Tell me, do you sell your car for what it's actually worth, or do you add a little bit extra to negotiate down from? Same thing. Admittedly, most people add 10--15%, not 1000%...
And what happens, if the accused accepts the original terms inflated for about 10-15%? You would lock him for the extra time he doesn't deserve?
This is clearly bullshit, legal system is not a barter. People should be charged with sentences apropriate with the damages they caused. In the case of Aaron Schwarz, that woul be warning or probation, certainly not 30 years in prison. The prosecutor should be jailed instead.
if you don't like a service that requires real names, use one that allows pseudonyms
Or, if you like to use the service that requires real names, use it with fake real name. There is no way they could enforce the rule if you are careful.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
You entire post sounds like what Aaron did (the JSTOR database publication, not the suicide) was wrong and no one should ever follow him. When we think some law is unjust, we should not challenge it, because the rattlesnake goverment could bite us, we should just stay quiet and swallow it up. Is it what you are trying to say?
I cannot agree with this. People need to challenge things they don't agree with. The evil in this case is the prosecutor and the law which enabled him to buly and threat Aaron with charges of up to 30 years in prison for act with no or minimal damages. Let's not forget this.
Money for publication should be part of the grant. If public pays for research but the results are closed, what did the public exactly paid for? Where is the benefit?
While I see some reason there, most of the zealots (most of whom don't come from research) forget the very important issue that open access doesn't mean free. If someone wants to publish an article as "open access", that can cost the author many thousands of Eur/USD, essentially shifting the cost from the readers to the authors
If you are unable to release the results of your research to the public, that's OK with me, but don't expect to get any public money from the goverment. Why should be the private research journals able to profit from tax-payers funded research?
No. Black holes are not dark matter. Well, I mean, yeah, they are dark. Like black dark. Like "how much more dark could they be? None, none more dark." But they are normal matter, not dark matter. The mass of (nearby) galactic core black holes is easily measured by measuring the speed of closely orbiting stars. Their velocity is entirely dependent on the mass inside their orbit, so no need to invoke dark matter.
You are right that we can measure the mass of black holes pretty well so this discovery would probably not lead to any new insight about the origin of dark matter. (or in other words: the missing mass in our universe).
But your statement that black holes are composed of 'normal matter' is slightly inaccurate. Black holes are formed mainly from normal "baryonic" matter (protons and neutrons) but when this matter is absorbed by black hole, it is stripped of all it's properties expect mass, charge and momentum. So theoreticaly, black hole could be formed from more exotic types of matter or even just from photons/radiation. On the outside, it would alway look the same. This is called No Hair theorem.
"We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy,"
Even more, from when or where did arise an obligation for Google to demote the sites with "large amount of piracy"? Will RIAA pay the extra cost? Or is somehow RIAA turning "pinky" (that is: suggesting that the "hand of free market needs guidance")?
They could have problem if they don't actively try to demote pirate sites, because then, they would be no different from the Pirate Bay and could be charged with copyright infringment support.
Yes, our copyright laws are stupid and should go away and be replaced with some form of support for IP creators which doesn't depend on artificial distribution restrictions.
If people are looking for pirating sites, I would expect them to show up at the top of the rankings. Because if I was searching for [artist] [track] download, I am not looking for amazon.com.
What Google has done is reduced when these sites would show up when you were looking for legitimate sites. Just like they reduced the adult content you see unless you are looking for adult content. It's not Google's job to police what people search for, just to make sure they find what they are looking for.
Also, the "legitimate" sites RIAA is suggesting to Google (NPR's music website, Hulu, Spotify) would be useless for most users outside USA as they don't offer their services to much countries outside of U.S.
- first we should find out how much money are we spending on IP today. - set the cultural tax so the total amount of money poured into the IP creation remains roughly the same as today. (In fact, it will mean more money for IP creators, because we will save quite significiant amount which is today wasted on IP related litigation, reduntant network technology instalations etc.) - there should be slight progression in cultural tax, so low income people pay less, high income people pay more. Tax deductible coupons and similar mechanisms could be also introduced.
