infringe upon personal freedoms when technological progress renders their service unprofitable
This is the part that gets me more than anything. The personal freedoms that are being so brutally infringed upon in your estimation are bullshit... nothing. "You" wouldn't even be aware of the EM radiation, if you didn't have special equipment to detect it. It's only an infringement in the sense that you want to take any and every excuse to fuck over "the Man" or the big bad corporation.
I'm not prone to ad hominem, but your arguments are weak, destructive, selfish, and immature in the extreme. I'm really hoping that not many people are swayed by them.
Yeah, and it's impossible in humans unless you have a male and a female get together... so what? Is it the technology that troubles you? If I have to fly to Europe to conceive a baby with some baby, is that baby "unnatural" because it wouldn't have happened without technology?
We just got into this at work too. Reselling is different. Dare I use this word on slashdot, but now I'm trying to profit off of DTV's invention. This is clearly a no-no.
Well, I'm not the one throwing around absolute-sounding statements about "tries to tell me what I can or can't do with them".
It's amazing to me how easily people are convinced to give up their freedoms when big bullies spin it the right way (and buy legislation).
And to me, it's amazing to see how people will rationalize taking things that they don't have a right to, and would eagerly set up freeloader-friendly systems that would completely destroy the entertainment and informational content system that most of us use and enjoy daily.
If you want to go after Disney for getting copyrights extended to a ridiculous length of time, or the RIAA for making all of us pay a tax on blank recording media -- no matter its use -- I'm right behind you. But this vibe you're giving off that all content producers and transporters are the enemy and shouldn't be allowed to make a buck unless they use perfect encryption with idealized technology is just way wrong and should be fought vigorously.
It reminds me of the whole "if you leave your front door unlocked, it's your problem if someone walks in your front door and steals your stuff". At what point do we start being decent to one another and respecting each others' rights to decide how they want their unique creations to be used? DirecTV makes a reasonable effort to secure their content. The RF signal passing through your house doesn't interfere with you in any way. Why are you determined to take it and show everyone else how to take it... but only if you don't make a profit?
The point I was illustrating was not the impact of the transmission, it's the claim of ownership. It's ridiculous for me to claim that I still own those ping-pong balls after tossing 'em at you.
I get that, but you're thinking of property ownership as some god/universe given absolute right that is ideal in all ways. For most tangible things, it makes sense, but for EM radiation, it really doesn't. Don't get hung up on the whole "it's in my house" thing. It's not what's all that important. What is important is that we all share the RF world, and we've got to try to make the best use of it possible. Looking at EM radiation inadvertently passing through your house the same way as looking at a bunch of ping pong balls doesn't seem to provide us with a useful analogy.
It's equally ridiculous that DTV claims ownership on their signals and tries to tell me what I can or can't do with them.
Umm, so maybe you should be able to resell that signal?
Ok, here's one for ya. I'm gonna start a company and become a competing service provider to DirecTV. I'm gonna deliver content to everyone's house, my delivery medium will be ping-pong balls. I'll have encrypted content written on each ping-pong ball, it'll probably be along the lines of "YUCK FOU".
Do you even begin to think that sending ping pong balls through someone's house at all equates with sending a radio wave through someone's house? One is a noticeable physical object that bounces noisily, and the other is a harmless electromagnetic wave that is not perceivable with our built-in human sensors, and unlikely to affect standard consumer electronic components.
DirectTV has a flawed business model and wants to use laws to keep it going.
What're you talking about? It's a great business model that uses EM radiation to deliver content to millions of people who appreciate having that option. Why should we ditch the wonderful benefits of satellite dish reception of various types of signals because a few people feel they have the misguided right to everything in the universe that's within their reach.
They have a serious technological problem that they need to correct somehow, not punish people for taking advantage of their failed delivery mechanism.
Bah. Homeowners wouldn't even have any clue of that satellite signal, if they were obsessing over the whole "It passes through my house!" nonsense. Calling it a "failed delivery mechanism" is unreasonable. Homeowners decrypting the signal aren't just stumbling across something in their living room, they're actively employing sophisticated technological devices to take something that isn't theirs.
