Alternativly the companies in the US higher cheap labour thereby making there products cheaper benefiting both US citizens and those abroad.
Each immigrant we let in is an additional source of production and a consumer. If we pay him less than his american counterparts this means he is producing considerably more than he is consuming (measured in dollars). The market then adjusts to this by lowering prices.
The assumption that immigration will hurt US citizens is equivalent to the non-scalibility of the American market. It stands to reason that if the economy can generate a high quality of life for 270 million then it can do so for 300 million. In fact because of economies of scale you would think that people would be better off in an economy of 300 million than 270 million.
If we accept this assertion combined with your assumption that the foreign programmer is working at lower wages than his american counterparts this means his labour is subsidizing US citizens.
The reason that this doesn't *seem* to be the case is because the negative consequence (falling wages) is immediate and very visible while the positive consequence is long term and distributed.
Now onto the outside of the US. Certainly it helps those people outside of the US who come here to work. Secondly most of the people who come here to work have family back in their native land and send cash back (in some areas this is probably the most significant source of income).
So why does eveyr corrospondance need to be PGP encrypted? If they were a normal organization like d.net or whatever they wouldn't care. The only reason they would need to pgp encrypt the results is if they didn't want people to know they had cracked the messages? Does this seem fishy to anyone else?
This would be a wonderful way for forgien governments to crack some of these codes...enlist US knowledge to unknowing crack their own codes. Personally (although I probably wouldn't be much help) I am not working on this until I have more evidence on who these people are.
Well of course he is using a word for "propaganda value" in the sense that his word describes the way he feels about the subject. Most english non-technical word reflect some sort of value judgement about the thing in question.
It all comes down to which side you think is right. If RMS is indeed correct then the RIAA is in indeed spreading misleading propaganda..while if he is wrong the reverse is true. Personally I find RMS's point of view convincing because I think even the most ardent copyright supporter would agree that the point of copyright is to provide economic incentive for development of IP. Therefore while there might be convincing reasons why we need to punish copyright breakers it is not because the nature of the act (sharing music) is essential bad but for external factors.
>Since information will become a commodity it will be governed by the laws of supply and demand in much the same way as any other product.
This will be true only if we insist on treating it as a good. If nstead we mandadted free information this clearly would not be so.
>information will always cost something to create, and those that put their resources into it should be the ones to profit from it.
I agree, however, it does not follow from this principle that they *own* the product of their labour only that they need some compensation. Unlike physical goods where the maker of the good should be able to set his price (if you take a good away from him he no longer has it) no such philosophical justification exists here to say that the compensation he deserves is what the market will bear. In the case of information often some people are compensated far beyond the effort they put in or the amount of money necessery to encourage creation of the product.
My claim is that the traditional item based model for intellectual property is a poor model for compensation. Instead we need to compensate these people directly from tax money based on some sort of usage/value census.
>Countries and organisations that have spent their resources on an information infrastructure should feel no need to help others to join it.
It seems to be a fairly standard moral principle that you should help others. If your friend comes beging for a loan do you say too bad should have worked harder. Of course not you help him out. So what if these countries problems are the result of internal strife...this doesn't make people in those countries any less human or any less deserving of aid. The nationalistic distinction is necesserily a fallacious one. I would rather help a motivated but uneducated and poor farmer in africa than local trailer trash. There is no difference between a ethiopian and a american except where they happen to be born so their should be no moral justification to saying we need to help one but not the other.
Moreover, intellectual property costs us nothing to offer to these people. I think everyone but the most rabid Ayn Randians will agree with me when I say if you can help someone at no cost to yourself you should indeed help them.
Now your final argument is that freeing IP won't necesserily help them.
>just look at all the trouble caused when Britain gave them an Industrial age infrastructure during the days of their Empire.
Yes, but this also involved britain forcing this infrastructure on them. If we meerly free up information for their use we never need to do anything to them. In fact as it is freely availible for everyone to use we meerly put them at the same place as everyone else.
While you are correct that to some extent they need to develop their own infrastructure this does not mean they need to reinvent the wheel. Japan has managed to prosper not because we told them to go back and rework all of our science and research but because things the western world had already solved were made availible to them. As a result we are both better off (they have a higher standard of living and we exchange goods allowing them to be made more efficently).
