They could do it in the opposite order (come out with a good security system, and then give the FBI the skeleton key that only works on phones that haven't yet been updated to the new system). I would be much happier with Apple if they did this than if they didn't.
If it is possible for Apple to "create a backdoor" after the fact, then that itself is a back door. The FBI wants apple to release a version of it's OS that can disable certain security features and push that update out to the terrorist's phone without any confirmation from the (now deceased) user. Apple seems to confirm that this is indeed possible and has said that it would be dangerous to even create this version of it's OS because it might fall into the wrong hands and be abused. I would argue that it is already in the wrong hands, because it is in the hands of Apple, and even if Apple fights the FBI, they may be forced by a court to cooperate.
What Apple *should* do (and should have already done), is to create a security system that they would not have the ability to help the FBI hack into. They have already indicated they are working on this.
The IOS security is already broken. The only thing keeping the FBI from cracking it, is their own incompetence, and Apple's limited will to challenge the government. I doubt many people at Apple are willing to go to jail over this (nor should they be).
My advice to Apple, is to help the FBI hack into this phone, and come out with a real security system that is actually secure.
Humans don't have good reaction time, so they develop all these strategies to mitigate negative consequences of having bad reaction time (like keeping very large spaces between cars, driving slow, etc), but if you can have split second reaction times, it opens up the possibility of having cars be closer together and driving faster, which would be a huge benefit in terms of getting a giant city full of people where they need to go more quickly.
Depending on how you define "the elderly" I think just about anybody (teenagers included) would be safer drivers by comparison.
Also, even if reaction time isn't so important in terms of preventing the sort of accidents that humans can typically prevent through vigilance. There are many accidents that are not preventable by humans, like getting t-boned in an intersection, or a car swerving into oncoming traffic. In these scenarios, having millisecond or microsecond reaction times can drastically reduce the deadliness of an accident or prevent it altogether. Also, even the best drivers have lapses in their vigilance. Computers don't panic, or get tired or distracted.
There is a reason why we have computers guiding spaceships and missiles.
We aren't talking about cars. We are talking about autonomous cars. The car part of an autonomous car is just a normal car. The autonomous part is a bunch of sensors and a computer to process the information and control the car part. An autonomous car eventually will not cost much more than a normal car, because it's just a car + a computer.
Given that poor people today can afford cars and cell phones, I am pretty sure the poor people of tomorrow will be able to afford autonomous cars, but they won't need to because simply using them will be cheaper than buying them.
And cars do come down in price. It's called depreciation. I just sold my old car to my brother in law for $1700. You don't need to be able to afford a brand new autonomous car to own an autonomous car.
Re: "narrow personal definition of a right" I agree that is narrow, but not that it is personal.:-) Meaning that I hold a concept of rights that is more Enlightment / Individualist rather than Collectivist.
By personal, I mean that there is no universally agreed upon model of what rights are and where they are derived and how they should be presented (positive vs. negative or, of complimentary rights, etc).
Re right to murder - now we're getting into a matter of semantics that is very difficult to get into in a setting such as this (quick posts as opposed to lengthy conversations or extensive, elaborate explanations. Let it be said that in my "narrow personal definition" of a right I make a distinction between their power to act without consequences to right.
Exactly. So the right to murder would be the ability to legally murder people (i.e. without legal consequence). This would not stop another private citizen from exercising their right to murder you. Like freedom of speech it only protects you from state consequences of your speech.
What is convincing is the concept that *I* have a right over my own body (not an 18thC idea) as well as my ideas.
To me this doesn't explain anything about where rights come from, anymore than explaining where consciousness comes from by saying "I have a soul because I find the concept that I have a soul convincing".
Government is there to enforce the social contract - "I promise not to kill you and take your stuff if you promise not to kill me and take mine."
I agree. But I also think that it is the enforcement of this contract that causes these rights to manifest. I think we could have chosen a different social contract and different rights would have manifested. I don't think there are any rights that transcend a government's willingness to uphold them. Is there the right to life under the sea? I would say no, because there is no King Triton prosecuting undersea murders.
