We presently take our tax dollars and distribute them to construction companies who build and repair roads on which I may or may not wish to drive. Does that also offend you?
Maybe just stop trying to come up with excuses that it's okay for you to take things without paying for them. It isn't.
I don't do that. I also don't buy digitally encumbered files, regardless of price or convenience. By not selling to people like me, you are only stealing from yourself. Plenty of authors, stores, and publishers seem to be happy to sell me what I want to buy, so I'll just go buy it from them.
You could call it the "Please Don't Warez All Our Books Store"
That way your entire product line doesn't end up on TPB. It's business model is perfect!
For the last time. It. Doesn't. Matter.
The people who would get the files via P2P were never your customers. You weren't selling anything to them before, you're selling exactly the same amount of nothing to them now. It's costing you nothing to sell this nothing. You lose nothing.
Contrast this with the situation as it stands right now in the real world, with the Kindle. Amazon is most certainly losing at least one customer. Me. They are deliberately taking money out of their own pocket strictly out of spite and shitty math.
I'm losing all the mods I made thus far (and resisting the temptation to downmod you just because you coughed up that stupid "I'll get modded down for this" crap, which is my usual policy for such whiny attention-seeking dickweedism), but I can't let this go by uncontested.
turning a blind eye to crime just because you don't like the victim leads to mob rule. It is the antithesis of the rule of law on which our society is founded, which protects our rights as well as Sony's.
That's just crazy. Our society in no way "protects our rights as well as Sony's." Our legal system is designed to protect Sony's "rights" (which are not rights, but privileges granted to an artificial construct called Sony) at the expense of our rights (which are in fact, as enumerated in our Constitution, actual and legal rights). The idea you propose here matches neither the theoretical nor the actual system under which we live. And you know it.
That's one slope that history has proven time and time again to be very slippery indeed.
I'd say the exact same thing, but I don't think we're talking about the same slope.
And, hey, maybe they'll put up such a good defence that the jury will refuse to convict them and the balance of power between corporations and common people will be shifted, and that would probably be good too. But it should be done in courts or congress, not by vigilante mobs deciding to lynch a corporation that offended them.
Because that happens in courtrooms across this great land of ours every day, doesn't it? Congresscritters are pushing each other out of the way to champion Joe Everyman against the nefarious interests of Big Media, aren't they? And our well-informed, socially aware, and technologically savvy courts deal defeat after defeat to these villains! Why, it's a wonder things like this ever happen given the enlightened society and legal code under which we live!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Are you for some reason under the impression that those people work for you or something? I can assure you they do not.
Given all that, I'd like to hear a realistic alternative to vigilante mobs.
I have the power to spend a large portion of my free time volunteering and doing charity work. This entails little or no risk to myself and would have a large positive impact on other people. Do you feel that I have a responsibility to sacrifice my free time to such an endeavor?
I would say "It depends on a number of factors." But I feel like all these analogies are getting us further away from what we were talking about.
Yes, but my decision to buy a Sony product or not is a drop in the ocean. It is a measurable but tiny effect. You could similarly try to measure my chance of doing good as a crimefighter and estimate the effect there.
Indeed, no argument there. But a big (and thus far unaddressed) difference between those two things is that to not buy Sony products entails no risk, or even effort, on your part. All you have to do is not do something. That's easy. I don't do things all the time.
I do not think you have a moral responsibility to do so, no. You probably *should* do so. It is the right and proper course of action as surely as the right thing to do when on fire is to stop, drop, and roll, but if the gunman escapes, you are not responsible for his actions or his escape. You did not behave optimally, but it was also not fair to expect you to behave optimally.
This one is debatable. So let's change the parameters of the situation so that it is less ambiguous. There is likely a crime being committed right now somewhere in a 10 mile radius of me (I do live in a big city). My ability to prevent this crime by leaving my apartment, looking for it, and then taking action to stop it is extremely small... but it is not zero. If power *alone* confers responsibility, then I have a moral responsibility to do exactly that.
I agree with what you're getting at here, but it's a poor analogy.
