You can play at defcon, but the level of the competition would probably be a bit intimidating for people who attend a boot camp.
Most people attending the course would not know that you have to prepare for DEFCON by imaging your hard drive, then reimage the machine and flash the BIOS when you return. When I go to BlackHat I draw an old machine that has been decomissioned.
$4,300 is the going rate for training, if anything slightly low. You can find all the information on the Web but only if you know what to look for.
And the thousands of American scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff that design and work on these systems. Based on comments like this, you'd think that the government is stuffing shells full of cash and launching them at the enemy. Where do you think these "weapon systems" are designed and built?
Are engaded in a corrupt, shameful use of their time? Yes absolutely.
The UK deployed an anti-anti-balistic misslile system in the 70s called Chevalene. It worked by ejecting several hundred mylar ballons, one of which enclosed the actual live warhead. The system deployed is incapable of defeating that level of countermeasure even if it worked.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to spot a fraudulent test. The only time the system was 'tested' with decoys there were only two decoys and the missile was preprogramed to shoot the middle target.
This is an asymmetric challenge. The game is much easier for the attacker than the defender. The opposition can get access to technology that is way ahead of the best 1980s US technology without difficulty.
It just occurred to me that the domain system has similar flaws as the DOS/Windows drive letter system. The top-level.com,.net, C:, D:, etc. are so separated that moving between them is inconvenient at best, and once committed to one choice it pretty much is permanent. E.g., don't try to move MS Office from C: to D: or vice versa...the registry is *not* your friend.
Which is of course the origin.
When this started the biggest domain on the net was.mil. Most of.mil was not visible to the rest of the Internet. The next biggest was.edu.
The reason for separating off.com was because that traffic could not travel over the NSF backbone. The country codes were an afterthought.
If it was all to be done over there would be one master registry with no country codes, everything would be a tld.
But it wont de done over and can't. Instead what is gradually happening is that.com is becomming the defacto tld as searches default against it.
No matter what you do to design a system there will always be some hack who comes along to crap on your project
So you are arguing that the whole idea of a missile defense program is bogus, that it can never work and that we should therefore pay a hundred billion dollars for one that does not work because it could not be expected to work?
Someone's head is going to roll over this one. The military has been really tight on network security lately, even with contractors. A hole as big as this is simply unacceptable.
Why is anyone going to care about a weapon system everyone knows is a dud anyway?
The system has never once demonstrated that it works, every single test has either failed outright or been rigged. The only reason the program exists at all is to hand out taxpayer money to campaign contributors.
I'm sorry, I thought I heard you say that Vista does not provide any new applications. Well that's just plain wrong. How about the sidebar, sync center, photo gallery or even the calendar. Based on this link there will also be some new games.
Those sound like they are revisions and repacakging of existing code rather than a completely new application. Microsoft has done plenty of side bars over the years. Sync center and photo gallery type tools have been distributed as part of the powertoy for years.
The point I was making was that I don't see any initiatives in Longhorn where I would expect the coding team to start off from a completely clean slate. If they had I am certain they would have used C#, thats what most Microsofties use as a matter of choice, they were writing C# code before the compilers were even available outside Microsoft.
With respect to the claim that.NET is a clone of the Java VM, that is completely untrue. Gosling did not invent the idea of a VM and would never make such a silly claim. The USCD p-system is well known to everyone in that field. The.NET model is not based on the Java VM, nor is it a clone of it, the.NET model is actually a different concept that also has a long line of prior art. The CLI code is actually based on the intermediate representation used by all the Microsoft compilers. This is a very common compiler architecture, GCC uses it and it was not the first by a long way.
The only 'innovation' in the.NET CLI is that it is designed to allow the final stage of the compilation to be performed at installation time or at run time. Again there are 20 year old precedents but this idea was really not a very practical one until relatively recently
The antecedents of.NET are really the work done at Digital in the late 80s when they were managing the transition from VAX to Alpha. This is not at all suprising given the number of ex-DEC people working in Redmond.
