If your children are considering doing drugs, they aren't going to be stopped by the legal risks. Nor are they going to be stopped by horror stories that are, even if real, one in a million. They need real, to them, reasons.
We know that lust is bad because Jesus says it is. But that's not what God says. God says that what comes out of the heart defiles us
Your circular reasoning is, um, a little... circular. Lust is bad because Jesus says it is. All you've got is a book written over a period of a few hundred years after his death, with quotes taken out of context and badly translated, and you're putting enough faith in it to think that make decisions about "lust" in every context.
Yes, it's really "black and white" of me to think that there is right and wrong when it comes to sex,
The black and white comes from you thinking that one line in a book that's over a thousand years old, not even written by the guy in question, has absolute answers that you can directly apply to life in a world that's completely different than the one this messiah of yours lived in.
Can you not see how you're extrapolating just a wee bit?
Ha ha! We've heard that one before. A billion Christians in the rest of the world aren't too worried, and neither am I.
Hey, I'm one of those Billion. On paper at least. As are five of my friends. All of us baptized or otherwise confirmed into a religion that we thought was nuts. My grandparents think I'm christian but I haven't been in a church except for a marriage or a rummage sale since I was four.
Have you ever wondered why the only religion people are those who grew up in a religious household? As if, perhaps, the only way you could come to such a belief was by being indoctrinated as a child. And thankfully our society is less accepting of this, we realize it for the abuse that it is and take steps to make sure children get a religion-free education when possible.
If the kid is going to do it, and I think you can usually tell, wouldn't it be better to teach them safe ways of doing it?
In my experience, kids who've had a beer or two at home from ~15 on, don't go crazy when they move away to university. Kids for whom it's a new experience though, and without any idea of what being drunk does to your judgement, are the ones who end up hooked, or screwing up and dropping out.
But yeah, the law says 21 is the age to drink (in your area) so it's child abuse. But the guy across the border when the age is 18 isn't abusing his kid by giving him a beer. That's just normal adult behaviour...
Bleh. You can't use the law as anything other than a guideline, and as such, you need to decide when you think hearing about drugs (including booze) and trying them are going to be the best for your child.
Besides, do you think you'll have any credibility with your child when you tell them that all drugs are terrible bad things and should be avoided, without explaining that some are worse than others and some are essentially harmless while some can kill you in a dose, and your kid sees his friends having a joint every now and then without any harm. They'll wonder if you were full of shit about heroin too...
If giving a child a cigarette when they ask, and doing it in such a way as to ensure they don't start smoking, is a crime, well I don't want to be law-abiding.
If you let a law get in the way of doing what's right for your kids, you're the monster.
Have you ever tried pot and decided that you don't like it as much as booze, or are you just accepting that beer is good clean fun but pot is a damn dirty drug and thus morally and socially wrong?
Both intoxicate you, in fact the beer more, so it can't be that you want to remain clear-headed.
It's misinformation like yours that's going to be the most damaging. LSD does not make you psychotic, from one dose or many. In fact, because of how LSD works, you can't even overdose on it.
If you kids ask about Marijuana you need to give them honest info, as in, it's less disabling than alcohol, carries less risk (you don't die of THC poisoning for smoking any ammount I've ever heard of), doesn't make you violent, and doesn't produce a hangover. The risks are mainly the psychological addiction (as in, if you do nothing else, you'll end up being a bum who's always stoned) and the legality. But I know people who end up mostly the same way on Playstation games.
If you can put them off by saying it's an adult decision, as in when your kids ask about sex, then go for it. But at the age that you think they'll either learn from you or from their peers, I suggest you teach them yourself. If they feel free to ask but never do, it could just be that you don't have a kid who's even going to be into drinking or smoking.
What's the chance, that out of all of the religions on the planet, that your parents happened to raise you in the right one?
Sorry, but even if you're right about this religion thing, you're very likely joining all the athiests and evil ones, and people of all but one religion, in someone else's version of hell.
If you apply rules from the bible in blanket fashion, then of course you won't see any gaps. But perhaps this is a sign that you're taking it a little too far...
Is there any practical reason why lust is bad? Let alone all lust? It's all about actions. If that women is attractive, why shouldn't you feel attracted? If there's no temptation, there's no virtue in resisting temptation.