When we have the money, the remaining problem is, how to distribute them. The best and most fair solution would be imo goverment and/or privately run kickstarter-like websites. IP creators would post their creations for sale there. Every tax-paying citizen would automaticaly get some credit on those sites (equal to te tax he payed) and he could then distribute the credit between the IP works he likes. When the credit assigned to some work by various users reaches the ammount the submitter requested, the work is purchuased. Works purchuased in this way are automaticaly released into public domain and are free to share. When some passive users refuse to use the site and distribute their credit, it is distributed automaticaly (based on the active users prefferences). Also, IP could be divided into categories and there could be some minimum mandatory amount which each user must spent on specific category of IP. That's because we want some unpopular but important segments of IP to be still funded. This way, we can ensure that the spectrum of IP works funded remains roughly the same as today, if we wish so.
That would be the outline of my idea of copyright reform. I'm of course open for discussion about this. Sure there is a room for coruption when large amounts of money are redistributed via goverment, but the problem is IMO far smaller then the problems of current copyright. Unfortunately it looks like utopy today, because current copyright it supported by many international threaties and i don't see any way it will change in near future. Fortunately piracy exist so the more internet-savy users can ignore copyright completely.
Maybe exclusivity was the only way which drove creation of IP in the past, but it is certainly not the only posibility and it is pretty bad choice. With exclusivity, you have same problems as with copyright: you cannot effectively share, archive, catalogue, remix and build upon the IP.
We must think of a way of supporting creators without the need to artificaly limit distribution. There certainly are many ways how to do that.
The economy wouldn't support the situation you describe. There would be people opening hotels to serve people who otherwise couldn't find a place.
You realy believe that? Check out how many bars/restaurants did the economy open for black people in the past when it was legal and common to ban them from such premises.
He brought the system to halt? This is new info for me. I though he just tested for vulnerabilities. If you had your personal data stored in vulnerable school system, you'd just report it and let it go? You wouldn't check if the vulnerability is fixed and your data secured? Personaly i think that what Ahmed did was perfectly rational and right thing to do. Expeling him for it is gross abuse of power of school administration.
You are confusing your utopian vision with the real world. How people should judge others is unimportant. How they *do* judge others is. So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.
Not working for assholes, who dismiss you just because someone with the same name has a party photo public on the internet, is not utopian, it's probably you who has wrong vision of real world.
There is no need to go back to parents and begg to live in basement again (btw you must have strange parents, normal people are not living in basement). You just look for another employer, who doesn't threat his people like shit. There are lots of them, i'm working for one.
Bullshit. You can still search for whatever you want, you just need to specify that yes you really do want THOSE kind of images. I think this is a good thing. It shouldn't be easy to end up with porn in your search results by accident.
But, what if i'm not aware what information i'm looking for (whis is usualy the case)?
Take this example: i'm looking for all kinds of images of some person. I don't know anythink about that person and i just want to find out more about her using google image search.
Suppose that the person i'm looking for is a porn star but i don't know that.
In previous version of google image search, with safe search off (i had it off on my account, i'm adult after all) i'd get mix of porn and normal images of the person i'm interesting in. My picture of her, that i draw from those results would be quite acurate.
In current version of google image search, i'd only get "safe" pictures and the resulting opinion i draw from those would be much less accurate.
By making safe search mandatory, google had crippled it's search accuracy for many use cases.
The other kids then report to their parents that you showed them porn on your computer. Next thing you know you're being visited by the police who seize your computer, laptop and iPad. Next, child services have taken away your kids. Your name is muck, you lose your job as a result of the press attention and you need to remortgage the house to clear the whole mess up.
If what you just described is even remotely posiible in U.S. it means that your justice system and your social values are so fucked up that i wouldn't be afrtaid to compare them to religious regimes like Iran. The right thing to do then would not be to accept further censorship from google but to take stance against those practices.
