I think you mean to be arguing with somebody else. I don't recall suggesting anything to the effect of how much or how little punishment is appropriate for copyright infringement. I might suggest that infringing on copyright is wrong, but the poster to whom I responded remarked that it was not as bad as certain other activities, such as armed robbery. I don't contest that point, but such a remark does not, itself, justify an action that is still wrong, by itself.
Now of course, it may seem that the notion that infringing on copyright is wrong is somewhat subjective, but if it can be shown that copyright has value to society, then it logically follows that copyright infringement must be wrong. "Value" itself is an intrinsically subjective concept, however... since there are many interpretations of it which are independent of monetary worth.
Sure... anybody who releases works under GPL, BSD, MIT, or any of the dozens of other open source licenses.
It was to such works that I was referring... where did you get the impression I was ever referring to advertisement supported content?
My point is that copyright has value which is independent of monetary worth... and it is simply *because* of that value that it is worth respecting. And of course, as I said above, it's far preferable to the alternative (which is *NOT* public domain, and I think even you realize that... because if you were trying to advocate that it were, you'd at least be putting your own stuff into public domain instead of having it under a CC license).
Show me one of the "free" content makers you speak of that does not have advertising alongside their content
You, apparently, since you utilize a creative commons license. My point, of course, is that although there is no lack of people such as yourself, who will self-publish and make works which they intend to be free, the fact remains that they, like you, still want their works to be copyrighted, and not put into public domain. Since you appeared to be implying through sarcasm that there was such an abundance of free material in the pre-copyright world, I thought it would be worthwhile to consider just what the real alternative to copyright actually would be in today's world. What existed before copyright was invented could not work today, because copy controls on works existed even then... but then it was only by the natural characteristic of copying being extremely tedious and error prone. Since that is no longer the case, we cannot return to that system.
If, in fact, people who were interested in creating works for free and without the constraints of copyright are so plentiful, then why is it the case that, considering the entire body of works produced these days that actually has any significant measure of appeal, and are legally freely distributable, why such an overwhelming majority of them are copyrighted, and not put into public domain?
The answer, of course, is that copyright has value to its creators which is not a function of monetary worth... simply put, it is an incentive to content makers to continually create more works which can then go on to culturally enrich society, and it is this potential for cultural enrichment that obligates society to respect it. To argue otherwise is to ignore the fact that even *FREE* content creators routinely utilize copyright.
If or when a majority of free content makers start putting their stuff into public domain, I might consider the notion that copyright isn't particularly useful anymore. Not before.
Only if simply ignoring errors and continuing in the program's main event loop is adequate. This can be the case with many programs, but can very easily cause side effects resulting from incomplete operations.
Copyright infringement is not theft. It does not involve the complete removal of property
Neither does stealing only $10 out of a wallet containing $100.
The "victim" retains their copy of the work, and there are no natural property rights in the work being illegally copied.
The very concept of "property" in the first place is entirely unnatural, as it arises out of an abstract concept of ownership ntitlement, not mere possession.
So it is you who are "moving the goalposts" by pushing an incorrect definition ("copyright infringement is theft") and then claiming that anyone who corrects you is "moving the goalposts".
First of all, I asserted that copyright infringement could be reasonably considered theft if you call the unauthorized taking of any resource to be theft. I further did not try to accuse anyone in particular of moving the goalposts of an argument... I was heading off one particular type of claim which is wholly irrelevant to the issue of whether or not copyright infringement is theft.
You can argue all you want that such an intangible thing like copy control should not be considered such a resource, but that argument is only a reflection of how little value you place upon it. If it were really of no value to anybody, then people who create freely distributable works would be more likely to put things into public domain than copyright them, yet the converse is actually true.
When they showed bad will toward the people, that goodwill contract was rendered void and copyright lost any value it may have had.
Not *ALL* value, but much of it... certainly.
For the content maker, its value actually remains largely intact, deriving, as always, from people who abide by it. For consumers, copyright's only remaining value is that even in its altered state, it is still far preferable to the alternative... and the alternative to copyright is not public domain, it is censorship and limited accessibility.
