Until you can define exactly what qualifies as child porn, you can't have child porn.
And it is defined in the laws that criminalize it and by the courts that interpret those laws.
This is not mathematics. There is no single definition that will be universally accepted as correct. Child abuse and child porn is, in fact, whatever any given society wants to say it is.
Building a sophomoric facade of arguments trying to convince me that child abuse/porn doesn't exist because different societies have slightly different definitions of it is neither enlightening or productive or likely to change my mind. The original post I replied to appeared to be using that kind of argument as a defense of child abuse/porn. It's one thing to entertain yourself with pointless "what if" conjecture, but it is entirely another to defends predators and criminals in our society simply because other societies have no criminalized some of that behavior.
What is or is not socially acceptable is the collective decision of a society. That's why the opinion of any single individual "doesn't count".
I only live in one society. I'm not disputing the fact that other societies did, and do, things differently. But, I see nothing in the fact that ancient Greek men may have commonly had sex with ancient Greek boys that convinces me their behavior was anything other than child abuse.
The fact that I acknowledge that some behavioral norms are different in different societies does not mean I must, therefore, abandon my obligation to decide what I think is wrong and right. Each of us has that obligation, and a society's determination of normal versus aberrant behavior is determined by the aggregation of individual opinions.
I said what I said: Arguments about when someone stops being a child have no bearing on the fact of child abuse and child pornography.
I was replying to a post that attempted to excuse child abuse and child porn because different societies define different legal ages for marriage and adulthood.
The original article was about an Australian law, certainly a valid discussion topic. But, the poster wasn't discussing that law. I can't think of a single reason to excuse or defend child abuse or child porn.
The point is that simply because people and societies have different opinions on when people stop being children and become adults does not mean that child abuse does not exist.
In other words, silly debates about defining and quantifying the margins of something have no bearing on its actual existence.
Child abuse is whatever a society says it is. Unless an individual can convince his society to go along with him, his opinion is irrelevant.
None of this has anything to do with the health of my brain cells (thanks for the gratuitously condescending remarks). And I discovered a long time ago that there is no "independent value system" with all the ansers. That's why the collective opinion of a society count for everything and the individual opinion of one person count for very little.
You may not want to demonize child abuse, but I do, as well as its apologists, which you certainly appear to be.
Arguing that child porn isn't evil or doesn't even exist because different legislatures have used different age categories when codifying its prohibition is inane and specious. Different locations have different speed limits, too. Would you argue, then, that speed limits do no exist and should not exist?
The ame applies to your attempt at historical analysis. The legal age for marriage has always varied, and still varied, from one society to the next. This is because the "legal age" for marriage is not, and should not be, synonymous with the age at which we come to sexual maturity.
Your argument boils down to the same kind of childish, petulant, arrogant and ultimately unconvincing argument so abundantly produced by the adolescents who post here.
If the Australian government wants its ISP's to block sites carrying illegal material, it ought to supply ISP's with a list of IP addresses to block. If the law doesn't provide for that, then it needs to be fixed. End of story.
What's the risk in letting anyone (terrorists included) know where...
Presumably, someone believes there's risk in allowing anonymous people to learn where these things are located. That's a different risk than the potential to destroy them. And, they are considerably higher the "60 miles straight up"....why do I have to sign up on a list to get this data?
Again, presumably, because someone wants to know who's looking at it. You haven't lost any freedoms, just your anonymity. Life is full of that and it doesn't retrict you....this is simply tracking me for the purpose of tracking me.
I doubt anyone is going to actively track anyone using this service. Costs way too much.
I want to know why.
Ask them....the crack about "quietly" was in regards to this legislation being passed in 2003, and it took a NASA server failure two years later for me to find out about it.
Whose fault is that? Hundreds of bills were passed in 2003. Do you expect someone to wake you up and tell you about each one? Congress publishes them all; call the GPO and get a subscription.
...why don't they get busy and invent a way to permit duplication of digital files onto physical media that also prevents duplication over a network?
You can just barely make a plausible fair use case about unlimited personal copying of an entire work for personal use, but even Lessig draws the line at hosting digitized works on servers that permit unlimited duplication by all comers. I.e., you have no fair use right to allow unlimited numbers of strangers to make unlimited duplicates of a work to which you do not hold the copyright.
The TV and movie folks are worried about people making thousands of DVD's for their personal use (who would?). They're worried about their products being almost instantly made available for unlimited duplication by anyone across the globe.
