Civil rights movement, current gay rights movement (including and beyond the marriage issue)...
But your point is still a good one. The thing that bothers me about those, as well as the porn issue, is how few people that are not members of the "persecuted" (for lack of a more precise word) class fight for the rights of others.
Ok, sure, and to be honest I was being somewhat glib about it. The OP clearly meant that it was "protected speech" in the sense that it "should be protected." I'm just saying that, for whatever ultimate reason, it wasn't actually protected by anyone.
Personally, I think it's distasteful that there are laws on the books such that they can be put in a position to plead guilty without it being clearly shown that either a substantive crime was committed in the production of the material (e.g., rape) or that the material was distributed in such a way as to cause actual harm (e.g., something other than transmitted/shipped to adults, and I'm aware that I'm using "actual harm" in a funny way here, there could be a whole 'nother debate about whether seeing something unpleasant causes actual harm to anyone). Basically, I don't see much legitimate reason for "A and B decide to film some act and then C sends them $59.95 plus S&H to get a copy of that tape" to generate even the threat of prison time for A, B, or C.
It's still chilling that the prosecution was made. I suppose it's "better" than had the courts ruled against them, but the distinction you draw doesn't make these debates wrong. The justice system as a whole is still resulting in this penalty.
Read the OP again. She was not under age, and it was not actual rape. So you can point your son to six other movies where she's still, ahem, running around.
Ok, so I guess they're still involving the router. Not quite as ideal as just going over the LAN without routing, but in practice probably ok.
I agree, talking routers would be great. Except that I have mine in my bedroom and I don't think I could sleep -- no doubt it would start getting lonely.
How would the computers know they were on the same LAN? They'll both think they're talking to the NATted IP address that battlenet is aware of, wouldn't they?
At some point people have to made judgment calls. At what level do we call a bomb threat "unlikely" ? It's easy to determine when a bomb threat is real (like, say, when we find a bomb or it goes off), but essentially impossible to determine the converse.
This is true. It is a fact of life that judgment calls are sometimes necessary. The opposite of censorship is not necessarily free, unthinking publication of every fact to the world at large. Actions have consequences that need to be considered.
Ummm. And that couldn't be manipulated by a government or large group how?
It could. We need to be vigilant. It's certainly good to ask whether each instance of suppression like this was valid. Obviously I think it was, and I think it's irresponsible to get caught up in the slippery slope arguments based on the mere fact that something was intentionally suppressed.
if Wikipedia is going to consider censoring information such as this, then they should put it up for a vote to the community. Obviously they'd have to vote on some basic rules ahead of time, but honestly if it's "the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit," the community should vote on its rules of governance.
I don't see a good way to do this democratically in a way that would appease the folks already angry. The decision about what to suppress and how ultimately has to be granted to a small set of people. Suddenly it starts looking an awful lot like an elected government...
I think having some editorial controls in place are necessary, and sometimes the usual open contribution policy needs to be limited.
What unnerves me is people who think like you, making these sort of statements without seeing how they have already been abused. If there is a slippery slope, you're sliding down it.
Cute. Ignorant, but cute.
Yes, oppressive regimes use censorship. Do you want a cookie for pointing that out? The fact that there was no government coercion here is not something you can wave your hands about. It's crucial to the analysis and that's not what happened here. Yes, information was kept off Wikipedia, but there were plenty of other venues by which it could have been shared, and it's not obvious that it was of a nature that is consistent with Wikipedia's mission as an encyclopedia.
And yes, perhaps it's best to err on the side of anarchy if the alternative is fascism, but that does not mean that we should aspire to do no better.
I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain myself. Apparently it's not working.
As I said to the other OP, please give me a specific example reason why not being an active user of web browsers would undermine one's credibility to speak out about software IP issues. Is there some reason that IP as it pertains to the HTTP protocol is different from IP as it pertains to printer drivers that I'm just not seeing?
Finally, RMS has probably spent more time thinking about, discussing, debating, formulating ideas, and taking concrete action on software IP issues than 99.99% of the population. If that is insufficient to make him an expert, no J.D. is going to make the difference. Does this mean he knows the right answer? No. But, as I have said at least twice, it would be foolish to ignore his advice simply because he doesn't share your software needs. Contrary to the/. common wisdom, he doesn't often spout off -- he generally thinks very hard about what he is saying. It would be wise to at least understand why he says what he does before deciding whether to ignore it. He's not a unique figure in this regard.
