In my opinion that's exactly the wrong way to look at it, at least when we're talking about Amazon affiliate links. Instead, I look at it this way: Whenever you buy a n item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away - you could be using an affiliate link and donating that money to someone you wanted to support. The fact that Mozilla sets that affiliate ID to a reasonable default (support the browser you're using) when you explicitly use the built in Amazon search box is a feature, not a bug.
someone patenting a simple equation is indeed a bad idea, and should not be allowed. Same with genes etc etc. But expanding this definition to somehow find a justification for downloading the latest harry potter movie without paying for it, despite the fact that everyone involved is relying on income from that movie to pay their rent and food bills, seems a bit of a desperate stretch to me.
You're right. The arguments have nothing to do with each other.
There is an excellent argument for not having patent protection for software, as RMS covers here. This is a very important issue, because software patents make software engineering a legal nightmare.
The unrelated argument against the general concept of copyright is somewhat less clear. To begin with, we're talking about a much more abstract area - art and culture - rather than something easily quantifiable like software engineering. You can look at software over the last 20 years and see clearly the damage the RSA patent did in terms of incompatibilities and efficiency losses because programmers couldn't use the best known algorithm for what they needed to do. In contrast, it's hard to quantify the social and economic damage caused because some remixer couldn't sample Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back".
That doesn't mean that there aren't excellent arguments for limiting or even abolishing copyright. It was originally part of a censorship agreement. It causes massive economic damage to society. But you're right... the argument against copyright is not an extension of the argument against software patents. They're mostly unrelated.
I'm pretty sure that Knoppix has Linus's Linux in it, so I don't see how it could cause any confusion between Linux and some competing product in the field of computer operating systems. The same argument applies to the soap.
The problem with things like digitally recorded music is that it is scarce, however, the scarcity is in two states - none or infinite.
Without copyright we may never have gotten the amazing Gwen Stefani / Akon collaboration "The Sweet Escape". In my opinion, that's OK. That song was only produced because of a wealthy patron who thought they could make a shitload of money from it. Perhaps without copyright, the wealthy patrons will again be motivated by artistic merit like they were in the past.
So culture should be relegated to what the rich want, or who you can pin a pretty face to?
Umm... this would be different how? The only thing I can see is that "What the rich want" might be better than "What the rich think they can make money on".
Personally I feel that copyright with more reasonable protection (~5-10years) and taxation, is preferable to just abandoment of copyright.
There's a good argument for a short term copyright policy based on commercial restrictions only. On the other hand, I have yet to hear a good argument for restricting personal copying - having everyone trade their physical property rights away for an alleged marginal increase in the supply of artistic works seems like a strictly bad deal.
There are certain... herbal medicines... that have been the exclusive property of families for untold generations.
And that's why they, as a society, never developed their understanding beyond "traditional medicine" on their own.
It was only through sharing basic knowledge that the modern concept of science was able to take hold in Europe. Sure, it's extremely politically incorrect to ever say that Europe ever got anything right or that anything important was ever done there, but what historians call the "Age of Reason" was essential to bringing humanity's level of understanding about the world to the way it is today. The fact that people in Europe were able to move beyond the idea that all knowledge was proprietary (in Europe, probably proprietary to guilds) is one of the basic things that allowed the modern world to develop.
Charles Dickens had to write his works as 'serials' in newspapers -- if he published them, then competing publishers would just print their own versions without paying him any royalties. (And, in fact, that's what happened once they were published in the newspaper.)
Why is this a problem? He found a business model that worked, and we have his works today. If anything, that example demonstrates that copyright is *not* necessary for great artistic works to be created and published.
A copyrighted work is based off the fact that you created something, don't confuse imaginary with non-scarce.
Scarcity is the thing that makes the idea of property useful. It's useful that I own my car because only one person can use it at a time - it's a limited resource, and it needs to be allocated somehow. For something like a digitally recorded song, there need be no allocation step - physically, everyone can have a copy and there need be no contention over it.
The general response to that is to ask "how do artists get paid?", which is a perfectly reasonable question. My response is this: There's no reason - social or economic - why the number of artists getting paid the amounts they are paid under the current system is "correct". Society doesn't owe a living to Gwen Stefani or Justin Timberlake through fat recording contracts. If they can make a living through performances, great. If they can find a wealthy patron, great. If they can subsist on merchandise sales and fan donations, that's great too. But... if they have to get traditional jobs and don't have time to produce the next "Sexy Back" track, the world will have lost less than it is losing today by people not having access to their own culture and to all the remixes that remix-artists aren't able to make.
