If there are super-advanced aliens out there that want to kill everyone, they will do so. Might as well get it over with. If there are super-advanced aliens that want to help, let them. I want my utopia free of disease and poverty. I say: proceed with the search!
Exactly!
If there is intelligent life out there at our level, then they can't affect us anymore than we can affect them, so it doesn't matter. If there is advanced intelligent life out there, then they will do what they wish no matter what our desires are, so it also doesn't matter.
The only logical option left is to continue on with our plans for humanity with the assumption that anything that would want to stop us is out of our control, so there is no reason to factor them into our plans.
Keep in mind here that SETI was started 50 years ago.
50 years ago, we did not HAVE the technology to look for planets, earth-like life supporting planets, analysis of planets far away, nor the ability to detect microbes on any planet or rock other than Earth.
Searching for things we have no ability to find would be very stupid and wasteful.
We did have radio technology however. Thus, we had the ability to detect if radio signals were coming from other planets to us. We also had the ability to tell natural radio signals apart from some types of artificial ones (Patterns, modulations, things that just don't seem to happen naturally.)
So we had the ability to look for extraterrestrial intelligence, but did NOT have the ability to look for any other forms of life or potential places life as we know it may be able to exist.
Why would you want to look for things we can't see, and ignore what we can see?
The TSA employee should be fired... preferably from a large canon.
I think an officer of the law (despite the fact the TSA are not, they seem to get the same extra rights and privlidges to comit crimes as officers of the law do) should be held to a higher standard.
A TSA agent admitting to having, and showing the evidence of, an ounce of cocaine in a baggie is an amount to be an automatic felony with required prison term and no bail.
He needs to be held accountable for possession of the schedule I drug cocaine, and put in prison accordingly.
If I as a normal citizen were to admit to possession of an ounce of cocaine, that act in and of itself is enough to be given a jail sentence, even after it has been tested and proven not to be actual cocaine.
Anything less is only begging for vigilante justice to be taken out on him.
Come to think of it, since all this comes under the category of "export controls", it would probably be illegal to move the servers across the border. You'd have to start over from scratch, using only software that's legally available outside the U.S.
You are probably right. However technically, you just can't take your software over the boarder legally. Slashcode I would assume is mirrored all over the place (If not, it should be!)
So one would just need to leave the old servers/software behind, move, then redownload it and setup again using the same software.
Amazing how relatively simple it would be to legally avoid this law in this day and age. Still a needless PITA thou
It doesn't make any sense. SF.net DID NOT create these projects.
PGP was not created in the US either, but was one of the major victoms of this law.
It was legal for someone in the US to download it from DE, but illegal for that same person to put it up for download without restrictions, and if that exact same person in DE downloaded it from the US, the person in the US is going to jail.
So no, SF did not create any of those projects, nor are they all USA technology. You are correct in that point.
You are incorrect in that point matters at all. The law doesn't make any such distinction.
So basically you are calling SF cowardly because they don't want to be sent to prison and killed by the guards. Lovely.
EFF's lawyers charged $400,000 for checking to confirm that the video was covered under fair use then writing one letter to that effect? That's not legal advice, that's extortion.
All the courts that already have decided and agreed that sticking the plaintiff with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for less than a days work is perfectly legal, fine, and encouraged.
Courts and judges have called this 'Legal', not 'Extortion'. Not a single one has been reversed on that detail in the past few decades that I've been paying attention either.
Hard to claim they are committing the crime of extortion when a lot of judges over thousands of cases have stated this act is legal and encouraged it.
Not to say things SHOULD be this way, but they are, which was the point you were arguing.
Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?
On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.
If almost two million dollars for sharing 10 songs is 'fair', then yes many multiples higher than $400,000 for lawyer fees is more than fair.
As the so called rights holders have been given a tool that allows them to ruin the life of anyone they choose for breaking no laws other than ones granted in that very tool, they need to be held just as accountable and responsible for their use of it.
