You can't prove a negative, but you can, a positive, or the presence of something. It's called "having a case." Otherwise one could claim any crazy thing, and insist people believe it on your say-so.
You can prove a negative, but you just can't prove it absolutely. The atheist can prove the non-existance of God to his own satisfaction, but the believer won't accept his argument.
As far as proving a positive, P2P defenders have not managed to produce a case that would pass the laugh test on any forum other than Slashdot. The fact that the most commonly cited argument is that "CD sales peaked during Napster's run and fell off shortly after it was shut down" dispells any presumption that Slashdotters would have a better grasp of statistics and mathematical reasoning than the general population. There are good argumnets, and proven cases, of the record industry deliberately over-pricing their wares, and engaging in all sorts of deception, fraud, and scamming.
I'm not saying that the music industry is chock full of nice people, but they're definitely in it for the money. Your allegations of fraud only reinforce this. The question is not whether such copyright infringement is illegal or not, it's whether the situation, ie. the damage to a respectful industry (chortles into sleeve, but shows concern to the artists, natch) merits the implementation of such horrendous laws.
Oh... so now you concede that there is damage to the industry. That's like a lawyer argument... "My client didn't kill anyone, your honour, but if he did kill someone it's because the victim was a really bad person."
I care about preserving copyright so that when the musicians finally do overthrow their RIAA oppressors and gain the rights to their music, they will still have something left worth selling. Otherwise, they are merely trading one tyrant at the record company for a million tyrants all around the world. You do know their track record, regarding video taping, compact cassette taping, and the like, don't you?
Are you going to tell me that VCRs increased movie sales/rentals? That is just BS. Keep in mind that VCRs are actually Video Cassette Recorders and players. If they had made a device that could play movies but not record them, it would still have been popular (as CD players were), and it would have not damaged the TV industry. (Also note that VCRs contain a piracy countermeasure that prevents you from making good copies of rented movies.)
Atheist: prove to me that God exists. Believer: prove to me that he doesn't exist.
Ahh... the eternal argument of who has to prove to whom. An excellent way to make your point without actually making a point. The fact of the matter is that the **AA, the copyright cartels, have not proved that their incomes, have been damaged by Kazaa et al.
You have your interpretation of the data and they have theirs. I happen to find their argument more convincing, but that's not the whole story. Overturning a law is like a coach's challenge in a football game. The ruling on the field is that P2P copyright violations are illegal, and if you want to get that ruling overturned you need to show conclusive evidence that there are no damages. I don't consider an uninformed opinion by a group of biased/. readers (who have shown over and over that they don't understand statistics) to be conclusive evidence.
And if you ask the tobacco companies, they still claim that there has never been a conclusive link between smoking and lung cancer.
The distinction is clear; theft deprives the 'owner' of the use of something, whereas infringement alone does not, but only uses something without permission to do so.
With all this talk of obsolete business models and such, has it ever occured to you that you may be using an obsolete definition of stealing?
But I digress. All of this is nearly irrelevant in the first place-- mod chips are no more illegal than guns. Just because they can be used illegally does not make them intrinsically illegal.
Unlicensed guns are illegal. If you would like Microsoft and Sony to get started on the national mod chip registration database, I'm sure they could oblige.
-a If kiddie pr0n was illegal, only criminals would have kiddie pr0n.
In your comment you refer to a signed applet, which is quite a different thing from an SSL session. (the topic of discussion)
It's not a completely different topic, since the same certs are used for both purposes. I checked my browser's configuration today and I was shocked how many root certs come preloaded. Lots of stuff from other countries. How do I know that some random cert issuer isn't going to get bought out by the Russian mafia.
Say what you like about Verisign, but at least they are a large company that is concerned about its image. AFAIK, they go through some steps to verify that you are an actual registered company with a legitimate street address, unlike the 10 minute sign-up form the OP mentioned. When Verisign issued those fake Microsoft certs it was a big scandal; if Geotrust had done it, would we have even heard about it?
Luckily, DNS provides a good second wall of defense against these sorts of attacks, but it's not perfect. Let's say you're surfing the web and someone recommends a book that interests you. It's the Onion Ad Nauseam with the customary link to Amazon.com (http://www.anazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/140 0047242/ref=ts_bh_1_8//103-0748334-6971015?v=glanc e&n=283155). Do you always check to see if Amazon.com might be misspelled? Normally I couldn't care less whether I'm browsing securely or not, but when I'm getting ready to place an order, I always check for the little lock in the frame of my browser.