Well, it's not like it's important. At the rate it's going, in two generations there won't be more than a few religious people in the first-world countries. Especially with silly black and white attitudes like yours.
Sometimes what you say is true, that there are insights in the originals that have been lost. Other times they're just old.
If the original is like this Codd you mention, where he makes a science out of something and other people distill it for popular reading, then yes, reading the original is likely to teach you something.
But if the original is scientific, as are all of the books that build upon it, you're not likely going to learn a lot more about the state of the art today. You'll learn what it was like then, but nothing will really have been lost and indeed, any of the old mistakes are likely to be corrected.
Scientific works are expected to make sense at every step. It's not like the game of telephone the bible went through - where you need to go back to an original to find out what they meant by unicorns. Further, science usually gets expanded at each step, where the literature gets translated, inevitably losing something, but doesn't get anything except new notes.
So for literature, you need to go back to the originals at every step, and for scientific works, assuming their assumptions proved to be true, you can usually build on the previous generation.
Not that going back to basics is bad, it provides a reality check, but it's not as necessary.
Copyright law is written as a trade. Limited enforced monopoly in trade for enriching the public domain.
It has been argued by copyright lawyers that a work which for technical reasons could never enter the public domain might not be copyrightable. This is where I think the law will end up, after the abuses of the DMCA and similar laws reach the public consciousness.
The original author has absolutely no control over the use to which their copyrighted works are put. The law has some control, in that you can't create an unauthorized copy, but this isn't at the wish of the author. (Though enforcement does usually require someone to report the abuse.)
No matter what you create, I can use if in a content you hate. I could read from your poetry at a KKK meeting, or piss on your painting, or quote from your book (or post) to mock your opinions.
There are some protections, but usually only at the point where my use of the work implies your connection with my cause. For instance, if I said that you wrote your poem to be read at the KKK meeting. Also, originals of famous works are protected as historical treasures. You wouldn't be allowed to burn an original Rembrandt, even if you could buy one.
But under normal copyright law, no. You don't get any say if how I use your work. If you don't like that your choice is to not release the work.
And this is as it should be. For instance, Diebold is within their rights to claim copyright on their memos, but they shouldn't be able to dictate the use to which people can put those memos once they have them.
There's no law saying I can't watch a DVD in Linux, just that trafficing in software or devices to enable me to do so, or describing how to write/construct such a thing, is illegal.
In other words, I can watch it if I can decrypt it, but I'm not allowed to get anything that will let me decrypt it, or ask for help in making my own. In fact, simply publishing enough information to allow me to bypass the encryption is probably an offense.
Thanks to the DMCA. Bypassing a device protection an effective copy control.
It's unsolicited unless you asked them to send it to you. If you're simply a movie critic and it's known that you like to receive movies to review, that movie was still unsolicited unless you asked for it. (Or agree "Sure, please send it", when you were asked.)
If I sent Roger Ebert a copy of my new movie, it would be unsolicited, despite the fact that *everyone* knows he reviews new movies that studios send to him.
And yes, the studios seek out reviewers who were favorable to their type of movie in the past. If you get a positive review of Austin Powers published, the studios will send you all the sequels and all other kooky comedies like Something About Mary for years, hoping you'll do it again. It's cheap publicity.
But the RIAA knew they didn't have a case against Felten when they started. They weren't trying to get the law enforced, they were trying to use an overly broad law and the threat of huge legal bills to gag him. It's not until he forced them to actually make a claim that they backed out.
Elcomsoft didn't need its day in court. No member of the company was in the USA when they performed any actions that were against the DMCA. Skylarov's talk should (according to the law, not just my wishes) have been legal.
And in the DeCSS case the MPAA got Jon charged, despite the legality of his actions in his country.
As I said, anything that hurts a corporation might as well be illegal, because you're going to go to jail for it or simply be bankrupted by the legal bills anyways, regardless of the legality.
We'll probably see Diebold have people put in jail. Or simply sue them, charging $150k per copy of the memo that their servers sent out. It's the American way. You can't tolerate someone's actions? Make up baseless lawsuits and push one of the government's hot-buttons like terrorism, or simply bury them under legal bills.
