The thing about middlemen? Sometimes they don't just get in the way. In this case, it's easier to go to one big warehouse for royalty-free content than it is to scour dozens of websites looking for exactly what you need.
I understand that not everyone is going to want to release complete works into this pool of ideas. But if you found some of their content worthwhile, you may want to give back by contributing some of the sounds you collected as part of your work, or maybe an acoustic version of the song, or a song without a vocal track (so that fans and other wannabes can practice their m4d 4m3r1c4|\| 1d01 5k1llzzz).
Another reason to contribute, which the website mentioned, is that it may catch the attention of someone who wants to use your work in ways which the license doesn't allow. For those uses, they still need to go to you and negotiate.
The system might not be perfect for everyone or everything, but I think some good things are going to come out of it.
Mars has all those mile-deep canyons, along with about a billion other places a probe like this could wander into and never return. Wouldn't a weather balloon make more sense? I know the atmosphere is thin, but I still keep seeing designs for Martian gliders.
Also, the story doesn't seem to indicate whether these things can steer themselves (though it would certainly be possible to do so), or how it reports the data back to NASA. I would assume that it reports back to an orbiting satellite. Having a transmitter capable of reaching Earth would add a lot of weight to the thing, and it couldn't get far from a ground-based station without going over the horizon.
I think the point is, it's very difficult to do something very well if you're not passionate about it. I've had jobs which I didn't care about, except that they paid the bills. I did them well enough to keep them, but whenever I thought about taking it to "the next level," my brain always came back with a, "why bother?"
There's no shame in being "merely competent." If the only people who could survive in the computer industry were those who lived, breathed, and bathed code, we wouldn't have enough people to keep things running. But if you find someone who has "the love," try and hang onto him.
The GPL is simply the legal implementation of the ideals and goals of open source. It's necessary, because those who don't share those ideals and goals could set themselves up to take quasi-ownership of originally free code.
It's called "embrace and extend," and it has happened more than a few times. Say a piece of BSD-style free software--an instant messaging system called TCPChat for example-- becomes very popular. Someone starts a closed source company called Chatterbox, which is a virtual clone of the original code. It adds some neat features (voice support, file sharing, and maybe a shared whiteboard system) that are only available to users of their software.
Suddenly, users of their software outnumber the users of TCPChat 10 to 1. The final step is to tweak the communications protocol in such a way that their clients will no longer talk with the old clients at all. They've basically taken the results of someone else's work, made money hand over fist with it, and given nothing back to the original creators.
The point is, the GPL wouldn't be necessary if a large majority agreed with its goals and were willing to support them. Instead, the GPL exists to enforce these ideals within a hostile medium.
Sure it does. Both, insofar as they are legal and binding, are enforcable as a result of copyright law. Both govern the actions a recipient of a copyrighted work can take.
The main difference, and the reason that the GPL is probably far stronger than EULAs, is that the GPL places no restrictions on the use of a product, only on redistribution.
It would be very difficult for a court to smack down the GPL without weakening the legal framework which justifies EULAs.
May I just point out that FTP.exe does not implement the TCP/IP stack? It's actually just an application-level app.
But the greater point--that Microsoft could have boatloads of BSD code strewn throughout its codebase and still be perfectly legal--is essentially correct.
1) Getting worked up into a slobbering frenzy is a lot more fun.
2) Windows NT has been "POSIX-compliant"--or has at least claimed to be so--for almost a decade now, and Microsoft has been working on UNIX interoperability for far longer than that. If it was really about getting credibility for their UNIX development, they would have bought a license a long time ago.
3) You do not need a license to the old Bell Labs code in order to create a POSIX-compliant OS, to create applications for or interoperate with same, or to implement any of the high-performance features found in modern UNIX implementations. Unless Microsoft is planning to release its own flavor of UNIX, I don't see any (non-shady) reason for this move.
Much has been made of SCO's comparison of pre-IBM Linux to a tricycle. If I understand right, the code they are licensing is simply another design for a tricycle, with zero technological significance to anyone working on a modern operating system. [I'm interested in hearing arguments to the contrary]
I think the point is, if your company found out that it was unwittingly distributing its own proprietary code under an open license[*], it wouldn't matter whether the code was under the GPL specifically. If the code was released under the BSD, it's still "out there" for others to use.
So it wouldn't be proper to place blame on the "viralness" of the GPL license.
* As SCO would be, in an alternate universe where their case actually had merit.
But it they are burning oil and even worse, foreign oil, to charge them up, then it seems to defeat the purpose.
Not entirely. First, these NEVs are much smaller and lighter than traditional, gasoline-powered vehicles. So they use less energy, regardless of the source. Plus they have the advantage of using zero energy when idling.