Why wasn't the open source community and friends organized enough to get to these legislators and persuade them to support bills specifically permitting municipal broadband before the corporations began to act in their own self interest?
It is all well and good to wait until something bad happens and then wag your finger, but that never accomplishes anything.
Rather than whine after-the-fact, why doesn't the open source community learn how the game is played and start working toward its own self interest? Why isn't the community raising money for its candidates? Why isn't the community trying to sell its point here? (Come on, folks: Free Broadband versus $50 a month ought to be an easy sell. The cable and phone companies aren't exactly popular.)
A server supporting a system scheduled to end goes down a few weeks before that and the government decides not to spend the money to repair it. What's the problem?
The same data remains available. What's the problem?
The government -- any government with satellites -- doesn't want you or anyone else to know the location of its secret satellites. Why enable the very people those satellites are targetting to find out where they are?
And, what is that crack about legislation that was "passed quietly" supposed to mean? Looks like deliberate paranoia-mongering to me: those sneaky people in Congress passed a bill and didn't ven bother to jump up and down on TV about it. Guess they forgot that the/. crowd won't pay attention unless you make a lot of loud noise.
I have a friend who works for the Air Force and he was telling me the other day about the alien masterminds who've secretly run the government since the Truman Administrations and who...
The converstation is about medical costs, not some trumped up euphimism for "the rich get richer" like "personal responsibility".
So, if you claim you don't have health insurance, how about auto insurance, life insurance, homeowners and mortage insurance? Or, are you asserting your "personal responsibility"?
It isn't hypocritical of me to say smokers should pay extra for the health care costs they create and dump on the rest of us. I buy insurnace to cover my health care costs. If I didn't, I couldn't afford it, and never would be able to afford it, regardless of how much of so-called "personal responsibility" I exercised. And the same applies to almost everyone else on the planet. Five days in the hospital can cost more than most Americans annual income. How many people do you really think can afford that care without insurance?
People who smoke aren't as healthy as people who don't and that makes health care costs go up, not insurance. That means my health care costs more because you smoke.
All I can conclude is that you have confused "personal responsibility" with miscreant and complete lack of responsiblity for anyone but yourself.
Like I said, anyone who smokes has certainly proven their inability to reason soundly, and your posts provide ample evidence.
Either you're independently wealthy or you've never had a serious medical condition to treat. (Even if you were wealthy, only a fool would pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills if he had the alternative of insurance.)
It's also a clue that you aren't employed.
>>...dolts like you who are driving up healthcare costs by requiring doctors to deal with insurance...
Nicely repugnant display of arrogance and ignorance. Medical costs are not sky high simply because of insurance paperwork.Do you seriously imagine that if medical insurance disappeared tomorrow, health costs would decrease? (By the way, I'm not "requiring" my doctors to use insurance. I require medical care that I can afford.
Often, care covered by insurance is cheaper than if not. Here's an example even you might understand: Two years ago I had cancer surgery. My out of pockets costs was $200. My insurance company was billed more than $10,000. If I'd lacked insurance, the bill to me would have been almost $20,000.
Sorry, that's too much money to pay to join you in your infantile campaign to drive down health costs by avoiding insurance.
>>......I smoke.
Well, that explains a lot: No sense of judgment. Especially since you're proposing that people shouldn't buy medical insurance, which means that most of us would just get sick and die. But, then, you're the jerk who's already committing slow suicide. Why don't you call up an oncologist and ask how much it costs to treat lung cancer without insurance? Or, if they'd even treat you without it? (Frankly, I hope not, since their costs would just be passed on to other patients, like me.)
I'm in favor of punitive taxes for any consumable that people use voluntarily and that causes illness. The examples you cite are inappropriate because they don't involve harmful consumables that people choose to use.
If someone knowingly uses a substance that he also knows will increase his risk of disease, I don't want to help pay for his medical bills via increased insurance premiums.
I agree that smokers often pay higher insurance costs. But, since they're still smoking and since they're still getting sick as a result, my insurance costs are still increasing.
Since people who smoke have already demonstrated they lack the sense to take care of themselves, I want them to pay dearly for their addiction and I want the funds to subsidize the medical costs that are a direct result of their ignorant and selfish behavior.
You've set up a bogus arguments and then proceed to attempt to demolish it, in the grand tradition of/. poseurs. I didn't say anything about consistency. There's no logical reason why a tax on unhealthy food should be the same as a tobacco tax. The purpose of the tax on either is to discourage comsumption of products that raise health costs for everyone and to generate funds to offset those health costs created by people who use tobacco and eat unhealthy foods.