Unlike Java the CLI code is not directly executable (or at least not designed to be). A lot of the information is non-executable identity hints that is lost in a pure VM (as Java is re-engineered to optimize the just in time compilation mode it will look more like CLI). The result is that CLI code does not in theory suffer any penalty as a result of the CLI processing step. The 'inefficiency' in.NET comes from the use of implicit garbage collection rather than requiring the programmer to handle GC and the security mechanisms built in to make the code safe, prevent privillege boosting etc.
The Vista engineers have taken a slightly different tack. Intead of using.NET to provide fine grained security protections they worked out what they need most and implemnted that in the O/S core.
This seems like a vote of no-confidence. You'd think the marketing people, at the very least, would've told someone "We have to include at least one hosted app or service in Vista, or people are going to think the CLR and.NET APIs are second-class environments."
Vista does not provide any new applications though. The main changes are deep in the O/S at the level where folk used to argue over high level language vs assembler. The user interface eye candy is expensive enough in cycles without using a set of relatively new compilers.
Longhorn has been in development for 6 years now. The last thing Microsoft needed to do was to introduce another delay for any reason.
Today managed code is slower than the best optimized C. It is on a par with average quality code. There was a time when the same was true of C code vs assembler. Today the number of coders who can produce code that is faster than compiler generated is pretty small and even they can't keep it up for very long. I don't think it will be long before the same is true of CLI code, particularly if the code is optimized for the platform at install time.
Unlike Java CLI code has exactly the same information available as the standard microsoft C++ compiler, plus it knows the exact target processor. The only thing that dings managed code performance wise is having the garbage collector running.
This is not far from the point. The Internet was designed to serve the university research community. It is hardly unexpected if less than 100% of US households are interested in the result.
The 'slow' rate of growth is entirely expected. The telephone system grew rapidly in the 30s through the 60s then 'growth' hit a wall and the increase in the number of subscribers was almost entirely due to old non subscribers passing away and a near 100% uptake rate amongst people in their 20s.
If you look at the figures the number of non Internet households is only 34%. The number of non-subscribers is only 29%. Multiply the two figures together and the proportion of the population that has not adopted the net that is most likely to is only 10%. 1% growth per year is about what you would expect at that point - and it is going to be comming almost entirely from the aging effect.
This has been the case for several years now.
The other effect that is not mentioned here is the number of people who have broadband at work but don't want to pay for or cannot get broadband at home. If I could not get broadband at home I would really not want to pay for dialup. I would probably go to Panera to surf instead.
The Death tax hurts little people, too. I have a friend who's parents died recently, and as an only child, left him pretty much everything. Unfortunately, he couldn't afford the taxes associated with his parent's estate, mainly the house his parents were living in - a house that had been in their family for four generations. Yeah, that death tax was real fair!
The inheritance tax in the US only starts at $2 million. So I get the feeling that either your anecdote is untrue or you are leaving out some pretty important information about the size of the estate.
If the kid could not afford to pay inheritance taxes there would be no way they could afford a fair property tax on a $2 million house. It probably happens on occasion but nobody has yet identified a real case of the other popular anecdote where a family has been forced to sell the family farm as a result of death duties. There are plenty of cases in Colorado where folk inherit a small, uneconomic farm which they promptly sell to a property developer for several millions but taxes are not the principle cause.
This country is currently in the middle of a very expensive war, there is a massive budget deficit. 42% of taxes go to pay for the military directly or indirectly. Only about 15% of the budget is discretionary spending. An inheritance tax is a lot less unfair and a lot less burdensome on the economy as a whole than payroll taxes.
Theft removes the property from the owner, preventing them from enjoying ANY revenue. Starting to see a distinction?
Information goods are not rival goods. I do not see how that changes the moral issue in the slightest.