Also, if we were able to convert the entire nation's electrical grid over to solar/wind/geothermal/small-children-on-treadmills this instant, it wouldn't change the amount of fossil fuels being used by our current fleet of vehicles. If we had a significant number of electric cars, then the fleet as a whole suddenly becomes cleaner.
Finally, having a single, huge power generator designed to operate efficiently at one speed would be more efficient than having a small engine in every car, which has to operate efficiently at a wide variety of speeds. On the other hand, a lot of energy is also lost as it is transmitted over power lines, so much of the benefit would be lost.
As for your plan to cover *every* house in the country with solar panels, I think it would be a bad idea. First, many people wouldn't bother to maintain the equipment needed to get the energy onto the grid. Also, there's a certain amount of support equipment required no matter how small the installation.
A better idea might be to put cells on the top of especially large buildings. We could probably run half the country off the energy falling on Wal-Mart Super Centers alone.
And i cant imagine them making noise or slicing up flcoks of birds like people say
Well that's just a shame. I'm a strong proponent of tax dollars being spent in the most entertaining ways possible.
The problem was, early wind prop designs weren't built with birds in mind. The props were too light and too fast for the birds to see. Therefore, they tended to get plastered.
Modern designs are built for slower, more powerful strokes, so the birds have a better chance of avoiding them.
Kind of a shame, really. There's nothing quite like loading the family up into the station wagon and taking a jaunt through the bird-whacking fields.:)
Yawn. First you said that you wouldn't report it because the law of the land prohibited you from doing so. Now you're claiming that you don't care what the law says, you'll ignore it.
If a computer user isn't taking precautions, it's quite possible for a technicians to find evidence in the normal course of his duties. You cannot tell me that you are legally obligated to avoid reporting it, if you didn't go out of your way in finding it. Hell, if I was paying a lawyer to give me the advice you are, I'd ask him to go double-check his facts. Coming from some pseudonym who is obviously more interested in covering his own ass than in stopping a felony?
If anyone here finds themselves in a situation like the article describes, I think they would be well advised to ignore everything you've said.
As far as the article goes, it doesn't delve into details about how they discovered the child porn. If it was "bored techie syndrome," then yes they were going beyond their job mandate, which should only require them to perform actions pursuant to fixing the perceived problems with the computer.
But regardless of how they found it, there would be absolutely no rationale for ignoring it. First, because they aren't federal officers, they're not obligated to follow rules regarding warrants. Second, warrants have never applied when the evidence is in plain view. Finally, in some areas it isn't legal to *not* report evidence of a felony, however much stammering and stuttering you have to do to explain how you got into the position of discovering it.
If you really are a federal employee, and are sure that you're correct in the interpretation of your responsibilities, then do what you consider appropriate. But it may be prudent for you to run your interpretation of your job duties by your lawyer types.
If, as your goatse link would suggest, you are a troll, then you really need to go back to spreading FUD about things that can only mess up Slashdot, not another person's actual life.
You're right, a company is just an idea. And sometimes, other ideas take precedence. If something you discover about an employee's conduct is harming the company (cooking the books, embezzlement, theft of company materials) then by all means, work within the company. But if you discover something that represents an immediate threat to the greater society (an assault by an armed coworker, for example), then the most important thing is to get the police there as soon as possible.
Now, in the case described above, I wouldn't say that the child porn represented an immediate threat. Nevertheless, it's an ongoing one which concerns people outside the company. While I would be willing to send it through corporate channels, I also have an obligation to make sure that it does eventually get turned over to police, and that no evidence tampering occurs.
"If you discover that an employee has, say, severed limbs in his desk drawer, it is certainly not your business to go and report him. You are not the law, you have no moral authority, and you should therefore not be able to bring punishment down upon someone who has done you no wrong. After all, you still have all your limbs, so what harm is it to you? Pure and simple."
"I know I would be very displeased if I found one of our system administrators playing "hall monitor" with our proprietary meat storage. If he can't be trusted to keep the privacy of a coworker, then who's to say that he can keep the privacy of the company's trade secrets? He would be outta here in no time."
I've got Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search set to the keyword "goto". So I type in "goto cowboyneal" and it takes me straight to cowboyneal.org. Goofy looking fella. BTW, I'm running Mozillaphoenixfirebirdbrowser 0.5.
I'm not sure, but "I feel lucky" also seems to be the default behavior when I don't type in a keyword.
Aha! So now you're not only an individualist-hating , Star Trek-watching, whining college student, leftist Earth worshipper, but you also hate the poor! And you're all a bunch of Christians to boot! There, I said it! You're all Christians! Beware! BEWAAAAAAARE!!
