What you say is just dumb. With that mindset, you could say Mac OSX is not ready for regular desktop use, because it doesn't support most motherboards and graphic cards. Or you could say that windows vista (or 7) is not ready, because it doesn't run on ARM chips, or because it doesn't have drivers for my older video capture cards.
Some software runs with some hardware. Most printers just work with linux, some don't. Big deal. You can just ask the one who sells them, or just stick to HP.
Well, I get your point, but let's take everything into account here. Bolivia can't just do whatever they want. If powerful countries want their resources, they will get them, one way or another. As an undeveloped country, they have to take what they can. Trying to leverage too much the natural resources might result in losing them by force. In the end, countries only own the resources and the land they can defend. It would not be sensible to risk foreign intervention. Nowadays, as an example, it would not be that hard for a foreign company (with its own government support) to get rid of Bolivia's president, accusing him of drug dealing or something like that, and put another guy in his place, more friendly with foreign companies. So, while I share your view in theory, in practice I think countries like Bolivia just can't play hard ball.
Latin "occultus" means "hidden" and resembles the word for it in most latin languages ("oculto"). Of course, that is why black magic and stuff is associated to that word.
Because an occupied country is, by definition, not free.
So you are saying that a democracy cannot exist without freedom?
I like to call it "independence".
So an absolute monarch who chooses to allow the country to run itself based on democratic principles is called what then?
Either an absolute monarch, or a former absolute monarch, if he gives up power completely.
The world is more complicated than you seem to think, and "democracy" is not some absolute definition with firm lines drawn in the sand. The United States wasn't very democratic if you were black, poor, or a woman. Does that mean that it wasn't a democratic republic?
Yes. Democracy is the rule of the people, if the people can't even vote, it's not a democracy.
Iraq can in fact have democratic processes in place and be effectively run by its own people even if they aren't 100% free. Until they hit the limits of their freedom, there is no practical difference - only an ideological difference.
The point here was Saddam Hussein. I said his judges were not appointed by the people of Iraq. I still think so.
Only free countries have the opportunity for democracy. Iraq is an occupied country. There is no democracy in such a country. There might be some kind of voting, tough. Voting does not designate a democracy, per se. There was voting in Iraq before the invasion, and most people didn't call it a democracy.
Torture is torture. The fact that they skipped the forms of torture that leave physical marks doesn't make it non torture. The same kind of people used waterboarding, electrocution, and other stuff thirty years ago where I leave. Maybe they found out that this kind of stuff is cleaner, and as effective. The thing with torture is this: if you take a prisoner, feed them right and treat them right, it's ok. If you take a prisoner, and mess with them, it's not ok. Even if you use "cleaner" ways of messing with them, it's not ok.
Since the problem is Windows culture and not Windows itself, one has to educate one's self in order to avoid the pitfalls that people tend to associate with Windows itself.
Well, I can't see it that way. There is not such thing as "windows itself". First of all, "windows itself" does close to nothing. There is little you can achieve with a fresh copy of Windows. Third party software is an integral part of the windows platform.
You could say that "ubuntu itself" is good, and nonfree stuff you add is crap, because "ubuntu itself" includes lots of software you can use that has passed some kind of QA, so you have a single guy to complain about.
Secondly, people don't install windows by themselves. It's very hard, in my experience. For example, looking for network drivers, when offline, is kind of hard. The regular windows experience involves just using what you already paid for. When you get a laptop, you pay for a preinstallation of windows. In all cases I know, it comes preloaded with all kinds of crap. That is also part of the windows platform that real people have to deal with.
So, in my opinion, "windows itself" is the ms windows OS, plus preloaded stuff from the integrator, plus the third party software one needs to get work done. You can't make it smaller than that. I, myself, never had a good XP or Vista experience, but I am not really an ms beta tester, so I only use their software on a new laptop or at some jobs. I don't think you can honestly say that "windows itself" is somehow stable and free from library conflicts and stuff, because of the reasons I stated.
