You have a point. I think everyone, to some extent, has double standards. It is unfortunate that we often let our world views cloud our judgement instead of trying to view all sides of an issue.
That being said I take issue with your comparrison. I think that there is a huge difference between governments limiting/restricting/not being happy with use of something like the GPL and spam. Using the GPL for your own code is a choice. If it doesn't make sense for company X to use the GPL they shouldn't. If their stuff is good enough (or their maketing department is swift enough) they will sell allot of it. If their stuff sucks (and they have a bad marketing department) they will go out of business. Because this is the case the use of the GPL will be governed in a broad sense by people making marginal decisions. If the benefits of using the GPL outweigh the costs it will be used, if the costs are to high it won't be. The one exception to this is government software. The use of the GPL in government software/government contracts is a policy issue. Open discussion and passionate debate about policy is always a good thing.
Spam differs from the GPL in that one doesn't get to choose spam. It just comes to you. Spam is something that the consumer (ie the guy receiving spam) really doesn't have a say in. Much of this is because the economics of spam don't have much of a concept of scale. Manufacturing 10,000 spam messages or 1,000,000 spam messages has a much different price tradeoff than manufacturing 10,000 cars vs. 1,000,000 cars. In this sense spam and the GPL fall into two very different catergories.
I think the best way to sum this up is by using an analogy. The GPL (whether in a half baked sceme or not) and other licenses are like cars. There are some good cars and some bad cars. Yet government doesn't tell you which car to buy even though they may have a preference (ie domestic v. foreign).* Spam is like pollution. I don't know of anyone who enjoys breathing smoggy air. Like spam, pollution isn't a problem each of us can solve on our own. Sure we can purchase masks (spam filters) but that doesn't get rid of the underlying unpleasantry. This is a case where limited, focussed government intervention would probably be a good thing.
The preceding comments are not meant to support any specific government policy or action. They are merely my off the cuff ramblings on a public policy debate I am probably not qualified to participate in. You gotta love free speach...
*Just to counter the "but cars are regulated. Thing of safety and pollution" arguement I'd like to point out that there are legal restrictions on liscenses in the form of applicable contract law. (ie you can't have a liscense that forces someone to do something illegal.)
Sheesh i feel dirty now that i have summed up the whole article because people post before they read it.
I find it amusing that you say this when your first post to this thread was at 10:29, just three minutes after the article was posted. You sure must read fast...
The idea of "nothing to lose lawsuits" is a double edged sword. On one hand if these suits are allowed then you have to worry about the possibility of having to defend against one. On the other hand if a losing plaintiff is liable for the legal fees of the defendant it provides a severe advantage to large corporations. No little guy in his right mind would ever sue a megacorporation if he had to pay said megacorporations legal fees in the event of a loss. Losing without incurring that liability is already a very expensive proposition.
Personally I think the key to tort reform is to remove the profit insentive to lawsuits by diverting punative damages to education. This would mean that if you sue Huge-Mega-Corp for something and win you would collect actual damages (ie restitution, money to compensate you for what you actually lost/suffered). Any punative damages (punishment, the bazillion dollar sums that are supposed to say "don't do that again") awarded would go to an education trust used to buy books, computers, college scolarships etc. for your state.*
*This is the first time I have ever floated this idea to anyone. If you see holes in it please respond so I can avoid looking like an idiot in the future.
Quoting cOdEgUru: (4)Title: setup32.exe - error in application The instruction "0x77e0a053" points to memory at "0x0f1366b8". The data was not transferred into RAM because of an I/O error in "0x000 [snip] 00000 0000000000000000000000000000000c0000240". That's a lot of zeros... I thought addresses were only 32 bits long in Windows2000...
This is just about being able to reuse code. All software will have some errors in it. Thus the programmers of the error message decided that it should not only work with the current 32 bit memory model but also future, larger memory models. Ahh the beuty of thinking ahead...