If I go through all the work to get a gun permit and legally register a firearm, I seriously doubt the courts would agree with my "Oops, I didn't MEAN to shoot him" defense either (And rightly so.)
When you have the ability to have someones life ruined and turned into a form of capitalist slavery, nothing short of equal slavery or jail time (Apparently it is a deterrent now) is 'fair' for what should happen to those that use this tool improperly.
While it is very true we still have a long way to go, it is worth pointing out that thoughts about the effects of such change have been pondered over before.
Some interesting reading, especially the social aspects in the later chapters, is Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler.
If your organization used Paypal and they froze your assets once, and you "struggled for more than half a year" to resolve it, why the fuck would you STILL be using Paypal?
Probably because a little bit of money most or even some of the time, is a whole lot better than no money none of the time.
I guess you've never been in an abusive relationship.
Nope. Never really understood those in the 'victim' person in them either.
Though you have a good point, in that I do know more than a couple people in such relationships, and the reality of it does seem it is very hard for them to break out of it. So I admit there is probably something there I am missing.
Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.
The employee that reports it is guaranteed to get 300% of the income they legally are entitled to, as will all the others that come out in the DOJ investigation who wish to join.
Then there will be tons of fines towards the company measuring in the tens of millions of dollars.
I always love to see the excuses why particular members of management are allowed to remain on the payroll after costing the company tens of millions of dollars in illegal activities.
Unless the employees do not wish to start legal action. Which means there is no problem at all.
A company that willingly turns its back on a market of 1 billion people risks having its CEO bludgeoned to death by angry investors.
The only problem with your projection I see is the above statement. You word it as such to imply 1 billion people in a market are lost and that somehow translates to less money.
Lets be perfectly clear here. It is not a market, it is China. It's not JUST 1 billion people, it's 1 billion people living in China. (No, not to imply they aren't people)
So add up the amount of money all 1 billion Chinese people not living in a market will gain. I haven't done this, but I can be certain Google has done this.
I bet Larry Page has more cash in his cars ash tray than one would get out of China in the same amount of time. It's not exactly a great loss.
It's no different from a business looking at its lowest priced 'budget' service, and cutting out the customers that end up costing way more than anyone else in non-legit support and such. Your bottom line goes up. Both in that yes you lose a tiny amount of money, while at the same time not having to spend a much larger amount of money on that same 'customer'. I quote 'customer' because people that consistently COST you money are not customers. The word we have for that is liability.
In a normal market, it is also a good thing for those people to go to your competition, as that means you will now gain more money over all due to their loss, and your competition will LOSE money due to that person changing to them. Win Win! Don't think the competitor part comes into play here with a whole country, but the point still stands.
Odds are if Larry ploped down a $100 bill on the table, it would balance out their China account. And to someone like Larry, that is soda pop money in his desk drawer. No real loss at all.
Doesn't P2Pnet realize that Elmo is copyrighted! And yet, there they are showing a boy with Elmo on his overalls! Doesn't anyone think of the content owners??? When will this madness end???
The first image of Elmo (or appearance anyways) was in 1972, thus under the actual legal copyright law, fell out of copyright 14 years later in 1986 so is now public domain.
Granted under our current illegal copyright laws the image will be copyrighted until 2182 or so, but fortunately most of us don't care or mind those illegal versions of copyright law so its fair game.
I am of course assuming their image is a derivative work. If it is a direct copy of a more recently made image then it could very well be under 14 years old. I don't think that is the case however.
The record company has been deprived of its right to distribute.
Yea but to most people in the country right now, the record labels lost that right when they stopped making the required payment that is needed to get that right in the first place.
Go tell them to hold up their end of the deal, and we... well never mind, i doubt that broken trust will be healed anytime soon no matter what they do.
You don't think that a strict distinction between theft and infringement is just a tad pedantic?
No more than if a judge calls you a rapist after convicting you for jaywalking.
Of course going by penalty not damage from the crime here. Jaywalking is a ticket. Rape is a prison sentence.