Of course such armed theft is worse. But arguing that something isn't *AS* bad as something else in attempt to justify the former does not, by itself, necessarily mean that what you are trying to justify isn't actually bad at all.
Behavior has to be assessed on its own terms, not according to some imaginary comparative scale. The fact that someone's act is more or less ethical than yours has no effect on the ethical nature of your conduct. "There are worse things" is not an argument; it's the desperate cry of someone who has run out of rationalizations.
What I find interesting is practically every excuse that pirates offer for what they do can be found on the Ethics Scoreboard site, I've just linked to above.
Not quite... because in the case of copyrighted content, the original doesn't possess exactly the same value after copying it without authorization. More specifically, by making an unauthorized copy, you have diminished the value of the control that the copyright holder is supposed to have over who is permitted to make copies of their works.
In fact, you haven't just diminished the value of the original work you even copied... you diminished the value of *ALL* works protected by exactly the same mechanisms.
If you want to argue that a content maker shouldn't ever have such control in the first place, that's a different argument entirely.
Piracy involves theft. Always. That's why its called piracy.
As for what is being stolen by piracy, it is the measure of control that the content maker is supposed to have over who is allowed to copy their work, which is the entire point of copyright in the first place. And while this is an abstract and not a physical thing,. but the lack of physicality does not preclude some people considering it to be of great value.
OI course, the entire notion of "property" is abstract in the first place, since property is defined by concepts of ownership, not mere possession, and is only regulated by the notion of what society chooses to intellectually recognize as such. Not coincidentally, this applies exactly to the notion of copyright.
If you consider theft to be the completely unauthorized taking of a resource, whether this resource is physical or not, then copyright infringement could still reasonably be considered theft. The resource, in the case of copyright, is the measure of control that the copyright holder is supposed to possess over who is allowed to make copies, which is the only real value of copyright in the first place. To suggest that the content maker has just as much control before you make an unauthorized copy as after is blatantly false... of course it is reduced - however insignificantly a single copy might affect it... while many thousands or millions of copies which were not generally possible for a private individual to economically accomplish before technology like the internet, simply scales that issue.
If you want to argue that this type of control is not reasonable for a content maker to desire, then that's an entirely different kettle of fish to suggesting that copyright infringement isn't theft, and even at best is moving the goalposts. Please consider the alternative to copyright before subscribing to that belief however... and the alternative is not public domain.
This is the principle that bad or unethical behavior justifies, and somehow makes ethical, unethical behavior intended to counter it. The logical extension of this fallacy is the abandonment of all ethical standards. Through the ages, we have been perplexed at the fact that people who don't play by the rules have an apparent advantage over those who do, and "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" has been the rallying cry of those who see the abandonment of values as the only way to prosper.
The very concept of ethics assumes that winning isn't the only thing, Vince Lombardi to the contrary, and that we must hold on to ethical standards to preserve the quality of civil existence.
Although maxims and aphorisms cause a lot of confusion in ethical arguments, this one is still valid in its simple logic: "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Of course, if you are now going to argue that violating copyright isn't actually wrong, then why did you bother to imply that copyright could have been worth respecting if the government and content makers did?
Anyways....
If copyright has value, it stands to reason that breaking it is wrong... for *EITHER* party. If it had no value, then please try to consider exactly why a vast majority of content makers that *DO* make freely available content decide to explicitly utilize copyright instead of putting their works into public domain.
Why should anyone else show respect for it? Because copyright is preferable to the alternative... and that alternative isn't public domain. That's why it's bad.... for *BOTH* sides.
Granted, this particular crash would not have occurred had it been written in Lisp, but the failure on the part of the programmers to anticipate the kind of input that might produce a crash in C could just as likely to cause catastrophic failure in a program written in any language, even Lisp. Ultimately, the problem was not programming language choice - which is my whole point.
Example: it was once thought that atoms were indivisible, and there was nothing smaller. This was proven completely false. Others: That the world is flat was proven false as well. That everything revolves around the earth is proven false.
In fact, all you ever have to do to disprove something is establish the veracity of something else which can be shown to be mutually exclusive with whatever it is you are wanting to disprove.