If you look at the debates in Congress over copyright you will see this type of behavior described as outright theft. The fact that it is called something else in the criminal code is irrelevant. Theft is refered to as 'fraud', 'conversion' and numerous other terms.
I don't think the objection here is to the incorrect use of the legal term. I think that what is really objected to is the assertion that taking material without paying for it is morally wrong and should be considered a crime.
If you take something that belongs to someone else without intending to pay them for it that is theft.
Some uses of copyright material are considered to be fair use. Reasonable non-commercial sharing is not theft. But what is going on here is people trading copyright material they have access to in return for free access to other copyright material.
However, any content which has been sold that is over 28 years has no protection in my opinion. We agreed to give creators a 28 year monopoly on their creations. They have successfully increased that period to effectively "forever" legally-- but not morally.
Here we agree on something. As I pointed out earlier today the legislative manipulations of RIAA and Disney were both wrong and counterproductive.
They were wrong in the first place because the RIAA tried to steal copyrights from its own artists by having Congress declare them to be 'works for hire'. Disney stole copyright works from the public domain.
These actions were wrong morally and they were wrong tactically. It is much harder to convince people that stealling is wrong when you are stealling yourself.
I think that the DVD zone system is foolish for the exact same reason. First it is wrong because the real purpose of the zone system is to support illegal differential pricing schemes. Once you have cheated the public by overcharging for the product it is going to be much harder to convince them that stealling content off bitorrent is wrong.
Off course people are very popular when they are giving away other people's property. The Kray twins were very popular in London's East End, Buch Cassidy, Jessie James and his gang were all pretty popular with the people who benefited from their generosity. And you will find the exact same rationalizations at work in the comments written at the time, the real criminals are the railway bosses etc etc.
And maybe you feel morally conflicted about libraries and lending, but you don't speak for the whole.
Neither do you.
If you don't like file sharing, don't do it. But some of us feel entitled, morally and legally, to share culture with our neighbours, and we will exercise that freedom.
Ah you are not stealling from the copyright owner who paid to create the material. You are engaging in the noble cause of freedom and culture.
What you seem to be saying here is that we should each amuse ourselves in our own way.
Fine, you amuse yourself by stealing from others and I will amuse myself by bringing the law down on you and people like you.
If you think that the most important political issue facing the world today is your right to take what does not belong to you without paying for it I really do pity you.
From Wikipedia theft is defined as "...the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it". Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but do have any idea what crime is allegedly being commited?
You appear to intend permanently depriving the copyright holder of the payment that they would expect to receive for their services.
From a moral perspective this is plain theft. You know you are taking something that does not belong to you.
But you don't want to call it theft because you don't want to think of yourself as a theif. So you call it other things, you insist on calling it 'copyright infringement'.
That is exactly the type of thinking that led the Bush administration to Abu Graihb. They didn't want to think of themselves as torturers so they had a corrupt lawyer provide them with a convenient definition of torture.
That's the law. In the eyes of Swedish law, TPB is not facilitating theft, they are a library of text files.
Sweedish law has said nothing about the matter to date. You are certainly not a Sweedish lawyer.
From a moral perspective this is theft. The Sweedish law may have a defect that means that this particular form of facilitating theft is not currently covered. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this represents a concious decision of the Sweedish lawmakers.
Seems like you were not here for the Napster affair then.
Seems like you didn't read the whole thing, or believe that US is the only country in the world.
I think it was pretty obvious in my post that what I was saying is that Slashdot is not noted for the accuracy of its legal advice, particularly where rationalizations for stealing copyright material is concerned.
Absent a favorable decision from the Sweedish courts the only conclusion that can be made at this point is that Sweedish law moves slowly.
The site is engaged in theft, they are not performing the theft themselves they are helping others to steal. Sure that makes them popular with the beneficiaries of the theft but it does not make what they do right.
