Why redefine bitrate to mean something it's not? Bitrate is the size of the datastream per second; how many bits per second (hence the term 'bit rate'). It directly correlates to compression ratio: 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo audio takes about 1.35 megabits per second uncompressed (44,100 samples x 16 bits per channel x 2 channels) If an mp3 is encoded at 128kb/s, then the compression ratio is 10.7:1.
I suppose you could try to redefine bitrate to mean "qualitatively sounds about as good as an mp3 encoded at rate 'x'" but that would be stupid (not to mention vague, since two encoders can sound very different at the same frequency).
That works unless the files are encrypted (presumably with different keys), and if they're not encrypted, it's pretty hard to maintain plausable denyability as to the contents of a node's cache (which is one of the project goals).
Re:Can't we re-reverse engineer CSS?
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How do you propose to clean-room reverse engineer the unpublished algorithm without violating a clickthrough license agreement? You'll have to disassemble a compliant player, or else take apart a hardware decoder and take a microscope to the decoder ASIC. The former is exactly what happened with the Xing player, and the latter is unlikely to be undertaken by someone with an interest in making the reverse-engineered version public.
Why shouldn't there be a natural property right, to intellectual property? Why should the works of my mind, be any less mine, than the works of my body?
When I click on a link my browser (unless I tell it not to; iCab lets you pick) sends the REFERER info as part of the HTTP request. How does the site I last accessed forge the referer tag; some sort of skanky javascript or something?
Hmm, too bad they didn't shrink-wrap it, then they'd be covered under DMCA.
Be careful not to confuse DMCA (circumventing access control mechanisms, federal copyright law, already passed) with UCITA (validating shrinkwrap license, proposed uniform state contract law, only passed in Virginia).
Mail order transactions may not be federally taxed, but in Washington state at least (and probably others) there is a "Use Tax" owed on goods purchased from out of state on which sales tax wasn't payed, and this tax rate is equal to the sales tax rate. Maybe you don't pay this (I don't know who does) but if you don't, you're technically evading taxes.
Think a cross-office-app virus is bad? Imagine an office macro virus which carries around dormant copies of a windows native virus and a Mac OS native virus. Write once, infect anywhere...
Paul McCartney is doing NOTHING to MP3.com. A company which owns the rights to much of his music is doing something to MP3.com. Artists may literally sell their songs and figuratively their souls to the record company, but power of attorney as well?
I wonder how much I could have gotten for selling the right to blame things on me to, say, Union Carbide. "We're not dumping PCBs naked into the environment, it's that bastard Phil who's doing it!"
Slavery is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
Intellectual property is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
Even PHYSICAL property is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
The difference is a matter of degree, not kind. Certainly, most people find slavery morally repugnant; it certainly had the largest impact on the freedom of the people involved.
Artist produces a song. Artist sells property rights to the song to record company. Everyone else living in a WIPO-treatybound country is bound by the asserted property right not to share that song with their friends. We do not have a choice in the matter either.
There are any number of reasons to prefer a system in which any of these property rights exist. There are also reasons to hate these systems. In the embarassingly recent past, enough of humanity decided slavery was wrong to abolish it--although that certainly didn't benefit the plantation owners much (not that I shed a tear for their loss).
The word is 'intellectual property' for a reason. Once you have it, it's yours, like more tangible property. Amongst these rights, is the right to sell it. If you don't recognize the right of the artist to transfer full ownership (including the right to price it however they want), then you're denying the artists' rights.
The phrase is 'human property' for a reason. Once you have it, it's yours, like more tangible property. Amongst these rights, is the right to exploit the owned human for your benefit. If you don't recognize the right of the slaveowner to transfer full ownership (including the right to price it however they want), then you're denying the slaveowners' rights.
Why does that sound ridiculous? Because our society and legal system don't recognize that type of property as just or legally binding.
You can assert all the property rights you want. You can get a legal system on your side. You may even be in the moral right--but it takes more than "because I said so", "because that's how it's always been", or "because that's what we're used to" to justify it.
If that were the case, then copyright starts looking a lot more like a patent, and standard reverse-engineer/cleanroom reimplementation would create a derivative work. Obviously if such reverse-engineering were illegal, PCs would still be using IBM BIOSes.
I'm curious about your definition of "libertarian" as applied to free software licenses. I assume you intend to group (at least) the non-advertising BSD and X11 licenses as "libertarian free software" and the GPL as "non-libertarian free software." I see the distinction you want to draw--the X11 and GPL licenses have different aims, and try to protect different freedoms.
