Okay, this is all well and good, but what would you say if I tapped into the telephone box outside my home to get "free" service? I suppose you might say that it doesn't say "all are welcome" on it, especially if it is locked. But what if a technician left it unlocked and I decided to use this opportunity to make long-distance calls to Taiwan? Does the act of leaving the box unlocked constitute implied consent?
No. For one thing, all the equipment and is plastered with "Property of [GTE|???-Bell|etc]". This, combined with the fact that we already have public phones and any reasonable and prudent person knows they aren't inside that green monument box by the road, and don't require a can wrench and buttset to use. The problem with WAPs is that they use radio, and it has been fairly firmly established that radio signals in public places are free for public consumption. Any exception to this is specifically legislated (such as the Cell band freqs).
Similarly, does an admin who doesn't know how to lock down their wireless network mean that his employer implied consent for the public to use the exposed bandwidth indiscriminately?
Frankly, yes. If you install a drinking fountain by the sidewalk, do you have any room to complain that passers-by are using it? How hard will the authorities laugh when you show up at the Police station with photos of people using your drinking fountain, demanding that they be tracked down and arrested for unauthorized accessing of water? The point is, the law is clear in a myriad of ways that if you place something in a public place, it is up to you to keep the public from using it (via locks, encryption, etc) if that's what you want.
In the end, if you steal a service from an individual or a company, somebody will pay the cost. Just because you aren't taking something from them does not mean that they aren't paying the price in the end.
This is entirely beside the point. Despite the fact that it costs money, there are indeed some people who give it away, either as promotional gimmickry or just because. Stating that it's not free for the provider says nothing about the provider's intent.
That's true. And, as someone else already pointed out: permission cannot be assumed. It must be given explicitly.
The problem with that argument is that it is totally false. There are innumerable instances where permission is assumed and because it's not given explicitly. Ever park in a parking lot? Use the bathroom at a mall? Browse around a garage sale? The law has quite a bit already regarding something called implied consent.
I think your instincts can tell you in any given situation whether the owners are likely to want you to use their stuff (be it a bathroom or a WLAN).
The law doesn't recognize "instincts", but it does reference the actions of Reasonable and Prudent people. Yes, a reasonable and prudent person will be able to discern whether consent is or is not implied at either end of the spectrum, but what we're really talking about here is the grey area in the middle. I'm sitting in Denny's and my 802.11b card goes green. There's a starbuck's across the street, a bagel shop next to it, and apartments past that. Where's the WAP? Dunno. It's not protected, so maybe it's a free service from Denny's. Or Starbuck's. Or some dude in his apartment. The point is, requiring explicit permission for WAP access is as untenable as requiring permission to use a shopping mall. If the door is open and people are inside, is it open to the public? If you want to keep people out, you have to excercise a little responsibility.
Many companies have protection from such theft of service.
Actually, "theft of service" is a complete non-sequiter. Theft is the taking of real property, while a service is useful labor that does not produce a tangible commodity. One cannot steal that which does not physically exist. In this case, one might access servies without permission, but then that brings up the issue of implied consent. If they charged "unauthorized access", then Nokia et.al would have to explain why a node essentially broadcasting a message of "all are welcome" isn't implied consent. Better to simply label it "theft", because the law regarding theft doesn't consider implied consent except under very strange conditions. This may seem like a minor distinction, but it's very important. Calling it "theft" is an attempt to frame the transgressors as worse than they really are. It's like calling someone who runs over a cat a murderer.
And that also happens to be slightly similar to saying it only took you 5 minutes to check IMDB.com and write this post. The reality is it took you a lifetime of strenuous social engineering for us to enjoy that incredibly insightful piece of information. Of course, by 'social engineering' I mean 'you're a huge geek'.
Hah. it only took me 10 seconds to find out how long ESB is, and I didn't use IMDB.com. Everybody knows that a Real Geek need only grab the tape/DVD from the stack next to his computer to find out. I am indeed a Huge Geek.
Dunno what the decision said, but Schlage is a subsidiary of Ingersoll-Rand. Robert Steinman was "installed" as president when I-R bought the company, and he's essentially running it into the ground. Ever since then Schlage has discontinued many of their locks which were well designed and replaced them with locks full of plastic parts. I guess they're trying to compete with Kwikset, which has always made low-quality locks. Oh well. We live in a Home Depot world now, where price is more important than quality. Kind of a shame. I've seen old-style Schlage locks that are still working fine after 40 years. The new crap they're turning out, I've seen 'em break in under a year.
if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Sorry. That line was an unrelated tangent to my original point. I have to deal with numerous smug liberal academics at work/school who think that way and don't realize they're essentially being apologists for the people they're deriding by saying their actions are the result of stupidity rather than malefaction. Bugs me sometimes.
A not so bright son of a powerful ex president/spymaster disagrees with the educated opinions of a consensus of experts on various subjects. And you think 'maybe Bush is right because he's so gosh darn folksy!'
Oh, I don't think he's right; I just don't think he's stupid. He may go against the opinions of experts, but not because he's dumb. Follow the money and I'm sure you'll find "Interested Parties" whose coffers stand to be enriched in one way or another by the actions of the executive branch. Does it seem more likely that the president has specific intentions, or that he's a chimp throwing darts at the stock pages? He may cultivate the down-home reg'lar guy theme not just as good middle-america PR, but perhaps also to cause his opponents to underestimate him. I say writing him off as a chimp, though reassuring to smug liberal types, isn't a very wise choice.
