I considered that but discarded it on the basis that there might not be a vote in the system that matches what he wants.
I had figured on using "seed votes", one vote for each candidate, having a valid vote number and appearing in the vote publication, but which is not counted in the totals (ie subtract 1 from each candidates vote total). This would be public knowledge so that they reported totals would match.
If they're paying for votes, they could just refuse to pay both voters if they get any duplicate numbers. If they're breaking kneecaps...
My goal with the system is to prevent the buyer/kneecap breaker of being at all sure the vote was cast correctly regardless of how willing the voter is to cooperate. In essence, make it so easy to defraud the buyer that the transaction isn't worth attempting. The chances that someone else will report the same number to the buyer are low enough not to concern someone trying to cheat him.
The system would also have to provide a variable number of "same vote tokens", because the bad guys could require him to provide not only his own number, but also all of the other numbers provided to him by the system.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'm picturing Joe Voter entering the booth, receiving his number, voting for one of five candidates, and getting a receipt with his vote and four other votes (one for each candidate he didn't vote for). Even if he had to present all of them, the buyer wouldn't have any idea which one was real.
* Since the voter has the information, he can be made to provide it and prove which vote was his. The only way out of this is if he can produce other information which will plausibly "prove" he voted differently. What makes this difficult is that he must be able to provide this information *prior* to seeing the published list, which pretty much precludes authenticating a different vote on the list.
If the false information could be provided to him as he is voting, and the true information impossible to give before voting, it might work. For simplicity's sake: The voter is assigned a random number which can't be identified with him. After he places his vote, he is presented with a list of other vote numbers and the candidates they chose (one for each candidate). The list could take the form of a computer printout containing his real vote number and candidate (if the voter is going to actually vote for who they're paying him to vote for, it makes little sense to provide him with "fake" data for this candidate), and other vote numbers for each of the other candidates, in random order.
The voter can now give an actual vote number for any candidate which cannot be verified or disputed by anyone who doesn't know his vote number. There could be a problem for the first few voters if there are no votes for some candidates yet. But a "seed vote" for each candidate could be presented which is then subtracted from the totals.
In order to resolve disputes, though, the voting authority would also have to know his vote number, but not be able to identify the voter without his permission.
In other words, people shouldn't be able to see how individual, even nameless voters, voted across different races.
This could be acheived fairly easily by treating each race as a separate vote. Simply provide a different vote number (or whatever the secret is) for each race.
Okay, name something that puts C02 in the air that doesn't also pollute in other ways?
That wasn't the argument. The argument was that we should reduce CO2 emissions despite the lack of evidence they were harmful. If there are other, known harmful pollutants, then we should reduce those emissions. But don't use "CO2 causes global warming" as an argument because the evidence isn't there.
I'm tempted to give you my conclusions, but maybe you'll come up with something I missed.
It's hardly my area of expertise, but it's something I'm interested in. I would like to hear some of your conclusions.
Which is why absentee ballots are a bad thing. They're acceptable as long as they only represent a small fraction of the votes, but in general they're dangerous to democracy.
I don't disagree. But the argument I was presented with implied that any system which allows for vote buying is unacceptable. My response was that our present system allows for it.
It will only work if it's accessible to my 80 year-old grandmother, and that's the kicker.
Absolutely. And that's what makes it such a difficult problem. But I'm not convinced it's not at least worth a try.
I think a reasonable voter has good reason to believe that once their correctly filled-out ballot passes through that slot, it will be counted correctly.
Well, in my district we use mechanical lever type machines, and I have never been confident that those things work. Not that I think there's any active fraud going on, but there's just too much hidden from the voter. Even most paper ballots are counted by machine that is essentially a black box even to those watching it. And the whole fiasco with Florida in the last presidential election shows that the sysytem is far from foolproof.
I'm also not suggesting that the security be done away with, only that the added measure of a voter being able to verify his vote would make those security measures much less of a weak point.
Your talking about spending billions of dollars refitting essentially the entire power delivery industry (electric, gasoline, natural gas, propane etc.) to combat something that you don't know is a problem. And the solutions you implement may well be worse. That's the point, you don't know what will happen. You don't even have a reasonably good guess.