You are correct in assuming that the "it" referred to the business model. There are multiple ways to not use a particular model. You could use a different model or you could use no model at all. The point here is not to debate whether Microsoft has a right to sell or not sell their product in a given locality. (I beleive it is perfectly legitimate for them to decide not to sell a particular product in a given market if they beleive it is uneconomical.) That being said, the real point is to draw attention to two things:
1. The laws referenced by Steve Balmer in this article were what they were when MS started in the console market. (This is to the best of my knowledge.) If those laws are harful to the business model MS shouldn't have used it in the first place. This is a perfect opportunity to use a diffent model or stay out of the market.
2. It is absurd for MS to even consider the possibility that the laws in question would be changed so that their business model (which I contend was mistakenly chosen since the law hasn't changed) will function as they intended. As you pointed out, the X-Box is a luxury item. Laws should not be changed (and companies should not expect them to change) to fix their mistakes, especially for an item that couldn't even be remotely considered essential. If the model doesn't work when you pick it out, don't expect legislation to fix it later on.
"If there are aspects that are not allowed, it would encourage us to require a change in the legal framework. Otherwise, it wouldn't make economic sense."
If the legal frame work of a given locality doesn't support your business model, don't use it. In the past few years we've all seen a bunch of crazy business models crash at full speed into the solid wall of reality. What Balmer is proposing here makes even the worst dot-bomb plan look sterling. Even groups like the RIAA and the MPAA can claim that "times and technology have changed" when they go to try to change laws. In this case MS is the newcomer to an existing markeplace that has had to deal with the problem of mod chips for quite some time. I suppose that this just shows that you don't have to smart to help run a multi-gajillion dollar company.
Hopefully the "change the law" business model doesn't become as popular as the "put it online and they will buy it" model was. If this takes off one can just imagine the headlines: "Company fails to buy law, declares bankruptcy." If that wouldn't be grounds for a mismanagement suit on the part of investors, I don't know what would be.
Just to add to your point about TCO numbers being witchcraft consider the following:
In the grand scheme of things the cost of the servers and the software and the support staff are insignificant. The whole point of computers is productivity. Neat whizbang super efficient software will help the productivity of any company. This saves time and, as the old adage goes, time is money. Since the entire point of the computer is to save time and increase efficieny the real issue of TCO doesn't come down to how much you have to pay an administrator but on how often your system goes down causing you to lose PRODUCTIVITY. This means that a system outage in a company with X people will "cost" less than a system outage for a company with X + N employess (N > 0). This could be construed to mean that the real TCO is based on reliability not hardware or admin costs. If this is the case then the equation becomes really murky. Comparing two OSes you not only have to consider the difference in liscensing and admin but also scalability and realiability and whether you save enough on liscensing (or admin to make the argument go both ways) to be able to afford a redundant system. Just some thoughts...
While the step by step cookbook plan to get rich is amusing its kind of sad to see how many people actually think that making money is that simple. Making money is hard. First you have to get that degree, then there's the lengthy process of lawsuits. If you really want to be rich you definitely need a "file lawsuit" step somewhere in the middle.
I must say I can understand your sentiment. This may be a detail of the investigation that the police shouldn't tell the public about. On the other hand a big problem that you have to deal with during an incident like this is public fear. Releasing some information about how authorities are working to capture this lunatic may work to calm the publics nerves a little because "something is being done."
I will take issue with the idea that witholding this information is "security through obscurity." Instead I think it would be more accurately called "security through secrecy." I will illustrate the difference with an example. You wish to travel between point 1 and point 2. There are three routes you can take (A, B and C). If you keep your route of choice a secret it makes it more difficult for your enemy to find you. Thus by keeping a secret you have improved your security. On the other hand, if you are my enemy and have excellent defenses on routes A and B but horrid security on route C, not divulging that information (ie obscuring it) does not improve the security on route C. If I carefully scout out my route, I may realize that your route C security sux. Having done this I will then quietly exploit that cap. Thus keeping the vulnerability secret did not stop me from exploiting it. The proper response, as with computer security, would be to actually fix the problem.
I know I am kind of nitpicking about semantics here but it is something I've been wanting to say for a while.
What if we check out some of these places where there might be water that might indicate life and find nothing? How does that change our view of life on earth? Does it change it all?