When it comes to the huge bureaucratic monstrosity that is the US Government, I don't see any way of making it better; that is, none other than disbanding it entirely. I have the same beef with Socialism that I have with all top-down rule-from-on-high systems-- which accurately describes 99.9% of the world's current governments, including the Representative Republic here in the U.S. of A. My ideal government is one in which the majority of the decisions are made at the local level. The problem with Socialism is that it (like all large, coercive controlling bodies) forces society apart and breeds antagonism. Example: I'm doing well, but the gov't is taking 50% of my pay for "social programs". Persons down on their luck who need help may be getting this money, but I get no satisfaction from it because I have no personal involvement. All I see is a sour-faced IRS agent demanding money. All the recipient sees is a disinterested government worker. He feels no gratitude, because the bureaucracy isn't going out of its way to help him-- if he fell sick and didn't come in for his check the bureaucracy sure as hell isn't going to knock on his door to see if he's ok. Additionally, when a huge government attacks poverty it has no flexibility. Large numbers of needy people will get little or nothing, while others who shouldn't be eligible collect. The bigger the bureaucracy, the less personal attention.
Ideally, we'd have a society where the government isn't in the business of charity. Ideally, if one of our neighbors is starving, we'd all help him/her out. Instead of some faceless machine spitting out Social Security checks to old people who don't have anyone to talk to be telemarketers, we'd have (as stupid and Hippy-Commune as it sounds) a community where people help each other. It's the old saying: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", but with the caveat added: "voluntarily". As soon as the coercion of a large central authority is thrown in, it becomes just another lousy dictatorship like the old Soviet Union. What it comes down to for me is, large government cannot be "made nice"; not through socialism or anything else. Large government, in the end, turns into a thug putting a gun to your head and saying "give me that which is yours, because only I can really help people."
Well, you think critcizing the President is moronic, I think the President IS moronic.
Hey man, the worst thing you can do is underestimate the man because you disagree with him. He's not stupid. He may sound goofy at times, but that's mostly just schtick . People like his "down-home folksyness" and he's working that angle hard. I don't care for him either, but I'm not willing to simply write him off as a moron. You sound like all these academics I know: if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load. Perhaps CPUs of the future will be used for nothing but scheduling and coordination.
It seems like such things go in cycles. Originally, mainframes would do serial comms by twiddling outputs with CPU instructions directly. Then someone sez "hey, it's now possible to build a little buffer circuit that does it for me". Then later, as CPU's got faster, the wealth of extra clock cycles were put to use tiddling serial bits again because it was faster than the homebrew serial buffer. Repeat until you reach today, where the UART chips are fast enough and cheap enough that we'll not see direct serial manipulation by the CPU again. Right now it seems we've reached that point with video. The CPU can't even come close to what the vid card chipsets are doing, so that task is currently in an "offloaded" cycle. But who know what the future might hold? They may come up with something new that has so many clock cycles to burn that it can run circles around a GF4. Not likely, but also not impossible. Basically, it appears that functions go off-CPU permanently when the peripheral hardware that performs said functions becomes cheap and plentiful.
Well if they don't want them returned, wtf is the point of glueing the player shut?
Like most low-cost security solutions, it's to keep honest people honest. Serves the same purpose as a cheap bike lock. No serious [MusicWarezD00d/BikeThief] is bothered by [Glue/a$2Padlock]. It just keeps those with no expertise in such things as [CDplayerBreaking/WireCutters] from doing Bad Things.
I would note that despite your obfuscation, two things remain:
Obfuscation? I'm sorry, I thought I was providing a multitude of plausible counter-scenarios to counter your solitary example scenario. Perhaps you think it obfuscation to illustrate that the extreme case shouldn't be the basis for argument.
The first is that you know that these people don't want you using their networks. All this rhetoric about how someday wireless networks will be universal doesn't conceal the fact that you know that you are intruding upon them.
No, I don't necessarily know if I'm intruding on a private network. Sure, you can whip up a dozen scenarios where it would be clear that I was, but I can concoct an equal number of hypotheticals where the opposite is true. I'm not arguing a specific scenario where I can suddenly access the entire C: drive Bob's new Dell machine full of pr0n; I'm arguing that there are too many possible cases IN GENERAL where it'd not be clear whether a WiFi node is intended for common consumption and therefore a blanket denunciation of anyone utilizing such is irrational.
The second is that, when you strip away all the redundancies, what you have said is this: it's their fault that they haven't kept me out. And that is the age-old self-rationalization of the thief.
Cripes, man, that may be a rationalization of a thief, but it is also the basis of quite a bit of law! Ever heard of an easement? I can legally keep you from fencing your yard if I've been using it as a shortcut long enough and you haven't done anything to stop me (fence, signs). The point is, I'm not going to intrude on a network that's obviously not meant for public use, but in cases not so obvious the best person to control access is the provider. Not some blanket moratorium without written consent, etc. Do you have to get written consent from a store before using it's parking lot? Again, the law is fairly clear about this already. The extreme case you argue is irrelevant because it is extreme enough where a reasonable and prudent person would say "hey, this isn't a public node; this is Bob's network and I can see all his pr0n". The type of case that's relevant is one such as: "You're sitting outside a Starbuck's in Santa Clara and your 802.11b card comes up green; you have internet access and nothing else; is it reasonable and prudent to assume it's a public node?" Maybe it's from Starbuck's. Maybe it's from the bagel shop across the street. Maybe it's from Bob's 802.11b hub in the apartment above the bagel shop. Should Bob be allowed to have you arrested/fined for "hacking" if it was Bob's node? Or should Bob turn his damn encryption on? Think, man!