If exercising that responsibility through editorial actions in a case where a real human being's life is in real danger of being ended is unacceptable to your view of what Wikipedia should be, then I am profoundly thankful that you are not running Wikipedia. Information wants to be free, but this man's family and friends want him to come home safely. One of those is more important.
Anarchy is a slippery slope as well, as this case illustrates.
The fact that he is an expert programmer is unquestionable, in much the same way that it is unquestionable that McCain is an experienced senator. In both cases, you need to decide whether that unquestionable fact supports the conclusion that is being implied.
In this case, the OP was suggesting something along the lines that the fact that RMS doesn't use a web browser somehow suggests that he knows nothing about software. That is ridiculous. Whether you like Emacs or not, it's an amazing piece of software.
And my point is not that we should accept him as our leader, agree with everything he says, or even agree with him in this particular case. My point is simply that he is a software expert and an expert on intellectual property. As such, discounting his opinion because of an irrelevant fact such as "he doesn't use a web browser" is foolish.
Or you get out of an imaginary dream world and realize that your choices affect the lives of others and that sometimes the idealistic option is not the right one. If not getting someone killed is a "political end," then I'm 100% in favor of their actions.
Furthermore, Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopedia, not a news outlet. It's not at all obvious that there's a conflict in restraining information for a temporary period. Have you noticed that they tend to clamp down pretty freely on articles that are hot news topics, such as celebrity deaths?
Scroll lock is to change the arrow keys from moving the cursor up and down to scrolling all the text on your screen up and down. I learned that from the intro program for my dad's IBM PC back in about 1986. Incidentally, that intro program was the only software I've ever used that implemented that use of scroll lock... When I ran a BBS, scroll lock was used to indicate whether I was available for chat, which was convenient.
I'm just going by what the law books say. Sorry you disagree with them. The law books say that for a distribution to be "to the public" it can't be to a limited network.
I think it's more than just disagreeing with them. If that's really what they say, then the law books are just wrong. That is simply not a reasonable definition of "public." By your logic, nothing on the Internet could ever be interpreted as "public."
I don't think your analogy is appropriate. As I said in another post in this thread, RMS is not saying anything about the technical merits of.NET or C# or Mono or the GNU equivalent. There's no need to be more than peripherally aware of the software to recognize the IP issues. Do you really not understand the risk of trying to build a software system that is dependent on the goodwill of a company like Microsoft?
RMS is nutty in some ways and I disagree with some of the things he says. But this release is spot-on, and not at all nutty. Whatever you believe about the merits of his idea of free software, you should think carefully about what he's saying here. It's decidedly not his usual spiel. He's focusing on a specific danger, which I think is very real. The possibility of an outsider using the legal system to pull the rug out from under the Debian project is definitely there.
RMS's comments aren't about the merits of the technology -- he actually more or less supported the existence of the mono project and the similar GNU effort. You don't need to know the technical details to recognize that if there are patents protecting the core of that technology that building up a system that relies on that core is a risky business. The discussion he's having transcends the implementation details, or even the purpose of the software. If RMS were advising not to use Mono because of some technical language problem, then he'd need to be up to date on language technology. For him to say it has risky patent encumbrances is well within his area of expertise.
You're right, some new technologies survive and become the old workhorses, and I don't mean to belittle the value of keeping up to date. Not everyone needs to do this, however, and it's unwise to discount the advice of someone simply because they prioritize their time and tools differently. In particular, RMS seems to focus his energy on issues that have nothing to do with the sorts of apps people choose to run. As such, I don't think his unfamiliarity with web applications is relevant criticism. His "real issues" are the freedom to use your software, and whether that's a printer drive, a text editor, or a social web application, the patent and copyright issues are not that different (ignoring issues of the content, just focusing on the software itself).
Using a web browser is not a prerequisite for being an authority on programming, let alone an authority on IP policy implications. What specific information is he missing out on by not using a web browser that gives you a reason to question his knowledge? Your little analogy about engines is laughably pathetic, unless you really mean to question the software experience of the guy who wrote emacs...
In my experience, the real experts frequently don't have time or interest in mucking around with the latest flavor of the month technology because they're too busy thinking about real issues.