I would argue that UC Irvine is making a value judgement not a moral judgement. If it were truly a moral judgement then they would have simply cut off all access to P2P. Instead they chose to prioritize the traffic on their network instead. Placing a higher value on web traffic than on P2P traffic doesn't translate to UC Irvine saying P2P is immoral. They're just saying it isn't important as other things.
I'd say that copyright lengths have been extended primarily because the copyright holders have lobied for it with great vigor. Corporations like Disney have obvious economic reasons for wanting copyrights extended. They want to make money on everything they can and don't want competition from someone else using public domain works that Disney created. (ie Disney doesn't want to compete with a new Mickey Mouse movie based off the Steam Boat Willy (sp?) cartoons.) From a greed standpoint it makes sense. Competition is by its very nature tough and everyone likes things to be easy if at all possible.
For non corporate copyright holders (I'm really speaking about families of deceased content creators) there is a sense that the work is "something special to our family." Recenty a family member of mine discovered that a long dead distant relative wrote a hymn that is now in the public domain because no one renewed the copyright.* Family members were actually distressed because they preceived that our family had lost something (despite the fact that no one had yet found a complete copy of the hymn). The hymn was pretty obscure and wasn't going to make anyone rich but people were concerned about the loss of a piece of our family history.
In a way this is a real case of the squeeky wheel gets the grease. While people advocating what I'd call "reasonable copyright lengths" have and do lobby I've never seen that they do it with the same vigor as the copyright holders. I'd also have to admit that copyright holders have arguments that sound pretty good. Companies can moan about "lost revenue" and "negative economic impact" while families have a great line with stories about "family history" and such. (Although I have mentioned families throughout this reply I think that most of the lobbying etc. is done by corporations as they have the most to lose.) While these arguments are, in my opinion, unsound they are convincing and there isn't a politician out there who wants to be seen as anti-economic or anti-family-history.
*Here I'm just repeating what I was told. I nevery bothered to verify any of this myself because I support short copyrights and am happy that the work is now in the public domoin.
I know this was probably a rhetorical question but here's the answer: Marketing. The makers of this product want to be associated with things/people that are commonly viewed as "winners". By most people's standards Microsoft is a winner with their insane marketshare. Many here on Slashdot (and elsewhere would disagree) but such people are usually not the first targets that come to the minds of marketers.
I agree. Bad management and bad planning lead to many errors (not just security). When I worked in web development (intranet) I was amazed that the developers for the external stuff didn't do any security planning until after their code was audited. Then they just fixed anything that the audit turned up. It has been said before and should be said again: If you want something to be secure you have to build it that way from the ground up.
I'm not going to go as far as some posters by suggesting the parent is a troll (although the anonymous coward authorship might make one wonder). I will say that the original post is very alarmist. Phrases like "destruction of America", "glorifies terrorism" and "being Nazist" do not make for a good constructive diaglog about the merits (or lack thereof) for aparticular organization. Before giving money to any charity/non-profit the giver should carefully review what the organization stands stands for. If you don't, well, a fool and his money are soon parted.
Finaly I'd just like to say, if you're going to knock an organization please offer some documentation* to back up your claims. It will save the rest of us allot of time.
* Since this is Slashdot bashing of Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, DMCA or other "acceptable targets" does not require coherant thought or documentation.
A few posters have already pointed out that some police departments have deployed/are developing "stink bomb"/pepper spray projectiles. As for your comment about shooting them out of a normal service weapon, Simunition (produced by SNC Technologies) is a training ammunition similar to a paintball that can be fired from a standard side arm. Currently the ammunition requires the use of an adapter to prevent chambering of live ammunition.
Having read the "well considered positions" I have to say I agree with Bruce. Paper is needed to provide an audit trail. Moving millions of electrons is "easy" to do without someone noticing. Physical ballots are just a little bit harder to play with. I think there's a confidence issue as well. If I just click a button I wouldn't have the same confidence that I have when I put a physical piece of paper in a box.