[This message brought to you by the Loundry 2004 Presidential Campaign: Remember, a vote for Loundry is a vote for four highly entertaining years]
[Oooh, I'm going to take it in the karma for this one.]
Okay, as a resident of Europe, I understand why you might not be up on the situation here.
As part of the AT&T breakup waaaaay back in the '80s, phone companies had to become "equal access carriers." That is, they couldn't discriminate between traffic. That fact is what allowed ISPs to start using local dialups to provide Internet access. Believe me, they would have made calls to ISPs more expensive than a call to your neighbor, if they'd been given the chance. Government regulation really promoted the Internet for the masses.
Cable Internet companies are under a totally different set of regulations than phone companies. To promote the building of expensive infrastructure, cable companies are given a monopoly on that infrastructure. They don't have to open their lines to third parties as the phone companies do.
Because cable companies have more control over the traffic on their lines, any cable company that gets bought up by a major provider suddenly becomes the tool of that provider.
When that connectivity provider also happens to be a major content provider, it's in that company's interests to mess with the traffic to promote their own content. It does happen, and cable providers are always looking for regulation that will allow them to do it more. Government, for its part, seems to be increasingly stepping aside.
Smaller ISPs have difficulty competing with cable. The best they can provide is DSL, which also uses the phone lines. But they are totally locked out of the cable market, and will remain so forever unless the regulatory climate changes.
Kazaa is not a perfect safeguard of our freedoms, nor is any other distributed system. The reason is, the freedom inherent in the original vision of the Internet is increasingly under attack. Though the original TCP/IP protocol made no distinction between types of traffic, that was a design decision, nothing more. If The Powers that Be decide that we should replace TCP/IP with a wholly new protocol, where only authorized applications could communicate over it, it could be done.
It needn't go that far, though. There are always less drastic measures that can--and most likely will--be taken against such distributed networks. They all share the same weakness in that they rely on the underlying network (the Internet).
Sure, people "in the know," will always know where to get their crappy bootlegs of first-run movies. I don't care. But there could come a day when only those "in the know" will know where to get "unauthorized" news and alternative viewpoints.
We can't just be fighting for those in the know. We have to fight for everyone. But most of all, we have to believe that there's something that needs to be fought.
The article was pretty bad, and doesn't do justice to Lessig's views.
The problem Lessig sees with the Internet is twofold. First, we have a longrunning trend towards consolidation. Consolidation of media and content, and consolidation of the pipelines that convey that information. Second, the network is slowly being made more "intelligent", by which I mean, obnoxious.
If the owners of the pipeline acted as universal carriers, this wouldn't be a problem. However, in many cases *cough*AOL-TW*cough*, the pipeline owner and the content provider are the same organization.
Therefore, the "intelligence" of the network allows the pipeline owners to decide what information flows over the pipeline. I don't care how many successful pings you send across the pipeline, or how well the packets you receive conform to the TCP/IP protocol; this is not "The Internet."
"The Internet" is a network whose power lies in its own stupidity. All it does is route packets. It doesn't care why the packet has been sent, what port it's headed for, or what information it carries. All "The Internet" knows is where to send the packet next. Things like QoS, encryption, and reliable delivery aren't meant to be handled by "The Internet," but by the computers using it to communicate.
We're rapidly approaching--hell, we're already in--a world where computers have to communicate through pipes where the message can be altered, rejected, or re-routed in whatever way the pipeline provider wishes. If we were truly on "The Internet," you could write applications which using it without worrying about whether some third party would disapprove of its use. Getting permission raises the barrier to entry for any new, innovative application. Hence, it retards progress, and ensures that nothing can happen without the approval of those who benefitted from the old way of doing things.
I can't say I've done justice to Lessig, but I think this post captures his message a good deal better than the main article. Everyone here who hasn't read "The Future of Ideas" needs to do so. This is too important to botch.
"Why move to a neighborhood near my office where I pay $30K more for half the house?"
You make that sound like it's a rhetorical question. Truth is, it's not. There are advantages to urban living.
First, there's the advantage of only having half the house. When I was young, my parents decided to move out of the city into a farmtown-turning-suburb. Even though they checked out the school system and all the other homework, I think their main attraction to the place was that land was going for about $1500 an acre.
There, they built their dream house. In my opinion, it was too big, and on too much land. The bulk of weekends was spent cleaning/fixing the innards and mowing/watering/pruning outside. Frankly, I spent too much time doing maintenance to really enjoy it.
When I moved out into a one bedroom apartment, it was a revelation. There was nothing to mow, and when I got sick of my own clutter, I could have the place totally cleaned in under forty minutes. Everything I needed was a long walk or a short drive away.