My guess is you don't work and don't pay health insurance premiums, otherwise you'd have already figured out that your health costs are much greater than any money you might lose if you bought some tobacco. In other words, you'd rather pay a lot more for medical costs than pay a little more if you bought tobacco.
It is accepted medical fact that smoking causes cancer and heart disease. It is not accepted medical fact that smoking cures Alzheimer's.
If a smoker contracts lung cancer, emphysema, etc., it is reasonable to say the illness was self-inflicted. If someone eats too much and dies of a heart attack, it is reasonable to say their death was self-inflicted.
When discussing social policy, it is not necessary to prove that that no exceptions exist. In this case, it is not necessary to prove that all smokers will develop cancer. It is only necesary to show that, in the aggregate, more smokers die of cancer than the general non-smoking population. That this is the case is indisputable.
In the U.S., health costs are stuctured so that non-smokers insurance costs increase to cover the costs of treating people with smoking-related illnesses. Why, then, should I pay hundreds of dollars each year in added insurance premiums simply because some people choose to addict themselves to tobacco? Let them pay for the privilege of killing themselves. Tax tobacco at exorbitant rates and transfer the proceeds into health costs.
Sure, I'd support a tax on sugar and animal fats to offset medical costs.
There're 50 million people in the U.S. without health insurance and the rest of us are paying through the nose for it inlarge part because people like you play us for suckers by continuing to feed your addictions.
I think most of us would rather pay a few pennies more every time we buy candy or a Big Mac or any other crap food we don't need than pay thousands of dollars more in health insurance because we funding the surgeries and long-term care expenses of smokers and other addicts who are playing us for suckers.
Yeah, you've proved my point if you seriously suggest people should smoke and die early just to prevent getting Alzheimer's.
Arguing that nicotine may play a role in treating Alzeheimer's doesn't justify smoking tobacco. Lots of drugs and chemicals have medical uses, but will kill you if you start ingesting them like candy.
Next time, give us all a break and use your brain before you post.
Isn't it great how Slashdot provides a forum for know-nothing dweebs?
Smoking is a self-inflicted addiction. Alzheimer's and cancer are not. Everyone has a choice about smoking. You don't have a choice about Alzheimer's and cancer.
If you want to kill yourself by inhaling tobacco smoke, go ahead. But please don't try and tell me that I'm obligated to pay for your medical expenses as a result.
Forget that, how about a $5 per pack federal surcharge on cigarettes to offset the extra thousands of dollars we and our employers pay in health insurance every year to pay oncologists and cardiologists to treat these addicts?
Only a tiny percentage of Apple's market is aware of these lawsuits, so it is unlikely that Apple is motivated by a desire to maintain its popularity with that little band of geeks and fanatics.
Apple brought the suits in pursuit of a business objective, and if/when it withdraws the suits, that will also be in pursuit of a business objective.
I really doubt Apple is worried about the few people who would not buy an Apple product simply because they don't like how it does business.
Microsoft can provide fixes and updates via several methods. There is no requirement that they make the code available on publicly accessible servers. They, like everyone else, do that because it is the cheapest way to reach the widest audience. But, they could, if they chose, provide updates only to registered users via CD. Or, make fixes available gratis, but charge for updates. Or, remove the servers from public access and make them available only to registered and/or paying customers. (There is precedence for the latter in the Linux world.)
I've seen a post or two here complaining that they bought MS software and they can run it on any platform they choose.
Well, of they can. This move by MS won't stop that. They didn't buy perpetual upgrades, though, and MS didn't agree to provide perpetual upgrades at no cost to anyone.
So, what are people bitching about? Maybe they'd be happier if MS offered piad subscriptions to updates to non-MS users?
That doesn't mean access to it will be at no cost.
For example, the records of your local municipal government are almost certainly available to the public. But, it will cost you to get yourself downtown to City Hall to look at them. If you'd rather opt for another form of access -- say, sending someone downtown to find, copy, and deliver records to you -- you'll need to fork over some cash.
Neither Google or anyone else has any obligation to provide no-cost access to public domain data.
Slashdot Mirror
Until you can define exactly what qualifies as child porn, you can't have child porn.
And it is defined in the laws that criminalize it and by the courts that interpret those laws.
This is not mathematics. There is no single definition that will be universally accepted as correct. Child abuse and child porn is, in fact, whatever any given society wants to say it is.