A person who sells spam tools to a spammer is engaged in spamming even if they never use the tool themselves. A fence who receives stolen goods is engaged in theft even though someone else does the actual stealling.
Sure you can rationalize a set of values where taking a movie off bittorrent is different from stealling a DVD off the shelf of a store. But the reason people have moderated my original comment down as troll even though it is nothing of the kind is because they know deep down that what I am saying here is correct and they don't like to hear it.
They aren't hosting any of the content. Only text files (as explained on their web page).
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content. The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
It is not illegal (Again, according to their web page) to host files that *point* to the content. Untill that changes in their country, they will stay alive (also, so long as they can keep their bills paid, that would help...:) )
Seems like you were not here for the Napster affair then. During the Napster affair there was no shortage of people flaming about how the service was obviously 100% legal. After the company folded it turned out that they had never received even an internal opinion to the effect that the service was legal.
Turns out that the appeals court that gave Napster a stay of execution only did so so that the company could stay around long enough for them to make a landmark ruling on Internet copyright.
The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
Regardless of the rationalization there is no difference taking content this way and going to a store and stealing a CD or DVD.
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.
I do find it interesting that everytime I've seen Irvings speak he hasn't denied that the holocaust existed. The basic gist I got from his speeches was, that after the fact it's been publised as a Jewish persecusion. In fact they made up around 50% of the victims. Gypses and Homosexuals were also killed, in concentration camps, making up a massive portion of those killed.
Irving changes his story depending on his audience. He has no trouble making contradictory statements. He removed all references to the holocaust in in the self published second edition of Hitler's war.
He is also an opportunist who makes use of common misperceptions claiming them as evidence of deliberate fraud. There are certainly some Jews who have attempted to claim that only Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. They are a small minority and do not include any of the well known NAZI hunters. This is the main reason for uncertainty in the number of Jews Hitler murdered, there are reasonably good figures for number of people murdered, tracking down the category is harder. Once people got to the camps they were all non-people.
Irving's figure of 50% is low unless you add in prisoners of war murdered by the NAZIs. He is a practiced liar as the court record demonstrates.
This concept is not exclusive to e-commerce and is likely as old as the concept of auctioning. It is certainly as old as the concept of haggling. Regardless, an existing concept does not become unique or non-obvious simply because it is implemented online
The root of the problem here is that the USPTO definition of 'obvious' is not the usual understanding of the term. I did an essay about this recently
In particular the USPTO thinks that taking an obvious idea and taking the obvious to any idiot step of doing it on the Internet using standard engineering approaches merits a state sponsored monopoly.
What I am trying to get at here is that there are three tracks to patent reform. The first is write new rules to make the patent system more relevant to the modern economy. The second is to abolish patents altogether. The third is to make the USPTO implement the same longstanding principles that other PTOs have always enforced and the USPTO did a good job of from about 1930 up till the 1980s.
I think that the first track is certainly necessary, some changes are needed. But this is going to take a lot of time, will be very complex and will require a lot of political capital. The second track ain't going to happen. The third track is immediately implementable and gets 80% or more of what the industry desperately needs.
At present the patent system is not only failing the software provider, it is also failing the legitimate inventor with a legitimate, defensible invention.
I have chased net.NAZIs, not so much for their content as the spam. Back in the early 90s, before Canter and Segal found the net they were blasting holocaust denial into every newsgroup they could find.
After a short while I decided that it was pretty counter productive. The nazis wanted to be booted off Usenet so they could whine 'censorship'. Thats why Irving went to Austria, he wanted to be made a martyr, at least up to the point he went to prison when I think he got buyers remorse.
I did a piece on this on my blog if folk are interested in the origins of all this. The punchline being that censoring the net.nazis is like feeding trolls.
The modern holocaust denial movement only got started after the Canadians went after Zundel and Irving brought out 'hitler's war'. Most of the 'documents' that have circulated since were produced (i.e. fabricated) for that trial.