It's bad enough to be called on a crime you actually committed, but to also have a judge of all people call that crime by a ton of other unrelated criminal acts is not pedantic at all, its a simple matter of being literate.
See that little 'parent' button right next to 'reply' ? Try clicking it some time. It might give you an insight into what everyone else is talking about.
You'll see how this works in a few hours when this post is modded flamebait due to others doing exactly what you did, not reading the parent post and thus replying to this comment 100% out of context:P
In earlier ages, the reason why you were supposed to be quiet in a library was because some people were there to do research and couldn't check out all the reference books they could possibly need. Who needs that, now that we have the Internet?
My guess is the people whom don't have the Internet at home, and are in the exact situation you describe.
Given a bunch of gold atoms, the arms can make a larger shape of gold out of them, yes.
We can do that today too, in our crude large macro scale ways. Just take some gold, melt it down to liquid form, and fill a mold.
That wouldn't be atomically accurate of course.
Any structure of gold you want that needs to be atomically accurate, you will still need to supply the arms with gold atoms to move around and position.
You've made the classical mistake of mistaking the name of a thing with the thing itself.
The name of my web server is not 'www'. The machine has a real name, and www is a cname (Alias) to that.
In reality, for those of us that have been using the Internet since before 1992 and the web existed, some of us still run many other services than web servers, and some of them for a lot longer than web servers existed. Why single out a relatively new service to hand the root of your domain over to?
Maybe 'example.com' points to my mail server, because I am an email company. That means I must use a subdomain, and it must be one my visitors KNOW IN ADVANCE.
This means 'screwball.example.com' would be unreachable to anyone I did not tell the computers name to ahead of time, since it would not be possible for just 'example.com' to redirect to the web server, being on a different machine than the mail server it already points to.
This means going to 'example.com' would end up TCP wise at my mail server, and 'www.example.com' would not exist. How would anyone ever find my web server?
Welcome to networking 101
In addition, if you want to base your case off of that logic, then OK. If you think 'www' is the machines name out of 'www.example.com', then your solution of using just 'example.com' means your machine is named 'example' and part of the network 'com'.
That makes even less sense. (At least for all of us that are not ICANN/NetSol)
It's 2 decades out of date, and more importantly, specifically states It does not specify any standard.
Let's see what I said (Since you clearly didn't)
Looks like someone hasn't read RFC 1178 and enjoys breaking interoperability.
No, I don't see the word standard anywhere in there.
I see 'enjoys breaking interoperability', and following that I see a very precise example, which you ignored.
Every once in a while, I still see sites that don't serve up unless you include "www." in the address - but it's like I said - a dufus.
Looks like someone hasn't read RFC 1178 and enjoys breaking interoperability.
Your method also breaks email by redelegating MX records one sub domain above where the control should be and MX's point to, thus breaks delegation of sub domains.
Wouldn't that make exactly the same defence valid for Pirate Bay and other torrent sites?
Yes.
Tis a shame The Pirate Bay didn't setup shop in the UK, where this defense is now known valid.
Silly pirates instead setup shop in a country where this is specifically legal to do, exactly so what happened wouldn't happen. I guess in this day and age, you never know who you can trust.
Was it ordinary when it was done for the very first time? Just because it's obvious now, after becoming commonplace, doesn't mean it wasn't a big leap for the person who came up with it.
So what you are saying is, you would support me patenting the wheel, and suing everyone for using it, because the wheel was not obvious for the first person that made it when it was done for the first time.
That is stupid.
Patents last 14 years for a reason. You can not patent something you didn't invent from over 80 years ago and sue people today.
Slashdot Mirror
If there are super-advanced aliens out there that want to kill everyone, they will do so. Might as well get it over with. If there are super-advanced aliens that want to help, let them. I want my utopia free of disease and poverty. I say: proceed with the search!
Exactly!
If there is intelligent life out there at our level, then they can't affect us anymore than we can affect them, so it doesn't matter.
If there is advanced intelligent life out there, then they will do what they wish no matter what our desires are, so it also doesn't matter.