Well, or maybe not. Remember that/. is made of people like you, too. And like the guy who posted the Ask Slashdot, who probably doesn't care a lot for free software, or he wouldn't make that question. And some of us are free software advocates (or zealots). None of those groups think we are entitled to things for free. _I_ refuse to run non-free software for other reasons. I don't like dealing with licensing and support budgets, and I think proprietary software tends to need support contracts, in my area. Free software is easier to support in house. Unauthorized copies are a even more of a PITA for support.
CMD.EXE is superior to bash!!!?!?!?!?!? You must be on drugs. First, CMD.EXE is useless for programmins, you are way better with vbs or something like that. Second, CMD.EXE doesn't have anything that compares to readline for command line editing. Auto-completion is useless, compared to what bash provides. Bash autocompletes commands and context sensitive arguments, for most common commands. There is nothing like that in any command line interpreter in Windows.
I understand your opinion, though, you are just talking out of your ass, like those people you talk about.
I have never run into anyone who said OpenOffice has a better interface than msoffice 2007. The purpose there is to clone a familiar interface, not to make something better. The only part of OO I actually believe to be far superior to its msoffice counterpart is equation editing for college papers, far easier if you have to write more than a couple of equations. Of course, both of them pale in comparison to LaTeX, or even LyX, but OO is easier to learn and to use than msoffice 2003, the last version I tested. After that, I lost track, because I don't make a living out of testing ms software, at some point one has to give up on software providers.
About ff and ie, tabs is a lousy arguments. Few people said that ff was superior because and only because it had tabs. It was superior because it was superior, period. Security, rendering, javascript support (against ie braindead "JScript" support) extensions, being free software, also were reasons to think ff was better than ie. Most of them are still valid reasons to believe ff was better than ie, as tabs were for a long time.
Anyhow, _if_ some dumb kids _did_ say ie didn't have tabs when it did, it doesn't represent the voice of all of slashdot. There are a lot of people here, you know? some of us are not that bright, but some of us are, so you shouldn't listen only to the voice of the dumber. Anyway, the fact that someone's reasons to have an opinion are wrong, does not imply the opinion is wrong itself
No way. A real "OSS mujahadeen", or, as we like to call ourselves, a real bearded Saint of the Church of Emacs, doesn't run Windows apps, so could not complain about backwards compatibility.
In fact, right now most of us don't complain about Windows anymore, we are too busy trying to get our bios-less laptops to work with the latest version of Gnewsense
Xerox developed electronic paper in the seventies. Thirty years later, there is a commercial implementation. Those are just anecdotes. Real life is more complicated.
No, it's a law designed to protect the Human rights of the novelist's labor, just the same as laws protect your human right to get paid wages for your labor. It's designed to prevent theft of labor (i.e. working for free).
No, you are wrong. You say you know what copyright is, and what it is designed for, but you just don't.
Working for free is ok. You are not entitled to payment for your labor, it's just not reasonable. I like to do a lot of things, some of them are even creative. I don't think it's fair to ask for retribution for all of them, just because it's labor.
You are entitled to payment when you work for someone who promises to pay. It's only about honoring a contract.
With copyrights, governments promise you a time-limited distribution monopoly on your works, provided you release them into the public domain. That's why authors can expect governments to "protect" their copyrights, because it's a deal the governments make with them. But the reason governments make this deal is to benefit the general public, not the authors. They do this in the hope that people will release more works in a world with copyrights than otherwise. At least, that is what is stated in US copyright law, that copyrights exist as an incentive to the publishing of creative works, not because authors have some fundamental right to get paid.
Using bold words like "theft" and comparing things that have nothing to do with each other won't make you any less wrong. This is a difficult thing to understand. Far fetched analogies, like slavery, only make things worse.
When I lend a book to a friend, I am not stealing anything. I am only doing what a friend would do, sharing. Sharing used to be a good thing. I understand it's hard for the publishing industry to deal with that concept when it scales. But that doesn't make sharing a bad thing. Maybe the service that the publishing industry used to provide is not needed anymore. Maybe there is a service to be provided, and people will pay for it. Maybe groups of people or companies will pay authors a plus to write new works, and then release with come creative commons license. Maybe new works are not needed any more, and people will just keep sharing what is already written (unlikely, but not the end of the world). Work (creative and otherwise) that has value will continue to be paid. Work that has no value will start being less and less paid.