You seem to be classifying as "libertarian" only those licenses in which the author has given up his rights under modern copyright law to exclude others' use (the basis of property in general, and copyright in particular). Does your definition of libertarianism not include the right of author to control his work?
One of the funniest things about those discussions is that when it concerns GPL many/. people want such a license to be enforcable way beyond anything reasonable, while when it concerns a license from for example a big company none of you really feel bound by it... fon't forget that tho such licenses have a very different purpose, their legal vaule is based on the exact same thing: a user supposedly reading it, and by continuing installation/startup/usage, agree to comply with it.
There are fundamental differences between the GPL and a shrinkwrap commercial license, and they can be found in clause 5 of the GPL:
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
First, the GPL does not attempt to restrict your use of the program. Second, when you buy a commercial package, First Sale doctrine grants you certain rights including the right to use the program. If you download a GPL'd program, nothing automaticaly grants you the right to change it--copyright law restricts you from doing so without the permission of the author. The GPL describes the conditions under which the author grants you the rights to create and distribute derivative works. A shrinkwrap license (until UCITA passes) is an attempt by the company to convince you that by installing the software you are giving up rights which you gained when you and the software company agreed to exchange a product for money in the absence of any overriding contract at the point of sale.
I have never stated a belief that illegal copying is moral--to the contrary, I have remained intentionally agnostic on the subject precisely because there is an important distinction which is completely orthogonal to the issues of morality. There is continued usage of the word word "theft" to describe copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal, but is different from theft--this is my entire point.
I am not rationalizing thievery. I am not even attempting to rationalize copyright infringement. What I am trying to point out is the fundamental difference between physical and intellectual property--that it is impossible to "steal" the latter, unless you somehow destroy the original. It may be illegal, it may be immoral, it may give you herpes, it may kill your dog, it may cause the collapse of civilization as we know it, but they're not the same thing, and only confusion (and $400/hr if you're a lawyer) results from conflating the two.
I have no moral obligation to respect your definition of property when it interferes with my human rights.
Access to leisure products, AKA *luxuries* is a human right? What kind of privileged-class freak are you, anyway?
Don't read more into my statements than is there. If you define property to include ownership of human beings against their will, then I believe I have no moral obligation to respect that right, especially if it's me who you're claiming to own. My point is that just because you say you have a moral right to ownership of something doesn't mean you do. As a general rule, shouldn't morality of ownership derive from more than just telling people to "repeat after you" or to "get it into their pointy little heads."
If you create a physical object from raw materials you own (based on some system of legality), then it makes perfect sense that said system of legality should recognize you as the owner of the final product. Why? So nobody can take away the product of your labor.
If you create an idea from raw "intellectual" materials you own (to the degree this is even possible; creative artists draw on elements of the culture they inhabit, inventors draw upon the work of predecessors), then it also makes sense that nobody should be legally allowed to take away the product of your labor without your consent. Such is the wonderful nature of ideas--it's very hard to take them away!
At some point, it was decided that if authors were given exclusive control over their creations, then they would be able to require people to get their permission to use their work, thereby creating scarcity, and value. This necesarily entails restricting the freedom of others, but it benefits the authors, enabling them to make a living creating, rather than having to do it as a hobby. When a society decides they're willing to give up their intellectual freedom (the freedom to act on ideas entering your mind, regardless of the source, which I present as a legal concept rather than a inviolable moral right) in exchange for the benefits a society gains from having full-time authors who can make a living off their work, then they create IP laws, copyright, patents, etc. Similarly, when a society decides they're willing to give up their freedom to kill with impunity (again, as a legal concept rather than an inviolable moral right) in exchange for the (obvious) benefits of being able to live without worrying about people murdering you without consequence, then they create laws against murder, etc.
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of morals/morality. Morals are about what is right and wrong. These are completely static throughout time. It is people's values that change. Back in the early part of last century, people felt slavery was fine. That doesn't mean possessing another human is right, just that they adjusted their values so they didn't feel bad about it. The morality of it has always been that it is wrong.