Incidentally, if you do decide to check out anazon.com, you might want to turn Javascript off first.
If I go to a page and an applet pops up that says "You are about to run an app signed by foo.com. Geotrust asserts that this really is foo.com" I'm going to say "who the hell are Geotrust" and hit cancel.
You are also mistaken that RSA started Verisign; RSA Security was the company that licensed the RSA public-key algorithm. They actually compete directly with Verisign as a CA.
Check your facts before you post. RSA was in fact spun out of Verisign. Just because they compete now doesn't mean that they weren't ever affiliated.
The "use 'fewer' for counting, 'less' for measurements" rule is really pretty obscure and useless. Only the truly pedantic care about that rule. On the other hand, the apostrophe rule for contractions IS an important, useful rule.
Hey guys, could we ditch this rathole and start talking affect/effect... The WSJ ought to know better.
In fact, spamfighters have good reason to claim this is inevitable if spam-supporting organizations aren't severely curtailed.
1. And copyright owners have good reason to claim that lost sales are inevitable if piracy is not curtailed. Conversely, if I copy media on my own equipment, the publisher literally cannot tell that it's happening. All they know is how many copies they sell.
2. And when your mailbox fills up with spam you can't point to any one particular message and state with certainty that that was the spam e-mail that caused a legitimate message to be lost.
Yes I know that (2) is an invalid argument, but that's my point. An argument can be statistically valid, even if you can't prove it for any specific case.
Yes, spam is theft. And thank you for the straw man. I doubt that anyone who's thought about the music piracy issue for longer than 6 seconds takes the extremely simplistic position straw man summary you made.
Sigh...only on Slashdot!
Try asking some regular people (i.e. non-geeks) which of the whether they consider spam theft and whether they consider music piracy theft. You may be surprised at how ignorant the average person is.
That's not a libertarian argument either. That's a leech's rationalization of their position.
Yes, I'm aware of that (note my sig). But I also see it as "left-wing libertarianism". Intellectual property is a highly libertarian concept. However, not all libertarians agree with this.
Particularly the ones who read/. Besides: Spam is theft of bandwidth. Who pays for my network connection? I do.
It's the same kind of abstract theft as music/movie piracy, but I don't expect the majority of slashdotters to grasp that. You don't explicitly pay to receive spam, but the amortized infrastructure and operating costs are passed back to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
So what you're saying is that the slogan should be amended to:
Slashdot: We're libertarians, except when it comes to music/movie piracy.
Libertarians have never enjoyed theft. Since email spam is theft (advertising is NOT protected speech, and even it were protected, I wouldn't have to pay to hear it), spammers are thieves, mere common criminals, not first amendment martyrs.
Spam is theft? That conflicts with other typical liberterian arguments, such as "theft is depriving someone of property, therefore music/movie piracy isn't theft".
-a
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 2
To clean up some disk space, I once typed "rm -rf core*" in my root source directory (actually it was a script that did it). Sadly, this also deleted such files as core.c from the Linux source tree. My script now explicitly excludes the Linux source, but the next time I need to recompile my kernel is going to be a bitch.
The crux of the article is that the earth's climate system is complicated and multivariate. Global warming is not as simple as "the world will get warmer and we'll all live in a tropical paradise." Messing with the relevant factors won't necessarily bring about the 'obvious' consequence.
Now if only we could get Slashdotters to understand this the next time they make one of those quasi-informed pronouncement about economics (e.g. give away software to sell your hardware, music sharing increases sales).
"You can do whatever you want with this code, but you must pass along this same freedom to someone who wishes to do the same with what you produce with it".
I don't see what the problem is. Someone who wants to use GPL code in an "embrace and extend" project is prohibited by copyright law from doing so, just as someone who wanted to use MS code would be prohibited.
So how come stuff like this never gets modded as troll?
Whether you like the GPL or not is a matter of personal opinion, but any regular reader who claims that he doesn't understand why anyone could dislike viral licensing is either dumb as a post or he is being facetious.
Do not even *think* of speaking to the other lawyer without representation. They are the masters of spin and they will take anything you say and turn it against you.
That's fine in general, but in this specific situation what can you possibly say to him that can be used against you? If all it takes to clear this up is a phone call and a link to www.mcafee.com, how can you pass that up?
That's the first thing that occured to me as well. I can't believe you got modded as troll by some idiot moderator who doesn't know the difference between suggesting that something might happen and advocating it.