Hmm...A very interesting analysis. I've always taken a slightly differnt view on censorship. Censorship has always seemed to me to be used in the guise of the "learned/elite/politically powerful" protectecting the "unlearned/peasant/politically unsophisticated." However, taking your comments into account it would seem that there may acutally be two kinds of censor ship: anti corruption censorship and anti deception censorship.
Anti corruption would be the idea expressed by the original post that someone has to protect you from certain material so that you will not be corrupted. This would imply there is something inherrantly bad about the material itself. [see the orignal post for why this argument fails.] On the other hand anti deception censorship would say that people are trying to deceive you with bad information (after all how could *ism possibly be better than what we have?). The purpose of censoship under this scenario would be to sort out and censor the "bad" information. Many reasons can be presented for why quashing the views that you don't agree with is a bad idea and exhaustive listing of these is left as an excercise for the reader.
I will however say that determining what is good and bad can be very difficult. To often we as human beings, lack the wisdom to distinguish closely spaced lines of white and black. Instead we see gray. If one cannot distinguish between the good and the bad is it right to choose good and bad for someone else? Times also change. What was once good has now fallen out favor. Likewise activities and philosophies that were once thought to be bad are now accepted. Times change and the only way to change with the times is to have an open dialog and an open mind.
I think you may want to consider a third culprit: apathy. It seems to me that if things don't affect people directly they don't care. The average Joe doesn't care if Fox and NBC merge as long as they don't cancel his favorite show. Likewise there are a significant number of people who only care about the news to get the latest sports scores and the weather report. Just look at a typical 11:00 news broadcast. Where I come from probably, half of the broadcast is taken up with sports and weather no matter how many interesting and important things happened during the day.
As long as people are apathetic censorship and propoganda take a back seat to that apathy. How effective is propaganda when people don't care about the issues? If you censor information about a topic that people don't care about, will they be more inclined to read the censored information?
Of course, the the truly insidious propaganda is the stuff we feed ourselves that we can't make a difference...
When the Bill or Rights was first proposed there were people who objected to it. These people were not fascists (or the folks conspiracy theorists have nightmares about) but rather individuals who were concerned that enumerating specific rights would close the door on any rights that were unenumerated.
This is the case here. While it may appear at first glance that defining fair use would be a good thing, we must remember that the world changes faster than the law. As society and technology change, what should constitue fair use may very well need to change as well. Without some generality no law will work as intended because no one can anticipate every contigency.
For all their intellignece (or stupidity as the case may be) no legislator is possibly smart enough to list EVERY single fair use. Enumerating certain fair use scenarios will ultimately result in future (or unlisted current uses) fair use scenarios being prohibited.
To resolve the quandry about unenumerated rights, the authors of the Bill of Rights included a clause stating: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." (US Constitution, Ammendment 9) The success of this ammendment is most likely debatable and will not be discussed here. Even with such a clause I beleive that fair use enumeration to be ultimately harmful. In the copyright law arena content providers have shown themselves, in my opinion, to be openly hostile to fair use. Under such a scenario, content providers would seek to place the burden of proof onto the defendent in cases where fair use was claimed but not enumerated rather than being forced to prove that a violation had in fact taken place.
I think you should be careful saying that "the bulk of [Geeks] are too damned lazy to even write a letter to our congressperson." Recently the chair of the senate commerce comittee nicely shot down Senator Hollings' latest boondogle because public outcry against it was so great. I can't say for certain who sent in all the comments against the CBD-whatever-the-hell-the-acronym-is but it sure wasn't my grandmother.
The real danger to letting public works of software be made private as outlined above is embrace and extend. A trivial change to a piece of open software can make the proprietary version incompatible with the open version. This places people and companies in the awkward position of having to adopt the proprietary versoin or risk being left behind. Granted open source programmers can modify the open code to bring it into compliance but then they are forced into reacting to companies and not proactively inovating. The danger of this situation is greatly increased when a company like Microsoft commands such a large market share.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point. I think everyone, to some extent, has double standards. It is unfortunate that we often let our world views cloud our judgement instead of trying to view all sides of an issue.