This is one of the largest problems with IP is that it forces a huge waste of human capital as companies and countries recreate the same things over and over again. How often do you think people in the corporate world recode the same functions again and again. This is the secret to open source success...not that our coders are better or work more but that we can reuse the code that has been previously written.
Furthermore the economic discrimination about IP is not just country to country but alsso intra-country. I don;t suppose you would argue that the poor in the US should have to build their own infrastructure to reap the benifits of our modern world.
We live in an age of gross usrplus it is time to find something better to do than amass more for personal gain.
The DMCA specifically deals with this. In return for no liability for copyrighted material posted to their site they must remove all copyrighted material in something like 48 hours after being officially notified.
Ohh and yes i am pretty sure rob would remove 100 stolen credit card numbers
Unfourtunately you are talking about the wrong part of the DMCA. This case (mostly) involves people directly posting copyrighted materials. Even if the other parts of the DMCA were striken as unconstitutional the part which requires service provides to remove copyrighted work upon notification in return for abscence of liability would still be present.
While their are some issues with this section (in cases where the service provider isn't sure the material is copyrighted or it is under dispute ala the church of scientology) this is not such a case. This case here boils down to two issues.
A) is a liscence with no associated sale enfourceable
Several thoughts on this manner. First until copyright is finally replaced with a superior system websites must bow to this pressure. For instance if someone posted a cracked copy of quake3 on this site or something similar it is quite reasonable (if you accept copyright law) to suppose that the website will take it down once notified.
However, it is interesting to note that this doesn't seem to be a copyright law issue. This is specifically a liscensing issue. No sale was ever made (it is availible freely) so it is possible a convincing argument could be made that slashdot is not violating copyright law. However to undertake such a position in court and win could very well undermine the GPL (as it doesn't have a sale either). Although I don't think it would be that terrible a thing (most companies are open sourcing their material because of public opinion not because they are traped by the GPL)...BSD isn't dying because of their liscence.
Ok several questions about the method for identifying the DDOS user.
First the method employed is to XOR the addresses of the first and second routers on an edge. Now it is clear that you can trace back IF you are sure what the IP of the secondary router is. However given that the data can follow multiple paths how are you ever certain what this IP is. Secondly as it is a probablisitic process the second IP of the router may be one of many. Is this solved because the IP's of routers along the path are very sparse?
Secondly what prevents a DDos attack from faking this field. Make it look like the attack came through another nearby router.
Thirdly as most DDOS bounce pings off of remote boxes this doesn't let you catch the perpratrtor only identify what boxes are pinging you (these boxes most likely not being aware they are used in a DDOS attack won't be using these methods) thus as this method doesn't allow you to block the DOS attack (most of the packets will be encoded only with routers close to the destination and you don't want to cut off all trafic) what good is it?
Yes, I thought specifically they got around the patents by using the ISO sources. Therefore LAME was never in violation only ISO was and as fraunfaufer submited mp3 to them to standardize they couldn't very well sue ISO over the matter.
I have found ps readerss on every platform you can imagine. Aladdin ps viewer works for linux windows and BSD I believe. I believe there is also a free viewer for mac but i am unsure
Has anyone else noticed that beta.slashdot.org when quesoed reports itself as IBM AIX? Anyone else think this is a little hypocritical or is queso just fucked up?
BTW a big enough round robin should be able to handle just about anything so what is the deal.
Does anyone else find it sucpiscious that no computer was found in this guys house? Maybe its just me but this makes me think its a setup. Moreover they arrested him after watching him for several days and finding no evidence.
Moreover why are they arresting both him and his girlfriend? is this normal?
The fact that the market is acting irrationally with respect to individual stocks should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who looked at the 3com palm valuations. The more important question is the technology sector as a whole overvalued.
I think it was cringely who pointed out that a simple analysis suggests it is undervalued. Technology and internet sales should in the future account for a sizeable percent of all transactions. Therefore comparing against the total amount of sales in the US the total valuation of internet stocks isn't very large.