I would argue that most of the scientists you hear arguing for atheism have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist
I don't quite follow what are you trying to say, but this sentence is clearly false. Current scientific consensus is that we cannot observe things beyond our visible universe. Our visible universe is limited by the speed of light and the time it has to reach us. So scientists know that there are many things which exist but we will never be able to reach them. If anyone is trying to tell you anythink else, it's not scientist but pseudoscientist in my opinion.
Also, scientist usualy don't argue about god. They simply don't know what did our universe emerged from. Also, if they eventualy find out, where the space-time and matter at the beggining of the big bang came from, people will just push the question further back in time and will start to ask "where did the conditions we have before big bang come from" and so on ad infinitum.
So scientists don't know anything about our initial conditions and where did they come from. But from the observations of our current universe, there are very strong indications that the initial creating force was not antropocentric or inteligent, but rather random, chaotic and full of quantum fluctuations.
I don't have to find the actual downloader, just the person facilitating it. Like it or not, facilitating crime IS a crime.
Running TOR exit node or open wifi or similar is NOT facilitating crime.
It's just like bulding a public road. When some thief uses your road to escape from crime scene, you are not responsible for facilitating crime, are you?
The surest way to combat piracy will be to require ISP's to map IP addresses to subscribers. Add monitoring and automatic notices that warn of the copyright laws already on the books will follow.
This won't work at all. ISPs already map IP addresses to subscribers but they have no way to find out who exactly is using the internet connection at any time. It could be the subscriber, it could be someone from his family, guests or complete strangers using his open wifi network.
You can add monitoring of traffic at ISP level, but how will the ISP find out, if some movie upload/download should be considered copyright infrigment and not fair use? We live in 21st century, it's increasingly common that users are backing up their movie colections to personal cloud storages etc which is completely legal.
The surest way to combat piracy is to abolish copyright. It is backward law causing many problems to wide group of people which has no place in this digital century.
I promise that I'll delete all the ROMs as soon as the set sells
Please don't do this. It took certainly great effort to make proper dump of each game you have. Don't let this effort go to waste due to some idiotic laws and rather then deleting the ROMs, share then via some p2p network like bittorrent - http://thepiratebay.se/ There are certainly people who will help you to share your roms anonymously, if you are afraid to share them yourself.
These belong in a public museum, not some private collection. I hope that somebody who is rich and who appreciates video games makes the purchase, and donates them to the Smithsonian or some other reputable museum so that they can be publicly displayed for all to see and to experience.
The physical goods should be surely in the care of some good museum, but the digital games should be in public domain for everyone to enjoy, not just for ultra rich people who are able to afford this overblown price.
I have always had serious trouble with the "rational" part of that in regards to Stallman, and the foot-eating thing only reinforces that.
You say you have problems with Stallman ideas yet you fail to provide single valid argument against him. Instead you resort to attacking his behaviour, which has nothing to do with his opinions. This is logical falacy.
I have a better way to ensure that no one can "pirate" my works: Don't make them unless I'll get paid to do so. After you've done the work, the public has paid you to do, then everyone gets copies for free (or only the cost to make the copy). The trick is asking for enough money to fund my development up front, you know, like a home builder or a mechanic will give you an estimate for their work.
That's nice idea that i'd realy like to see implemented. There are imo two problems that i see with it:
- it will not work very well while copyright is still in effect (people will be not incentivised enough to organise themself and crowdfund something, when they can just buy (or rather license) finished movie on their own for few bucks) - when copyright is gone, people will just wait for other people to crowdfund something so they can enjoy the finished movie released in public domain for free. As a result, very few people will be willing to participate in crowdfunding.
My solution to those problems would be to abolish copyright AND to make payment for IP mandatory for example in the form of tax (but the decision, how the tax is spend would remain on the user paying the tax!)
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, do you sell your car for what it's actually worth, or do you add a little bit extra to negotiate down from? Same thing. Admittedly, most people add 10--15%, not 1000%...
And what happens, if the accused accepts the original terms inflated for about 10-15%? You would lock him for the extra time he doesn't deserve?
