What part of human/animal intelligence is not detecting, storing, and applying patterns and relations?
Paraphrasing to make a point: What part of computing is not detecting, storing, and applying patterns and relations?
To be meaningful, "AI" should denote more than (as the article summary indicates is being done) doing a grep through a web repository to deduce associations. There are branches of AI founded on brain neurology (neural nets), evolution (Genetic Algorithms), Bayesian logic, and various other things. Not all of the variants I can think of necessarily should qualify as AI (IMO), but the ones I'm thinking of are all substantially more esoteric than the summary's described approach. I take the GP's point to be that using a web repository as a database is too pedestrian to qualify as AI.
It depends how good their algorithm is - let's say it looks at what proportion of your life since graduating you've been in work, where more is better. That's a disadvantage to women because they (generally) take time off to have/raise kids and so on, even though the algorithm isn't specifically designed to discriminate against them.
Damn! Even though I keep my gender a secret, they'll be able to tell I'm a woman because of gaps in my resume when I took time to be with the infants... krap, it was so nice thinking I was flying under the radar. Maybe I need to fill those gaps: "Dec97-Mar99, Lactation Dispensation Consultant".
(ps - I *am* joking. And, I'm not really a woman... I'm really a horse. Well... I'm just pretending to be a horse... actually, I'm a broom.)
The sales departments sell services to external customers. They then arrange for the work to get done by 'hiring' the services of any of the specialty groups inside our company. Presumably, the cost of the internal services is lower than the cost to the external customers, so the sales department makes a profit.
Very cool idea. In the scenario above, is there "competition" within the company to fulfill the sales department's needs? If not, what leverage is wielded by the sales group when negotiating price? Or is there some other mechanism used to determine the cost?
This particular option isn't really available in this case, is it? They don't control the OSX source code, Apple does.
It is like finding a car door open and yelling out "Hey This Car Door is Open and all the valuables are inside someone should lock it!" vs. Finding the person who owns the car and descretly telling him to that is is unlocked.
Bit of a problem with this analogy too. The "door" in question is controlled/lockable only by the person who owns the house (as pointed out above), yet leaving it unlocked affects not the residents of that "controlling" house but instead millions of other residents of other houses. The pivotal question is whether the owner of the controlling house can be sufficiently motivated to act on behalf of these other folks. I couldn't tell from reading the faq whether they've approached apple privately or not. I spose I'd guess they haven't or else they'd probably mention it... but that doesn't necessarily render their current approach less moral.
So - that only leaves you the letters H, I, N, O, P (sic!), U, V, W, Y and Z
I hope someone creates an "O" language. That way, interface bindings for it could be called "O-interfaces", or "O-faces" for short. So when you create a nifty library for the language, publishing it could be known as "showing the world your O-face".
Hornik writes:...'[Ideas] that do bear fruit will gain traction and either be acquired or go public. Those are the traits of a rational market in my mind.'
I find it odd that so many people think like this. I.e., that to be a success a company MUST be bought, either by the public or by another company. In either scenario, the company being bought loses most of its capability to be rational and agile... so selling is an act that destroys value quite a lot of the time, not just in terms of lost profits to the company, but in terms of lost quality available to the public via the company's output, and lost diversity in the marketplace. Remaining privately held, and making enough money to meet expenses and stream some profit to enough interested parties, is a worthwhile and oft overlooked goal.
DRM sucks, yes. But if you are agreeing to pay for a rental of a movie you have no right; legal, moral, or otherwise, to keep it permanently.
Agreed about not having the legal right. But who are you to say there's no moral right? The laws defining what's legal are fairly clear in this matter, at least in the US, but there is no clearly delimited moral construct... morality is up to each individual. You are free to decide that -- morally speaking -- you are going to adhere to a certain standard. It is up to others to decide for themselves what their morality is.
As for "or otherwise", what "otherwise"'s (i.e., alternatives to legality and morality) are being referenced? Without even knowing what alternate frameworks of interpretation are being summarily dismissed, I'm not inclined to green light that throw-away, no matter how compellingly rhetorical it might sound at first blush.
That's like looking at a key eye witness who saw you stab Nicole Brown Simpson and saying "How do I know you weren't on LSD and just imagining me there?" Seriously, independent third party witnesses are key to the judicial process. Get over yourself.
