It's not generally illegal to simply ask someone to put a backdoor in their product, nor is it typically illegal for them to comply with such a request voluntarily unless there were patently obvious negative implications to public safety and security.
.... that will be required on the part of law enforcement to protect innocent people from the prying eyes of nefarious individuals that will use the exact same back doors that the government will have.
Oh, of course these people may be breaking the law, but that's not going to help the people that will get harmed in the interim.
I expect they will realize their folly within about 6 months to a year,
I would imagine that VPN's everywhere would simply fail to function, unless the VPN you were using was paying a kickback to your ISP to include it in their basic service plan.
It's trivial for an ISP to block any traffic that is not expressly whitelisted based on customer demands. You wouldn't even be able to ping an IP address other than those that your ISP allows to talk to.
Actually, I said that if a person has a legally recognized right to something that they value, and you deprive them of that, then you deprive them of a corresponding measure of that value... regardless of what kind of value you or I or anyone else might place upon it.
Value may translate directly to monetary worth, but not always. I deem that the the copyrights on GPL software have value, for instance, but I would not associate any particular monetary value to them/.
Of the things you've mentioned, the only thing actually poor people can do is ask to borrow money. People who have any ability to do the other things you said are not poor.
I've been poor. We didn't have a cable tv package, fancy or otherwise. We had one car between my wife and I, and we drove that thing into the dirt. We bought groceries at the nearby discount grocery store, and we certainly didn't go on any vacations.
You realize that you want some feature, X, from an open source project, and nobody on the dev team wants to do it or thinks its high enough priority, so you roll up your sleeves and make it happen, and after going through an arduous code review process that you spend the better part of a week trying to accommodate, they suddenly they get all like "can you fix this?"or "can you help us with that?" and you end up essentially working for free for several months out of the same sense of just wanting to help that prompted your involvement in the first place, and for people you will never even meet.
Lesson learned. If you want to fix a problem you find with an open source project, make sure you understand that you may find yourself obligated into doing more than you initially expect.
Of course... but then that boils down to what I had said in the first place about not agreeing with the ethics behind copyright.
That someone might happen to think copyright is okay in theory. but not like how it actually gets implemented in practice, even if they imagine that it could be implemented differently, is entirely irrelevant. The end result is the same.... they don't agree with copyright... any copyright they might allege to agree with is not the real world copyright that we are actually faced with.
And hey, who *wouldn't* prefer their ideal fantasy to something as it might actually exist in the real world.
One might think there's plenty of fixable stuff wrong with copyright, but that doesn't mean that it's up to individuals in the general public to act as vigilantes to correct the wrongdoing. Again, the principle of two wrongs don't make a right applies here.
That said, if one thinks copyright is too long, and only pirates content from before about the mid 1960's, then I might have a little more sympathy. Call me skeptical that is what people who are justifying their piracy on account of overly long copyright terms are actually doing, however.
Of course... so just because the law doesn't happen to cater to *THEIR* preference, it must be a bad law, and therefore ignored.
The same argument could be made for people with compulsive kleptomania. Doesn't mean they are doing an acceptable thing by following their impulses, however.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said that if you don't think that copyright has any ethical merits, then one is being more honest by admitting that they just don't respect intellectual property in the first place instead of trying to pretend that they are taking some sort of moral high ground that should be immune to being judged.
Explain how anyone is harmed when a "pirate" torrents a movie that they otherwise would not have watched at all.
Fair question.
Copyright is supposed to entail the exclusive right of control over who may copy a work. If someone copies the work without permission, they deprive the copyright owner of that control, meaning that a portion of what the copyright owner was supposely supposed to have is irrecoverably lost.
That someone else might not think that causes any measurable or real harm is irrellevant. If the copyright holder places value upon that right, then infringing on it lessens that value, and so harms the copyright holder.
It exists for purposes of control... and while it is artificial, it is an extension of the natural right of control one does have when they create a work when they don't distribute it in the first place.
The entire point of copyright is to offer the creator an artificially created form of control over the work similar to the control they would have had if they had never distributed it in exchange for distributing it publicly. In this way, it is seen that copyright promotes the sciences and arts by enriching culture with an influx of new created works that are not kept private, but available publicly (even if at cost).
Copyright is too long, I hear you on that point.... I just don't believe that disrespecting it in return is doing anything other than returning wrong for wrong, and there's an old saying about two wrongs that however cliche is still true.