I don't think that any but the rawest, most naive recruits beleive a word of the holocaust denial crap, they love Hitler precisely because they know it is all true. The whole point in promoting it is to get censored.
No, GnuPG is not the same as PGP. GnuPG was in fact developed to replace PGP, both because PGP is covered by a non-commercial use only license, and (probably) because it by default incorporates the patented IDEA algorithm. Yes, PGP Freeware and GPG are both free and interoperable, but they are not the same thing.
The full story is a bit more complex. The original PGP used a lot of patented stuff only Phil Z. did not bother to get a license for any of it. This led Jim Bizdos to complain about the patent infringement which led to Louis Freeh's FBI persecuting Phil. That is why folk found the idea that Bizdos was behing PGP, he almost had Phil Z. sent to jail for distributing it (although in fairness to Jim he did not anticipate Freeh persuing the case in the way he did and his objective was to stop Phil infringing his patent not send him to jail.)
The PGP code was rewritten quite a few times for a number of reasons. MIT brought out a legal version that used the non-commercial use license from MIT. The MIT portions were open source but the RSAREF part was encumbered.
GPG started as an attempt to develop an entirely unencumbered version of PGP after the Diffie Hellman patent expired in 97. The IDEA algorithm would have been dropped even if it had not been patented as it had been compromised by then. A second implementation was in any case required to get OpenPGP accepted as an IETF standard.
Around the same time Phil Z. was starting PGP inc and wanted to use PGP as the company name. Otherwise the FSF version would have probably been called something like GnuPGP.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people attending the course would not know that you have to prepare for DEFCON by imaging your hard drive, then reimage the machine and flash the BIOS when you return. When I go to BlackHat I draw an old machine that has been decomissioned.
$4,300 is the going rate for training, if anything slightly low. You can find all the information on the Web but only if you know what to look for.
Are engaded in a corrupt, shameful use of their time? Yes absolutely.
The UK deployed an anti-anti-balistic misslile system in the 70s called Chevalene. It worked by ejecting several hundred mylar ballons, one of which enclosed the actual live warhead. The system deployed is incapable of defeating that level of countermeasure even if it worked.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to spot a fraudulent test. The only time the system was 'tested' with decoys there were only two decoys and the missile was preprogramed to shoot the middle target.
This is an asymmetric challenge. The game is much easier for the attacker than the defender. The opposition can get access to technology that is way ahead of the best 1980s US technology without difficulty.
Oh yes?.
Which is of course the origin.
When this started the biggest domain on the net was .mil. Most of .mil was not visible to the rest of the Internet. The next biggest was .edu.
The reason for separating off .com was because that traffic could not travel over the NSF backbone. The country codes were an afterthought.
If it was all to be done over there would be one master registry with no country codes, everything would be a tld.
But it wont de done over and can't. Instead what is gradually happening is that .com is becomming the defacto tld as searches default against it.
Because porn is so hard to find on the Internet.
So you are arguing that the whole idea of a missile defense program is bogus, that it can never work and that we should therefore pay a hundred billion dollars for one that does not work because it could not be expected to work?
Why is anyone going to care about a weapon system everyone knows is a dud anyway?
The system has never once demonstrated that it works, every single test has either failed outright or been rigged. The only reason the program exists at all is to hand out taxpayer money to campaign contributors.
Those sound like they are revisions and repacakging of existing code rather than a completely new application. Microsoft has done plenty of side bars over the years. Sync center and photo gallery type tools have been distributed as part of the powertoy for years.
The point I was making was that I don't see any initiatives in Longhorn where I would expect the coding team to start off from a completely clean slate. If they had I am certain they would have used C#, thats what most Microsofties use as a matter of choice, they were writing C# code before the compilers were even available outside Microsoft.