What raises the question: does Hans Reiser have a laptop, and SVN access? Reiser4 was supposed to have a lot of metadata, at least eventually. Making use of the metadata is not the hard thing, the issue is to make it fast, and try not to break too many APIs. I trusted Reiser on that.
Another group that already had that idea is MS. They have been messing around with that WinFS thing for at least a decade. They were trying to use MS sql server, at some point, I think that approach is what is keeping them from succeeding.
 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs53
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
I stopped reading you when you started redefining concepts. Here in slashdot some of us are somewhat literate.
Copyright is not property, it's a distribution monopoly usually backed by a government.
Your view on the "essence" of copyright infringement is very far from mine, and from what I remember as usual from the pre-digital age.
I think the main problem is that copyright is such a difficult concept to grasp, that using analogies is always misleading (lying, I mean).
When intellectual works are released to the public, the same laws than assign copyright to the publisher, also give the ownership to the public domain.
So, you could not steal from the author something he does not own. Of course you can't steal a book from the public domain, because once you copy it, the public domain doesn't cease to have it, either, but that's another thing.
When you hear the words "stealing" or "theft", dealing with copyrights, usually it means someone is lying to you. You might be able to steal a copyright, but that would involve registering other people's work as yours, and you would be stealing the distribution monopoly, not the actual content. You can't steal intellectual works themselves.
I am from Uruguay, South America. Few people here wants to move to the US. Lots of people go there as illegal immigrants, stay for 5 to 15 years, and then come back with money to buy themselves a home, or a business. Spain is our number one migration destiny, though. In fact, for some of them is returning to their fathers land. Those who go to Spain, just don't come back. In our eyes, Spain is a good place to live, for some, even better than our country. The US, though, looks like a good place to get some money, but most people don't even think about staying there. I don't think illegal immigration is a good measure. Money availability makes people migrate, not just standards of living.
In fact Stallman is against software as a service, he said so when he was in my city. Even if he didn't say it, it goes against the FSF phylosophy. The whole point is giving freedom to the user. If someone else has your data, you lose some freedom to do what you want with your data.
If you believe in capitalism, then music will never cease existing. There might come a time when most people just won't pay for music, and I could imagine a very unlikely scenario where artists take other jobs because making music doesn't pay enough. If the amount of creative works already made, plus the ones made for free are not enough, and people have the need for newer music, they will pay for it, somehow. Even if after paying for the new music it becomes free. If people really want new music, someone will finance it.
In my opinion, it's all nonsense. Copyright is not good for people, so it just should not exist. And all my works are "protected" by copyright, but I would rather not have copyright at all. There are lots of ways I can make a living, without copyright, and I think all producers of copyrightable works can, also.
You make "willingly aiding copyright infringement" sound like they're a bunch of pedophiles.
I mostly agree with your point, but I just wanted to point out that most pedophiles are not criminals. Pederasty is a crime. Pedophilia is just an ugly sexual preference, but doesn't involve actually having sex with children. It's not the same to have sexual attraction for children, than to actually do it, or take pictures of naked kids. The _doing_ part is important.
Lots of people like seeing people kill each other in movies. That doesn't make them criminals. If they actually did it, or made people kill each other for their enjoyment, they would be criminals.
I _do_ get your point. I just do not agree. If somewhere the difference between going to jail or not _could_ potentially be using custom hardware, freedom is in danger. The thing is that a well thought combination of several laws of this kind and laws of the style of California's three strike laws is a great tool for incarcerating people the government does not like. Of course, it _could_ be used as a tool for good, but most of the tools of a police state also have good uses. The thing is to know when to stop giving that kind of tools to the government. In my opinion, that time has long passed in most of the US. The "think of the children" way of thinking has taken a lot of freedom, not only in the US, but also in other, countries through trade agreements with them. I think that has gone too far already.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say is just dumb.
With that mindset, you could say Mac OSX is not ready for regular desktop use, because it doesn't support most motherboards and graphic cards.
Or you could say that windows vista (or 7) is not ready, because it doesn't run on ARM chips, or because it doesn't have drivers for my older video capture cards.
Some software runs with some hardware.
