However when your wireless netowrk invites someone to use it, is it their fault for accepting it, or your fault for sending an invitiation you had no intention of honouring?
Is that a serious argument? It's fairly obvious that you have no ethical or legal right to use a service that has been misconfigured to give you access, against the intent of the owner. It's irrelevant that the misconfiguration happens to be a factory default.
Also, the fault in this case is not "either/or", it's both.
That's funny. I seem to remember paying for my internet access. And it's rare that WiFi is not available anywhere in an urban area, for a price.
You can debate what the right price should be. But the answer is not zero: the scarce resources on which the internet depends, like routers, fibre, and administrator salaries, are not "free"; they are paid for by the value of ISP service contracts. There is no good reason -- ethical, legal, or economic -- why anyone should be allowed to use someone else's ISP contract without their express permission. Interfering with that contract reduces the apparent size of the market and drives the price up for those willing to pay.
Such lame thinking as your post is either self-serving or reflects the smallness of mind that intangible objects need not be subject to economics.
The people of Connecticut already made the point clear that they like Lieberman better than they like the Democratic party. In any case, six years is a long time in politics.
Given the bitter feelings between Lieberman and the "netroots", it's not inconcievable that he would cross the floor just to stick it to them.
Seriously? Assuming the Dems get both VA and MT, he can threaten to caucus with either party, thereby delivering the majority -- a credible threat since the Republicans already like him, and the Democrats already booted him. It would be surprising if he didn't demand a chairmanship.
Agreed, but in the original post, you appeared to suggest that a person who is aware of their ignorance should vote *anyway*, suggesting that they would somehow make a more intelligent choice than a stupid ignorant person.
Supposing that ignorance is total, an ignorant vote has no more "value" than someone who goes to the voting booth and rolls a dice to decide how to vote. The awareness of ignorance is independent of the names on the ballot, and cannot transfer intelligence into the choice. The same is true of someone who votes based on false knowledge, assuming that the false knowledge is also independent of the ballot.
However, in my model, I'm assuming that our "intelligent ignorant person" has no prior knowledge at all, not even of the parties. I suspect that you are imagining a world in which ignorance is not total. Also, if someone is trying to manipulate a stupid person into voting based on false knowledge, the independence assumption breaks down.
Therefore, not voting because you don't think you are informed enough results in fewer votes by smart people. It puts more power in the hands of the stupid.
This is a perfect example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. Being smart but ignorant does not somehow make your ignorance any more valuable than that of stupid people.
The achilles heel of modern storage is thermodynamics. We can read text chiseled in stone over thousands of years, because stone is very stable. In modern ultradense storage devices, even the natural thermodynamic properties of the material will cause degradation over time.
It would requre a comparatively short disruption of human society, on the order of years to decades, to lose the technology to read contemporary DVDs; in the time it may take to recover that technology, even if it is also on the order of years to decades, contemporary DVDs may have degraded to the point of unreadability.
This is in fact much less reliable than any other system in the history of mankind! It doesn't matter if you have zillions of copies since (unlike, e.g., the Rosetta stone) they all have to be completely refreshed every 20-30 years. A worldwide century-long dark age would have the nasty side effect of erasing all the electronic "books", too.
I'd sure like to know if the guy I'm voting for is willing to call a group of people something offensive.
It's somewhat hard to believe that there is any candidate for any office in the land who has never told a racial, ethnic, or sexist joke at any time in their lives.
So you want to RE a proprietary solution specifically to sell it in a region which is known for its "loose" ethics toward piracy?
I'm not interested in re-selling the proprietary solution. I'm interested in selling detailed information about the proprietary solution.
Reverse engineering makes security holes more obvious (does it not? Otherwise, how do hackers find security holes?). This is of obvious interest to "industrial" crackers -- the ones who harness large botnets and sell them to the highest bidder. It's a multi-million dollar business.
Even though the source is not available, binaries can be reverse-engineered
Just wondering. How easy is it to reverse-engineer a massive closed-source piece of software (like, say, MS Windows)?
Such a reverse-engineering job would be of obvious commercial interest (especially to parties who work in countries with lax regulatory regimes), so there is an obvious incentive to do it.