Building a sophomoric facade of arguments trying to convince me that child abuse/porn doesn't exist because different societies have slightly different definitions of it is neither enlightening or productive or likely to change my mind. The original post I replied to appeared to be using that kind of argument as a defense of child abuse/porn. It's one thing to entertain yourself with pointless "what if" conjecture, but it is entirely another to defends predators and criminals in our society simply because other societies have no criminalized some of that behavior.
What is or is not socially acceptable is the collective decision of a society. That's why the opinion of any single individual "doesn't count".
...that applies only to our society...
I only live in one society. I'm not disputing the fact that other societies did, and do, things differently. But, I see nothing in the fact that ancient Greek men may have commonly had sex with ancient Greek boys that convinces me their behavior was anything other than child abuse.
The fact that I acknowledge that some behavioral norms are different in different societies does not mean I must, therefore, abandon my obligation to decide what I think is wrong and right. Each of us has that obligation, and a society's determination of normal versus aberrant behavior is determined by the aggregation of individual opinions.
I said what I said: Arguments about when someone stops being a child have no bearing on the fact of child abuse and child pornography.
I was replying to a post that attempted to excuse child abuse and child porn because different societies define different legal ages for marriage and adulthood.
The original article was about an Australian law, certainly a valid discussion topic. But, the poster wasn't discussing that law. I can't think of a single reason to excuse or defend child abuse or child porn.
The point is that simply because people and societies have different opinions on when people stop being children and become adults does not mean that child abuse does not exist.
In other words, silly debates about defining and quantifying the margins of something have no bearing on its actual existence.
Child abuse is whatever a society says it is. Unless an individual can convince his society to go along with him, his opinion is irrelevant.
None of this has anything to do with the health of my brain cells (thanks for the gratuitously condescending remarks). And I discovered a long time ago that there is no "independent value system" with all the ansers. That's why the collective opinion of a society count for everything and the individual opinion of one person count for very little.
Your opinion doesn't count.
You may not want to demonize child abuse, but I do, as well as its apologists, which you certainly appear to be.
Arguing that child porn isn't evil or doesn't even exist because different legislatures have used different age categories when codifying its prohibition is inane and specious. Different locations have different speed limits, too. Would you argue, then, that speed limits do no exist and should not exist?
The ame applies to your attempt at historical analysis. The legal age for marriage has always varied, and still varied, from one society to the next. This is because the "legal age" for marriage is not, and should not be, synonymous with the age at which we come to sexual maturity.
Your argument boils down to the same kind of childish, petulant, arrogant and ultimately unconvincing argument so abundantly produced by the adolescents who post here.
If the Australian government wants its ISP's to block sites carrying illegal material, it ought to supply ISP's with a list of IP addresses to block. If the law doesn't provide for that, then it needs to be fixed. End of story.
What's the risk in letting anyone (terrorists included) know where...
...why do I have to sign up on a list to get this data?
...this is simply tracking me for the purpose of tracking me.
...the crack about "quietly" was in regards to this legislation being passed in 2003, and it took a NASA server failure two years later for me to find out about it.
Presumably, someone believes there's risk in allowing anonymous people to learn where these things are located. That's a different risk than the potential to destroy them. And, they are considerably higher the "60 miles straight up".
Again, presumably, because someone wants to know who's looking at it. You haven't lost any freedoms, just your anonymity. Life is full of that and it doesn't retrict you.
I doubt anyone is going to actively track anyone using this service. Costs way too much.
I want to know why.
Ask them.
Whose fault is that? Hundreds of bills were passed in 2003. Do you expect someone to wake you up and tell you about each one? Congress publishes them all; call the GPO and get a subscription.
...why don't they get busy and invent a way to permit duplication of digital files onto physical media that also prevents duplication over a network?
You can just barely make a plausible fair use case about unlimited personal copying of an entire work for personal use, but even Lessig draws the line at hosting digitized works on servers that permit unlimited duplication by all comers. I.e., you have no fair use right to allow unlimited numbers of strangers to make unlimited duplicates of a work to which you do not hold the copyright.
The TV and movie folks are worried about people making thousands of DVD's for their personal use (who would?). They're worried about their products being almost instantly made available for unlimited duplication by anyone across the globe.
Why wasn't the open source community and friends organized enough to get to these legislators and persuade them to support bills specifically permitting municipal broadband before the corporations began to act in their own self interest?
