Explosives are restricted to those who have a legitimate use for them.
That's the trick, isn't it: define who has a legitimate use for something. Nobody questions whether miners have a legitimate use for explosives, but what about the guy who thinks it'd be cool to blow up the old rust bucket he has been driving around? I suspect that if you ask him, he'd claim a legitimate use that is a legitimate use and really, who is anyone else to tell him no?
Who has Bittorrent but no legitimate uses for it?
It seems likely that 90% or more of the people who use BitTorrent do not have a legitimate use for it.
Just think about it... HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims.
Does it? Seriously. That's a pretty big claim. You could make the same claim of diabetes. No cure. Without treatment you will die from it. But nobody thinks of it as a fatal condition. AIDS may well become something similar. Look at Magic Johnson, been diagnosed with HIV for 15 years. As far as anyone knows he is quite healthy. Given the way things look for him, at 47 years old he is more likely to die of old age than HIV/AIDS complications.
Why couldn't you understand something like that? You've got to stop thinking about these things as network cards and video cards. Think of them as devices that take input, do some work, and produce output. Then you can see that any kind of device is susceptible to bad data.
So, out of curiousity, what exactly is "open source" in your world?
You can take Solaris get the complete source. Make whatever changes you want, build your own distro and release it. Sun could decide it was all a complete screwup and shutdown opensolaris tomorrow and you'd still be able to continue to develop and release your derivative code. Sounds like open source to me.
Contrast this to Linux. You can contribute patcehs to Linus. You can discuss it on IRC. You can subscribe to email lists. You can take the source and build your own. And Linus undeniably has private discussions with developers whom he has established working relationships with about the development of Linus' kernel. Additionally you cannot directly check your code into the mainline Linux kernel. Sounds about the same as the OpenSolaris development process to me.
Maybe they are, but IBM is still on our side for this battle anyhow. IBM's big money comes from services, Sun's big money comes from expensive hardware.
Apparently you've never priced Sun and IBM hardware. Sun's bottom end x86 server is $745, or $945 for a dual core Opteron. They're lowest end SPARC is $3145. IBM's bottom end x86 server is $1129. They're lowest end p-series is $2995 for a PPC970, for an actual POWER5 system it's $3399 and then you have to license the software on top of that.
Claiming that Sun is selling overpriced hardware just indicates that you really aren't in touch with the market.
Around these parts, if some old fuck pissed everyone off with a mosquito device, he'd just get put in hospital.
Around here, if some young turd figures he has to prove how macho he is by beating up someone's grandfather he ends up nailed to his front door with a spike through his head with a note to his family to get the fuck off the continent.
You are such a fucking loser. My guess is that in the real world everyone pushes you around and it's only in the security of your own home that you manage to work yourself up to some righteous fit of manlyness.
If you own a building and hang a sign outside saying "Open to the public" with the doors unlocked, do you need to post someone outside to explicitly tell people they can come in?
Except in situations where your wireless SID is "Welcome2Use" or "FreeWIFI" or some other such thing, the mere presence of an unsecured AP isn't the same as a sign saying "Open to the public". An unsecured AP with a default SID ("LINKSYS", "ACTIONTEC", "BELKIN", etc) is just unconfigured, it's not advertising free internet access for anyone who comes along.
Negotiating a connection, giving out an IP address via DHCP, and routing traffic are the basic requirements of the device. They are not an invitation to public usage. In fact, your basic AP sitting there sends out an SSID broadcast. The client initiates the connection. It requests an IP address and routing information. If you wanted to use your door analogy, what is happening is more akin to a building with a door. The door is sending out it's SSID broadcast by generally looking like a door, having a knob, hinges, is generally three feet wide by six and a half feet high. You walking up to it and trying the knob is like trying to associate with the AP. The door being unlocked would be not using WEP or something better and accepting DHCP requests. Opening up, as doors are designed to do would be the equivalent of getting an IP address back on your DHCP request. But even so, it would not be appropriate for you to just make yourself and home and go on walkabout inside the building any more than it is appropriate to use someones network connection just because their WAP was configured in a permissive mode.