However, my "armchair" estimation is that it is nearly impossible, since there exist parts of the world with large numbers of skilled computer scientists, and lax copyright laws. But so far there is no evidence that anyone has reverse-engineered Windows, or anything similar, on a large scale (e.g., I am not aware of any Russian web sites where you can download source of closed programs).
However, I am not a software engineer. Are there any experts out there who can enlighten me? I'm rather curious.
I did grad school in a place where there was not an enormous amount of money to go around, so computers would generally get passed from graduating students to new students.
One of the grossest experiences of my grad school career was to take posession of one of these "hand-me-down" computers. You cannot imagine the grunge that came out of the keyboard. Crumbs, hairs, dandruff, even fucking fingernail clippings! Not to mention that gross skin-oil film on all the keys. euuuuwwwwwhhh...
You see things like that, and naturally you start wondering about the things you can't see. I didn't even want to touch the mouse. And this computer was owned by a MS student, who had been there for less than two years. The computer was new when he got it.
The first thing I did was to run down to the local hole-in-the-wall computer joint and buy the cheapest keyboard I could find. The old one went into a corner and was never seen or heard from again (maybe it crawled away on its own, who knows).
For one thing, your analogy is (deliberately?) confused. You start out by talking about "food" (which is not copyable in the real world) and then end up talking about "recipes" (which are copyable in the real world). Even if all recipes were destroyed, and the occupation of "chef" was outlawed, people would not starve, because there would still be plenty of raw food ingredients to eat. So your line about the "status quo" is misleading and disingenuous.
However, it's most ironic that with your analogy, you just illustrated why copyright is important. Also, your analogy has far more to do with software than music.
So let's play this game in the "autocooker" world, where food is not copyable, but recipes are. In a world without copyright, no chef has any incentive to release a digital recipe, because the investor-backed restaurant next door would take the recipe, buy a dozen autocookers, and undercut his prices. In a world with copyright, a chef would be perfectly happy to license a digital recipe for a fee (or for free, maybe under some free recipe license, as s/he wished). So worlds without copyright promote secrecy: the value in the chef's knowledge is retained only so long as it is kept secret. Reverse engineering of food is about as practical as reverse engineering of software.
I think an "autocooker" world without copyright would see fewer independent restaurants, more national food conglomerates, and a decline in culinary knowledge, as everyone desperately tried to keep their techniques secret. Much like a software industry without copyright.
Also, I remind you that my points are about software, not music. I don't think music really applies to the "autocooker" analogy.
Also, I might say that if I were the only person affected, I would not care. However, if enough other people adopt an incorrect line of reasoning, it may make my life difficult (e.g., by making it difficult to sell software, due to the perception of immorality). Therefore I should care. Analogies to religious evangelism are obvious.
I don't care. It doesn't bother me much at all. The GPL is an excellent and useful contribution, but as I see it, the philosophy that motivated it has already been proven wrong in practice.
The original poster was wondering why people hate Stallman, and I was suggesting that people tend to react strongly (both positively and negatively) to moralization, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he is hated by some. I don't think he would be as polarizing a figure if he didn't try to impute morality to software development.
not sure why there's any hate for stallman. you have the choice to release your software under whatever license you choose to. if you don't like a given license, then don't use it. in which case stallman has no bearing into your existence at all.
Same reason most people hate door-to-door evangelists. You have the choice to go to their church or not; they will not kidnap you and take you there by force. But most people resent being told -- over and over -- that they are immoral heathens if they don't accept the "choice". Which is exactly what Stallman believes of those who do not use licenses approved by him.
Yes, I saw that stupid movie too. I certainly lock my door, as do most people I know.
He must have had his eyes closed when he visited Toronto... if he wants to come back, I volunteer to give him a tour of the real slums. They're not as bad as some American cities, but they sure as hell are not as nice as he portrayed, either. But, as he surely knows, with selective editing you can make anything look good or bad, as you wish.
Also, please tell him to keep his damn opinions to himself. I don't like Harper either, but this is our country, and he has no right to tell us how to vote. Same goes for this guy (ps: Thanks for eight years of George W! Who are you to lecture us on how to vote?)
So customs authorities have the power to inspect the data on your laptop, or presumably any other data-carrying device, without warrant or even cause.
But an obvious way around this search would be to transfer the data electronically, and perhaps rent a laptop in the US to retrieve it.