Pro-tip: words in English can have multiple meanings. Typically you can figure out which one by context, although if you can't, it's not usually considered rude to ask (ignorant maybe, but not rude).
When people say they had to behave unethically because they had no choice, it is almost always a lie. What they mean is that they didn't like the choices they had, and taking the unethical option involved less sacrifice, less controversy, less criticism, less effortâ¦in short, less courage, than doing the right thing. Ethics often requires pain; if making the ethical choice was easy, there would be no need to practice being ethical. You may decide that doing the right thing is too costly or requires more personal misery than you can bear - a lost job, a ruined reputation, financial capacity, punishment for breaking with tradition or rules -
sometimes that is a reasonable choice. But you still had a choice, and you are still accountable for the choice you made.
If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
False analogy. Edge is created by Microsoft, not the other way around. Your metaphor for my initial question seems to effectively liken Hitler to Edge and the Holocaust to Microsoft, which is like saying that the Holocaust caused Hitler.
Assuming that you meant it the other way around, the Holocaust was bad regardless of who initiated it, and there are plenty of bad things that Hitler did anyways... these are all quite obvious.
Edge is something happening *today*. And as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. It's not impossible that a bad company could produce a product that is technically good, and I was asking if there were any technically bad reasons to avoid Edge, or if the bias against it was only based only on distrust of Microsoft based on their past performances. Regardless of how deserving Microsoft might be about this is irrelevant.
All I got from the initial round of replies was, in fact, that no... everyone who initially responded was so focused on hating Microsoft that they never even bothered to see if Edge was or was not actually technically inferior to alternatives.
That's not objective. At best it's lazy, and it's certainly not what I asked for.
Nice self-professed Godwin, by the way. Full marks.
I was upset that people are dumping on Edge because of grievances against Microsoft when I explicitly mentioned right from the very beginning that I wanted to exclude such biases from consideration.
Call me pedantic, but when I ask a question about XYZ stating at the very beginning that I already know about ABC and want a list of any other issues, and everybody that initially responds only gives me more of ABC, I can get a little ornery about the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
If all of this data is being *given away*, then how is it objectively worth any money?
It's not generally illegal to simply ask someone to put a backdoor in their product, nor is it typically illegal for them to comply with such a request voluntarily unless there were patently obvious negative implications to public safety and security.
I was operating on the same assumptions that the poster to whom I replied was making, and going on one cup a day.
How infeasible this might or might not seem to be is irrelevant.
I could ask a company to put a backdoor in their product if I wanted to. I might be laughed at, but I can certainly ask.
A court order is only required if you need to force the recipient to comply.
Oh, of course these people may be breaking the law, but that's not going to help the people that will get harmed in the interim.
I expect they will realize their folly within about 6 months to a year,
I would imagine that VPN's everywhere would simply fail to function, unless the VPN you were using was paying a kickback to your ISP to include it in their basic service plan.
It's trivial for an ISP to block any traffic that is not expressly whitelisted based on customer demands. You wouldn't even be able to ping an IP address other than those that your ISP allows to talk to.
[nt]
Actually, I said that if a person has a legally recognized right to something that they value, and you deprive them of that, then you deprive them of a corresponding measure of that value... regardless of what kind of value you or I or anyone else might place upon it.
Value may translate directly to monetary worth, but not always. I deem that the the copyrights on GPL software have value, for instance, but I would not associate any particular monetary value to them/.
Of the things you've mentioned, the only thing actually poor people can do is ask to borrow money. People who have any ability to do the other things you said are not poor.
I've been poor. We didn't have a cable tv package, fancy or otherwise. We had one car between my wife and I, and we drove that thing into the dirt. We bought groceries at the nearby discount grocery store, and we certainly didn't go on any vacations.
(excuse the typos.... the final answer is right, however)
$2.20/cup - $0.18/cup = $2.22/cup, multiplied by 1 cup/day times 365 days per year = $846.80 saved vs going to Starbucks each day.
You realize that you want some feature, X, from an open source project, and nobody on the dev team wants to do it or thinks its high enough priority, so you roll up your sleeves and make it happen, and after going through an arduous code review process that you spend the better part of a week trying to accommodate, they suddenly they get all like "can you fix this?"or "can you help us with that?" and you end up essentially working for free for several months out of the same sense of just wanting to help that prompted your involvement in the first place, and for people you will never even meet.