The only logical option left is to continue on with our plans for humanity with the assumption that anything that would want to stop us is out of our control, so there is no reason to factor them into our plans.
Keep in mind here that SETI was started 50 years ago.
50 years ago, we did not HAVE the technology to look for planets, earth-like life supporting planets, analysis of planets far away, nor the ability to detect microbes on any planet or rock other than Earth.
Searching for things we have no ability to find would be very stupid and wasteful.
We did have radio technology however. Thus, we had the ability to detect if radio signals were coming from other planets to us.
We also had the ability to tell natural radio signals apart from some types of artificial ones (Patterns, modulations, things that just don't seem to happen naturally.)
So we had the ability to look for extraterrestrial intelligence, but did NOT have the ability to look for any other forms of life or potential places life as we know it may be able to exist.
Why would you want to look for things we can't see, and ignore what we can see?
The TSA employee should be fired... preferably from a large canon.
I think an officer of the law (despite the fact the TSA are not, they seem to get the same extra rights and privlidges to comit crimes as officers of the law do) should be held to a higher standard.
A TSA agent admitting to having, and showing the evidence of, an ounce of cocaine in a baggie is an amount to be an automatic felony with required prison term and no bail.
He needs to be held accountable for possession of the schedule I drug cocaine, and put in prison accordingly.
If I as a normal citizen were to admit to possession of an ounce of cocaine, that act in and of itself is enough to be given a jail sentence, even after it has been tested and proven not to be actual cocaine.
Anything less is only begging for vigilante justice to be taken out on him.
Come to think of it, since all this comes under the category of "export controls", it would probably be illegal to move the servers across the border. You'd have to start over from scratch, using only software that's legally available outside the U.S.
You are probably right. However technically, you just can't take your software over the boarder legally.
Slashcode I would assume is mirrored all over the place (If not, it should be!)
So one would just need to leave the old servers/software behind, move, then redownload it and setup again using the same software.
Amazing how relatively simple it would be to legally avoid this law in this day and age.
Still a needless PITA thou
It doesn't make any sense. SF.net DID NOT create these projects.
PGP was not created in the US either, but was one of the major victoms of this law.
It was legal for someone in the US to download it from DE, but illegal for that same person to put it up for download without restrictions, and if that exact same person in DE downloaded it from the US, the person in the US is going to jail.
So no, SF did not create any of those projects, nor are they all USA technology. You are correct in that point.
You are incorrect in that point matters at all. The law doesn't make any such distinction.
So basically you are calling SF cowardly because they don't want to be sent to prison and killed by the guards.
Lovely.
I agree.
If a person who makes under $30000/year is fined almost two million, that is roughly 6600% of ones income that already has president as 'fair'.
So if Universal is making a 2 billion per year profit, that would be about $132 trillion in fees.
Seems fair to me.
EFF's lawyers charged $400,000 for checking to confirm that the video was covered under fair use then writing one letter to that effect? That's not legal advice, that's extortion.
All the courts that already have decided and agreed that sticking the plaintiff with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for less than a days work is perfectly legal, fine, and encouraged.
Courts and judges have called this 'Legal', not 'Extortion'.
Not a single one has been reversed on that detail in the past few decades that I've been paying attention either.
Hard to claim they are committing the crime of extortion when a lot of judges over thousands of cases have stated this act is legal and encouraged it.
Not to say things SHOULD be this way, but they are, which was the point you were arguing.
Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?
On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.
If almost two million dollars for sharing 10 songs is 'fair', then yes many multiples higher than $400,000 for lawyer fees is more than fair.
As the so called rights holders have been given a tool that allows them to ruin the life of anyone they choose for breaking no laws other than ones granted in that very tool, they need to be held just as accountable and responsible for their use of it.
If I go through all the work to get a gun permit and legally register a firearm, I seriously doubt the courts would agree with my "Oops, I didn't MEAN to shoot him" defense either (And rightly so.)