Most printers just work with linux, some don't. Big deal. You can just ask the one who sells them, or just stick to HP.
Well, I get your point, but let's take everything into account here.
Bolivia can't just do whatever they want.
If powerful countries want their resources, they will get them, one way or another.
As an undeveloped country, they have to take what they can. Trying to leverage too much the natural resources might result in losing them by force.
In the end, countries only own the resources and the land they can defend. It would not be sensible to risk foreign intervention.
Nowadays, as an example, it would not be that hard for a foreign company (with its own government support) to get rid of Bolivia's president, accusing him of drug dealing or something like that, and put another guy in his place, more friendly with foreign companies.
So, while I share your view in theory, in practice I think countries like Bolivia just can't play hard ball.
Latin "occultus" means "hidden" and resembles the word for it in most latin languages ("oculto").
Of course, that is why black magic and stuff is associated to that word.
Where I live, staying awake and drunk at 4AM is key to the reproduction of ugly girls.
Because an occupied country is, by definition, not free.
So you are saying that a democracy cannot exist without freedom?
I like to call it "independence".
So an absolute monarch who chooses to allow the country to run itself based on democratic principles is called what then?
Either an absolute monarch, or a former absolute monarch, if he gives up power completely.
The world is more complicated than you seem to think, and "democracy" is not some absolute definition with firm lines drawn in the sand. The United States wasn't very democratic if you were black, poor, or a woman. Does that mean that it wasn't a democratic republic?
Yes.
Democracy is the rule of the people, if the people can't even vote, it's not a democracy.
Iraq can in fact have democratic processes in place and be effectively run by its own people even if they aren't 100% free. Until they hit the limits of their freedom, there is no practical difference - only an ideological difference.
The point here was Saddam Hussein. I said his judges were not appointed by the people of Iraq. I still think so.
Only free countries have the opportunity for democracy.
Iraq is an occupied country. There is no democracy in such a country. There might be some kind of voting, tough.
Voting does not designate a democracy, per se. There was voting in Iraq before the invasion, and most people didn't call it a democracy.
And who got to choose who would have the power to judge him?
Torture is torture. The fact that they skipped the forms of torture that leave physical marks doesn't make it non torture.
The same kind of people used waterboarding, electrocution, and other stuff thirty years ago where I leave. Maybe they found out that this kind of stuff is cleaner, and as effective.
The thing with torture is this: if you take a prisoner, feed them right and treat them right, it's ok. If you take a prisoner, and mess with them, it's not ok. Even if you use "cleaner" ways of messing with them, it's not ok.
Since the problem is Windows culture and not Windows itself, one has to educate one's self in order to avoid the pitfalls that people tend to associate with Windows itself.
Well, I can't see it that way.
There is not such thing as "windows itself".
First of all, "windows itself" does close to nothing. There is little you can achieve with a fresh copy of Windows. Third party software is an integral part of the windows platform.
You could say that "ubuntu itself" is good, and nonfree stuff you add is crap, because "ubuntu itself" includes lots of software you can use that has passed some kind of QA, so you have a single guy to complain about.
Secondly, people don't install windows by themselves. It's very hard, in my experience. For example, looking for network drivers, when offline, is kind of hard.
The regular windows experience involves just using what you already paid for. When you get a laptop, you pay for a preinstallation of windows. In all cases I know, it comes preloaded with all kinds of crap. That is also part of the windows platform that real people have to deal with.
So, in my opinion, "windows itself" is the ms windows OS, plus preloaded stuff from the integrator, plus the third party software one needs to get work done. You can't make it smaller than that.
I, myself, never had a good XP or Vista experience, but I am not really an ms beta tester, so I only use their software on a new laptop or at some jobs. I don't think you can honestly say that "windows itself" is somehow stable and free from library conflicts and stuff, because of the reasons I stated.
Well, or maybe not. /. is made of people like you, too.
Remember that
And like the guy who posted the Ask Slashdot, who probably doesn't care a lot for free software, or he wouldn't make that question.
And some of us are free software advocates (or zealots).
None of those groups think we are entitled to things for free.
_I_ refuse to run non-free software for other reasons. I don't like dealing with licensing and support budgets, and I think proprietary software tends to need support contracts, in my area. Free software is easier to support in house.