That's going to make the society better and more healthy
I think the 100's of millions of years the world supported life without us emitting tons of CO2 is proof that us cutting our emissions won't do more harm. Hell, we have 1000's of years of human history without us emitting tons of CO2 to use as evidence.
Evidence that it won't do more harm to the atmosphere, but it will certainly harm our society. Where's the proof of good that outweighs the harm?
If you can verify it to your satisfaction, you can verify it to mine as well.
If I can give you 50 different answers which all look equally valid to you, you would have no way of knowing which one was right.
If I tell you that I've picked a number x such that x mod 9 = 5, there are an infinite number of values for x which satisfy the equation. There is no way I can prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that the value of x that I chose was 50. I could just as easily tell you that I chose 14, 59, or 95 and you would have no way to verify it. If the algorithm were constructed in such a way that there were many seeds which resulted in the desired output, and it were trivial to produce those seeds, then the original seed would be extremely tough, if not impossible, to verify to someone else.
But the other side to this argument is that it is perfectly possible to verify your vote to a buyer now simply by using an absentee ballot rather than voting in person.
Any such system that is workable would have to have a way that the voter could prove that they had voted for any given candidate to prevent this sort of abuse.
Yes. The system would have to allow the voter to definitively prove to an authorized body that his vote was miscounted for it to have any value. But at the same time it would have to be impossible for him to prove it to an unauthorized body.
Such a system might be possible, but it gets really complex.
Yes, it probably would. But it would fix a whole lot of problems with the way we vote.
It doesn't prevent him from selling his vote, because all he has to do is give the secret string to the people who paid him. If the hash could be constructed so that every hash is a valid vote, then the buyer would have no way of knowing if he had the right one. This is a case where we want to make it incredibly easy for the seller to defraud the buyer, thus making the sale less attractive.
The major flaw in a secret ballot, however, is that the only person who knows for sure how he voted can't verify his vote was counted correctly. The people who can verify the vote don't know what the vote is. There's no check. Even in a simple summation, You can't verify the output without knowing all the inputs.
Take a simple model of a non-secret ballot where everybody's vote is published in a newspaper the day after the vote. John Q. Public can check the paper, verify his vote was recorded correctly, and verify that all the votes add up to the reported total. There's no opportunity for fraud except for the case of vote buying but then the voter is a willing participant, and, in fact, can be done in the existing system through absentee ballots.
What's needed is a method where the voter can verify his vote and the reported totals without sacrificing his anonymity. Then it doesn't matter if the vote is cast on paper, electronically, or by smoke signals. It then becomes an argument over which system is more efficient (less mistakes, faster results, etc.) rather than which system is more open to fraud.
don't you think it might be a good idea to stop pumping out as much CO2 as we currently to in case it's the problem.
No. Not at all. Because until you know it is the problem, you have no idea that your course of action won't make things worse. It's this same "why take the chance" mentality that gets a lot of stupid laws passed that may or may not solve the problem. Restricting behavior without reasonable proof that that behavior is harmful is flat out wrong. And don't talk to me about "why take the chance" until you have a good idea what "the chance" is.
Before you ask me to dump a ton of money, time and energy into a cause, you had better have good reason to believe it's actually going to do some good and not do more harm. Because the changes you're proposing are not easy to make, and will impact society greatly, all for some tenuous belief that it might help.
The idea is the abstract plot. The experession are the details of the plot and the characters. Thats not the idea, thats an expression of the idea.
idea n.
1. Something, such as a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity.
expression n.
1. The act of expressing, conveying, or representing in words, art, music, or movement; a manifestation
The plot and characters are imaginary. They exist only in the mind of the creator. That's what "idea" means. The entire plot, including the characters and places, can exist in the mind in entire detail. That's the idea. The expression is the form the idea takes when the creator wishes to convey it to others, the manifestation of the mental activity. That's even inherent in the term copyright. It only protects (supposedly) what's able to be copied. You can't copy an idea without first expressing it.
If the film (based on a book) is a different expression of the idea in the book, then the film should get a separate copyright from the book, end of story. But requiring permission from the book's author to make the film means you need the author's permission to use his idea.
i'm trying to explain how things have been defined by law.