Morals, then, are like absolute truths. We assume they exist, but there's apparantly no way to verify them. Throughout time, various people have held differing views of slavery. I believe slavery is morally wrong, but a Greek who owned slaves may honestly have held the belief that another group of humans was "destined" to be slaves, and it was perfectly moral to treat them as such. That doesn't make it right, but if it is against "absolute morality", why didn't he know that? You can pick a religious work and interpretation, but they aren't unanimous on the subject (and have little to say about intellectual property in most cases) and in so doing, you are choosing to believe in that moral schema, and choosing not to believe in another. Holding a vote based on popularity of beliefs seems a stupid way to do it. All that's left is honest introspection, along with rational assumptions about the consequences of one's actions. The only other option is for me to take -your- word for what is, and isn't, moral, and you very well might be wrong. I'm told by many that absolute ownership of intellectual property is a moral right of the author. Why? "Because it just is." I wasn't born knowing this, the Bible doesn't tell me so, and the notion that IP is a utilitarian social convention designed to balance the rights of the many with the ability of authors to profit makes sense. If you believe IP ownership is a moral right, how can you be sure it won't be the 23rd century equivilent of slavery?
I do not consider myself above the law; I have every belief that if I break the law, I will be caught. What I do not believe is that the law defines morality--if that were true, there would be no need for new laws. As an example, I believe that it is not immoral for a competent adult to choose to injest psychoactive substances in a situation he cannot do harm to others; this is, however, generally illegal in many countries.
As for your suggestion that I would legalize murder if it would profit me, the concept makes no sense as long as murder is defined as illegal killing of a person. If, by murder, you mean killing someone, there are many cases where it is legal: justifiable homicide, self-defense, the death penalty. These are all cases were society (not me, personally) decided that there were advantages to defining certain types of killings as legal.
I was unaware of the practice of cracking software to release it under the GPL--such a relicensing would have no legal force in any event, since it was not done with the permission of the copyright holder. I wondered at the interpretation because the plain meaning refered to something outside my experience. Someone posting photoshop on a warez site, or releasing a list of serial numbers, does not mean they are claiming to be releasing it under the GPL, it just means they are putting there for people to (illegally) copy. In any event, this would not be theft; rather, "copyright infringement". The law recognizes this distinction even if you choose not to.
Serious GPL advocates advocate the use of the GPL with the specific authorization of the legal copyright holder because they believe there are specific moral or utilitarian reasons to do so.
They wouldn't walk into a record store and steal the CD, but ripping it off via the net and mp3s is not only OK, it is something to stand up and protect.
Whether copying an MP3 without authorization is legal, illegal, moral, or immoral, it is fundamentally different from physically stealing a CD from a record store. How? Because if I steal a physical object from you, you don't have it anymore. If I copy something from you, it is still in your posession.
As a society we have decided (or in some cases, those with lots of political power have decided for us) that it is economically adventageous to create a monopoly on some forms of information as a means to stimulate its creation. If I copy for free something that you would like me to pay for, then you don't receive the revinue you would have received under your monopoly on your creation. If I do this, I may have violated the law, and I may have comitted an immoral act, but you are no worse off than if I had decided I didn't want it in the first place.
Naturally, if everybody were to do this, then the "incentive" created by the monopoly would be lessened, but it's becoming easier and easier for people to do this. The response to that is to either strengthen the power of the monopoly holders, ergo further eroding the rights of others, or to give up and start over with a new system.
I have no moral obligation to respect your definition of property when it interferes with my human rights. The quibble is what can morally be called property. Physical objects? Animals? Other people? Ideas? There's no universal agreement on the subject. If we repealed the 13th ammendment, and I got the law to recognize you as my slave, it wouldn't affect the morality of the situation.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "'cracking' copy-protected software to release it under the GPL"--do you mean creating open source clones of closed source products? If copyright isn't violated, do you still think this is wrong? Does creating a piece of software mean you "own" the idea of software to perform that function? Except in the case of software patents, the current law (which is pretty highly in favor of intellectual "property" owners) isn't even with you on that one.
Meta Moderation will just display the post and the moderation done to it without any of the surrounding context. It's difficult to judge the accuracy of a "redundant" mod during meta-moderation.
It's a distinction without a difference -- like anyone in authority, Clinton is ultimately responsible for the acts of his subordinates.
Okay, then he's responsible for having requested that some people render their opinion. It doesn't logically follow that he necesarily agrees with their conclusions.
One shot was fired, but blood on the barrel of the gun indicated it was fired at very close range. Was the officer worried the guy was going to inject him with the heroin? Why does running away from a police officer (who is increasingly statistically likely to shoot you if you're unarmed, beat you, take you to the station and sodomize you with a broomstick, etc) justify getting fatally shot?