That being said I take issue with your comparrison. I think that there is a huge difference between governments limiting/restricting/not being happy with use of something like the GPL and spam. Using the GPL for your own code is a choice. If it doesn't make sense for company X to use the GPL they shouldn't. If their stuff is good enough (or their maketing department is swift enough) they will sell allot of it. If their stuff sucks (and they have a bad marketing department) they will go out of business. Because this is the case the use of the GPL will be governed in a broad sense by people making marginal decisions. If the benefits of using the GPL outweigh the costs it will be used, if the costs are to high it won't be. The one exception to this is government software. The use of the GPL in government software/government contracts is a policy issue. Open discussion and passionate debate about policy is always a good thing.
Spam differs from the GPL in that one doesn't get to choose spam. It just comes to you. Spam is something that the consumer (ie the guy receiving spam) really doesn't have a say in. Much of this is because the economics of spam don't have much of a concept of scale. Manufacturing 10,000 spam messages or 1,000,000 spam messages has a much different price tradeoff than manufacturing 10,000 cars vs. 1,000,000 cars. In this sense spam and the GPL fall into two very different catergories.
I think the best way to sum this up is by using an analogy. The GPL (whether in a half baked sceme or not) and other licenses are like cars. There are some good cars and some bad cars. Yet government doesn't tell you which car to buy even though they may have a preference (ie domestic v. foreign).* Spam is like pollution. I don't know of anyone who enjoys breathing smoggy air. Like spam, pollution isn't a problem each of us can solve on our own. Sure we can purchase masks (spam filters) but that doesn't get rid of the underlying unpleasantry. This is a case where limited, focussed government intervention would probably be a good thing.
The preceding comments are not meant to support any specific government policy or action. They are merely my off the cuff ramblings on a public policy debate I am probably not qualified to participate in. You gotta love free speach...
*Just to counter the "but cars are regulated. Thing of safety and pollution" arguement I'd like to point out that there are legal restrictions on liscenses in the form of applicable contract law. (ie you can't have a liscense that forces someone to do something illegal.)
Quoting packeteer:
Sheesh i feel dirty now that i have summed up the whole article because people post before they read it.
I find it amusing that you say this when your first post to this thread was at 10:29, just three minutes after the article was posted. You sure must read fast...
The idea of "nothing to lose lawsuits" is a double edged sword. On one hand if these suits are allowed then you have to worry about the possibility of having to defend against one. On the other hand if a losing plaintiff is liable for the legal fees of the defendant it provides a severe advantage to large corporations. No little guy in his right mind would ever sue a megacorporation if he had to pay said megacorporations legal fees in the event of a loss. Losing without incurring that liability is already a very expensive proposition.
Personally I think the key to tort reform is to remove the profit insentive to lawsuits by diverting punative damages to education. This would mean that if you sue Huge-Mega-Corp for something and win you would collect actual damages (ie restitution, money to compensate you for what you actually lost/suffered). Any punative damages (punishment, the bazillion dollar sums that are supposed to say "don't do that again") awarded would go to an education trust used to buy books, computers, college scolarships etc. for your state.*
*This is the first time I have ever floated this idea to anyone. If you see holes in it please respond so I can avoid looking like an idiot in the future.
Quoting cOdEgUru:
(4)Title: setup32.exe - error in application
The instruction "0x77e0a053" points to memory at "0x0f1366b8". The data was not transferred into RAM because of an I/O error in "0x000 [snip] 00000 0000000000000000000000000000000c0000240".
That's a lot of zeros... I thought addresses were only 32 bits long in Windows2000...
This is just about being able to reuse code. All software will have some errors in it. Thus the programmers of the error message decided that it should not only work with the current 32 bit memory model but also future, larger memory models. Ahh the beuty of thinking ahead...
You are correct in assuming that the "it" referred to the business model. There are multiple ways to not use a particular model. You could use a different model or you could use no model at all. The point here is not to debate whether Microsoft has a right to sell or not sell their product in a given locality. (I beleive it is perfectly legitimate for them to decide not to sell a particular product in a given market if they beleive it is uneconomical.) That being said, the real point is to draw attention to two things:
1. The laws referenced by Steve Balmer in this article were what they were when MS started in the console market. (This is to the best of my knowledge.) If those laws are harful to the business model MS shouldn't have used it in the first place. This is a perfect opportunity to use a diffent model or stay out of the market.