The biggest piece of common sense I've heard for ages on the subject of copyright reform was from the Gowers report: no extensions, no reductions. Leave it as it is.
Wait a second... you seriously think that copyright should last for 70 years after the author's death? That means that, for a person with the average lifespan, no work that they see released will ever go into the public domain before they die. That's not a balance between the interests of publishers/authors and the public, that's the publishers getting everything and the public getting screwed.
The argument for copyright as a short term restriction on commercial reproduction and resale is actually pretty reasonable. It wouldn't cause that much harm to society if we had to wait five years before we could buy unofficial copies of the new Harry Potter book or the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I could even get behind a six month restriction on unauthorized public screenings of just-released movies.
But, I absolutely agree with you that no one is entitled to know what data I have on my computer or what is on the DVD+R's that I give to friends. Private data is private data, and it's far more important that it stay private than for some random companies to be able to extort another $10 out of unwilling "consumers".
Patents and Copyright are significantly different, and lumping them together as "intellectual property" is more likely to confuse than enlighten. Getting people to lump unlike things together is an excellent way to confuse multiple issues and usually results in incorrect conclusions.
The simple version is this: Copyright are promoted as an incentive for artists to make art, while patents are intended to make engineering research extremely profitable. They're both economic incentives intended to promote social good, but the cost/benefit tradeoffs are massively different in the two cases. RMS makes an excellent more detailed argument, if you're willing to listen to him.
If my idea is the only thing I have, and I give it away, I don't eat. That's "so what".
If all you have is an idea - hopefully there is a charity run homeless shelter that you can stay at. You should try to get a job. Nobody owes you a living, and the fact that you think you have a "great idea" doesn't change that. Same thing for music/movie factories - we don't owe them a living. It's their responsibility to find a business model that works in the real world of unrestricted information sharing, not ours.
Porting that portion of the game engine that's necessary for a server actually is trivial. That's why you see a ton of FPS games that have a Linux server but no Linux client. The only things it needs to interface with the OS for are networking and file I/O, and those work basically the same everywhere. Porting the client is much more difficult - it gets into all kinds of Direct X complications. But, Blizzard is already doing a Mac port which already implies all the same problems as a Linux port - if they just used the portable development stack (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL) from the beginning the game would work on all three client platforms.
Of course id had no problem. (1) They had a tendency to leave Linux games in a perpetual beta mode to avoid support.
If that's all the Linux game market can support, great. ID being able do it still implies that a company as large as Blizzard can do it too.
Id has also publicly stated that they do Linux games merely because they think it is a cool thing to do, not because it makes business sense. This thread is about business sense not what is cool.
Reference? My guess is that the reason it's so obviously a good deal for both ID and Epic is that their main business is licensing game engines rather than selling games - their games largely tech demos. An engine that supports another platform is obviously better than one that doesn't, because if Linux market share starts growing it could easily become obviously worth targeting with less warning than a full dev cycle for a game.
Blizzard doesn't have that same argument that would make Linux support obvious for them, but here's another argument: StarCraft still sells copies in retail stores today, nearly 10 years after it was first released. I'm sure that the argument for not supporting Linux today is marginal rather than obvious. Can they be sure it will stay that way for even three years?
You have gone past optimistic into the rediculous, unless you are arguing that there will be few Linux support calls or emails because there will be few Linux customers.;-)
Hey, taking that the other direction - if there are that many Linux support calls, it *proves* that the Linux release was a good business decision.
A secondary but non-trivial problem with targeting Linux, support. Targeting Linux is not like Mac where you have one platform, or two if you still want to target PowerPC. There are many Linux distribution, your code and/or installer may need to be aware of some of their subtleties, your support personnel surely will need to be aware.
Bullshit. Neither ID Software nor Epic seem to have any problem with this. The Linux APIs for game development (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL) are stable and compatible across all relevant distributions. The Loki installer still works great everywhere, and if some obscure distribution has problems the community will figure it out. As for support personnel, you need to have maybe one guy check the "Linux Support" forum on your web site every few days to make sure nothing major has come up that the users haven't already figured out - the phone support people don't even need to know there *is* a Linux port.
There is quite a range between the extremes of a "simple game" like Chess and a "complex simulation" like, say, Sim City. I agree with you that StarCraft was much closer to the simple game end of the spectrum, and it would be appropriate if StarCraft II maintains that flavor.
