I almost never agree with Alan Dershowitz, but he was right when he pointed out recently, "You have a right to privacy. You have NO right to anonymity."
You chose a bad time to agree with him, since both of you are now on the opposite side of liberal to the supreme court.
I tried BitTorrent, it was really slow, and while people say that it speeds up over time, I was still getting 10k/sec after 2 hours. I tried the mirrors - they were also dead slow. Eventually, I tried Shareaza, that P2P app which tried to hijack the "Gnutella" brand, and I actually got really good download speeds. I plan to upload to Freenet once I get the files (hopefully within 24 hours). If anyone with a really fast connection has the files, please consider uploading them to Freenet and letting us know what the keys are.
Apparently British troops jokingly refer to their US counterparts as "Ninja Turtles" - in reference to their helmets, body-armor, and ray-bans. Is it any wonder that there is such a contrast between the graceful manner in which British troops handle the delicate task of interacting with Iraqi civilians and the "them and us" attitude of their US counterparts? British troops learned what they know on the civilian streets of Northern Ireland, the Americans think its "Doom IV - Iraq!".
A better analogy would be closing the doors to a movie theater to everyone except people who purchased a ticket, thus "artificially" creating scarcity to those people hoping to sneak in for free.
Yes, and this can be achieved through conventional trespassing law that even your cat would agree with. It does not rely on a massive artificial legal construction to enforce scarcity on something that is, in reality, abundant, as is the case with IP law.
Ahh, but there is scarcity in IP. Not in the dissemination of intellectual property, but in the creation of the intellectual property.
IP law doesn't apply to labor - that is property by its very nature, and the law already protects that, rather it applies to the product of that labor, which isn't the same thing. As can be seen from the multitude of ways that IP law is being used to inhibit technological advancement, it is clear that IP law is a very inefficient way to ensure effective use of creativity.
It does take real, and scarce, intellectual resources to come up with a new idea, a new piece of fiction, a new computer game, or whatever. How are these intellectual resources to be managed without some sort of intellectual property rights?
Firstly, IP law doesn't cover ideas. Secondly, in answer to your question I suggest you look at Linux, FreeBSD, or any of the multitude of projects which people devoted their efforts to not for personal financial gain, but for the enhancement of society's collective wealth - and which achieve this by ignoring, or actively subverting the concept of information as property.
So what he's saying here is interesting and balances the ideology of "intellectual property" with pragmatic reality.
The "ideology" of information as a property right is a recent fiction, copyright started as a compromise - it was never an "ideal", and that compromise has been corrupted almost beyond recognition.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:
One thing is implementations of this technology and the other, the good use of that kind of ideas. DRM should be a technology that must be designed to prevent you from controlling the technology/data/media/etc that you don't own.
And the only way to control the data you don't own (if you accept that data is property - which I don't), is to prevent you from controlling the hardware that you do own.
I think that this could be positive. It could make open source access more information, to have more things that can be used with it, not less.
Open technology is about having the right to control the property that you own. DRM is technology that, regardless of whether you paid for it, is designed to prevent you from controlling the technology that you own.
While normally any Open Source software is a good thing, this project is little more than the vaseline that will make it that bit easier for big media to screw us just as they will screw users of non-Open Source software.
The only way to prevent this is for users to boycott Digital Restrictions Management technologies. As such, anything which makes it easier for DRM technologies to integrate with any software is a bad thing.
This project may comply to the letter of Open Source, but it entirely contradicts the spirit of open technology.
In a related study...
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BSA IDC FUD
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· Score: 5, Funny
...the BSA pointed out that countries with more relaxed Intellectual Property laws had higher child mortality rates. "The inference is clear", BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said, "Piracy kills babies".
I emailed PayPal customer support over their apparent politically motivated freezing of whatreallyhappened.com's PayPal account (see
here for the wrh.com account). To my surprise they responded quite quickly, but said that under the terms of their privacy policy they couldn't discuss the issue with me, but that there was another side to the story.
What Paypal does is actually quite difficult, and I suspect it is a constant battle for them to prevent their service from being used illegally, and without them getting landed with massive liabilities. This is primarily due to the braindead way that credit cards work. I suspect that people that have had bad PayPal experiences might simply have become victims of the fact that Paypal has to be extremely aggressive about fraud just to survive.
Before everyone hangs them out to dry - perhaps stop to think, for a moment, what their side of the story might be.
I moved from the UK to the US in 2001, and long before I moved they had this in the UK. Sorry Americans, but you are living in the cell-phone stone-age.
GSM allows you to buy a new phone like you might buy a new wristwatch, switch over the little GSM card - and you are up and running, no need to phone your provider, and no need to worry about whether a given phone will work with a given service provider. I was able to wander all over the world (except the US, of course) and receive calls on my cellphone.
Providers fight each-other tooth and nail for your business, unlike the US where I have to wait for up to an hour before speaking to someone in my local Verizon shop (Sprint is just as bad).
In the UK, reception was rarely a problem, particularly in urban areas. In the US of A the situation is quite different. A few months ago I got a Cingular phone which didn't work in my apartment that was just two blocks away from the Cingular store and 3 blocks from downtown Santa Monica! Cingular charged me $40 just to get out of the contract).
Now I think I am finally getting close to the quality of phone and service that I took for granted in the UK in 1999, I have a Verizon T720.
Whoever is responsible for the cell phone mess in the US should be shot.
And it's shit like this that undermines companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, and other open-source companies.
Red Hat Network & the Mandrake Club, etc., exist so the people who are willing to *PAY A PREMIUM* receive better or more prioritized service.
