but their real goal here is to stop piracy, which is against the law
Aye, excuse me for being short, but I've said this here about 20 times:
As much as the music industry would like you to think so, unauthorized copying is not, generally, 'against the law.' It is a civil offense, which means, if a copyright holder can show (a) that it wan't 'fair use' or the like AND (b) that it caused the holder specific monetary damage, they can sue. This is a summary; go look at Congress' blue and white papers, or the EFF site, or search google for Pamela Samuelson, if you really want to delve into copyright law.
In any case, the above are fairly hard to prove in each case of peer-to-peer networking. Especially when bigwigs like Orren Hatch say they'd use Napster to sample music:) and they'll expand the legislative definition of fair use if the music industry doesn't stop being pricks:).
In any case,
If they really put their minds to it, I'm sure they can find several ways to help law-enforcement without breaking the law.
This is not a "law enforcement" issue -- because law enforcement agencies don't, by and large, step into civil matters. And if they "really put their minds to it," I'm sure Congress will be glad to use the Law to put them and their revenue streams in place...
FKK= Frei Korper Kulture, literally, "Free Body Culture," and is the German term for the movement behind the (quite large) number of public parks, lakes, etc., which allow, encourage or tolerate what Americans call "nudism." (In practice, the Germans make a whole less of a big deal about the whole thing -- you do to the lake, you take your clothes off, you go swimming...).
I'm not sure this makes the above comment funny, but it sure helps.
If the law decides that you've done something wrong, and you did it of your own will (not entrapment or mental sickness), then you get punished, regardless of what some other party did.
Aye, but what we're talking about here are civil damages, not criminal prosecutions.
Imaging Ima Dion O. Cancer sues Guiless Drugs for selling her cigarettes for 50 years. Guiless is, of course, gonna point his finger directly at Brown and Williamson, since they (a) made the damn things (b) are on record as knowing they were bad and (c) have pretty big pockets.
Now, AOL only meets 2 of the 3 criteria here, but since they're non-exclusive in the legal world, and because AOL has pockets that extend right down to the center of the earth, I suspect MP3Board thinks its worth a shot.
Or, more simply put, pointing yer finger at a likely accomplice (however innocent) is always preferable to walking the plank straightaways.
Then don't use the word "fascism" if you don't mean it.
Well, to start off, I didn't use it, they did; I merely referenced them in making a different point about people's opinions.
But since you seem interested in those forms of semantic sparing with which students of philosophy, rhetoric, and the related literary disciples -- of which I once was one -- amuse themselves in times of need:
You may not be interested in the proper definition of fascism
"Terms with histories have no definitions." -Nietzsche (who was stealing from the Swedish Baron von Stromberg, who was reversing von Ranke)
Nietsche's basic point, which has come to be more widely embraced in an age of Quantum Physics, is that the meaning is a very messy thing, and terms change their definitions over time and place, as we learn new things. And sometimes they just don't make 'rational' sense, at least in a strictly definitional sort of way. To wit:
You may not be interested... but rational discourse demands it.
Then reason, I say, must be fascist!
The above is a metaphor -- a term Aristotle once defined as strictly a verb, metaphorien, 'to make things alike.'
What he was suggesting in that definition is that defining things produces the world. You say Reason doth demand that I be interested in 'proper' definitions, I say nay, nought, if Reason doth so dictate, She be a harsh, fascist mistress!
And so our dear readers, if there be any, may decide: either Reason be fascist, or this Fascist demand may not be attributed to reason (but rather to the inaccuracies of your Narrative).
But continuing the exposition:
If you can assign any definition to any word
As Kant and Fueurbach pointed out, one may quite certainly do so. Indeed, this is a concept that may be quite familiar to many programmers. A statment such as 'fascism is..." or "Italy is fascist" reduces to simple variable assignment:
variable X:= a
do (something);
variable X:= b
do (something); ...
The technical term for such a statement is a "logical coupula," because the first statement is coupled to the second, by means of the "equals" operator.
Of course, the value of the something that you do is highly dependent on the value of a,b,... that you input into the model, especially if you are attempting to model some feature of the real world. But, as our dear Messers. Kart and Fueurbach pointed out, even the purely random iteration of terms can be very useful:
In fact, this reminds me of a rather interesting story told to me by the Honorable Roger Gregory, about the GNU compiler. As he relates it, the guys were interested in optimizing their compiler performance, but hadn't come up with any rational and proper way to do so, logically speaking. So what they did instead was this:
* For any given function T, assume the argument 3.
* For ALL one, two, or three-byte instuctions F, test all F(3).
* Throw away all F(3) where the answer is wrong for T.
* For any F(x) such that the answer is correct for the number 3, test and verify for all F(x).
* For all F(x) which test & verify, collect timing data.
And whammo, you've just tested the entire possible instruction set, finding the optimal solutions to everything! Mr. Feuerbach would, indeed, have been quite happy.
However, Mr. Feuerbach did produce quite some anxiety and consternation in the Church of the time when, in The Essence of Christianity, he did declare this very point in opposition to the so-called 'proper truths' of Christianity. Indeed, he went so far to say that we find G-d in iterating through all the (quite improper!) possible definitions of our terms, and that this had been what the (hitherto quite respected) Mr. Hegel had meant in his (rather unreadable) Logic of History and (rather more unreadable) other works.
Moving back to generality, the point is this: language, computer or not, is a simulation. And simulations are not reality. They are tests, challenges, in the most cosmic sense of the term.
Should we return to the fascists?
If you need help with the definition, go find a dictionary.
My OED doth dictate:
Fascism: The principles and organisation of the Fascists. Fascist: One of a body of Italian nationalists, which was organized in March 1919 to oppose Bolshevism in Italy, and, as the partito nationale fascista, under the leadership of Signor Mussolini assumed control of the Italian government in October 1922; transf. applied to similar organizations in other countries.
Well. There is, indeed, some room here for walking down the slippery slope of saying that Fascism, properly speaking, only occured in countries such-and-such because of their direct relation to Mussolini; and I'm sure a good philologist would remind us that, as fascism first came into existence in 1919, it would be improper to call anything that existed before 1919 fascist.