It is all well and good to wait until something bad happens and then wag your finger, but that never accomplishes anything.
Rather than whine after-the-fact, why doesn't the open source community learn how the game is played and start working toward its own self interest? Why isn't the community raising money for its candidates? Why isn't the community trying to sell its point here? (Come on, folks: Free Broadband versus $50 a month ought to be an easy sell. The cable and phone companies aren't exactly popular.)
Typical nonsense from the tinfoil brigade.
/. crowd won't pay attention unless you make a lot of loud noise.
A server supporting a system scheduled to end goes down a few weeks before that and the government decides not to spend the money to repair it. What's the problem?
The same data remains available. What's the problem?
The government -- any government with satellites -- doesn't want you or anyone else to know the location of its secret satellites. Why enable the very people those satellites are targetting to find out where they are?
And, what is that crack about legislation that was "passed quietly" supposed to mean? Looks like deliberate paranoia-mongering to me: those sneaky people in Congress passed a bill and didn't ven bother to jump up and down on TV about it. Guess they forgot that the
I have a friend who works for the Air Force and he was telling me the other day about the alien masterminds who've secretly run the government since the Truman Administrations and who...
The converstation is about medical costs, not some trumped up euphimism for "the rich get richer" like "personal responsibility".
So, if you claim you don't have health insurance, how about auto insurance, life insurance, homeowners and mortage insurance? Or, are you asserting your "personal responsibility"?
It isn't hypocritical of me to say smokers should pay extra for the health care costs they create and dump on the rest of us. I buy insurnace to cover my health care costs. If I didn't, I couldn't afford it, and never would be able to afford it, regardless of how much of so-called "personal responsibility" I exercised. And the same applies to almost everyone else on the planet. Five days in the hospital can cost more than most Americans annual income. How many people do you really think can afford that care without insurance?
People who smoke aren't as healthy as people who don't and that makes health care costs go up, not insurance. That means my health care costs more because you smoke.
All I can conclude is that you have confused "personal responsibility" with miscreant and complete lack of responsiblity for anyone but yourself.
Like I said, anyone who smokes has certainly proven their inability to reason soundly, and your posts provide ample evidence.
>> I pay all of my health costs out of pocket...
...dolts like you who are driving up healthcare costs by requiring doctors to deal with insurance...
Either you're independently wealthy or you've never had a serious medical condition to treat. (Even if you were wealthy, only a fool would pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills if he had the alternative of insurance.)
It's also a clue that you aren't employed.
>>
Nicely repugnant display of arrogance and ignorance. Medical costs are not sky high simply because of insurance paperwork.Do you seriously imagine that if medical insurance disappeared tomorrow, health costs would decrease? (By the way, I'm not "requiring" my doctors to use insurance. I require medical care that I can afford.
Often, care covered by insurance is cheaper than if not. Here's an example even you might understand: Two years ago I had cancer surgery. My out of pockets costs was $200. My insurance company was billed more than $10,000. If I'd lacked insurance, the bill to me would have been almost $20,000.
Sorry, that's too much money to pay to join you in your infantile campaign to drive down health costs by avoiding insurance.
>>......I smoke.
Well, that explains a lot: No sense of judgment. Especially since you're proposing that people shouldn't buy medical insurance, which means that most of us would just get sick and die. But, then, you're the jerk who's already committing slow suicide. Why don't you call up an oncologist and ask how much it costs to treat lung cancer without insurance? Or, if they'd even treat you without it? (Frankly, I hope not, since their costs would just be passed on to other patients, like me.)
I'm in favor of punitive taxes for any consumable that people use voluntarily and that causes illness. The examples you cite are inappropriate because they don't involve harmful consumables that people choose to use.
If someone knowingly uses a substance that he also knows will increase his risk of disease, I don't want to help pay for his medical bills via increased insurance premiums.
I agree that smokers often pay higher insurance costs. But, since they're still smoking and since they're still getting sick as a result, my insurance costs are still increasing.
Since people who smoke have already demonstrated they lack the sense to take care of themselves, I want them to pay dearly for their addiction and I want the funds to subsidize the medical costs that are a direct result of their ignorant and selfish behavior.
Typcial moronic obscene puerile Slashdot dweeb.
/. poseurs. I didn't say anything about consistency. There's no logical reason why a tax on unhealthy food should be the same as a tobacco tax. The purpose of the tax on either is to discourage comsumption of products that raise health costs for everyone and to generate funds to offset those health costs created by people who use tobacco and eat unhealthy foods.