Unauthorized copies are a even more of a PITA for support.
CMD.EXE is superior to bash!!!?!?!?!?!?
You must be on drugs.
First, CMD.EXE is useless for programmins, you are way better with vbs or something like that.
Second, CMD.EXE doesn't have anything that compares to readline for command line editing. Auto-completion is useless, compared to what bash provides.
Bash autocompletes commands and context sensitive arguments, for most common commands. There is nothing like that in any command line interpreter in Windows.
I understand your opinion, though, you are just talking out of your ass, like those people you talk about.
I have never run into anyone who said OpenOffice has a better interface than msoffice 2007. The purpose there is to clone a familiar interface, not to make something better.
The only part of OO I actually believe to be far superior to its msoffice counterpart is equation editing for college papers, far easier if you have to write more than a couple of equations. Of course, both of them pale in comparison to LaTeX, or even LyX, but OO is easier to learn and to use than msoffice 2003, the last version I tested. After that, I lost track, because I don't make a living out of testing ms software, at some point one has to give up on software providers.
About ff and ie, tabs is a lousy arguments. Few people said that ff was superior because and only because it had tabs. It was superior because it was superior, period.
Security, rendering, javascript support (against ie braindead "JScript" support) extensions, being free software, also were reasons to think ff was better than ie. Most of them are still valid reasons to believe ff was better than ie, as tabs were for a long time.
Anyhow, _if_ some dumb kids _did_ say ie didn't have tabs when it did, it doesn't represent the voice of all of slashdot. There are a lot of people here, you know? some of us are not that bright, but some of us are, so you shouldn't listen only to the voice of the dumber. Anyway, the fact that someone's reasons to have an opinion are wrong, does not imply the opinion is wrong itself
No way. A real "OSS mujahadeen", or, as we like to call ourselves, a real bearded Saint of the Church of Emacs, doesn't run Windows apps, so could not complain about backwards compatibility.
In fact, right now most of us don't complain about Windows anymore, we are too busy trying to get our bios-less laptops to work with the latest version of Gnewsense
Of course. The magic of capitalism is that it is supposed to work even when people are self-centered and lack group ethics.
I don't believe such a system exists, but most people do.
Xerox developed electronic paper in the seventies.
Thirty years later, there is a commercial implementation.
Those are just anecdotes. Real life is more complicated.
>>>Copyright is not property,
No, it's a law designed to protect the Human rights of the novelist's labor, just the same as laws protect your human right to get paid wages for your labor. It's designed to prevent theft of labor (i.e. working for free).
No, you are wrong. You say you know what copyright is, and what it is designed for, but you just don't.
Working for free is ok. You are not entitled to payment for your labor, it's just not reasonable.
I like to do a lot of things, some of them are even creative. I don't think it's fair to ask for retribution for all of them, just because it's labor.
You are entitled to payment when you work for someone who promises to pay. It's only about honoring a contract.
With copyrights, governments promise you a time-limited distribution monopoly on your works, provided you release them into the public domain. That's why authors can expect governments to "protect" their copyrights, because it's a deal the governments make with them. But the reason governments make this deal is to benefit the general public, not the authors. They do this in the hope that people will release more works in a world with copyrights than otherwise. At least, that is what is stated in US copyright law, that copyrights exist as an incentive to the publishing of creative works, not because authors have some fundamental right to get paid.
Using bold words like "theft" and comparing things that have nothing to do with each other won't make you any less wrong. This is a difficult thing to understand. Far fetched analogies, like slavery, only make things worse.
When I lend a book to a friend, I am not stealing anything. I am only doing what a friend would do, sharing. Sharing used to be a good thing. I understand it's hard for the publishing industry to deal with that concept when it scales.
But that doesn't make sharing a bad thing. Maybe the service that the publishing industry used to provide is not needed anymore.
Maybe there is a service to be provided, and people will pay for it. Maybe groups of people or companies will pay authors a plus to write new works, and then release with come creative commons license.
Maybe new works are not needed any more, and people will just keep sharing what is already written (unlikely, but not the end of the world).
Work (creative and otherwise) that has value will continue to be paid. Work that has no value will start being less and less paid.