And, indeed, this would get us out of the hard work of running simulations of reality in our little brains, deciding if and to what extent f(x)=f(y) when, say,
x=Jerry Brown
y=Sig. Benito Mussolini
(apologies to the good Jerry Garcia for stealing the equation from his work)
much less, the much more tedious work of deciding which sub-functions we may need to establish the validity of this claim. Unfortunately for our moral workload, the authority of the OED doth proclaim: and "applied to similar organizations in other countries." Which gets us into the little trenches of deciding what a similar organization is, exactly.
But returning to the origin of this discourse:
But relevance does this have to your friends calling the US fascist? They would be pissed if I called Europe communist or South America a quilt of petty dictators.
I think, rather, not. A number of them would be in the US because, say, they were running from their lives from those same South American despots, or starving under the conditions they caused; or because they found Europe's version of socialism a bit too communist for their tastes. And, like everyone from Feuerbach to our dear GNU programmers, they'd like to try something different.
Why should I not get angry when they cast similar aspersions on my country.
Because, after all, an aspersion, a turn of language, an expression -- see Larry Wall's introduction to the Magic of Perl -- is a magic trick, meant to change the world, should it be the right incantation.
And to oppose such Witchcraft with petty Anger and needless Wrath, be the error of the Mideval Church.
Did I say any of those countries was absolutely perfect?
I'm not interested in getting in a discussion of the bona-fide definition of bona-fide fascism; I merely meant to point out that there were a good number of people who would question the r-rating exclusion on grounds of freedom. There are a good number of people, like myself, who frequently exchange the wonders of the American economy for the freedom to do what you want in Eastern Europe, despite some other persistent failures there.
In terms of fascism, though: what about good parts of east asia or Jerry Brown's California?
>Nobody questions the concept that you have to be 17 to get into an R-rated movie -- everyone understands that's just the way things work.
Really? I have a bunch of European and South American friends who think its a fairly good indication of the repressive, fascist state of America. They love the drinking age, too.
Try "it isn't really a free speech issue; the publication is simply being kept out of the hands of scientists, academics, and members of the media."
NASA with it's wind tunnels, computers, physicists, and scientists working on lifting bodies, wing surfaces, rocket engines, turbinges, etc. Where would our Concordes be, our Boeings, our cars, without this research?
The SR-71 is the last new aerodynamic design of an aircraft, and it was designed in the very early years of NASA, and with slide rules, for that matter. Boeings to B-2s are all refinements of prior work, some of which has been heavily influenced by NASA -- but have not heavily profited from advanced technology, like the heat shielding you mention.
For instance, the Concorde was merely a 1950s airliner re-designed to stand hitting Mach 1. Same aerodynamic model, same engines. The SR-71, on the other hand, was fully designed, essentially from scratch -- aerodynamics and engines & etc. -- to ride a sonic shock wave. It derived a good 53% of its fuel efficiency from riding the wave alone, and another large amount from the compression of fuel in the engines.
Now that ceramic tiles and other advances have come along, it seems quite feasable to design a Mach 3 passenger aircraft that uses only slightly more fuel/lb/mile than current craft. Equally, the space shuttle -- which was another #($#( government compromise -- has main engines which are also 1950s technology. (The original plan, of course, was to lift the thing on a re-usable ramjet... which would have been 4-5x more fuel efficient. Damn Congress.) We will see -- probably from private ventures -- spacecraft based on radically different technologies.
In short: there are a lot of NASA-derived technologies sitting on the shelf; our world will be a lot different when they are in use.
Yes, there have been a few commercially viable innovations which came out of the space prgram. But at what cost? Are those inventions really worth the billions spent? To whom?
Other than the aerodynamics, imaging and other technologies mentioned by another poster, there were also clear advances in microelectronics and medical processes, to name a few. Mapping. Location of oil resources....
I believe the standard conversion to civilian economy ratio quoted for NASA is about 20:1, making it one of the most valuable government programs ever.
Russia was never a police state. American SitCom Television has taught you that. Use your head.
Tak, vy rozumiste comunism? A domil jste nad comunismu? Nevidel jsem nekdy americky SitComy na telivize nad comunismu...
What, you understand communism? And you have lived under communism? I didn't see any American SitComs on communist television...
No, communism wasn't evil, and America is hardly free. But the Eastern block certainly was a 'police state,' by all reasonable definitions.
And if the only form of 'public participation' the American left has left is the shenanigans (er, "Ruckus") in Philly, America may very well be one soon, too.
"I was carrying a long round case... of the kind issued to field personnel to carry surface-to-air missles. All I had in it was my flute and some dirty underwear, but the stupid cop stopped me and asked what was in it. So I said, 'fuck off, you ugly shit-eating Nazi pig, and the asshole asked me for ID.'"
(So, no, this ain't the same as Selma... Boy seems to want some real southern pigs to tangle with, but since they burned white boys from the North, I bet he wouldn't have been around a real protest for long...)
I think this all boils down to something I remember John Perry Barlow saying a few years back:
"I quickly learned, that if you treat cops like pigs, they'll act like pigs."
The sad thing here, for democracy and protest, is that the cops will never respect people who treat them like pigs.
If the Russians in Red Square had acted like this, the soldiers would have fired on them, and Russia would likely still be a police state. The Russian soldiers didn't fire, because they respected the common Russian people -- who we're being "AssHoles," after all, unlike these guys.
Of course, all these "lets get arrested" guys would like to think that they're involved in something as important as bringing down Communism. I live in Berkeley, and it's amazing to sit in coffeeshops listening to the bandana-wearning pacholi-smelling kids talking about the old-white-male convention in Philly and trying to find things wrong with it. "Geez, half the people there must be millionares!" I heard. Little rebels without a cause, hopping from Dead show to the next protest, spending their parent's money and wishing that they were poor working class folks... this is liberalism in America, circa 2000.
Geez, I wonder if we could find some way to charge them to get into the protests as well as the concerts?