This is clearly bullshit, legal system is not a barter. People should be charged with sentences apropriate with the damages they caused. In the case of Aaron Schwarz, that woul be warning or probation, certainly not 30 years in prison. The prosecutor should be jailed instead.
if you don't like a service that requires real names, use one that allows pseudonyms
Or, if you like to use the service that requires real names, use it with fake real name. There is no way they could enforce the rule if you are careful.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
You entire post sounds like what Aaron did (the JSTOR database publication, not the suicide) was wrong and no one should ever follow him. When we think some law is unjust, we should not challenge it, because the rattlesnake goverment could bite us, we should just stay quiet and swallow it up. Is it what you are trying to say?
I cannot agree with this. People need to challenge things they don't agree with. The evil in this case is the prosecutor and the law which enabled him to buly and threat Aaron with charges of up to 30 years in prison for act with no or minimal damages. Let's not forget this.
Money for publication should be part of the grant. If public pays for research but the results are closed, what did the public exactly paid for? Where is the benefit?
While I see some reason there, most of the zealots (most of whom don't come from research) forget the very important issue that open access doesn't mean free. If someone wants to publish an article as "open access", that can cost the author many thousands of Eur/USD, essentially shifting the cost from the readers to the authors
If you are unable to release the results of your research to the public, that's OK with me, but don't expect to get any public money from the goverment. Why should be the private research journals able to profit from tax-payers funded research?
No. Black holes are not dark matter. Well, I mean, yeah, they are dark. Like black dark. Like "how much more dark could they be? None, none more dark." But they are normal matter, not dark matter. The mass of (nearby) galactic core black holes is easily measured by measuring the speed of closely orbiting stars. Their velocity is entirely dependent on the mass inside their orbit, so no need to invoke dark matter.
You are right that we can measure the mass of black holes pretty well so this discovery would probably not lead to any new insight about the origin of dark matter. (or in other words: the missing mass in our universe).
But your statement that black holes are composed of 'normal matter' is slightly inaccurate. Black holes are formed mainly from normal "baryonic" matter (protons and neutrons) but when this matter is absorbed by black hole, it is stripped of all it's properties expect mass, charge and momentum. So theoreticaly, black hole could be formed from more exotic types of matter or even just from photons/radiation. On the outside, it would alway look the same. This is called No Hair theorem.
What distinguishes ""real" currency" (that is legal tender; aka money) is that mutually acceptability is not required for its use.
Realy? And how does the transaction between two parties work, when one party refuses to accept your "real" currency?
"We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy,"
Even more, from when or where did arise an obligation for Google to demote the sites with "large amount of piracy"? Will RIAA pay the extra cost?
Or is somehow RIAA turning "pinky" (that is: suggesting that the "hand of free market needs guidance")?
They could have problem if they don't actively try to demote pirate sites, because then, they would be no different from the Pirate Bay and could be charged with copyright infringment support.
Yes, our copyright laws are stupid and should go away and be replaced with some form of support for IP creators which doesn't depend on artificial distribution restrictions.
If people are looking for pirating sites, I would expect them to show up at the top of the rankings. Because if I was searching for [artist] [track] download, I am not looking for amazon.com.
What Google has done is reduced when these sites would show up when you were looking for legitimate sites. Just like they reduced the adult content you see unless you are looking for adult content. It's not Google's job to police what people search for, just to make sure they find what they are looking for.
Also, the "legitimate" sites RIAA is suggesting to Google (NPR's music website, Hulu, Spotify) would be useless for most users outside USA as they don't offer their services to much countries outside of U.S.
I'm advocating for cultural tax.
- first we should find out how much money are we spending on IP today.
- set the cultural tax so the total amount of money poured into the IP creation remains roughly the same as today. (In fact, it will mean more money for IP creators, because we will save quite significiant amount which is today wasted on IP related litigation, reduntant network technology instalations etc.)
- there should be slight progression in cultural tax, so low income people pay less, high income people pay more. Tax deductible coupons and similar mechanisms could be also introduced.
