I claim: as an addition to biological optical character recognition a moisturizing agent: Tetral Ethanol Alpha Reverse Sriptinase or T.E.A.R.S. The aforesaid moisturizing agent would be used to lubricate and cleanse said biological optical character recognition means and provide a low friction lubrication method for the B.L.I.N.K. apparatus claimed in the aidoneous application.
I claim a web site which will automatically bill any customer who fails to visit the site. By making the site invisible to search engines we can insure that only those corporate investors who know the proper dotted quad address of the site and have the proper password (protected under the DMCA and WIPO treaties) will be able to visit it, and thus avoid being billed by the site.
Interested investors should email: guido@bent.nose.com
Well, once again a moderator without a clue. Would you be good enough to explain what sort of flames I would be trying to get with that post?
The Anonymous Coward who made the post I was replying to was being arrogant and demeaning to people who lack his intellectual strength. I called him on his arrogance by extending his position to an absurdity.
Intellectual strength is much like physical strength - if it is not used properly it can be destructive and damaging rather than constructive. Using intellectual strength to damage those who lack it is very similar to using physical strength to damage those who lack physical strength.
The problems of the world are often blamed on the stupid - but the truth is most of those problems are the result of the actions of the intelligent. The stupid lack the intellectual strength to cause much damage - far more damage is done by intelligent people doing things without thinking about what they are doing. Sloppy thinking is far more destructive than being unable to think could ever be.
The intellectually strong blame the weak because the weak are unable to stop the strong from doing so. Weakness of any kind often takes the blame for misapplied strength. This is such a problem that the intellectually strong really believe that the intellectually weak are responsible for the world's problems.
If intellectual weakness is the cause of problems - why not blame chimps for all of our troubles? After all even the dullest of people are smarter than chimps. If stupidity causes troubles then chimps are far more to blame than dumb humans.
In my opinion the time for the intellectually strong to realize and admit that most problems are their fault has arrived; quit blaming helpless people who can't defend themselves. Being demeaning to people with less intellectual ability than you have is just as wrong as physically bullying a cripple.
The truth is that intelligent people tend to be intellectual bigots; the intellectually weak are the 'lackey slaves' of the intellectual world; people beneath our contempt - to be whipped and reviled for our amusement. Watching the behavior of the intelligent around the less gifted is a disgusting event for me: it makes me ashamed to admit that I have a brain. Perhaps now you can begin to understand why average people hate nerds - we couldn't be much worse than we are.
When I see someone physically bullying a cripple I'll step into the situation; when I see someone being demeaning toward the less intelligent I'll stomp on him just as hard as I would any other bully.
Of course we can reasonably assume that you will be one of the intelligent survivors can't we?
Suppose we take your idea one step farther: kill the stupidest person in any given setting - so that we can be assured that there will only be intelligent people left. Oh wait, once we kill the stupidest person that means that someone else is now the stupidest so we have to kill them... Do I have to continue? Or are you smart enough to see where that leads?
You really need to be grateful for all the people in the world who are less intelligent than you are; if it wasn't for them you would be the dumbest sumbitch in the world. Come to think of it, based on your idiotically arrogant comments concerning the survival of only the intelligent - you may already have achieved that position.
Actually - like most artists he wasn't the least bit interested in the legal end of the music business - he was more interested in the music end of it. Which is why he and his group sold so many records. He could have devoted all of his time and energy to tracking every penny that came in - in which case the songs wouldn't have sold since he would then have been just another soulless bean counter.
Arrogant smart asses like you - who have all the answers - never sell any records, never produce any products anyone wants to buy and never write any programs that work; you are too busy being arrogant smart asses to bother with any of that actually doing anything of value to humanity stuff.
Compared to commercial pirates - individuals giving a copy of a movie to a friend are irrelevant. We probably need to come up with another term besides piracy to describe this sort of activity - I suggest 'casual copying'.
The MPAA and the RIAA want people to believe that commercial pirates and Joe Schlub copying a song for a friend are the same thing; they clearly are not. The RIAA and the MPAA are the ones who want to call both activities 'piracy'. The losses to MPAA and RIAA companies from non commercial activity are non existant. If they were real they would be mentioned on their SEC filings as the law would require for actual losses - they aren't and the industry knows that.
When the MPAA talks about 'piracy' costing them a fortune they mean commercial counterfeiters. When they come up with something like CSS they want legislators to believe that it is to stop commercial pirates, and that most commercial pirates are hackers. What CSS is intended to do is exactly what I said it is designed to do - allow them to control who gets to make authorized players under the DMCA.
Organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA go after DivX and MP3 because they know they can win and make evil 'hackers' look bad and imply that the hackers are the evil commercial pirates who cost them money. But they know these things like MP3 and DivX aren't costing them any money. They don't go after commercial counterfeiting operations because they are too difficult to fight. They lie to the legislators and imply that their losses come from evil 'hackers' giving an MP3 to a friend.
People like you play right into their hands by failing to understand the game they are playing, and saying idiotic things like "DeCSS is used for piracy". That way they get to use your moronic posts as evidence in law suits: "See even the people on Slashdot know that DeCSS is for piracy". That way they can keep anything like a Linux based DVD player coming into existance, and causing them to lose control of who can build a DVD player.
I will agree with the statement that "DeCSS can be used for casual copying of DVD's as can several other techniques." I will not agree that DeCSS can be used for practical piracy.
Real commercial pirates make a bit for bit master which they use to mass produce counterfeit disks. The MPAA knows about these people and they know that no matter what form of encryption they use that they can't stop them. The 'encryption is there to stop piracy' is nothing but a plausible lie. The encryption is there to control who gets to build a player for DVD's thus allowing the MPAA to maximize industry profits and for no other reason. The encryption is not to stop pirates.
You don't think so? OK show us a single production counterfeit DVD which used DeCSS in its production process.
If you are so gullible as to insist on buying the MPAA's lies I have some lovely swamp property in Florida which I'm sure you'll want to buy also.