You go down to Selma to protest... you volunteer with some activst types to get arrensted, you sit down in the white section of a restaurant, and you are bitching about getting arrested? Am I missing something?
Why do these people bother? I see people like this and all I think is how misguided they are, shake my head, and move on...
Particularly troubling is the Court's assertion that a personal computer does not constitute a home audio recording device.
I believe the issue in question is whether a personal computer constitutes a digital home audio recording device under the statutory terms of the home recording act. If it did, it might be further restricted, because it was not protected as a general-purpose device. See the Diamond RIO case, where the RIO narrowly escaped restrictions because it was not a serial copy device (one way, onto the RIO, only).
The designers of the home recording act specifically excluded computers from the definition -- because the act's restrictions would have hobbled computer manufacturers. Under these purely legal terms, a home computer clearly is not a home audio recording device, because it can do so much more:).
The solution I came up with (which worked very well for our small population) was to keep a log of sites visited. Every couple of days I would scan the list of sites. Didn't take too long, as the "inappropriate" sites tended to jump off the list. A few banned accounts and everyone stayed in line.
Oh good grief. You think this is "appropriate" behavior on your part?
Exactly who authorized you to make decisions on which sites it is "appropriate" for these kids to visit? Does your system have a written policy that outlines the criteria on which you are to make these censorship decisions? What are your qualifications for being in such a position, managing children's behavior, etc.?
It seems that your position was ripe for abuse; and I point this out because the above are the first questions that a lawyer would be likely to choose.
Personally, I see the actions above as idiotic (not to mention rather sysadminish, in the negative sense criticised by, say, Ted Nelson in his various books). What is it about technology that encourages this sort of abuse of power (in relation to those who don't have technical knowledge)?
Why should anyone need an account to look at information in a library, and who the hell gave you the right to invade these kids privacy by reviewing their logs? I suggest you review your State Attorney Generals advisory on monitoring library patron use in a public school setting; at least when I worked in a school library, it treated what kids read as confidential information to be treated with respect...
Let the children look at what they want, the majority of them will get bored pretty quickly, the few that won't are probably natural pervs:) In any case you don't need to be instilling children with complexes about porn and sex by the neanderthal behavior above, much less my children, and you should seriously consider the potential negative legal ramifications of implementing this sort of policy without consulting a few experts in child development...
Keep the control at the local and parental level. Keep the federal government the hell out of it.
Oh, good grief. So the pea-brains in Peoria can decide that their children can't read Hemmingway? So self-righteous parents can keep their children away from information about drugs, pregnancy, whatever?
Having had the distinct pleasure of growing up in one of America's hick-ass towns, I can tell you what this leads to in one word. IGNORANCE. People whose view of the world is freakishly distorted because of thier censored view of reality. Girls who get pregnant, then married, at 13 because they didn't know HOW you got pregnant. People who genuinely believe that blacks should live in a different part of town. People who still believe that maggots come from rotting meat, that black cats need to be shot at, and that their children don't need to be reading about evolution. And if English was good enough for God...
The Dark Ages.
Libraries are about freedom of information, not its censorship. They're about letting people access what they want, and decide for themselves, not keeping them in little local boxes. Ditto the Internet -- Abhay Bhushan, one of the architects of ftp, often tells the story of the group that first ran cables between computers at MIT, and the excitement that what was being created there could mean that anyone, anywhere, could access any piece of human knowledge.
That is a vision about the possibilities of learning that is fundamentally incompatible with the censorship of information. Where is censorship going to stop, after all? People -- especially children -- should have access to whatever information they choose, with neither feds nor locals getting in the way.
>implication that people copying music on Napster is a form of righteous rebellion is just wrong. Come now.
Perhaps my implication was that there were strong material interests behind the American Revolution. Come now.
>A couple differences... I mean really. There's a big difference between record companies (who are not the only source of music, you know), and a colonial government.
Well, they are the source of 98% of it, you know. And the colonists could damn well have drunk something else, after all...
Seriously, my point is that if the RIAA suceeds in its current efforts, the difference between record companies and a colonial government might be a lot less. For instance, imagine what it would be like to live in a world where, everytime you gave a record or book to a friend, they had to be charged to look at it. And where they could only look at it on an "authorized," "trusted" device. Where digital signatures are imbedded in everything so that, if you do manage to make an 'unauthorized' copy, the work can be traced back to you, even after many generations of copying -- presumably so the SS can show up on your door.
That's precisely the sort of system that the RIAA people envision, and that boys over at PARC are building for them... and which come into place unless distributed copying is legally defended.
>what this is really about, then, is 20 million people infringing on an entire industry by stealing that industry's copyrighted works.
*** FLAME ON ***
Since you used bold: I am really tired of reading idiots who don't know shit about copyright.
'Unauthorized copying' is not stealing. It is simply 'unauthorized.' Being unauthorized does not, in itself, constitute a violation. Period.
If you bothered to read the Napster case, you'd find that showing damages is necessary to show a copyright violation. In fact, copyright law before DCMA established four "mutual non-exclusive" criteria for determining copyright violation: (1) The nature of the use (commercial vs. academic, news, personal). (2) The monetary damage to the copyright holder, if any. (3) The extent of the work used (a phrase or sentence, or an exact copy of a painting). (4) The intent of the person(s) making the copy.
(For those who care to do their research, the key documents here are the White and Blue Papers produced by Congress on the issues).
Unless the DCMA and other recent attempts to redefine copyright stand, copyright does not mean that you 'own' a work and can do with it as you wish. All you 'own' is the copyright itself, and all this means is that you have certain very limited rights to authorize copying of particular works. Very limited, as the point of this system was to establish a balance between the public's need and right to information, and the need to fairly compensate authors, spurring them to create new Works.
Once again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. The DCMA & etc. have yet to hold up in Court, and the Supremes have repeatedly indicated their intent to resist any attempt to limit fair use. Before DCMA etc., copyright was almost entirely a civil matter. Let's say it again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. THERE'S NOTHING TO STEAL. OWNING A COPYRIGHT IS NOT THE SAME AS OWNING A WORK. A WORK CANNOT BE STOLEN -- ONLY THE PAPER IT'S PRINTED ON. CODING IS NOT A CRIME, EITHER.