The question at hand is then will the internet market be filled by a few big companies or many many small stores. If the former then the valuation for amazon.com and similar stores is not to high as they will probably control all of the internet market (the internet equivalent of GE or something). If on the other hand the low cost of entry into the market opens them up to little stores then they are tremendously overvalued.
Fortunatly for them it does appear that the internet will come to be dominated by a few big companies in each area. Unlike conventional stores there are no underserved areas to strat a new company in. If I start a new brick and mortar store I automatically get a certain customer base of those people closer to my store than to the other. People may be dribing around and happen to stop in. The web on the other hand has no such features. If I happen to see another book store online it is no more trouble to click the bookmark for amazon then to enter this other store.
Furthermore much more than conventional stores people wish to shop the same places online as there friends do. This is augmented by the efforts of these online stores to set up programs benifiting those whose friends are also members (gift lists etc..).
As people seem to neglect price differences under a dollar or so the competition on the internet seems an unlikely force to draw people to seperate vendors. In fact the major vendors have a size advantage which is not compensated for by any sort of local advantage as every web vendor is an international seller.
In truth it wouldn't be that surprising if one gnereal purpose retailer ended up serving 90% of the internet orders. As such the high internet prices can be viewed as a bet that this vendor is going to become the powerhouse or at least one of them.
> I'm all for freedom of data sharing but not when it comes to exploiting children.
Quick vote who here thinks he is really concerned about children and who thinks this guy just wants some attention.
Moreover while we all know molesting children should be illegal why to we legislate against child porn? Does not for profit child porn increase the number of children abused or decrease it?
Who gets busted in regards to free child porn? middle aged men sitting in their basements harming no one. While the commercial rings encourage the abuse of children the man next door just needs some conseling not jail time. Moreover does the availibility encourage more molestation of children or discourage it because their impulses are satisfied other ways?
Does the laws against non-commercial distribution make it easier to catch the actual molesters or harder by encouraging everyone else involved not to squeal so they themselves are not prosecuted.
We don't know the answers to any of the above questions. But we do know making non-commercial consumtion illegal seriously infringes on our rights.
How often have you heard someone say they support freedom of expresion except for child porn. What other crime can you commit in the privacy of your own home with GIMP and artistic skills (yes in order to make child porn laws enforceable they also made images which only appear to be child porn illegal).
The child porn issue is a wonderful wedge which convinces otherwise stalwart defenders of free expresion and privacy to cave and make allowances. It is the first step on a slippery slope which will eventually make illegal bondage photos.
First womens groups campaign and get images of women getting raped made illegal (sounds reasonable just like child porn). But then we need to make images which only appear to show women getting raped illegal as otherwise everyone may just claim they thought it was fake. Eventually all bondage porn is illegal. Then eventually all porn.
This is the issue where we finally see the true color of internet libertarians. The truth is they do nothave a great respect for the first ammendment and the willingness to tolerate that which offends them but rahter they just like porn so they don't want to see it banned.
In your statements you claim to oppose napster not because of the money but because of the lose of artistic control. I am sure other posts will cover the specifics about how downloading an mp3 vs. ripping it has any effect on your control of the content but my question is more basic.
There is a long and grand tradition modifying and creating commentaries on great works...think of the variations on classical pieces. Moreover many people might claim that being able to modify and engag in constructive refinement of our culture is a sign of a vibrant society.
So, irrespective of payment, what is your opinion on modifications (like wierd al songs) and the evolution of your material if it is properly labeled.
Fianlly maybe we can have all the papers locally and let us reasonably search through them. It is incredibly annoying when you have to visit several sites to do a full text search
Alright this privacy thing went to far with the PIII id but this is jsut ridiculous. Personally I support the mp3 traders even though it is illegal it is not necesserily immoral. We need a change in copyright laws in this county and voting or letter writing isn't going to do it. The big companies control the legislation via donations and the jobs they provide (ever wonder why copyright keeps getting extended b4 mickey mouse enters the public domain?) so civil disobediance is justified. As metallica doesn't have a prima facia right to Y amount of profit it isn't stealing.
