If this isn't talking out of both sides of your mouth, I don't know what is. You argue that things that could do illegal things should be legal, because it is personal responisiblity to use them correctly. We have to assume people will use them for legal purposes, so we shouldn't ban them (and I agree with this for the most part). Then you argue that Carnivore should be illegal because it can be used in an illegal way. You don't have faith in the government to use it legally, yet you want the government to trust you to use DeCSS legally. Seems trust works both ways, if you want everyone to trust you, you have to trust them.
There is no inconsistency here; the government should be held to much tighter constraints than a private citizen, for two reasons.
The Philosophical Reason: Government requires a short leash in order to keep the unique power of the former (legal authorization to use force up to and including full-scale military) in check.
The Pragmatic Reason: The US government (like all others I've ever heard of) has what amounts to a long "rap sheet". Even the NRA doesn't have a problem with restricting or removing a violent felon's right to bear arms as part of his punishment; by the same token, it's reasonable to restrict or remove the surveillance capabilities of the government that ran COINTELPRO (especially since it shows no sign of repenting and reforming its evil ways).
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The reasonableness or otherwise of the CSS copy protection [sic] scheme is not relevant to the question of whether it is a copy protection scheme; and in any case, the issue has been decided in court
And so the circle is completed: the courts system is correct in calling the CSS access control system a copy protection scheme because the courts have ruled to that effect. /.
Hate to break it to all of them, but the treasured Free Market economy does have this exact drawback -- companies will gain power.
Actually, the problem isn't the free market economy; it's government manipulation. Once the mechanisms of government regulation are in place, existing megacorps buy control of them and use them to entrench their positions -- see any of a dozen RIAA/MPAA threads on/. for examples.
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The point that has to be hammered home is the "...and for that matter, let us fast forward through commercials on DVDs". Everybody -- especially if they've already run into one of the DVDs that uses that trick -- understands, and is offended by, that.
Pitch it in terms of "somebody cracked the fast forwarding lock, but the industry filed all these lawsuits so nobody can build it into a DVD player", and you can get Joe Sixpack as pissed as you are. /.
Oh yeh, and for all the people determined to slander Judge Kaplan -- give me just one example of a technical mistake made in his judgement.
"CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an access control and copy prevention [sic] system"
Of course, CSS no more prevents a DVD from being copied than Pig Latin prevents a text from being photocopied.
My fact-checking fee is $30/hour. You owe me fifty cents (and if you hadn't been too lazy to provide a link to the decision, you'd only owe me a quarter). /.
Vint Cerf may have helped author the TCP/IP standard, but this really doesn't provide any credentials regarding the ethics of privacy in a free society.
If I had mod points (and hadn't already commented to this thread), I'd mark that "Insightful".
This is a classic example of exploiting people with the wrong type of expertise to cast a patina of credibility. It reminds me of the distinguised scientists who endorsed Uri Geller's spoon-bending -- however knowledgeable they may have been in their fields, they were clueless when it came to sleight-of-hand and distraction. /.
"The FBI cannot and does not 'snoop," said Donald Kerr, FBI assistant director. (from the MSNBC article)
Maybe it's just my distrust of government agencies (especially alphabet ones) after the entire information gathering thing up here in Canada, but does anyone else find this just a little hard to believe?
Kerr is simply emulating his (ultimate) boss -- it all depends on what the meaning of "snoop" is.
In their own minds, the COINTELPRO people weren't "snooping"; they were "monitoring a threat to national security" or such such thing. /.
If your argument were correct, you'd be seeing Libertarian advertising everywhere you looked, because of all the big-business backing they'd get.
In reality, big business hates the idea of cutting back government to what libertarians consider its proper level, because they'd lose the ability to buy special favors from politicians (with the government's powers cut back, the politicians simply wouldn't have very many favors to sell). /.
The problem of low turnout really hit in the 1920s when turnout plummeted way below 50% and the mandate of parliament began to lack credibility. The solution - compulsorary voting.
All subsequent elections should be treated as if they had their actual level of chosen turnout -- namely, zero -- to determine the credibility level of parliament's mandate. /.
The big problem with this is: the DMCA was passed by a VOICE VOTE. You have no idea if your rep was for or against beyond writing them and finding out.
Then all Congresscritters are for it, by definition, unless they weren't on the job that day. Write them and tell them that you're using that definition to deny them their attempt to escape their responsibility.
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The answer is for a certain minimum level to be tax exempt to provide for basic accomodations and food. It would make sense to have something like a $20K base and x% of any income above that.
And, in fact, most proposals for a "flat" tax do precisely that. They include two levels of graduation (0% up to a certain income, x% above that income level).
By insuring that the only way to raise taxes overall are to increase the percentage x or to lower the income threshold, this insures that tax increases affect the bulk of voters (the middle class). This keeps the characteristic disease of democracies (bread-and-circus politics) in remission. /.
Take Bill Gates for example, he siphons the labor of thousands of students educated in state-run colleges and institutions. These students pay tuition, but a vast number of them get subsidies from the govt to attend school.