To use your first analogy, if someone urinates on your face and you consciously decide to do nothing about it, you have expressed your consent.
A) Your restatement of my analogy is completely different than what I originally put out there. B) Not responding to an event is not consent to the events happening, it's just not doing anything about it. For example perhaps the person doing the urinating is twice your size and has bits of the last nerd he ate still stuck in his teeth.
Just as the idea that anything not expressly denied is allowed is stupid, the idea that anything not expressly allowed is denied is stupid as well.
When it comes to someone else's private property, and this is private property we're talking about, the idea that lack of explicit permission is denied is absolutely proper and correct.
Consider this, to get away from the violent metaphors, I'm at the bus station planning my trip the next day and I have a piece of paper but I seem to have lost my pen. I notice someone sitting on a bench with a backpack next to them. I suspect that there might be a pen in there and there are no locks on the zippers. So I grab it, open it up, rifle through it, find a pen, take my notes, put the pen back in the pack, zip it up and set it back to the supposed owner. Is that proper? No, it's not.
The act of placing it on your network and leaving it configured for open access is implied consent.
No it isn't. Someone's private property not being secured is not implied consent. You're just wrong there's no question about it.
You don't wear a full body rubber cover, so it's OK for me to urinate on your face.
You aren't wearing a bullet proof vest, so it's OK for me to shoot you.
Iraq didn't field a powerful enough army, so it's OK for the US to kick ass and ignore names.
That thing wasn't bolted, glued or locked down, so it's OK for me to take it.
You aren't resistant to HIV, so it's OK for me to infect you with it.
The idea that anything not expressely denied is allowed is just stupid. It may be OK for your parents and yourself, but for the real world you ask before you do something that can have an impact on someone else.
Um. You must not be very aware of the IT industry. Lots of people buy mainframes. They spend an awful lot of money on them too. However proud you are of your favorite OS (which in all likelyhood you had a miniscule part in creating), there are many tasks that mainframes are much better at doing.
Alright. I'm fed up with copyright advocates saying that there would be 'less material produced' if there was no copyright. Bull. there would be less corporate-planned and marketed, low-entertainment/high revenue crap, yes. But art would not suffer froma lack of copyright. Artists do not create in order to get more revenue. Artists create because of an internal drive.
You can be as fed as you please. You might as well throw some indignation in there too. Maybe some self righteousness on the side. The fundamental proof that I am right and you are wrong is to compare the amount of content produced that is immediately sent to the public domain (content that is created purely for the love of the art) and the amount that is protected under copyright (commercially produced art.) It's orders of magnitude in favor of protected art.
Art of all kinds, paintings, photographs, music, literature, would continue to get created on a small scale. And if you happened to have a personal relationship with an artist you might be able to work out some kind of individual transaction that would get you a recording to listen to or a picture to hang on the wall. On the other hand the people who refine the art, editors, framers, decorators, producers, all would basically get out of the business. Because what they do isn't the creative fire. Working all day in the studio with an artist to create a recording with an even sound. This sort of thing takes time and people need to eat. They need shelter. And they aren't going to be able to get the standard of living that goes along with the level of work that they see themselves doing to polish up the product. So they'd move on to something else.
The idea that those that listen or watch are consuming media is as fundamentally flawed as the idea that artists are primarily motivated to make a buck.
The idea that artists are all obsessively driven to produce art for the sake of art is the fundamentally what is fundamentally flawed. Most people who create the art that you consume are just people who have a talent for it. They are using the available market dynamics to maximize their gain. If that market wasn't available to them, then they would turn around and go work in some other field and do their art on the side. They will probably produce some works on the side, but generally they will not spend day after day working on creating a highly polished, refined work.