In a (sane) legal proceeding, there are resources allocated to evaluating the likelihood of scenarios proposed by either side. If one side posits that one of the witnesses may be unreliable because of being on LSD, the assertion isn't just tossed out... it's evaluated. There will be people who can come forward and testify as to the witness's habits, character, circumstances, all of which will usually lead to a reasonable assessment of the credibility of the "might he have been on LSD" question.
If google turns over search terms, this gets one FUCK of a lot harder. If someone wants to contest the search terms, what exactly are they going to say? "Um, I want google to prove the impossibility of someone mucking with the records in question. And I'd like google to prove the integrity of the code involved in collecting and storing this data"... even though doing so is in all likelihood impossible even for someone with a triple PhD in computer science, and to even try is something that google will fight tooth and nail since it would involve revealing both code and business logic.
Is the information faulty? Did someone munge with the data? Were Google's databases corrupt? Was the data recreated or generated from other data? Has Google's spy software been through open source review? How well was Google's software tested?
Agreed all! I'll add one: Might someone at google have an agenda? I.e., might the data be deliberately falsified?
None of your MAC addresses go over the wire to web servers, unless the web servers are on the same physical network as you.
Two scenarios to keep in mind:
(1) You're surfing on a wireless hotspot that isn't yours, e.g. you're at starbux, or using a neighbor's router. You download something that The Man gets interested in. The Man then requests access to the (starbux's or neighbor's) router, and gleans your mac address from it.
(2) You're surfing on the wireless router in your own home. You think you're safe, since you could always reset (or destroy) the router if trouble started coming. But... your ISP has a backdoor in their cable/dsl modem that allows them direct access to your wireless router... and, your router happens to have a known exploitable bug in it that allows remote access. Or you just haven't secured it to begin with.
[Novell will] come out with something *like* Samba, but different, and proprietary (50% MS, 50% Novell), and it would probably work better than Samba does now...thus killing an otherwise excellent OSS program
I really doubt this would be a threat to Samba, let alone kill it. Samba is GPL'd, so even if Novell somehow "owned" the Samba team (which AFAIK they do NOT) then it would still be likely that people would pick up the code and run with it. It does seem likely that Novell itself will stop using Samba, but that won't kill Samba any more than Novell disregarding the GPL will kill the GPL.
There is no justification to have physical property in the hands of a few individuals.... Quite a few cultures, for example, do not believe in land ownership.
I share your aversion to physical property being held by a minority of people. I do think that some variation in physical property holdings is to be expected even in what I'd think of as a fair economic system, since I'd expect people to have the entitlement to sell property in return for other things they might want more. But generally speaking, I'd want a system that puts more caps on skewed physical property accumulation (which I bluntly equate with wealth)... and if we're talking about the US in particular, this would be secondary to the primary goal of eradicating corruption first (again, just my personal preference of priorities).
I feel relatively capable of envisioning a functioning society that does not believe in IP. Some people would say that book production and medical research and so on would grind to a standstill without IP. I doubt it. I think people would still feel the need to express creativity, and there could be govt programs for research (some people think anything involving the govt is doomed to failure, but how much worse could it be than the current artificial scarcities of medicines created by the current greed-driven system?). But take the worst case: no new books are produced ever, no new medical research, and so on... really doesn't sound that bad to me. We already have a lot of great works to choose from. And existing medicines do well enough against most things.
I have trouble envisioning a functioning society without material ownership. If somebody builds a house, a non-ownership society would seem to imply that someone else could simply come along and take the house, leaving the original builder in the rain. I know that tribal societies like the indians moved their wigwams whereever they went and so land ownership wasn't a big thing, but I don't know how readily that motif could be applied to today's areas of dense population. In theory, if we were willing to undergo a complete change of life and society as we know it, we could perhaps over time phase in a system where land ownership wasn't possible... but contrast that kind of radical lifestyle change with the relatively benign change of abolishing IP; the vast majority of people probably wouldn't even notice the latter until they stopped getting sued by the RIAA.
How do societies that don't believe in land ownership function? Do they have other forms of property, and adjudications of land use that in effect mimic property? I believe an IP-less society could function rather easily; in what ways is that notion misguided? Generally speaking, how could a pysical property-less society function?
By that same argument, *ALL* property should be abandoned regardless of physicality.
Not according to me.