DirecTV makes a reasonable effort to scramble their signal, and they shouldn't have to constantly expend development and legal force to prevent weasels from trying to steal their content.
DirecTV won't sell me their service because of where I live.
Then move.
So why shouldn't I decrypt the information?
Whether or not it costs them money is only part of the problem. The bottom line is that it's their content, and they get to decide who gets it and for how much.
Why should people go to jail if they help me decrypt the information?
Because it's not their content either. While they're breaking the law, you can't seriously think that they're going to make sure that only people who *can't* buy DirecTV are going to gain access to their circumvention hardware/software. It's not their content, not their responsibility, and not for them to decide.
Another argument is that if you don't get the content through satellite, and it's important to you, then you'll rent/buy DVDs. Thus, content producers will be compensated for their efforts in one way or another.
I know it's convenient. I know it's fun. I know it's cheap. I know that it's nice to have. I know that there are rationalizations for having it.
I love when people quote revenue figures as though they mean something. Okay, so the revenue per title is $417,000. For all you know, the cost per title is $416,999 -- leaving $1 profit per title for the publisher.
After hosting an HTTP file transfer area for some time for my company, we decided to move to an FTP setup that was a bit more sophisticated.
So far, it's been a failure for two reasons:
1. IE blows as an FTP client, and users aren't comfortable dropping into the (somewhat crappy) DOS FTP client.
2. Firewall setups at the fortune 500 companies that we deal with normally seem to keep FTP access off-site restricted.
Uh, you're wrong there. In lots of states, you can create a "living will" that lets people know what to do with you if you are in a long-term coma or most-likely permanently debilitating medical condition. Without the existence of such a document, killing you could be considered to be murder.
Hey, you're the one who picked the extreme-sounding example.:)
If you've got *real* technical solutions to the problem that won't seriously curtail the ease of use of email as it exists today, then go for it. I really doubt that a reasonable one exists.
The behavioral problem is that there's a definite misdirection of financial and labor burdens upon the recipient of spam that should be illegal no matter what technical solutions are achieved.
A lot of countries follow the US's lead in making things illegal that they do, so it's worth it to set the precedent.
It also wouldn't hurt the US much at all to shut off non-complying countries' network access to the US. When they're ready to play nicely, they can play in our sandbox too.
If you want to filter spam for yourself, great. You probably appreciate all of the issues involved.
The irony is, though, that the better joe-surfer has spam filtered *for* him, the less he'll realize that it's a problem -- and the less political stink spam will have associated with it.
This is like right on the borderline between being a possible product, and being yet another vapor storage product scam.
The line about its being as durable as a regular credit card seems like BS. If you've got a moving spindle in there, it's not going to be very good at handling being flexed.
Well, if you like Robert Jordan, you'll most likely enjoy Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule & company.
It's very similar in many ways, but is a bit gritier in its depiction of sex and violence. Some of the violence descriptions were quite um... memorable. It's also a bit heavy-handed politically -- not that I disagree with his libertarian point of view -- but there ya have it.
Bah, finally an AC with something to say, and no one has modded it up. Since I hate posting, "Mod the parent up!", I'll just quote him. Mod the parent up if you like what it says... I'm no karma whore, dammit!:)
Actually, the lawsuit was not about Karl's right to inspect the records. Read the filings.