It's not that hard to get a phone that will roam to Europe. After all, the reason the European phones work here is that T-Mobile (and at least one other, but T-Mobile is the one I use) use a compatible system. These phones are also far superior in terms of battery life, particularly in areas with weak signals. At least, they were the last time I shopped around. I've taken my phone to Europe and to Chile and had very good coverage.
But I'm not going to argue that the providers don't suck...
Ridiculous, but customary. If I make an hour-long phone call from Canada, I expect to be dinged for something on the order of a hundred bucks for it. If I'm billed for more like TEN THOUSAND, that's a little different...
I'm not sure one should conclude they thought they were going to lose. It seems just as likely to me that they had no inkling that the music and PC industries would intersect a couple decades down the road. If they didn't have any plans to start recording albums, there wouldn't be much incentive to incur the expense of actually pressing for a ruling.
Generally noncommercial use gets pretty wide latitude. Without distribution, it's hard to interpret the use as commercial, so you have very little say over how your image is used. By going in public, like it or not, you're accepting that other people may record your image.
That's true, no link was found in that scenario ("study 2" in their paper). That is interesting, but their explanation is that there is a difference between the subject actively choosing which ear to offer and passively having that choice made for them. It is of course possible that there are alternative explanations for the effect, but I don't think it's fair to describe their explanation as "made-up bullshit."
In fact, I don't recall exactly, but I believe there was a larger bias toward offering the right ear in their first study than in the second. In the first study, they observed interactions between pairs who were not involved in the study; typically these people are more likely to know each other than in the second when it was an approach by a stranger. If the effect were a comfort zone effect, I'd expect the bias to be stronger in the case of a stranger approaching, but IIRC it wasn't.
Finally, it's important to note that the claim made in the paper is a lot weaker than that the headlines in the popular press. The paper more or less notes that this is consistent with the hypothesis and certainly doesn't exaggerate the strength of their findings.
Pardon me. The interpretation of that law in the presence of a complex ecology of statutory and case law and its specific application to the facts of this case are now firmly established.
Slashdot Mirror
Civil rights movement, current gay rights movement (including and beyond the marriage issue)...
But your point is still a good one. The thing that bothers me about those, as well as the porn issue, is how few people that are not members of the "persecuted" (for lack of a more precise word) class fight for the rights of others.
Ok, sure, and to be honest I was being somewhat glib about it. The OP clearly meant that it was "protected speech" in the sense that it "should be protected." I'm just saying that, for whatever ultimate reason, it wasn't actually protected by anyone.
Personally, I think it's distasteful that there are laws on the books such that they can be put in a position to plead guilty without it being clearly shown that either a substantive crime was committed in the production of the material (e.g., rape) or that the material was distributed in such a way as to cause actual harm (e.g., something other than transmitted/shipped to adults, and I'm aware that I'm using "actual harm" in a funny way here, there could be a whole 'nother debate about whether seeing something unpleasant causes actual harm to anyone). Basically, I don't see much legitimate reason for "A and B decide to film some act and then C sends them $59.95 plus S&H to get a copy of that tape" to generate even the threat of prison time for A, B, or C.
It's still chilling that the prosecution was made. I suppose it's "better" than had the courts ruled against them, but the distinction you draw doesn't make these debates wrong. The justice system as a whole is still resulting in this penalty.
I mod you +1 Interesting. I did not know that. But that's tangential to my real (glib) point which is that their speech was not actually protected.
Read the OP again. She was not under age, and it was not actual rape. So you can point your son to six other movies where she's still, ahem, running around.
but last I looked that was still protected speech..
If they're doing prison time for it, apparently it's not protected speech... maybe it should be, but it's apparently not.
Ok, so I guess they're still involving the router. Not quite as ideal as just going over the LAN without routing, but in practice probably ok.
I agree, talking routers would be great. Except that I have mine in my bedroom and I don't think I could sleep -- no doubt it would start getting lonely.
How would the computers know they were on the same LAN? They'll both think they're talking to the NATted IP address that battlenet is aware of, wouldn't they?
At some point people have to made judgment calls. At what level do we call a bomb threat "unlikely" ? It's easy to determine when a bomb threat is real (like, say, when we find a bomb or it goes off), but essentially impossible to determine the converse.