SRP does rely on a shared secret (the password), but most of the time you already are going to have this set up. The advantage offered by SRP is that for a man in the middle attack to work, the host in the middle would have to either know your password or blindly authenticate you. SRP authenticates while passing information which is useless in identifying the password to someone without the shared secret.
Slashdot Mirror
I had that trouble with mac IE4.x, but you might try iCab for the mac. IE5 is supposed to fix it too.
Why redefine bitrate to mean something it's not? Bitrate is the size of the datastream per second; how many bits per second (hence the term 'bit rate'). It directly correlates to compression ratio: 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo audio takes about 1.35 megabits per second uncompressed (44,100 samples x 16 bits per channel x 2 channels) If an mp3 is encoded at 128kb/s, then the compression ratio is 10.7:1.
I suppose you could try to redefine bitrate to mean "qualitatively sounds about as good as an mp3 encoded at rate 'x'" but that would be stupid (not to mention vague, since two encoders can sound very different at the same frequency).
That works unless the files are encrypted (presumably with different keys), and if they're not encrypted, it's pretty hard to maintain plausable denyability as to the contents of a node's cache (which is one of the project goals).
How do you propose to clean-room reverse engineer the unpublished algorithm without violating a clickthrough license agreement? You'll have to disassemble a compliant player, or else take apart a hardware decoder and take a microscope to the decoder ASIC. The former is exactly what happened with the Xing player, and the latter is unlikely to be undertaken by someone with an interest in making the reverse-engineered version public.
When I click on a link my browser (unless I tell it not to; iCab lets you pick) sends the REFERER info as part of the HTTP request. How does the site I last accessed forge the referer tag; some sort of skanky javascript or something?
Be careful not to confuse DMCA (circumventing access control mechanisms, federal copyright law, already passed) with UCITA (validating shrinkwrap license, proposed uniform state contract law, only passed in Virginia).
What would be the grounds for the suit? ORBS isn't forcing you to use their list to do anything, let alone block email.
Mail order transactions may not be federally taxed, but in Washington state at least (and probably others) there is a "Use Tax" owed on goods purchased from out of state on which sales tax wasn't payed, and this tax rate is equal to the sales tax rate. Maybe you don't pay this (I don't know who does) but if you don't, you're technically evading taxes.
Think a cross-office-app virus is bad? Imagine an office macro virus which carries around dormant copies of a windows native virus and a Mac OS native virus. Write once, infect anywhere...
Paul McCartney is doing NOTHING to MP3.com. A company which owns the rights to much of his music is doing something to MP3.com. Artists may literally sell their songs and figuratively their souls to the record company, but power of attorney as well?
I wonder how much I could have gotten for selling the right to blame things on me to, say, Union Carbide. "We're not dumping PCBs naked into the environment, it's that bastard Phil who's doing it!"
Slavery is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
Intellectual property is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
Even PHYSICAL property is an asserted property right interfering with the free actions of a human being other than the alleged 'owner'.
The difference is a matter of degree, not kind. Certainly, most people find slavery morally repugnant; it certainly had the largest impact on the freedom of the people involved.
Artist produces a song. Artist sells property rights to the song to record company. Everyone else living in a WIPO-treatybound country is bound by the asserted property right not to share that song with their friends. We do not have a choice in the matter either.
There are any number of reasons to prefer a system in which any of these property rights exist. There are also reasons to hate these systems. In the embarassingly recent past, enough of humanity decided slavery was wrong to abolish it--although that certainly didn't benefit the plantation owners much (not that I shed a tear for their loss).
The phrase is 'human property' for a reason. Once you have it, it's yours, like more tangible property. Amongst these rights, is the right to exploit the owned human for your benefit. If you don't recognize the right of the slaveowner to transfer full ownership (including the right to price it however they want), then you're denying the slaveowners' rights.
Why does that sound ridiculous? Because our society and legal system don't recognize that type of property as just or legally binding.
You can assert all the property rights you want. You can get a legal system on your side. You may even be in the moral right--but it takes more than "because I said so", "because that's how it's always been", or "because that's what we're used to" to justify it.
If that were the case, then copyright starts looking a lot more like a patent, and standard reverse-engineer/cleanroom reimplementation would create a derivative work. Obviously if such reverse-engineering were illegal, PCs would still be using IBM BIOSes.