Those that want to financially reward Redhat or Mandrake for their efforts should be able to, but there is nothing wrong with someone doing what they can to make GPL'd code more available to everyone else. Remember that RedHat did not write most of the code in the product they are distributing, which is fine, but there *is* a price to be paid for that - and that price is that anyone can place their stuff on Freenet. All is fair in love, war, and business.
Set up a 501c3 non-profit corp which will act as a pool of patents to be used as a counter-threat against patent racketeering. These large companies can then donate their patents to it, get a tax write-off, and they can simultaenously continue to benefit from the defensive protection of those patents.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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Rumor has it that not so long ago, they were invaded. Which is apparently justification for us to wage war on the country that invaded them.
They did, you did, that was a decade ago. What is today's excuse?
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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Strike on Iraq
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Nazi Germany was ruled with an iron fist
Try being a Muslim in today's America.
killed all opposition to the ruling party
Fortunately, there is no real opposition to the ruling party in the US, so this isn't necessary.
had a thing against jews
Try being a Muslim in today's America.
were agressive towards their neighbours
Has anyone else lost count of the democratic South American governments overthrown by the CIA?
were supposed to disarm under a Peace Treaty they signed
At least they got as far as signing the treaty in the first place, more than can be said for the US
.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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SO that whole HOLOCAUST thing was just a little side show? Hitler was an inherently evil individual with malformed, distorted and perverse ideals.
Sorry to challenge your world view, but the Holocaust was not the motivating force for either British or American involvement in the second world war - they have ignored similar events before, during, and since WWII (Stalin anyone?), in fact, the Holocaust didn't really become a big deal until the 60s (read "The Holocaust Industry" - written by a Jew - for a very enlightening perspective on all this)
In the case of the US, they are no stranger to genocide themselves, talk to a native American, they know all about it.
I hate the war, but I support you
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I am anti-war, but I sincerely hope that you, and other soldiers (US, British, *and* Iraqi) emerge unharmed.
It requires immense bravery to fight for your country, and I have a deep respect for anyone that does, I just wish the leaders of the country for which you are fighting actually deserved your loyalty.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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I think the defeats to communism that he is refering to are Korea and Vietnam.
Ah yes, never forget Vietnam - if those evil Vietnamese actually got to have the government they wanted, then it would have been the beginning of the end for freedom - except they did (after immense suffering at the hands of the US), and it wasn't.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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Defeat Nazism, Communism, and [hopefully] Terrorism.
The USSR brand of authoritian communism defeated itself, it was not defeated by the US and terrorism has never been defeated by war, just ask the British in Northern Ireland.
And the reason the Nazi's needed to be defeated was the fact that they attacked and invaded other countries, just as the US is now doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Free speech is meaningless without anonymity.
His claim that Java will be an evolutionary dead-end is already wrong - since Microsoft's C# is clearly heavily inspired by Java.
Let's hope that Neo has a better knowledge of basic information theory than whoever put these trailers online.
I tried BitTorrent, it was really slow, and while people say that it speeds up over time, I was still getting 10k/sec after 2 hours. I tried the mirrors - they were also dead slow. Eventually, I tried Shareaza, that P2P app which tried to hijack the "Gnutella" brand, and I actually got really good download speeds. I plan to upload to Freenet once I get the files (hopefully within 24 hours). If anyone with a really fast connection has the files, please consider uploading them to Freenet and letting us know what the keys are.
Come on, grow up - war is no video game.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:
"stop shooting people!"
"what, you don't like hospitals?"
The only way to prevent this is for users to boycott Digital Restrictions Management technologies. As such, anything which makes it easier for DRM technologies to integrate with any software is a bad thing.
This project may comply to the letter of Open Source, but it entirely contradicts the spirit of open technology.
...the BSA pointed out that countries with more relaxed Intellectual Property laws had higher child mortality rates. "The inference is clear", BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said, "Piracy kills babies".
What Paypal does is actually quite difficult, and I suspect it is a constant battle for them to prevent their service from being used illegally, and without them getting landed with massive liabilities. This is primarily due to the braindead way that credit cards work. I suspect that people that have had bad PayPal experiences might simply have become victims of the fact that Paypal has to be extremely aggressive about fraud just to survive.
Before everyone hangs them out to dry - perhaps stop to think, for a moment, what their side of the story might be.
But seriously, it looks good, and their replacement for Java's bloated and slow Swing GUI toolkit should be adopted by Sun yesterday.
GSM allows you to buy a new phone like you might buy a new wristwatch, switch over the little GSM card - and you are up and running, no need to phone your provider, and no need to worry about whether a given phone will work with a given service provider. I was able to wander all over the world (except the US, of course) and receive calls on my cellphone.
Providers fight each-other tooth and nail for your business, unlike the US where I have to wait for up to an hour before speaking to someone in my local Verizon shop (Sprint is just as bad).
In the UK, reception was rarely a problem, particularly in urban areas. In the US of A the situation is quite different. A few months ago I got a Cingular phone which didn't work in my apartment that was just two blocks away from the Cingular store and 3 blocks from downtown Santa Monica! Cingular charged me $40 just to get out of the contract).
Now I think I am finally getting close to the quality of phone and service that I took for granted in the UK in 1999, I have a Verizon T720.
Whoever is responsible for the cell phone mess in the US should be shot.
Set up a 501c3 non-profit corp which will act as a pool of patents to be used as a counter-threat against patent racketeering. These large companies can then donate their patents to it, get a tax write-off, and they can simultaenously continue to benefit from the defensive protection of those patents.
In the case of the US, they are no stranger to genocide themselves, talk to a native American, they know all about it.
It requires immense bravery to fight for your country, and I have a deep respect for anyone that does, I just wish the leaders of the country for which you are fighting actually deserved your loyalty.
And the reason the Nazi's needed to be defeated was the fact that they attacked and invaded other countries, just as the US is now doing.