So in conclusion, I'm right. You are wrong. If you want to convince anyone differently then show the world all this free art that is being created for the pure love of the art. Where can I get a piece of high art for the cost of materials? Where is the Great American Novel that I can download off the net and print out? Where is the Mozart level talent that is producing new symphonies? How about plays? How about movies? The complete lack of a glut of available content is a pretty fucking clear indicator that you're argument is full of shit.
It has nothing to do with being stupidly technical. It has to do with language. When it is said "necessity is the mother of invention" anyone with even a little bit of intelligence can identify that it's not a literal statement of fact, it's figurative. That same person will then think about what it might mean. Then being the marginally smart person they are, they will see the idea being expressed and the particularily articulate way that idea was expressed.
Your statement of "the best invention really is necessity" makes very little sense. At it's most literal, no one will agree with you. What is so great about necessity? Even taken figuratively... well, there's nothing figurative about it. If you've heard people say that and you connected it to the famous "necessity is the mother of invention", then you either didn't understand what they said or both you and the speaker aren't very good at the english language.
I realize that english is a living language, but even so if you want people to take you seriously and be persuaded by what you have to say, you need to use the language in a skilled fashion. Being articulate, forming complex ideas with efficient use of words, and constructing logical statements is the very basics of being a proficient communicator.
Never said they wouldn't have a service. I said that they wouldn't have a service that anyone would pay for. All four of the responders missed the multiple reasons why no one would go to allofmp3.com if there were no copyright protection.
1) there'd be less material in general. 2) but for the material that there was, why would I go to a foreign site if I could go to a local site that would be better connected for me? 3) why would I spend my money internationally when I can spend it domestically? 4) why would I give up billing information to a company in a foreign country where if there was a data breach I would have zero recourse?
In a copyright free world, I could use ITMS for the same price that you get at allofmp3.com.
What's more is that eventually some semi-creative programmer who is living on the college welfare program would get to thinking how great it would be to be able to save even the thirteen cents it costs to get the latest POS album. He'd slap something together, tell his buddies, and suddenly you'd have this great network of well connected gits who are spending their student loans and parent's money on music pooling their resources into the biggest, fastest music service on the planet. All for "free" (that is, zero cost to the users.)
And the final point I have to make is that even with allofmp3.com sitting out there selling music without the permission of the rights holders, people still go on p2p networks to get it for free.
What'll be funny is when the various music organizations eventually get fed up and dump some cash on some Russian politician and the next day all of allofmp3.com's servers and logs are seized and then you'll see some lawsuits against the customers. (Because even allofmp3.com admits that in general it's not legal for people outside of Russia to buy music from them.)
Nah to stretch the original metaphor... HD Self-Promoter sees a situation in the theatre that under the proper conditions that won't pop up in normal operations of the theatre would start a fire. So he decides to demonstrate that he is correct about this by burning the theatre to the ground.
allofmp3.com would not have a service anyone would pay for if it wasn't for copyright and the general lack of an automatic "everything goes into the public domain at the moment of creation" situation.
If you walk out of the barber shop without paying for your haircut, you've taken the barber's time, which he could've been using to cut hair for a paying customer.
Oh good. I'll only walk out without paying where there are no other customers waiting. That way the barber didn't lose anything in giving me a free haircut....
Also, let's not forgot the Atari handheld "Lynx" system. Some of the ports were pretty terrible, but the four player support preceeded GBA by awhile, eh??
Four? "What you talkin' about Willis?!" The ComLynx port on the Lynx is a bus type (ie. think ethernet.) The drivers are capable of pushing 16 units together. There were/are several games that would allow 8 players. So there.
You do realize that you don't have to know programming for the shit that they do at Los Alamos, NASA, etc.? You have to know science. John C. knows programming. If you've followed his writing, looked at his code, etc. you'd see that he understands not only the algorithms, but the underlying hardware architectures and processor interactions. I'd place $100 on the fact that John's production code is more efficient than the code produced by programmers at Los Alomos. Just because he writes for efficiency, whereas they write to solve particular problems and will throw $100 million in computing hardware at the problem rather than spend 6 months optimizing their software to run on half the machine than the code development platform. Knowing science does not equate to being a good programmer, nor does being a good programmer equate to knowing science. But, if you look at what John has written (ie. his words) you would see that he's a pretty smart fellow and the odds are that he's not out in his garage carving rockets out of hunk of pine with a pocket knife.