Government did not create my ideas, did not "breathe life into me" (an 18th C phrasing - not mine). It did not give me my rights but it certainly can prevent me from exercising my right: freedom of conscience - called religion back when; freedom of speech, etc...M
No government did not create the concept of rights. But it is nonetheless where rights come from. If you ask where does a Boeing 737 come from. One answer might be that it came from Boeing engineers and visionaries. Another answer would be that it comes from the Boeing factory, and the raw materials came from wherever they came from. Obviously human beings created the concept of rights. I am saying that governments are rights factories (where rights come from in a literal sense).
We wouldn't have commercial airliners without engineers, we also wouldn't have them without the factories (or facilities where they are actually produced). By the same token, rights would just be an abstract concept without governments to make them a reality.
I think you have a very narrow personal definition of what a right is, and that is limiting your ability to have a conversation that doesn't fall within your strict definition.
The right to life is not in opposition to the right to murder. There has never been a right to murder another.
The right to murder has certainly existed for various individuals throughout history. They were allowed to kill people as they saw fit according to the laws of their lands. You might argue that while their laws allowed them to murder, they still did not have the "right" to murder.
I am quite familiar with the concepts of positive and negative rights, so I really don't need you to keep trying to explain them to me. In fact the concepts of positive and negative rights fits quite well into my model of complimentary rights (i.e. where one is positive and one is negative).
You seem to be someone who is of the opinion that only positive rights are legitimate. Fine. You are free to have that opinion, and you have a lot of company. And in general I agree that positive rights tend to be the better choice when deciding which side of the dichotomy we want. But what you seem to be denying is that the dichotomy even exists.
Where does the right to life come from? I suspect I know what your answer will be, but I'll let you answer for yourself. My answer is that it comes from the government's laws against murder and it's prosecution of crimes that violate these laws. This then becomes a right that requires government action to manifest, blurring the line between positive and negative rights a little.
I don't believe in the abstract concept of self evident rights bestowed by our creator. I find this to be a pretty lazy explanation that creates a convenient yet flawed oversimplification.
This doesn't seem like an argument against autonomous vehicles so much as it is an argument for against leaving small children unattended in general. There is an age when children are allowed to be on their own (I think I was 11), and an age where they aren't. In the bus example, you could have a person watching the children on the autonomous bus much more diligently than a bus driver ever could.
The old
I don't think it's a good idea to assume that the elderly of the future will have the same habits as the elderly of the present. Current elderly people may like to kill time riding on a bus and talking to people. Future elderly people may have technologies (i.e. internet, exoskeletons, etc) that allow them to have a more fulfilling life with more meaningful connections as compared with perpetually riding a bus and striking up conversations.
For example I saw a news story of a website that was pairing up elderly people from country A who just want to talk with people to youngsters from country B trying to become more proficient in language A. The elderly people get to have conversations with people who actually want to have a conversation. The young people get to have a real interactive lesson in conversation in a foreign language that is going to be far better than listening to a tape or reading a book. And both parties get to learn about different people and cultures.
The autonomous car isn't going to make traffic, construction, nor other idiot drivers magically disappear, so I'd say this is a hopeful but doubtful claim.
Computers did not make tedious arithmetic computations disappear completely, but they did a pretty damn good job.
With autonomous cars, you have a lot of advantages. You can have cars drive closer together as they will have better reaction times. You will have fewer accidents. You will have cars that can coordinate with each other. Maybe we won't need traffic lights anymore. There may actually be more "traffic" in the sense that there is a higher rate of cars/time or people/time, but there won't be as much "traffic" (i.e. congestion).
Congestion is is due to high traffic, but also inefficiencies in the way people drive as individuals and as a group.
As more and more labor is automated, a higher percentage of jobs will no longer require "going" to work every morning (e.g. telecommuting). We may even be able to afford fewer work days. My job recently cut back to 9 work days every 2 weeks. With more automation, we could see a higher leisure:work ratio overall (e.g. 36 hour work week).
And most importantly, we will no doubt have autonomous cars that run on renewable energy, where having more of them will not represent the same environmental impact compared to the car situation in the 20th (and early 21st) century. So even though I think we will be driving less, even if we drove more, it will not be as bad fro the environment.
The same thing happened with the advent of computers. When computers came out, they made a lot of human jobs obsolete. The glut of unemployment drove down wages, and nobody but the very rich could afford the computers. To this very day, only the top 1% own computers.
Everything you've just said is irrelevant to the singular point I am reiterating, which is that for every right that is granted a complimentary right is removed. This is not a claim about any specific laws in any specific countries.