As for during take off and landing.. I think they should ban the use of iPads, nooks, ereaders, music players, etc. of all types. During takeoff and landing I want passenger attention focused on following instructions in the unlikely event of a problem, not zoning out with headphones stuck in their ears.
You should then also ban paper books, talking, sleeping, as well as any people who might be hard of hearing (which would discriminate against a substantial majority of people over about the age of 70).
The *EXACT* same problem (abrupt program termination) would have plagued the software if had been written in either C# or Java unless exception-handling code was in place to prevent it. Not so coincidentally, the effort spent writing such exception handling code in C# or Java could just as easily be spent on a simple null pointer check before passing a value to strlen in C. Not to mention the fact that neither C# nor Java even existed when ircd was invented.
This was a flaw that exploited nothing more technical than programmer oversight, which can happen just as easily in software written in *ANY* language.
That question is like asking how many meters per second are there in a kilometer More generally, it is like asking how many first derivatives of f(x) are in 1000 f(x). Quite honestly, the question has no factual answer other than discarding the wording of the question, and informing the questioner of the difference between power and energy. It would have been very interesting to watch if the contestant actually knew this and the show had the answer wrong.
... it is possible for the owner to disable it.. I have no problem with this being accomplished either in BIOS settings or even if it requires placing a pin jumper on the motherboard.
As for OS's that won't run with UEFI disabled. I have no use for them.
If the crimp is tight enough to stop molecules of water under pressure the why is it not tight enough to stop molecules of metal under very little pressure
The former is caused by electrostatic repulsion between droplets of liquid, whose minimum size is determined by the surface tension properties of the liquid. But even these tiny droplets, which are on the order of only about a nanometer or two in size, are still about another order of magnitude larger than the molecules that liquid itself is made of.
Imagine a copyright-free future where every individual publisher makes their own ebook reader... where paper bound books are hardly ever printed any more, and publishers resort to closely guarded trade secrets to maintain whatever control they can manage over the content that they do release. There will be no standardization for data format or technology, because standardization would enable the public to easily reverse engineer the technology. The content would be heavily advertisement laden to help subsidize the costs, and tampering with the technology to try to bypass such advertisements could go so far as to render the reader utterly unusable, increasing costs to consumers. And even as the secrets are broken by hackers, new DRM methods will continually developed which obsolete the old, and people with hacked technologies will simply not be able to continue to utilize newer content, and people who buy newer technology will not be able to utilize older content. You can choose not to buy such technology, of course, but as it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, all you'd be doing is ostracizing yourself from the digital culture that will only grow proportionally prevalent in a technologically advanced society. Programmable computers would not be available commercially... although there would not be laws forbidding their manufacture or sale, since the closed appliances would meet so many of the average person's needs, the market for them would be all but non-existent. The niche market which does exist for such devices would cause the costs of such equipment to be likely out of the reach of all but the very wealthy. But even as useful technologies are developed on such devices, the lack of copyright would enable corporations to freely copy the technologies and incorporate the capabilities into their own closed devices, so that new customers do not feel that they are being left out by not having a versatile programmable device. Small-time publishers that may not have the money to employ sophisticated protection systems could end up having their content stolen from them before they are able to adapt, and put on more sophisticated content controls that are managed by another, larger publisher, leaving the small publisher with no legal recourse due to the abolition of copyright. On account of the larger publisher's wider distribution capacity or bandwidth, they would effectively receive all the credit for the work, while the original artist may receive almost none, since much of society will still continue to prefer spoon-fed content to that which they must actively try to search for.
That, I would dare say, is almost certainly but a glimpse of what would await us within but a single generation after the abolition of copyright. Dream on if you seriously believe it would be any better.
Unproven in this day and age when it's much easier to produce content.
One only has to casually examine the body of freely available works that are being made and distributed today to ascertain the veracity of such a supposition.
While it's true that there's no lack of ability or desire for people to produce their own content without seeking compensation direction for that content, looking only at that body of content, it's worth noting that a majority of quality freely distributable works that are being made today are *NOT* simply released into public domain... they are still copyrighted, again, in spite of being freely distributable. If, in fact, the control that copyright offers that the creators of free works was not important to them, then the distributors would not put copyright notices on them.