You blind? How about the MPAA trying to enforce the DMCA in other countries? How about Adobe encouraging the US government to arrest Skylarov for something that technically isn't a crime in the US. (ie, actions of a foreign citizen, in their own country, where those actions are legal.)
How about the RIAA threatening Felten with huge legal bills and then backing out when asked to prove anything, leaving him with the bill and no guarantee that he's safe to publish his research in the future.
You know. If it hurts a corporations bottom line you're treated like criminal before you even get a trial.
Thankfully, a few thousand times smarter than you.
Diebold claims it's a copyright violation to use their own memos to incriminate them. Technically, if they're right, it's about as illegal as a DoS attack.
In the US the current legal climate seems to suggest that doing anything that hurts a corporation is illegal, despite the legality of the specific action.
I can see a huge difference between many things that all seem to end up with some poor schmuck either bankrupt or in jail for something nobody thinks is crime. Unfortunately, the courts don't seem so capable of discriminating.
It's related to technology because the way these companies could cheat is through their technology, and it's a technology they have a motive to leave weak, simply to allow them to cheat.
We could end up with weak voting systems because industry specs for it, adopted by a friendly government, don't specify the kind of security we need.
Because if I dress in thick leather bikers gear and wear a motorcycle helmet, I'm impervious to most non-firearm violence you could dish out, short of a sword. Add in my size (6'4") and the other two friends with me, we could perform home invasions with pretty much no risk. It's hard to stab through even a leather bomber jacket, let alone a biker's jacket with ballistic crash padding inserts. A bike helmet would let me shrug off a baseball bat the head.
And you'd be naked or in PJs, and just waking up, as we crashed through your door. You wouldn't stand a chance.
But, there's no good way to provide even 80% protection from bullets from a reasonably sized handgun. Bullet-proof vests are very expensive and they only cover the torso.
If I thought you might have a gun I wouldn't feel so invunlerable. I mean, I might shoot you first, but if you (who knew the house and the squeeky stairs) shot me first, you'd probably kill me. Now, what if I don't know if you have a gun, but know that you could if you wanted.
Guns are equalizers. One senior citizen with a gun could kill or wound an attacking thug and drive the others off. With only strength-multipliers (baseball bats and such) how would they fare? Guns might be scary, but they do have a purpose.
If you were given a copy of a DVD outside of work (ie: you're not the editor or something) and you didn't sign an NDA beforehand, there is no "license" involved. You can do anything with it you can do with any copyrighted video. Show it to friends, give it away, whatever.
Unsolicited mailings are property of the recipient - they can't even ask for it back.
Now you're just trolling. If Slashdot is a "liberal" blog, you have a twisted idea of Liberal.
I'm suprised there are so many ultra-conservative, love it or leave it, our president - right or wrong, types on here. It'd make me say that Slashdot had been invaded by Ditto-heads.
It is very on-topic that these Electronic Voting proponents are connected to the Republicans. The Republicans who many people believe both cheated and unfairly took advantage of errors in the Florida election. The fact that these companies are very obviously Republican supporters, and that they have donated to the Republicans, goes together with the apparent corruption in that party and suggests that perhaps some of the insecurity of the electronic voting platforms (and the reason it's not generated a lot more noise in the government) is intentional.
The fact is that these companies publicly support the Republicans, and that the Republicans are the largest proponents of using these machines. The conclusions are your own, but an article that mention how one political party seems to be embracing flawed technology (which has been discussed here) seems on-topic.
And of course Clear Channel's holdings are a representative distribution between huge stations in large cities and tiny little country stations with mere thousands of listeners...
Oh wait, no, that's absolutely not the case. Nor is it with Murdoch and newspapers. The majority of the holdings in both cases are large metropolitan media outlets where the majority of the population lives.
That 8% holding of Clear Channels probably reaches 90% of the population. (Though it's not a monopoly for all of those people.)
Slashdot Mirror
They could mark it with anything they want, but it wouldn't change what you can do with it.
Did you agree (before being given the book) to an NDA? If not, you're not under any restrictions.
If your children are considering doing drugs, they aren't going to be stopped by the legal risks. Nor are they going to be stopped by horror stories that are, even if real, one in a million. They need real, to them, reasons.