Plus, growing up twenty miles from anything of significance had its drawbacks. But the point is, a big house with a big yard also means big responsibility. I'd also imagine that you tend to tie yourself down, since you'll invariably collect enough "stuff" to make it difficult to ever move somewhere smaller.
Ultimately, it's a matter of personal preference. Which brings us back to the original article: Mass transit done right could be a very cool thing.
Music does not get made without studio time, equipment, expertise and salaries. All of those, and the money that purchases them, are finite resources.
Compared to the costs of getting your work into major distribution channels without help from the RIAA, none of the costs you cite are a drop in the bucket. If you live in a major city, there are plenty of ways to get access to professional studios. Of course you have to pay for the privilege, but as I said, the main cost in producing a world-famous CD is access to the distribution channels.
The recording industry knows this, and that's why they're concerned about the Internet. Musicians no longer need the access to distribution channels that only the major studios were able to provide.
Just ask your wedding singer what he'd be willing to do unpaid and you'll quickly get my point.
Totally irrelevant example. We're talking about music which has been fixed to an easily reproducible medium such as a CD or MP3 file. Given that, it is possible to transmit whatever work the artist and recording studio did to everyone who desires it, with no further work on their parts.
When it comes to your wedding band's work at a specific wedding, there is no way for that work to be reproduced at little Harry's bar-mitzvah, except by paying the band to do another gig.
More? To whom? Not to the people who have made signifigant investment in the viability of an acts' career only to see that investment go up in smoke due to peer-to-peer pirating.
Funny, I don't see anybody making significant investments in "career viability" these days. What I see from the major studios is typified by "American Idol": Manufacture a "super-hot, gotta-buy-their-CDs" band using the latest in marketing glitz. Inflate everyone's expectations to the point where there's no way they can deliver, and then sit back and watch the sales roll in. Soon, all the fans are sick and tired of the act, and the "career" in question dies. But that's okay, because the studio stopped pumping them a long time ago, in favor of an even newer "super-hot, gotta-buy-their-CDs" band.
It should also be pointed out that, if a few entities didn't control major distribution channels, the investment necessary to create a "viable career" would be much lower. Lower barrier to entry should equate to more viable careers.
Nothing to do with music; it's the technology I'm concerned with; as I outlined here
I read your post, and it does nothing to cover up the trollish smell I mentioned earlier. The guy who responded to you there had some excellent points: every privacy techology, every communication channel, every encryption scheme has potential "terrorist" applications. Using this fact as an excuse to link p2p file trading to terrorism is indeed trollian, and using it as an excuse to ban p2p technology is simply braindead policy.
Actually, it could be said that in light of recent legislation, it is, in fact, a crime. At least with regards to illegal IP and technologies (such as the DVD decryption flap a while back).
Again, the point is that the Internet is just a tool, and it's the uses that people put it to that determines the legality of an action.
I question why so many intelligent people would have such a glaring blindspot just because the object being discussed is intangible. If I opened up a store where people brought me in copyrighted works to redistribute to other people -sometimes for a fee- (ala' new napster) how long would I stay in business?
Not very, you can bet on that!
True fact, if your business model was "Copyright Infringment, Inc." But wh
I can see where you're coming from in a "theoretically, Communism should work" sort of way. But from a practical standpoint, free speech only works if people have the ability to tune out some messages and concentrate on others.
Imagine that you're having a lively conversation at a dinner party. There are a dozen different groups of chatters in the room. The spammer mentality recognizes the opportunity here: If I just brought in a megaphone, then everyone would be able to hear what I have to say.
The problem is twofold: Everyone has a message that they want others to hear, and thanks to the marvels of the Internet, everyone with a broadband connection has a huge megaphone. At some point, it becomes difficult to pick out the messages that are important to an individual, and the medium as a whole suffers. The solution here is to silence the proverbial megaphones.
The difference between Spamhaus and the RIAA is that Spamhaus is interfering with "speech" that interferes with more constructive speech, and the RIAA is trying to interfere with speech that interferes with their monopoly on certain messages.
All I want to know is, how the hell am I supposed to tell the difference? I get e-mails from RedHat, because I signed up for their newsletters. I get them from Yahoo, because I signed up for their services.
But how are you, the consumer, supposed to tell if one of your "white hats" is actually one of Yahoo's "marketing partners?" Seriously, every spam I get comes with a disclaimer that says I "opted in." I remember one especially infuriating one that listed about a dozen different ways to opt in, and at least half of them were so vague as to make it impossible to say, "no I didn't."