Physical property is a lot easier to adjudicate than IP because physical property cannot be easily duplicated at near zero cost... this is a huge, fundamental, significant difference.
This difference is manifest in the reasons behind physical property laws vs IP laws. Abstractly, both sets of laws were conceived to better the overall existence of mankind, but the ways in which they're intended to work are vastly different. Physical property laws are *not* intended to increase everyone's access to all physical property. Instead, physical property laws are intended to establish a concept of ownership to prevent the mayhem of everyone taking anything at any time. This doesn't achieve the ideal of everyone having enough, but I don't think there's much disagreement that it's better than a free-for-all.
By contrast, IP laws were intended to increase everyone's access to all ideas. The idea of granting a limited-time monopoly on ideas was solely a means to the end of incentivizing the development of ideas, with those ideas eventually becoming free for anyone's use, benefit, or enjoyment. This framework was established at a time when the printing press was cutting edge technology, and if there was any public debate about it then the public probably didn't figure it was giving up much. Now, everyone and their dog has the means to duplicate gigabytes of information and distribute around the world at near zero cost. Any benefits conferred by IP laws have long since been eclipsed by the hamstringing of innovation and creativity, and the villification of generosity. (Relevant read: John Gilmore's essay What's Wrong With Copy Protection.)
This distinction between physical property vs ideas is, I think, a lot easier to follow than the highly convoluted arguments put forth in furtherance of current IP laws (such as the argument you proposed which I originally responded to earlier in this thread.)
No, it would be more like putting up signs advertising the services of drug dealers, telling folks that you know all the drug dealers in town and that you can arrange an anonymous deal between you and the dealer, of course taking a cut of the action for your troubles, and stating clearly that your system is the safest way to get drugs because you have done some referral screenings, your clients say that this is the uncut shit, and you'll cut off anyone that offers the stuff mixed with ratpoison.
Without agreeing or disagreeing, I must simply say: contorted arguments like the above are exactly why "intellectual property" must die. It's just such a wasteful concept. IP was conceived as a way to benefit society, and it has been tried and it has failed. IP is instead serving as a vehicle of oppression. And of self-aggrandizement for people who think they're so special that nobody else ever would think of the same thing they thought of, or produce something similar of equal worth. What a bunch of fools.
I'm not claiming it to be a bad thing, simply an economic truism.
I see your point, but think it's more dependent on how you slice it.
Suppose the average population's household income is 10$/year and they pay on average $1/year, but a certain individual X in the population makes $100/year and is taxed $80/year. Is person X benefitting from the government, or paying more because of the government?
Suppose another individual Y doesn't make any money per year, and has in fact never had an income, but inherited $1,000,000, and annually pays $1000 in wealth taxes. Can it be said that person Y is benefitting from the current government?
It's cases like the above that make me hesitant to hold up "wealthy" as the very defition of "benefitting from the government".
And while I like the idea of continuous wealth re-distribution to a far greater degree than it's currently practiced in the US, I worry that hinging it on "benefits" vs "assets" might be barking up the wrong tree.
[Wealthier people] don't "consume" more [than middle class people], but they do, by definition, benefit more financially from the existing government
Niggle: it's not by definition. I.e., the definition of wealthy people does not include reference to their benefitting from the existing government, any more than it includes references to them benefitting from the laws of physics.
It may be accurate to say that wealthy people are currently benefitting from the (US) government as a matter of (unofficial but rampant) *policy*... but policies can be changed.
Really, I'm not anal, the only reason I'm nitpicking is because I don't like casual misuses of language that promote the misconception that nothing can be done about the distribution of wealth.
The difference is that I as an end-user decide when to have braces put on my teeth. I don't want some dentist (i.e. O/S developer) forcing these on me, reagardless of some mythical potential future benefit.
I assume you likewise object to the GPL, since it's not you who's choosing what license the software is being distributed under.
So take your pick...do you want vendor support for the operating system or to stand on principle? You can't have both.
Rest easy, I'm not trying to have both. My point is to clarify that any objections to the proposed patch should be seen in a practical light, and should not stem from the misguided notion that the patch is "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer", as the GGP asserts.
Banning binary modules will only reduce what people can do on linux and therefore drive people away, which is not what you want.
I don't disagree. My point is to clarify that any objections to the proposed patch should be seen in exactly such a practical light, and should not stem from the misguided notion that the patch is "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer", as the GGP asserts.