And again, if you bother to read through what people have posted here, through Barlow's writings at EFF, or things written by copyright experts like Pamula Samuelson, you'll find that copyright is a lot more complex than your "we can't let the masses storm the Bastille" rant assumes.
Look, I dislike the English as much as the next guy... but the fact is, clippers are used mostly (not exclusively) to pirate tea, and that's bad. Yes, the King needs to see the writing on the wall that representation is the way to go and that He can't gouge colonists. But that doesn't mean that John Paul and the rest of those pirates are a good thing! They're both in the wrong.
Cheap tea is not a right. The colonist's rights are not being stepped on. Maybe you buy more tea because you tried Jefferson's stuff first... so what? It's still not a right. King George is bone-headed, but He's not wrong on this issue.
It also alarms me that people get this issue confused with freedom of religion, housing militia, etc... these have nothing to do with what the pirates are doing. Religion and housing are about control, using your own property as you wish. Running clippers to get past the British is about making money for Jefferson and his friends, not freedom.
Is there a reason you seem to be actively trying to avoid the point? The NZ/Brit/Carnivore/Echelon systems allow government access far beyond snail mail, period. Most people seem to get that.
Or is that what you want?
While it may come as some surprise to you, US Mail cannot be searched/examined/siezed without due cause. And, yes, a lot of drugs did get shipped that way:), before the 16oz. -> ID requirement made it fairly easy to trace mail and fairly dangerous to drop it off. And cocaine, btw, is highly detectable and very expensive, making it a very bad idea to ship it in the mail.
Generally, "sane individuals" (as you put it) consider it an act of fascist/communist governments to go reading their mail, to find what they can find and create dossiers about people. Those good, sane people have been posting their concerns here a lot, probably because most SlashDoters come from the FREE WORLD (God bless it!).
But, unfortunately, there are dangers in the fact that the internet allows participation by all. Evidently you have lived under a fascist government, given your opinions. For instance, your definition of 'public' would apply to the world's phone system, as well. I'm not sure what highways would be. Evidently the U.S.'s would be private, but Europe's public. Typical RED propaganda here, denoucing the US for privatization, applauding socialist measures in Europe, and trying to place private resources like phone and internet communications in the so-called public's (read: you commie bastards) hands.
And who modded you up? Evidently there are a few more communists around here...
All bent on making the InterNet public property, no doubt, and then reading all our emails, and doing who-knows-what with our precious bodily fluids.
Well, we won't let you take over a good, private forum like SlashDot! VALinuxers, unite! Start IP filtering mods from current and former communist countries, NOW!, or all is lost!
> 2) Why do you assume you have a 'right' to privacy when you send cleartext data on the public internet? (I know we feel we >DO have a right to privacy, but if it is there in the clear, a court can take it).
Well, if for no other reason, because of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act of 1991, which guarantees that U.S. traffic has the same expectation of privacy as, for instance, sealed mail; and declares its invasion to be a felony.
So, no, a Court can't "take it" if it's a clear-text email transmission, no more than a Court could take a copy of a letter sent through the mail, photographed through the address slot or something. (The Court has consistently maintained that the standard is "reasonable expectation of privacy:" if you reasonably expected that your property (of whatever type) would be private, no matter how easy it is to access, accessing it is a violation of the law.)
(And there is no "public internet," BTW; we're taliing about traffic carried on private dataways, a small number of them owned by government entities with essentially private status.)
>1) With court order, why should computer systems be treated any different than meatspace systems?
Because they're not meatspace systems. A court order that allows the FBI to tap my neighbor's phone because he's trafficing explosives does not give the FBI the ability to hear my conversations unless they abide by the "honor system." But Carnivore does give them this; Echelon does;...
>Poor choice for an example, since no one has used a nuclear weapon (outside of testing them) since WWII ended over half a century ago. Maybe we can be trusted with these technologies after all...
Not true at all.
First, nuclear weapons, of all shapes and sizes, are built and used, will all sorts of profound consequences. A few examples:
1- Russia's placement of short-rance BCMs in Cuba, and the world situation that resulted. 2- Nuclear mining of the Western European Alps, which effectively eliminates the possibility of an enemy force crossing them. 3- Deployment of nuclear backpacks and field munitions, radically altering potential battlefield conditions (please remember that the US/NATO has never agreed to no-first-use on OUR territory). 4- Use of Depleted Uranium (DU) and other derivative rounds in NATO operations, and the creation of amounts of fallout that may exceed Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
Second, it is by no means clear that we have avoided significant military detonation -- and will avoid such in the future -- by anything but pure luck. Viz:
1) That Russia clearly planned an invasion during the Cuban crisis -- had placed 300,000 troops in Cuba when Kennedy declared to Kruschev, "there will be war." 2) That the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's nuclear clock reached one minute to midnight five times. 3) That the US has ACCIDENTALLY reached DEFCON 2 over ten times.
Couple this with countries like Pakistan developing 60-megaton "citykillers*" on a wind-and-a-prayer budget, and the new world order doesn't seem all that safe to me. In fact, it has quite aptly been called "the new world disorder."
But active nuclear holocaust wasn't my point; it was that fundamental technologies will be USED once developed; they will be used by whomever can control them to manipulate power; and that this will have little to nothing to do with the pretty fairy tales that the children who created them told themselves while making them.
Which pretty much sums up the early development of nuclear munitions, Einstein to Oppenheimer to Mandelbaum. Teller is another story...
*FYI: past the late 50s, the US/USSR became committed to the "tactical" use of nuclear warheads, generally less than 50 kilotons in yield, most less than those used at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The re-development of "strategic" nuclear weapons, capable of destroying cities in Terminator-esqe style, is a peculiar innovation of the previous few years.
Scientists and system administrators at this prestigious national security laboratory announced today that they had been the first to extract small organisms known as mitocarians directly from the bloodsteam of their sysadmin team members. As a result, claim key researchers, their Top-Secret "Red Team" is able to use the Force to break into other sites with astonishing ease.