It is certainly common for countries to place their own combination of restrictions on free speech as they see fit. But nearly everyone views these as restrictions on free speech (albeit necessary restrictions). It would be silly to treat the United States version of freedom of speech as the benchmark, and treat all deviations from this benchmark as added restrictions or extraneous rights from the gold standard definition for freedom of speech. Laws can change. In fact the UN has urged members of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to decriminalize libel.
Freedom of Speech does not, and never has, applied to saying untruths about a specific individual (slander). That is outside the scope of the definition of Freedom of Speech.
Freedom of speech wasn't invented by the United States and it is a concept that transcends US law.
There was probably a time when people said that the constitution did not, and never has applied to slaves, and it was true, until it wasn't. Eventually people recognized that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the morals they wanted to embody. I believe that eventually the same thing will happen (and is starting to happen) with defamation laws.
But all this is besides my point that rights are complimentary. The granting of every right is the rejection of it's counterpart. Sometimes it is clear which rights we want (e.g. the right to life vs. the right to murder), but sometimes it isn't so clear (e.g. the right to free speech vs. right to not be slandered). This is a perfectly legitimate and widely accepted rights model.
The DMCA does not prohibit reverse engineering. It prohibits circumventing a copy protection system. And yes I think you can reverse engineer software if you did not specifically agree not to.
Except for anybody who knows that the definition of "enslaved" is precisely about choice and if you remove freedom of choice then you are no longer enslaved [oxforddictionaries.com]. The "choice" to be enslaved is directly contradictory to the concept of slavery.
That's only true if you can't wrap your head around the idea of choosing to limit your own choices.
Right, and I have the freedom to choose whether I want to go there or not, that is exactly the scenario you laid out and it is absolutely not slavery because I have choice.
A person could choose to go to a place that has debtors prisons and choose to rack up a huge debt, and be forced into a slave labor camp. Despite the fact that this person decided to become a slave, they are a slave who no longer has freedoms nonetheless.
Except that isn't what we are talking about because in terms of use of proprietary software you always have the freedom of choice to stop being under those conditions at any point you like, because you are not a "slave".
Yeah you already said that, and I said, there are some conditions in software licenses that you can not unagree to.
I like that I have the freedom to visit a museum despite not having the freedom to smash the place up when I'm there and I also like that I have the freedom to leave and go somewhere else should I feel the need to smash something up.
I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said. The fact that you bring up this seemingly irrelevant example, makes me feel liek you aen;t understanding what I am saying.
You have to be extremely intellectually dishonest or extremely stupid to think that is in any way anything like "slavery".
Or maybe you just lack the comprehension necessary to understand what I am saying.
So you think you can reverse engineer the software so long as you don't agree to the license?
According to who? The license or the law?
But it isn't, that's why it's not analagous to slavery because in order for it to be you need to redefine slavery to mean you have a choice about whether you want to be a slave or not.
That's definitely not true. Nearly all cars have steering wheels. That doesn't mean a car is defined by a having a steering steering wheel. It doesn't mean that a car without a steering wheel is redefining what a car is. It shouldn't be that hard to imagine a scenario where a person makes a choice to be enslaved.
I have control of my freedoms, I have all the choice, that is the complete opposite of slavery. You think I feel enslaved just because I can't come into your house and just pee all over your walls? I - like most people - are quite happy to restrict my freedom to do that, to suggest this is anything even close to slavery is just complete idiocy.
I really don't see how this statement has anything to do with anything I've said.
In some places you don't have control over *all* your freedoms. In some places you are prevented from entering into a contract where you enslave yourself (e.g. like in the US). This is maybe a good freedom to restrict, as sacrificing this freedom will ensure the preservation of your other freedoms, but it is nonetheless a freedom that is denied to you.
Denying a person the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot may help to preserve other freedoms that person may have (e.g. freedom to walk), but it is nonetheless a restriction on that persons freedom.
Of course you can. You can't use the software without agreeing to its license stipulations, if you no longer agree you no longer use it.
That's may be true for some conditions. Other conditions might promises not to reverse engineer the software. I don't think this means that you are allowed by the license to reverse engineer the software once you stop using it.
Using proprietary software - or the road for that matter - under the specified licensing conditions is a choice, slavery is not.