Sorry once again that I didn't see this reply when it was posted.
Martial arts is much more than the study of how to fight - it is mainly - at least at the highest level - a study of why humans fight. I understand how to fight, when to fight, and when not to fight.
My problem is not that the court room is a battle front - my problem is why the courtroom is a battle front.
We as humans have been fed the idea since the earliest of times that the only way to determine the truth is though battle. Battles are a lousy way to determine truth! How can anyone hope to arrive at the delicate beauty of truth by the ugly process of a fight? All battles result in destruction - not construction. Whether battles are physical, intellectual, emotional, or otherwise the result is damage.
Evil is about destruction and the creation of human misery. As a result the destruction caused in fights is always part of evil's plan.
Evil gets away with this because of the natural fighting which bulls do to set up a pecking order - so those of us who are not evil will buy the idea that the fights that evil people sell us on are a good and natural thing - they are not.
So ingrained in our thought patterns are the fighting ways which evil has conned us into that it is hard to imagine any other way of doing things. Here is a suggestion:
Suppose that instead of an adversarial legal system that we adopt a cooperative legal system which works in this way: any people who use the weasel arguments typical of lawyers are deemed uncooperative and automatically lose . This is not a fool proof system - but it is infinitely superior to the system which evil people have foisted off on us. It at least stands a chance of working. That is a lot more than the system we have been handed - which everyone seems to accept without even questioning it.
The problem with your amoral view - that it is not your place to decide which of us is right - is that by taking that position you surrender your part of the world to evil. Be aware of that simple fact.
This is an excellent point; the DMCA changes everything - giving copyright holders the stranglehold over 'readers' of that information that they have long sought.
Traditional solutions (The ASCAP/BMI royalties) under previous law were a reasonable solution for the "How do you compensate creators for their contributions?" problem.
The RIAA wants to use the DMCA to short circuit the payment of royalties to creators and put the payments into the pockets of the parasites at the RIAA and the record companies. If there is any way that the record companies can turn artists into slaves, rest assured they will. 'Suits' see artists are even bigger chumps than nerds are.
I once met the lead guitarist in a band which sold 47 million records during its existence. He had a wooden box that said "Use RCA tubes" as the only thing he had to show from the experience. Various business types wound up with all of the money from those 47 million records.
It appears that the author of this post is either a lawyer, or is able to think like a lawyer. He makes a mistake which many intelligent people make: he mistakes the winner of a fight for the person who is right.
One of the most important things that I have learned in martial arts is that the person who wins a fight has won the fight and nothing else. This is fairly obvious in the physical world: a thirty year old beating up a three year old hardly makes the thirty year old right. It is not so obvious in the intellectual world; someone with a high IQ beating up someone with a low IQ does not make the person with the high IQ right! I used to use my intellectual strength to win arguments (intellectual fights) all the time; very few people were ever successful arguing with me - so I thought I was right. The truth is that I was often wrong - sometimes disastrously so. I suspect that many people here on slashdot are guilty of making that particular mistake.
The confusion comes from the fact that right makes might. However there are many reasons that fights can be won or lost which have nothing to do with being right. Legal fights are often won or lost for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong; one side might have a lawyer who is just a better fighter than the other side - or, as I have pointed out before, case law may have been established by a large corporation taking on an individual with no resources (thirty year old vs three year old) and that case law is then used as a precedent for other bad rulings.
A legal victory does not mean 'right'. The arguments that this poster used - while impressive sounding and intimidating to the average person are not sufficient to prove he is correct. Slashdot is not a court of law; there is no judge to keep truth from being spoken.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
After someone tells you how to do something, it is always obvious. Therefore the test for obviousness is could anyone skilled in the state of the art of web design at the time the patent was filed have come up with the same thing?
The answer is 'yes'. It was an obvious idea in that sense. 'Fifty two clicks' would not have been obvious, and that would be patentable (if anything of the sort was patentable) but one click to do the whole job was obvious to any ordinary web designer for all the same reasons that ending a sentence with a single period is obvious - while ending one with 52 periods might not be.
There is one weak point in Judge Jackson's ruling which Microsoft is sure to attack and on which they might win.
At one point in the trial Microsoft testified that 'such and such' was impossible - Judge Jackson went home and tried to perform the action on his computer and found that Microsoft was lying; he was able to do it. He came into court the next day and stated what he had found.
While this sounds like an eminently reasonable thing to do - surely anyone with technical knowledge would likely have done the same thing - it is a violation of 'due process'. Judge Jackson was supposed to rule only on evidence entered at trial not on independent investigation he or anyone else performed outside of the courtroom. The Microsoft lawyers objected but Judge Jackson overruled their objection.
The fact that the judge caught Microsoft lying, even the fact that they were lying is legally irrelevant; remember, the essence of the law is 'straining at gnats while swallowing camels'. This may be the gnat of reversible error on which the ruling against Microsoft is overturned at the appellate level.
If you are pointing a gun at my head and I sign a contract
saying I'll pay you $1M, it is not valid. But an Olympic athlete has a choice: they can
sign the contract and go to Australia, or they can not sign the contract and not go.
What is it that you are threatening to take away from a person when you hold a gun to their head? Everyone dies - all life ends eventually. The answer is that you are threatening to take away their dreams - their possibilities. That is exactly what the coercion the IOC is using against those athletes is doing.
You can only see the most direct level of coercion: physical force or torture. Ultimately what any threat does is cause pain. Pain is the central nervous system's way of reporting physical damage is occurring to itself. It doesn't matter how that damage is done to a person's central nervous system: all pain is signals which are integrated by the brain. You wish to exclude only that pain which is directly caused and which you are sensitive enough to detect . I am simply a little more aware than you are, and I can see that coercion is almost always wrong.
Just because the actions of the IOC are legal, doesn't mean that they are right. I'll repeat it again, just because you can get someone's signature on a piece of paper doesn't make what you are doing right. The motivations of 'Guido' with a gun and the IOC with a non - negotiable contract are virtually indistinguishable; each is trying to get something which it hasn't earned. It is the similarity of their motivations which cause me see their actions as similar.