However metallica, just like anyone else, is entitled to use information they find on the internet. Come now if we can hack DVDcss then surely they can save the results of a search. This privacy styff is BS...sure if the government legislates awa our anonimity its a big deal but if i am stupid enough to give away my info then its my problem.
Moreover Mr. Katz metallica is pursuing no legal action against those users as stated in various news sources. All they are doing is blocking their napster accounts. While I disagree with the copyright system as it is (direct government payment is better) this hardly constitutes abusive behavoir.
because many people myself included find it much easier to read on paper than a monitor. Hopefully that nifty e-book/rocketbook stuff will eventually change that
Ohh wonderful argument. There are other people who are just as convinced on the other side. So what!!
If *in fact* information should be free it does give me the right to download it it should be free after all. The existance of those who disagree means nothing...if I think my opinion is correct, and i must otherwise i wouldn't hold it, then I must think these people are wrong so their opinion is entierly irrelevant.
Hell fleeing slavery used to be illegal and many ppl thought it was wrong but still slaves had the right to escape slavery.
In regards to your coke analogy it is perfectl consistant to believe IP should be free but not physical goods. If you believe otherwise give us an argument why it is morally wrong to copy the song don't just point out others thinks its bad
>The moderation system is just a system like any other very similar to political patronage. All I have to do my friend is just state the party line and I get massive rewards.
Or in fact like any other community in existance. What do you think is going on when everyone complains about the gs prices or how horrible columbine is. Calling slashdot similar to political patronage, while true to a limited extent, is a bit melodramatic.
Every cohesive social group, be it slashdot or your suburb, is held together by certain shared opinions. Naturally, especially when these are minority opinions, people feel good when their belifs are affirmed and hence affirming these belifs is socially encouraged.
These are simple facts about people. So while you might be surprised by the fact that slashdoters are human otherwise this is to be expected.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternativly the companies in the US higher cheap labour thereby making there products cheaper benefiting both US citizens and those abroad.
Each immigrant we let in is an additional source of production and a consumer. If we pay him less than his american counterparts this means he is producing considerably more than he is consuming (measured in dollars). The market then adjusts to this by lowering prices.
The assumption that immigration will hurt US citizens is equivalent to the non-scalibility of the American market. It stands to reason that if the economy can generate a high quality of life for 270 million then it can do so for 300 million. In fact because of economies of scale you would think that people would be better off in an economy of 300 million than 270 million.
If we accept this assertion combined with your assumption that the foreign programmer is working at lower wages than his american counterparts this means his labour is subsidizing US citizens.
The reason that this doesn't *seem* to be the case is because the negative consequence (falling wages) is immediate and very visible while the positive consequence is long term and distributed.
Now onto the outside of the US. Certainly it helps those people outside of the US who come here to work. Secondly most of the people who come here to work have family back in their native land and send cash back (in some areas this is probably the most significant source of income).
Doesn't this mean your liscense expires as soon as your computer is no longer *new*?
So why does eveyr corrospondance need to be PGP encrypted? If they were a normal organization like d.net or whatever they wouldn't care. The only reason they would need to pgp encrypt the results is if they didn't want people to know they had cracked the messages? Does this seem fishy to anyone else?
This would be a wonderful way for forgien governments to crack some of these codes...enlist US knowledge to unknowing crack their own codes. Personally (although I probably wouldn't be much help) I am not working on this until I have more evidence on who these people are.
Well of course he is using a word for "propaganda value" in the sense that his word describes the way he feels about the subject. Most english non-technical word reflect some sort of value judgement about the thing in question.
It all comes down to which side you think is right. If RMS is indeed correct then the RIAA is in indeed spreading misleading propaganda..while if he is wrong the reverse is true. Personally I find RMS's point of view convincing because I think even the most ardent copyright supporter would agree that the point of copyright is to provide economic incentive for development of IP. Therefore while there might be convincing reasons why we need to punish copyright breakers it is not because the nature of the act (sharing music) is essential bad but for external factors.
>Since information will become a commodity it will be governed by the laws of supply and demand in much the same way as any other product.
This will be true only if we insist on treating it as a good. If nstead we mandadted free information this clearly would not be so.