If copyright ceases to offer content creators the control that they desire, it is a certainty that they will resort to other means... such as self-censorship or recourses that will impact the number of people that can actually enjoy the product at their convenience (which many content makers are already starting to resort to even today, and laws forbidding the circumvention of such techniques are starting to appear with greater and greater frequency). In the end, society suffers.
It's this point that you're wrong about. You'll get an inkling of what I'm talking about if you try the experiment I described with a tube full of water and two sealed ends.
I've attempted to describe to you what would happen at the very tiny scales that would be easily wide enough for electrons to pass, while still being far too tiny for the surface tension of the liquid to permit the formation of droplets that would allow macroscopic flow. Again, everyday experience with the macroscopic, such as what you'd get with a water hose and blocking water by crimping it just doesn't translate very well to scales as small as what you need to actually block electron flow.
However, if you're convinced that I'm a moron, then there's not much point in continuing this. But for the record, resorting to ad hominems doesn't exactly strengthen your position.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean to be arguing with somebody else. I don't recall suggesting anything to the effect of how much or how little punishment is appropriate for copyright infringement. I might suggest that infringing on copyright is wrong, but the poster to whom I responded remarked that it was not as bad as certain other activities, such as armed robbery. I don't contest that point, but such a remark does not, itself, justify an action that is still wrong, by itself.
Now of course, it may seem that the notion that infringing on copyright is wrong is somewhat subjective, but if it can be shown that copyright has value to society, then it logically follows that copyright infringement must be wrong. "Value" itself is an intrinsically subjective concept, however... since there are many interpretations of it which are independent of monetary worth.
It was to such works that I was referring... where did you get the impression I was ever referring to advertisement supported content?
My point is that copyright has value which is independent of monetary worth... and it is simply *because* of that value that it is worth respecting. And of course, as I said above, it's far preferable to the alternative (which is *NOT* public domain, and I think even you realize that... because if you were trying to advocate that it were, you'd at least be putting your own stuff into public domain instead of having it under a CC license).
You, apparently, since you utilize a creative commons license. My point, of course, is that although there is no lack of people such as yourself, who will self-publish and make works which they intend to be free, the fact remains that they, like you, still want their works to be copyrighted, and not put into public domain. Since you appeared to be implying through sarcasm that there was such an abundance of free material in the pre-copyright world, I thought it would be worthwhile to consider just what the real alternative to copyright actually would be in today's world. What existed before copyright was invented could not work today, because copy controls on works existed even then... but then it was only by the natural characteristic of copying being extremely tedious and error prone. Since that is no longer the case, we cannot return to that system.
Consider this:
If, in fact, people who were interested in creating works for free and without the constraints of copyright are so plentiful, then why is it the case that, considering the entire body of works produced these days that actually has any significant measure of appeal, and are legally freely distributable, why such an overwhelming majority of them are copyrighted, and not put into public domain?
The answer, of course, is that copyright has value to its creators which is not a function of monetary worth... simply put, it is an incentive to content makers to continually create more works which can then go on to culturally enrich society, and it is this potential for cultural enrichment that obligates society to respect it. To argue otherwise is to ignore the fact that even *FREE* content creators routinely utilize copyright.
If or when a majority of free content makers start putting their stuff into public domain, I might consider the notion that copyright isn't particularly useful anymore. Not before.
Only if simply ignoring errors and continuing in the program's main event loop is adequate. This can be the case with many programs, but can very easily cause side effects resulting from incomplete operations.
Neither does stealing only $10 out of a wallet containing $100.
The very concept of "property" in the first place is entirely unnatural, as it arises out of an abstract concept of ownership ntitlement, not mere possession.
First of all, I asserted that copyright infringement could be reasonably considered theft if you call the unauthorized taking of any resource to be theft. I further did not try to accuse anyone in particular of moving the goalposts of an argument... I was heading off one particular type of claim which is wholly irrelevant to the issue of whether or not copyright infringement is theft.