2. It is absurd for MS to even consider the possibility that the laws in question would be changed so that their business model (which I contend was mistakenly chosen since the law hasn't changed) will function as they intended. As you pointed out, the X-Box is a luxury item. Laws should not be changed (and companies should not expect them to change) to fix their mistakes, especially for an item that couldn't even be remotely considered essential. If the model doesn't work when you pick it out, don't expect legislation to fix it later on.
From the article quoting Steve Balmer:
"If there are aspects that are not allowed, it would encourage us to require a change in the legal framework. Otherwise, it wouldn't make economic sense."
If the legal frame work of a given locality doesn't support your business model, don't use it. In the past few years we've all seen a bunch of crazy business models crash at full speed into the solid wall of reality. What Balmer is proposing here makes even the worst dot-bomb plan look sterling. Even groups like the RIAA and the MPAA can claim that "times and technology have changed" when they go to try to change laws. In this case MS is the newcomer to an existing markeplace that has had to deal with the problem of mod chips for quite some time. I suppose that this just shows that you don't have to smart to help run a multi-gajillion dollar company.
Hopefully the "change the law" business model doesn't become as popular as the "put it online and they will buy it" model was. If this takes off one can just imagine the headlines: "Company fails to buy law, declares bankruptcy." If that wouldn't be grounds for a mismanagement suit on the part of investors, I don't know what would be.
Just to add to your point about TCO numbers being witchcraft consider the following:
In the grand scheme of things the cost of the servers and the software and the support staff are insignificant. The whole point of computers is productivity. Neat whizbang super efficient software will help the productivity of any company. This saves time and, as the old adage goes, time is money. Since the entire point of the computer is to save time and increase efficieny the real issue of TCO doesn't come down to how much you have to pay an administrator but on how often your system goes down causing you to lose PRODUCTIVITY. This means that a system outage in a company with X people will "cost" less than a system outage for a company with X + N employess (N > 0). This could be construed to mean that the real TCO is based on reliability not hardware or admin costs. If this is the case then the equation becomes really murky. Comparing two OSes you not only have to consider the difference in liscensing and admin but also scalability and realiability and whether you save enough on liscensing (or admin to make the argument go both ways) to be able to afford a redundant system. Just some thoughts...
While the step by step cookbook plan to get rich is amusing its kind of sad to see how many people actually think that making money is that simple. Making money is hard. First you have to get that degree, then there's the lengthy process of lawsuits. If you really want to be rich you definitely need a "file lawsuit" step somewhere in the middle.
they are just after the almighty dollar (or yen in this case)
It's kind of nitpicky, but in China they use the Yuan not the Yen.
1 Yuan = 14.9331 Yen = 0.120817 USD
I must say I can understand your sentiment. This may be a detail of the investigation that the police shouldn't tell the public about. On the other hand a big problem that you have to deal with during an incident like this is public fear. Releasing some information about how authorities are working to capture this lunatic may work to calm the publics nerves a little because "something is being done."
I will take issue with the idea that witholding this information is "security through obscurity." Instead I think it would be more accurately called "security through secrecy." I will illustrate the difference with an example. You wish to travel between point 1 and point 2. There are three routes you can take (A, B and C). If you keep your route of choice a secret it makes it more difficult for your enemy to find you. Thus by keeping a secret you have improved your security. On the other hand, if you are my enemy and have excellent defenses on routes A and B but horrid security on route C, not divulging that information (ie obscuring it) does not improve the security on route C. If I carefully scout out my route, I may realize that your route C security sux. Having done this I will then quietly exploit that cap. Thus keeping the vulnerability secret did not stop me from exploiting it. The proper response, as with computer security, would be to actually fix the problem.
I know I am kind of nitpicking about semantics here but it is something I've been wanting to say for a while.
Just to clarify:
by "might be water" I meant water in liquid form. Sorry for any confusion.