The point I'm trying to make is that the law is inaccurate. It claims to only protect the expression, but in fact protects the idea itself. The law may define "expression" and "idea" differently, but that doesn't make it true any more than the law defining pi being equal to 3 makes it true. It would be the equivalent of saying we have "freedom of speech", which is a wonderful concept, but having the law define "speech" so narrowly that the concept no longer matches the law.
People use the phrase "protects the expression of the idea, not the idea" all the time to defend the copyright system as if it somehow makes it better. The phrase is wrong. It use to be right, but copyright has expanded considerably, not only in duration but also in purview, since that phrase was first written. It is no longer correct.
The movie is using the same plot, and the SAME characters as the book.
Yes. The plot and the characters are the idea. The book or movie is the expression of the idea. By requiring permission from the original copyright holder to use the idea in a movie, you are protecting the idea, not the expression.
I'm all about my privacy. Yet it would be nice knowing I could be safe.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"and will lose both" is commonly added afterwards.
The only reason to even have certain behavior classified as criminal is to prevent behavior that is detrimental to society. When the method of prevention is more detrimental than the behavior is, what's the point?
From what I can gather from the article, it's not a red-light enforcement camera but a camera to monitor traffic volume through the intersection (ie. not meant to be used for law enforcement at all). This makes it necessary for it to be video (snapshots won't show how fast traffic is moving) and making it moveable allows them to see how far the traffic extends.
Spam is a technical problem which can be solved technically.
And there should be technical solutions to stop it. But when the spammers go out of their way to circumvent the technology, a law making it illegal would go a long way towards stopping it. There are technical solutions to stop people from stealing your car, but it's illegal to do so just the same. You can have both. And both are necessary.
It is not a legal problem.
Theft isn't a legal problem?
but only in sofar as you put up a public service accepting bits from anyone in the world
Where does it say that because I have a computer on the internet that I am required to accept bits from anyone anywhere? That's the same logic that telemarketers are using: because you have a phone, we are allowed to call you whether you want us to or not.
We all hate murderers, and anti-murder laws are good.
This is the same logic that got us into the situation where someone who gets caught having sex with their boy/girlfriend on lover's lane (especially if you're in Mass. and happen to be in a non-missionary position) can end up having to walk around to all of your neighbors and tell them you're a sex-offender... joy.
I fail to see how punishing a couples consensual (I'm assuming or you wouldn't be using it as an argument) relationship and punishing behavior that costs many people a lot of money is analagous.
It's not an easy problem and there's no magic bullet. No law, no matter how carefully crafted, is going to solve the spam problem. But it's important to have the law on your side when you're trying to prevent it. A large number of people are under the impression that if it's not illegal, then it's not wrong.
Making spam illegal is just one step in a long path of getting rid of spam, but it's a necessary step.
Yeah, so the definition of a spammer is what? If you get 1000 messages a day with my name as the return-address, do I get fined? What if the headers are *very* convincing? What if it's "from" someone else, but it came from my network?
Obviously you would need good evidence the person actually sent the spam before fining them. But no law enforcement agency is even going to bother looking at it if it's not illegal.
What if that was someone who I let put thier virus-infected laptop on my wireless network?
Access providers should take some responsibility for the people they provide access to. Claiming ignorance of the users on your network is no better than claiming ignorance of the virus on your computer. They're both your responsibility. Clean it up or shut it down.
Just change your scenario to two people that wrote romance novels.
You're confusing "genre" with "plot". If one was a rewrite of the other, would they still be distinct? Would the second need the permission of the first?
The 'structure' is the same in both
I'm not talking about the structure, I'm talking about the story.
The simple fact that two copyrights are issued but permission is required from the first is enough to see that it's the idea which is protected. If it were only the expression of the idea, then you would have two choices. Either the film and the book are different expressions of the same idea and would receive separate copyrights, or they are the same expression of the idea and the book's copyright would cover the movie. If it were only the expression of the idea, you wouldn't need permission to express someone else's idea differently. But you do, so it's not just the expression which is protected.