Linus is dead right: putting code into the kernel for non-technical reasons, purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer is very much "anti-computer-freedom" and should never be done.
My understanding is that the aim of such a patch would not be primarily for its direct effect (limiting users) but for its indirect effect: urging vendors to release source, which ultimately is PRO-user. It therefore seems like disingenuous rhetoric to claim that this would be "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer".
To me, the idea of thusly restricting binary-only modules seems pretty close to the spirit of the GPL. Similar rhetoric could be concocted regarding the GPL, i.e. someone could claim that it "restricts end users" by disallowing them the latitude to mod code, compile it, and distribute it without source for their own ends... but the goal of the GPL is very much about preserving the freedom of end users.
The only reasonable argument I've seen against the binary-restricting patch is the practicality-based argument that there may currently be so many highly desirable binary-only modules that such a patch doesn't have the critical mass to effectively force the hand of the binary-only vendors. I don't know enough to comment on the validity of the numbers of such modules, but more to the point: this is a *practical* objection, not a philosophical one. The practical objection may be perfectly valid, but if so it in no way justifies the portrayal of the restrictive patch as being philosophically "wrong", or having its heart in the wrong place.
I disagree with Linus's equating of the patch with the RIAA's tactics. That is bullshit. The RIAA's tactics are intended to restrict people and impoverish society to the end of benefitting a few crabbed souls. The patch as proposed is intended to empower people. Equating the two is like equating a toothache with braces; sure, they both hurt your mouth, but there's a good reason for the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Paraphrasing to make a point: What part of computing is not detecting, storing, and applying patterns and relations?
To be meaningful, "AI" should denote more than (as the article summary indicates is being done) doing a grep through a web repository to deduce associations. There are branches of AI founded on brain neurology (neural nets), evolution (Genetic Algorithms), Bayesian logic, and various other things. Not all of the variants I can think of necessarily should qualify as AI (IMO), but the ones I'm thinking of are all substantially more esoteric than the summary's described approach. I take the GP's point to be that using a web repository as a database is too pedestrian to qualify as AI.
Damn! Even though I keep my gender a secret, they'll be able to tell I'm a woman because of gaps in my resume when I took time to be with the infants... krap, it was so nice thinking I was flying under the radar. Maybe I need to fill those gaps: "Dec97-Mar99, Lactation Dispensation Consultant".
(ps - I *am* joking. And, I'm not really a woman... I'm really a horse. Well... I'm just pretending to be a horse... actually, I'm a broom.)
Very cool idea. In the scenario above, is there "competition" within the company to fulfill the sales department's needs? If not, what leverage is wielded by the sales group when negotiating price? Or is there some other mechanism used to determine the cost?
This particular option isn't really available in this case, is it? They don't control the OSX source code, Apple does.
It is like finding a car door open and yelling out "Hey This Car Door is Open and all the valuables are inside someone should lock it!" vs. Finding the person who owns the car and descretly telling him to that is is unlocked.
Bit of a problem with this analogy too. The "door" in question is controlled/lockable only by the person who owns the house (as pointed out above), yet leaving it unlocked affects not the residents of that "controlling" house but instead millions of other residents of other houses. The pivotal question is whether the owner of the controlling house can be sufficiently motivated to act on behalf of these other folks. I couldn't tell from reading the faq whether they've approached apple privately or not. I spose I'd guess they haven't or else they'd probably mention it... but that doesn't necessarily render their current approach less moral.
I hope someone creates an "O" language. That way, interface bindings for it could be called "O-interfaces", or "O-faces" for short. So when you create a nifty library for the language, publishing it could be known as "showing the world your O-face".
I find it odd that so many people think like this. I.e., that to be a success a company MUST be bought, either by the public or by another company. In either scenario, the company being bought loses most of its capability to be rational and agile... so selling is an act that destroys value quite a lot of the time, not just in terms of lost profits to the company, but in terms of lost quality available to the public via the company's output, and lost diversity in the marketplace. Remaining privately held, and making enough money to meet expenses and stream some profit to enough interested parties, is a worthwhile and oft overlooked goal.
Agreed about not having the legal right. But who are you to say there's no moral right? The laws defining what's legal are fairly clear in this matter, at least in the US, but there is no clearly delimited moral construct... morality is up to each individual. You are free to decide that -- morally speaking -- you are going to adhere to a certain standard. It is up to others to decide for themselves what their morality is.