When you trick someone into signing a 'con'tract you are trying to get something you don't deserve. You can claim that you deserve it because you are cleverer than the people whom you con, but 'Guido' is cleverer than you are: he had his gun at your head before you got yours out - so by the 'who is more clever' argument he is entitled to your wealth.
Contracts obtained by coercion are wrong - it doesn't matter what the coercion is.
Of course the law agrees with you, but as has often been pointed out, the law is an ass.
Yes, I do have a thing with evil - I oppose it where I can. The question is: "If I oppose evil whenever I find it, would that tend to indicate that I am A. evil or B. Good?" I suspect that the most likely answer is 'B'.
Of course it could also be claimed that I am 'tilting at windmills' well meaning but mistaken. I have been wrong many times in the past, and I am sure I will be wrong many times in the future so that is possible - however, I have the honesty to admit that possibility. Do you have the honesty to admit that you might be wrong? I have a very different perpective on the legal system than lawyers have: I am looking at the forrest, lawyers look at the trees - I see very different things than legal schollars see.
You claim that the royal treatment of judges is an 'accident'. Bullshit, If it was an accident then the modern judiciary will realize that the royal title of 'Your honor' is unconstitutional - and that the royal treatment they are being given is wrong in an egalitarian country and they will stop demanding it. ROFLOL. Yeah, that is going to happen.
Do I believe people are mostly evil? No, I think that about 5% of people are evil. I think most people tend toward the 'good' end of the spectrum. It is not a bell shaped curve, it is a distribution which is skewed toward good.
I think that evil presents arguments which are attractively packaged and which if not examined closely are persuasive.
Arguments similar to mine could be made about many systems: for example "surgery causes pain, and therefore surgery is the product of evil." That is a specious argument. What differentiates my arguments from those kind of arguments is one key fact: The legal system is the only societal construct which is directly involved with the regulation of evil; as such it is the one system in society which evil people have an overriding desire to control. In effect the legal system acts like the societal equivalent of the human immune system.
What I am trying to point out is that there is a class of evil people who behave like the AIDS virus - they pervert that societal immune system to their own evil ends - to reproduce and further their goals rather than the goals which most people want. The actions of those people pervert those ideals which were democratically arrived at.
I have stated my views simply and in a way which anyone with an IQ exceeding that of a box turtle can understand. If you insist on 'arguing like a lawyer' to defend a system which has been corrupted by evil people, then I can have only one response to you: FUCK YOU, YOU EVIL PIECE OF SHIT
The technique is properly called a "plausible lie". It is actually perjury, and it is a felony. The reason people get away with it is that it is very difficult to prove that plausible lies are lies.
Since technical people tend to be more honest than 'people people' we tend to tell the truth on the stand. Does this get us in trouble? Oh yes. The legal system assumes that one side lies one way, the other side lies the other, and that a jury will find the truth which is somewhere between those two extremes.
Of course that means that anyone who tells the truth is at a great disadvantage in a court of law; since the jury will try to find the truth between the two sides claims - the slant is away from anyone who tells the truth and toward those who lie.
This means that the system favors lies over the truth; that is why "I don't know" is an effective tactic in a court of law. As a lie "I don't know" carries more weight in the MPAA's favor than Mr. Valenti telling the truth:
Attorney: "Did the MPAA ask the Norwegian police to harass the teenager who released the DeCSS code"
Mr. Valenti's possible answers:
The truth: "Of course we did, we have the money, and the power that money gives us. We wanted to intimidate the kid and anyone else who threatens our position of wealth and power."
Plausible lie: "I can't recall."
Which one do you think he is going to use?
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The law; 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
The reason they have the olympics is that the results are not predictable. The race is not always to the swift, or the fight always to the strong - however mostly that is who wins.
Sometimes what are apparently dumb ass management decisions work, but mostly they fail. Sometimes wise decisions fail, but mostly they work. There are always good sounding arguments for foolishness; else why would anyone ever make a foolish decision? In Intel's case abandoning a successful strategy to do just the opposite might work - but so far the evidence is strongly against it. Even the staunchest supporters of the new direction have to admit that it is a very risky approach; the odds are against it.
The reason that fools continue to exist in the world is that they succeed just often enough to keep trying. Those successes are both necessary and proper - the wise don't have the world completely figured out, and successful fools remind them of that fact. It is more evidence of the Yin and Yang nature of reality: mostly the wise succeed and mostly fools fail, but there is an element of the wise failing and fools succeeding.
Had Intel continued to do things the way it did things in the past: with focus, great engineering from experienced personnel, a sterling reputation, and a huge bankroll for development, it is difficult to see how anyone could have challenged them. Now the only part of that package which is there is the huge bankroll, and that may be enough to buy Intel the time to succeed with its new direction, or it may not be, time will tell.
Has anyone else noticed that Intel started having the current rash of problems when Andy Grove retired?
The new management wanted to change Intel's direction - that is what new management always wants to do. Since Intel was a successful dominant player in a single huge market - they decided to become an unsuccessful player in lots of smaller markets. Of course the consequences of that sort of direction change seems to escape the perceptions of the razor sharp minds who are paid the big money to lead industry.
I am reminded of the huge retail discount chain who spent close to a billion dollars to build branch stores in Mexico - only to discover to their shock that Mexico is a poor country compared to the US and that the people there couldn't afford to buy what they had to sell.
Yes, those of us who do Judo call it playing. In Japanese Judo means 'the gentle way'. Considering that under the rules of Judo breaking an arm or choking someone unconscious is legal and the Japanese considered that 'gentle' - it is not to difficult to understand that we would call it 'play' with the same sort of semi ironic logic.
Judo players have a strange view of enjoyment: I actually enjoy being thrown to the mat; it is a lot like an amusement park ride that you don't know you're on. If you listen to really good players, they laugh when they get thrown.