So my question is this. If searching files on a physical device is legal, would it not also be legal for customs to "inspect" all electronic data that crosses international borders? And in the same way that it is legal for the authorities to sieze a laptop for more intensive analysis, would it not also be legal for customs to "embargo" electronic transmissions until they can be analyzed? (Perhaps compelling the sender or receiver, whichever one is on their soil, to disclose the key?)
Think about the implications for a couple of minutes. This would put the Great Firewall of China to shame, and you have to know that somebody in the justice department is thinking about doing it.
Every time I post a comment saying, "The GPL would not exist without copyright" (and this has happened several times), I get a flurry of replies from RMS apologists saying that Stallman's intent was to destroy copyright by turning it on itself, and that in the world without copyright, the GPL's protections are unnecessary. I am not sure what Stallman thinks of copyright, but it is reasonable to believe that his self-described followers have opinions which are representative of his.
If, in my original post, one replaced "Stallman" with "Stallman's followers", the point is still valid.
So, according to you, the only significant thing standing in the way of code reuse is licensing? Not only does that ignore most of the experience of software engineering over the past two decades, it also ignores the fact that people re-use proprietary software all the time, e.g., in the form of libraries.
The rest of your argument is simply bizarre. In the world you envision, software costs an enormous amount for the first customer, and nothing for each subsequent customer. Why would anyone pay, when they could just wait and see if some other sucker would pay?
Of course, it would be a lot better to spread the enormous cost over all the users. If only a way existed to require everyone pay a small share of the total cost and outlaw cheating. Oh, wait.
I hate to point out the obvious, but if you have a trillion dollar idea, why aren't you working on it right now? And if you're just sitting on such an idea because you're lazy, risk averse, or not a good enough programmer, you may as well give it to Steve Jobs. It's doing no good rattling around in your head.
Slashdot Mirror
imagine what would happen if Bill released Windows for free!
He would be poor.
However when your wireless netowrk invites someone to use it, is it their fault for accepting it, or your fault for sending an invitiation you had no intention of honouring?
Is that a serious argument? It's fairly obvious that you have no ethical or legal right to use a service that has been misconfigured to give you access, against the intent of the owner. It's irrelevant that the misconfiguration happens to be a factory default.
Also, the fault in this case is not "either/or", it's both.
That's funny. I seem to remember paying for my internet access. And it's rare that WiFi is not available anywhere in an urban area, for a price.
You can debate what the right price should be. But the answer is not zero: the scarce resources on which the internet depends, like routers, fibre, and administrator salaries, are not "free"; they are paid for by the value of ISP service contracts. There is no good reason -- ethical, legal, or economic -- why anyone should be allowed to use someone else's ISP contract without their express permission. Interfering with that contract reduces the apparent size of the market and drives the price up for those willing to pay.
Such lame thinking as your post is either self-serving or reflects the smallness of mind that intangible objects need not be subject to economics.
The people of Connecticut already made the point clear that they like Lieberman better than they like the Democratic party. In any case, six years is a long time in politics.
Given the bitter feelings between Lieberman and the "netroots", it's not inconcievable that he would cross the floor just to stick it to them.
Seriously? Assuming the Dems get both VA and MT, he can threaten to caucus with either party, thereby delivering the majority -- a credible threat since the Republicans already like him, and the Democrats already booted him. It would be surprising if he didn't demand a chairmanship.
You remember how you were going to send pro-war democrats a big message and kick Lieberman's sorry ass out of the senate?
Well, the way the senate results are coming down, guess what: you just made Independent Joe Lieberman the most powerful man in the Senate.
How do you like them apples?
With love,
-- Irony
Agreed, but in the original post, you appeared to suggest that a person who is aware of their ignorance should vote *anyway*, suggesting that they would somehow make a more intelligent choice than a stupid ignorant person.
Supposing that ignorance is total, an ignorant vote has no more "value" than someone who goes to the voting booth and rolls a dice to decide how to vote. The awareness of ignorance is independent of the names on the ballot, and cannot transfer intelligence into the choice. The same is true of someone who votes based on false knowledge, assuming that the false knowledge is also independent of the ballot.
However, in my model, I'm assuming that our "intelligent ignorant person" has no prior knowledge at all, not even of the parties. I suspect that you are imagining a world in which ignorance is not total. Also, if someone is trying to manipulate a stupid person into voting based on false knowledge, the independence assumption breaks down.