My philosophy is, if I'm not absolutely sure I signed up for something, then kill them all. Let/dev/null sort them out. If an e-mail "marketer" is using some obscure loophole in some bogus website EULA, then they're not white hats. They're just not the deepest shade of black around.
I'm not sure which way this goes. After all, emarketersamerica (spit twice) made it quite clear that they were supposed to be an organization representing anonymous clients who were harmed by the publication of the list. I'm wondering why it is even legal to bring suit anonymously, and I'm interested in seeing how the court handles that.
But I think that Spamhaus should have accepted the gambit, and instead of pointing out that emarketersamerica (spit twice) didn't exist a month ago, they should have said that it would be impossible to answer the allegations without naming the entities the "trade organization" actually represented.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about middlemen? Sometimes they don't just get in the way. In this case, it's easier to go to one big warehouse for royalty-free content than it is to scour dozens of websites looking for exactly what you need.
I understand that not everyone is going to want to release complete works into this pool of ideas. But if you found some of their content worthwhile, you may want to give back by contributing some of the sounds you collected as part of your work, or maybe an acoustic version of the song, or a song without a vocal track (so that fans and other wannabes can practice their m4d 4m3r1c4|\| 1d01 5k1llzzz).
Another reason to contribute, which the website mentioned, is that it may catch the attention of someone who wants to use your work in ways which the license doesn't allow. For those uses, they still need to go to you and negotiate.
The system might not be perfect for everyone or everything, but I think some good things are going to come out of it.
If any of the girls in the picture are reading this, *write me!*
Mars has all those mile-deep canyons, along with about a billion other places a probe like this could wander into and never return. Wouldn't a weather balloon make more sense? I know the atmosphere is thin, but I still keep seeing designs for Martian gliders.
Also, the story doesn't seem to indicate whether these things can steer themselves (though it would certainly be possible to do so), or how it reports the data back to NASA. I would assume that it reports back to an orbiting satellite. Having a transmitter capable of reaching Earth would add a lot of weight to the thing, and it couldn't get far from a ground-based station without going over the horizon.
I think the point is, it's very difficult to do something very well if you're not passionate about it. I've had jobs which I didn't care about, except that they paid the bills. I did them well enough to keep them, but whenever I thought about taking it to "the next level," my brain always came back with a, "why bother?"
There's no shame in being "merely competent." If the only people who could survive in the computer industry were those who lived, breathed, and bathed code, we wouldn't have enough people to keep things running. But if you find someone who has "the love," try and hang onto him.
The GPL is simply the legal implementation of the ideals and goals of open source. It's necessary, because those who don't share those ideals and goals could set themselves up to take quasi-ownership of originally free code.
It's called "embrace and extend," and it has happened more than a few times. Say a piece of BSD-style free software--an instant messaging system called TCPChat for example-- becomes very popular. Someone starts a closed source company called Chatterbox, which is a virtual clone of the original code. It adds some neat features (voice support, file sharing, and maybe a shared whiteboard system) that are only available to users of their software.
Suddenly, users of their software outnumber the users of TCPChat 10 to 1. The final step is to tweak the communications protocol in such a way that their clients will no longer talk with the old clients at all. They've basically taken the results of someone else's work, made money hand over fist with it, and given nothing back to the original creators.
The point is, the GPL wouldn't be necessary if a large majority agreed with its goals and were willing to support them. Instead, the GPL exists to enforce these ideals within a hostile medium.
Sure it does. Both, insofar as they are legal and binding, are enforcable as a result of copyright law. Both govern the actions a recipient of a copyrighted work can take.
The main difference, and the reason that the GPL is probably far stronger than EULAs, is that the GPL places no restrictions on the use of a product, only on redistribution.
It would be very difficult for a court to smack down the GPL without weakening the legal framework which justifies EULAs.
May I just point out that FTP.exe does not implement the TCP/IP stack? It's actually just an application-level app.
But the greater point--that Microsoft could have boatloads of BSD code strewn throughout its codebase and still be perfectly legal--is essentially correct.
I would be so happy if IBM stole that bit of IP and got it into every distro. That would be schweet, and well worth another billion dollar lawsuit.
Nah, let's not calm down. Three reasons:
1) Getting worked up into a slobbering frenzy is a lot more fun.
2) Windows NT has been "POSIX-compliant"--or has at least claimed to be so--for almost a decade now, and Microsoft has been working on UNIX interoperability for far longer than that. If it was really about getting credibility for their UNIX development, they would have bought a license a long time ago.
3) You do not need a license to the old Bell Labs code in order to create a POSIX-compliant OS, to create applications for or interoperate with same, or to implement any of the high-performance features found in modern UNIX implementations. Unless Microsoft is planning to release its own flavor of UNIX, I don't see any (non-shady) reason for this move.