We know that lust is bad because Jesus says it is.
But that's not what God says. God says that what comes out of the heart defiles us
Your circular reasoning is, um, a little... circular. Lust is bad because Jesus says it is. All you've got is a book written over a period of a few hundred years after his death, with quotes taken out of context and badly translated, and you're putting enough faith in it to think that make decisions about "lust" in every context.
Yes, it's really "black and white" of me to think that there is right and wrong when it comes to sex,
The black and white comes from you thinking that one line in a book that's over a thousand years old, not even written by the guy in question, has absolute answers that you can directly apply to life in a world that's completely different than the one this messiah of yours lived in.
Can you not see how you're extrapolating just a wee bit?
Ha ha! We've heard that one before. A billion Christians in the rest of the world aren't too worried, and neither am I.
Hey, I'm one of those Billion. On paper at least. As are five of my friends. All of us baptized or otherwise confirmed into a religion that we thought was nuts. My grandparents think I'm christian but I haven't been in a church except for a marriage or a rummage sale since I was four.
Have you ever wondered why the only religion people are those who grew up in a religious household? As if, perhaps, the only way you could come to such a belief was by being indoctrinated as a child. And thankfully our society is less accepting of this, we realize it for the abuse that it is and take steps to make sure children get a religion-free education when possible.
And you actually think they would block ESR's site because someone downloaded a PDF... Yeah right.
If they didn't want kids to waste school time they'd use a white-list, not black-list every site the kids get to, one at a time.
If the kid is going to do it, and I think you can usually tell, wouldn't it be better to teach them safe ways of doing it?
In my experience, kids who've had a beer or two at home from ~15 on, don't go crazy when they move away to university. Kids for whom it's a new experience though, and without any idea of what being drunk does to your judgement, are the ones who end up hooked, or screwing up and dropping out.
But yeah, the law says 21 is the age to drink (in your area) so it's child abuse. But the guy across the border when the age is 18 isn't abusing his kid by giving him a beer. That's just normal adult behaviour...
Bleh. You can't use the law as anything other than a guideline, and as such, you need to decide when you think hearing about drugs (including booze) and trying them are going to be the best for your child.
Besides, do you think you'll have any credibility with your child when you tell them that all drugs are terrible bad things and should be avoided, without explaining that some are worse than others and some are essentially harmless while some can kill you in a dose, and your kid sees his friends having a joint every now and then without any harm. They'll wonder if you were full of shit about heroin too...
If giving a child a cigarette when they ask, and doing it in such a way as to ensure they don't start smoking, is a crime, well I don't want to be law-abiding.
If you let a law get in the way of doing what's right for your kids, you're the monster.
Have you ever tried pot and decided that you don't like it as much as booze, or are you just accepting that beer is good clean fun but pot is a damn dirty drug and thus morally and socially wrong?
Both intoxicate you, in fact the beer more, so it can't be that you want to remain clear-headed.
It's misinformation like yours that's going to be the most damaging. LSD does not make you psychotic, from one dose or many. In fact, because of how LSD works, you can't even overdose on it.
If you kids ask about Marijuana you need to give them honest info, as in, it's less disabling than alcohol, carries less risk (you don't die of THC poisoning for smoking any ammount I've ever heard of), doesn't make you violent, and doesn't produce a hangover. The risks are mainly the psychological addiction (as in, if you do nothing else, you'll end up being a bum who's always stoned) and the legality. But I know people who end up mostly the same way on Playstation games.
If you can put them off by saying it's an adult decision, as in when your kids ask about sex, then go for it. But at the age that you think they'll either learn from you or from their peers, I suggest you teach them yourself. If they feel free to ask but never do, it could just be that you don't have a kid who's even going to be into drinking or smoking.
What's the chance, that out of all of the religions on the planet, that your parents happened to raise you in the right one?
Sorry, but even if you're right about this religion thing, you're very likely joining all the athiests and evil ones, and people of all but one religion, in someone else's version of hell.
If you apply rules from the bible in blanket fashion, then of course you won't see any gaps. But perhaps this is a sign that you're taking it a little too far...