I'm curious about your definition of "libertarian" as applied to free software licenses. I assume you intend to group (at least) the non-advertising BSD and X11 licenses as "libertarian free software" and the GPL as "non-libertarian free software." I see the distinction you want to draw--the X11 and GPL licenses have different aims, and try to protect different freedoms.
You seem to be classifying as "libertarian" only those licenses in which the author has given up his rights under modern copyright law to exclude others' use (the basis of property in general, and copyright in particular). Does your definition of libertarianism not include the right of author to control his work?
I ask, because the (modern) definitions I've seen generally do (although here's The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights)
There are fundamental differences between the GPL and a shrinkwrap commercial license, and they can be found in clause 5 of the GPL:
First, the GPL does not attempt to restrict your use of the program. Second, when you buy a commercial package, First Sale doctrine grants you certain rights including the right to use the program. If you download a GPL'd program, nothing automaticaly grants you the right to change it--copyright law restricts you from doing so without the permission of the author. The GPL describes the conditions under which the author grants you the rights to create and distribute derivative works. A shrinkwrap license (until UCITA passes) is an attempt by the company to convince you that by installing the software you are giving up rights which you gained when you and the software company agreed to exchange a product for money in the absence of any overriding contract at the point of sale.
These are two vastly different situations.
I have never stated a belief that illegal copying is moral--to the contrary, I have remained intentionally agnostic on the subject precisely because there is an important distinction which is completely orthogonal to the issues of morality. There is continued usage of the word word "theft" to describe copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal, but is different from theft--this is my entire point.
I am not rationalizing thievery. I am not even attempting to rationalize copyright infringement. What I am trying to point out is the fundamental difference between physical and intellectual property--that it is impossible to "steal" the latter, unless you somehow destroy the original. It may be illegal, it may be immoral, it may give you herpes, it may kill your dog, it may cause the collapse of civilization as we know it, but they're not the same thing, and only confusion (and $400/hr if you're a lawyer) results from conflating the two.
Don't read more into my statements than is there. If you define property to include ownership of human beings against their will, then I believe I have no moral obligation to respect that right, especially if it's me who you're claiming to own. My point is that just because you say you have a moral right to ownership of something doesn't mean you do. As a general rule, shouldn't morality of ownership derive from more than just telling people to "repeat after you" or to "get it into their pointy little heads."
If you create a physical object from raw materials you own (based on some system of legality), then it makes perfect sense that said system of legality should recognize you as the owner of the final product. Why? So nobody can take away the product of your labor.
If you create an idea from raw "intellectual" materials you own (to the degree this is even possible; creative artists draw on elements of the culture they inhabit, inventors draw upon the work of predecessors), then it also makes sense that nobody should be legally allowed to take away the product of your labor without your consent. Such is the wonderful nature of ideas--it's very hard to take them away!
At some point, it was decided that if authors were given exclusive control over their creations, then they would be able to require people to get their permission to use their work, thereby creating scarcity, and value. This necesarily entails restricting the freedom of others, but it benefits the authors, enabling them to make a living creating, rather than having to do it as a hobby. When a society decides they're willing to give up their intellectual freedom (the freedom to act on ideas entering your mind, regardless of the source, which I present as a legal concept rather than a inviolable moral right) in exchange for the benefits a society gains from having full-time authors who can make a living off their work, then they create IP laws, copyright, patents, etc. Similarly, when a society decides they're willing to give up their freedom to kill with impunity (again, as a legal concept rather than an inviolable moral right) in exchange for the (obvious) benefits of being able to live without worrying about people murdering you without consequence, then they create laws against murder, etc.
Morals, then, are like absolute truths. We assume they exist, but there's apparantly no way to verify them. Throughout time, various people have held differing views of slavery. I believe slavery is morally wrong, but a Greek who owned slaves may honestly have held the belief that another group of humans was "destined" to be slaves, and it was perfectly moral to treat them as such. That doesn't make it right, but if it is against "absolute morality", why didn't he know that? You can pick a religious work and interpretation, but they aren't unanimous on the subject (and have little to say about intellectual property in most cases) and in so doing, you are choosing to believe in that moral schema, and choosing not to believe in another. Holding a vote based on popularity of beliefs seems a stupid way to do it. All that's left is honest introspection, along with rational assumptions about the consequences of one's actions. The only other option is for me to take -your- word for what is, and isn't, moral, and you very well might be wrong. I'm told by many that absolute ownership of intellectual property is a moral right of the author. Why? "Because it just is." I wasn't born knowing this, the Bible doesn't tell me so, and the notion that IP is a utilitarian social convention designed to balance the rights of the many with the ability of authors to profit makes sense. If you believe IP ownership is a moral right, how can you be sure it won't be the 23rd century equivilent of slavery?