Hey Bob, can you show me how to use this new app? Oh wait, I guess you'll have to tell me how to use it. Actually, this sucks... let's just go to your computer.
I wonder if what they'll do about my laptop mouse.
Face it, most Linux users are not those free thinkers who carefully weigh the pros and cons of a tool they use to get a job done based on what philosophies it represents.
I use Linux only because it is free (as in beer) and because I am a cheap bastard who doesn't care that I am supporting what I perceive as communism (actually I'm not really supporting it since I haven't contributed any work or money and don't plan to). I object to your implication that the average consumer is not a free thinker just because they don't base their purchasing/leetching decision on some fad socio-economic theory.
I suppose this will get modded down, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
1. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. 2. p2p doesn't pirate software, people pirate software 3. knives don't stab people, people stab people 4. McDonalds coffee doesn't burn people, stupid people spill it all over themselves.
Umm... actually, McDonalds coffee does burn people, regardless of whether they are at fault for spilling it on themselves. And the people who spill it are more likely to be clumsy than stupid. Are you willing to take your argument to the logical extreme? E.g. pollution doesn't kill people, drinking polluted water does. The fact is, McDonalds coffee is obscenely hot, and somehow you expect this fact to be common knowledge. But how are they supposed to know that? Because they burned their tongue the first time they tried it? Because they carry a portable thermometer with them everywhere they go? Or because they read about the McDonalds case in the newspaper?
And guns may not kill people, but people who have access to guns are more likely to kill people. People who don't own guns don't risk having their kids find them. I actually know (casually) a guy who killed a man in a drunken rage. It only happened because he had easy access to a gun (his father owned one). Part of the purpose of law enforcement is to prevent crimes before they happen. It doesn't really help the guy who got shot to know that his killer will probably be caught.
Designing and operating a system that will be used primarily for music piracy is irresponsible and unethical. Regular/. readers don't have a problem crying foul when corporations commit other ethical violations, such as failing to disclose bugs or operating an illegal monopoly. Criminal facilitation is illegal, as is receiving stolen property.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't prove a negative, but you can, a positive, or the presence of something. It's called "having a case." Otherwise one could claim any crazy thing, and insist people believe it on your say-so.
You can prove a negative, but you just can't prove it absolutely. The atheist can prove the non-existance of God to his own satisfaction, but the believer won't accept his argument.
As far as proving a positive, P2P defenders have not managed to produce a case that would pass the laugh test on any forum other than Slashdot. The fact that the most commonly cited argument is that "CD sales peaked during Napster's run and fell off shortly after it was shut down" dispells any presumption that Slashdotters would have a better grasp of statistics and mathematical reasoning than the general population.
There are good argumnets, and proven cases, of the record industry deliberately over-pricing their wares, and engaging in all sorts of deception, fraud, and scamming.
I'm not saying that the music industry is chock full of nice people, but they're definitely in it for the money. Your allegations of fraud only reinforce this.
The question is not whether such copyright infringement is illegal or not, it's whether the situation, ie. the damage to a respectful industry (chortles into sleeve, but shows concern to the artists, natch) merits the implementation of such horrendous laws.
Oh... so now you concede that there is damage to the industry. That's like a lawyer argument... "My client didn't kill anyone, your honour, but if he did kill someone it's because the victim was a really bad person."
I care about preserving copyright so that when the musicians finally do overthrow their RIAA oppressors and gain the rights to their music, they will still have something left worth selling. Otherwise, they are merely trading one tyrant at the record company for a million tyrants all around the world.
You do know their track record, regarding video taping, compact cassette taping, and the like, don't you?
Are you going to tell me that VCRs increased movie sales/rentals? That is just BS. Keep in mind that VCRs are actually Video Cassette Recorders and players. If they had made a device that could play movies but not record them, it would still have been popular (as CD players were), and it would have not damaged the TV industry. (Also note that VCRs contain a piracy countermeasure that prevents you from making good copies of rented movies.)
-a
The competing petsores themselves
Hehe... you said "petsore." As in "Mr Novak, you're a festering petsore."
-a
Atheist: prove to me that God exists.
/. readers (who have shown over and over that they don't understand statistics) to be conclusive evidence.
Believer: prove to me that he doesn't exist.
Ahh... the eternal argument of who has to prove to whom. An excellent way to make your point without actually making a point.