Historically, slavery, for the vast majority of people, has not been a choice (neither entering nor exiting it). That doesn't mean it can't be a choice. There are no doubt people who makes decisions for various reasons that they know for whatever reason will lead to their enslavement. There are also probably people who forego the opportunity to become freed from slavery for various reasons.
This historical aspect of slavery rarely involving choice, is not the focus of my analogy.
If you really can't let it go, then try to imagine some other kind of slavery like thing that involves the freedom to restrict your own freedoms.
This is slightly flawed thinking. What those odds mean is that, when dealing with large numbers, you expect the average distribution of results to be 1 for every million. However, it makes no guarantee that there will be exactly 1 incident per million.
I really don't see where I made the claim you are attributing to me either explicitly or implicitly.
So, back to the topic, if there is a 1-in-700 quintillion chance of having an Earth, then it may not be likely we have 1, 2 or even 100 of them - but it doesn't mean it is impossible
The article said:
His research indicates that, from a purely statistical standpoint, Earth perhaps shouldn’t exist.
This implies that the even though the earth is one of 700-quintillion planets it's odds of existing are perhaps lower than 1 in 700quintillion. If the odds of an earth like planet were 1 in 700-quintillion, aside from being an amazing coincidence, we would expect 1 earth in every iteration of our universe on average, and in that case it probably should exist. The chances of if not existing are still pretty good, they are ((x-1)/x)^x where x is 700-quintillion or ~ 37%, leaving the odds of at least 1 earth at ~63%
In this example slavery is not analogous to the use of proprietary software, it's analogous to agreeing to the license of proprietary software, which you can't unagree to.
Sounds more like you're arguing that bondage should be illegal because it allows people to enter and exit "slavery" as they see fit.
I am arguing is that it's a semantic debate, and neither side is right or wrong.
You can also show that your claim was satire, and that no reasonable person could mistake your claim to be serious. For example, you can say that Donald Trump's father was an orangutan. That said, I think slander laws are pretty stupid, and I don't think the benefit we gain from them is worth the diminished state of our freedom of speech.
I am just trying to better explain slashpings claim, which you did not seem to understand. Slander laws are a good example of the complimentary nature of freedoms. Slander laws grant a limited freedom to silence people (when they are being slanderous), thereby reducing "the freedom of speech" to "the freedom of non-slanderous speech".
It's not like Stallman makes no sense. Imagine 2 societies. Society A in which you are free to enter into any contract want, and society B which is exactly like Society A except that contracts that involve slavery are not legal. Which society has more freedom?
Society A provides the additional freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society A is more free.
Society B lacks the freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society B is more free.
Which of these statements is true? It's just a pointless semantic debate that depends on your personal definition of a "free society". Is agreeing to use commercial software similar selling yourself into slavery? Not really, but I think it's still an appropriate analogy even if the magnitude of the consequences are not comparable.
You can have freedom of speech, but that is mutually exclusive with the freedom to silence people. By granting freedom of speech, you are implicitly removing the freedom to silence people, and vice versa.
When one refers to a "1 in a million chance" they are not implying that they actually tried something 1 million times and it only worked once. They are implying that *if* they would have tried something 1 million times it would have only worked once. So if you win the lottery jackpot, your winning ticket was still "1 in 300 million" regardless of how many other tickets you bought or how many exist.
The title of the article is "Earth may be a 1-in-700 quintillion kind of place", but the article cites the 700-quintillion number as the total number of planets, and then goes on to say that according to the scientist's calculations, the earth should probably not exist (i.e. the odds of an earth like planet are even lower than 1 in 700-quintillion). So what are the odds that earth should exist? Who knows, it's not even mentioned.
This would be like if I reported on some guy winning the powerball and said "This guy bought 100 lottery tickets and one of the tickets won the jackpot. That was an amazingly improbable event that happened, making the ticket a "1 in a hundred kind of ticket.""
I have no idea if the statistical analysis done by this scientists is good or bad. But all I ask is that it is presented in a way that is coherent.
Slashdot Mirror
They could do it in the opposite order (come out with a good security system, and then give the FBI the skeleton key that only works on phones that haven't yet been updated to the new system). I would be much happier with Apple if they did this than if they didn't.