Much has been made of SCO's comparison of pre-IBM Linux to a tricycle. If I understand right, the code they are licensing is simply another design for a tricycle, with zero technological significance to anyone working on a modern operating system. [I'm interested in hearing arguments to the contrary]
I think the point is, if your company found out that it was unwittingly distributing its own proprietary code under an open license[*], it wouldn't matter whether the code was under the GPL specifically. If the code was released under the BSD, it's still "out there" for others to use.
So it wouldn't be proper to place blame on the "viralness" of the GPL license.
* As SCO would be, in an alternate universe where their case actually had merit.
Also, if we were able to convert the entire nation's electrical grid over to solar/wind/geothermal/small-children-on-treadmill
Finally, having a single, huge power generator designed to operate efficiently at one speed would be more efficient than having a small engine in every car, which has to operate efficiently at a wide variety of speeds. On the other hand, a lot of energy is also lost as it is transmitted over power lines, so much of the benefit would be lost.
As for your plan to cover *every* house in the country with solar panels, I think it would be a bad idea. First, many people wouldn't bother to maintain the equipment needed to get the energy onto the grid. Also, there's a certain amount of support equipment required no matter how small the installation.
A better idea might be to put cells on the top of especially large buildings. We could probably run half the country off the energy falling on Wal-Mart Super Centers alone.
The problem was, early wind prop designs weren't built with birds in mind. The props were too light and too fast for the birds to see. Therefore, they tended to get plastered.
Modern designs are built for slower, more powerful strokes, so the birds have a better chance of avoiding them.
Kind of a shame, really. There's nothing quite like loading the family up into the station wagon and taking a jaunt through the bird-whacking fields.
Yawn. First you said that you wouldn't report it because the law of the land prohibited you from doing so. Now you're claiming that you don't care what the law says, you'll ignore it.
If a computer user isn't taking precautions, it's quite possible for a technicians to find evidence in the normal course of his duties. You cannot tell me that you are legally obligated to avoid reporting it, if you didn't go out of your way in finding it. Hell, if I was paying a lawyer to give me the advice you are, I'd ask him to go double-check his facts. Coming from some pseudonym who is obviously more interested in covering his own ass than in stopping a felony?
If anyone here finds themselves in a situation like the article describes, I think they would be well advised to ignore everything you've said.
As far as the article goes, it doesn't delve into details about how they discovered the child porn. If it was "bored techie syndrome," then yes they were going beyond their job mandate, which should only require them to perform actions pursuant to fixing the perceived problems with the computer.
But regardless of how they found it, there would be absolutely no rationale for ignoring it. First, because they aren't federal officers, they're not obligated to follow rules regarding warrants. Second, warrants have never applied when the evidence is in plain view. Finally, in some areas it isn't legal to *not* report evidence of a felony, however much stammering and stuttering you have to do to explain how you got into the position of discovering it.
If you really are a federal employee, and are sure that you're correct in the interpretation of your responsibilities, then do what you consider appropriate. But it may be prudent for you to run your interpretation of your job duties by your lawyer types.
If, as your goatse link would suggest, you are a troll, then you really need to go back to spreading FUD about things that can only mess up Slashdot, not another person's actual life.
You're right, a company is just an idea. And sometimes, other ideas take precedence. If something you discover about an employee's conduct is harming the company (cooking the books, embezzlement, theft of company materials) then by all means, work within the company. But if you discover something that represents an immediate threat to the greater society (an assault by an armed coworker, for example), then the most important thing is to get the police there as soon as possible.
Now, in the case described above, I wouldn't say that the child porn represented an immediate threat. Nevertheless, it's an ongoing one which concerns people outside the company. While I would be willing to send it through corporate channels, I also have an obligation to make sure that it does eventually get turned over to police, and that no evidence tampering occurs.
Refactoring time:
"If you discover that an employee has, say, severed limbs in his desk drawer, it is certainly not your business to go and report him. You are not the law, you have no moral authority, and you should therefore not be able to bring punishment down upon someone who has done you no wrong. After all, you still have all your limbs, so what harm is it to you? Pure and simple."
"I know I would be very displeased if I found one of our system administrators playing "hall monitor" with our proprietary meat storage. If he can't be trusted to keep the privacy of a coworker, then who's to say that he can keep the privacy of the company's trade secrets? He would be outta here in no time."
Thank you. I'll be here all week.
I've got Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search set to the keyword "goto". So I type in "goto cowboyneal" and it takes me straight to cowboyneal.org. Goofy looking fella. BTW, I'm running Mozillaphoenixfirebirdbrowser 0.5.