WC3 was the sequel to SC. So will SC2 be the sequel to WC3. It is a replacement. So better/worse arguments aside, once SC2 is released it will replace WC3 and everyone will play that.
If that were true, people would have stopped playing StarCraft by now. They definitely haven't. I doubt they will when StarCraft II comes out either.
If a nation's government is united enough and willing to break their own laws on protecting human rights, I rather doubt they'll care about "the PR disaster associated with directly breaking the Internet".
You seem to have far too much respect for the effectiveness of law, and far too little realization of how frequently government actors are willing to ignore the law to further their personal agenda. Consider the NSA internal spying controversy in the USA: that was blatantly illegal, there were even specific laws made against it the last time this happened, but that didn't slow them down from doing it. Even with all the controversy, we don't even have any reason to believe that they've stopped.
They get away with that because they can do it silently. The government can silently break the law, and the consequences - if any - take time to happen. In that world (well, this world - the one we live in), tools of free expression - including anonymous speech - are essential. If people can't speak anonymously, how can whistle blowers expose some of these scandals?
Well, once either side start to step outside the bounds of the law, all bets are off.
Reality takes place on both sides of the law, so I guess all bets have been off for a very long time.
So in a very real sense, laws are always all that stand between a government, collectively, and doing wrong.
I'm not willing to rely on that as my sole protection from the state, especially when it comes to censorship. I'd much rather if there wasn't a switch that *anyone* could flip to censor public discourse - and I'm willing to donate time and money to projects like Freenet to make sure that such a switch is impossible to implement without the PR disaster associated with directly breaking the Internet.
Obviously this requires a state that protects people's basic rights in the first place. Many of my arguments against anonymity do not really apply in places where this is not the case. But the biggest issue there is not the lack of anonymity, it's the lack of respect for basic human rights, which is a far more difficult problem to deal with.
Just because a state protects its citizens rights today doesn't mean that it won't stop protecting them tomorrow. Anonymous speech is a key tool for when that happens - necessary just as much in Iceland or Canada today as it is in China or it was in the USA right before the revolutionary war.
Instead of viewing streaming media over and over, I'd rather d/l it once and view the local dataset over and over. Conserves bandwidth all around, from one end to another.
You're assuming that the streaming video isn't something like a video conferencing feed.
The advantage to capacity improvement in things like bandwidth is that they enable applications that were difficult or impossible previously. In 128k up, it's hard to do multi-party peer to peer audio conferencing. In 10mbps, you can just throw bandwidth at the problem and it's easy. Other applications are similar, including ones we haven't even thought of yet.
I have 10mbit/1mbit to the home through Time Warner Cable.
Blech. 10:1 is horrible. I bet you have trouble surfing the web when you're downloading a big file just from the upstream TCP overhead. You can argue for 2:1, but any higher than that and it's not even really an internet connection any more - it's a "youtube connection" or something.
Small businesses co-locate not because they can't get the pipe to their site, but because colos have multiple redundant feeds and will maintain that for you.
And you know because you've compared the situation when they *are* able to get the pipe to their site? There are tons of applications where an on site server is a more reasonable solution than an off-site server - and tons of applications we don't even know about because they won't work until we have high speed links to local businesses (and homes).
My cable service delivers OOo2 in about 5 minutes. That's good enough.
Yup. It's not like someone might ever want to do anything more data intensive than that. I'm sorry - just because you haven't found a use for high speed connectivity in the past when you didn't have it doesn't mean that other people won't have applications for it in the future. I can easily see somoene in the 80's saying "a connection faster 16 kbps per second is absurd - you can refresh an entire character terminal every second at that speed - who could possibly need speeds faster than that?". It's obvious that they would have been wrong, and it's just as obvious that you are wrong.
Very few of them should. They should be outsourcing such things, no matter how cheap bandwidth is.
You have way, way too little information to make that call for "most" businesses. What if it's an Asterisk server that's being used to host their office telephone system? What if they're hosting a game server for some local Quake clans who want a crazy low ping? What if they're streaming live video? What if price is more important than reliability?
The needs of businesses vary, trying to declare that one solution is best for everyone as an excuse to avoid building valuable telecommunications infrastructure is doubly absurd.
Gad, whaddayou, retahded? If requiring an attacker to guess the admin account's username is security through obscurity, then requiring an attacker to guess the password is, too.
The evidence in this case implies that you are both "retarded".