Fear of harmful things is one the reasons people survive. Being afraid of tigers is a good thing. Unnecessary fear is rarely a good thing (I say "rarely" because as soon as I say "never" ten thousand people will post remote examples to prove me wrong). And panic more often then not does more damage than good. Panic and fear make you do stupid things. They make you think emotionally, not rationally. Causing unnecessary fear will hurt things far more than the money you get from it will help.
Despite what copyright law says it says, copyrights protect the idea.
Case in point: Arthur Author writes a book. Fred Filmmaker makes a movie based on Arthur's book. Are they the same expression of the idea? Very few people would say they are, but copyright law says they are different since each work gets its own copyright. But, copyright law also says Fred has to get Arthur's permission before he makes the film. Therefore, it's the idea which is protected, not just the expression of the idea.
As soon as copyrights started covering derivative works, the whole concept of protecting the expression of the idea went out the window.
Where is that listed in the criteria presented to be considered 100% secure?
Read the whole comment before you reply. For your convenience, here's the part you missed:
Or, you can argue that it doesn't matter, in which case you're just redefining "secure". If we're going to do that, we can just call everything 100% secure by defining it as such, which isn't terribly useful.
Please tell me why it's impossible to create an application that pulls an HTML document off the web, renders this and displays it on a monitor without any security problems?
Because there are a myriad of things that could go wrong even in that one simple transaction. Because there are security problems that haven't even been invented yet.
Let's just take one example: How does the user know he's looking at the correct web page? There are a dozen ways to fool someone into thinking he's looking at a different web page than he is. So how does he know this is the right one? There are authentication methods, but none of them are 100% foolproof. So, right there, you've just blown your 100% security. Or, you can argue that it doesn't matter, in which case you're just redefining "secure". If we're going to do that, we can just call everything 100% secure by defining it as such, which isn't terribly useful.
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I considered that but discarded it on the basis that there might not be a vote in the system that matches what he wants.
I had figured on using "seed votes", one vote for each candidate, having a valid vote number and appearing in the vote publication, but which is not counted in the totals (ie subtract 1 from each candidates vote total). This would be public knowledge so that they reported totals would match.
If they're paying for votes, they could just refuse to pay both voters if they get any duplicate numbers. If they're breaking kneecaps...
My goal with the system is to prevent the buyer/kneecap breaker of being at all sure the vote was cast correctly regardless of how willing the voter is to cooperate. In essence, make it so easy to defraud the buyer that the transaction isn't worth attempting. The chances that someone else will report the same number to the buyer are low enough not to concern someone trying to cheat him.
The system would also have to provide a variable number of "same vote tokens", because the bad guys could require him to provide not only his own number, but also all of the other numbers provided to him by the system.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'm picturing Joe Voter entering the booth, receiving his number, voting for one of five candidates, and getting a receipt with his vote and four other votes (one for each candidate he didn't vote for). Even if he had to present all of them, the buyer wouldn't have any idea which one was real.
Then why did it take you five posts to say it?
* Since the voter has the information, he can be made to provide it and prove which vote was his. The only way out of this is if he can produce other information which will plausibly "prove" he voted differently. What makes this difficult is that he must be able to provide this information *prior* to seeing the published list, which pretty much precludes authenticating a different vote on the list.
If the false information could be provided to him as he is voting, and the true information impossible to give before voting, it might work. For simplicity's sake: The voter is assigned a random number which can't be identified with him. After he places his vote, he is presented with a list of other vote numbers and the candidates they chose (one for each candidate). The list could take the form of a computer printout containing his real vote number and candidate (if the voter is going to actually vote for who they're paying him to vote for, it makes little sense to provide him with "fake" data for this candidate), and other vote numbers for each of the other candidates, in random order.
The voter can now give an actual vote number for any candidate which cannot be verified or disputed by anyone who doesn't know his vote number. There could be a problem for the first few voters if there are no votes for some candidates yet. But a "seed vote" for each candidate could be presented which is then subtracted from the totals.
In order to resolve disputes, though, the voting authority would also have to know his vote number, but not be able to identify the voter without his permission.
In other words, people shouldn't be able to see how individual, even nameless voters, voted across different races.