In fact, my odds of preventing crimes by spending my free time actively being a crimefighter are greater than the difference I make on Sony's bottom line by not buying their products.
This is where you lose me. This is obviously untrue. People buying Sony products is Sony's bottom line. If you buy your next set of headphones (or whatever) from Sennheiser (or whomever), you have affected Sony's bottom line in a miniscule but measurable way. You have much more direct power in this situation than in your above analogy.
To try and offer a counter-analogy: You are walking to the store, and you see a woman getting mugged at gunpoint. You are unarmed. You have no opportunity to stop the crime in progress, but the criminal runs right past you as he tries to make his escape. Three big guys are chasing him. Do you have a moral responsibility to trip the mugger? Or, to bring this back around, do you have a moral responsibility to affect the outcome of the situation in a miniscule but measurable way?
I do not think that having power or influence necessarily confers responsibility
I cannot imagine you rationalize that.
I have more power to personally stop street crime in my area with my fists than I do to alter Sony's activity by voting with my dollar. By your reasoning, I have more responsibility to be a vigilante crime fighter than I do to boycott Sony.
I would say that if you are in a situation where you can stop a crime being committed by means of physical violence, and the crime being committed is "worse" (for some value of "worse") than the violence you would inflict, yes, that is your moral responsibility. Neither more nor less responsibility than you have to boycott a company for their misdeeds.
First off, if you didn't see this coming, what the hell's wrong with you. Second, there is a very easy workaround for this problem. Stop supporting Big Media.
A fair request (and the only reason I did reply). You claim Israel do various atrocities, and yet you claim Israelis should not receive certain type of visitors. When I point out that this is collective punishment, you respond [snip]
At no time did I forward any opinion on whether "Israelis should...receive certain types of visitors." You may be confusing me with a poster further up the chain.
If you wish to re-check your presuppositions, please feel free to contact me via email. I think this public forum has run its course, and we are so off topic (which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels)
I certainly don't see it like that. As the saying goes, "Your dime, your time." Of course whoever is paying RMS's way to the middle east should have some say over what he does with their money. If an Israeli organization wanted to pay for RMS to come speak there and he refused, then I would certainly look at that differently.
FTR, I do apologize for getting kinda heated here. It's a charged topic, and the environment of Slashdot really encourages shit getting out of hand. I mean, I stand by what I said, but that's no reason for me to be a dick. If your posted email address is correct, I would welcome further dialog.
What I see is someone who is so fond of taking the moral high ground, that you do not seem to care whether your views were formed by incomplete cooked information
Hey, way to punt and reply to nothing I said. Well done.
yet so sure of them that you are willing to condemn a whole nation
Could you cite where I did that? Kthx. This "If you're against Israeli occupation, you're a Jew-hater" schtick is tired as hell.
If he's getting a paid flight to the middle east to give paid talks, it's not free time. It's work time. If the Israelis want to pay him to give talks, then they can have some of his work time too.
Well, that sounds like a test that will flag all criticism of Israel's occupation policy as anti-Semetic, which I can only assume it was designed to do.
The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.
Well, at least we got Godwin out of the way.
The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.
Cuba? Cuba?! That well known bloodthirsty occupier Cuba?! WTF. Of course I'm more "selective" than that. That's fucking stupid.
The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.
Why on earth a made-up state should have some sort of "right to exist" on land that someone else was just living on a minute ago is completely beyond me. In the modern world, there has never been a state of Israel until the victorious powers of World War II spun it out of whole cloth and gave them other people's land. Of course they have no right to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
We presently take our tax dollars and distribute them to construction companies who build and repair roads on which I may or may not wish to drive. Does that also offend you?
Maybe just stop trying to come up with excuses that it's okay for you to take things without paying for them. It isn't.
I don't do that. I also don't buy digitally encumbered files, regardless of price or convenience. By not selling to people like me, you are only stealing from yourself. Plenty of authors, stores, and publishers seem to be happy to sell me what I want to buy, so I'll just go buy it from them.
Huh. No mod points today, but that's a +1 interesting idea. Cheers.
Suit yourself. I am not.
You could call it the "Please Don't Warez All Our Books Store"
That way your entire product line doesn't end up on TPB. It's business model is perfect!