As for "or otherwise", what "otherwise"'s (i.e., alternatives to legality and morality) are being referenced? Without even knowing what alternate frameworks of interpretation are being summarily dismissed, I'm not inclined to green light that throw-away, no matter how compellingly rhetorical it might sound at first blush.
oblig. Chief Wiggum quote: "I'd rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase them."
In a (sane) legal proceeding, there are resources allocated to evaluating the likelihood of scenarios proposed by either side. If one side posits that one of the witnesses may be unreliable because of being on LSD, the assertion isn't just tossed out... it's evaluated. There will be people who can come forward and testify as to the witness's habits, character, circumstances, all of which will usually lead to a reasonable assessment of the credibility of the "might he have been on LSD" question.
If google turns over search terms, this gets one FUCK of a lot harder. If someone wants to contest the search terms, what exactly are they going to say? "Um, I want google to prove the impossibility of someone mucking with the records in question. And I'd like google to prove the integrity of the code involved in collecting and storing this data"... even though doing so is in all likelihood impossible even for someone with a triple PhD in computer science, and to even try is something that google will fight tooth and nail since it would involve revealing both code and business logic.
Agreed all! I'll add one: Might someone at google have an agenda? I.e., might the data be deliberately falsified?
Two scenarios to keep in mind:
I really doubt this would be a threat to Samba, let alone kill it. Samba is GPL'd, so even if Novell somehow "owned" the Samba team (which AFAIK they do NOT) then it would still be likely that people would pick up the code and run with it. It does seem likely that Novell itself will stop using Samba, but that won't kill Samba any more than Novell disregarding the GPL will kill the GPL.
I share your aversion to physical property being held by a minority of people. I do think that some variation in physical property holdings is to be expected even in what I'd think of as a fair economic system, since I'd expect people to have the entitlement to sell property in return for other things they might want more. But generally speaking, I'd want a system that puts more caps on skewed physical property accumulation (which I bluntly equate with wealth)... and if we're talking about the US in particular, this would be secondary to the primary goal of eradicating corruption first (again, just my personal preference of priorities).
I feel relatively capable of envisioning a functioning society that does not believe in IP. Some people would say that book production and medical research and so on would grind to a standstill without IP. I doubt it. I think people would still feel the need to express creativity, and there could be govt programs for research (some people think anything involving the govt is doomed to failure, but how much worse could it be than the current artificial scarcities of medicines created by the current greed-driven system?). But take the worst case: no new books are produced ever, no new medical research, and so on... really doesn't sound that bad to me. We already have a lot of great works to choose from. And existing medicines do well enough against most things.
I have trouble envisioning a functioning society without material ownership. If somebody builds a house, a non-ownership society would seem to imply that someone else could simply come along and take the house, leaving the original builder in the rain. I know that tribal societies like the indians moved their wigwams whereever they went and so land ownership wasn't a big thing, but I don't know how readily that motif could be applied to today's areas of dense population. In theory, if we were willing to undergo a complete change of life and society as we know it, we could perhaps over time phase in a system where land ownership wasn't possible... but contrast that kind of radical lifestyle change with the relatively benign change of abolishing IP; the vast majority of people probably wouldn't even notice the latter until they stopped getting sued by the RIAA.
How do societies that don't believe in land ownership function? Do they have other forms of property, and adjudications of land use that in effect mimic property? I believe an IP-less society could function rather easily; in what ways is that notion misguided? Generally speaking, how could a pysical property-less society function?
Not according to me.
Physical property is a lot easier to adjudicate than IP because physical property cannot be easily duplicated at near zero cost... this is a huge, fundamental, significant difference.
This difference is manifest in the reasons behind physical property laws vs IP laws. Abstractly, both sets of laws were conceived to better the overall existence of mankind, but the ways in which they're intended to work are vastly different. Physical property laws are *not* intended to increase everyone's access to all physical property. Instead, physical property laws are intended to establish a concept of ownership to prevent the mayhem of everyone taking anything at any time. This doesn't achieve the ideal of everyone having enough, but I don't think there's much disagreement that it's better than a free-for-all.