This is true. It is a fact of life that judgment calls are sometimes necessary. The opposite of censorship is not necessarily free, unthinking publication of every fact to the world at large. Actions have consequences that need to be considered.
Ummm. And that couldn't be manipulated by a government or large group how?
It could. We need to be vigilant. It's certainly good to ask whether each instance of suppression like this was valid. Obviously I think it was, and I think it's irresponsible to get caught up in the slippery slope arguments based on the mere fact that something was intentionally suppressed.
if Wikipedia is going to consider censoring information such as this, then they should put it up for a vote to the community. Obviously they'd have to vote on some basic rules ahead of time, but honestly if it's "the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit," the community should vote on its rules of governance.
I don't see a good way to do this democratically in a way that would appease the folks already angry. The decision about what to suppress and how ultimately has to be granted to a small set of people. Suddenly it starts looking an awful lot like an elected government...
I think having some editorial controls in place are necessary, and sometimes the usual open contribution policy needs to be limited.
What unnerves me is people who think like you, making these sort of statements without seeing how they have already been abused. If there is a slippery slope, you're sliding down it.
Cute. Ignorant, but cute.
Yes, oppressive regimes use censorship. Do you want a cookie for pointing that out? The fact that there was no government coercion here is not something you can wave your hands about. It's crucial to the analysis and that's not what happened here. Yes, information was kept off Wikipedia, but there were plenty of other venues by which it could have been shared, and it's not obvious that it was of a nature that is consistent with Wikipedia's mission as an encyclopedia.
And yes, perhaps it's best to err on the side of anarchy if the alternative is fascism, but that does not mean that we should aspire to do no better.
I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain myself. Apparently it's not working.
As I said to the other OP, please give me a specific example reason why not being an active user of web browsers would undermine one's credibility to speak out about software IP issues. Is there some reason that IP as it pertains to the HTTP protocol is different from IP as it pertains to printer drivers that I'm just not seeing?
Finally, RMS has probably spent more time thinking about, discussing, debating, formulating ideas, and taking concrete action on software IP issues than 99.99% of the population. If that is insufficient to make him an expert, no J.D. is going to make the difference. Does this mean he knows the right answer? No. But, as I have said at least twice, it would be foolish to ignore his advice simply because he doesn't share your software needs. Contrary to the /. common wisdom, he doesn't often spout off -- he generally thinks very hard about what he is saying. It would be wise to at least understand why he says what he does before deciding whether to ignore it. He's not a unique figure in this regard.
Freedom is great.
With it comes responsibility.
If exercising that responsibility through editorial actions in a case where a real human being's life is in real danger of being ended is unacceptable to your view of what Wikipedia should be, then I am profoundly thankful that you are not running Wikipedia. Information wants to be free, but this man's family and friends want him to come home safely. One of those is more important.
Anarchy is a slippery slope as well, as this case illustrates.
The fact that he is an expert programmer is unquestionable, in much the same way that it is unquestionable that McCain is an experienced senator. In both cases, you need to decide whether that unquestionable fact supports the conclusion that is being implied.
In this case, the OP was suggesting something along the lines that the fact that RMS doesn't use a web browser somehow suggests that he knows nothing about software. That is ridiculous. Whether you like Emacs or not, it's an amazing piece of software.
And my point is not that we should accept him as our leader, agree with everything he says, or even agree with him in this particular case. My point is simply that he is a software expert and an expert on intellectual property. As such, discounting his opinion because of an irrelevant fact such as "he doesn't use a web browser" is foolish.
Or you get out of an imaginary dream world and realize that your choices affect the lives of others and that sometimes the idealistic option is not the right one. If not getting someone killed is a "political end," then I'm 100% in favor of their actions.
Furthermore, Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopedia, not a news outlet. It's not at all obvious that there's a conflict in restraining information for a temporary period. Have you noticed that they tend to clamp down pretty freely on articles that are hot news topics, such as celebrity deaths?
Scroll lock is to change the arrow keys from moving the cursor up and down to scrolling all the text on your screen up and down. I learned that from the intro program for my dad's IBM PC back in about 1986. Incidentally, that intro program was the only software I've ever used that implemented that use of scroll lock... When I ran a BBS, scroll lock was used to indicate whether I was available for chat, which was convenient.
I'm just going by what the law books say. Sorry you disagree with them. The law books say that for a distribution to be "to the public" it can't be to a limited network.