But you own the copy instance, for the purposes of the law. I think the mean "the guy who legally has" the copy.
What raises the question: does Hans Reiser have a laptop, and SVN access?
Reiser4 was supposed to have a lot of metadata, at least eventually.
Making use of the metadata is not the hard thing, the issue is to make it fast, and try not to break too many APIs. I trusted Reiser on that.
Another group that already had that idea is MS. They have been messing around with that WinFS thing for at least a decade. They were trying to use MS sql server, at some point, I think that approach is what is keeping them from succeeding.
Just wanted to point out that Ubuntu did wipe my disk, but not my users directory.
I am not aware of any law that allows copying a game. Not even for backups. Please provide a citation.
Copyright law:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs53
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. â" Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
I stopped reading you when you started redefining concepts.
Here in slashdot some of us are somewhat literate.
Copyright is not property, it's a distribution monopoly usually backed by a government.
Your view on the "essence" of copyright infringement is very far from mine, and from what I remember as usual from the pre-digital age.
I think the main problem is that copyright is such a difficult concept to grasp, that using analogies is always misleading (lying, I mean).
When intellectual works are released to the public, the same laws than assign copyright to the publisher, also give the ownership to the public domain.
So, you could not steal from the author something he does not own. Of course you can't steal a book from the public domain, because once you copy it, the public domain doesn't cease to have it, either, but that's another thing.
When you hear the words "stealing" or "theft", dealing with copyrights, usually it means someone is lying to you. You might be able to steal a copyright, but that would involve registering other people's work as yours, and you would be stealing the distribution monopoly, not the actual content. You can't steal intellectual works themselves.
I am from Uruguay, South America.
Few people here wants to move to the US.
Lots of people go there as illegal immigrants, stay for 5 to 15 years, and then come back with money to buy themselves a home, or a business.
Spain is our number one migration destiny, though.
In fact, for some of them is returning to their fathers land.
Those who go to Spain, just don't come back.
In our eyes, Spain is a good place to live, for some, even better than our country.
The US, though, looks like a good place to get some money, but most people don't even think about staying there.
I don't think illegal immigration is a good measure. Money availability makes people migrate, not just standards of living.
In fact Stallman is against software as a service, he said so when he was in my city.
Even if he didn't say it, it goes against the FSF phylosophy. The whole point is giving freedom to the user. If someone else has your data, you lose some freedom to do what you want with your data.
If you believe in capitalism, then music will never cease existing. There might come a time when most people just won't pay for music, and I could imagine a very unlikely scenario where artists take other jobs because making music doesn't pay enough. If the amount of creative works already made, plus the ones made for free are not enough, and people have the need for newer music, they will pay for it, somehow. Even if after paying for the new music it becomes free.
If people really want new music, someone will finance it.
In my opinion, it's all nonsense. Copyright is not good for people, so it just should not exist.
And all my works are "protected" by copyright, but I would rather not have copyright at all. There are lots of ways I can make a living, without copyright, and I think all producers of copyrightable works can, also.
You make "willingly aiding copyright infringement" sound like they're a bunch of pedophiles.
I mostly agree with your point, but I just wanted to point out that most pedophiles are not criminals. Pederasty is a crime. Pedophilia is just an ugly sexual preference, but doesn't involve actually having sex with children. It's not the same to have sexual attraction for children, than to actually do it, or take pictures of naked kids. The _doing_ part is important.
Lots of people like seeing people kill each other in movies. That doesn't make them criminals. If they actually did it, or made people kill each other for their enjoyment, they would be criminals.
I _do_ get your point. I just do not agree.
If somewhere the difference between going to jail or not _could_ potentially be using custom hardware, freedom is in danger.
The thing is that a well thought combination of several laws of this kind and laws of the style of California's three strike laws is a great tool for incarcerating people the government does not like.
Of course, it _could_ be used as a tool for good, but most of the tools of a police state also have good uses. The thing is to know when to stop giving that kind of tools to the government.
In my opinion, that time has long passed in most of the US.
The "think of the children" way of thinking has taken a lot of freedom, not only in the US, but also in other, countries through trade agreements with them. I think that has gone too far already.