With respect to the claim that .NET is a clone of the Java VM, that is completely untrue. Gosling did not invent the idea of a VM and would never make such a silly claim. The USCD p-system is well known to everyone in that field. The .NET model is not based on the Java VM, nor is it a clone of it, the .NET model is actually a different concept that also has a long line of prior art. The CLI code is actually based on the intermediate representation used by all the Microsoft compilers. This is a very common compiler architecture, GCC uses it and it was not the first by a long way.
The only 'innovation' in the .NET CLI is that it is designed to allow the final stage of the compilation to be performed at installation time or at run time. Again there are 20 year old precedents but this idea was really not a very practical one until relatively recently
The antecedents of .NET are really the work done at Digital in the late 80s when they were managing the transition from VAX to Alpha. This is not at all suprising given the number of ex-DEC people working in Redmond.
Unlike Java the CLI code is not directly executable (or at least not designed to be). A lot of the information is non-executable identity hints that is lost in a pure VM (as Java is re-engineered to optimize the just in time compilation mode it will look more like CLI). The result is that CLI code does not in theory suffer any penalty as a result of the CLI processing step. The 'inefficiency' in .NET comes from the use of implicit garbage collection rather than requiring the programmer to handle GC and the security mechanisms built in to make the code safe, prevent privillege boosting etc.
The Vista engineers have taken a slightly different tack. Intead of using .NET to provide fine grained security protections they worked out what they need most and implemnted that in the O/S core.
Vista does not provide any new applications though. The main changes are deep in the O/S at the level where folk used to argue over high level language vs assembler. The user interface eye candy is expensive enough in cycles without using a set of relatively new compilers.
Longhorn has been in development for 6 years now. The last thing Microsoft needed to do was to introduce another delay for any reason.
Today managed code is slower than the best optimized C. It is on a par with average quality code. There was a time when the same was true of C code vs assembler. Today the number of coders who can produce code that is faster than compiler generated is pretty small and even they can't keep it up for very long. I don't think it will be long before the same is true of CLI code, particularly if the code is optimized for the platform at install time.
Unlike Java CLI code has exactly the same information available as the standard microsoft C++ compiler, plus it knows the exact target processor. The only thing that dings managed code performance wise is having the garbage collector running.
This is not far from the point. The Internet was designed to serve the university research community. It is hardly unexpected if less than 100% of US households are interested in the result.
The 'slow' rate of growth is entirely expected. The telephone system grew rapidly in the 30s through the 60s then 'growth' hit a wall and the increase in the number of subscribers was almost entirely due to old non subscribers passing away and a near 100% uptake rate amongst people in their 20s.
If you look at the figures the number of non Internet households is only 34%. The number of non-subscribers is only 29%. Multiply the two figures together and the proportion of the population that has not adopted the net that is most likely to is only 10%. 1% growth per year is about what you would expect at that point - and it is going to be comming almost entirely from the aging effect.
This has been the case for several years now.
The other effect that is not mentioned here is the number of people who have broadband at work but don't want to pay for or cannot get broadband at home. If I could not get broadband at home I would really not want to pay for dialup. I would probably go to Panera to surf instead.
The inheritance tax in the US only starts at $2 million. So I get the feeling that either your anecdote is untrue or you are leaving out some pretty important information about the size of the estate.
If the kid could not afford to pay inheritance taxes there would be no way they could afford a fair property tax on a $2 million house. It probably happens on occasion but nobody has yet identified a real case of the other popular anecdote where a family has been forced to sell the family farm as a result of death duties. There are plenty of cases in Colorado where folk inherit a small, uneconomic farm which they promptly sell to a property developer for several millions but taxes are not the principle cause.
This country is currently in the middle of a very expensive war, there is a massive budget deficit. 42% of taxes go to pay for the military directly or indirectly. Only about 15% of the budget is discretionary spending. An inheritance tax is a lot less unfair and a lot less burdensome on the economy as a whole than payroll taxes.
Information goods are not rival goods. I do not see how that changes the moral issue in the slightest.