The lawsuit was about who got to decide what he got to do with the records besides look at them himself. Karl maintained it was not appropriate for ICANN to impose any restrictions whatsoever on what he personally as an individual decided to do with those records. ICANN maintained that it was not appropriate for an individual Director to assume all discretion over what could be done with the corporation's records; each Director has a fiduciary responsibility for the well-being of the corporation, but no Director decides alone what that is. The judge imposed a balance between the Director's right to inspect the records and the corporation's right to retain some control over what an individual does with the corporation's records. If they could have reached this compromise themselves, there would have been no lawsuit. But people on all sides preferred to be stubborn. It doesn't generally seem to occur to anyone that ICANN's records may have material in them that legitimately should be kept confidential. Everyone would far rather assume that the only possible motive for confidentiality here is for ICANN staff to conceal wrongdoing. Karl will be deeply disappointed to discover that there isn't really all that much money to start with; there's a lot that the USG and others have asked ICANN to do and limited sources of funding. Everyone wants something from ICANN, everyone wants ICANN to stop doing something else, and no one wants to pay. This is a real problem, which ICANN's reform process has tried (badly) to address. The saddest part is that people like Karl and the others associated with ICANN in their various ways, including most of its critics, should be teaming up against the real threats to the openness of the net, mostly the corporatization of access and content and the threats of *real* government regulation via the ITU: ICANN has fought VeriSign as far as feasible, has resisted the interest of various corporate powers in content control of the DNS, and has provided alternatives to the government control that would be imposed by turning over the DNS to the US government or to the EU or the ITU. As flawed as ICANN is, it's a compromise that successfully preserves many important values against some even worse alternatives. The lawsuit is mostly an unfortunate distraction. But if people would rather cheer mindlessly over a great victory for The Peepul, so be it. At least when they've crippled ICANN beyond any hope of effectiveness, there won't be anywhere for them to go to whine about it. You don't actually think the ITU and such agencies hold public meetings and comment boards where real people who are real users of the technology they oversee can actually speak, do you?
Superman may be a genius and clever and all that, but there are certain ways that he simply won't think because it's against his nature.
We saw in Superman II that Superman is capable of fairly judging and anticipating "evil" human behavior. I think that a lot of this "batman is darkly clever" is really just a form of apologetics.
Regarding magic: I don't think Batman will be playing that card.
That's the kind of contrived bullshit that will lead to a decrease in the enjoyment that I'll have when viewing the movie.
Superman is a genius intellect and partially a product of an advanced race and civilization. He's able to make an enormous number of decisions at nearly the speed of light (move at near the speed of light, and you kinda need to be able to think that quickly as well). Time and again in the cartoons and comics, supervillains neutralize Superman's physical advantages, and Superman has to instead outsmart them.
So we can see after years of evidence that he's this world-class intellect, yet Batman is going to defeat Superman's nearly invincible physical attributes. That's just contrived nonsense. You'd think by now that Superman would be paranoid when entering a situation where he might be trapped in closed quarters with someone bearing Kryptonite. But no, X-Ray vision and all, he's going to walk right into it once again. Ugh, it's just awful.
Right. Even the US courts have said that the problem with child pornography isn't its offensiveness. Virtual kiddie porn, such as cartoons or calling "of age" models "minors" is legal. The problem occurs when you use real minors to create the porn. In that case, you have a helpless victim -- a child.
Slashdot Mirror
infringe upon personal freedoms when technological progress renders their service unprofitable
This is the part that gets me more than anything. The personal freedoms that are being so brutally infringed upon in your estimation are bullshit... nothing. "You" wouldn't even be aware of the EM radiation, if you didn't have special equipment to detect it. It's only an infringement in the sense that you want to take any and every excuse to fuck over "the Man" or the big bad corporation.
I'm not prone to ad hominem, but your arguments are weak, destructive, selfish, and immature in the extreme. I'm really hoping that not many people are swayed by them.
it is in fact impossible without medical science
Yeah, and it's impossible in humans unless you have a male and a female get together... so what? Is it the technology that troubles you? If I have to fly to Europe to conceive a baby with some baby, is that baby "unnatural" because it wouldn't have happened without technology?
If man does it, it's natural.
We just got into this at work too. Reselling is different. Dare I use this word on slashdot, but now I'm trying to profit off of DTV's invention. This is clearly a no-no.
Well, I'm not the one throwing around absolute-sounding statements about "tries to tell me what I can or can't do with them".
It's amazing to me how easily people are convinced to give up their freedoms when big bullies spin it the right way (and buy legislation).