For the last time. It. Doesn't. Matter.
The people who would get the files via P2P were never your customers. You weren't selling anything to them before, you're selling exactly the same amount of nothing to them now. It's costing you nothing to sell this nothing. You lose nothing.
Contrast this with the situation as it stands right now in the real world, with the Kindle. Amazon is most certainly losing at least one customer. Me. They are deliberately taking money out of their own pocket strictly out of spite and shitty math.
Our rights are most obviously alienable. The question is what we are prepared to do about it.
Oh, yeah. Sorry, I don't know what the hell I thought you meant. Yeah, that's still there.
So far as I know, both Gnome and KDE on Linux also have something similar
Really? I've never heard of it (I'm a KDE user). I can't imagine ever using it, but...really?
I know. It makes me want to slit my wrists.
I'm losing all the mods I made thus far (and resisting the temptation to downmod you just because you coughed up that stupid "I'll get modded down for this" crap, which is my usual policy for such whiny attention-seeking dickweedism), but I can't let this go by uncontested.
turning a blind eye to crime just because you don't like the victim leads to mob rule. It is the antithesis of the rule of law on which our society is founded, which protects our rights as well as Sony's.
That's just crazy. Our society in no way "protects our rights as well as Sony's." Our legal system is designed to protect Sony's "rights" (which are not rights, but privileges granted to an artificial construct called Sony) at the expense of our rights (which are in fact, as enumerated in our Constitution, actual and legal rights). The idea you propose here matches neither the theoretical nor the actual system under which we live. And you know it.
That's one slope that history has proven time and time again to be very slippery indeed.
I'd say the exact same thing, but I don't think we're talking about the same slope.
And, hey, maybe they'll put up such a good defence that the jury will refuse to convict them and the balance of power between corporations and common people will be shifted, and that would probably be good too. But it should be done in courts or congress, not by vigilante mobs deciding to lynch a corporation that offended them.
Because that happens in courtrooms across this great land of ours every day, doesn't it? Congresscritters are pushing each other out of the way to champion Joe Everyman against the nefarious interests of Big Media, aren't they? And our well-informed, socially aware, and technologically savvy courts deal defeat after defeat to these villains! Why, it's a wonder things like this ever happen given the enlightened society and legal code under which we live!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Are you for some reason under the impression that those people work for you or something? I can assure you they do not.
Given all that, I'd like to hear a realistic alternative to vigilante mobs.
I have the power to spend a large portion of my free time volunteering and doing charity work. This entails little or no risk to myself and would have a large positive impact on other people. Do you feel that I have a responsibility to sacrifice my free time to such an endeavor?
I would say "It depends on a number of factors." But I feel like all these analogies are getting us further away from what we were talking about.
Yes, but my decision to buy a Sony product or not is a drop in the ocean. It is a measurable but tiny effect. You could similarly try to measure my chance of doing good as a crimefighter and estimate the effect there.
Indeed, no argument there. But a big (and thus far unaddressed) difference between those two things is that to not buy Sony products entails no risk, or even effort, on your part. All you have to do is not do something. That's easy. I don't do things all the time.
I do not think you have a moral responsibility to do so, no. You probably *should* do so. It is the right and proper course of action as surely as the right thing to do when on fire is to stop, drop, and roll, but if the gunman escapes, you are not responsible for his actions or his escape. You did not behave optimally, but it was also not fair to expect you to behave optimally.
Fair enough.
This one is debatable. So let's change the parameters of the situation so that it is less ambiguous. There is likely a crime being committed right now somewhere in a 10 mile radius of me (I do live in a big city). My ability to prevent this crime by leaving my apartment, looking for it, and then taking action to stop it is extremely small... but it is not zero. If power *alone* confers responsibility, then I have a moral responsibility to do exactly that.
I agree with what you're getting at here, but it's a poor analogy.
In fact, my odds of preventing crimes by spending my free time actively being a crimefighter are greater than the difference I make on Sony's bottom line by not buying their products.