If you look at the debates in Congress over copyright you will see this type of behavior described as outright theft. The fact that it is called something else in the criminal code is irrelevant. Theft is refered to as 'fraud', 'conversion' and numerous other terms.
I don't think the objection here is to the incorrect use of the legal term. I think that what is really objected to is the assertion that taking material without paying for it is morally wrong and should be considered a crime.
If you take something that belongs to someone else without intending to pay them for it that is theft.
Some uses of copyright material are considered to be fair use. Reasonable non-commercial sharing is not theft. But what is going on here is people trading copyright material they have access to in return for free access to other copyright material.
Here we agree on something. As I pointed out earlier today the legislative manipulations of RIAA and Disney were both wrong and counterproductive.
They were wrong in the first place because the RIAA tried to steal copyrights from its own artists by having Congress declare them to be 'works for hire'. Disney stole copyright works from the public domain.
These actions were wrong morally and they were wrong tactically. It is much harder to convince people that stealling is wrong when you are stealling yourself.
I think that the DVD zone system is foolish for the exact same reason. First it is wrong because the real purpose of the zone system is to support illegal differential pricing schemes. Once you have cheated the public by overcharging for the product it is going to be much harder to convince them that stealling content off bitorrent is wrong.
Off course people are very popular when they are giving away other people's property. The Kray twins were very popular in London's East End, Buch Cassidy, Jessie James and his gang were all pretty popular with the people who benefited from their generosity. And you will find the exact same rationalizations at work in the comments written at the time, the real criminals are the railway bosses etc etc.
Neither do you.
If you don't like file sharing, don't do it. But some of us feel entitled, morally and legally, to share culture with our neighbours, and we will exercise that freedom.
Ah you are not stealling from the copyright owner who paid to create the material. You are engaging in the noble cause of freedom and culture.
What you seem to be saying here is that we should each amuse ourselves in our own way.
Fine, you amuse yourself by stealing from others and I will amuse myself by bringing the law down on you and people like you.
If you think that the most important political issue facing the world today is your right to take what does not belong to you without paying for it I really do pity you.
You appear to intend permanently depriving the copyright holder of the payment that they would expect to receive for their services.
From a moral perspective this is plain theft. You know you are taking something that does not belong to you.
But you don't want to call it theft because you don't want to think of yourself as a theif. So you call it other things, you insist on calling it 'copyright infringement'.
That is exactly the type of thinking that led the Bush administration to Abu Graihb. They didn't want to think of themselves as torturers so they had a corrupt lawyer provide them with a convenient definition of torture.
Sweedish law has said nothing about the matter to date. You are certainly not a Sweedish lawyer.
From a moral perspective this is theft. The Sweedish law may have a defect that means that this particular form of facilitating theft is not currently covered. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this represents a concious decision of the Sweedish lawmakers.
I think it was pretty obvious in my post that what I was saying is that Slashdot is not noted for the accuracy of its legal advice, particularly where rationalizations for stealing copyright material is concerned.
Absent a favorable decision from the Sweedish courts the only conclusion that can be made at this point is that Sweedish law moves slowly.
That is the most bizare perversion of free market theology ever.
The movie will in effect face competition from the 'free' pirated version of itself.
The site is engaged in theft, they are not performing the theft themselves they are helping others to steal. Sure that makes them popular with the beneficiaries of the theft but it does not make what they do right.
A person who sells spam tools to a spammer is engaged in spamming even if they never use the tool themselves. A fence who receives stolen goods is engaged in theft even though someone else does the actual stealling.
Sure you can rationalize a set of values where taking a movie off bittorrent is different from stealling a DVD off the shelf of a store. But the reason people have moderated my original comment down as troll even though it is nothing of the kind is because they know deep down that what I am saying here is correct and they don't like to hear it.