This could be acheived fairly easily by treating each race as a separate vote. Simply provide a different vote number (or whatever the secret is) for each race.
Okay, name something that puts C02 in the air that doesn't also pollute in other ways?
That wasn't the argument. The argument was that we should reduce CO2 emissions despite the lack of evidence they were harmful. If there are other, known harmful pollutants, then we should reduce those emissions. But don't use "CO2 causes global warming" as an argument because the evidence isn't there.
Less polution in the air will make people more healthy:
Whether or not CO2 is pollution is what is in dispute.
I'm tempted to give you my conclusions, but maybe you'll come up with something I missed.
It's hardly my area of expertise, but it's something I'm interested in. I would like to hear some of your conclusions.
Which is why absentee ballots are a bad thing. They're acceptable as long as they only represent a small fraction of the votes, but in general they're dangerous to democracy.
I don't disagree. But the argument I was presented with implied that any system which allows for vote buying is unacceptable. My response was that our present system allows for it.
It will only work if it's accessible to my 80 year-old grandmother, and that's the kicker.
Absolutely. And that's what makes it such a difficult problem. But I'm not convinced it's not at least worth a try.
I think a reasonable voter has good reason to believe that once their correctly filled-out ballot passes through that slot, it will be counted correctly.
Well, in my district we use mechanical lever type machines, and I have never been confident that those things work. Not that I think there's any active fraud going on, but there's just too much hidden from the voter. Even most paper ballots are counted by machine that is essentially a black box even to those watching it. And the whole fiasco with Florida in the last presidential election shows that the sysytem is far from foolproof.
I'm also not suggesting that the security be done away with, only that the added measure of a voter being able to verify his vote would make those security measures much less of a weak point.
Your talking about spending billions of dollars refitting essentially the entire power delivery industry (electric, gasoline, natural gas, propane etc.) to combat something that you don't know is a problem. And the solutions you implement may well be worse. That's the point, you don't know what will happen. You don't even have a reasonably good guess.
That's going to make the society better and more healthy
You don't know this. That's the entire point.
I think the 100's of millions of years the world supported life without us emitting tons of CO2 is proof that us cutting our emissions won't do more harm. Hell, we have 1000's of years of human history without us emitting tons of CO2 to use as evidence.
Evidence that it won't do more harm to the atmosphere, but it will certainly harm our society. Where's the proof of good that outweighs the harm?
If you can verify it to your satisfaction, you can verify it to mine as well.
If I can give you 50 different answers which all look equally valid to you, you would have no way of knowing which one was right.
If I tell you that I've picked a number x such that x mod 9 = 5, there are an infinite number of values for x which satisfy the equation. There is no way I can prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that the value of x that I chose was 50. I could just as easily tell you that I chose 14, 59, or 95 and you would have no way to verify it. If the algorithm were constructed in such a way that there were many seeds which resulted in the desired output, and it were trivial to produce those seeds, then the original seed would be extremely tough, if not impossible, to verify to someone else.
But the other side to this argument is that it is perfectly possible to verify your vote to a buyer now simply by using an absentee ballot rather than voting in person.
Any such system that is workable would have to have a way that the voter could prove that they had voted for any given candidate to prevent this sort of abuse.
Yes. The system would have to allow the voter to definitively prove to an authorized body that his vote was miscounted for it to have any value. But at the same time it would have to be impossible for him to prove it to an unauthorized body.
Such a system might be possible, but it gets really complex.
Yes, it probably would. But it would fix a whole lot of problems with the way we vote.
It doesn't prevent him from selling his vote, because all he has to do is give the secret string to the people who paid him. If the hash could be constructed so that every hash is a valid vote, then the buyer would have no way of knowing if he had the right one. This is a case where we want to make it incredibly easy for the seller to defraud the buyer, thus making the sale less attractive.
The major flaw in a secret ballot, however, is that the only person who knows for sure how he voted can't verify his vote was counted correctly. The people who can verify the vote don't know what the vote is. There's no check. Even in a simple summation, You can't verify the output without knowing all the inputs.