I am sorry I didn't see this reply until the day after I made my original post; it makes it look like I had nothing to say on the subject.
rjh's post is an excellent example of the conventional point of view. I would like to dissect it a little bit.
As I see it there are two types of people who staunchly support the legal status quo - there is a small core of truly evil psychopaths who benefit from the deliberate actions of the psychopaths who proceeded them in the legal system. These people are not in any sort of formal conspiracy and never have been - but they recognize each other when they see another of like mind. In the past these people have been very influential in shaping the course of the legal system. They understand that the correct course is a very narrow path; that it takes only a single step off of that path to steer things into the quicksand on either side of the path. It takes only small, deliberately introduced errors, in the structure of the legal system to pervert it from something intended to be good to something which results in evil.
The second type of status quo supporters in the legal system are those who are utterly unable to see the evil core of what they are doing and come up with reasonable explanations for their actions.
Let us give rjh the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is not a psychopath. That is a reasonable assumption to make as most psychopaths are unwilling to try fighting out in the day light where they might be exposed for what they are.
The first point rjh raises is about this case being legal crack. He is correct in that point; it is the tacit understanding of that point that causes most people to have an expectation that Microsoft will get a de-facto automatic appeal. I have no argument with the fact that the law is very addicting to those who practice it. I would like to point out that addictions are generally considered to be very
bad things.
People who are addicted to anything are often very dangerous, and legal addicts are no exception; people who are in positions where their actions affect the lives and fortunes of others need to be particularly resistive to the temptations of addiction; less they do great harm in feeding that addiction. Sadly the people who are in positions of great power and thus are potentially far more dangerous to society than any single criminal could ever be - rarely resist the temptations that the law gives to them.
Temptation is the main tool of evil, it is how people are seduced into doing evil's bidding. Here is an example of the direct temptations that a few evil people have suggested into the basic structure of the law: the royal treatment that is given to judges. Judges dress in royal robes and are addressed by a royal title; "Your honor".
Doubtless an apologist for the legal system will be quick to point out that the honor is for the legal system - not for the individual judge - but that is only a plausible lie. The brutal truth - which the judges are not honest enough to admit to themselves - is that their subconscious minds except the 'stroking' they are getting as their personal due - and most judges act as though they personally are due the respect that is being 'afforded to the legal system'.
For example most contempt citations come when somebody shows a judge that the judge is wrong about something - it would be a very rare situation when you would get a contempt citation for showing a judge he was right. The judge realizes he was wrong - but isn't about to admit it - so he threatens a contempt ruling if the lawyer doesn't stop causing the judge turmoil. When would you get more angry, when you think you are right about something and somebody disagrees with you - or when you realize you were wrong but you don't want to admit it because it would make you look bad?
Now let us look at the second point rjh raises - about automatic appeal. I believe he has misinterpreted what I was saying. I meant that someone would have an automatic right to have an appeal heard if one was offered. I did not mean that all cases would be automatically appealed to a higher court.
Now to the crux of the discussion; the contention that the law is fair. Rjh states that the law is exquisitely fair - that it applies equally to both sides. I have no objection to statement that the law applies equally to both sides - that is absolutely true; Bill Gates is just as forbidden to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family as is someone living under a bridge. In that sense the law is equally applied - the question is: "Does that automatically mean that the law is fair in practice?" The answer to that question is - as the loaf of bread example demonstrates - "Not necessarily; correctly applied law can be very unfair."
We now get to my real argument with the legal system: rjh's legal definition of the word fair :
" Fair, in a legal context, doesn't mean everybody's happy. Fair means everybody gets screwed over equally."
My main objection to the legal system is the belief by those in the profession that they get to screw everybody . That Sir is a carnivorous view of the world; the belief that everyone else is raw meat for your consumption.
Here is an alternative structure for the legal system: that the law be constructed so as to afford the maximum chance of arriving at a decision which is "Free of favoritism or bias - impartial, just to all parties, equitable, consistent with rules, logic, or ethics." That is the definition of fair which most people mean when they say "fair" in a legal sense - and that is what most people want to get from the legal system. But by your own admission that is not what people get as the legal definition of fair. The legal definition of fair comes from a different definition of the word fair: " Lawful to hunt or attack as in fair game ".
None of the rest of us have got any interest in having a legal system which allows those in the system to screw everybody equally. I am sure that those of you in the system have fun with the illusion of power that screwing all the rest of us gives to you - but the simple fact is that we all hate you for it. You have outlined something which is absolutely evil in its nature - and there is no arguing with that fact - you really stepped on your dick with that admission.
I stand by my statements about the 'blind lady'. I am sure that the people who created that symbol (at least the addition of the blindfold) meant exactly what I said they meant by it - they came up with the plausible lie about 'impartiality' to mask what they were doing. It is an idiotic symbol.
The problem with having any sort of hidden agenda is that is the intellectual equivalent of trying to walk in one direction while looking like you are walking in another direction. This is a ridiculous method of walking - no one tries it in the physical world because it is so obvious. The mental "hidden agenda walk" is just as obvious to anyone who is basically honest and has some world experience - people with hidden agendas look strange. The only hope of getting away with a hidden agenda is to convince everyone that "This is how we walk in this field". A key to spotting institutionalized hidden agendas is to look for systematic formalism: any time people are dressed in 'traditional' garbs and do things in a formalized stilted fashion - that can be used to hide a "hidden agenda walk" - by getting everyone in the field to have that peculiar "walk". The formalism's of the legal system are there to hide the presence of evil in the system - anything else is a plausible lie used to sell that formalism to the people in the system.
For instance here is an example of an argument that could be used against what I have to say: "Ballet is done in traditional garb and in a 'stilted' formal fashion - do I think there is a hidden agenda in Ballet?" No, Ballet does not have the power to damage the population as a whole - a hidden agenda there would be meaningless. The legal system does have the power to cause great damage so anything which could hide a hidden agenda in the law is something which it is proper to suspect.