"By harnessing mitocarians from select team members," said a researcher who would only identify himself as "Obi-wan," "we are able to channel the Force in strange, new ways." As a result, team members have sucessfully broken into sites that no man has broken into before...
Slashdot Mirror
Aye, excuse me for being short, but I've said this here about 20 times:
As much as the music industry would like you to think so, unauthorized copying is not, generally, 'against the law.' It is a civil offense, which means, if a copyright holder can show (a) that it wan't 'fair use' or the like AND (b) that it caused the holder specific monetary damage, they can sue. This is a summary; go look at Congress' blue and white papers, or the EFF site, or search google for Pamela Samuelson, if you really want to delve into copyright law.
In any case, the above are fairly hard to prove in each case of peer-to-peer networking. Especially when bigwigs like Orren Hatch say they'd use Napster to sample music :) and they'll expand the legislative definition of fair use if the music industry doesn't stop being pricks :).
In any case,
If they really put their minds to it, I'm sure they can find several ways to help law-enforcement without breaking the law.
This is not a "law enforcement" issue -- because law enforcement agencies don't, by and large, step into civil matters. And if they "really put their minds to it," I'm sure Congress will be glad to use the Law to put them and their revenue streams in place...
For the non-Europeans here:
FKK= Frei Korper Kulture, literally, "Free Body Culture," and is the German term for the movement behind the (quite large) number of public parks, lakes, etc., which allow, encourage or tolerate what Americans call "nudism." (In practice, the Germans make a whole less of a big deal about the whole thing -- you do to the lake, you take your clothes off, you go swimming...).
I'm not sure this makes the above comment funny, but it sure helps.
Aye, but what we're talking about here are civil damages, not criminal prosecutions.
Imaging Ima Dion O. Cancer sues Guiless Drugs for selling her cigarettes for 50 years. Guiless is, of course, gonna point his finger directly at Brown and Williamson, since they (a) made the damn things (b) are on record as knowing they were bad and (c) have pretty big pockets.
Now, AOL only meets 2 of the 3 criteria here, but since they're non-exclusive in the legal world, and because AOL has pockets that extend right down to the center of the earth, I suspect MP3Board thinks its worth a shot.
Or, more simply put, pointing yer finger at a likely accomplice (however innocent) is always preferable to walking the plank straightaways.
Well, to start off, I didn't use it, they did; I merely referenced them in making a different point about people's opinions.
But since you seem interested in those forms of semantic sparing with which students of philosophy, rhetoric, and the related literary disciples -- of which I once was one -- amuse themselves in times of need:
You may not be interested in the proper definition of fascism
"Terms with histories have no definitions." -Nietzsche (who was stealing from the Swedish Baron von Stromberg, who was reversing von Ranke)
Nietsche's basic point, which has come to be more widely embraced in an age of Quantum Physics, is that the meaning is a very messy thing, and terms change their definitions over time and place, as we learn new things. And sometimes they just don't make 'rational' sense, at least in a strictly definitional sort of way. To wit:
You may not be interested... but rational discourse demands it.
Then reason, I say, must be fascist!
The above is a metaphor -- a term Aristotle once defined as strictly a verb, metaphorien, 'to make things alike.'
What he was suggesting in that definition is that defining things produces the world. You say Reason doth demand that I be interested in 'proper' definitions, I say nay, nought, if Reason doth so dictate, She be a harsh, fascist mistress!
And so our dear readers, if there be any, may decide: either Reason be fascist, or this Fascist demand may not be attributed to reason (but rather to the inaccuracies of your Narrative).
But continuing the exposition:
If you can assign any definition to any word As Kant and Fueurbach pointed out, one may quite certainly do so. Indeed, this is a concept that may be quite familiar to many programmers. A statment such as 'fascism is ..." or "Italy is fascist" reduces to simple variable assignment:
variable X := a := b
...
do (something);
variable X
do (something);
The technical term for such a statement is a "logical coupula," because the first statement is coupled to the second, by means of the "equals" operator.
Of course, the value of the something that you do is highly dependent on the value of a,b,... that you input into the model, especially if you are attempting to model some feature of the real world. But, as our dear Messers. Kart and Fueurbach pointed out, even the purely random iteration of terms can be very useful: In fact, this reminds me of a rather interesting story told to me by the Honorable Roger Gregory, about the GNU compiler. As he relates it, the guys were interested in optimizing their compiler performance, but hadn't come up with any rational and proper way to do so, logically speaking. So what they did instead was this:
* For any given function T, assume the argument 3.
* For ALL one, two, or three-byte instuctions F, test all F(3).
* Throw away all F(3) where the answer is wrong for T.
* For any F(x) such that the answer is correct for the number 3, test and verify for all F(x).
* For all F(x) which test & verify, collect timing data.
And whammo, you've just tested the entire possible instruction set, finding the optimal solutions to everything! Mr. Feuerbach would, indeed, have been quite happy.
However, Mr. Feuerbach did produce quite some anxiety and consternation in the Church of the time when, in The Essence of Christianity, he did declare this very point in opposition to the so-called 'proper truths' of Christianity. Indeed, he went so far to say that we find G-d in iterating through all the (quite improper!) possible definitions of our terms, and that this had been what the (hitherto quite respected) Mr. Hegel had meant in his (rather unreadable) Logic of History and (rather more unreadable) other works.
Moving back to generality, the point is this: language, computer or not, is a simulation. And simulations are not reality. They are tests, challenges, in the most cosmic sense of the term.
Should we return to the fascists?
If you need help with the definition, go find a dictionary.
My OED doth dictate:
Fascism: The principles and organisation of the Fascists.
Fascist: One of a body of Italian nationalists, which was organized in March 1919 to oppose Bolshevism in Italy, and, as the partito nationale fascista, under the leadership of Signor Mussolini assumed control of the Italian government in October 1922; transf. applied to similar organizations in other countries.
Well. There is, indeed, some room here for walking down the slippery slope of saying that Fascism, properly speaking, only occured in countries such-and-such because of their direct relation to Mussolini; and I'm sure a good philologist would remind us that, as fascism first came into existence in 1919, it would be improper to call anything that existed before 1919 fascist.