You can argue all you want that such an intangible thing like copy control should not be considered such a resource, but that argument is only a reflection of how little value you place upon it. If it were really of no value to anybody, then people who create freely distributable works would be more likely to put things into public domain than copyright them, yet the converse is actually true.
Not *ALL* value, but much of it... certainly.
For the content maker, its value actually remains largely intact, deriving, as always, from people who abide by it. For consumers, copyright's only remaining value is that even in its altered state, it is still far preferable to the alternative... and the alternative to copyright is not public domain, it is censorship and limited accessibility.
Of course such armed theft is worse. But arguing that something isn't *AS* bad as something else in attempt to justify the former does not, by itself, necessarily mean that what you are trying to justify isn't actually bad at all.
And consider, from The Ethics Scoreboard
What I find interesting is practically every excuse that pirates offer for what they do can be found on the Ethics Scoreboard site, I've just linked to above.
Not quite... because in the case of copyrighted content, the original doesn't possess exactly the same value after copying it without authorization. More specifically, by making an unauthorized copy, you have diminished the value of the control that the copyright holder is supposed to have over who is permitted to make copies of their works.
In fact, you haven't just diminished the value of the original work you even copied... you diminished the value of *ALL* works protected by exactly the same mechanisms.
If you want to argue that a content maker shouldn't ever have such control in the first place, that's a different argument entirely.
Only if it ever possessed some sort of legally recognized exclusive right to control who was permitted to do such things.
Piracy involves theft. Always. That's why its called piracy.
As for what is being stolen by piracy, it is the measure of control that the content maker is supposed to have over who is allowed to copy their work, which is the entire point of copyright in the first place. And while this is an abstract and not a physical thing,. but the lack of physicality does not preclude some people considering it to be of great value.
OI course, the entire notion of "property" is abstract in the first place, since property is defined by concepts of ownership, not mere possession, and is only regulated by the notion of what society chooses to intellectually recognize as such. Not coincidentally, this applies exactly to the notion of copyright.
If you want to argue that this type of control is not reasonable for a content maker to desire, then that's an entirely different kettle of fish to suggesting that copyright infringement isn't theft, and even at best is moving the goalposts. Please consider the alternative to copyright before subscribing to that belief however... and the alternative is not public domain.
Of course, if you are now going to argue that violating copyright isn't actually wrong, then why did you bother to imply that copyright could have been worth respecting if the government and content makers did?
Anyways....
If copyright has value, it stands to reason that breaking it is wrong... for *EITHER* party. If it had no value, then please try to consider exactly why a vast majority of content makers that *DO* make freely available content decide to explicitly utilize copyright instead of putting their works into public domain.
Why should anyone else show respect for it? Because copyright is preferable to the alternative... and that alternative isn't public domain. That's why it's bad.... for *BOTH* sides.
Haskell didn't exist in 1992 either.
Interesting call... Lisp existed back then.
Granted, this particular crash would not have occurred had it been written in Lisp, but the failure on the part of the programmers to anticipate the kind of input that might produce a crash in C could just as likely to cause catastrophic failure in a program written in any language, even Lisp. Ultimately, the problem was not programming language choice - which is my whole point.
Sure you can prove a negative.
Example: it was once thought that atoms were indivisible, and there was nothing smaller. This was proven completely false. Others: That the world is flat was proven false as well. That everything revolves around the earth is proven false.
In fact, all you ever have to do to disprove something is establish the veracity of something else which can be shown to be mutually exclusive with whatever it is you are wanting to disprove.
You should then also ban paper books, talking, sleeping, as well as any people who might be hard of hearing (which would discriminate against a substantial majority of people over about the age of 70).
What language would you advocate, exactly?
The *EXACT* same problem (abrupt program termination) would have plagued the software if had been written in either C# or Java unless exception-handling code was in place to prevent it. Not so coincidentally, the effort spent writing such exception handling code in C# or Java could just as easily be spent on a simple null pointer check before passing a value to strlen in C. Not to mention the fact that neither C# nor Java even existed when ircd was invented.
This was a flaw that exploited nothing more technical than programmer oversight, which can happen just as easily in software written in *ANY* language.