Is there any practical reason why lust is bad? Let alone all lust? It's all about actions. If that women is attractive, why shouldn't you feel attracted? If there's no temptation, there's no virtue in resisting temptation.
Well, it's not like it's important. At the rate it's going, in two generations there won't be more than a few religious people in the first-world countries. Especially with silly black and white attitudes like yours.
Sometimes what you say is true, that there are insights in the originals that have been lost. Other times they're just old.
If the original is like this Codd you mention, where he makes a science out of something and other people distill it for popular reading, then yes, reading the original is likely to teach you something.
But if the original is scientific, as are all of the books that build upon it, you're not likely going to learn a lot more about the state of the art today. You'll learn what it was like then, but nothing will really have been lost and indeed, any of the old mistakes are likely to be corrected.
Scientific works are expected to make sense at every step. It's not like the game of telephone the bible went through - where you need to go back to an original to find out what they meant by unicorns. Further, science usually gets expanded at each step, where the literature gets translated, inevitably losing something, but doesn't get anything except new notes.
So for literature, you need to go back to the originals at every step, and for scientific works, assuming their assumptions proved to be true, you can usually build on the previous generation.
Not that going back to basics is bad, it provides a reality check, but it's not as necessary.
... Bypassing a device protecting an effective copy control is a violation.
You know, it would be illegal to crack ROT13 encryption if it was the method with which I protected my E-Book.
Copyright law is written as a trade. Limited enforced monopoly in trade for enriching the public domain.
It has been argued by copyright lawyers that a work which for technical reasons could never enter the public domain might not be copyrightable. This is where I think the law will end up, after the abuses of the DMCA and similar laws reach the public consciousness.
The original author has absolutely no control over the use to which their copyrighted works are put. The law has some control, in that you can't create an unauthorized copy, but this isn't at the wish of the author. (Though enforcement does usually require someone to report the abuse.)
No matter what you create, I can use if in a content you hate. I could read from your poetry at a KKK meeting, or piss on your painting, or quote from your book (or post) to mock your opinions.
There are some protections, but usually only at the point where my use of the work implies your connection with my cause. For instance, if I said that you wrote your poem to be read at the KKK meeting. Also, originals of famous works are protected as historical treasures. You wouldn't be allowed to burn an original Rembrandt, even if you could buy one.
But under normal copyright law, no. You don't get any say if how I use your work. If you don't like that your choice is to not release the work.
And this is as it should be. For instance, Diebold is within their rights to claim copyright on their memos, but they shouldn't be able to dictate the use to which people can put those memos once they have them.
There's no law saying I can't watch a DVD in Linux, just that trafficing in software or devices to enable me to do so, or describing how to write/construct such a thing, is illegal.
In other words, I can watch it if I can decrypt it, but I'm not allowed to get anything that will let me decrypt it, or ask for help in making my own. In fact, simply publishing enough information to allow me to bypass the encryption is probably an offense.
Thanks to the DMCA. Bypassing a device protection an effective copy control.
Gotta love it.
It's unsolicited unless you asked them to send it to you. If you're simply a movie critic and it's known that you like to receive movies to review, that movie was still unsolicited unless you asked for it. (Or agree "Sure, please send it", when you were asked.)
If I sent Roger Ebert a copy of my new movie, it would be unsolicited, despite the fact that *everyone* knows he reviews new movies that studios send to him.
And yes, the studios seek out reviewers who were favorable to their type of movie in the past. If you get a positive review of Austin Powers published, the studios will send you all the sequels and all other kooky comedies like Something About Mary for years, hoping you'll do it again. It's cheap publicity.
But the RIAA knew they didn't have a case against Felten when they started. They weren't trying to get the law enforced, they were trying to use an overly broad law and the threat of huge legal bills to gag him. It's not until he forced them to actually make a claim that they backed out.
Elcomsoft didn't need its day in court. No member of the company was in the USA when they performed any actions that were against the DMCA. Skylarov's talk should (according to the law, not just my wishes) have been legal.
And in the DeCSS case the MPAA got Jon charged, despite the legality of his actions in his country.
As I said, anything that hurts a corporation might as well be illegal, because you're going to go to jail for it or simply be bankrupted by the legal bills anyways, regardless of the legality.