What if we check out some of these places where there might be water that might indicate life and find nothing? How does that change our view of life on earth? Does it change it all?
Just something to ponder.
I would argue that UC Irvine is making a value judgement not a moral judgement. If it were truly a moral judgement then they would have simply cut off all access to P2P. Instead they chose to prioritize the traffic on their network instead. Placing a higher value on web traffic than on P2P traffic doesn't translate to UC Irvine saying P2P is immoral. They're just saying it isn't important as other things.
I'd say that copyright lengths have been extended primarily because the copyright holders have lobied for it with great vigor. Corporations like Disney have obvious economic reasons for wanting copyrights extended. They want to make money on everything they can and don't want competition from someone else using public domain works that Disney created. (ie Disney doesn't want to compete with a new Mickey Mouse movie based off the Steam Boat Willy (sp?) cartoons.) From a greed standpoint it makes sense. Competition is by its very nature tough and everyone likes things to be easy if at all possible.
For non corporate copyright holders (I'm really speaking about families of deceased content creators) there is a sense that the work is "something special to our family." Recenty a family member of mine discovered that a long dead distant relative wrote a hymn that is now in the public domain because no one renewed the copyright.* Family members were actually distressed because they preceived that our family had lost something (despite the fact that no one had yet found a complete copy of the hymn). The hymn was pretty obscure and wasn't going to make anyone rich but people were concerned about the loss of a piece of our family history.
In a way this is a real case of the squeeky wheel gets the grease. While people advocating what I'd call "reasonable copyright lengths" have and do lobby I've never seen that they do it with the same vigor as the copyright holders. I'd also have to admit that copyright holders have arguments that sound pretty good. Companies can moan about "lost revenue" and "negative economic impact" while families have a great line with stories about "family history" and such. (Although I have mentioned families throughout this reply I think that most of the lobbying etc. is done by corporations as they have the most to lose.) While these arguments are, in my opinion, unsound they are convincing and there isn't a politician out there who wants to be seen as anti-economic or anti-family-history.
*Here I'm just repeating what I was told. I nevery bothered to verify any of this myself because I support short copyrights and am happy that the work is now in the public domoin.
I know this was probably a rhetorical question but here's the answer: Marketing. The makers of this product want to be associated with things/people that are commonly viewed as "winners". By most people's standards Microsoft is a winner with their insane marketshare. Many here on Slashdot (and elsewhere would disagree) but such people are usually not the first targets that come to the minds of marketers.
I agree. Bad management and bad planning lead to many errors (not just security). When I worked in web development (intranet) I was amazed that the developers for the external stuff didn't do any security planning until after their code was audited. Then they just fixed anything that the audit turned up. It has been said before and should be said again: If you want something to be secure you have to build it that way from the ground up.
I'm not going to go as far as some posters by suggesting the parent is a troll (although the anonymous coward authorship might make one wonder). I will say that the original post is very alarmist. Phrases like "destruction of America", "glorifies terrorism" and "being Nazist" do not make for a good constructive diaglog about the merits (or lack thereof) for aparticular organization. Before giving money to any charity/non-profit the giver should carefully review what the organization stands stands for. If you don't, well, a fool and his money are soon parted.
Finaly I'd just like to say, if you're going to knock an organization please offer some documentation* to back up your claims. It will save the rest of us allot of time.
* Since this is Slashdot bashing of Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, DMCA or other "acceptable targets" does not require coherant thought or documentation.
A few posters have already pointed out that some police departments have deployed/are developing "stink bomb"/pepper spray projectiles. As for your comment about shooting them out of a normal service weapon, Simunition (produced by SNC Technologies) is a training ammunition similar to a paintball that can be fired from a standard side arm. Currently the ammunition requires the use of an adapter to prevent chambering of live ammunition.
Having read the "well considered positions" I have to say I agree with Bruce. Paper is needed to provide an audit trail. Moving millions of electrons is "easy" to do without someone noticing. Physical ballots are just a little bit harder to play with. I think there's a confidence issue as well. If I just click a button I wouldn't have the same confidence that I have when I put a physical piece of paper in a box.