Take a simple model of a non-secret ballot where everybody's vote is published in a newspaper the day after the vote. John Q. Public can check the paper, verify his vote was recorded correctly, and verify that all the votes add up to the reported total. There's no opportunity for fraud except for the case of vote buying but then the voter is a willing participant, and, in fact, can be done in the existing system through absentee ballots.
What's needed is a method where the voter can verify his vote and the reported totals without sacrificing his anonymity. Then it doesn't matter if the vote is cast on paper, electronically, or by smoke signals. It then becomes an argument over which system is more efficient (less mistakes, faster results, etc.) rather than which system is more open to fraud.
don't you think it might be a good idea to stop pumping out as much CO2 as we currently to in case it's the problem.
No. Not at all. Because until you know it is the problem, you have no idea that your course of action won't make things worse. It's this same "why take the chance" mentality that gets a lot of stupid laws passed that may or may not solve the problem. Restricting behavior without reasonable proof that that behavior is harmful is flat out wrong. And don't talk to me about "why take the chance" until you have a good idea what "the chance" is.
Before you ask me to dump a ton of money, time and energy into a cause, you had better have good reason to believe it's actually going to do some good and not do more harm. Because the changes you're proposing are not easy to make, and will impact society greatly, all for some tenuous belief that it might help.
The idea is the abstract plot. The experession are the details of the plot and the characters. Thats not the idea, thats an expression of the idea.
idea n.
1. Something, such as a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity.
expression n.
1. The act of expressing, conveying, or representing in words, art, music, or movement; a manifestation
The plot and characters are imaginary. They exist only in the mind of the creator. That's what "idea" means. The entire plot, including the characters and places, can exist in the mind in entire detail. That's the idea. The expression is the form the idea takes when the creator wishes to convey it to others, the manifestation of the mental activity. That's even inherent in the term copyright. It only protects (supposedly) what's able to be copied. You can't copy an idea without first expressing it.
If the film (based on a book) is a different expression of the idea in the book, then the film should get a separate copyright from the book, end of story. But requiring permission from the book's author to make the film means you need the author's permission to use his idea.
i'm trying to explain how things have been defined by law.
The point I'm trying to make is that the law is inaccurate. It claims to only protect the expression, but in fact protects the idea itself. The law may define "expression" and "idea" differently, but that doesn't make it true any more than the law defining pi being equal to 3 makes it true. It would be the equivalent of saying we have "freedom of speech", which is a wonderful concept, but having the law define "speech" so narrowly that the concept no longer matches the law.
People use the phrase "protects the expression of the idea, not the idea" all the time to defend the copyright system as if it somehow makes it better. The phrase is wrong. It use to be right, but copyright has expanded considerably, not only in duration but also in purview, since that phrase was first written. It is no longer correct.
The movie is using the same plot, and the SAME characters as the book.
Yes. The plot and the characters are the idea. The book or movie is the expression of the idea. By requiring permission from the original copyright holder to use the idea in a movie, you are protecting the idea, not the expression.
I'm all about my privacy. Yet it would be nice knowing I could be safe.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"and will lose both" is commonly added afterwards.
The only reason to even have certain behavior classified as criminal is to prevent behavior that is detrimental to society. When the method of prevention is more detrimental than the behavior is, what's the point?
From what I can gather from the article, it's not a red-light enforcement camera but a camera to monitor traffic volume through the intersection (ie. not meant to be used for law enforcement at all). This makes it necessary for it to be video (snapshots won't show how fast traffic is moving) and making it moveable allows them to see how far the traffic extends.
I've always wanted to know how many cops get caught by speed-trap and red-light cameras.
Spam is a technical problem which can be solved technically.
And there should be technical solutions to stop it. But when the spammers go out of their way to circumvent the technology, a law making it illegal would go a long way towards stopping it. There are technical solutions to stop people from stealing your car, but it's illegal to do so just the same. You can have both. And both are necessary.
It is not a legal problem.
Theft isn't a legal problem?
but only in sofar as you put up a public service accepting bits from anyone in the world
Where does it say that because I have a computer on the internet that I am required to accept bits from anyone anywhere? That's the same logic that telemarketers are using: because you have a phone, we are allowed to call you whether you want us to or not.
