it defines the very nature of the human condition. It is beyond politics and the petition of leaders.
In fact, the entire foundation of politics rests on the notion that it's better to fight wars with words than wars with bloodshed. But to copy things does not require coercion or viloence at all, the rules are not the same. We will not change the copyright situation by petitioning our leaders, or voteing to change the system. No it can only be changed by defiance.
Defiance by holding the belief that people have rights, even if those rights appear contrary to the popular mob or to the system. Defiance, by shedding off the guilt and shame that those who try to impose copyrights impose on us and understanding that they are the ones who should be guilty and shamefull. Defiance by copying and sharing creative works whenever we have acess to them. Defiance by using technologies that make it harder and harder for copyrights to be imposed upon us. And defi
That is such a thoughtfull comment. (If I had mod points right now, I'd give you all of them if I could.)
When I was reading his paper, it reminded me of the tendencies of government. Like how governments insist on imposing a tax "give people a safety net", but that tax causes economic harm, so that causes the government to want to pass more laws and taxes to "help the people in need", which causes things to get worse and so on.... eventually the system collapese on its own weight like the former USSR.
I think the same is true with his observations. The real solution to his issues are a heavy dose of individual liberty and upholding of individual property rights. But contrary to the trends he mentioned. I do believe individuals can make a difference. People who stand up and assert their own rights, make it less costly and safer for every one else arround them to do it too.
In that sense, the biggest threat is not enviromental, but political to our freedoms.
Yeah, I mean look at that terrible window technology. It's so easy to break the glass that people are practically inviting people to come in and take their stuff. Why outlaw burglary when people are just too lazy to get a new security model and start installing steel plates over those windows?
I understand that it's wrong for people to act certain ways, but that does not always mean that the force of government is the only or best solution. In the physical world you half to use force to keep people who don't belong out of your space, or from violating you - that implies the need for a legal and political system in that space. In the virtual world, that system of accountability doesn't make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
1. When I first got the traffic control tunnels working, I noticed that my throughput was 1/2 of what it was supposed to be. A very hostile guy named "AxLaptop" in #freebsd on EFNet was not only a huge jerk, but also just pissed enough to through me the bone that you need to have "out" and "in" on your ipfw pipes. If you do not put those words in, you will get half bandwidth as it is going through each ipfw pipe twice -- one packet takes up twice the bandwidth = half bandwidth.
I don't get it. Doesn't the firewall process the traffic after it's been picked up off the network. Even if it did process it twice, it shouldn't make traffic twice as slow because the thruput on the motherboard bus on the computer is probably 100 times faster than on the network card anyhow.
Actually, I don't really care what the FCC does with the rest of it (other than I don't think I should be considered a criminal for using a frequency that they dont approve of). But unfortunately because specturm is a "limited natural public resource" in their eyes - that implies that they half to manage the content for the publics best interest. EG - regulations on the types and styles of music you can play in your FCC charter, or the types of programs you can broadcast. It also facilitates bad media, because once a company has a license it deprives someone else of one even if they have all the tecnology to do it anyhow.
The radio spectrum is a ''vital and limited national resource'' needed for economic growth, scientific research and homeland security, Bush said.
And that is the problem - right there. It is not a limited natural resource, it is limited by nothing in physics - only by the devices we've currently locked ourselves into using because the FCC tried to "allocate" frequencies to begin with. If we shut down the FCC and respect that people should have unrestricted use of airwaves, then these "limited" problems will magically start to go away, and so will the poor technology that we've all been locked into using.
If the government granted incentive monopolies in any other part of the economy - most people would see this as communisim, but when the do it with IP then all of a sudden people see it as capitalisim. Bullshit. Just because the government calls something a "property" does not mean it is (nor was it in 1850 ... damn you - you "stole" those slaves off my plantation - you must be anti-free market, I paid for those slaves dammit, I paid to train them dammit! You owe me!!!!)
Thankfully many of us naturally understand that free markets are not about phoney rights and phoney markets, but about freedoms and how we apply them to improve and better ourselves in a free society. Unfortunately SCO, Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA do not understand this and the sooner we make them pay the bitter price they deserve, the sooner we will all be able to enjoy the benefits that the information age has to offer.
oh
if you do a "strings" command on the SCO binaries - you'd be amazed at how closely it matches the Free-BSD binaries. You'd think that for all the BSD code that they used, they'd actully have some of the stability of BSD - NOT!!!! Not only are they liars, they are hypocrites - they never could have made it as far as they did without free software. Goodbye and good riddance to SCO, they pissed on the hands that fed them, no will miss them a bit.
Several years ago I made a strong push to move my career from SCO to Linux. One of the main motivations for this was that I was so fed up with SCO, SCO support, SCO licenses (and policy daemons), and most of all SCO crashes. It was so bad - SCO eventually made the entire OS mirror a bunch of soft links to the real files, and changed their FSCK program so as not to do a real fsck on bootup. (which made things worse) They litterally had programs to undo the damage of their crashes like "fixmog".