>information will always cost something to create, and those that put their resources into it should be the ones to profit from it.
I agree, however, it does not follow from this principle that they *own* the product of their labour only that they need some compensation. Unlike physical goods where the maker of the good should be able to set his price (if you take a good away from him he no longer has it) no such philosophical justification exists here to say that the compensation he deserves is what the market will bear. In the case of information often some people are compensated far beyond the effort they put in or the amount of money necessery to encourage creation of the product.
My claim is that the traditional item based model for intellectual property is a poor model for compensation. Instead we need to compensate these people directly from tax money based on some sort of usage/value census.
>Countries and organisations that have spent their resources on an information infrastructure should feel no need to help others to join it.
It seems to be a fairly standard moral principle that you should help others. If your friend comes beging for a loan do you say too bad should have worked harder. Of course not you help him out. So what if these countries problems are the result of internal strife...this doesn't make people in those countries any less human or any less deserving of aid. The nationalistic distinction is necesserily a fallacious one. I would rather help a motivated but uneducated and poor farmer in africa than local trailer trash. There is no difference between a ethiopian and a american except where they happen to be born so their should be no moral justification to saying we need to help one but not the other.
Moreover, intellectual property costs us nothing to offer to these people. I think everyone but the most rabid Ayn Randians will agree with me when I say if you can help someone at no cost to yourself you should indeed help them.
Now your final argument is that freeing IP won't necesserily help them.
>just look at all the trouble caused when Britain gave them an Industrial age infrastructure during the days of their Empire.
Yes, but this also involved britain forcing this infrastructure on them. If we meerly free up information for their use we never need to do anything to them. In fact as it is freely availible for everyone to use we meerly put them at the same place as everyone else.
While you are correct that to some extent they need to develop their own infrastructure this does not mean they need to reinvent the wheel. Japan has managed to prosper not because we told them to go back and rework all of our science and research but because things the western world had already solved were made availible to them. As a result we are both better off (they have a higher standard of living and we exchange goods allowing them to be made more efficently).
This is one of the largest problems with IP is that it forces a huge waste of human capital as companies and countries recreate the same things over and over again. How often do you think people in the corporate world recode the same functions again and again. This is the secret to open source success...not that our coders are better or work more but that we can reuse the code that has been previously written.
Furthermore the economic discrimination about IP is not just country to country but alsso intra-country. I don;t suppose you would argue that the poor in the US should have to build their own infrastructure to reap the benifits of our modern world.
We live in an age of gross usrplus it is time to find something better to do than amass more for personal gain.
Uhh why bother you can go ahead and download it from microsoft anyway.
The DMCA specifically deals with this. In return for no liability for copyrighted material posted to their site they must remove all copyrighted material in something like 48 hours after being officially notified.
Ohh and yes i am pretty sure rob would remove 100 stolen credit card numbers
Unfourtunately you are talking about the wrong part of the DMCA. This case (mostly) involves people directly posting copyrighted materials. Even if the other parts of the DMCA were striken as unconstitutional the part which requires service provides to remove copyrighted work upon notification in return for abscence of liability would still be present.
While their are some issues with this section (in cases where the service provider isn't sure the material is copyrighted or it is under dispute ala the church of scientology) this is not such a case. This case here boils down to two issues.
A) is a liscence with no associated sale enfourceable
B) do you believe in copyright
Several thoughts on this manner. First until copyright is finally replaced with a superior system websites must bow to this pressure. For instance if someone posted a cracked copy of quake3 on this site or something similar it is quite reasonable (if you accept copyright law) to suppose that the website will take it down once notified.
However, it is interesting to note that this doesn't seem to be a copyright law issue. This is specifically a liscensing issue. No sale was ever made (it is availible freely) so it is possible a convincing argument could be made that slashdot is not violating copyright law. However to undertake such a position in court and win could very well undermine the GPL (as it doesn't have a sale either). Although I don't think it would be that terrible a thing (most companies are open sourcing their material because of public opinion not because they are traped by the GPL)...BSD isn't dying because of their liscence.
Ok several questions about the method for identifying the DDOS user.