If it is possible for Apple to "create a backdoor" after the fact, then that itself is a back door. The FBI wants apple to release a version of it's OS that can disable certain security features and push that update out to the terrorist's phone without any confirmation from the (now deceased) user. Apple seems to confirm that this is indeed possible and has said that it would be dangerous to even create this version of it's OS because it might fall into the wrong hands and be abused. I would argue that it is already in the wrong hands, because it is in the hands of Apple, and even if Apple fights the FBI, they may be forced by a court to cooperate.
What Apple *should* do (and should have already done), is to create a security system that they would not have the ability to help the FBI hack into. They have already indicated they are working on this.
The IOS security is already broken. The only thing keeping the FBI from cracking it, is their own incompetence, and Apple's limited will to challenge the government. I doubt many people at Apple are willing to go to jail over this (nor should they be).
My advice to Apple, is to help the FBI hack into this phone, and come out with a real security system that is actually secure.
Humans don't have good reaction time, so they develop all these strategies to mitigate negative consequences of having bad reaction time (like keeping very large spaces between cars, driving slow, etc), but if you can have split second reaction times, it opens up the possibility of having cars be closer together and driving faster, which would be a huge benefit in terms of getting a giant city full of people where they need to go more quickly.
Depending on how you define "the elderly" I think just about anybody (teenagers included) would be safer drivers by comparison.
Also, even if reaction time isn't so important in terms of preventing the sort of accidents that humans can typically prevent through vigilance. There are many accidents that are not preventable by humans, like getting t-boned in an intersection, or a car swerving into oncoming traffic. In these scenarios, having millisecond or microsecond reaction times can drastically reduce the deadliness of an accident or prevent it altogether. Also, even the best drivers have lapses in their vigilance. Computers don't panic, or get tired or distracted.
There is a reason why we have computers guiding spaceships and missiles.
We aren't talking about cars. We are talking about autonomous cars. The car part of an autonomous car is just a normal car. The autonomous part is a bunch of sensors and a computer to process the information and control the car part. An autonomous car eventually will not cost much more than a normal car, because it's just a car + a computer.
Given that poor people today can afford cars and cell phones, I am pretty sure the poor people of tomorrow will be able to afford autonomous cars, but they won't need to because simply using them will be cheaper than buying them.
And cars do come down in price. It's called depreciation. I just sold my old car to my brother in law for $1700. You don't need to be able to afford a brand new autonomous car to own an autonomous car.
BTW I accidentally switched positive and negative rights. Everything else I still stand by.
Re: "narrow personal definition of a right" I agree that is narrow, but not that it is personal. :-) Meaning that I hold a concept of rights that is more Enlightment / Individualist rather than Collectivist.
By personal, I mean that there is no universally agreed upon model of what rights are and where they are derived and how they should be presented (positive vs. negative or, of complimentary rights, etc).
Re right to murder - now we're getting into a matter of semantics that is very difficult to get into in a setting such as this (quick posts as opposed to lengthy conversations or extensive, elaborate explanations. Let it be said that in my "narrow personal definition" of a right I make a distinction between their power to act without consequences to right.
Exactly. So the right to murder would be the ability to legally murder people (i.e. without legal consequence). This would not stop another private citizen from exercising their right to murder you. Like freedom of speech it only protects you from state consequences of your speech.
What is convincing is the concept that *I* have a right over my own body (not an 18thC idea) as well as my ideas.
To me this doesn't explain anything about where rights come from, anymore than explaining where consciousness comes from by saying "I have a soul because I find the concept that I have a soul convincing".
Government is there to enforce the social contract - "I promise not to kill you and take your stuff if you promise not to kill me and take mine."
I agree. But I also think that it is the enforcement of this contract that causes these rights to manifest. I think we could have chosen a different social contract and different rights would have manifested. I don't think there are any rights that transcend a government's willingness to uphold them. Is there the right to life under the sea? I would say no, because there is no King Triton prosecuting undersea murders.
Government did not create my ideas, did not "breathe life into me" (an 18th C phrasing - not mine). It did not give me my rights but it certainly can prevent me from exercising my right: freedom of conscience - called religion back when; freedom of speech, etc...M
No government did not create the concept of rights. But it is nonetheless where rights come from. If you ask where does a Boeing 737 come from. One answer might be that it came from Boeing engineers and visionaries. Another answer would be that it comes from the Boeing factory, and the raw materials came from wherever they came from. Obviously human beings created the concept of rights. I am saying that governments are rights factories (where rights come from in a literal sense).