Now as to rjh's advice that I quit complaining and run for office etc. As a matter of fact I have run for office, and I have been involved in politics. What I learned from that experience is that before people can change things that they have to understand :
1. That a problem exists.
2. What the problem is.
That is an education problem: how do you show people a problem they don't even dream exists? What I am doing on slashdot is trying to learn how to educate people about the existence of a problem which they don't know is there. The main problem which I face is that circumstances are such that anyone who does see the fundamental problems in the world looks like a crackpot - things are so complex that I need a great deal of bandwidth to transfer the information I have obtained in my life. The internet is the highest bandwidth information transfer agent I have available - so I use it.
I have discussed the "we are the government" argument is previous posts - while that may have flown in 1800 - not many people buy that particular argument 200 years later.
There are evil people in the law - just as there are evil people in most fields - the difference is that the law is the only field which is structured deliberately to favor those who are evil. While there are psychopaths who enter surgical fields in medicine because they enjoy cutting people and causing them pain I do not believe that the surgery was created for the amusement of those people.
I do believe that the law differs in that respect and that the fundamental structure of the legal system needs to be completely revamped.
Slashdot Mirror
"Nobody would buy a house without Windows, a PC without Windows is just as bad."
I claim: as an addition to biological optical character recognition a moisturizing agent: Tetral Ethanol Alpha Reverse Sriptinase or T.E.A.R.S. The aforesaid moisturizing agent would be used to lubricate and cleanse said biological optical character recognition means and provide a low friction lubrication method for the B.L.I.N.K. apparatus claimed in the aidoneous application.
As in microsoft.con : "How are we going to take you today?"
guido@bent.nose.con
Interested investors should email: guido@bent.nose.com
You are about as amusing as someone mocking my legally blind brother for his lack of eyesight.
The Anonymous Coward who made the post I was replying to was being arrogant and demeaning to people who lack his intellectual strength. I called him on his arrogance by extending his position to an absurdity.
Intellectual strength is much like physical strength - if it is not used properly it can be destructive and damaging rather than constructive. Using intellectual strength to damage those who lack it is very similar to using physical strength to damage those who lack physical strength.
The problems of the world are often blamed on the stupid - but the truth is most of those problems are the result of the actions of the intelligent. The stupid lack the intellectual strength to cause much damage - far more damage is done by intelligent people doing things without thinking about what they are doing. Sloppy thinking is far more destructive than being unable to think could ever be.
The intellectually strong blame the weak because the weak are unable to stop the strong from doing so. Weakness of any kind often takes the blame for misapplied strength. This is such a problem that the intellectually strong really believe that the intellectually weak are responsible for the world's problems.
If intellectual weakness is the cause of problems - why not blame chimps for all of our troubles? After all even the dullest of people are smarter than chimps. If stupidity causes troubles then chimps are far more to blame than dumb humans.
In my opinion the time for the intellectually strong to realize and admit that most problems are their fault has arrived; quit blaming helpless people who can't defend themselves. Being demeaning to people with less intellectual ability than you have is just as wrong as physically bullying a cripple.
The truth is that intelligent people tend to be intellectual bigots; the intellectually weak are the 'lackey slaves' of the intellectual world; people beneath our contempt - to be whipped and reviled for our amusement. Watching the behavior of the intelligent around the less gifted is a disgusting event for me: it makes me ashamed to admit that I have a brain. Perhaps now you can begin to understand why average people hate nerds - we couldn't be much worse than we are.
When I see someone physically bullying a cripple I'll step into the situation; when I see someone being demeaning toward the less intelligent I'll stomp on him just as hard as I would any other bully.
Suppose we take your idea one step farther: kill the stupidest person in any given setting - so that we can be assured that there will only be intelligent people left. Oh wait, once we kill the stupidest person that means that someone else is now the stupidest so we have to kill them... Do I have to continue? Or are you smart enough to see where that leads?
You really need to be grateful for all the people in the world who are less intelligent than you are; if it wasn't for them you would be the dumbest sumbitch in the world. Come to think of it, based on your idiotically arrogant comments concerning the survival of only the intelligent - you may already have achieved that position.
Arrogant smart asses like you - who have all the answers - never sell any records, never produce any products anyone wants to buy and never write any programs that work; you are too busy being arrogant smart asses to bother with any of that actually doing anything of value to humanity stuff.
The MPAA and the RIAA want people to believe that commercial pirates and Joe Schlub copying a song for a friend are the same thing; they clearly are not. The RIAA and the MPAA are the ones who want to call both activities 'piracy'. The losses to MPAA and RIAA companies from non commercial activity are non existant. If they were real they would be mentioned on their SEC filings as the law would require for actual losses - they aren't and the industry knows that.
When the MPAA talks about 'piracy' costing them a fortune they mean commercial counterfeiters. When they come up with something like CSS they want legislators to believe that it is to stop commercial pirates, and that most commercial pirates are hackers. What CSS is intended to do is exactly what I said it is designed to do - allow them to control who gets to make authorized players under the DMCA.
Organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA go after DivX and MP3 because they know they can win and make evil 'hackers' look bad and imply that the hackers are the evil commercial pirates who cost them money. But they know these things like MP3 and DivX aren't costing them any money. They don't go after commercial counterfeiting operations because they are too difficult to fight. They lie to the legislators and imply that their losses come from evil 'hackers' giving an MP3 to a friend.
People like you play right into their hands by failing to understand the game they are playing, and saying idiotic things like "DeCSS is used for piracy". That way they get to use your moronic posts as evidence in law suits: "See even the people on Slashdot know that DeCSS is for piracy". That way they can keep anything like a Linux based DVD player coming into existance, and causing them to lose control of who can build a DVD player.
I will agree with the statement that "DeCSS can be used for casual copying of DVD's as can several other techniques." I will not agree that DeCSS can be used for practical piracy.
Real commercial pirates make a bit for bit master which they use to mass produce counterfeit disks. The MPAA knows about these people and they know that no matter what form of encryption they use that they can't stop them. The 'encryption is there to stop piracy' is nothing but a plausible lie. The encryption is there to control who gets to build a player for DVD's thus allowing the MPAA to maximize industry profits and for no other reason. The encryption is not to stop pirates.