"sudo" is basically exactly as secure as having a root password set. In both cases, the root account is protected by a password and a process running as a non-root user with admin access cannot increase its privileges to full root access. Passwords (and cryptgraphic keys) are not security by obscurity. Assuming a security gain from having a "hidden" admin account probably would be (that's not information that the system designers expected to be private).
In conclusion, the only difference between "sudo" and a root password are: 1.) sudo allows the user to only need to remember one password 2.) sudo on Ubuntu confuses people who can't handle change. Ease of use and confusing the inflexible are both causes I can get behind.
Put another way, you seem to be concerned with what people can do. In contrast, I accept that governments will always be physically able to impair communications if they disregard any legal restrictions on them, and I accept that someone sufficiently determined and willing to pay any price will probably always be able to circumvent any restrictions. I am therefore more concerned that when either group's actions are reviewed under due process afterwards, justice should be done for all involved.
We disagree in two places then:
First, I think that if there are censorship methods in place all that stands between governments and restraining political speech is one legal restriction, we've already failed. They'll ignore that restriction without a second thought because all they have to do is use a tool that they have in place. If we prevent them from installing that set of tools, then we at least have a chance to see what they're doing and respond before it's too late. Currently, the architecture of the internet makes effective censorship very difficult - we, as individuals, should value that advantage over the the state very highly.
Second, I believe that anonymous speech is an essential element of free speech. By its very nature, the speech that needs to be protected will always be unpopular - no need to help the government identify "dissidents" too quickly.
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the state.
You have this in your sig, and yet you argue that the state should be given the tools to control our communication?
Once you consider what the state can do with those tools - restrain political discourse - I don't see how it's possible for an ethically aware individual to consider issues like defamation, scams, and spam as good enough to even consider giving the state that power. Without freedom of political expression there can be no lasting freedom, and if we give the state the tools of control to prevent spam or "online predators" then they have the power to censor - and can use it however they want.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion that's exactly the wrong way to look at it, at least when we're talking about Amazon affiliate links. Instead, I look at it this way: Whenever you buy a n item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away - you could be using an affiliate link and donating that money to someone you wanted to support. The fact that Mozilla sets that affiliate ID to a reasonable default (support the browser you're using) when you explicitly use the built in Amazon search box is a feature, not a bug.
You're right. The arguments have nothing to do with each other.
There is an excellent argument for not having patent protection for software, as RMS covers here. This is a very important issue, because software patents make software engineering a legal nightmare.
The unrelated argument against the general concept of copyright is somewhat less clear. To begin with, we're talking about a much more abstract area - art and culture - rather than something easily quantifiable like software engineering. You can look at software over the last 20 years and see clearly the damage the RSA patent did in terms of incompatibilities and efficiency losses because programmers couldn't use the best known algorithm for what they needed to do. In contrast, it's hard to quantify the social and economic damage caused because some remixer couldn't sample Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back".
That doesn't mean that there aren't excellent arguments for limiting or even abolishing copyright. It was originally part of a censorship agreement. It causes massive economic damage to society. But you're right... the argument against copyright is not an extension of the argument against software patents. They're mostly unrelated.
I'm pretty sure that Knoppix has Linus's Linux in it, so I don't see how it could cause any confusion between Linux and some competing product in the field of computer operating systems. The same argument applies to the soap.
Without copyright we may never have gotten the amazing Gwen Stefani / Akon collaboration "The Sweet Escape". In my opinion, that's OK. That song was only produced because of a wealthy patron who thought they could make a shitload of money from it. Perhaps without copyright, the wealthy patrons will again be motivated by artistic merit like they were in the past.
Umm... this would be different how? The only thing I can see is that "What the rich want" might be better than "What the rich think they can make money on".
There's a good argument for a short term copyright policy based on commercial restrictions only. On the other hand, I have yet to hear a good argument for restricting personal copying - having everyone trade their physical property rights away for an alleged marginal increase in the supply of artistic works seems like a strictly bad deal.
And that's why they, as a society, never developed their understanding beyond "traditional medicine" on their own.
It was only through sharing basic knowledge that the modern concept of science was able to take hold in Europe. Sure, it's extremely politically incorrect to ever say that Europe ever got anything right or that anything important was ever done there, but what historians call the "Age of Reason" was essential to bringing humanity's level of understanding about the world to the way it is today. The fact that people in Europe were able to move beyond the idea that all knowledge was proprietary (in Europe, probably proprietary to guilds) is one of the basic things that allowed the modern world to develop.
Why is this a problem? He found a business model that worked, and we have his works today. If anything, that example demonstrates that copyright is *not* necessary for great artistic works to be created and published.