Since the average American is not as rich as Bill Gates, a flat tax leaves a disproportionate responcibility on the bottom 99.9%. Yet, Bill Gates undeniably reaps a huge personal benefit from public education. In fact he reaps a much larger benefit that I do.
I hope we can all agree that public Universities are a good thing (an educated population is an effective population). So Bill Gates recieves (other that the warm fuzzies I get about higher education) a larger chunk of that pie than I do, yet under a flat tax, we pay the same.
This argument implies that somebody who gets lucky in Vegas and blows the money on wine, women, and song should not be taxed at a particularly high rate, since he is not tapping any particular governmental infrastructure.
The fallacy, obviously, is that Bill Gates has already paid for the benefit of those highly-educated employees, unless he has somehow managed to find people smart enough to write Windows 2000 [pause until laughter dies down] and dumb enough to accept the same pay as uneducated burger-flippers.
Fees charged for services rendered. That should be pretty straitforward right?
That turns out to be one of the two main arguments in favor of a flat tax, when spurious arguments about what constitutes "services" (see above) are stripped away. The other is as follows:
The fundamental flaw of a graduated "progressive" tax is that it lends itself to one of the oldest political scams -- he who robs Peter to pay Paul will have the support of Paul. A graduated tax system combined with equal votes makes it too easy for the politicians to set up a bread-and-circuses system under which a minority of Peters support a majority of Pauls.
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You may get the impression that "Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne or Newton" cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity, but in terms of numbers of birth, they do not.
You have missed the point. Each of them does cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity in terms of numbers of birth by the evidence available to each in his own time. If no particular individual is privileged, then each, using human history up to and including his own time, can make an equally valid calculation of how long the human race can be expected to endure into the future (again, from his own time as the baseline). Looking back on it from our viewpoint, we can see that each calculation is meaningless -- just as someone looking back from two thousand years in the future will dismiss our own similar calculations. /.
Now it evidently doesn't make sense to take for x the total lifespan of humanity, because men are not uniformly distributed along it. So we take for x the total number of human beings that will have lived in the entire duration of humanity. We would like to know what x is. We don't have a clue. However, one thing we do know is how many people have lived so far, or, which is roughly the same thing, your (or my) "rank number" in the list of all human beings (in order of birth). This number, y, is of the order of 8*10^10 (80 billion that is). Further, since you (or I) have no reason of being one given human being than another, y is uniformly distributed between 0 and x. Consequently, we can apply the result I just gave, and conclude that x has one chance out of two of being between y=8*10^10 and 2y=1.5*10^11.
The obvious fallacy is that Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne, or Isaac Newton could, in principle, have done the same calculation (with the values of y and birthrate appropriate to their times) and gotten radically different expected dates for Doomsday. Thus, either the assumption of uniformity is wrong or the calculation is fundamentally broken.
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Instead they are by and large content to expand the government's ability to invade our privacy and usurp our rights pretty much whenever they are asked to.
We have twelve years of Reagan/Bush to thank for no small part of this, so remember that in November;)
That depends -- vector fonts are independent of display dpi (if the font engine works right); bitmap fonts (or simple bitmap images of text) shrink as the dpi increase unless the display software compensates. /.
Given the threat to crack PCs and damage their connectivity, shouldn't this story have the DoJ logo, or perhaps it should have provided the rollout for a "Computer Crime" logo? /.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, California plans to do that one better, by requiring a remote shutoff switch for cars.
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There is no inconsistency here; the government should be held to much tighter constraints than a private citizen, for two reasons.
The Philosophical Reason: Government requires a short leash in order to keep the unique power of the former (legal authorization to use force up to and including full-scale military) in check.
The Pragmatic Reason: The US government (like all others I've ever heard of) has what amounts to a long "rap sheet". Even the NRA doesn't have a problem with restricting or removing a violent felon's right to bear arms as part of his punishment; by the same token, it's reasonable to restrict or remove the surveillance capabilities of the government that ran COINTELPRO (especially since it shows no sign of repenting and reforming its evil ways).
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It is not possible to copy any of the tracks without a special piece of equipment.
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And so the circle is completed: the courts system is correct in calling the CSS access control system a copy protection scheme because the courts have ruled to that effect.
/.
Actually, the problem isn't the free market economy; it's government manipulation. Once the mechanisms of government regulation are in place, existing megacorps buy control of them and use them to entrench their positions -- see any of a dozen RIAA/MPAA threads on /. for examples.
/.
Pitch it in terms of "somebody cracked the fast forwarding lock, but the industry filed all these lawsuits so nobody can build it into a DVD player", and you can get Joe Sixpack as pissed as you are.
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Again, that's access control, not copy prevention -- the bits have indeed been copied, but the data is inaccessible.
If you have any further legal questions
You said that this discussion is to be limited to technical questions. Which is it?
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"CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an access control and copy prevention [sic] system"
Of course, CSS no more prevents a DVD from being copied than Pig Latin prevents a text from being photocopied.