I'm not sure, but "I feel lucky" also seems to be the default behavior when I don't type in a keyword.
Aha! So now you're not only an individualist-hating , Star Trek-watching, whining college student, leftist Earth worshipper, but you also hate the poor! And you're all a bunch of Christians to boot! There, I said it! You're all Christians! Beware! BEWAAAAAAARE!!
[This message brought to you by the Loundry 2004 Presidential Campaign: Remember, a vote for Loundry is a vote for four highly entertaining years]
[Oooh, I'm going to take it in the karma for this one.]
Okay, as a resident of Europe, I understand why you might not be up on the situation here.
As part of the AT&T breakup waaaaay back in the '80s, phone companies had to become "equal access carriers." That is, they couldn't discriminate between traffic. That fact is what allowed ISPs to start using local dialups to provide Internet access. Believe me, they would have made calls to ISPs more expensive than a call to your neighbor, if they'd been given the chance. Government regulation really promoted the Internet for the masses.
Cable Internet companies are under a totally different set of regulations than phone companies. To promote the building of expensive infrastructure, cable companies are given a monopoly on that infrastructure. They don't have to open their lines to third parties as the phone companies do.
Because cable companies have more control over the traffic on their lines, any cable company that gets bought up by a major provider suddenly becomes the tool of that provider.
When that connectivity provider also happens to be a major content provider, it's in that company's interests to mess with the traffic to promote their own content. It does happen, and cable providers are always looking for regulation that will allow them to do it more. Government, for its part, seems to be increasingly stepping aside.
Smaller ISPs have difficulty competing with cable. The best they can provide is DSL, which also uses the phone lines. But they are totally locked out of the cable market, and will remain so forever unless the regulatory climate changes.
Kazaa is not a perfect safeguard of our freedoms, nor is any other distributed system. The reason is, the freedom inherent in the original vision of the Internet is increasingly under attack. Though the original TCP/IP protocol made no distinction between types of traffic, that was a design decision, nothing more. If The Powers that Be decide that we should replace TCP/IP with a wholly new protocol, where only authorized applications could communicate over it, it could be done.
It needn't go that far, though. There are always less drastic measures that can--and most likely will--be taken against such distributed networks. They all share the same weakness in that they rely on the underlying network (the Internet).
Sure, people "in the know," will always know where to get their crappy bootlegs of first-run movies. I don't care. But there could come a day when only those "in the know" will know where to get "unauthorized" news and alternative viewpoints.
We can't just be fighting for those in the know. We have to fight for everyone. But most of all, we have to believe that there's something that needs to be fought.
The article was pretty bad, and doesn't do justice to Lessig's views.
The problem Lessig sees with the Internet is twofold. First, we have a longrunning trend towards consolidation. Consolidation of media and content, and consolidation of the pipelines that convey that information. Second, the network is slowly being made more "intelligent", by which I mean, obnoxious.
If the owners of the pipeline acted as universal carriers, this wouldn't be a problem. However, in many cases *cough*AOL-TW*cough*, the pipeline owner and the content provider are the same organization.
Therefore, the "intelligence" of the network allows the pipeline owners to decide what information flows over the pipeline. I don't care how many successful pings you send across the pipeline, or how well the packets you receive conform to the TCP/IP protocol; this is not "The Internet."
"The Internet" is a network whose power lies in its own stupidity. All it does is route packets. It doesn't care why the packet has been sent, what port it's headed for, or what information it carries. All "The Internet" knows is where to send the packet next. Things like QoS, encryption, and reliable delivery aren't meant to be handled by "The Internet," but by the computers using it to communicate.
We're rapidly approaching--hell, we're already in--a world where computers have to communicate through pipes where the message can be altered, rejected, or re-routed in whatever way the pipeline provider wishes. If we were truly on "The Internet," you could write applications which using it without worrying about whether some third party would disapprove of its use. Getting permission raises the barrier to entry for any new, innovative application. Hence, it retards progress, and ensures that nothing can happen without the approval of those who benefitted from the old way of doing things.
I can't say I've done justice to Lessig, but I think this post captures his message a good deal better than the main article. Everyone here who hasn't read "The Future of Ideas" needs to do so. This is too important to botch.
First, there's the advantage of only having half the house. When I was young, my parents decided to move out of the city into a farmtown-turning-suburb. Even though they checked out the school system and all the other homework, I think their main attraction to the place was that land was going for about $1500 an acre.
There, they built their dream house. In my opinion, it was too big, and on too much land. The bulk of weekends was spent cleaning/fixing the innards and mowing/watering/pruning outside. Frankly, I spent too much time doing maintenance to really enjoy it.