When you have the ability to have someones life ruined and turned into a form of capitalist slavery, nothing short of equal slavery or jail time (Apparently it is a deterrent now) is 'fair' for what should happen to those that use this tool improperly.
While it is very true we still have a long way to go, it is worth pointing out that thoughts about the effects of such change have been pondered over before.
Some interesting reading, especially the social aspects in the later chapters, is Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler.
Full online version: http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html
Or it's about a $6 paperback these days.
I think you might find it interesting.
If your organization used Paypal and they froze your assets once, and you "struggled for more than half a year" to resolve it, why the fuck would you STILL be using Paypal?
Probably because a little bit of money most or even some of the time, is a whole lot better than no money none of the time.
Except that those laws unfortunately don't apply to programmers [flsa.com].
Wow, I just read that page and this is the first I've heard of those exemptions. (I am not a programmer)
That seriously blows then.
I guess you've never been in an abusive relationship.
Nope. Never really understood those in the 'victim' person in them either.
Though you have a good point, in that I do know more than a couple people in such relationships, and the reality of it does seem it is very hard for them to break out of it. So I admit there is probably something there I am missing.
Only one of those over stressed people would need to report that to the DOJ. The laws on over time pay are laid out pretty clear, and this if true is not at all legal.
The employee that reports it is guaranteed to get 300% of the income they legally are entitled to, as will all the others that come out in the DOJ investigation who wish to join.
Then there will be tons of fines towards the company measuring in the tens of millions of dollars.
I always love to see the excuses why particular members of management are allowed to remain on the payroll after costing the company tens of millions of dollars in illegal activities.
Unless the employees do not wish to start legal action. Which means there is no problem at all.
A company that willingly turns its back on a market of 1 billion people risks having its CEO bludgeoned to death by angry investors.
The only problem with your projection I see is the above statement.
You word it as such to imply 1 billion people in a market are lost and that somehow translates to less money.
Lets be perfectly clear here. It is not a market, it is China.
It's not JUST 1 billion people, it's 1 billion people living in China. (No, not to imply they aren't people)
So add up the amount of money all 1 billion Chinese people not living in a market will gain.
I haven't done this, but I can be certain Google has done this.
I bet Larry Page has more cash in his cars ash tray than one would get out of China in the same amount of time. It's not exactly a great loss.
It's no different from a business looking at its lowest priced 'budget' service, and cutting out the customers that end up costing way more than anyone else in non-legit support and such. Your bottom line goes up.
Both in that yes you lose a tiny amount of money, while at the same time not having to spend a much larger amount of money on that same 'customer'. I quote 'customer' because people that consistently COST you money are not customers. The word we have for that is liability.
In a normal market, it is also a good thing for those people to go to your competition, as that means you will now gain more money over all due to their loss, and your competition will LOSE money due to that person changing to them. Win Win!
Don't think the competitor part comes into play here with a whole country, but the point still stands.
Odds are if Larry ploped down a $100 bill on the table, it would balance out their China account. And to someone like Larry, that is soda pop money in his desk drawer.
No real loss at all.
Doesn't P2Pnet realize that Elmo is copyrighted! And yet, there they are showing a boy with Elmo on his overalls! Doesn't anyone think of the content owners??? When will this madness end???
The first image of Elmo (or appearance anyways) was in 1972, thus under the actual legal copyright law, fell out of copyright 14 years later in 1986 so is now public domain.
Granted under our current illegal copyright laws the image will be copyrighted until 2182 or so, but fortunately most of us don't care or mind those illegal versions of copyright law so its fair game.
I am of course assuming their image is a derivative work. If it is a direct copy of a more recently made image then it could very well be under 14 years old. I don't think that is the case however.
The record company has been deprived of its right to distribute.
Yea but to most people in the country right now, the record labels lost that right when they stopped making the required payment that is needed to get that right in the first place.
Go tell them to hold up their end of the deal, and we... well never mind, i doubt that broken trust will be healed anytime soon no matter what they do.
You don't think that a strict distinction between theft and infringement is just a tad pedantic?