And, indeed, this would get us out of the hard work of running simulations of reality in our little brains, deciding if and to what extent f(x)=f(y) when, say,
x=Jerry Brown
y=Sig. Benito Mussolini
(apologies to the good Jerry Garcia for stealing the equation from his work)
much less, the much more tedious work of deciding which sub-functions we may need to establish the validity of this claim. Unfortunately for our moral workload, the authority of the OED doth proclaim: and "applied to similar organizations in other countries." Which gets us into the little trenches of deciding what a similar organization is, exactly.
But returning to the origin of this discourse:
But relevance does this have to your friends calling the US fascist? They would be pissed if I called Europe communist or South America a quilt of petty dictators.
I think, rather, not. A number of them would be in the US because, say, they were running from their lives from those same South American despots, or starving under the conditions they caused; or because they found Europe's version of socialism a bit too communist for their tastes. And, like everyone from Feuerbach to our dear GNU programmers, they'd like to try something different.
Why should I not get angry when they cast similar aspersions on my country.
Because, after all, an aspersion, a turn of language, an expression -- see Larry Wall's introduction to the Magic of Perl -- is a magic trick, meant to change the world, should it be the right incantation.
And to oppose such Witchcraft with petty Anger and needless Wrath, be the error of the Mideval Church.
Did I say any of those countries was absolutely perfect?
I'm not interested in getting in a discussion of the bona-fide definition of bona-fide fascism; I merely meant to point out that there were a good number of people who would question the r-rating exclusion on grounds of freedom. There are a good number of people, like myself, who frequently exchange the wonders of the American economy for the freedom to do what you want in Eastern Europe, despite some other persistent failures there.
In terms of fascism, though: what about good parts of east asia or Jerry Brown's California?
>Nobody questions the concept that you have to be 17 to get into an R-rated movie -- everyone understands that's just the way things work.
Really? I have a bunch of European and South American friends who think its a fairly good indication of the repressive, fascist state of America. They love the drinking age, too.
Try "it isn't really a free speech issue; the publication is simply being kept out of the hands of scientists, academics, and members of the media."
The SR-71 is the last new aerodynamic design of an aircraft, and it was designed in the very early years of NASA, and with slide rules, for that matter. Boeings to B-2s are all refinements of prior work, some of which has been heavily influenced by NASA -- but have not heavily profited from advanced technology, like the heat shielding you mention.
For instance, the Concorde was merely a 1950s airliner re-designed to stand hitting Mach 1. Same aerodynamic model, same engines. The SR-71, on the other hand, was fully designed, essentially from scratch -- aerodynamics and engines & etc. -- to ride a sonic shock wave. It derived a good 53% of its fuel efficiency from riding the wave alone, and another large amount from the compression of fuel in the engines.
Now that ceramic tiles and other advances have come along, it seems quite feasable to design a Mach 3 passenger aircraft that uses only slightly more fuel/lb/mile than current craft. Equally, the space shuttle -- which was another #($#( government compromise -- has main engines which are also 1950s technology. (The original plan, of course, was to lift the thing on a re-usable ramjet... which would have been 4-5x more fuel efficient. Damn Congress.) We will see -- probably from private ventures -- spacecraft based on radically different technologies.
In short: there are a lot of NASA-derived technologies sitting on the shelf; our world will be a lot different when they are in use.
Other than the aerodynamics, imaging and other technologies mentioned by another poster, there were also clear advances in microelectronics and medical processes, to name a few. Mapping. Location of oil resources. ...
I believe the standard conversion to civilian economy ratio quoted for NASA is about 20:1, making it one of the most valuable government programs ever.
Because the device is muscle-powered, users are assured by the fact that it may always be disabled by simply ceasing all muscular activity.
Tak, vy rozumiste comunism? A domil jste nad comunismu? Nevidel jsem nekdy americky SitComy na telivize nad comunismu...
What, you understand communism? And you have lived under communism? I didn't see any American SitComs on communist television...
No, communism wasn't evil, and America is hardly free. But the Eastern block certainly was a 'police state,' by all reasonable definitions.
And if the only form of 'public participation' the American left has left is the shenanigans (er, "Ruckus") in Philly, America may very well be one soon, too.
Yes, his comments seems to be something like:
"I was carrying a long round case... of the kind issued to field personnel to carry surface-to-air missles. All I had in it was my flute and some dirty underwear, but the stupid cop stopped me and asked what was in it. So I said, 'fuck off, you ugly shit-eating Nazi pig, and the asshole asked me for ID.'"
(So, no, this ain't the same as Selma... Boy seems to want some real southern pigs to tangle with, but since they burned white boys from the North, I bet he wouldn't have been around a real protest for long...)
I think this all boils down to something I remember John Perry Barlow saying a few years back:
"I quickly learned, that if you treat cops like pigs, they'll act like pigs."
The sad thing here, for democracy and protest, is that the cops will never respect people who treat them like pigs.
If the Russians in Red Square had acted like this, the soldiers would have fired on them, and Russia would likely still be a police state. The Russian soldiers didn't fire, because they respected the common Russian people -- who we're being "AssHoles," after all, unlike these guys.
Of course, all these "lets get arrested" guys would like to think that they're involved in something as important as bringing down Communism. I live in Berkeley, and it's amazing to sit in coffeeshops listening to the bandana-wearning pacholi-smelling kids talking about the old-white-male convention in Philly and trying to find things wrong with it. "Geez, half the people there must be millionares!" I heard. Little rebels without a cause, hopping from Dead show to the next protest, spending their parent's money and wishing that they were poor working class folks... this is liberalism in America, circa 2000.
Geez, I wonder if we could find some way to charge them to get into the protests as well as the concerts?
You go down to Selma to protest... you volunteer with some activst types to get arrensted, you sit down in the white section of a restaurant, and you are bitching about getting arrested? Am I missing something?
Why do these people bother? I see people like this and all I think is how misguided they are, shake my head, and move on...