Scarcity is the thing that makes the idea of property useful. It's useful that I own my car because only one person can use it at a time - it's a limited resource, and it needs to be allocated somehow. For something like a digitally recorded song, there need be no allocation step - physically, everyone can have a copy and there need be no contention over it.
The general response to that is to ask "how do artists get paid?", which is a perfectly reasonable question. My response is this: There's no reason - social or economic - why the number of artists getting paid the amounts they are paid under the current system is "correct". Society doesn't owe a living to Gwen Stefani or Justin Timberlake through fat recording contracts. If they can make a living through performances, great. If they can find a wealthy patron, great. If they can subsist on merchandise sales and fan donations, that's great too. But... if they have to get traditional jobs and don't have time to produce the next "Sexy Back" track, the world will have lost less than it is losing today by people not having access to their own culture and to all the remixes that remix-artists aren't able to make.
Wait a second... you seriously think that copyright should last for 70 years after the author's death? That means that, for a person with the average lifespan, no work that they see released will ever go into the public domain before they die. That's not a balance between the interests of publishers/authors and the public, that's the publishers getting everything and the public getting screwed.
The argument for copyright as a short term restriction on commercial reproduction and resale is actually pretty reasonable. It wouldn't cause that much harm to society if we had to wait five years before we could buy unofficial copies of the new Harry Potter book or the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I could even get behind a six month restriction on unauthorized public screenings of just-released movies.
But, I absolutely agree with you that no one is entitled to know what data I have on my computer or what is on the DVD+R's that I give to friends. Private data is private data, and it's far more important that it stay private than for some random companies to be able to extort another $10 out of unwilling "consumers".
Patents and Copyright are significantly different, and lumping them together as "intellectual property" is more likely to confuse than enlighten. Getting people to lump unlike things together is an excellent way to confuse multiple issues and usually results in incorrect conclusions.
The simple version is this: Copyright are promoted as an incentive for artists to make art, while patents are intended to make engineering research extremely profitable. They're both economic incentives intended to promote social good, but the cost/benefit tradeoffs are massively different in the two cases. RMS makes an excellent more detailed argument, if you're willing to listen to him.
If all you have is an idea - hopefully there is a charity run homeless shelter that you can stay at. You should try to get a job. Nobody owes you a living, and the fact that you think you have a "great idea" doesn't change that. Same thing for music/movie factories - we don't owe them a living. It's their responsibility to find a business model that works in the real world of unrestricted information sharing, not ours.
Porting that portion of the game engine that's necessary for a server actually is trivial. That's why you see a ton of FPS games that have a Linux server but no Linux client. The only things it needs to interface with the OS for are networking and file I/O, and those work basically the same everywhere. Porting the client is much more difficult - it gets into all kinds of Direct X complications. But, Blizzard is already doing a Mac port which already implies all the same problems as a Linux port - if they just used the portable development stack (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL) from the beginning the game would work on all three client platforms.
If that's all the Linux game market can support, great. ID being able do it still implies that a company as large as Blizzard can do it too.
Reference? My guess is that the reason it's so obviously a good deal for both ID and Epic is that their main business is licensing game engines rather than selling games - their games largely tech demos. An engine that supports another platform is obviously better than one that doesn't, because if Linux market share starts growing it could easily become obviously worth targeting with less warning than a full dev cycle for a game.
Blizzard doesn't have that same argument that would make Linux support obvious for them, but here's another argument: StarCraft still sells copies in retail stores today, nearly 10 years after it was first released. I'm sure that the argument for not supporting Linux today is marginal rather than obvious. Can they be sure it will stay that way for even three years?
Hey, taking that the other direction - if there are that many Linux support calls, it *proves* that the Linux release was a good business decision.
Bullshit. Neither ID Software nor Epic seem to have any problem with this. The Linux APIs for game development (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL) are stable and compatible across all relevant distributions. The Loki installer still works great everywhere, and if some obscure distribution has problems the community will figure it out. As for support personnel, you need to have maybe one guy check the "Linux Support" forum on your web site every few days to make sure nothing major has come up that the users haven't already figured out - the phone support people don't even need to know there *is* a Linux port.
There is quite a range between the extremes of a "simple game" like Chess and a "complex simulation" like, say, Sim City. I agree with you that StarCraft was much closer to the simple game end of the spectrum, and it would be appropriate if StarCraft II maintains that flavor.
If that were true, people would have stopped playing StarCraft by now. They definitely haven't. I doubt they will when StarCraft II comes out either.