When we have the money, the remaining problem is, how to distribute them. The best and most fair solution would be imo goverment and/or privately run kickstarter-like websites. IP creators would post their creations for sale there. Every tax-paying citizen would automaticaly get some credit on those sites (equal to te tax he payed) and he could then distribute the credit between the IP works he likes. When the credit assigned to some work by various users reaches the ammount the submitter requested, the work is purchuased. Works purchuased in this way are automaticaly released into public domain and are free to share.
When some passive users refuse to use the site and distribute their credit, it is distributed automaticaly (based on the active users prefferences).
Also, IP could be divided into categories and there could be some minimum mandatory amount which each user must spent on specific category of IP. That's because we want some unpopular but important segments of IP to be still funded. This way, we can ensure that the spectrum of IP works funded remains roughly the same as today, if we wish so.
That would be the outline of my idea of copyright reform. I'm of course open for discussion about this. Sure there is a room for coruption when large amounts of money are redistributed via goverment, but the problem is IMO far smaller then the problems of current copyright. Unfortunately it looks like utopy today, because current copyright it supported by many international threaties and i don't see any way it will change in near future. Fortunately piracy exist so the more internet-savy users can ignore copyright completely.
Maybe exclusivity was the only way which drove creation of IP in the past, but it is certainly not the only posibility and it is pretty bad choice. With exclusivity, you have same problems as with copyright: you cannot effectively share, archive, catalogue, remix and build upon the IP.
We must think of a way of supporting creators without the need to artificaly limit distribution. There certainly are many ways how to do that.
The economy wouldn't support the situation you describe. There would be people opening hotels to serve people who otherwise couldn't find a place.
You realy believe that? Check out how many bars/restaurants did the economy open for black people in the past when it was legal and common to ban them from such premises.
He used Acunetix to bring their system to a halt
He brought the system to halt? This is new info for me. I though he just tested for vulnerabilities. If you had your personal data stored in vulnerable school system, you'd just report it and let it go? You wouldn't check if the vulnerability is fixed and your data secured? Personaly i think that what Ahmed did was perfectly rational and right thing to do. Expeling him for it is gross abuse of power of school administration.
You are confusing your utopian vision with the real world. How people should judge others is unimportant. How they *do* judge others is. So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.
Not working for assholes, who dismiss you just because someone with the same name has a party photo public on the internet, is not utopian, it's probably you who has wrong vision of real world.
There is no need to go back to parents and begg to live in basement again (btw you must have strange parents, normal people are not living in basement). You just look for another employer, who doesn't threat his people like shit. There are lots of them, i'm working for one.
And where to draw the line ? Crossbows ? Bows ? Slingshots ? Knives ?
I think that no automatic or semi-automatic guns would be good start.
Bullshit. You can still search for whatever you want, you just need to specify that yes you really do want THOSE kind of images. I think this is a good thing. It shouldn't be easy to end up with porn in your search results by accident.
But, what if i'm not aware what information i'm looking for (whis is usualy the case)?
Take this example: i'm looking for all kinds of images of some person. I don't know anythink about that person and i just want to find out more about her using google image search.
Suppose that the person i'm looking for is a porn star but i don't know that.
In previous version of google image search, with safe search off (i had it off on my account, i'm adult after all) i'd get mix of porn and normal images of the person i'm interesting in. My picture of her, that i draw from those results would be quite acurate.
In current version of google image search, i'd only get "safe" pictures and the resulting opinion i draw from those would be much less accurate.
By making safe search mandatory, google had crippled it's search accuracy for many use cases.
The other kids then report to their parents that you showed them porn on your computer. Next thing you know you're being visited by the police who seize your computer, laptop and iPad. Next, child services have taken away your kids. Your name is muck, you lose your job as a result of the press attention and you need to remortgage the house to clear the whole mess up.
If what you just described is even remotely posiible in U.S. it means that your justice system and your social values are so fucked up that i wouldn't be afrtaid to compare them to religious regimes like Iran. The right thing to do then would not be to accept further censorship from google but to take stance against those practices.