They're not stupid. They're underpaid. They're tired. They're harrassed. They're trying to do a job with active interferance from parents and supervisors. They're disrespected.
Just because someone is a K-12 teacher doesn't make them stupid and if you honestly think that they are, then you are truly narrowminded and possibly bordering on stupid yourself.
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That's the trick, isn't it: define who has a legitimate use for something. Nobody questions whether miners have a legitimate use for explosives, but what about the guy who thinks it'd be cool to blow up the old rust bucket he has been driving around? I suspect that if you ask him, he'd claim a legitimate use that is a legitimate use and really, who is anyone else to tell him no?
Who has Bittorrent but no legitimate uses for it?
It seems likely that 90% or more of the people who use BitTorrent do not have a legitimate use for it.
Does it? Seriously. That's a pretty big claim. You could make the same claim of diabetes. No cure. Without treatment you will die from it. But nobody thinks of it as a fatal condition. AIDS may well become something similar. Look at Magic Johnson, been diagnosed with HIV for 15 years. As far as anyone knows he is quite healthy. Given the way things look for him, at 47 years old he is more likely to die of old age than HIV/AIDS complications.
Why couldn't you understand something like that? You've got to stop thinking about these things as network cards and video cards. Think of them as devices that take input, do some work, and produce output. Then you can see that any kind of device is susceptible to bad data.
So, out of curiousity, what exactly is "open source" in your world?
You can take Solaris get the complete source. Make whatever changes you want, build your own distro and release it. Sun could decide it was all a complete screwup and shutdown opensolaris tomorrow and you'd still be able to continue to develop and release your derivative code. Sounds like open source to me.
Contrast this to Linux. You can contribute patcehs to Linus. You can discuss it on IRC. You can subscribe to email lists. You can take the source and build your own. And Linus undeniably has private discussions with developers whom he has established working relationships with about the development of Linus' kernel. Additionally you cannot directly check your code into the mainline Linux kernel. Sounds about the same as the OpenSolaris development process to me.
Yeah, then Google can "own" the product by hiring the lead developers and closing the development, a la FireFox.
Apparently you've never priced Sun and IBM hardware. Sun's bottom end x86 server is $745, or $945 for a dual core Opteron. They're lowest end SPARC is $3145. IBM's bottom end x86 server is $1129. They're lowest end p-series is $2995 for a PPC970, for an actual POWER5 system it's $3399 and then you have to license the software on top of that.
Claiming that Sun is selling overpriced hardware just indicates that you really aren't in touch with the market.
As it should.
Around here, if some young turd figures he has to prove how macho he is by beating up someone's grandfather he ends up nailed to his front door with a spike through his head with a note to his family to get the fuck off the continent.
You are such a fucking loser. My guess is that in the real world everyone pushes you around and it's only in the security of your own home that you manage to work yourself up to some righteous fit of manlyness.
Think flash and a usb controller on the card.
Except in situations where your wireless SID is "Welcome2Use" or "FreeWIFI" or some other such thing, the mere presence of an unsecured AP isn't the same as a sign saying "Open to the public". An unsecured AP with a default SID ("LINKSYS", "ACTIONTEC", "BELKIN", etc) is just unconfigured, it's not advertising free internet access for anyone who comes along.