And to me, it's amazing to see how people will rationalize taking things that they don't have a right to, and would eagerly set up freeloader-friendly systems that would completely destroy the entertainment and informational content system that most of us use and enjoy daily.
If you want to go after Disney for getting copyrights extended to a ridiculous length of time, or the RIAA for making all of us pay a tax on blank recording media -- no matter its use -- I'm right behind you. But this vibe you're giving off that all content producers and transporters are the enemy and shouldn't be allowed to make a buck unless they use perfect encryption with idealized technology is just way wrong and should be fought vigorously.
It reminds me of the whole "if you leave your front door unlocked, it's your problem if someone walks in your front door and steals your stuff". At what point do we start being decent to one another and respecting each others' rights to decide how they want their unique creations to be used? DirecTV makes a reasonable effort to secure their content. The RF signal passing through your house doesn't interfere with you in any way. Why are you determined to take it and show everyone else how to take it... but only if you don't make a profit?
The point I was illustrating was not the impact of the transmission, it's the claim of ownership. It's ridiculous for me to claim that I still own those ping-pong balls after tossing 'em at you.
I get that, but you're thinking of property ownership as some god/universe given absolute right that is ideal in all ways. For most tangible things, it makes sense, but for EM radiation, it really doesn't. Don't get hung up on the whole "it's in my house" thing. It's not what's all that important. What is important is that we all share the RF world, and we've got to try to make the best use of it possible. Looking at EM radiation inadvertently passing through your house the same way as looking at a bunch of ping pong balls doesn't seem to provide us with a useful analogy.
It's equally ridiculous that DTV claims ownership on their signals and tries to tell me what I can or can't do with them.
Umm, so maybe you should be able to resell that signal?
Ok, here's one for ya. I'm gonna start a company and become a competing service provider to DirecTV. I'm gonna deliver content to everyone's house, my delivery medium will be ping-pong balls. I'll have encrypted content written on each ping-pong ball, it'll probably be along the lines of "YUCK FOU".
Do you even begin to think that sending ping pong balls through someone's house at all equates with sending a radio wave through someone's house? One is a noticeable physical object that bounces noisily, and the other is a harmless electromagnetic wave that is not perceivable with our built-in human sensors, and unlikely to affect standard consumer electronic components.
You have GOT to be kidding me.
Right back at ya.
DirectTV has a flawed business model and wants to use laws to keep it going.
What're you talking about? It's a great business model that uses EM radiation to deliver content to millions of people who appreciate having that option. Why should we ditch the wonderful benefits of satellite dish reception of various types of signals because a few people feel they have the misguided right to everything in the universe that's within their reach.
They have a serious technological problem that they need to correct somehow, not punish people for taking advantage of their failed delivery mechanism.
Bah. Homeowners wouldn't even have any clue of that satellite signal, if they were obsessing over the whole "It passes through my house!" nonsense. Calling it a "failed delivery mechanism" is unreasonable. Homeowners decrypting the signal aren't just stumbling across something in their living room, they're actively employing sophisticated technological devices to take something that isn't theirs.
DirecTV makes a reasonable effort to scramble their signal, and they shouldn't have to constantly expend development and legal force to prevent weasels from trying to steal their content.
It's still stealing.
Oh, I never said it wasn't. I just don't feel bad about it.
Heh, good point.
DirecTV won't sell me their service because of where I live.
Then move.
So why shouldn't I decrypt the information?
Whether or not it costs them money is only part of the problem. The bottom line is that it's their content, and they get to decide who gets it and for how much.
Why should people go to jail if they help me decrypt the information?
Because it's not their content either. While they're breaking the law, you can't seriously think that they're going to make sure that only people who *can't* buy DirecTV are going to gain access to their circumvention hardware/software. It's not their content, not their responsibility, and not for them to decide.
Another argument is that if you don't get the content through satellite, and it's important to you, then you'll rent/buy DVDs. Thus, content producers will be compensated for their efforts in one way or another.
I know it's convenient. I know it's fun. I know it's cheap. I know that it's nice to have. I know that there are rationalizations for having it.