We all hate spammers, so anti-spam laws are good.
We all hate murderers, and anti-murder laws are good.
This is the same logic that got us into the situation where someone who gets caught having sex with their boy/girlfriend on lover's lane (especially if you're in Mass. and happen to be in a non-missionary position) can end up having to walk around to all of your neighbors and tell them you're a sex-offender... joy.
I fail to see how punishing a couples consensual (I'm assuming or you wouldn't be using it as an argument) relationship and punishing behavior that costs many people a lot of money is analagous.
It's not an easy problem and there's no magic bullet. No law, no matter how carefully crafted, is going to solve the spam problem. But it's important to have the law on your side when you're trying to prevent it. A large number of people are under the impression that if it's not illegal, then it's not wrong.
Making spam illegal is just one step in a long path of getting rid of spam, but it's a necessary step.
Yeah, so the definition of a spammer is what? If you get 1000 messages a day with my name as the return-address, do I get fined? What if the headers are *very* convincing? What if it's "from" someone else, but it came from my network?
Obviously you would need good evidence the person actually sent the spam before fining them. But no law enforcement agency is even going to bother looking at it if it's not illegal.
What if that was someone who I let put thier virus-infected laptop on my wireless network?
Access providers should take some responsibility for the people they provide access to. Claiming ignorance of the users on your network is no better than claiming ignorance of the virus on your computer. They're both your responsibility. Clean it up or shut it down.
Just change your scenario to two people that wrote romance novels.
You're confusing "genre" with "plot". If one was a rewrite of the other, would they still be distinct? Would the second need the permission of the first?
The 'structure' is the same in both
I'm not talking about the structure, I'm talking about the story.
The simple fact that two copyrights are issued but permission is required from the first is enough to see that it's the idea which is protected. If it were only the expression of the idea, then you would have two choices. Either the film and the book are different expressions of the same idea and would receive separate copyrights, or they are the same expression of the idea and the book's copyright would cover the movie. If it were only the expression of the idea, you wouldn't need permission to express someone else's idea differently. But you do, so it's not just the expression which is protected.
Fear of harmful things is one the reasons people survive. Being afraid of tigers is a good thing. Unnecessary fear is rarely a good thing (I say "rarely" because as soon as I say "never" ten thousand people will post remote examples to prove me wrong). And panic more often then not does more damage than good. Panic and fear make you do stupid things. They make you think emotionally, not rationally. Causing unnecessary fear will hurt things far more than the money you get from it will help.
Despite what copyright law says it says, copyrights protect the idea.
Case in point: Arthur Author writes a book. Fred Filmmaker makes a movie based on Arthur's book. Are they the same expression of the idea? Very few people would say they are, but copyright law says they are different since each work gets its own copyright. But, copyright law also says Fred has to get Arthur's permission before he makes the film. Therefore, it's the idea which is protected, not just the expression of the idea.
As soon as copyrights started covering derivative works, the whole concept of protecting the expression of the idea went out the window.
Where is that listed in the criteria presented to be considered 100% secure?
Read the whole comment before you reply. For your convenience, here's the part you missed:
Or, you can argue that it doesn't matter, in which case you're just redefining "secure". If we're going to do that, we can just call everything 100% secure by defining it as such, which isn't terribly useful.
Please tell me why it's impossible to create an application that pulls an HTML document off the web, renders this and displays it on a monitor without any security problems?
Because there are a myriad of things that could go wrong even in that one simple transaction. Because there are security problems that haven't even been invented yet.
Let's just take one example: How does the user know he's looking at the correct web page? There are a dozen ways to fool someone into thinking he's looking at a different web page than he is. So how does he know this is the right one? There are authentication methods, but none of them are 100% foolproof. So, right there, you've just blown your 100% security. Or, you can argue that it doesn't matter, in which case you're just redefining "secure". If we're going to do that, we can just call everything 100% secure by defining it as such, which isn't terribly useful.
how hard is it to just that with absolute security?
Impossible.
i have my dear old mother on linux
Unless it's powered off, disconnected from the network and sealed in concrete where no human can find it, it's not 100% secure.
damn close to 100%
"Damn close to" != "is".