Yeah, right. I'm driving past a building and I happen to see that I can, for a few feet, access BOBS_NETWORK. Doubtless that means that Bob is delighted to let any passerby use the access which he has paid for.
"Bob was surprised to notice that passers-by were using the sidewalk-adjacent drinking fountain he installed which was intended for his own personal use while mowing the lawn." Though one could probably guess that Bob didn't mean to share his internet, as more and more people do set up open nodes this inference will become less concrete. The problem is that Bob needs to understand how to set up his system properly (or maybe put up a sign that says "WiFi not for public use"). If Bob finds his water bill goes through the roof because joggers are stopping by in the early a.m. to use his drinking fountain, he needs to take steps to make it clear that it's not a public drinking fountain. Like a lock (encryption).
By your analogy, if he left his door unlocked I could come in and make a couple calls on his home phone
No, because by entering his home without permission you are breaking the analogy. Inside the house is private property, requiring the commission of trespass in order to use the phone. The drinking fountain at the sidewalk has attached to it implied consent for public use. As more free WiFi nodes appear, consent will be implied as well. The proper phone analogy would be if one installed a phone extension in a phone booth facing the sidewalk where anyone walking by could pick up the handset and dial. Implied consent once again. If you called the cops on someone using your sidewalk phone they'd say "idiot. lock it up or take it out if you don't want people using it."
and a reasonable and prudent person wouldn't think that one could get unauthorized access to another person's network.
Again, we are fast approaching the point where a reasonable and prudent person would conclude that an open node in a public place is OK to use.
The point is, Bob paid for his Internet access, and it's his. It isn't yours. And it's his to decide who gets to use it, even if it wouldn't cost him any more to let you use it also.
The duty of allowing/disallowing access to WiFi nodes falls upon the owner of that node. It doesn't take a genius to turn encryption on, and (again) the fact that it's not on could be construed as permission to use the node. The controlling factor shouldn't be an arbitrary, absolute law; it should be people taking reasonable steps to secure otherwise publicly accessable resources. What it comes down to is, the onus of protecting a resource from public consumption is on the one paying for said resource. If it's that important SECURE IT!.
I can see here the age-old argument that the clever have the natural right to steal from the foolish.
No, what you see here is the argument that the foolish have no right to complain when they fail to take reasonable and prudent precautions to prevent public use of private facilities. The law is full of analagous precedent. If you have an unfenced, unlocked, abandoned house and some kids walk in and one of them hurts themselves while playing therein, not only will you find it nearly impossible to have them convicted of trespass, but you will find yourself defending against a charge of maintaining an attractive nuisance. The concepts here aren't all that new, only the technology is.
In my opinion, resources that are on public property are free by implied consent.
Your opinion is silly. Can I have your car next time you park on a street?
Pull your head out, please. Like all those idiots who say "copying a music CD is theft/stealing", you are comparing real property e.g. my car, with services. Services may or may not cost someone money based on quantity used. WiFi accesss on public property could be compared to putting a drinking fountain next to the sidewalk. Water is a metered utility, but cheap enough for a drinking fountain to not incur any significant cost; likewise, 'net access is cheap in that it's usually either flat-rate or metered only above a certain cap. If you don't lock up your sidewalk-adjacent drinking fountain, people will use it and you'd have a hard time getting the authorities to do anything about it. If you don't want the public using your sidewalk-accessable drinking fountain (wireless network), lock it up (encrypt it) and only give keys to those whom you wish to use it. If you pay a lot of money on a metered basis for your Internet access, then you're a fool to leave it open for anyone to use (see sidewalk drinking fountain analogy).
Point is, one can pontificate about absolute morality (picking a dime up off the sidewalk is theft!), or take the Common Law/rational approach to such things (would a reasonable and prudent person assume that a drinking fountain by the sidewalk is for public use?). Free WiFi 'net access is common enough that if a reasonable and prudent person with an 802.11b equipped laptop found himself able to access his webmail at Denny's, he'd assume it was intended for public use. To argue that one should seek specific permission first renders unusable such publicly-available things as parking lots and sidewalks.
Subject: Re: your Bible order
Body: (an HTML porn email...)
Hmmm...that might not be deceptive if they were trying to sell you an abridged version of the Old Testament (only the smutty parts) illustrated with full-color photo speads by re-enactors.
IMHO this is a pretty poor application for an unwanted notebook. They're great for a email machine or something to surf channel listings in the TV room, though.
Jeezly crow, man, come join the rest of us in the 21st century! I'm a 30 year old dirt-poor undergrad student and even I have a half-dozen laptops WAY better than that gathering dust under my desk. Heck, I have a P166 Dell laptop for email and TVguide on the sofa, and that's almost too lame for my tastes.
"It'd at least make a good machine to do [simple task]". I hear people say that kind of stuff all the time, but they're usually wrong. A "good machine to do [whatever]" is best defined as the best machine at the bottom of the price curve. Those powerbooks aren't all that great for $100 when one can get a decent IBM Thinkpad with a MUCH better screen for around the same price. At some point older equipment must enter the "crap zone". That is, the machine must one day be too weak to be usefull, but not old enough to be "classic" or "nostalgic". A Duo 280c at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, no PCMCIA (thus no 802.11b, friend), and no SCSI is definitely in the Crap Zone.
Didn't the patent office used to require that you submit a working model, or at least blueprints for a working model, along with the patent application? What happened to that??