Lesson learned. If you want to fix a problem you find with an open source project, make sure you understand that you may find yourself obligated into doing more than you initially expect.
What's I find interesting is that it's actually been modded up as insightful.
I shudder to think what the implications of that are.
Of course... but then that boils down to what I had said in the first place about not agreeing with the ethics behind copyright.
That someone might happen to think copyright is okay in theory. but not like how it actually gets implemented in practice, even if they imagine that it could be implemented differently, is entirely irrelevant. The end result is the same.... they don't agree with copyright... any copyright they might allege to agree with is not the real world copyright that we are actually faced with.
And hey, who *wouldn't* prefer their ideal fantasy to something as it might actually exist in the real world.
One might think there's plenty of fixable stuff wrong with copyright, but that doesn't mean that it's up to individuals in the general public to act as vigilantes to correct the wrongdoing. Again, the principle of two wrongs don't make a right applies here.
That said, if one thinks copyright is too long, and only pirates content from before about the mid 1960's, then I might have a little more sympathy. Call me skeptical that is what people who are justifying their piracy on account of overly long copyright terms are actually doing, however.
Of course... so just because the law doesn't happen to cater to *THEIR* preference, it must be a bad law, and therefore ignored.
The same argument could be made for people with compulsive kleptomania. Doesn't mean they are doing an acceptable thing by following their impulses, however.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said that if you don't think that copyright has any ethical merits, then one is being more honest by admitting that they just don't respect intellectual property in the first place instead of trying to pretend that they are taking some sort of moral high ground that should be immune to being judged.
Fair question.
Copyright is supposed to entail the exclusive right of control over who may copy a work. If someone copies the work without permission, they deprive the copyright owner of that control, meaning that a portion of what the copyright owner was supposely supposed to have is irrecoverably lost.
That someone else might not think that causes any measurable or real harm is irrellevant. If the copyright holder places value upon that right, then infringing on it lessens that value, and so harms the copyright holder.
Remember.... you asked.
Probably true... but most of what people pirate isn't content that's been around before around 1960, is it?
And of course, the saying about two wrongs not making a right still applies.
It exists for purposes of control... and while it is artificial, it is an extension of the natural right of control one does have when they create a work when they don't distribute it in the first place.
The entire point of copyright is to offer the creator an artificially created form of control over the work similar to the control they would have had if they had never distributed it in exchange for distributing it publicly. In this way, it is seen that copyright promotes the sciences and arts by enriching culture with an influx of new created works that are not kept private, but available publicly (even if at cost).
Copyright is too long, I hear you on that point.... I just don't believe that disrespecting it in return is doing anything other than returning wrong for wrong, and there's an old saying about two wrongs that however cliche is still true.
See rationalization #7.
See the explanations for rationalizations #2, #7 and #49.
Pro-tip: words in English can have multiple meanings. Typically you can figure out which one by context, although if you can't, it's not usually considered rude to ask (ignorant maybe, but not rude).
Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it
Also, see rationilzation #25, the Coercion Myth:
If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
False analogy. Edge is created by Microsoft, not the other way around. Your metaphor for my initial question seems to effectively liken Hitler to Edge and the Holocaust to Microsoft, which is like saying that the Holocaust caused Hitler.
Assuming that you meant it the other way around, the Holocaust was bad regardless of who initiated it, and there are plenty of bad things that Hitler did anyways... these are all quite obvious.
Edge is something happening *today*. And as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. It's not impossible that a bad company could produce a product that is technically good, and I was asking if there were any technically bad reasons to avoid Edge, or if the bias against it was only based only on distrust of Microsoft based on their past performances. Regardless of how deserving Microsoft might be about this is irrelevant.
All I got from the initial round of replies was, in fact, that no... everyone who initially responded was so focused on hating Microsoft that they never even bothered to see if Edge was or was not actually technically inferior to alternatives.
That's not objective. At best it's lazy, and it's certainly not what I asked for.
Nice self-professed Godwin, by the way. Full marks.
I was upset that people are dumping on Edge because of grievances against Microsoft when I explicitly mentioned right from the very beginning that I wanted to exclude such biases from consideration.
Call me pedantic, but when I ask a question about XYZ stating at the very beginning that I already know about ABC and want a list of any other issues, and everybody that initially responds only gives me more of ABC, I can get a little ornery about the matter.