The fact of the matter is that the **AA, the copyright cartels, have not proved that their incomes, have been damaged by Kazaa et al.
You have your interpretation of the data and they have theirs. I happen to find their argument more convincing, but that's not the whole story. Overturning a law is like a coach's challenge in a football game. The ruling on the field is that P2P copyright violations are illegal, and if you want to get that ruling overturned you need to show conclusive evidence that there are no damages. I don't consider an uninformed opinion by a group of biased
And if you ask the tobacco companies, they still claim that there has never been a conclusive link between smoking and lung cancer.
-a
The distinction is clear; theft deprives the 'owner' of the use of something, whereas infringement alone does not, but only uses something without permission to do so.
With all this talk of obsolete business models and such, has it ever occured to you that you may be using an obsolete definition of stealing?
-a
But I digress. All of this is nearly irrelevant in the first place-- mod chips are no more illegal than guns. Just because they can be used illegally does not make them intrinsically illegal.
Unlicensed guns are illegal. If you would like Microsoft and Sony to get started on the national mod chip registration database, I'm sure they could oblige.
-a
If kiddie pr0n was illegal, only criminals would have kiddie pr0n.
In your comment you refer to a signed applet, which is quite a different thing from an SSL session. (the topic of discussion)
It's not a completely different topic, since the same certs are used for both purposes. I checked my browser's configuration today and I was shocked how many root certs come preloaded. Lots of stuff from other countries. How do I know that some random cert issuer isn't going to get bought out by the Russian mafia.
Say what you like about Verisign, but at least they are a large company that is concerned about its image. AFAIK, they go through some steps to verify that you are an actual registered company with a legitimate street address, unlike the 10 minute sign-up form the OP mentioned. When Verisign issued those fake Microsoft certs it was a big scandal; if Geotrust had done it, would we have even heard about it?
Luckily, DNS provides a good second wall of defense against these sorts of attacks, but it's not perfect. Let's say you're surfing the web and someone recommends a book that interests you. It's the Onion Ad Nauseam with the customary link to Amazon.com (http://www.anazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/14
Incidentally, if you do decide to check out anazon.com, you might want to turn Javascript off first.
-a
The fact that the cast has a clause in their contract to do 3 films has been mentioned in like the last 17 Simpsons stories on /.
-a
If I go to a page and an applet pops up that says "You are about to run an app signed by foo.com. Geotrust asserts that this really is foo.com" I'm going to say "who the hell are Geotrust" and hit cancel.
-a
You are also mistaken that RSA started Verisign; RSA Security was the company that licensed the RSA public-key algorithm. They actually compete directly with Verisign as a CA.
Check your facts before you post. RSA was in fact spun out of Verisign. Just because they compete now doesn't mean that they weren't ever affiliated.
-a
Good comment. You're right on all points.
The "use 'fewer' for counting, 'less' for measurements" rule is really pretty obscure and useless. Only the truly pedantic care about that rule. On the other hand, the apostrophe rule for contractions IS an important, useful rule.
Hey guys, could we ditch this rathole and start talking affect/effect... The WSJ ought to know better.
-a
It's impossible to patent a time machine. Think about it.
Unless it's a time machine that only goes into the future. Ha, gotcha.
-a
In fact, spamfighters have good reason to claim this is inevitable if spam-supporting organizations aren't severely curtailed.
1. And copyright owners have good reason to claim that lost sales are inevitable if piracy is not curtailed.
Conversely, if I copy media on my own equipment, the publisher literally cannot tell that it's happening. All they know is how many copies they sell.
2. And when your mailbox fills up with spam you can't point to any one particular message and state with certainty that that was the spam e-mail that caused a legitimate message to be lost.
Yes I know that (2) is an invalid argument, but that's my point. An argument can be statistically valid, even if you can't prove it for any specific case.
-a
Yes, spam is theft. And thank you for the straw man. I doubt that anyone who's thought about the music piracy issue for longer than 6 seconds takes the extremely simplistic position straw man summary you made.
Sigh...only on Slashdot!
Try asking some regular people (i.e. non-geeks) which of the whether they consider spam theft and whether they consider music piracy theft. You may be surprised at how ignorant the average person is.
-a
That's not a libertarian argument either. That's a leech's rationalization of their position.
Yes, I'm aware of that (note my sig). But I also see it as "left-wing libertarianism".
Intellectual property is a highly libertarian concept. However, not all libertarians agree with this.