You've set up a bogus arguments and then proceed to attempt to demolish it, in the grand tradition of
My guess is you don't work and don't pay health insurance premiums, otherwise you'd have already figured out that your health costs are much greater than any money you might lose if you bought some tobacco. In other words, you'd rather pay a lot more for medical costs than pay a little more if you bought tobacco.
It is accepted medical fact that smoking causes cancer and heart disease. It is not accepted medical fact that smoking cures Alzheimer's.
If a smoker contracts lung cancer, emphysema, etc., it is reasonable to say the illness was self-inflicted. If someone eats too much and dies of a heart attack, it is reasonable to say their death was self-inflicted.
When discussing social policy, it is not necessary to prove that that no exceptions exist. In this case, it is not necessary to prove that all smokers will develop cancer. It is only necesary to show that, in the aggregate, more smokers die of cancer than the general non-smoking population. That this is the case is indisputable.
In the U.S., health costs are stuctured so that non-smokers insurance costs increase to cover the costs of treating people with smoking-related illnesses. Why, then, should I pay hundreds of dollars each year in added insurance premiums simply because some people choose to addict themselves to tobacco? Let them pay for the privilege of killing themselves. Tax tobacco at exorbitant rates and transfer the proceeds into health costs.
Sure, I'd support a tax on sugar and animal fats to offset medical costs.
There're 50 million people in the U.S. without health insurance and the rest of us are paying through the nose for it inlarge part because people like you play us for suckers by continuing to feed your addictions.
I think most of us would rather pay a few pennies more every time we buy candy or a Big Mac or any other crap food we don't need than pay thousands of dollars more in health insurance because we funding the surgeries and long-term care expenses of smokers and other addicts who are playing us for suckers.
Yeah, you've proved my point if you seriously suggest people should smoke and die early just to prevent getting Alzheimer's.
Arguing that nicotine may play a role in treating Alzeheimer's doesn't justify smoking tobacco. Lots of drugs and chemicals have medical uses, but will kill you if you start ingesting them like candy.
Next time, give us all a break and use your brain before you post.
Yes, I'm sure. Smoking causes cancer and lung and heart disease.
If you have evidence to the contrary and aren't just posturing, say so.
Otherwise, go be ludicrous someplace else.
Isn't it great how Slashdot provides a forum for know-nothing dweebs?
Smoking is a self-inflicted addiction. Alzheimer's and cancer are not. Everyone has a choice about smoking. You don't have a choice about Alzheimer's and cancer.
If you want to kill yourself by inhaling tobacco smoke, go ahead. But please don't try and tell me that I'm obligated to pay for your medical expenses as a result.
Forget that, how about a $5 per pack federal surcharge on cigarettes to offset the extra thousands of dollars we and our employers pay in health insurance every year to pay oncologists and cardiologists to treat these addicts?
Only a tiny percentage of Apple's market is aware of these lawsuits, so it is unlikely that Apple is motivated by a desire to maintain its popularity with that little band of geeks and fanatics.
Apple brought the suits in pursuit of a business objective, and if/when it withdraws the suits, that will also be in pursuit of a business objective.
I really doubt Apple is worried about the few people who would not buy an Apple product simply because they don't like how it does business.
Has anyone moved next door to a hotspot just to get free access?
Microsoft can provide fixes and updates via several methods. There is no requirement that they make the code available on publicly accessible servers. They, like everyone else, do that because it is the cheapest way to reach the widest audience. But, they could, if they chose, provide updates only to registered users via CD. Or, make fixes available gratis, but charge for updates. Or, remove the servers from public access and make them available only to registered and/or paying customers. (There is precedence for the latter in the Linux world.)
I've seen a post or two here complaining that they bought MS software and they can run it on any platform they choose.
Well, of they can. This move by MS won't stop that. They didn't buy perpetual upgrades, though, and MS didn't agree to provide perpetual upgrades at no cost to anyone.
So, what are people bitching about? Maybe they'd be happier if MS offered piad subscriptions to updates to non-MS users?
Public domain information is free.
That doesn't mean access to it will be at no cost.
For example, the records of your local municipal government are almost certainly available to the public. But, it will cost you to get yourself downtown to City Hall to look at them. If you'd rather opt for another form of access -- say, sending someone downtown to find, copy, and deliver records to you -- you'll need to fork over some cash.
Neither Google or anyone else has any obligation to provide no-cost access to public domain data.