No more than if a judge calls you a rapist after convicting you for jaywalking.
Of course going by penalty not damage from the crime here. Jaywalking is a ticket. Rape is a prison sentence.
It's bad enough to be called on a crime you actually committed, but to also have a judge of all people call that crime by a ton of other unrelated criminal acts is not pedantic at all, its a simple matter of being literate.
Where did you get 3,000 CDs?
It was right in the parent post.
See that little 'parent' button right next to 'reply' ? Try clicking it some time. It might give you an insight into what everyone else is talking about.
You'll see how this works in a few hours when this post is modded flamebait due to others doing exactly what you did, not reading the parent post and thus replying to this comment 100% out of context :P
A cow, 5 bags of salt, and the Pacific Ocean are in a car doing donuts...
Oh dear, not the pornoholic midget on steroids joke again!
In earlier ages, the reason why you were supposed to be quiet in a library was because some people were there to do research and couldn't check out all the reference books they could possibly need. Who needs that, now that we have the Internet?
My guess is the people whom don't have the Internet at home, and are in the exact situation you describe.
Can they make gold?
Given a bunch of gold atoms, the arms can make a larger shape of gold out of them, yes.
We can do that today too, in our crude large macro scale ways.
Just take some gold, melt it down to liquid form, and fill a mold.
That wouldn't be atomically accurate of course.
Any structure of gold you want that needs to be atomically accurate, you will still need to supply the arms with gold atoms to move around and position.
You've made the classical mistake of mistaking the name of a thing with the thing itself.
The name of my web server is not 'www'. The machine has a real name, and www is a cname (Alias) to that.
In reality, for those of us that have been using the Internet since before 1992 and the web existed, some of us still run many other services than web servers, and some of them for a lot longer than web servers existed.
Why single out a relatively new service to hand the root of your domain over to?
Maybe 'example.com' points to my mail server, because I am an email company. That means I must use a subdomain, and it must be one my visitors KNOW IN ADVANCE.
This means 'screwball.example.com' would be unreachable to anyone I did not tell the computers name to ahead of time, since it would not be possible for just 'example.com' to redirect to the web server, being on a different machine than the mail server it already points to.
This means going to 'example.com' would end up TCP wise at my mail server, and 'www.example.com' would not exist. How would anyone ever find my web server?
Welcome to networking 101
In addition, if you want to base your case off of that logic, then OK.
If you think 'www' is the machines name out of 'www.example.com', then your solution of using just 'example.com' means your machine is named 'example' and part of the network 'com'.
That makes even less sense. (At least for all of us that are not ICANN/NetSol)
It's 2 decades out of date, and more importantly, specifically states It does not specify any standard.
Let's see what I said (Since you clearly didn't)
Looks like someone hasn't read RFC 1178 and enjoys breaking interoperability.
No, I don't see the word standard anywhere in there.
I see 'enjoys breaking interoperability', and following that I see a very precise example, which you ignored.
Every once in a while, I still see sites that don't serve up unless you include "www." in the address - but it's like I said - a dufus.
Looks like someone hasn't read RFC 1178 and enjoys breaking interoperability.
Your method also breaks email by redelegating MX records one sub domain above where the control should be and MX's point to, thus breaks delegation of sub domains.
Wouldn't that make exactly the same defence valid for Pirate Bay and other torrent sites?
Yes.
Tis a shame The Pirate Bay didn't setup shop in the UK, where this defense is now known valid.
Silly pirates instead setup shop in a country where this is specifically legal to do, exactly so what happened wouldn't happen. I guess in this day and age, you never know who you can trust.
Was it ordinary when it was done for the very first time? Just because it's obvious now, after becoming commonplace, doesn't mean it wasn't a big leap for the person who came up with it.
So what you are saying is, you would support me patenting the wheel, and suing everyone for using it, because the wheel was not obvious for the first person that made it when it was done for the first time.
That is stupid.
Patents last 14 years for a reason. You can not patent something you didn't invent from over 80 years ago and sue people today.