Well, since they've started allowing patents on bizarre crap like "business models", the blueprint requirement has become a bit weak. How does one draw a diagram of the operation of a business model? I'd like to see the "blueprints" for Amazon's One-Click patent.
No, apparently all one needs to do is come up with a detailed, yet at the same time vague, description of what you claim is a Novel Concept. My cell phone patent should probably be "Method of Improving Cell Phone Service Through Cooperative Client Relay" followed by page after page after page of increasingly immaterial detail that, in the end, says "the call jumps from one cell phone to another until it can reach a tower". Then the first time Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. implements it, POW! Welcome to my party! Cover charge is $10 million at the door!
This is, of course the basic design of the ChaosNet that was in use at MIT during the 80's (and is still in use by some MIT hackers).
Yeah, that's clearly a case of Prior Art, but the way the patent office works, one need only specify that one's scheme is specifically for "cell phones" to get a narrow patent, even though that isn't really significantly different from any other radio-based system. Plus, by saying "cell phones" one paints a big red bullseye on the ass of any of the big wireless providers who implement your patented method. WooHoo! Deep Pockets!
you're wrong.. it was Cyris that started the PR Rating but AMD joined
Dear obstinant fool: if that be the case, then where pray tell to I find the PR rating on this AMD K6-2 processor from 1998 I currently hold in my hand? There isn't one you obtuse buffoon! In the days of the Pentium-clone processors, only Cyrix used the "Pentium equivalent" Rating. AMD marked their CPUs based on the clock speed. The CPU I have here says: "AMD-K6-2/366AFR". Its clock speed is 366mHz. No PR rating. Just clock speed. Since you seem to be so sure that AMD used the PR rating, please produce for me the markings for just such a CPU. Surely you can find a simple string of characters like that, yes? ignoramus.
I knew one freak in college who took a lighter to one of those plexiglass front candy machines in the dorm. He burnt a hole all the way through the front, then used a straightened out coat hanger to rake all the goodies into the door area at the bottom.
hmmmm.....I may have to try that. I think that if I too the coat hanger and heated the end red-hot with my mini propane torch I could push it through the plexiglass right near the edge so no one would notice. Then I could carefully steal only what I wanted, when I wanted it and conceivably do this for quite some time. Interesting idea.
I have a new idea for a business model:
Come up with a really generic idea, wait, say, ten years for another company to come up with the same idea and become successful and then sue them!
If you put a little thought into it, one could come up with a whole raft of "speculative patents" and conceivably make a killing in the future. All it takes is a little thought.
1. come up with an idea for a money-making business that is currently impossible due to technological limitations.
2. patent the impossible notion
3. wait for:
(a)technology to make it possible
(b)someone to start a business using some variation on your idea
(c)them to start making money
4. sue the bejeezus out of them for "stealing" your business model
of course, the REAL trick to this is coming up with a business idea that can't be done yet, but WILL be possible before the patent expires. Here's one off the top of my head:
"method of extending cellular communications" - a cell phone not in range of a cell tower instead merely connects to the nearest other cell phone which is in range and uses it as a relay for the call. I'm sure this idea has been thought of, but has it been patented yet? Could one write up a vague patent spec that would cover any future implementation of the concept? maybe...
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
Not to be disrespectful, but this argument is crap. Every unrepentent communist I know (and I know many) blames the failure of the USSR on (as you put it) "the U.S. trying to kick them in the eye". Tell me then, what exactly did the U.S. do that thwarted these otherwise effective plans towards utopia? The USSR was the largest country on earth, with the largest reserves of natural resources (oil, iron) some of the greatest farm land (Ukraine), yet the US had to sell them grain in their later years because they couldn't grow enough food, and what food they did produce frequently rotted in transit because they couldn't keep the railroads running. Was it the US going in and poisoning the grain fields? Did the US spike the tracks to make the trains derail? No, the problem with the USSR is that it was an evil dictatorship. For all the great idealism of Lenin, Trotsky, et.al, the country was essentially led by a coercive government which said "our way, or be buried by the highway". The notion of an "enlightened vanguard" leading the uneducated masses was the first step away from true communism and towards the evils of Stalin and his successors.
The reason the USSR failed wasn't because it wasn't "given a fair chance"; it was because the very idea that communism can be anything but totally voluntary leads eventually to dictatorship because, once you've pointed a gun at one person's head and said "you work for the good of all", all pretense of egalitarianism is right out the window. The truth is, real, honest to goodness communism must be totally voluntary, and that will never happen in groups larger than a community (hmmm....notice the similarity of the word?). Attempting to legislate an egalitarian society from On High is the worst sort of non-sequiter. In this way socialism is only a little better than soviet-style communism in that it simply doesn't pretend that those making the rules are "the same as everyone else". I would sooner choose the capitalist system which allows for individuals to cooperate with one another voluntarily than I would choose an enforced slavery to a mythical "common good" which often turns out to be "the good of the Party Leadership" (as it was in the USSR).
Real Communism(tm) can only happen in a truly free environment, which is something the ivory-tower academic communists you find in student unions everywhere will never be able to accept because it requires them to accept that the "uneducated" must be allowed to choose for themselves.
Dude, I think he was jst using an extreme case to illustrate a point, that point being "we DO have the right to choose which laws we obey". The moral difference between reverse engineering copy protection and opposing slavery isn't relevant to the point; whether or not we have the moral obligation to oppose bad law is.