We wouldn't have commercial airliners without engineers, we also wouldn't have them without the factories (or facilities where they are actually produced). By the same token, rights would just be an abstract concept without governments to make them a reality.
I think you have a very narrow personal definition of what a right is, and that is limiting your ability to have a conversation that doesn't fall within your strict definition.
The right to life is not in opposition to the right to murder. There has never been a right to murder another.
The right to murder has certainly existed for various individuals throughout history. They were allowed to kill people as they saw fit according to the laws of their lands. You might argue that while their laws allowed them to murder, they still did not have the "right" to murder.
I am quite familiar with the concepts of positive and negative rights, so I really don't need you to keep trying to explain them to me. In fact the concepts of positive and negative rights fits quite well into my model of complimentary rights (i.e. where one is positive and one is negative).
You seem to be someone who is of the opinion that only positive rights are legitimate. Fine. You are free to have that opinion, and you have a lot of company. And in general I agree that positive rights tend to be the better choice when deciding which side of the dichotomy we want. But what you seem to be denying is that the dichotomy even exists.
Where does the right to life come from? I suspect I know what your answer will be, but I'll let you answer for yourself. My answer is that it comes from the government's laws against murder and it's prosecution of crimes that violate these laws. This then becomes a right that requires government action to manifest, blurring the line between positive and negative rights a little.
I don't believe in the abstract concept of self evident rights bestowed by our creator. I find this to be a pretty lazy explanation that creates a convenient yet flawed oversimplification.
the young
This doesn't seem like an argument against autonomous vehicles so much as it is an argument for against leaving small children unattended in general. There is an age when children are allowed to be on their own (I think I was 11), and an age where they aren't. In the bus example, you could have a person watching the children on the autonomous bus much more diligently than a bus driver ever could.
The old
I don't think it's a good idea to assume that the elderly of the future will have the same habits as the elderly of the present. Current elderly people may like to kill time riding on a bus and talking to people. Future elderly people may have technologies (i.e. internet, exoskeletons, etc) that allow them to have a more fulfilling life with more meaningful connections as compared with perpetually riding a bus and striking up conversations.
For example I saw a news story of a website that was pairing up elderly people from country A who just want to talk with people to youngsters from country B trying to become more proficient in language A. The elderly people get to have conversations with people who actually want to have a conversation. The young people get to have a real interactive lesson in conversation in a foreign language that is going to be far better than listening to a tape or reading a book. And both parties get to learn about different people and cultures.
The autonomous car isn't going to make traffic, construction, nor other idiot drivers magically disappear, so I'd say this is a hopeful but doubtful claim.
Computers did not make tedious arithmetic computations disappear completely, but they did a pretty damn good job.
With autonomous cars, you have a lot of advantages. You can have cars drive closer together as they will have better reaction times. You will have fewer accidents. You will have cars that can coordinate with each other. Maybe we won't need traffic lights anymore. There may actually be more "traffic" in the sense that there is a higher rate of cars/time or people/time, but there won't be as much "traffic" (i.e. congestion).
Congestion is is due to high traffic, but also inefficiencies in the way people drive as individuals and as a group.
As more and more labor is automated, a higher percentage of jobs will no longer require "going" to work every morning (e.g. telecommuting). We may even be able to afford fewer work days. My job recently cut back to 9 work days every 2 weeks. With more automation, we could see a higher leisure:work ratio overall (e.g. 36 hour work week).
And most importantly, we will no doubt have autonomous cars that run on renewable energy, where having more of them will not represent the same environmental impact compared to the car situation in the 20th (and early 21st) century. So even though I think we will be driving less, even if we drove more, it will not be as bad fro the environment.
The same thing happened with the advent of computers. When computers came out, they made a lot of human jobs obsolete. The glut of unemployment drove down wages, and nobody but the very rich could afford the computers. To this very day, only the top 1% own computers.
Everything you've just said is irrelevant to the singular point I am reiterating, which is that for every right that is granted a complimentary right is removed. This is not a claim about any specific laws in any specific countries.