We'll probably see Diebold have people put in jail. Or simply sue them, charging $150k per copy of the memo that their servers sent out. It's the American way. You can't tolerate someone's actions? Make up baseless lawsuits and push one of the government's hot-buttons like terrorism, or simply bury them under legal bills.
You blind? How about the MPAA trying to enforce the DMCA in other countries? How about Adobe encouraging the US government to arrest Skylarov for something that technically isn't a crime in the US. (ie, actions of a foreign citizen, in their own country, where those actions are legal.)
How about the RIAA threatening Felten with huge legal bills and then backing out when asked to prove anything, leaving him with the bill and no guarantee that he's safe to publish his research in the future.
You know. If it hurts a corporations bottom line you're treated like criminal before you even get a trial.
Thankfully, a few thousand times smarter than you.
Diebold claims it's a copyright violation to use their own memos to incriminate them. Technically, if they're right, it's about as illegal as a DoS attack.
In the US the current legal climate seems to suggest that doing anything that hurts a corporation is illegal, despite the legality of the specific action.
I can see a huge difference between many things that all seem to end up with some poor schmuck either bankrupt or in jail for something nobody thinks is crime. Unfortunately, the courts don't seem so capable of discriminating.
Telling people how crappy the Diebold voting machines are is -- at best -- just better than murder?
And here I thought it was a public service...
It's related to technology because the way these companies could cheat is through their technology, and it's a technology they have a motive to leave weak, simply to allow them to cheat.
We could end up with weak voting systems because industry specs for it, adopted by a friendly government, don't specify the kind of security we need.
Because if I dress in thick leather bikers gear and wear a motorcycle helmet, I'm impervious to most non-firearm violence you could dish out, short of a sword. Add in my size (6'4") and the other two friends with me, we could perform home invasions with pretty much no risk. It's hard to stab through even a leather bomber jacket, let alone a biker's jacket with ballistic crash padding inserts. A bike helmet would let me shrug off a baseball bat the head.
And you'd be naked or in PJs, and just waking up, as we crashed through your door. You wouldn't stand a chance.
But, there's no good way to provide even 80% protection from bullets from a reasonably sized handgun. Bullet-proof vests are very expensive and they only cover the torso.
If I thought you might have a gun I wouldn't feel so invunlerable. I mean, I might shoot you first, but if you (who knew the house and the squeeky stairs) shot me first, you'd probably kill me. Now, what if I don't know if you have a gun, but know that you could if you wanted.
Guns are equalizers. One senior citizen with a gun could kill or wound an attacking thug and drive the others off. With only strength-multipliers (baseball bats and such) how would they fare? Guns might be scary, but they do have a purpose.
If you were given a copy of a DVD outside of work (ie: you're not the editor or something) and you didn't sign an NDA beforehand, there is no "license" involved. You can do anything with it you can do with any copyrighted video. Show it to friends, give it away, whatever.
Unsolicited mailings are property of the recipient - they can't even ask for it back.
Now you're just trolling. If Slashdot is a "liberal" blog, you have a twisted idea of Liberal.
I'm suprised there are so many ultra-conservative, love it or leave it, our president - right or wrong, types on here. It'd make me say that Slashdot had been invaded by Ditto-heads.
It is very on-topic that these Electronic Voting proponents are connected to the Republicans. The Republicans who many people believe both cheated and unfairly took advantage of errors in the Florida election. The fact that these companies are very obviously Republican supporters, and that they have donated to the Republicans, goes together with the apparent corruption in that party and suggests that perhaps some of the insecurity of the electronic voting platforms (and the reason it's not generated a lot more noise in the government) is intentional.
The fact is that these companies publicly support the Republicans, and that the Republicans are the largest proponents of using these machines. The conclusions are your own, but an article that mention how one political party seems to be embracing flawed technology (which has been discussed here) seems on-topic.
And of course Clear Channel's holdings are a representative distribution between huge stations in large cities and tiny little country stations with mere thousands of listeners...
Oh wait, no, that's absolutely not the case. Nor is it with Murdoch and newspapers. The majority of the holdings in both cases are large metropolitan media outlets where the majority of the population lives.
That 8% holding of Clear Channels probably reaches 90% of the population. (Though it's not a monopoly for all of those people.)