You don't think so? OK show us a single production counterfeit DVD which used DeCSS in its production process.
If you are so gullible as to insist on buying the MPAA's lies I have some lovely swamp property in Florida which I'm sure you'll want to buy also.
Martial arts is much more than the study of how to fight - it is mainly - at least at the highest level - a study of why humans fight. I understand how to fight, when to fight, and when not to fight.
My problem is not that the court room is a battle front - my problem is why the courtroom is a battle front.
We as humans have been fed the idea since the earliest of times that the only way to determine the truth is though battle. Battles are a lousy way to determine truth! How can anyone hope to arrive at the delicate beauty of truth by the ugly process of a fight? All battles result in destruction - not construction. Whether battles are physical, intellectual, emotional, or otherwise the result is damage.
Evil is about destruction and the creation of human misery. As a result the destruction caused in fights is always part of evil's plan.
Evil gets away with this because of the natural fighting which bulls do to set up a pecking order - so those of us who are not evil will buy the idea that the fights that evil people sell us on are a good and natural thing - they are not.
So ingrained in our thought patterns are the fighting ways which evil has conned us into that it is hard to imagine any other way of doing things. Here is a suggestion:
Suppose that instead of an adversarial legal system that we adopt a cooperative legal system which works in this way: any people who use the weasel arguments typical of lawyers are deemed uncooperative and automatically lose . This is not a fool proof system - but it is infinitely superior to the system which evil people have foisted off on us. It at least stands a chance of working. That is a lot more than the system we have been handed - which everyone seems to accept without even questioning it.
The problem with your amoral view - that it is not your place to decide which of us is right - is that by taking that position you surrender your part of the world to evil. Be aware of that simple fact.
The complaint is not just against the recording industry - it is just that they are the ones with which more people on this forum are familiar.
Oh wait, I just re-read your post and realized it is a troll - never mind.
Traditional solutions (The ASCAP/BMI royalties) under previous law were a reasonable solution for the "How do you compensate creators for their contributions?" problem.
The RIAA wants to use the DMCA to short circuit the payment of royalties to creators and put the payments into the pockets of the parasites at the RIAA and the record companies. If there is any way that the record companies can turn artists into slaves, rest assured they will. 'Suits' see artists are even bigger chumps than nerds are.
I once met the lead guitarist in a band which sold 47 million records during its existence. He had a wooden box that said "Use RCA tubes" as the only thing he had to show from the experience. Various business types wound up with all of the money from those 47 million records.
This is important because encrypting a message does no good against traffic analysis.
One of the most important things that I have learned in martial arts is that the person who wins a fight has won the fight and nothing else. This is fairly obvious in the physical world: a thirty year old beating up a three year old hardly makes the thirty year old right. It is not so obvious in the intellectual world; someone with a high IQ beating up someone with a low IQ does not make the person with the high IQ right! I used to use my intellectual strength to win arguments (intellectual fights) all the time; very few people were ever successful arguing with me - so I thought I was right. The truth is that I was often wrong - sometimes disastrously so. I suspect that many people here on slashdot are guilty of making that particular mistake.
The confusion comes from the fact that right makes might. However there are many reasons that fights can be won or lost which have nothing to do with being right. Legal fights are often won or lost for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong; one side might have a lawyer who is just a better fighter than the other side - or, as I have pointed out before, case law may have been established by a large corporation taking on an individual with no resources (thirty year old vs three year old) and that case law is then used as a precedent for other bad rulings.
A legal victory does not mean 'right'. The arguments that this poster used - while impressive sounding and intimidating to the average person are not sufficient to prove he is correct. Slashdot is not a court of law; there is no judge to keep truth from being spoken.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
The answer is 'yes'. It was an obvious idea in that sense. 'Fifty two clicks' would not have been obvious, and that would be patentable (if anything of the sort was patentable) but one click to do the whole job was obvious to any ordinary web designer for all the same reasons that ending a sentence with a single period is obvious - while ending one with 52 periods might not be.
At one point in the trial Microsoft testified that 'such and such' was impossible - Judge Jackson went home and tried to perform the action on his computer and found that Microsoft was lying; he was able to do it. He came into court the next day and stated what he had found.
While this sounds like an eminently reasonable thing to do - surely anyone with technical knowledge would likely have done the same thing - it is a violation of 'due process'. Judge Jackson was supposed to rule only on evidence entered at trial not on independent investigation he or anyone else performed outside of the courtroom. The Microsoft lawyers objected but Judge Jackson overruled their objection.
The fact that the judge caught Microsoft lying, even the fact that they were lying is legally irrelevant; remember, the essence of the law is 'straining at gnats while swallowing camels'. This may be the gnat of reversible error on which the ruling against Microsoft is overturned at the appellate level.
If you are pointing a gun at my head and I sign a contract saying I'll pay you $1M, it is not valid. But an Olympic athlete has a choice: they can sign the contract and go to Australia, or they can not sign the contract and not go.
What is it that you are threatening to take away from a person when you hold a gun to their head? Everyone dies - all life ends eventually. The answer is that you are threatening to take away their dreams - their possibilities. That is exactly what the coercion the IOC is using against those athletes is doing.
You can only see the most direct level of coercion: physical force or torture. Ultimately what any threat does is cause pain. Pain is the central nervous system's way of reporting physical damage is occurring to itself. It doesn't matter how that damage is done to a person's central nervous system: all pain is signals which are integrated by the brain. You wish to exclude only that pain which is directly caused and which you are sensitive enough to detect . I am simply a little more aware than you are, and I can see that coercion is almost always wrong.
Just because the actions of the IOC are legal, doesn't mean that they are right. I'll repeat it again, just because you can get someone's signature on a piece of paper doesn't make what you are doing right. The motivations of 'Guido' with a gun and the IOC with a non - negotiable contract are virtually indistinguishable; each is trying to get something which it hasn't earned. It is the similarity of their motivations which cause me see their actions as similar.