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Okay, this is all well and good, but what would you say if I tapped into the telephone box outside my home to get "free" service? I suppose you might say that it doesn't say "all are welcome" on it, especially if it is locked. But what if a technician left it unlocked and I decided to use this opportunity to make long-distance calls to Taiwan? Does the act of leaving the box unlocked constitute implied consent?
No. For one thing, all the equipment and is plastered with "Property of [GTE|???-Bell|etc]". This, combined with the fact that we already have public phones and any reasonable and prudent person knows they aren't inside that green monument box by the road, and don't require a can wrench and buttset to use. The problem with WAPs is that they use radio, and it has been fairly firmly established that radio signals in public places are free for public consumption. Any exception to this is specifically legislated (such as the Cell band freqs).
Similarly, does an admin who doesn't know how to lock down their wireless network mean that his employer implied consent for the public to use the exposed bandwidth indiscriminately?
Frankly, yes. If you install a drinking fountain by the sidewalk, do you have any room to complain that passers-by are using it? How hard will the authorities laugh when you show up at the Police station with photos of people using your drinking fountain, demanding that they be tracked down and arrested for unauthorized accessing of water? The point is, the law is clear in a myriad of ways that if you place something in a public place, it is up to you to keep the public from using it (via locks, encryption, etc) if that's what you want.
In the end, if you steal a service from an individual or a company, somebody will pay the cost. Just because you aren't taking something from them does not mean that they aren't paying the price in the end.
This is entirely beside the point. Despite the fact that it costs money, there are indeed some people who give it away, either as promotional gimmickry or just because. Stating that it's not free for the provider says nothing about the provider's intent.
That's true. And, as someone else already pointed out: permission cannot be assumed. It must be given explicitly.
The problem with that argument is that it is totally false. There are innumerable instances where permission is assumed and because it's not given explicitly. Ever park in a parking lot? Use the bathroom at a mall? Browse around a garage sale? The law has quite a bit already regarding something called implied consent.
I think your instincts can tell you in any given situation whether the owners are likely to want you to use their stuff (be it a bathroom or a WLAN).
The law doesn't recognize "instincts", but it does reference the actions of Reasonable and Prudent people. Yes, a reasonable and prudent person will be able to discern whether consent is or is not implied at either end of the spectrum, but what we're really talking about here is the grey area in the middle. I'm sitting in Denny's and my 802.11b card goes green. There's a starbuck's across the street, a bagel shop next to it, and apartments past that. Where's the WAP? Dunno. It's not protected, so maybe it's a free service from Denny's. Or Starbuck's. Or some dude in his apartment. The point is, requiring explicit permission for WAP access is as untenable as requiring permission to use a shopping mall. If the door is open and people are inside, is it open to the public? If you want to keep people out, you have to excercise a little responsibility.
.
Many companies have protection from such theft of service.
Actually, "theft of service" is a complete non-sequiter. Theft is the taking of real property, while a service is useful labor that does not produce a tangible commodity. One cannot steal that which does not physically exist. In this case, one might access servies without permission, but then that brings up the issue of implied consent. If they charged "unauthorized access", then Nokia et.al would have to explain why a node essentially broadcasting a message of "all are welcome" isn't implied consent. Better to simply label it "theft", because the law regarding theft doesn't consider implied consent except under very strange conditions. This may seem like a minor distinction, but it's very important. Calling it "theft" is an attempt to frame the transgressors as worse than they really are. It's like calling someone who runs over a cat a murderer.
And that also happens to be slightly similar to saying it only took you 5 minutes to check IMDB.com and write this post. The reality is it took you a lifetime of strenuous social engineering for us to enjoy that incredibly insightful piece of information. Of course, by 'social engineering' I mean 'you're a huge geek'.
Hah. it only took me 10 seconds to find out how long ESB is, and I didn't use IMDB.com. Everybody knows that a Real Geek need only grab the tape/DVD from the stack next to his computer to find out. I am indeed a Huge Geek.
Yeah, saying a concert is only 3 hours work is a stupid as saying The Empire Strikes Back was only 2hours, 8 minutes of work.
Dunno what the decision said, but Schlage is a subsidiary of Ingersoll-Rand. Robert Steinman was "installed" as president when I-R bought the company, and he's essentially running it into the ground. Ever since then Schlage has discontinued many of their locks which were well designed and replaced them with locks full of plastic parts. I guess they're trying to compete with Kwikset, which has always made low-quality locks. Oh well. We live in a Home Depot world now, where price is more important than quality. Kind of a shame. I've seen old-style Schlage locks that are still working fine after 40 years. The new crap they're turning out, I've seen 'em break in under a year.
if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Sorry. That line was an unrelated tangent to my original point. I have to deal with numerous smug liberal academics at work/school who think that way and don't realize they're essentially being apologists for the people they're deriding by saying their actions are the result of stupidity rather than malefaction. Bugs me sometimes.
A not so bright son of a powerful ex president/spymaster disagrees with the educated opinions of a consensus of experts on various subjects. And you think 'maybe Bush is right because he's so gosh darn folksy!'
Oh, I don't think he's right; I just don't think he's stupid. He may go against the opinions of experts, but not because he's dumb. Follow the money and I'm sure you'll find "Interested Parties" whose coffers stand to be enriched in one way or another by the actions of the executive branch. Does it seem more likely that the president has specific intentions, or that he's a chimp throwing darts at the stock pages? He may cultivate the down-home reg'lar guy theme not just as good middle-america PR, but perhaps also to cause his opponents to underestimate him. I say writing him off as a chimp, though reassuring to smug liberal types, isn't a very wise choice.