It is certainly common for countries to place their own combination of restrictions on free speech as they see fit. But nearly everyone views these as restrictions on free speech (albeit necessary restrictions). It would be silly to treat the United States version of freedom of speech as the benchmark, and treat all deviations from this benchmark as added restrictions or extraneous rights from the gold standard definition for freedom of speech. Laws can change. In fact the UN has urged members of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to decriminalize libel.
Freedom of Speech does not, and never has, applied to saying untruths about a specific individual (slander). That is outside the scope of the definition of Freedom of Speech.
Freedom of speech wasn't invented by the United States and it is a concept that transcends US law.
There was probably a time when people said that the constitution did not, and never has applied to slaves, and it was true, until it wasn't. Eventually people recognized that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the morals they wanted to embody. I believe that eventually the same thing will happen (and is starting to happen) with defamation laws.
But all this is besides my point that rights are complimentary. The granting of every right is the rejection of it's counterpart. Sometimes it is clear which rights we want (e.g. the right to life vs. the right to murder), but sometimes it isn't so clear (e.g. the right to free speech vs. right to not be slandered). This is a perfectly legitimate and widely accepted rights model.
The law, DMCA.
The DMCA does not prohibit reverse engineering. It prohibits circumventing a copy protection system. And yes I think you can reverse engineer software if you did not specifically agree not to.
Except for anybody who knows that the definition of "enslaved" is precisely about choice and if you remove freedom of choice then you are no longer enslaved [oxforddictionaries.com]. The "choice" to be enslaved is directly contradictory to the concept of slavery.
That's only true if you can't wrap your head around the idea of choosing to limit your own choices.
Right, and I have the freedom to choose whether I want to go there or not, that is exactly the scenario you laid out and it is absolutely not slavery because I have choice.
A person could choose to go to a place that has debtors prisons and choose to rack up a huge debt, and be forced into a slave labor camp. Despite the fact that this person decided to become a slave, they are a slave who no longer has freedoms nonetheless.
Except that isn't what we are talking about because in terms of use of proprietary software you always have the freedom of choice to stop being under those conditions at any point you like, because you are not a "slave".
Yeah you already said that, and I said, there are some conditions in software licenses that you can not unagree to.
I like that I have the freedom to visit a museum despite not having the freedom to smash the place up when I'm there and I also like that I have the freedom to leave and go somewhere else should I feel the need to smash something up.
I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said. The fact that you bring up this seemingly irrelevant example, makes me feel liek you aen;t understanding what I am saying.
You have to be extremely intellectually dishonest or extremely stupid to think that is in any way anything like "slavery".
Or maybe you just lack the comprehension necessary to understand what I am saying.
So you think you can reverse engineer the software so long as you don't agree to the license?
According to who? The license or the law?
But it isn't, that's why it's not analagous to slavery because in order for it to be you need to redefine slavery to mean you have a choice about whether you want to be a slave or not.
That's definitely not true. Nearly all cars have steering wheels. That doesn't mean a car is defined by a having a steering steering wheel. It doesn't mean that a car without a steering wheel is redefining what a car is. It shouldn't be that hard to imagine a scenario where a person makes a choice to be enslaved.
I have control of my freedoms, I have all the choice, that is the complete opposite of slavery. You think I feel enslaved just because I can't come into your house and just pee all over your walls? I - like most people - are quite happy to restrict my freedom to do that, to suggest this is anything even close to slavery is just complete idiocy.
I really don't see how this statement has anything to do with anything I've said.
In some places you don't have control over *all* your freedoms. In some places you are prevented from entering into a contract where you enslave yourself (e.g. like in the US). This is maybe a good freedom to restrict, as sacrificing this freedom will ensure the preservation of your other freedoms, but it is nonetheless a freedom that is denied to you.
Denying a person the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot may help to preserve other freedoms that person may have (e.g. freedom to walk), but it is nonetheless a restriction on that persons freedom.
Of course you can. You can't use the software without agreeing to its license stipulations, if you no longer agree you no longer use it.
That's may be true for some conditions. Other conditions might promises not to reverse engineer the software. I don't think this means that you are allowed by the license to reverse engineer the software once you stop using it.
Using proprietary software - or the road for that matter - under the specified licensing conditions is a choice, slavery is not.