Negotiating a connection, giving out an IP address via DHCP, and routing traffic are the basic requirements of the device. They are not an invitation to public usage. In fact, your basic AP sitting there sends out an SSID broadcast. The client initiates the connection. It requests an IP address and routing information. If you wanted to use your door analogy, what is happening is more akin to a building with a door. The door is sending out it's SSID broadcast by generally looking like a door, having a knob, hinges, is generally three feet wide by six and a half feet high. You walking up to it and trying the knob is like trying to associate with the AP. The door being unlocked would be not using WEP or something better and accepting DHCP requests. Opening up, as doors are designed to do would be the equivalent of getting an IP address back on your DHCP request. But even so, it would not be appropriate for you to just make yourself and home and go on walkabout inside the building any more than it is appropriate to use someones network connection just because their WAP was configured in a permissive mode.
A) Your restatement of my analogy is completely different than what I originally put out there. B) Not responding to an event is not consent to the events happening, it's just not doing anything about it. For example perhaps the person doing the urinating is twice your size and has bits of the last nerd he ate still stuck in his teeth.
When it comes to someone else's private property, and this is private property we're talking about, the idea that lack of explicit permission is denied is absolutely proper and correct.
Consider this, to get away from the violent metaphors, I'm at the bus station planning my trip the next day and I have a piece of paper but I seem to have lost my pen. I notice someone sitting on a bench with a backpack next to them. I suspect that there might be a pen in there and there are no locks on the zippers. So I grab it, open it up, rifle through it, find a pen, take my notes, put the pen back in the pack, zip it up and set it back to the supposed owner. Is that proper? No, it's not.
No it isn't. Someone's private property not being secured is not implied consent. You're just wrong there's no question about it.
The idea that anything not expressely denied is allowed is just stupid. It may be OK for your parents and yourself, but for the real world you ask before you do something that can have an impact on someone else.
Um. You must not be very aware of the IT industry. Lots of people buy mainframes. They spend an awful lot of money on them too. However proud you are of your favorite OS (which in all likelyhood you had a miniscule part in creating), there are many tasks that mainframes are much better at doing.
You can be as fed as you please. You might as well throw some indignation in there too. Maybe some self righteousness on the side. The fundamental proof that I am right and you are wrong is to compare the amount of content produced that is immediately sent to the public domain (content that is created purely for the love of the art) and the amount that is protected under copyright (commercially produced art.) It's orders of magnitude in favor of protected art.
Art of all kinds, paintings, photographs, music, literature, would continue to get created on a small scale. And if you happened to have a personal relationship with an artist you might be able to work out some kind of individual transaction that would get you a recording to listen to or a picture to hang on the wall. On the other hand the people who refine the art, editors, framers, decorators, producers, all would basically get out of the business. Because what they do isn't the creative fire. Working all day in the studio with an artist to create a recording with an even sound. This sort of thing takes time and people need to eat. They need shelter. And they aren't going to be able to get the standard of living that goes along with the level of work that they see themselves doing to polish up the product. So they'd move on to something else.
The idea that artists are all obsessively driven to produce art for the sake of art is the fundamentally what is fundamentally flawed. Most people who create the art that you consume are just people who have a talent for it. They are using the available market dynamics to maximize their gain. If that market wasn't available to them, then they would turn around and go work in some other field and do their art on the side. They will probably produce some works on the side, but generally they will not spend day after day working on creating a highly polished, refined work.
So in conclusion, I'm right. You are wrong. If you want to convince anyone differently then show the world all this free art that is being created for the pure love of the art. Where can I get a piece of high art for the cost of materials? Where is the Great American Novel that I can download off the net and print out? Where is the Mozart level talent that is producing new symphonies? How about plays? How about movies? The complete lack of a glut of available content is a pretty fucking clear indicator that you're argument is full of shit.
It has nothing to do with being stupidly technical. It has to do with language. When it is said "necessity is the mother of invention" anyone with even a little bit of intelligence can identify that it's not a literal statement of fact, it's figurative. That same person will then think about what it might mean. Then being the marginally smart person they are, they will see the idea being expressed and the particularily articulate way that idea was expressed.