Do you have a better idea?
When it comes to the huge bureaucratic monstrosity that is the US Government, I don't see any way of making it better; that is, none other than disbanding it entirely. I have the same beef with Socialism that I have with all top-down rule-from-on-high systems-- which accurately describes 99.9% of the world's current governments, including the Representative Republic here in the U.S. of A. My ideal government is one in which the majority of the decisions are made at the local level. The problem with Socialism is that it (like all large, coercive controlling bodies) forces society apart and breeds antagonism. Example: I'm doing well, but the gov't is taking 50% of my pay for "social programs". Persons down on their luck who need help may be getting this money, but I get no satisfaction from it because I have no personal involvement. All I see is a sour-faced IRS agent demanding money. All the recipient sees is a disinterested government worker. He feels no gratitude, because the bureaucracy isn't going out of its way to help him-- if he fell sick and didn't come in for his check the bureaucracy sure as hell isn't going to knock on his door to see if he's ok. Additionally, when a huge government attacks poverty it has no flexibility. Large numbers of needy people will get little or nothing, while others who shouldn't be eligible collect. The bigger the bureaucracy, the less personal attention.
Ideally, we'd have a society where the government isn't in the business of charity. Ideally, if one of our neighbors is starving, we'd all help him/her out. Instead of some faceless machine spitting out Social Security checks to old people who don't have anyone to talk to be telemarketers, we'd have (as stupid and Hippy-Commune as it sounds) a community where people help each other. It's the old saying: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", but with the caveat added: "voluntarily". As soon as the coercion of a large central authority is thrown in, it becomes just another lousy dictatorship like the old Soviet Union. What it comes down to for me is, large government cannot be "made nice"; not through socialism or anything else. Large government, in the end, turns into a thug putting a gun to your head and saying "give me that which is yours, because only I can really help people."
Cripes, not the Socialist/Marxist/Collectivist pep-talk again...
Well, you think critcizing the President is moronic, I think the President IS moronic.
Hey man, the worst thing you can do is underestimate the man because you disagree with him. He's not stupid. He may sound goofy at times, but that's mostly just schtick . People like his "down-home folksyness" and he's working that angle hard. I don't care for him either, but I'm not willing to simply write him off as a moron. You sound like all these academics I know: if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load. Perhaps CPUs of the future will be used for nothing but scheduling and coordination.
It seems like such things go in cycles. Originally, mainframes would do serial comms by twiddling outputs with CPU instructions directly. Then someone sez "hey, it's now possible to build a little buffer circuit that does it for me". Then later, as CPU's got faster, the wealth of extra clock cycles were put to use tiddling serial bits again because it was faster than the homebrew serial buffer. Repeat until you reach today, where the UART chips are fast enough and cheap enough that we'll not see direct serial manipulation by the CPU again. Right now it seems we've reached that point with video. The CPU can't even come close to what the vid card chipsets are doing, so that task is currently in an "offloaded" cycle. But who know what the future might hold? They may come up with something new that has so many clock cycles to burn that it can run circles around a GF4. Not likely, but also not impossible. Basically, it appears that functions go off-CPU permanently when the peripheral hardware that performs said functions becomes cheap and plentiful.
Well if they don't want them returned, wtf is the point of glueing the player shut?
Like most low-cost security solutions, it's to keep honest people honest. Serves the same purpose as a cheap bike lock. No serious [MusicWarezD00d/BikeThief] is bothered by [Glue/a$2Padlock]. It just keeps those with no expertise in such things as [CDplayerBreaking/WireCutters] from doing Bad Things.
I would note that despite your obfuscation, two things remain:
Obfuscation? I'm sorry, I thought I was providing a multitude of plausible counter-scenarios to counter your solitary example scenario. Perhaps you think it obfuscation to illustrate that the extreme case shouldn't be the basis for argument.
The first is that you know that these people don't want you using their networks. All this rhetoric about how someday wireless networks will be universal doesn't conceal the fact that you know that you are intruding upon them.
No, I don't necessarily know if I'm intruding on a private network. Sure, you can whip up a dozen scenarios where it would be clear that I was, but I can concoct an equal number of hypotheticals where the opposite is true. I'm not arguing a specific scenario where I can suddenly access the entire C: drive Bob's new Dell machine full of pr0n; I'm arguing that there are too many possible cases IN GENERAL where it'd not be clear whether a WiFi node is intended for common consumption and therefore a blanket denunciation of anyone utilizing such is irrational.
The second is that, when you strip away all the redundancies, what you have said is this: it's their fault that they haven't kept me out. And that is the age-old self-rationalization of the thief.
Cripes, man, that may be a rationalization of a thief, but it is also the basis of quite a bit of law! Ever heard of an easement? I can legally keep you from fencing your yard if I've been using it as a shortcut long enough and you haven't done anything to stop me (fence, signs). The point is, I'm not going to intrude on a network that's obviously not meant for public use, but in cases not so obvious the best person to control access is the provider. Not some blanket moratorium without written consent, etc. Do you have to get written consent from a store before using it's parking lot? Again, the law is fairly clear about this already. The extreme case you argue is irrelevant because it is extreme enough where a reasonable and prudent person would say "hey, this isn't a public node; this is Bob's network and I can see all his pr0n". The type of case that's relevant is one such as: "You're sitting outside a Starbuck's in Santa Clara and your 802.11b card comes up green; you have internet access and nothing else; is it reasonable and prudent to assume it's a public node?" Maybe it's from Starbuck's. Maybe it's from the bagel shop across the street. Maybe it's from Bob's 802.11b hub in the apartment above the bagel shop. Should Bob be allowed to have you arrested/fined for "hacking" if it was Bob's node? Or should Bob turn his damn encryption on? Think, man!