You seem to have far too much respect for the effectiveness of law, and far too little realization of how frequently government actors are willing to ignore the law to further their personal agenda. Consider the NSA internal spying controversy in the USA: that was blatantly illegal, there were even specific laws made against it the last time this happened, but that didn't slow them down from doing it. Even with all the controversy, we don't even have any reason to believe that they've stopped.
They get away with that because they can do it silently. The government can silently break the law, and the consequences - if any - take time to happen. In that world (well, this world - the one we live in), tools of free expression - including anonymous speech - are essential. If people can't speak anonymously, how can whistle blowers expose some of these scandals?
Reality takes place on both sides of the law, so I guess all bets have been off for a very long time.
I'm not willing to rely on that as my sole protection from the state, especially when it comes to censorship. I'd much rather if there wasn't a switch that *anyone* could flip to censor public discourse - and I'm willing to donate time and money to projects like Freenet to make sure that such a switch is impossible to implement without the PR disaster associated with directly breaking the Internet.
Just because a state protects its citizens rights today doesn't mean that it won't stop protecting them tomorrow. Anonymous speech is a key tool for when that happens - necessary just as much in Iceland or Canada today as it is in China or it was in the USA right before the revolutionary war.
You're assuming that the streaming video isn't something like a video conferencing feed.
The advantage to capacity improvement in things like bandwidth is that they enable applications that were difficult or impossible previously. In 128k up, it's hard to do multi-party peer to peer audio conferencing. In 10mbps, you can just throw bandwidth at the problem and it's easy. Other applications are similar, including ones we haven't even thought of yet.
Blech. 10:1 is horrible. I bet you have trouble surfing the web when you're downloading a big file just from the upstream TCP overhead. You can argue for 2:1, but any higher than that and it's not even really an internet connection any more - it's a "youtube connection" or something.
And you know because you've compared the situation when they *are* able to get the pipe to their site? There are tons of applications where an on site server is a more reasonable solution than an off-site server - and tons of applications we don't even know about because they won't work until we have high speed links to local businesses (and homes).
Yup. It's not like someone might ever want to do anything more data intensive than that. I'm sorry - just because you haven't found a use for high speed connectivity in the past when you didn't have it doesn't mean that other people won't have applications for it in the future. I can easily see somoene in the 80's saying "a connection faster 16 kbps per second is absurd - you can refresh an entire character terminal every second at that speed - who could possibly need speeds faster than that?". It's obvious that they would have been wrong, and it's just as obvious that you are wrong.
You have way, way too little information to make that call for "most" businesses. What if it's an Asterisk server that's being used to host their office telephone system? What if they're hosting a game server for some local Quake clans who want a crazy low ping? What if they're streaming live video? What if price is more important than reliability?
The needs of businesses vary, trying to declare that one solution is best for everyone as an excuse to avoid building valuable telecommunications infrastructure is doubly absurd.
The evidence in this case implies that you are both "retarded".
"sudo" is basically exactly as secure as having a root password set. In both cases, the root account is protected by a password and a process running as a non-root user with admin access cannot increase its privileges to full root access. Passwords (and cryptgraphic keys) are not security by obscurity. Assuming a security gain from having a "hidden" admin account probably would be (that's not information that the system designers expected to be private).
In conclusion, the only difference between "sudo" and a root password are: 1.) sudo allows the user to only need to remember one password 2.) sudo on Ubuntu confuses people who can't handle change. Ease of use and confusing the inflexible are both causes I can get behind.
We disagree in two places then:
First, I think that if there are censorship methods in place all that stands between governments and restraining political speech is one legal restriction, we've already failed. They'll ignore that restriction without a second thought because all they have to do is use a tool that they have in place. If we prevent them from installing that set of tools, then we at least have a chance to see what they're doing and respond before it's too late. Currently, the architecture of the internet makes effective censorship very difficult - we, as individuals, should value that advantage over the the state very highly.
Second, I believe that anonymous speech is an essential element of free speech. By its very nature, the speech that needs to be protected will always be unpopular - no need to help the government identify "dissidents" too quickly.
You have this in your sig, and yet you argue that the state should be given the tools to control our communication?
Once you consider what the state can do with those tools - restrain political discourse - I don't see how it's possible for an ethically aware individual to consider issues like defamation, scams, and spam as good enough to even consider giving the state that power. Without freedom of political expression there can be no lasting freedom, and if we give the state the tools of control to prevent spam or "online predators" then they have the power to censor - and can use it however they want.