When I moved out into a one bedroom apartment, it was a revelation. There was nothing to mow, and when I got sick of my own clutter, I could have the place totally cleaned in under forty minutes. Everything I needed was a long walk or a short drive away.
Plus, growing up twenty miles from anything of significance had its drawbacks. But the point is, a big house with a big yard also means big responsibility. I'd also imagine that you tend to tie yourself down, since you'll invariably collect enough "stuff" to make it difficult to ever move somewhere smaller.
Ultimately, it's a matter of personal preference. Which brings us back to the original article: Mass transit done right could be a very cool thing.
[snip]
Compared to the costs of getting your work into major distribution channels without help from the RIAA, none of the costs you cite are a drop in the bucket. If you live in a major city, there are plenty of ways to get access to professional studios. Of course you have to pay for the privilege, but as I said, the main cost in producing a world-famous CD is access to the distribution channels.
The recording industry knows this, and that's why they're concerned about the Internet. Musicians no longer need the access to distribution channels that only the major studios were able to provide.
Totally irrelevant example. We're talking about music which has been fixed to an easily reproducible medium such as a CD or MP3 file. Given that, it is possible to transmit whatever work the artist and recording studio did to everyone who desires it, with no further work on their parts.
When it comes to your wedding band's work at a specific wedding, there is no way for that work to be reproduced at little Harry's bar-mitzvah, except by paying the band to do another gig.
Funny, I don't see anybody making significant investments in "career viability" these days. What I see from the major studios is typified by "American Idol": Manufacture a "super-hot, gotta-buy-their-CDs" band using the latest in marketing glitz. Inflate everyone's expectations to the point where there's no way they can deliver, and then sit back and watch the sales roll in. Soon, all the fans are sick and tired of the act, and the "career" in question dies. But that's okay, because the studio stopped pumping them a long time ago, in favor of an even newer "super-hot, gotta-buy-their-CDs" band.
It should also be pointed out that, if a few entities didn't control major distribution channels, the investment necessary to create a "viable career" would be much lower. Lower barrier to entry should equate to more viable careers.
I read your post, and it does nothing to cover up the trollish smell I mentioned earlier. The guy who responded to you there had some excellent points: every privacy techology, every communication channel, every encryption scheme has potential "terrorist" applications. Using this fact as an excuse to link p2p file trading to terrorism is indeed trollian, and using it as an excuse to ban p2p technology is simply braindead policy.
Again, the point is that the Internet is just a tool, and it's the uses that people put it to that determines the legality of an action.
True fact, if your business model was "Copyright Infringment, Inc." But wh
I can see where you're coming from in a "theoretically, Communism should work" sort of way. But from a practical standpoint, free speech only works if people have the ability to tune out some messages and concentrate on others.
Imagine that you're having a lively conversation at a dinner party. There are a dozen different groups of chatters in the room. The spammer mentality recognizes the opportunity here: If I just brought in a megaphone, then everyone would be able to hear what I have to say.
The problem is twofold: Everyone has a message that they want others to hear, and thanks to the marvels of the Internet, everyone with a broadband connection has a huge megaphone. At some point, it becomes difficult to pick out the messages that are important to an individual, and the medium as a whole suffers. The solution here is to silence the proverbial megaphones.
The difference between Spamhaus and the RIAA is that Spamhaus is interfering with "speech" that interferes with more constructive speech, and the RIAA is trying to interfere with speech that interferes with their monopoly on certain messages.
All I want to know is, how the hell am I supposed to tell the difference? I get e-mails from RedHat, because I signed up for their newsletters. I get them from Yahoo, because I signed up for their services.
/dev/null sort them out. If an e-mail "marketer" is using some obscure loophole in some bogus website EULA, then they're not white hats. They're just not the deepest shade of black around.
But how are you, the consumer, supposed to tell if one of your "white hats" is actually one of Yahoo's "marketing partners?" Seriously, every spam I get comes with a disclaimer that says I "opted in." I remember one especially infuriating one that listed about a dozen different ways to opt in, and at least half of them were so vague as to make it impossible to say, "no I didn't."
My philosophy is, if I'm not absolutely sure I signed up for something, then kill them all. Let
I'm not sure which way this goes. After all, emarketersamerica (spit twice) made it quite clear that they were supposed to be an organization representing anonymous clients who were harmed by the publication of the list. I'm wondering why it is even legal to bring suit anonymously, and I'm interested in seeing how the court handles that.
But I think that Spamhaus should have accepted the gambit, and instead of pointing out that emarketersamerica (spit twice) didn't exist a month ago, they should have said that it would be impossible to answer the allegations without naming the entities the "trade organization" actually represented.