Yeah, right. I'm driving past a building and I happen to see that I can, for a few feet, access BOBS_NETWORK. Doubtless that means that Bob is delighted to let any passerby use the access which he has paid for.
"Bob was surprised to notice that passers-by were using the sidewalk-adjacent drinking fountain he installed which was intended for his own personal use while mowing the lawn." Though one could probably guess that Bob didn't mean to share his internet, as more and more people do set up open nodes this inference will become less concrete. The problem is that Bob needs to understand how to set up his system properly (or maybe put up a sign that says "WiFi not for public use"). If Bob finds his water bill goes through the roof because joggers are stopping by in the early a.m. to use his drinking fountain, he needs to take steps to make it clear that it's not a public drinking fountain. Like a lock (encryption).
By your analogy, if he left his door unlocked I could come in and make a couple calls on his home phone
No, because by entering his home without permission you are breaking the analogy. Inside the house is private property, requiring the commission of trespass in order to use the phone. The drinking fountain at the sidewalk has attached to it implied consent for public use. As more free WiFi nodes appear, consent will be implied as well. The proper phone analogy would be if one installed a phone extension in a phone booth facing the sidewalk where anyone walking by could pick up the handset and dial. Implied consent once again. If you called the cops on someone using your sidewalk phone they'd say "idiot. lock it up or take it out if you don't want people using it."
and a reasonable and prudent person wouldn't think that one could get unauthorized access to another person's network.
Again, we are fast approaching the point where a reasonable and prudent person would conclude that an open node in a public place is OK to use.
The point is, Bob paid for his Internet access, and it's his. It isn't yours. And it's his to decide who gets to use it, even if it wouldn't cost him any more to let you use it also.
The duty of allowing/disallowing access to WiFi nodes falls upon the owner of that node. It doesn't take a genius to turn encryption on, and (again) the fact that it's not on could be construed as permission to use the node. The controlling factor shouldn't be an arbitrary, absolute law; it should be people taking reasonable steps to secure otherwise publicly accessable resources. What it comes down to is, the onus of protecting a resource from public consumption is on the one paying for said resource. If it's that important SECURE IT!.
I can see here the age-old argument that the clever have the natural right to steal from the foolish.
No, what you see here is the argument that the foolish have no right to complain when they fail to take reasonable and prudent precautions to prevent public use of private facilities. The law is full of analagous precedent. If you have an unfenced, unlocked, abandoned house and some kids walk in and one of them hurts themselves while playing therein, not only will you find it nearly impossible to have them convicted of trespass, but you will find yourself defending against a charge of maintaining an attractive nuisance. The concepts here aren't all that new, only the technology is.
In my opinion, resources that are on public property are free by implied consent. Your opinion is silly. Can I have your car next time you park on a street?
Pull your head out, please. Like all those idiots who say "copying a music CD is theft/stealing", you are comparing real property e.g. my car, with services. Services may or may not cost someone money based on quantity used. WiFi accesss on public property could be compared to putting a drinking fountain next to the sidewalk. Water is a metered utility, but cheap enough for a drinking fountain to not incur any significant cost; likewise, 'net access is cheap in that it's usually either flat-rate or metered only above a certain cap. If you don't lock up your sidewalk-adjacent drinking fountain, people will use it and you'd have a hard time getting the authorities to do anything about it. If you don't want the public using your sidewalk-accessable drinking fountain (wireless network), lock it up (encrypt it) and only give keys to those whom you wish to use it. If you pay a lot of money on a metered basis for your Internet access, then you're a fool to leave it open for anyone to use (see sidewalk drinking fountain analogy).
Point is, one can pontificate about absolute morality (picking a dime up off the sidewalk is theft!), or take the Common Law/rational approach to such things (would a reasonable and prudent person assume that a drinking fountain by the sidewalk is for public use?). Free WiFi 'net access is common enough that if a reasonable and prudent person with an 802.11b equipped laptop found himself able to access his webmail at Denny's, he'd assume it was intended for public use. To argue that one should seek specific permission first renders unusable such publicly-available things as parking lots and sidewalks.
Subject: Re: your Bible order Body: (an HTML porn email ...)
Hmmm...that might not be deceptive if they were trying to sell you an abridged version of the Old Testament (only the smutty parts) illustrated with full-color photo speads by re-enactors.
He's referring to the /. blurb which incorrectly stated "200MHz bus"
IMHO this is a pretty poor application for an unwanted notebook. They're great for a email machine or something to surf channel listings in the TV room, though.
Jeezly crow, man, come join the rest of us in the 21st century! I'm a 30 year old dirt-poor undergrad student and even I have a half-dozen laptops WAY better than that gathering dust under my desk. Heck, I have a P166 Dell laptop for email and TVguide on the sofa, and that's almost too lame for my tastes.
"It'd at least make a good machine to do [simple task]". I hear people say that kind of stuff all the time, but they're usually wrong. A "good machine to do [whatever]" is best defined as the best machine at the bottom of the price curve. Those powerbooks aren't all that great for $100 when one can get a decent IBM Thinkpad with a MUCH better screen for around the same price. At some point older equipment must enter the "crap zone". That is, the machine must one day be too weak to be usefull, but not old enough to be "classic" or "nostalgic". A Duo 280c at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, no PCMCIA (thus no 802.11b, friend), and no SCSI is definitely in the Crap Zone.