First the method employed is to XOR the addresses of the first and second routers on an edge. Now it is clear that you can trace back IF you are sure what the IP of the secondary router is. However given that the data can follow multiple paths how are you ever certain what this IP is. Secondly as it is a probablisitic process the second IP of the router may be one of many. Is this solved because the IP's of routers along the path are very sparse?
Secondly what prevents a DDos attack from faking this field. Make it look like the attack came through another nearby router.
Thirdly as most DDOS bounce pings off of remote boxes this doesn't let you catch the perpratrtor only identify what boxes are pinging you (these boxes most likely not being aware they are used in a DDOS attack won't be using these methods) thus as this method doesn't allow you to block the DOS attack (most of the packets will be encoded only with routers close to the destination and you don't want to cut off all trafic) what good is it?
Yes, I thought specifically they got around the patents by using the ISO sources. Therefore LAME was never in violation only ISO was and as fraunfaufer submited mp3 to them to standardize they couldn't very well sue ISO over the matter.
I have found ps readerss on every platform you can imagine. Aladdin ps viewer works for linux windows and BSD I believe. I believe there is also a free viewer for mac but i am unsure
Has anyone else noticed that beta.slashdot.org when quesoed reports itself as IBM AIX? Anyone else think this is a little hypocritical or is queso just fucked up?
BTW a big enough round robin should be able to handle just about anything so what is the deal.
Does anyone else find it sucpiscious that no computer was found in this guys house? Maybe its just me but this makes me think its a setup. Moreover they arrested him after watching him for several days and finding no evidence.
Moreover why are they arresting both him and his girlfriend? is this normal?
The fact that the market is acting irrationally with respect to individual stocks should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who looked at the 3com palm valuations. The more important question is the technology sector as a whole overvalued.
I think it was cringely who pointed out that a simple analysis suggests it is undervalued. Technology and internet sales should in the future account for a sizeable percent of all transactions. Therefore comparing against the total amount of sales in the US the total valuation of internet stocks isn't very large.
The question at hand is then will the internet market be filled by a few big companies or many many small stores. If the former then the valuation for amazon.com and similar stores is not to high as they will probably control all of the internet market (the internet equivalent of GE or something). If on the other hand the low cost of entry into the market opens them up to little stores then they are tremendously overvalued.
Fortunatly for them it does appear that the internet will come to be dominated by a few big companies in each area. Unlike conventional stores there are no underserved areas to strat a new company in. If I start a new brick and mortar store I automatically get a certain customer base of those people closer to my store than to the other. People may be dribing around and happen to stop in. The web on the other hand has no such features. If I happen to see another book store online it is no more trouble to click the bookmark for amazon then to enter this other store.
Furthermore much more than conventional stores people wish to shop the same places online as there friends do. This is augmented by the efforts of these online stores to set up programs benifiting those whose friends are also members (gift lists etc..).
As people seem to neglect price differences under a dollar or so the competition on the internet seems an unlikely force to draw people to seperate vendors. In fact the major vendors have a size advantage which is not compensated for by any sort of local advantage as every web vendor is an international seller.
In truth it wouldn't be that surprising if one gnereal purpose retailer ended up serving 90% of the internet orders. As such the high internet prices can be viewed as a bet that this vendor is going to become the powerhouse or at least one of them.
It was posted awhile ago in the apache section with detailed commentary about how the break in was accomplised. Read the other sections.
#3 if the product doesn't work because you need new specs you have to go buy another one.
As long as all the companies don't release their old specs they are better off.
No, my right to artistic expresion i.e. lollita or etc..
My right to privacy because of enforcement measures.
Quote from the web page:
> I'm all for freedom of data sharing but not when it comes to exploiting children.
Quick vote who here thinks he is really concerned about children and who thinks this guy just wants some attention.
Moreover while we all know molesting children should be illegal why to we legislate against child porn? Does not for profit child porn increase the number of children abused or decrease it?
Who gets busted in regards to free child porn? middle aged men sitting in their basements harming no one. While the commercial rings encourage the abuse of children the man next door just needs some conseling not jail time. Moreover does the availibility encourage more molestation of children or discourage it because their impulses are satisfied other ways?