By contrast, IP laws were intended to increase everyone's access to all ideas. The idea of granting a limited-time monopoly on ideas was solely a means to the end of incentivizing the development of ideas, with those ideas eventually becoming free for anyone's use, benefit, or enjoyment. This framework was established at a time when the printing press was cutting edge technology, and if there was any public debate about it then the public probably didn't figure it was giving up much. Now, everyone and their dog has the means to duplicate gigabytes of information and distribute around the world at near zero cost. Any benefits conferred by IP laws have long since been eclipsed by the hamstringing of innovation and creativity, and the villification of generosity. (Relevant read: John Gilmore's essay What's Wrong With Copy Protection.)
This distinction between physical property vs ideas is, I think, a lot easier to follow than the highly convoluted arguments put forth in furtherance of current IP laws (such as the argument you proposed which I originally responded to earlier in this thread.)
Without agreeing or disagreeing, I must simply say: contorted arguments like the above are exactly why "intellectual property" must die. It's just such a wasteful concept. IP was conceived as a way to benefit society, and it has been tried and it has failed. IP is instead serving as a vehicle of oppression. And of self-aggrandizement for people who think they're so special that nobody else ever would think of the same thing they thought of, or produce something similar of equal worth. What a bunch of fools.
I see your point, but think it's more dependent on how you slice it.
Suppose the average population's household income is 10$/year and they pay on average $1/year, but a certain individual X in the population makes $100/year and is taxed $80/year. Is person X benefitting from the government, or paying more because of the government?
Suppose another individual Y doesn't make any money per year, and has in fact never had an income, but inherited $1,000,000, and annually pays $1000 in wealth taxes. Can it be said that person Y is benefitting from the current government?
It's cases like the above that make me hesitant to hold up "wealthy" as the very defition of "benefitting from the government".
And while I like the idea of continuous wealth re-distribution to a far greater degree than it's currently practiced in the US, I worry that hinging it on "benefits" vs "assets" might be barking up the wrong tree.
Niggle: it's not by definition. I.e., the definition of wealthy people does not include reference to their benefitting from the existing government, any more than it includes references to them benefitting from the laws of physics.
It may be accurate to say that wealthy people are currently benefitting from the (US) government as a matter of (unofficial but rampant) *policy*... but policies can be changed.
Really, I'm not anal, the only reason I'm nitpicking is because I don't like casual misuses of language that promote the misconception that nothing can be done about the distribution of wealth.
IMHO, any guy that wears a bra in highschool had better be prepared for a bit of hassling.
I'm so excited I wish I could wet my pants!
But it'll still work for the slot-machine approach.
I assume you likewise object to the GPL, since it's not you who's choosing what license the software is being distributed under.
Rest easy, I'm not trying to have both. My point is to clarify that any objections to the proposed patch should be seen in a practical light, and should not stem from the misguided notion that the patch is "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer", as the GGP asserts.
I don't disagree. My point is to clarify that any objections to the proposed patch should be seen in exactly such a practical light, and should not stem from the misguided notion that the patch is "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer", as the GGP asserts.
My understanding is that the aim of such a patch would not be primarily for its direct effect (limiting users) but for its indirect effect: urging vendors to release source, which ultimately is PRO-user. It therefore seems like disingenuous rhetoric to claim that this would be "purely to limit the *end user* and specifically limit what they can do with their computer".
To me, the idea of thusly restricting binary-only modules seems pretty close to the spirit of the GPL. Similar rhetoric could be concocted regarding the GPL, i.e. someone could claim that it "restricts end users" by disallowing them the latitude to mod code, compile it, and distribute it without source for their own ends... but the goal of the GPL is very much about preserving the freedom of end users.
The only reasonable argument I've seen against the binary-restricting patch is the practicality-based argument that there may currently be so many highly desirable binary-only modules that such a patch doesn't have the critical mass to effectively force the hand of the binary-only vendors. I don't know enough to comment on the validity of the numbers of such modules, but more to the point: this is a *practical* objection, not a philosophical one. The practical objection may be perfectly valid, but if so it in no way justifies the portrayal of the restrictive patch as being philosophically "wrong", or having its heart in the wrong place.
I disagree with Linus's equating of the patch with the RIAA's tactics. That is bullshit. The RIAA's tactics are intended to restrict people and impoverish society to the end of benefitting a few crabbed souls. The patch as proposed is intended to empower people. Equating the two is like equating a toothache with braces; sure, they both hurt your mouth, but there's a good reason for the latter.