Therefore, not voting because you don't think you are informed enough results in fewer votes by smart people. It puts more power in the hands of the stupid.
This is a perfect example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. Being smart but ignorant does not somehow make your ignorance any more valuable than that of stupid people.
The achilles heel of modern storage is thermodynamics. We can read text chiseled in stone over thousands of years, because stone is very stable. In modern ultradense storage devices, even the natural thermodynamic properties of the material will cause degradation over time.
It would requre a comparatively short disruption of human society, on the order of years to decades, to lose the technology to read contemporary DVDs; in the time it may take to recover that technology, even if it is also on the order of years to decades, contemporary DVDs may have degraded to the point of unreadability.
This is in fact much less reliable than any other system in the history of mankind! It doesn't matter if you have zillions of copies since (unlike, e.g., the Rosetta stone) they all have to be completely refreshed every 20-30 years. A worldwide century-long dark age would have the nasty side effect of erasing all the electronic "books", too.
I'd sure like to know if the guy I'm voting for is willing to call a group of people something offensive.
It's somewhat hard to believe that there is any candidate for any office in the land who has never told a racial, ethnic, or sexist joke at any time in their lives.
Three words to stop stuff like this from happening
"Move to Canada"
So you want to RE a proprietary solution specifically to sell it in a region which is known for its "loose" ethics toward piracy?
I'm not interested in re-selling the proprietary solution. I'm interested in selling detailed information about the proprietary solution.
Reverse engineering makes security holes more obvious (does it not? Otherwise, how do hackers find security holes?). This is of obvious interest to "industrial" crackers -- the ones who harness large botnets and sell them to the highest bidder. It's a multi-million dollar business.
Even though the source is not available, binaries can be reverse-engineered
Just wondering. How easy is it to reverse-engineer a massive closed-source piece of software (like, say, MS Windows)?
Such a reverse-engineering job would be of obvious commercial interest (especially to parties who work in countries with lax regulatory regimes), so there is an obvious incentive to do it.
However, my "armchair" estimation is that it is nearly impossible, since there exist parts of the world with large numbers of skilled computer scientists, and lax copyright laws. But so far there is no evidence that anyone has reverse-engineered Windows, or anything similar, on a large scale (e.g., I am not aware of any Russian web sites where you can download source of closed programs).
However, I am not a software engineer. Are there any experts out there who can enlighten me? I'm rather curious.
I'm thinking the IT profession has a dirty job.
...
I did grad school in a place where there was not an enormous amount of money to go around, so computers would generally get passed from graduating students to new students.
One of the grossest experiences of my grad school career was to take posession of one of these "hand-me-down" computers. You cannot imagine the grunge that came out of the keyboard. Crumbs, hairs, dandruff, even fucking fingernail clippings! Not to mention that gross skin-oil film on all the keys. euuuuwwwwwhhh
You see things like that, and naturally you start wondering about the things you can't see. I didn't even want to touch the mouse. And this computer was owned by a MS student, who had been there for less than two years. The computer was new when he got it.
The first thing I did was to run down to the local hole-in-the-wall computer joint and buy the cheapest keyboard I could find. The old one went into a corner and was never seen or heard from again (maybe it crawled away on its own, who knows).
For one thing, your analogy is (deliberately?) confused. You start out by talking about "food" (which is not copyable in the real world) and then end up talking about "recipes" (which are copyable in the real world). Even if all recipes were destroyed, and the occupation of "chef" was outlawed, people would not starve, because there would still be plenty of raw food ingredients to eat. So your line about the "status quo" is misleading and disingenuous.
However, it's most ironic that with your analogy, you just illustrated why copyright is important. Also, your analogy has far more to do with software than music.
So let's play this game in the "autocooker" world, where food is not copyable, but recipes are. In a world without copyright, no chef has any incentive to release a digital recipe, because the investor-backed restaurant next door would take the recipe, buy a dozen autocookers, and undercut his prices. In a world with copyright, a chef would be perfectly happy to license a digital recipe for a fee (or for free, maybe under some free recipe license, as s/he wished). So worlds without copyright promote secrecy: the value in the chef's knowledge is retained only so long as it is kept secret. Reverse engineering of food is about as practical as reverse engineering of software.