This is where you lose me. This is obviously untrue. People buying Sony products is Sony's bottom line. If you buy your next set of headphones (or whatever) from Sennheiser (or whomever), you have affected Sony's bottom line in a miniscule but measurable way. You have much more direct power in this situation than in your above analogy.
To try and offer a counter-analogy: You are walking to the store, and you see a woman getting mugged at gunpoint. You are unarmed. You have no opportunity to stop the crime in progress, but the criminal runs right past you as he tries to make his escape. Three big guys are chasing him. Do you have a moral responsibility to trip the mugger? Or, to bring this back around, do you have a moral responsibility to affect the outcome of the situation in a miniscule but measurable way?
I do not think that having power or influence necessarily confers responsibility
I cannot imagine you rationalize that.
I have more power to personally stop street crime in my area with my fists than I do to alter Sony's activity by voting with my dollar. By your reasoning, I have more responsibility to be a vigilante crime fighter than I do to boycott Sony.
I would say that if you are in a situation where you can stop a crime being committed by means of physical violence, and the crime being committed is "worse" (for some value of "worse") than the violence you would inflict, yes, that is your moral responsibility. Neither more nor less responsibility than you have to boycott a company for their misdeeds.
If the point of the hack is just to embarass Sony, they don't need to post customer information on their website
Of course they do. Otherwise this would get no press whatsoever. If you're gonna do something like this, you've gotta do it loud.
Are you kidding? The MPAA has lost. The RIAA has lost. They're gonna kick a little more on the way down, but that ship has sailed.
if you mess with a company you're not actually messing with the company but with its stockholders and all its employees.
What is a company besides stockholders and employees?
First off, if you didn't see this coming, what the hell's wrong with you. Second, there is a very easy workaround for this problem. Stop supporting Big Media.
(Not commenting on the substance of your post, but...) "Ninty?"
Jesus, people. Literacy is not a crime.
Son of a bitch, if I hadn't already posted. +1 Insightful.
Because the user experience hasn't changed. The user neither notices the viruses, or the antivirus.
Um. Er.
I'm pretty sure the user notices the virus, actually.
A fair request (and the only reason I did reply). You claim Israel do various atrocities, and yet you claim Israelis should not receive certain type of visitors. When I point out that this is collective punishment, you respond [snip]
At no time did I forward any opinion on whether "Israelis should...receive certain types of visitors." You may be confusing me with a poster further up the chain.
If you wish to re-check your presuppositions, please feel free to contact me via email. I think this public forum has run its course, and we are so off topic (which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels)
I certainly don't see it like that. As the saying goes, "Your dime, your time." Of course whoever is paying RMS's way to the middle east should have some say over what he does with their money. If an Israeli organization wanted to pay for RMS to come speak there and he refused, then I would certainly look at that differently.
FTR, I do apologize for getting kinda heated here. It's a charged topic, and the environment of Slashdot really encourages shit getting out of hand. I mean, I stand by what I said, but that's no reason for me to be a dick. If your posted email address is correct, I would welcome further dialog.
What I see is someone who is so fond of taking the moral high ground, that you do not seem to care whether your views were formed by incomplete cooked information
Hey, way to punt and reply to nothing I said. Well done.
yet so sure of them that you are willing to condemn a whole nation
Could you cite where I did that? Kthx. This "If you're against Israeli occupation, you're a Jew-hater" schtick is tired as hell.
Are you saying BSD is dying?
If he's getting a paid flight to the middle east to give paid talks, it's not free time. It's work time. If the Israelis want to pay him to give talks, then they can have some of his work time too.
Well, that sounds like a test that will flag all criticism of Israel's occupation policy as anti-Semetic, which I can only assume it was designed to do.
The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.
Well, at least we got Godwin out of the way.
The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.
Cuba? Cuba?! That well known bloodthirsty occupier Cuba?! WTF. Of course I'm more "selective" than that. That's fucking stupid.
The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.
Why on earth a made-up state should have some sort of "right to exist" on land that someone else was just living on a minute ago is completely beyond me. In the modern world, there has never been a state of Israel until the victorious powers of World War II spun it out of whole cloth and gave them other people's land. Of course they have no right to exist.