I believe the issue in question is whether a personal computer constitutes a digital home audio recording device under the statutory terms of the home recording act. If it did, it might be further restricted, because it was not protected as a general-purpose device. See the Diamond RIO case, where the RIO narrowly escaped restrictions because it was not a serial copy device (one way, onto the RIO, only).
The designers of the home recording act specifically excluded computers from the definition -- because the act's restrictions would have hobbled computer manufacturers. Under these purely legal terms, a home computer clearly is not a home audio recording device, because it can do so much more :).
Oh good grief. You think this is "appropriate" behavior on your part?
Exactly who authorized you to make decisions on which sites it is "appropriate" for these kids to visit? Does your system have a written policy that outlines the criteria on which you are to make these censorship decisions? What are your qualifications for being in such a position, managing children's behavior, etc.?
It seems that your position was ripe for abuse; and I point this out because the above are the first questions that a lawyer would be likely to choose.
Personally, I see the actions above as idiotic (not to mention rather sysadminish, in the negative sense criticised by, say, Ted Nelson in his various books). What is it about technology that encourages this sort of abuse of power (in relation to those who don't have technical knowledge)?
Why should anyone need an account to look at information in a library, and who the hell gave you the right to invade these kids privacy by reviewing their logs? I suggest you review your State Attorney Generals advisory on monitoring library patron use in a public school setting; at least when I worked in a school library, it treated what kids read as confidential information to be treated with respect...
Let the children look at what they want, the majority of them will get bored pretty quickly, the few that won't are probably natural pervs :) In any case you don't need to be instilling children with complexes about porn and sex by the neanderthal behavior above, much less my children, and you should seriously consider the potential negative legal ramifications of implementing this sort of policy without consulting a few experts in child development...
Oh, good grief. So the pea-brains in Peoria can decide that their children can't read Hemmingway? So self-righteous parents can keep their children away from information about drugs, pregnancy, whatever?
Having had the distinct pleasure of growing up in one of America's hick-ass towns, I can tell you what this leads to in one word. IGNORANCE. People whose view of the world is freakishly distorted because of thier censored view of reality. Girls who get pregnant, then married, at 13 because they didn't know HOW you got pregnant. People who genuinely believe that blacks should live in a different part of town. People who still believe that maggots come from rotting meat, that black cats need to be shot at, and that their children don't need to be reading about evolution. And if English was good enough for God...
The Dark Ages.
Libraries are about freedom of information, not its censorship. They're about letting people access what they want, and decide for themselves, not keeping them in little local boxes. Ditto the Internet -- Abhay Bhushan, one of the architects of ftp, often tells the story of the group that first ran cables between computers at MIT, and the excitement that what was being created there could mean that anyone, anywhere, could access any piece of human knowledge.
That is a vision about the possibilities of learning that is fundamentally incompatible with the censorship of information. Where is censorship going to stop, after all? People -- especially children -- should have access to whatever information they choose, with neither feds nor locals getting in the way.
Last I remember from the digidoc guys at PARC, their material survival was supported by (other than Xerox) publishing and music, not MPAA.
But that's not why I'm still chatting...
Napster ain't it... Oh, and I hope the RIAAs constituents go bankrupt no matter what
Those are both sentiments I suspect Jefferson and Franklin would have raised a beer to :)
Perhaps my implication was that there were strong material interests behind the American Revolution. Come now.
>A couple differences... I mean really. There's a big difference between record companies (who are not the only source of music, you know), and a colonial government.
Well, they are the source of 98% of it, you know. And the colonists could damn well have drunk something else, after all...
Seriously, my point is that if the RIAA suceeds in its current efforts, the difference between record companies and a colonial government might be a lot less. For instance, imagine what it would be like to live in a world where, everytime you gave a record or book to a friend, they had to be charged to look at it. And where they could only look at it on an "authorized," "trusted" device. Where digital signatures are imbedded in everything so that, if you do manage to make an 'unauthorized' copy, the work can be traced back to you, even after many generations of copying -- presumably so the SS can show up on your door.
That's precisely the sort of system that the RIAA people envision, and that boys over at PARC are building for them... and which come into place unless distributed copying is legally defended.
*** FLAME ON ***
Since you used bold: I am really tired of reading idiots who don't know shit about copyright.
'Unauthorized copying' is not stealing. It is simply 'unauthorized.' Being unauthorized does not, in itself, constitute a violation. Period.
If you bothered to read the Napster case, you'd find that showing damages is necessary to show a copyright violation. In fact, copyright law before DCMA established four "mutual non-exclusive" criteria for determining copyright violation:
(1) The nature of the use (commercial vs. academic, news, personal).
(2) The monetary damage to the copyright holder, if any.
(3) The extent of the work used (a phrase or sentence, or an exact copy of a painting).
(4) The intent of the person(s) making the copy.
(For those who care to do their research, the key documents here are the White and Blue Papers produced by Congress on the issues).
Unless the DCMA and other recent attempts to redefine copyright stand, copyright does not mean that you 'own' a work and can do with it as you wish. All you 'own' is the copyright itself, and all this means is that you have certain very limited rights to authorize copying of particular works. Very limited, as the point of this system was to establish a balance between the public's need and right to information, and the need to fairly compensate authors, spurring them to create new Works.
Once again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. The DCMA & etc. have yet to hold up in Court, and the Supremes have repeatedly indicated their intent to resist any attempt to limit fair use. Before DCMA etc., copyright was almost entirely a civil matter. Let's say it again: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IS NOT A CRIME. THERE'S NOTHING TO STEAL. OWNING A COPYRIGHT IS NOT THE SAME AS OWNING A WORK. A WORK CANNOT BE STOLEN -- ONLY THE PAPER IT'S PRINTED ON. CODING IS NOT A CRIME, EITHER.
And again, if you bother to read through what people have posted here, through Barlow's writings at EFF, or things written by copyright experts like Pamula Samuelson, you'll find that copyright is a lot more complex than your "we can't let the masses storm the Bastille" rant assumes.