I do not consider myself above the law; I have every belief that if I break the law, I will be caught. What I do not believe is that the law defines morality--if that were true, there would be no need for new laws. As an example, I believe that it is not immoral for a competent adult to choose to injest psychoactive substances in a situation he cannot do harm to others; this is, however, generally illegal in many countries.
As for your suggestion that I would legalize murder if it would profit me, the concept makes no sense as long as murder is defined as illegal killing of a person. If, by murder, you mean killing someone, there are many cases where it is legal: justifiable homicide, self-defense, the death penalty. These are all cases were society (not me, personally) decided that there were advantages to defining certain types of killings as legal.
I was unaware of the practice of cracking software to release it under the GPL--such a relicensing would have no legal force in any event, since it was not done with the permission of the copyright holder. I wondered at the interpretation because the plain meaning refered to something outside my experience. Someone posting photoshop on a warez site, or releasing a list of serial numbers, does not mean they are claiming to be releasing it under the GPL, it just means they are putting there for people to (illegally) copy. In any event, this would not be theft; rather, "copyright infringement". The law recognizes this distinction even if you choose not to.
Serious GPL advocates advocate the use of the GPL with the specific authorization of the legal copyright holder because they believe there are specific moral or utilitarian reasons to do so.
Whether copying an MP3 without authorization is legal, illegal, moral, or immoral, it is fundamentally different from physically stealing a CD from a record store. How? Because if I steal a physical object from you, you don't have it anymore. If I copy something from you, it is still in your posession.
As a society we have decided (or in some cases, those with lots of political power have decided for us) that it is economically adventageous to create a monopoly on some forms of information as a means to stimulate its creation. If I copy for free something that you would like me to pay for, then you don't receive the revinue you would have received under your monopoly on your creation. If I do this, I may have violated the law, and I may have comitted an immoral act, but you are no worse off than if I had decided I didn't want it in the first place.
Naturally, if everybody were to do this, then the "incentive" created by the monopoly would be lessened, but it's becoming easier and easier for people to do this. The response to that is to either strengthen the power of the monopoly holders, ergo further eroding the rights of others, or to give up and start over with a new system.
I have no moral obligation to respect your definition of property when it interferes with my human rights. The quibble is what can morally be called property. Physical objects? Animals? Other people? Ideas? There's no universal agreement on the subject. If we repealed the 13th ammendment, and I got the law to recognize you as my slave, it wouldn't affect the morality of the situation.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "'cracking' copy-protected software to release it under the GPL"--do you mean creating open source clones of closed source products? If copyright isn't violated, do you still think this is wrong? Does creating a piece of software mean you "own" the idea of software to perform that function? Except in the case of software patents, the current law (which is pretty highly in favor of intellectual "property" owners) isn't even with you on that one.
Meta Moderation will just display the post and the moderation done to it without any of the surrounding context. It's difficult to judge the accuracy of a "redundant" mod during meta-moderation.
It's a distinction without a difference -- like anyone in authority, Clinton is ultimately responsible for the acts of his subordinates.
Okay, then he's responsible for having requested that some people render their opinion. It doesn't logically follow that he necesarily agrees with their conclusions.
On the other hand, unlike Amazon, B&N has yet to send me marketing spam as a result of an order.
One shot was fired, but blood on the barrel of the gun indicated it was fired at very close range. Was the officer worried the guy was going to inject him with the heroin? Why does running away from a police officer (who is increasingly statistically likely to shoot you if you're unarmed, beat you, take you to the station and sodomize you with a broomstick, etc) justify getting fatally shot?
The day I physically remove a master reel from the record studio, such that nobody else can listen to the song, is the day I "steal" music.
SRP does rely on a shared secret (the password), but most of the time you already are going to have this set up. The advantage offered by SRP is that for a man in the middle attack to work, the host in the middle would have to either know your password or blindly authenticate you. SRP authenticates while passing information which is useless in identifying the password to someone without the shared secret.