I think it's more than just disagreeing with them. If that's really what they say, then the law books are just wrong. That is simply not a reasonable definition of "public." By your logic, nothing on the Internet could ever be interpreted as "public."
I don't think your analogy is appropriate. As I said in another post in this thread, RMS is not saying anything about the technical merits of .NET or C# or Mono or the GNU equivalent. There's no need to be more than peripherally aware of the software to recognize the IP issues. Do you really not understand the risk of trying to build a software system that is dependent on the goodwill of a company like Microsoft?
RMS is nutty in some ways and I disagree with some of the things he says. But this release is spot-on, and not at all nutty. Whatever you believe about the merits of his idea of free software, you should think carefully about what he's saying here. It's decidedly not his usual spiel. He's focusing on a specific danger, which I think is very real. The possibility of an outsider using the legal system to pull the rug out from under the Debian project is definitely there.
RMS's comments aren't about the merits of the technology -- he actually more or less supported the existence of the mono project and the similar GNU effort. You don't need to know the technical details to recognize that if there are patents protecting the core of that technology that building up a system that relies on that core is a risky business. The discussion he's having transcends the implementation details, or even the purpose of the software. If RMS were advising not to use Mono because of some technical language problem, then he'd need to be up to date on language technology. For him to say it has risky patent encumbrances is well within his area of expertise.
You're right, some new technologies survive and become the old workhorses, and I don't mean to belittle the value of keeping up to date. Not everyone needs to do this, however, and it's unwise to discount the advice of someone simply because they prioritize their time and tools differently. In particular, RMS seems to focus his energy on issues that have nothing to do with the sorts of apps people choose to run. As such, I don't think his unfamiliarity with web applications is relevant criticism. His "real issues" are the freedom to use your software, and whether that's a printer drive, a text editor, or a social web application, the patent and copyright issues are not that different (ignoring issues of the content, just focusing on the software itself).
Using a web browser is not a prerequisite for being an authority on programming, let alone an authority on IP policy implications. What specific information is he missing out on by not using a web browser that gives you a reason to question his knowledge? Your little analogy about engines is laughably pathetic, unless you really mean to question the software experience of the guy who wrote emacs...
In my experience, the real experts frequently don't have time or interest in mucking around with the latest flavor of the month technology because they're too busy thinking about real issues.
It's not that hard to get a phone that will roam to Europe. After all, the reason the European phones work here is that T-Mobile (and at least one other, but T-Mobile is the one I use) use a compatible system. These phones are also far superior in terms of battery life, particularly in areas with weak signals. At least, they were the last time I shopped around. I've taken my phone to Europe and to Chile and had very good coverage.
But I'm not going to argue that the providers don't suck...
Ridiculous, but customary. If I make an hour-long phone call from Canada, I expect to be dinged for something on the order of a hundred bucks for it. If I'm billed for more like TEN THOUSAND, that's a little different...
I'm not sure one should conclude they thought they were going to lose. It seems just as likely to me that they had no inkling that the music and PC industries would intersect a couple decades down the road. If they didn't have any plans to start recording albums, there wouldn't be much incentive to incur the expense of actually pressing for a ruling.
Generally noncommercial use gets pretty wide latitude. Without distribution, it's hard to interpret the use as commercial, so you have very little say over how your image is used. By going in public, like it or not, you're accepting that other people may record your image.
That's true, no link was found in that scenario ("study 2" in their paper). That is interesting, but their explanation is that there is a difference between the subject actively choosing which ear to offer and passively having that choice made for them. It is of course possible that there are alternative explanations for the effect, but I don't think it's fair to describe their explanation as "made-up bullshit."
In fact, I don't recall exactly, but I believe there was a larger bias toward offering the right ear in their first study than in the second. In the first study, they observed interactions between pairs who were not involved in the study; typically these people are more likely to know each other than in the second when it was an approach by a stranger. If the effect were a comfort zone effect, I'd expect the bias to be stronger in the case of a stranger approaching, but IIRC it wasn't.
Finally, it's important to note that the claim made in the paper is a lot weaker than that the headlines in the popular press. The paper more or less notes that this is consistent with the hypothesis and certainly doesn't exaggerate the strength of their findings.
Pardon me. The interpretation of that law in the presence of a complex ecology of statutory and case law and its specific application to the facts of this case are now firmly established.