Didn't the patent office used to require that you submit a working model, or at least blueprints for a working model, along with the patent application? What happened to that??
Well, since they've started allowing patents on bizarre crap like "business models", the blueprint requirement has become a bit weak. How does one draw a diagram of the operation of a business model? I'd like to see the "blueprints" for Amazon's One-Click patent.
No, apparently all one needs to do is come up with a detailed, yet at the same time vague, description of what you claim is a Novel Concept. My cell phone patent should probably be "Method of Improving Cell Phone Service Through Cooperative Client Relay" followed by page after page after page of increasingly immaterial detail that, in the end, says "the call jumps from one cell phone to another until it can reach a tower". Then the first time Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. implements it, POW! Welcome to my party! Cover charge is $10 million at the door!
This is, of course the basic design of the ChaosNet that was in use at MIT during the 80's (and is still in use by some MIT hackers).
Yeah, that's clearly a case of Prior Art, but the way the patent office works, one need only specify that one's scheme is specifically for "cell phones" to get a narrow patent, even though that isn't really significantly different from any other radio-based system. Plus, by saying "cell phones" one paints a big red bullseye on the ass of any of the big wireless providers who implement your patented method. WooHoo! Deep Pockets!
you're wrong.. it was Cyris that started the PR Rating but AMD joined
Dear obstinant fool: if that be the case, then where pray tell to I find the PR rating on this AMD K6-2 processor from 1998 I currently hold in my hand? There isn't one you obtuse buffoon! In the days of the Pentium-clone processors, only Cyrix used the "Pentium equivalent" Rating. AMD marked their CPUs based on the clock speed. The CPU I have here says: "AMD-K6-2/366AFR". Its clock speed is 366mHz. No PR rating. Just clock speed. Since you seem to be so sure that AMD used the PR rating, please produce for me the markings for just such a CPU. Surely you can find a simple string of characters like that, yes? ignoramus.
I knew one freak in college who took a lighter to one of those plexiglass front candy machines in the dorm. He burnt a hole all the way through the front, then used a straightened out coat hanger to rake all the goodies into the door area at the bottom.
hmmmm.....I may have to try that. I think that if I too the coat hanger and heated the end red-hot with my mini propane torch I could push it through the plexiglass right near the edge so no one would notice. Then I could carefully steal only what I wanted, when I wanted it and conceivably do this for quite some time. Interesting idea.
If you put a little thought into it, one could come up with a whole raft of "speculative patents" and conceivably make a killing in the future. All it takes is a little thought.
- 1. come up with an idea for a money-making business that is currently impossible due to technological limitations.
of course, the REAL trick to this is coming up with a business idea that can't be done yet, but WILL be possible before the patent expires. Here's one off the top of my head:2. patent the impossible notion
3. wait for:
- (a)technology to make it possible
4. sue the bejeezus out of them for "stealing" your business model(b)someone to start a business using some variation on your idea
(c)them to start making money
"method of extending cellular communications" - a cell phone not in range of a cell tower instead merely connects to the nearest other cell phone which is in range and uses it as a relay for the call. I'm sure this idea has been thought of, but has it been patented yet? Could one write up a vague patent spec that would cover any future implementation of the concept? maybe...
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
Not to be disrespectful, but this argument is crap. Every unrepentent communist I know (and I know many) blames the failure of the USSR on (as you put it) "the U.S. trying to kick them in the eye". Tell me then, what exactly did the U.S. do that thwarted these otherwise effective plans towards utopia? The USSR was the largest country on earth, with the largest reserves of natural resources (oil, iron) some of the greatest farm land (Ukraine), yet the US had to sell them grain in their later years because they couldn't grow enough food, and what food they did produce frequently rotted in transit because they couldn't keep the railroads running. Was it the US going in and poisoning the grain fields? Did the US spike the tracks to make the trains derail? No, the problem with the USSR is that it was an evil dictatorship. For all the great idealism of Lenin, Trotsky, et.al, the country was essentially led by a coercive government which said "our way, or be buried by the highway". The notion of an "enlightened vanguard" leading the uneducated masses was the first step away from true communism and towards the evils of Stalin and his successors.
The reason the USSR failed wasn't because it wasn't "given a fair chance"; it was because the very idea that communism can be anything but totally voluntary leads eventually to dictatorship because, once you've pointed a gun at one person's head and said "you work for the good of all", all pretense of egalitarianism is right out the window. The truth is, real, honest to goodness communism must be totally voluntary, and that will never happen in groups larger than a community (hmmm....notice the similarity of the word?). Attempting to legislate an egalitarian society from On High is the worst sort of non-sequiter. In this way socialism is only a little better than soviet-style communism in that it simply doesn't pretend that those making the rules are "the same as everyone else". I would sooner choose the capitalist system which allows for individuals to cooperate with one another voluntarily than I would choose an enforced slavery to a mythical "common good" which often turns out to be "the good of the Party Leadership" (as it was in the USSR).
Real Communism(tm) can only happen in a truly free environment, which is something the ivory-tower academic communists you find in student unions everywhere will never be able to accept because it requires them to accept that the "uneducated" must be allowed to choose for themselves.
Dude, I think he was jst using an extreme case to illustrate a point, that point being "we DO have the right to choose which laws we obey". The moral difference between reverse engineering copy protection and opposing slavery isn't relevant to the point; whether or not we have the moral obligation to oppose bad law is.