Got It? ?*** FLAME OFF ***
Look, I dislike the English as much as the next guy... but the fact is, clippers are used mostly (not exclusively) to pirate tea, and that's bad. Yes, the King needs to see the writing on the wall that representation is the way to go and that He can't gouge colonists. But that doesn't mean that John Paul and the rest of those pirates are a good thing! They're both in the wrong.
Cheap tea is not a right. The colonist's rights are not being stepped on. Maybe you buy more tea because you tried Jefferson's stuff first... so what? It's still not a right. King George is bone-headed, but He's not wrong on this issue.
It also alarms me that people get this issue confused with freedom of religion, housing militia, etc... these have nothing to do with what the pirates are doing. Religion and housing are about control, using your own property as you wish. Running clippers to get past the British is about making money for Jefferson and his friends, not freedom.
Is there a reason you seem to be actively trying to avoid the point? The NZ/Brit/Carnivore/Echelon systems allow government access far beyond snail mail, period. Most people seem to get that.
:), before the 16oz. -> ID requirement made it fairly easy to trace mail and fairly dangerous to drop it off. And cocaine, btw, is highly detectable and very expensive, making it a very bad idea to ship it in the mail.
Or is that what you want?
While it may come as some surprise to you, US Mail cannot be searched/examined/siezed without due cause. And, yes, a lot of drugs did get shipped that way
Generally, "sane individuals" (as you put it) consider it an act of fascist/communist governments to go reading their mail, to find what they can find and create dossiers about people. Those good, sane people have been posting their concerns here a lot, probably because most SlashDoters come from the FREE WORLD (God bless it!).
But, unfortunately, there are dangers in the fact that the internet allows participation by all. Evidently you have lived under a fascist government, given your opinions. For instance, your definition of 'public' would apply to the world's phone system, as well. I'm not sure what highways would be. Evidently the U.S.'s would be private, but Europe's public. Typical RED propaganda here, denoucing the US for privatization, applauding socialist measures in Europe, and trying to place private resources like phone and internet communications in the so-called public's (read: you commie bastards) hands.
And who modded you up? Evidently there are a few more communists around here...
All bent on making the InterNet public property, no doubt, and then reading all our emails, and doing who-knows-what with our precious bodily fluids.
Well, we won't let you take over a good, private forum like SlashDot! VALinuxers, unite! Start IP filtering mods from current and former communist countries, NOW!, or all is lost!
> 2) Why do you assume you have a 'right' to privacy when you send cleartext data on the public internet? (I know we feel we
...
>DO have a right to privacy, but if it is there in the clear, a court can take it).
Well, if for no other reason, because of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act of 1991, which guarantees that U.S. traffic has the same expectation of privacy as, for instance, sealed mail; and declares its invasion to be a felony.
So, no, a Court can't "take it" if it's a clear-text email transmission, no more than a Court could take a copy of a letter sent through the mail, photographed through the address slot or something. (The Court has consistently maintained that the standard is "reasonable expectation of privacy:" if you reasonably expected that your property (of whatever type) would be private, no matter how easy it is to access, accessing it is a violation of the law.)
(And there is no "public internet," BTW; we're taliing about traffic carried on private dataways, a small number of them owned by government entities with essentially private status.)
>1) With court order, why should computer systems be treated any different than meatspace systems?
Because they're not meatspace systems. A court order that allows the FBI to tap my neighbor's phone because he's trafficing explosives does not give the FBI the ability to hear my conversations unless they abide by the "honor system." But Carnivore does give them this; Echelon does;
...how many people wanted to buy one?
...how much would such a device actually cost?
Hmmmmm...
"Never call a man a fool. Take his money." --P.T. Barnum
>Poor choice for an example, since no one has used a nuclear weapon (outside of testing them) since WWII ended over half a century ago. Maybe we can be trusted with these technologies after all...
Not true at all.
First, nuclear weapons, of all shapes and sizes, are built and used, will all sorts of profound consequences. A few examples:
1- Russia's placement of short-rance BCMs in Cuba, and the world situation that resulted.
2- Nuclear mining of the Western European Alps, which effectively eliminates the possibility of an enemy force crossing them.
3- Deployment of nuclear backpacks and field munitions, radically altering potential battlefield conditions (please remember that the US/NATO has never agreed to no-first-use on OUR territory).
4- Use of Depleted Uranium (DU) and other derivative rounds in NATO operations, and the creation of amounts of fallout that may exceed Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
Second, it is by no means clear that we have avoided significant military detonation -- and will avoid such in the future -- by anything but pure luck. Viz:
1) That Russia clearly planned an invasion during the Cuban crisis -- had placed 300,000 troops in Cuba when Kennedy declared to Kruschev, "there will be war."
2) That the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist's nuclear clock reached one minute to midnight five times.
3) That the US has ACCIDENTALLY reached DEFCON 2 over ten times.
Couple this with countries like Pakistan developing 60-megaton "citykillers*" on a wind-and-a-prayer budget, and the new world order doesn't seem all that safe to me. In fact, it has quite aptly been called "the new world disorder."
But active nuclear holocaust wasn't my point; it was that fundamental technologies will be USED once developed; they will be used by whomever can control them to manipulate power; and that this will have little to nothing to do with the pretty fairy tales that the children who created them told themselves while making them.
Which pretty much sums up the early development of nuclear munitions, Einstein to Oppenheimer to Mandelbaum. Teller is another story...
*FYI: past the late 50s, the US/USSR became committed to the "tactical" use of nuclear warheads, generally less than 50 kilotons in yield, most less than those used at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The re-development of "strategic" nuclear weapons, capable of destroying cities in Terminator-esqe style, is a peculiar innovation of the previous few years.
Albuquerque, NM, 17:59 PDT --
Scientists and system administrators at this prestigious national security laboratory announced today that they had been the first to extract small organisms known as mitocarians directly from the bloodsteam of their sysadmin team members. As a result, claim key researchers, their Top-Secret "Red Team" is able to use the Force to break into other sites with astonishing ease.
"By harnessing mitocarians from select team members," said a researcher who would only identify himself as "Obi-wan," "we are able to channel the Force in strange, new ways." As a result, team members have sucessfully broken into sites that no man has broken into before...