Hmm...A very interesting analysis. I've always taken a slightly differnt view on censorship. Censorship has always seemed to me to be used in the guise of the "learned/elite/politically powerful" protectecting the "unlearned/peasant/politically unsophisticated." However, taking your comments into account it would seem that there may acutally be two kinds of censor ship: anti corruption censorship and anti deception censorship.
Anti corruption would be the idea expressed by the original post that someone has to protect you from certain material so that you will not be corrupted. This would imply there is something inherrantly bad about the material itself. [see the orignal post for why this argument fails.] On the other hand anti deception censorship would say that people are trying to deceive you with bad information (after all how could *ism possibly be better than what we have?). The purpose of censoship under this scenario would be to sort out and censor the "bad" information. Many reasons can be presented for why quashing the views that you don't agree with is a bad idea and exhaustive listing of these is left as an excercise for the reader.
I will however say that determining what is good and bad can be very difficult. To often we as human beings, lack the wisdom to distinguish closely spaced lines of white and black. Instead we see gray. If one cannot distinguish between the good and the bad is it right to choose good and bad for someone else? Times also change. What was once good has now fallen out favor. Likewise activities and philosophies that were once thought to be bad are now accepted. Times change and the only way to change with the times is to have an open dialog and an open mind.
The preceding words are my ramblings...
I think you may want to consider a third culprit: apathy. It seems to me that if things don't affect people directly they don't care. The average Joe doesn't care if Fox and NBC merge as long as they don't cancel his favorite show. Likewise there are a significant number of people who only care about the news to get the latest sports scores and the weather report. Just look at a typical 11:00 news broadcast. Where I come from probably, half of the broadcast is taken up with sports and weather no matter how many interesting and important things happened during the day.
As long as people are apathetic censorship and propoganda take a back seat to that apathy. How effective is propaganda when people don't care about the issues? If you censor information about a topic that people don't care about, will they be more inclined to read the censored information?
Of course, the the truly insidious propaganda is the stuff we feed ourselves that we can't make a difference...
Just some thoughts. Ignore them if you like.
so I could understand the whole Greed, Fear and Intimidation thing.
When the Bill or Rights was first proposed there were people who objected to it. These people were not fascists (or the folks conspiracy theorists have nightmares about) but rather individuals who were concerned that enumerating specific rights would close the door on any rights that were unenumerated.
This is the case here. While it may appear at first glance that defining fair use would be a good thing, we must remember that the world changes faster than the law. As society and technology change, what should constitue fair use may very well need to change as well. Without some generality no law will work as intended because no one can anticipate every contigency.
For all their intellignece (or stupidity as the case may be) no legislator is possibly smart enough to list EVERY single fair use. Enumerating certain fair use scenarios will ultimately result in future (or unlisted current uses) fair use scenarios being prohibited.
To resolve the quandry about unenumerated rights, the authors of the Bill of Rights included a clause stating: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." (US Constitution, Ammendment 9) The success of this ammendment is most likely debatable and will not be discussed here. Even with such a clause I beleive that fair use enumeration to be ultimately harmful. In the copyright law arena content providers have shown themselves, in my opinion, to be openly hostile to fair use. Under such a scenario, content providers would seek to place the burden of proof onto the defendent in cases where fair use was claimed but not enumerated rather than being forced to prove that a violation had in fact taken place.
I think you should be careful saying that "the bulk of [Geeks] are too damned lazy to even write a letter to our congressperson." Recently the chair of the senate commerce comittee nicely shot down Senator Hollings' latest boondogle because public outcry against it was so great. I can't say for certain who sent in all the comments against the CBD-whatever-the-hell-the-acronym-is but it sure wasn't my grandmother.
The real danger to letting public works of software be made private as outlined above is embrace and extend. A trivial change to a piece of open software can make the proprietary version incompatible with the open version. This places people and companies in the awkward position of having to adopt the proprietary versoin or risk being left behind. Granted open source programmers can modify the open code to bring it into compliance but then they are forced into reacting to companies and not proactively inovating. The danger of this situation is greatly increased when a company like Microsoft commands such a large market share.