When you trick someone into signing a 'con'tract you are trying to get something you don't deserve. You can claim that you deserve it because you are cleverer than the people whom you con, but 'Guido' is cleverer than you are: he had his gun at your head before you got yours out - so by the 'who is more clever' argument he is entitled to your wealth.
Contracts obtained by coercion are wrong - it doesn't matter what the coercion is.
Of course the law agrees with you, but as has often been pointed out, the law is an ass.
Of course it could also be claimed that I am 'tilting at windmills' well meaning but mistaken. I have been wrong many times in the past, and I am sure I will be wrong many times in the future so that is possible - however, I have the honesty to admit that possibility. Do you have the honesty to admit that you might be wrong? I have a very different perpective on the legal system than lawyers have: I am looking at the forrest, lawyers look at the trees - I see very different things than legal schollars see.
You claim that the royal treatment of judges is an 'accident'. Bullshit, If it was an accident then the modern judiciary will realize that the royal title of 'Your honor' is unconstitutional - and that the royal treatment they are being given is wrong in an egalitarian country and they will stop demanding it. ROFLOL. Yeah, that is going to happen.
Do I believe people are mostly evil? No, I think that about 5% of people are evil. I think most people tend toward the 'good' end of the spectrum. It is not a bell shaped curve, it is a distribution which is skewed toward good.
I think that evil presents arguments which are attractively packaged and which if not examined closely are persuasive.
Arguments similar to mine could be made about many systems: for example "surgery causes pain, and therefore surgery is the product of evil." That is a specious argument. What differentiates my arguments from those kind of arguments is one key fact: The legal system is the only societal construct which is directly involved with the regulation of evil; as such it is the one system in society which evil people have an overriding desire to control. In effect the legal system acts like the societal equivalent of the human immune system.
What I am trying to point out is that there is a class of evil people who behave like the AIDS virus - they pervert that societal immune system to their own evil ends - to reproduce and further their goals rather than the goals which most people want. The actions of those people pervert those ideals which were democratically arrived at.
I have stated my views simply and in a way which anyone with an IQ exceeding that of a box turtle can understand. If you insist on 'arguing like a lawyer' to defend a system which has been corrupted by evil people, then I can have only one response to you: FUCK YOU, YOU EVIL PIECE OF SHIT
Since technical people tend to be more honest than 'people people' we tend to tell the truth on the stand. Does this get us in trouble? Oh yes. The legal system assumes that one side lies one way, the other side lies the other, and that a jury will find the truth which is somewhere between those two extremes.
Of course that means that anyone who tells the truth is at a great disadvantage in a court of law; since the jury will try to find the truth between the two sides claims - the slant is away from anyone who tells the truth and toward those who lie.
This means that the system favors lies over the truth; that is why "I don't know" is an effective tactic in a court of law. As a lie "I don't know" carries more weight in the MPAA's favor than Mr. Valenti telling the truth:
Attorney: "Did the MPAA ask the Norwegian police to harass the teenager who released the DeCSS code"
Mr. Valenti's possible answers:
The truth: "Of course we did, we have the money, and the power that money gives us. We wanted to intimidate the kid and anyone else who threatens our position of wealth and power."
Plausible lie: "I can't recall."
Which one do you think he is going to use?
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The law; 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
Sometimes what are apparently dumb ass management decisions work, but mostly they fail. Sometimes wise decisions fail, but mostly they work. There are always good sounding arguments for foolishness; else why would anyone ever make a foolish decision? In Intel's case abandoning a successful strategy to do just the opposite might work - but so far the evidence is strongly against it. Even the staunchest supporters of the new direction have to admit that it is a very risky approach; the odds are against it.
The reason that fools continue to exist in the world is that they succeed just often enough to keep trying. Those successes are both necessary and proper - the wise don't have the world completely figured out, and successful fools remind them of that fact. It is more evidence of the Yin and Yang nature of reality: mostly the wise succeed and mostly fools fail, but there is an element of the wise failing and fools succeeding.
Had Intel continued to do things the way it did things in the past: with focus, great engineering from experienced personnel, a sterling reputation, and a huge bankroll for development, it is difficult to see how anyone could have challenged them. Now the only part of that package which is there is the huge bankroll, and that may be enough to buy Intel the time to succeed with its new direction, or it may not be, time will tell.
The new management wanted to change Intel's direction - that is what new management always wants to do. Since Intel was a successful dominant player in a single huge market - they decided to become an unsuccessful player in lots of smaller markets. Of course the consequences of that sort of direction change seems to escape the perceptions of the razor sharp minds who are paid the big money to lead industry.
I am reminded of the huge retail discount chain who spent close to a billion dollars to build branch stores in Mexico - only to discover to their shock that Mexico is a poor country compared to the US and that the people there couldn't afford to buy what they had to sell.
Doh.
Judo players have a strange view of enjoyment: I actually enjoy being thrown to the mat; it is a lot like an amusement park ride that you don't know you're on. If you listen to really good players, they laugh when they get thrown.
rjh's post is an excellent example of the conventional point of view. I would like to dissect it a little bit.
As I see it there are two types of people who staunchly support the legal status quo - there is a small core of truly evil psychopaths who benefit from the deliberate actions of the psychopaths who proceeded them in the legal system. These people are not in any sort of formal conspiracy and never have been - but they recognize each other when they see another of like mind. In the past these people have been very influential in shaping the course of the legal system. They understand that the correct course is a very narrow path; that it takes only a single step off of that path to steer things into the quicksand on either side of the path. It takes only small, deliberately introduced errors, in the structure of the legal system to pervert it from something intended to be good to something which results in evil.
The second type of status quo supporters in the legal system are those who are utterly unable to see the evil core of what they are doing and come up with reasonable explanations for their actions.
Let us give rjh the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is not a psychopath. That is a reasonable assumption to make as most psychopaths are unwilling to try fighting out in the day light where they might be exposed for what they are.