That question is like asking how many meters per second are there in a kilometer More generally, it is like asking how many first derivatives of f(x) are in 1000 f(x). Quite honestly, the question has no factual answer other than discarding the wording of the question, and informing the questioner of the difference between power and energy. It would have been very interesting to watch if the contestant actually knew this and the show had the answer wrong.
As for OS's that won't run with UEFI disabled. I have no use for them.
The former is caused by electrostatic repulsion between droplets of liquid, whose minimum size is determined by the surface tension properties of the liquid. But even these tiny droplets, which are on the order of only about a nanometer or two in size, are still about another order of magnitude larger than the molecules that liquid itself is made of.
I don't think you tried very hard.
Imagine a copyright-free future where every individual publisher makes their own ebook reader... where paper bound books are hardly ever printed any more, and publishers resort to closely guarded trade secrets to maintain whatever control they can manage over the content that they do release. There will be no standardization for data format or technology, because standardization would enable the public to easily reverse engineer the technology. The content would be heavily advertisement laden to help subsidize the costs, and tampering with the technology to try to bypass such advertisements could go so far as to render the reader utterly unusable, increasing costs to consumers. And even as the secrets are broken by hackers, new DRM methods will continually developed which obsolete the old, and people with hacked technologies will simply not be able to continue to utilize newer content, and people who buy newer technology will not be able to utilize older content. You can choose not to buy such technology, of course, but as it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, all you'd be doing is ostracizing yourself from the digital culture that will only grow proportionally prevalent in a technologically advanced society. Programmable computers would not be available commercially... although there would not be laws forbidding their manufacture or sale, since the closed appliances would meet so many of the average person's needs, the market for them would be all but non-existent. The niche market which does exist for such devices would cause the costs of such equipment to be likely out of the reach of all but the very wealthy. But even as useful technologies are developed on such devices, the lack of copyright would enable corporations to freely copy the technologies and incorporate the capabilities into their own closed devices, so that new customers do not feel that they are being left out by not having a versatile programmable device. Small-time publishers that may not have the money to employ sophisticated protection systems could end up having their content stolen from them before they are able to adapt, and put on more sophisticated content controls that are managed by another, larger publisher, leaving the small publisher with no legal recourse due to the abolition of copyright. On account of the larger publisher's wider distribution capacity or bandwidth, they would effectively receive all the credit for the work, while the original artist may receive almost none, since much of society will still continue to prefer spoon-fed content to that which they must actively try to search for.
That, I would dare say, is almost certainly but a glimpse of what would await us within but a single generation after the abolition of copyright. Dream on if you seriously believe it would be any better.
One only has to casually examine the body of freely available works that are being made and distributed today to ascertain the veracity of such a supposition.
While it's true that there's no lack of ability or desire for people to produce their own content without seeking compensation direction for that content, looking only at that body of content, it's worth noting that a majority of quality freely distributable works that are being made today are *NOT* simply released into public domain... they are still copyrighted, again, in spite of being freely distributable. If, in fact, the control that copyright offers that the creators of free works was not important to them, then the distributors would not put copyright notices on them.
If copyright ceases to offer content creators the control that they desire, it is a certainty that they will resort to other means... such as self-censorship or recourses that will impact the number of people that can actually enjoy the product at their convenience (which many content makers are already starting to resort to even today, and laws forbidding the circumvention of such techniques are starting to appear with greater and greater frequency). In the end, society suffers.
It's this point that you're wrong about. You'll get an inkling of what I'm talking about if you try the experiment I described with a tube full of water and two sealed ends.
I've attempted to describe to you what would happen at the very tiny scales that would be easily wide enough for electrons to pass, while still being far too tiny for the surface tension of the liquid to permit the formation of droplets that would allow macroscopic flow. Again, everyday experience with the macroscopic, such as what you'd get with a water hose and blocking water by crimping it just doesn't translate very well to scales as small as what you need to actually block electron flow.
However, if you're convinced that I'm a moron, then there's not much point in continuing this. But for the record, resorting to ad hominems doesn't exactly strengthen your position.