I would argue that most of the scientists you hear arguing for atheism have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist
I don't quite follow what are you trying to say, but this sentence is clearly false. Current scientific consensus is that we cannot observe things beyond our visible universe. Our visible universe is limited by the speed of light and the time it has to reach us. So scientists know that there are many things which exist but we will never be able to reach them. If anyone is trying to tell you anythink else, it's not scientist but pseudoscientist in my opinion.
Also, scientist usualy don't argue about god. They simply don't know what did our universe emerged from. Also, if they eventualy find out, where the space-time and matter at the beggining of the big bang came from, people will just push the question further back in time and will start to ask "where did the conditions we have before big bang come from" and so on ad infinitum.
So scientists don't know anything about our initial conditions and where did they come from. But from the observations of our current universe, there are very strong indications that the initial creating force was not antropocentric or inteligent, but rather random, chaotic and full of quantum fluctuations.
I don't have to find the actual downloader, just the person facilitating it. Like it or not, facilitating crime IS a crime.
Running TOR exit node or open wifi or similar is NOT facilitating crime.
It's just like bulding a public road. When some thief uses your road to escape from crime scene, you are not responsible for facilitating crime, are you?
The surest way to combat piracy will be to require ISP's to map IP addresses to subscribers. Add monitoring and automatic notices that warn of the copyright laws already on the books will follow.
This won't work at all. ISPs already map IP addresses to subscribers but they have no way to find out who exactly is using the internet connection at any time. It could be the subscriber, it could be someone from his family, guests or complete strangers using his open wifi network.
You can add monitoring of traffic at ISP level, but how will the ISP find out, if some movie upload/download should be considered copyright infrigment and not fair use? We live in 21st century, it's increasingly common that users are backing up their movie colections to personal cloud storages etc which is completely legal.
The surest way to combat piracy is to abolish copyright. It is backward law causing many problems to wide group of people which has no place in this digital century.
I promise that I'll delete all the ROMs as soon as the set sells
Please don't do this. It took certainly great effort to make proper dump of each game you have. Don't let this effort go to waste due to some idiotic laws and rather then deleting the ROMs, share then via some p2p network like bittorrent - http://thepiratebay.se/
There are certainly people who will help you to share your roms anonymously, if you are afraid to share them yourself.
These belong in a public museum, not some private collection. I hope that somebody who is rich and who appreciates video games makes the purchase, and donates them to the Smithsonian or some other reputable museum so that they can be publicly displayed for all to see and to experience.
The physical goods should be surely in the care of some good museum, but the digital games should be in public domain for everyone to enjoy, not just for ultra rich people who are able to afford this overblown price.
If you can pay your taxes with it, then it has real value.
If you can manufacture things with it, then it has real value.
If you can eat it, then it has real value.
If you can't do any of those things with it, then it has only speculative imaginary value.
So dollars have only speculative imaginary value for me? (Note i'm not paying my taxes in dollars)
I have always had serious trouble with the "rational" part of that in regards to Stallman, and the foot-eating thing only reinforces that.
You say you have problems with Stallman ideas yet you fail to provide single valid argument against him. Instead you resort to attacking his behaviour, which has nothing to do with his opinions. This is logical falacy.
I have a better way to ensure that no one can "pirate" my works: Don't make them unless I'll get paid to do so. After you've done the work, the public has paid you to do, then everyone gets copies for free (or only the cost to make the copy). The trick is asking for enough money to fund my development up front, you know, like a home builder or a mechanic will give you an estimate for their work.
That's nice idea that i'd realy like to see implemented. There are imo two problems that i see with it:
- it will not work very well while copyright is still in effect (people will be not incentivised enough to organise themself and crowdfund something, when they can just buy (or rather license) finished movie on their own for few bucks)
- when copyright is gone, people will just wait for other people to crowdfund something so they can enjoy the finished movie released in public domain for free. As a result, very few people will be willing to participate in crowdfunding.
My solution to those problems would be to abolish copyright AND to make payment for IP mandatory for example in the form of tax (but the decision, how the tax is spend would remain on the user paying the tax!)