I think an "autocooker" world without copyright would see fewer independent restaurants, more national food conglomerates, and a decline in culinary knowledge, as everyone desperately tried to keep their techniques secret. Much like a software industry without copyright.
Also, I remind you that my points are about software, not music. I don't think music really applies to the "autocooker" analogy.
Also, I might say that if I were the only person affected, I would not care. However, if enough other people adopt an incorrect line of reasoning, it may make my life difficult (e.g., by making it difficult to sell software, due to the perception of immorality). Therefore I should care. Analogies to religious evangelism are obvious.
I don't care. It doesn't bother me much at all. The GPL is an excellent and useful contribution, but as I see it, the philosophy that motivated it has already been proven wrong in practice.
The original poster was wondering why people hate Stallman, and I was suggesting that people tend to react strongly (both positively and negatively) to moralization, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he is hated by some. I don't think he would be as polarizing a figure if he didn't try to impute morality to software development.
not sure why there's any hate for stallman. you have the choice to release your software under whatever license you choose to. if you don't like a given license, then don't use it. in which case stallman has no bearing into your existence at all.
Same reason most people hate door-to-door evangelists. You have the choice to go to their church or not; they will not kidnap you and take you there by force. But most people resent being told -- over and over -- that they are immoral heathens if they don't accept the "choice". Which is exactly what Stallman believes of those who do not use licenses approved by him.
Heck, they don't even lock their houses!
... if he wants to come back, I volunteer to give him a tour of the real slums. They're not as bad as some American cities, but they sure as hell are not as nice as he portrayed, either. But, as he surely knows, with selective editing you can make anything look good or bad, as you wish.
Yes, I saw that stupid movie too. I certainly lock my door, as do most people I know.
He must have had his eyes closed when he visited Toronto
Also, please tell him to keep his damn opinions to himself. I don't like Harper either, but this is our country, and he has no right to tell us how to vote. Same goes for this guy (ps: Thanks for eight years of George W! Who are you to lecture us on how to vote?)
If any of you are ever in Ottawa, ...
And don't forget the Beaver Tails! (it's not what you think.)
So customs authorities have the power to inspect the data on your laptop, or presumably any other data-carrying device, without warrant or even cause.
But an obvious way around this search would be to transfer the data electronically, and perhaps rent a laptop in the US to retrieve it.
So my question is this. If searching files on a physical device is legal, would it not also be legal for customs to "inspect" all electronic data that crosses international borders? And in the same way that it is legal for the authorities to sieze a laptop for more intensive analysis, would it not also be legal for customs to "embargo" electronic transmissions until they can be analyzed? (Perhaps compelling the sender or receiver, whichever one is on their soil, to disclose the key?)
Think about the implications for a couple of minutes. This would put the Great Firewall of China to shame, and you have to know that somebody in the justice department is thinking about doing it.
Who want's to start a software company with me? I have a few ideas I just recently started kicking around.
Are you being serious? What's your area of expertise? Your web site is not very informative.
Every time I post a comment saying, "The GPL would not exist without copyright" (and this has happened several times), I get a flurry of replies from RMS apologists saying that Stallman's intent was to destroy copyright by turning it on itself, and that in the world without copyright, the GPL's protections are unnecessary. I am not sure what Stallman thinks of copyright, but it is reasonable to believe that his self-described followers have opinions which are representative of his.
If, in my original post, one replaced "Stallman" with "Stallman's followers", the point is still valid.
So, according to you, the only significant thing standing in the way of code reuse is licensing? Not only does that ignore most of the experience of software engineering over the past two decades, it also ignores the fact that people re-use proprietary software all the time, e.g., in the form of libraries.
The rest of your argument is simply bizarre. In the world you envision, software costs an enormous amount for the first customer, and nothing for each subsequent customer. Why would anyone pay, when they could just wait and see if some other sucker would pay?
Of course, it would be a lot better to spread the enormous cost over all the users. If only a way existed to require everyone pay a small share of the total cost and outlaw cheating. Oh, wait.
I hate to point out the obvious, but if you have a trillion dollar idea, why aren't you working on it right now? And if you're just sitting on such an idea because you're lazy, risk averse, or not a good enough programmer, you may as well give it to Steve Jobs. It's doing no good rattling around in your head.