Particularly the ones who read
Besides: Spam is theft of bandwidth. Who pays for my network connection? I do.
It's the same kind of abstract theft as music/movie piracy, but I don't expect the majority of slashdotters to grasp that. You don't explicitly pay to receive spam, but the amortized infrastructure and operating costs are passed back to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
So what you're saying is that the slogan should be amended to:
Slashdot: We're libertarians, except when it comes to music/movie piracy.
-a
Libertarians have never enjoyed theft. Since email spam is theft (advertising is NOT protected speech, and even it were protected, I wouldn't have to pay to hear it), spammers are thieves, mere common criminals, not first amendment martyrs.
Spam is theft? That conflicts with other typical liberterian arguments, such as "theft is depriving someone of property, therefore music/movie piracy isn't theft".
-a
To clean up some disk space, I once typed "rm -rf core*" in my root source directory (actually it was a script that did it). Sadly, this also deleted such files as core.c from the Linux source tree. My script now explicitly excludes the Linux source, but the next time I need to recompile my kernel is going to be a bitch.
-a
The crux of the article is that the earth's climate system is complicated and multivariate. Global warming is not as simple as "the world will get warmer and we'll all live in a tropical paradise." Messing with the relevant factors won't necessarily bring about the 'obvious' consequence.
Now if only we could get Slashdotters to understand this the next time they make one of those quasi-informed pronouncement about economics (e.g. give away software to sell your hardware, music sharing increases sales).
-a
The GPL can be summed up as thus:
"You can do whatever you want with this code, but you must pass along this same freedom to someone who wishes to do the same with what you produce with it".
I don't see what the problem is. Someone who wants to use GPL code in an "embrace and extend" project is prohibited by copyright law from doing so, just as someone who wanted to use MS code would be prohibited.
So how come stuff like this never gets modded as troll?
Whether you like the GPL or not is a matter of personal opinion, but any regular reader who claims that he doesn't understand why anyone could dislike viral licensing is either dumb as a post or he is being facetious.
-a
Do not even *think* of speaking to the other lawyer without representation. They are the masters of spin and they will take anything you say and turn it against you.
That's fine in general, but in this specific situation what can you possibly say to him that can be used against you? If all it takes to clear this up is a phone call and a link to www.mcafee.com, how can you pass that up?
-a
That's the first thing that occured to me as well. I can't believe you got modded as troll by some idiot moderator who doesn't know the difference between suggesting that something might happen and advocating it.
-a
A quasi-mainstream news source called warchalkers "independent security researchers." That's gotta be a first.
-a
Hey Bob, can you show me how to use this new app? Oh wait, I guess you'll have to tell me how to use it. Actually, this sucks... let's just go to your computer.
I wonder if what they'll do about my laptop mouse.
-a
Face it, most Linux users are not those free thinkers who carefully weigh the pros and cons of a tool they use to get a job done based on what philosophies it represents.
I use Linux only because it is free (as in beer) and because I am a cheap bastard who doesn't care that I am supporting what I perceive as communism (actually I'm not really supporting it since I haven't contributed any work or money and don't plan to). I object to your implication that the average consumer is not a free thinker just because they don't base their purchasing/leetching decision on some fad socio-economic theory.
I suppose this will get modded down, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
-a
1. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
2. p2p doesn't pirate software, people pirate software
3. knives don't stab people, people stab people
4. McDonalds coffee doesn't burn people, stupid people spill it all over themselves.
Umm... actually, McDonalds coffee does burn people, regardless of whether they are at fault for spilling it on themselves. And the people who spill it are more likely to be clumsy than stupid. Are you willing to take your argument to the logical extreme? E.g. pollution doesn't kill people, drinking polluted water does. The fact is, McDonalds coffee is obscenely hot, and somehow you expect this fact to be common knowledge. But how are they supposed to know that? Because they burned their tongue the first time they tried it? Because they carry a portable thermometer with them everywhere they go? Or because they read about the McDonalds case in the newspaper?
And guns may not kill people, but people who have access to guns are more likely to kill people. People who don't own guns don't risk having their kids find them. I actually know (casually) a guy who killed a man in a drunken rage. It only happened because he had easy access to a gun (his father owned one). Part of the purpose of law enforcement is to prevent crimes before they happen. It doesn't really help the guy who got shot to know that his killer will probably be caught.
Designing and operating a system that will be used primarily for music piracy is irresponsible and unethical. Regular
-a