Does the laws against non-commercial distribution make it easier to catch the actual molesters or harder by encouraging everyone else involved not to squeal so they themselves are not prosecuted.
We don't know the answers to any of the above questions. But we do know making non-commercial consumtion illegal seriously infringes on our rights.
How often have you heard someone say they support freedom of expresion except for child porn. What other crime can you commit in the privacy of your own home with GIMP and artistic skills (yes in order to make child porn laws enforceable they also made images which only appear to be child porn illegal).
The child porn issue is a wonderful wedge which convinces otherwise stalwart defenders of free expresion and privacy to cave and make allowances. It is the first step on a slippery slope which will eventually make illegal bondage photos.
First womens groups campaign and get images of women getting raped made illegal (sounds reasonable just like child porn). But then we need to make images which only appear to show women getting raped illegal as otherwise everyone may just claim they thought it was fake. Eventually all bondage porn is illegal. Then eventually all porn.
This is the issue where we finally see the true color of internet libertarians. The truth is they do nothave a great respect for the first ammendment and the willingness to tolerate that which offends them but rahter they just like porn so they don't want to see it banned.
In your statements you claim to oppose napster not because of the money but because of the lose of artistic control. I am sure other posts will cover the specifics about how downloading an mp3 vs. ripping it has any effect on your control of the content but my question is more basic.
There is a long and grand tradition modifying and creating commentaries on great works...think of the variations on classical pieces. Moreover many people might claim that being able to modify and engag in constructive refinement of our culture is a sign of a vibrant society.
So, irrespective of payment, what is your opinion on modifications (like wierd al songs) and the evolution of your material if it is properly labeled.
Fianlly maybe we can have all the papers locally and let us reasonably search through them. It is incredibly annoying when you have to visit several sites to do a full text search
Alright this privacy thing went to far with the PIII id but this is jsut ridiculous. Personally I support the mp3 traders even though it is illegal it is not necesserily immoral. We need a change in copyright laws in this county and voting or letter writing isn't going to do it. The big companies control the legislation via donations and the jobs they provide (ever wonder why copyright keeps getting extended b4 mickey mouse enters the public domain?) so civil disobediance is justified. As metallica doesn't have a prima facia right to Y amount of profit it isn't stealing.
However metallica, just like anyone else, is entitled to use information they find on the internet. Come now if we can hack DVDcss then surely they can save the results of a search. This privacy styff is BS...sure if the government legislates awa our anonimity its a big deal but if i am stupid enough to give away my info then its my problem.
Moreover Mr. Katz metallica is pursuing no legal action against those users as stated in various news sources. All they are doing is blocking their napster accounts. While I disagree with the copyright system as it is (direct government payment is better) this hardly constitutes abusive behavoir.
because many people myself included find it much easier to read on paper than a monitor. Hopefully that nifty e-book/rocketbook stuff will eventually change that
Ohh wonderful argument. There are other people who are just as convinced on the other side. So what!!
If *in fact* information should be free it does give me the right to download it it should be free after all. The existance of those who disagree means nothing...if I think my opinion is correct, and i must otherwise i wouldn't hold it, then I must think these people are wrong so their opinion is entierly irrelevant.
Hell fleeing slavery used to be illegal and many ppl thought it was wrong but still slaves had the right to escape slavery.
In regards to your coke analogy it is perfectl consistant to believe IP should be free but not physical goods. If you believe otherwise give us an argument why it is morally wrong to copy the song don't just point out others thinks its bad
>The moderation system is just a system like any other very similar to political patronage. All I have to do my friend is just state the party line and I get massive rewards.
Or in fact like any other community in existance. What do you think is going on when everyone complains about the gs prices or how horrible columbine is. Calling slashdot similar to political patronage, while true to a limited extent, is a bit melodramatic.
Every cohesive social group, be it slashdot or your suburb, is held together by certain shared opinions. Naturally, especially when these are minority opinions, people feel good when their belifs are affirmed and hence affirming these belifs is socially encouraged.
These are simple facts about people. So while you might be surprised by the fact that slashdoters are human otherwise this is to be expected.