I also got sick of people insisting that SCO was commercial quality UNIX while blowing off Linux, while I knew darn well that Linux was more trustworthy and stable, and the only way to get decent productivity out of a SCO box was to install tons of free software on it that was often better then the software you licensed out the nose for from SCO - they even licensed TCP/IP for chrisake. Anyhow, sometimes I still do SCO work, because I'm one of the few that know how to nowdays - but none the less I am so thankfull that this next generation will never need to deal with them. And I am so thankfull that many of the businesses that toiled under SCO now have the freedom to be productive with their computers.
I am also thankfull that people no longer need to suffer under their lies, lies about quality, lies about stability, lies about being for the enterprise, and most of all lies that they were better than free software. They are so full of it. At home I tell my 4yr old daughter no-no, and in the enterprise I tell business men sco-no.
Goodbye and good-riddance SCO, I should have known you'd sue IBM. You maximized damage and harm to the computing industry for years, it only makes sense you'd do it on your death bed too. Goodbye and good riddance.
thats what people want. thats what sells. thats what share holders want.........
Honestly, buying SCO is probably not a bad price to get the dogs off our back, the problem is that you can never give into a bully just because he wants money. If you do, then you are just feeding the beast thats beating you down. In the long run, you are far better off duking it out and sending the mesasge that this kinda of behavior does not pay.
This is infinitely more so with SCO, because if you think SCO's causing problems - wait till Microsoft share holders start to hurt from Linux. Then the shit will realy fly. In fact SCO does not really bother me that much, IBM can deal with them, this is just a practice run for what's instore when it hits the fan with Microsoft. We would be doing ourselves a favor to go after SCO and not relent till every individual and company who ever supported them is bitter, broke, and sorry.
The title says it all. Watch how quickly they try to turn on us as they try to find excuses to regulate and shut down copy promoting technologies.
Ironically, until they let go of copyrights, the forces opposed to true internet security will be too great because they will always want the right to "verify" we have the correct content.
Well, I can agree that it's a lot harder to point to patents being bad when the whole system has gone to hell. If they had their act together ... at least it would be easier to make conclusive observations. However, I think the patent office is bad because patents are bad - just like government tends to naturally go sour as soon as they get authorities that they shouldn't have, I see that as happening to the patent office also. Their failures are a symptom not the cause.
It's not bullshit that we wouldn't have this research done without commercial incentive, and patents are there to create commercial incentive. It simply costs a lot of money to do this stuff, and if you aren't motivated by capitalism, you have to have it be government-funded, and then you end up with socialism.
Arrgh!, this is exactly the kind of nonsense I'm talking about. Patents are not free market any more than any other artificial government imposed monopoly. Is it free market if the government gives some company a monopoly on making cars? Maybe (insert big3 auto maker here) does not have an incentive to make (insert great feature here) unless the government marches in the troops to shut down all the competition. So what! It's plainly stupid and so are patents.
This is a classic micocausim of why all patents are bad in general, and why arguments like the "inventor has no inventive" ... and arguments like nobody "would invest in such and such research" and "no pharmacutical would spend R&D for cures" without a patent, are bullshit. (excuse the language, but I'm tired of being spoonfeed this garbage) People just assume it's true without even thinking about the range of consequences patents cause, and then try and ram them down everyones throat.
If the author hasn't already, I plead with him to please GPL the code. With code all over the internet, they will be powerless to stop it.
I think a very easy solution would be to have an email server accept email by invitation only. Any unknown senders would be rejected with the SMTP message "please see site www.mysite.com to send email to this account..." then all they would half to do is take a turing number test that would take 15 seconds to complete and type in their email address.
A minor distraction for someone who wanted to contact you, but a nightmare for someone trying to send out 9 million emails per day. It wouldn't stop unsolicited email completely, just slow it down enough so it can be managed like telemarketers, door to door salesman, and regular junk mail, because now a persons time would be associated with the cost of sending email.
Sorry, Microsoft had prior art. Except that the whole screen would turn blue and halt the system!
A large fortune 100 company I worked for in 98 ordered an expensive gartner report about the future of Linux in the enterprise. Needless to say it did NOT paint a pretty picture and even implied that disputes between KDE and Gnome could be it's undoing. They were full of it then, and they are full of it now. The only difference being, now several years after the fact I know just how full of it they were, but since then they have covered it up with a bunch of newer reports that suggest that they knew Linux would storm the enterprise all along. WHAT A CROCK!!
If you want to know what has already happened, you get a Gartner report, but if you want to know what's going to happen, toss em in the trash and go talk to some of the people on the front line who use the technology to get results. 5 years ago I suggested tossing SCO because Linux was going to take over the enterprise - to this day I still can't believe how people so stubbornly refused to consider the facts not to mention their best interests.
copying is not thievery,
and that is not an opinion, but a fact
I've seen people come to blows over 5 bucks, but when there's trillions at stake, and copyrights are pretty much dead and unenforcable, you can bet that option is not off their list. Perhaps they'll do it under the table, perhaps they already are in some way we haven't heard about. Perhaps they'll coax the government to do it for them. I don't know, but I do know that they're bullies and thugs by nature, they are not just going to back off.