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content. The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
It is not illegal (Again, according to their web page) to host files that *point* to the content. Untill that changes in their country, they will stay alive (also, so long as they can keep their bills paid, that would help... :) )
Seems like you were not here for the Napster affair then. During the Napster affair there was no shortage of people flaming about how the service was obviously 100% legal. After the company folded it turned out that they had never received even an internal opinion to the effect that the service was legal.
Turns out that the appeals court that gave Napster a stay of execution only did so so that the company could stay around long enough for them to make a landmark ruling on Internet copyright.
Regardless of the rationalization there is no difference taking content this way and going to a store and stealing a CD or DVD.
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.
Irving changes his story depending on his audience. He has no trouble making contradictory statements. He removed all references to the holocaust in in the self published second edition of Hitler's war.
He is also an opportunist who makes use of common misperceptions claiming them as evidence of deliberate fraud. There are certainly some Jews who have attempted to claim that only Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. They are a small minority and do not include any of the well known NAZI hunters. This is the main reason for uncertainty in the number of Jews Hitler murdered, there are reasonably good figures for number of people murdered, tracking down the category is harder. Once people got to the camps they were all non-people.
Irving's figure of 50% is low unless you add in prisoners of war murdered by the NAZIs. He is a practiced liar as the court record demonstrates.
The root of the problem here is that the USPTO definition of 'obvious' is not the usual understanding of the term. I did an essay about this recently
In particular the USPTO thinks that taking an obvious idea and taking the obvious to any idiot step of doing it on the Internet using standard engineering approaches merits a state sponsored monopoly.
What I am trying to get at here is that there are three tracks to patent reform. The first is write new rules to make the patent system more relevant to the modern economy. The second is to abolish patents altogether. The third is to make the USPTO implement the same longstanding principles that other PTOs have always enforced and the USPTO did a good job of from about 1930 up till the 1980s.
I think that the first track is certainly necessary, some changes are needed. But this is going to take a lot of time, will be very complex and will require a lot of political capital. The second track ain't going to happen. The third track is immediately implementable and gets 80% or more of what the industry desperately needs.
At present the patent system is not only failing the software provider, it is also failing the legitimate inventor with a legitimate, defensible invention.
After a short while I decided that it was pretty counter productive. The nazis wanted to be booted off Usenet so they could whine 'censorship'. Thats why Irving went to Austria, he wanted to be made a martyr, at least up to the point he went to prison when I think he got buyers remorse.
I did a piece on this on my blog if folk are interested in the origins of all this. The punchline being that censoring the net.nazis is like feeding trolls.
The modern holocaust denial movement only got started after the Canadians went after Zundel and Irving brought out 'hitler's war'. Most of the 'documents' that have circulated since were produced (i.e. fabricated) for that trial.
I don't think that any but the rawest, most naive recruits beleive a word of the holocaust denial crap, they love Hitler precisely because they know it is all true. The whole point in promoting it is to get censored.
The full story is a bit more complex. The original PGP used a lot of patented stuff only Phil Z. did not bother to get a license for any of it. This led Jim Bizdos to complain about the patent infringement which led to Louis Freeh's FBI persecuting Phil. That is why folk found the idea that Bizdos was behing PGP, he almost had Phil Z. sent to jail for distributing it (although in fairness to Jim he did not anticipate Freeh persuing the case in the way he did and his objective was to stop Phil infringing his patent not send him to jail.)
The PGP code was rewritten quite a few times for a number of reasons. MIT brought out a legal version that used the non-commercial use license from MIT. The MIT portions were open source but the RSAREF part was encumbered.
GPG started as an attempt to develop an entirely unencumbered version of PGP after the Diffie Hellman patent expired in 97. The IDEA algorithm would have been dropped even if it had not been patented as it had been compromised by then. A second implementation was in any case required to get OpenPGP accepted as an IETF standard.
Around the same time Phil Z. was starting PGP inc and wanted to use PGP as the company name. Otherwise the FSF version would have probably been called something like GnuPGP.