Your statement of "the best invention really is necessity" makes very little sense. At it's most literal, no one will agree with you. What is so great about necessity? Even taken figuratively... well, there's nothing figurative about it. If you've heard people say that and you connected it to the famous "necessity is the mother of invention", then you either didn't understand what they said or both you and the speaker aren't very good at the english language.
I realize that english is a living language, but even so if you want people to take you seriously and be persuaded by what you have to say, you need to use the language in a skilled fashion. Being articulate, forming complex ideas with efficient use of words, and constructing logical statements is the very basics of being a proficient communicator.
Whether you were quoting someone or just have the verbal diarrhea, it makes no sense. It's kind of like saying "the best invention is starvation."
Never said they wouldn't have a service. I said that they wouldn't have a service that anyone would pay for. All four of the responders missed the multiple reasons why no one would go to allofmp3.com if there were no copyright protection.
1) there'd be less material in general.
2) but for the material that there was, why would I go to a foreign site if I could go to a local site that would be better connected for me?
3) why would I spend my money internationally when I can spend it domestically?
4) why would I give up billing information to a company in a foreign country where if there was a data breach I would have zero recourse?
In a copyright free world, I could use ITMS for the same price that you get at allofmp3.com.
What's more is that eventually some semi-creative programmer who is living on the college welfare program would get to thinking how great it would be to be able to save even the thirteen cents it costs to get the latest POS album. He'd slap something together, tell his buddies, and suddenly you'd have this great network of well connected gits who are spending their student loans and parent's money on music pooling their resources into the biggest, fastest music service on the planet. All for "free" (that is, zero cost to the users.)
And the final point I have to make is that even with allofmp3.com sitting out there selling music without the permission of the rights holders, people still go on p2p networks to get it for free.
What'll be funny is when the various music organizations eventually get fed up and dump some cash on some Russian politician and the next day all of allofmp3.com's servers and logs are seized and then you'll see some lawsuits against the customers. (Because even allofmp3.com admits that in general it's not legal for people outside of Russia to buy music from them.)
Nah to stretch the original metaphor... HD Self-Promoter sees a situation in the theatre that under the proper conditions that won't pop up in normal operations of the theatre would start a fire. So he decides to demonstrate that he is correct about this by burning the theatre to the ground.
allofmp3.com would not have a service anyone would pay for if it wasn't for copyright and the general lack of an automatic "everything goes into the public domain at the moment of creation" situation.
Oh good. I'll only walk out without paying where there are no other customers waiting. That way the barber didn't lose anything in giving me a free haircut....
That word does not mean what you think it means. Idiot.
Four? "What you talkin' about Willis?!" The ComLynx port on the Lynx is a bus type (ie. think ethernet.) The drivers are capable of pushing 16 units together. There were/are several games that would allow 8 players. So there.
Actually, see that first word up there on the banner? It's "News", which implies objectivity. Just a nit.
Yes, I agree! We all like a good cross-dressing game for the early morning hours at lan parties!
You do realize that you don't have to know programming for the shit that they do at Los Alamos, NASA, etc.? You have to know science. John C. knows programming. If you've followed his writing, looked at his code, etc. you'd see that he understands not only the algorithms, but the underlying hardware architectures and processor interactions. I'd place $100 on the fact that John's production code is more efficient than the code produced by programmers at Los Alomos. Just because he writes for efficiency, whereas they write to solve particular problems and will throw $100 million in computing hardware at the problem rather than spend 6 months optimizing their software to run on half the machine than the code development platform. Knowing science does not equate to being a good programmer, nor does being a good programmer equate to knowing science. But, if you look at what John has written (ie. his words) you would see that he's a pretty smart fellow and the odds are that he's not out in his garage carving rockets out of hunk of pine with a pocket knife.
They're not stupid. They're underpaid. They're tired. They're harrassed. They're trying to do a job with active interferance from parents and supervisors. They're disrespected.
Just because someone is a K-12 teacher doesn't make them stupid and if you honestly think that they are, then you are truly narrowminded and possibly bordering on stupid yourself.