Yeah, that's my question too. How did they do that ... I want to do it too, that is with quotes from a protest aginst copyrights
It is not me that has made this an "all or nothing" game. Like the plantation masters of the 1850's who believed that the entire purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited controll and profit. Many in holywood believe that the entire purpose of the information age is to use the internet to leverage their copyright holdings to the corners of the earth. With logic like this, easing off on the defiance will not pacify them, nor help society.
I'm sorry, but there can't be a middle ground. Information is so easy to copy and manipulate that you either half to controll all of it or none of it. The people in hollywood know this very well, and it is at the core of why they have made such a desperate push to impose copy controlls even on technologies that have so many other uses. They are the ones that have made it an all or nothing game, and the truth is that is a good thing. After all, anyone who looses X copyrights is likely to gain thousands of times that information when copyrights go away. Copyrights simply restrict and hinder alot more than they help.
Also, I am not ignoring copyrights. I think we all know very well they are there, and had better take wise precautions to protect ourselves from the wich hunt. But I refuse to pay token homage to their worthless arguments, and cheezy guilt trips that those who copy are "pirates" who are hurting "poor artists". The blazing hypocracy is amazing.
PS: Don't forget those in the 1850's who thought that the slave states could peacefully coexist with the free states. They were being dishonest with themselves, they didn't get it.
yes, please do.
I guess it just goes to show, copying is the nicest form of flattery.
thanks
I was attacking the logic of "incentive" so commonly spewed in our face about copyrights, not making an analogy between the physical and unphysical world.
If I said I didn't have an incentive to grow oranges uness I could plant a tree in your yard, or if I said I didn't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I could own slaves on the plantation, most people would see this is these as the worthless shallow arguments that they are. But if I said I didn't have an incentive to to make beneficial or creative works without a copyright monopoly, then all of a sudden people just take it on faith, they don't even question it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. In my humble opinion, this is intellectually dishonest, especially considering that the entire Renassance happened without copyrights.
The simple fact is, there is no equivalency relationship between copyrights and property rights - incentive does not a right make. The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the fact that property has physical limits, while the foundation of copyrights dervives from kings who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. The history of Copyrights is not one of rights, but controll of sharing and restricting the open use of knowledge.
That is why people who copy are not criminals, thiefs, or akin to pirates who board ships and murder people. No, infact they are really victims of a cruel deception. A deception that copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are litterally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
However, this is not the only failure of copyrights - it is just one in many issues related to copyrighrts that are just blown off ignored, or glossed over. Like the failures of Hollywood culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust behavior in the software industry to name a few.
While the problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable 20 years ago when the biggist issue was Xerox machines, today we are entering into the information age where information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society will either half to controll all of it or none of it. Our communications will either half to be monitored or free, our privacy to be either contunuiously probed or protected
In that sense, copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms until we cut it off at the root. The DMCA, infinite extensions, billion dollar lawsiuts, are all just symptoms of a poor belief system - not the cause. So the efforts to find a "middle ground" on copyrights are a failure because they do not address the core issue. That contrary to copyrights, the right to copy and distribute creative works and knowledge is a right!
Like freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, the right to copy things is a right that exists above government. It is a moral right, it is an inherent right, it defines the very nature of the human condition. It is beyond politics and the petition of leaders.
In fact, the entire foundation of politics rests on the notion that it's better to fight wars with words than wars with bloodshed. But to copy things does not require coercion or viloence at all, the rules are not the same. We will not change the copyright situation by petitioning our leaders, or voteing to change the system. No it can only be changed by defiance.
Defiance by holding the belief that people have rights, even if those rights appear contrary to the popular mob or to the system. Defiance, by shedding off the guilt and shame that those who try to impose copyrights impose on us and understanding that they are the ones who should be guilty and shamefull. Defiance by copying and sharing creative works whenever we have acess to them. Defiance by using technologies that make it harder and harder for copyrights to be imposed upon us. And defi
That is such a thoughtfull comment. (If I had mod points right now, I'd give you all of them if I could.)
When I was reading his paper, it reminded me of the tendencies of government. Like how governments insist on imposing a tax "give people a safety net", but that tax causes economic harm, so that causes the government to want to pass more laws and taxes to "help the people in need", which causes things to get worse and so on.... eventually the system collapese on its own weight like the former USSR.
I think the same is true with his observations. The real solution to his issues are a heavy dose of individual liberty and upholding of individual property rights. But contrary to the trends he mentioned. I do believe individuals can make a difference. People who stand up and assert their own rights, make it less costly and safer for every one else arround them to do it too.
In that sense, the biggest threat is not enviromental, but political to our freedoms.
Copies of technical books, offered unrestricted over p2p networks. Now that sounds exciting!
Yeah, I mean look at that terrible window technology. It's so easy to break the glass that people are practically inviting people to come in and take their stuff. Why outlaw burglary when people are just too lazy to get a new security model and start installing steel plates over those windows?
I understand that it's wrong for people to act certain ways, but that does not always mean that the force of government is the only or best solution. In the physical world you half to use force to keep people who don't belong out of your space, or from violating you - that implies the need for a legal and political system in that space. In the virtual world, that system of accountability doesn't make sense.