My fact-checking fee is $30/hour. You owe me fifty cents (and if you hadn't been too lazy to provide a link to the decision, you'd only owe me a quarter).
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...the subject will be forced to watch Survivor episodes and build himself a couple of robots for company....
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So, why do you have a computer instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor, hypocrite?
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Well, duh! Sophistry is SOP for William Jefferson "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" Clinton.
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If I had mod points (and hadn't already commented to this thread), I'd mark that "Insightful".
This is a classic example of exploiting people with the wrong type of expertise to cast a patina of credibility. It reminds me of the distinguised scientists who endorsed Uri Geller's spoon-bending -- however knowledgeable they may have been in their fields, they were clueless when it came to sleight-of-hand and distraction.
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Maybe it's just my distrust of government agencies (especially alphabet ones) after the entire information gathering thing up here in Canada, but does anyone else find this just a little hard to believe?
Kerr is simply emulating his (ultimate) boss -- it all depends on what the meaning of "snoop" is.
In their own minds, the COINTELPRO people weren't "snooping"; they were "monitoring a threat to national security" or such such thing.
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To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, how many legs does a cow have if I claim that a tail is a leg? (Answer: four)
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Nonsense. The Net servers and accounts are the property of the ISPs and users. Theft is immoral. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Wake up people, there are some very evil people out there
Yep -- and the levers of government power are their natural homes.
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In reality, big business hates the idea of cutting back government to what libertarians consider its proper level, because they'd lose the ability to buy special favors from politicians (with the government's powers cut back, the politicians simply wouldn't have very many favors to sell).
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All subsequent elections should be treated as if they had their actual level of chosen turnout -- namely, zero -- to determine the credibility level of parliament's mandate.
/.
Then all Congresscritters are for it, by definition, unless they weren't on the job that day. Write them and tell them that you're using that definition to deny them their attempt to escape their responsibility.
/.
And, in fact, most proposals for a "flat" tax do precisely that. They include two levels of graduation (0% up to a certain income, x% above that income level).
By insuring that the only way to raise taxes overall are to increase the percentage x or to lower the income threshold, this insures that tax increases affect the bulk of voters (the middle class). This keeps the characteristic disease of democracies (bread-and-circus politics) in remission.
/.
Since the average American is not as rich as Bill Gates, a flat tax leaves a disproportionate responcibility on the bottom 99.9%. Yet, Bill Gates undeniably reaps a huge personal benefit from public education. In fact he reaps a much larger benefit that I do.
I hope we can all agree that public Universities are a good thing (an educated population is an effective population). So Bill Gates recieves (other that the warm fuzzies I get about higher education) a larger chunk of that pie than I do, yet under a flat tax, we pay the same.
This argument implies that somebody who gets lucky in Vegas and blows the money on wine, women, and song should not be taxed at a particularly high rate, since he is not tapping any particular governmental infrastructure.
The fallacy, obviously, is that Bill Gates has already paid for the benefit of those highly-educated employees, unless he has somehow managed to find people smart enough to write Windows 2000 [pause until laughter dies down] and dumb enough to accept the same pay as uneducated burger-flippers.
Fees charged for services rendered. That should be pretty straitforward right?
That turns out to be one of the two main arguments in favor of a flat tax, when spurious arguments about what constitutes "services" (see above) are stripped away. The other is as follows:
The fundamental flaw of a graduated "progressive" tax is that it lends itself to one of the oldest political scams -- he who robs Peter to pay Paul will have the support of Paul. A graduated tax system combined with equal votes makes it too easy for the politicians to set up a bread-and-circuses system under which a minority of Peters support a majority of Pauls.
/.
You have missed the point. Each of them does cover a vast part of the timeline of humanity in terms of numbers of birth by the evidence available to each in his own time. If no particular individual is privileged, then each, using human history up to and including his own time, can make an equally valid calculation of how long the human race can be expected to endure into the future (again, from his own time as the baseline). Looking back on it from our viewpoint, we can see that each calculation is meaningless -- just as someone looking back from two thousand years in the future will dismiss our own similar calculations.
/.
The obvious fallacy is that Og the caveman, Euclid, Charlemagne, or Isaac Newton could, in principle, have done the same calculation (with the values of y and birthrate appropriate to their times) and gotten radically different expected dates for Doomsday. Thus, either the assumption of uniformity is wrong or the calculation is fundamentally broken.
/.
We have twelve years of Reagan/Bush to thank for no small part of this, so remember that in November ;)
Eight years of Clinton/Gore have been every bit as outrageous, and perhaps even worse, so I'd advise you to vote third party.
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That depends -- vector fonts are independent of display dpi (if the font engine works right); bitmap fonts (or simple bitmap images of text) shrink as the dpi increase unless the display software compensates.
/.
Given the threat to crack PCs and damage their connectivity, shouldn't this story have the DoJ logo, or perhaps it should have provided the rollout for a "Computer Crime" logo?
/.