It's still stealing.
Without legislation to seriously hinder spammers, this thing looks like trouble. The abuses stagger the mind.
I love when people quote revenue figures as though they mean something. Okay, so the revenue per title is $417,000. For all you know, the cost per title is $416,999 -- leaving $1 profit per title for the publisher.
After hosting an HTTP file transfer area for some time for my company, we decided to move to an FTP setup that was a bit more sophisticated.
So far, it's been a failure for two reasons:
1. IE blows as an FTP client, and users aren't comfortable dropping into the (somewhat crappy) DOS FTP client.
2. Firewall setups at the fortune 500 companies that we deal with normally seem to keep FTP access off-site restricted.
Uh, you're wrong there. In lots of states, you can create a "living will" that lets people know what to do with you if you are in a long-term coma or most-likely permanently debilitating medical condition. Without the existence of such a document, killing you could be considered to be murder.
:)
Hey, you're the one who picked the extreme-sounding example.
Spam is a technical and a behavioral problem.
If you've got *real* technical solutions to the problem that won't seriously curtail the ease of use of email as it exists today, then go for it. I really doubt that a reasonable one exists.
The behavioral problem is that there's a definite misdirection of financial and labor burdens upon the recipient of spam that should be illegal no matter what technical solutions are achieved.
A lot of countries follow the US's lead in making things illegal that they do, so it's worth it to set the precedent.
It also wouldn't hurt the US much at all to shut off non-complying countries' network access to the US. When they're ready to play nicely, they can play in our sandbox too.
Why is the above article so highly moderated? Obviously, the guy didn't read the linked article. It should be moderated to oblivion.
what AICN did for movies
I agree, that's about the most daming praise I could imagine.
If you want to filter spam for yourself, great. You probably appreciate all of the issues involved.
The irony is, though, that the better joe-surfer has spam filtered *for* him, the less he'll realize that it's a problem -- and the less political stink spam will have associated with it.
This is like right on the borderline between being a possible product, and being yet another vapor storage product scam.
The line about its being as durable as a regular credit card seems like BS. If you've got a moving spindle in there, it's not going to be very good at handling being flexed.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Well, if you like Robert Jordan, you'll most likely enjoy Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule & company.
It's very similar in many ways, but is a bit gritier in its depiction of sex and violence. Some of the violence descriptions were quite um... memorable. It's also a bit heavy-handed politically -- not that I disagree with his libertarian point of view -- but there ya have it.
Good stuff, overall.
Superman may be a genius and clever and all that, but there are certain ways that he simply won't think because it's against his nature.
We saw in Superman II that Superman is capable of fairly judging and anticipating "evil" human behavior. I think that a lot of this "batman is darkly clever" is really just a form of apologetics.
Regarding magic: I don't think Batman will be playing that card.
That's the kind of contrived bullshit that will lead to a decrease in the enjoyment that I'll have when viewing the movie.
Superman is a genius intellect and partially a product of an advanced race and civilization. He's able to make an enormous number of decisions at nearly the speed of light (move at near the speed of light, and you kinda need to be able to think that quickly as well). Time and again in the cartoons and comics, supervillains neutralize Superman's physical advantages, and Superman has to instead outsmart them.
So we can see after years of evidence that he's this world-class intellect, yet Batman is going to defeat Superman's nearly invincible physical attributes. That's just contrived nonsense. You'd think by now that Superman would be paranoid when entering a situation where he might be trapped in closed quarters with someone bearing Kryptonite. But no, X-Ray vision and all, he's going to walk right into it once again. Ugh, it's just awful.
Unbreakable was just about the best superhero movie ever.
Hmm... yeah... in Bizarro World.
I'm an atheist, but I'm pretty sure that you're going to hell for quoting that. Good luck in the fires of perdition.
Right. Even the US courts have said that the problem with child pornography isn't its offensiveness. Virtual kiddie porn, such as cartoons or calling "of age" models "minors" is legal. The problem occurs when you use real minors to create the porn. In that case, you have a helpless victim -- a child.