The first point rjh raises is about this case being legal crack. He is correct in that point; it is the tacit understanding of that point that causes most people to have an expectation that Microsoft will get a de-facto automatic appeal. I have no argument with the fact that the law is very addicting to those who practice it. I would like to point out that addictions are generally considered to be very bad things.
People who are addicted to anything are often very dangerous, and legal addicts are no exception; people who are in positions where their actions affect the lives and fortunes of others need to be particularly resistive to the temptations of addiction; less they do great harm in feeding that addiction. Sadly the people who are in positions of great power and thus are potentially far more dangerous to society than any single criminal could ever be - rarely resist the temptations that the law gives to them.
Temptation is the main tool of evil, it is how people are seduced into doing evil's bidding. Here is an example of the direct temptations that a few evil people have suggested into the basic structure of the law: the royal treatment that is given to judges. Judges dress in royal robes and are addressed by a royal title; "Your honor".
Doubtless an apologist for the legal system will be quick to point out that the honor is for the legal system - not for the individual judge - but that is only a plausible lie. The brutal truth - which the judges are not honest enough to admit to themselves - is that their subconscious minds except the 'stroking' they are getting as their personal due - and most judges act as though they personally are due the respect that is being 'afforded to the legal system'.
For example most contempt citations come when somebody shows a judge that the judge is wrong about something - it would be a very rare situation when you would get a contempt citation for showing a judge he was right. The judge realizes he was wrong - but isn't about to admit it - so he threatens a contempt ruling if the lawyer doesn't stop causing the judge turmoil. When would you get more angry, when you think you are right about something and somebody disagrees with you - or when you realize you were wrong but you don't want to admit it because it would make you look bad?
Now let us look at the second point rjh raises - about automatic appeal. I believe he has misinterpreted what I was saying. I meant that someone would have an automatic right to have an appeal heard if one was offered. I did not mean that all cases would be automatically appealed to a higher court.
Now to the crux of the discussion; the contention that the law is fair. Rjh states that the law is exquisitely fair - that it applies equally to both sides. I have no objection to statement that the law applies equally to both sides - that is absolutely true; Bill Gates is just as forbidden to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family as is someone living under a bridge. In that sense the law is equally applied - the question is: "Does that automatically mean that the law is fair in practice?" The answer to that question is - as the loaf of bread example demonstrates - "Not necessarily; correctly applied law can be very unfair."
We now get to my real argument with the legal system: rjh's legal definition of the word fair :
" Fair, in a legal context, doesn't mean everybody's happy. Fair means everybody gets screwed over equally."
My main objection to the legal system is the belief by those in the profession that they get to screw everybody . That Sir is a carnivorous view of the world; the belief that everyone else is raw meat for your consumption.
Here is an alternative structure for the legal system: that the law be constructed so as to afford the maximum chance of arriving at a decision which is "Free of favoritism or bias - impartial, just to all parties, equitable, consistent with rules, logic, or ethics." That is the definition of fair which most people mean when they say "fair" in a legal sense - and that is what most people want to get from the legal system. But by your own admission that is not what people get as the legal definition of fair. The legal definition of fair comes from a different definition of the word fair: " Lawful to hunt or attack as in fair game ".
None of the rest of us have got any interest in having a legal system which allows those in the system to screw everybody equally. I am sure that those of you in the system have fun with the illusion of power that screwing all the rest of us gives to you - but the simple fact is that we all hate you for it. You have outlined something which is absolutely evil in its nature - and there is no arguing with that fact - you really stepped on your dick with that admission.
I stand by my statements about the 'blind lady'. I am sure that the people who created that symbol (at least the addition of the blindfold) meant exactly what I said they meant by it - they came up with the plausible lie about 'impartiality' to mask what they were doing. It is an idiotic symbol.
The problem with having any sort of hidden agenda is that is the intellectual equivalent of trying to walk in one direction while looking like you are walking in another direction. This is a ridiculous method of walking - no one tries it in the physical world because it is so obvious. The mental "hidden agenda walk" is just as obvious to anyone who is basically honest and has some world experience - people with hidden agendas look strange. The only hope of getting away with a hidden agenda is to convince everyone that "This is how we walk in this field". A key to spotting institutionalized hidden agendas is to look for systematic formalism: any time people are dressed in 'traditional' garbs and do things in a formalized stilted fashion - that can be used to hide a "hidden agenda walk" - by getting everyone in the field to have that peculiar "walk". The formalism's of the legal system are there to hide the presence of evil in the system - anything else is a plausible lie used to sell that formalism to the people in the system.
For instance here is an example of an argument that could be used against what I have to say: "Ballet is done in traditional garb and in a 'stilted' formal fashion - do I think there is a hidden agenda in Ballet?" No, Ballet does not have the power to damage the population as a whole - a hidden agenda there would be meaningless. The legal system does have the power to cause great damage so anything which could hide a hidden agenda in the law is something which it is proper to suspect.
Now as to rjh's advice that I quit complaining and run for office etc. As a matter of fact I have run for office, and I have been involved in politics. What I learned from that experience is that before people can change things that they have to understand :
1. That a problem exists.
2. What the problem is.
That is an education problem: how do you show people a problem they don't even dream exists? What I am doing on slashdot is trying to learn how to educate people about the existence of a problem which they don't know is there. The main problem which I face is that circumstances are such that anyone who does see the fundamental problems in the world looks like a crackpot - things are so complex that I need a great deal of bandwidth to transfer the information I have obtained in my life. The internet is the highest bandwidth information transfer agent I have available - so I use it.
I have discussed the "we are the government" argument is previous posts - while that may have flown in 1800 - not many people buy that particular argument 200 years later.
There are evil people in the law - just as there are evil people in most fields - the difference is that the law is the only field which is structured deliberately to favor those who are evil. While there are psychopaths who enter surgical fields in medicine because they enjoy cutting people and causing them pain I do not believe that the surgery was created for the amusement of those people.
I do believe that the law differs in that respect and that the fundamental structure of the legal system needs to be completely revamped.