Historically, slavery, for the vast majority of people, has not been a choice (neither entering nor exiting it). That doesn't mean it can't be a choice. There are no doubt people who makes decisions for various reasons that they know for whatever reason will lead to their enslavement. There are also probably people who forego the opportunity to become freed from slavery for various reasons.
This historical aspect of slavery rarely involving choice, is not the focus of my analogy.
If you really can't let it go, then try to imagine some other kind of slavery like thing that involves the freedom to restrict your own freedoms.
This is slightly flawed thinking. What those odds mean is that, when dealing with large numbers, you expect the average distribution of results to be 1 for every million. However, it makes no guarantee that there will be exactly 1 incident per million.
I really don't see where I made the claim you are attributing to me either explicitly or implicitly.
So, back to the topic, if there is a 1-in-700 quintillion chance of having an Earth, then it may not be likely we have 1, 2 or even 100 of them - but it doesn't mean it is impossible
The article said:
His research indicates that, from a purely statistical standpoint, Earth perhaps shouldn’t exist.
This implies that the even though the earth is one of 700-quintillion planets it's odds of existing are perhaps lower than 1 in 700quintillion. If the odds of an earth like planet were 1 in 700-quintillion, aside from being an amazing coincidence, we would expect 1 earth in every iteration of our universe on average, and in that case it probably should exist. The chances of if not existing are still pretty good, they are ((x-1)/x)^x where x is 700-quintillion or ~ 37%, leaving the odds of at least 1 earth at ~63%
In this example slavery is not analogous to the use of proprietary software, it's analogous to agreeing to the license of proprietary software, which you can't unagree to.
Sounds more like you're arguing that bondage should be illegal because it allows people to enter and exit "slavery" as they see fit.
I am arguing is that it's a semantic debate, and neither side is right or wrong.
I think it's pretty clear that "freedom" means different things to different people. I think "is" means the same thing to everyone except Bill.
You can also show that your claim was satire, and that no reasonable person could mistake your claim to be serious. For example, you can say that Donald Trump's father was an orangutan. That said, I think slander laws are pretty stupid, and I don't think the benefit we gain from them is worth the diminished state of our freedom of speech.
I am just trying to better explain slashpings claim, which you did not seem to understand. Slander laws are a good example of the complimentary nature of freedoms. Slander laws grant a limited freedom to silence people (when they are being slanderous), thereby reducing "the freedom of speech" to "the freedom of non-slanderous speech".
If I may adapt the quote above from Mr. Orwell, I think you just said "Freedom is Licensing Restrictions."
I definitely didn't say that. I said that it's a semantic debate (i.e. rather than a substantive debate).
I presented both sides in order to show that, and I didn't even take a side.
It's not like Stallman makes no sense. Imagine 2 societies. Society A in which you are free to enter into any contract want, and society B which is exactly like Society A except that contracts that involve slavery are not legal. Which society has more freedom?
Society A provides the additional freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society A is more free.
Society B lacks the freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society B is more free.
Which of these statements is true? It's just a pointless semantic debate that depends on your personal definition of a "free society". Is agreeing to use commercial software similar selling yourself into slavery? Not really, but I think it's still an appropriate analogy even if the magnitude of the consequences are not comparable.
You can have freedom of speech, but that is mutually exclusive with the freedom to silence people. By granting freedom of speech, you are implicitly removing the freedom to silence people, and vice versa.
When one refers to a "1 in a million chance" they are not implying that they actually tried something 1 million times and it only worked once. They are implying that *if* they would have tried something 1 million times it would have only worked once. So if you win the lottery jackpot, your winning ticket was still "1 in 300 million" regardless of how many other tickets you bought or how many exist.
The title of the article is "Earth may be a 1-in-700 quintillion kind of place", but the article cites the 700-quintillion number as the total number of planets, and then goes on to say that according to the scientist's calculations, the earth should probably not exist (i.e. the odds of an earth like planet are even lower than 1 in 700-quintillion). So what are the odds that earth should exist? Who knows, it's not even mentioned.
This would be like if I reported on some guy winning the powerball and said "This guy bought 100 lottery tickets and one of the tickets won the jackpot. That was an amazingly improbable event that happened, making the ticket a "1 in a hundred kind of ticket.""
I have no idea if the statistical analysis done by this scientists is good or bad. But all I ask is that it is presented in a way that is coherent.