This seems like a really weak defense and I'd be interested to know what the justifications the judges are using to make such a ruling.
Technical evidence is being submitted without information about how it was gathered, leaving no way for a court to assess its reliability? I'd say that should be a pretty strong defence, actually, probably enough to instruct a jury to disregard that evidence entirely.
This is not a wedge issue that should be used to push open source.
Indeed, the title is deeply misleading. A court requiring evidence about how software works is not the same as requiring the software to be Open Source, nor anything close to it.
It seems to me that one place this could really matter would be if a precedent were set that affected all the electronic voting machines cropping up in recent elections (with not such a great reputation so far, IME).
Yes, several of my colleagues at work do that sort of thing. However, they generally have one main monitor that's central, and a secondary monitor off to one side for when it's useful. The displays here appear to be identical, and the stand appears to position them left-and-right (with central seam) rather than principal-and-secondary, which sounds like a recipe for horrible eye and/or neck strain after not very much time using them to me.
One thought that occurred to me, as I read all the "but there's a bezel in the center" comments:
Do you remember "books"?
Sure, but they're not really comparable. For a start, books are designed so that you can read one page then the other (with most people rotating the book so the page they're reading is actually central to their eyes), with a column width chosen to promote reading ease and reduce eye strain.
Isn't two LCDs exactly the wrong number to combine, since it puts the seam dead centre (or at least, that's how the image on their site looks to me)? I can see arguments for one large LCD, or possibly for a main central display flanked by secondary displays on either side, but two equivalent displays just seems awkward.
Sorry, but what is the relevance of that page -- basically a starting point for interested euro-sceptics -- to your position that the UK is not a real part of the EU? We have far more ties to the EU than many of the other states that belong. We are a net contributor in financial terms. We have trade agreements, financial agreements and many more with other EU nations.
You seem to be looking at this as black-and-white, as if the only options available are complete independence and a United States of Europe, and then concluding from the fact that we don't agree with everything being done centrally that we're on the complete independence side. That's not true of us, nor indeed any other country in Europe that I know of.
There's a lot more to winning rallies than high performance, as measured by some people.
Of course, but high performance is a prerequisite.
Yer WRX STi is about as powerful as the cheapest family sedan we make... (WRX STi 195 kW, our base engine is 185 kW)
FWIW, when I was commenting on my local dealer having an interest in powerful vehicles, I was actually thinking about the Isuzu trucks and the larger Subarus, rather than the Impreza that's all about performance.
Nevertheless, I'm betting the STi has performance and handling that pretty much blow your family sedan away regardless of the theoretical numbers. It'll outrace a lot of "fast" cars even in a straight line, and straight lines are hardly its speciality...
It may be more pleasant to look at, but there are still a bunch of people who aren't contributing to society, only taking, and that twists a society, especially a democracy, in harmful ways.
I'm not sure I agree with that as an absolute. If you'd said people who never contribute to society, maybe, but I can think of any number of people who might not be working temporarily for good reasons though they have worked in the past and/or will do so in the future: those in education (both young and old), those with health problems, those who've given most of a lifetime of service but have now retired, etc. And of course many people contribute in ways that don't attract an hourly rate, through everything from raising a family to doing charity work. All of these people would be classified as unemployed and might be attracting subsidy from the state, but I certainly don't object to my taxes providing those subsidies, both from the point of view of bettering society as a whole, and from the "if I were them" perspective.
On a serious note, read some demographic statistics about Europe's aging population and tell me that story again. Is your population of 65 year olds going to start working 80 hour weeks to keep up with the rest of the world?
No, they'll probably just notice that technology has advanced over the past few decades, and now it would only be necessary for a working population of the same size to work 3-4 day weeks to produce results that required 5 day weeks a few years ago. (Alternatively, the same productivity can be achieved by a working population significantly smaller working the same 5 day weeks.) The mundane stuff can increasingly be automated, leaving humans to focus on the thinking, creative, judgement and supervisory (of machines as well as people) work.
Moreover, with shorter working weeks, our workers will be able to sustain their productivity throughout their working lives (which are extending as health and working conditions improve). Countries who rely on absurdly long working weeks, as well as wasting a lot of worker time since you get dramatically diminishing and eventually negative returns here, will also develop burnt out populations who are incapable of maintaining anything close to their potential productivity in a few years' time, and whose health and life expectancy (both working life and actual life) are worse.
In fact, if they're not careful, that'll happen just after their populations realise that they're being underpaid for their time as part of the world economy and drive pay rates up, ultimately making those workforces poorer value for money in the medium term than those who take a more cautious approach throughout.
If my number is off, it doesn't change the fact that you have laws that tell people they aren't allowed to work hard, and bust their ass to get ahead, by their own choice. You think that's a good thing? How exactly do you reconcile that with personal liberty and freedom?
As another poster already pointed out to you, working for absurdly long hours does not equate to working hard. It does, however, equate to dramatically reduced productivity, dramatically increased rate of making mistakes, burning out, reduced quality of life for both the worker and their family and friends, and various other unpleasant side effects.
As far as the liberty and freedom thing goes: where's my freedom to work for a reasonable amount of time in exchange for a reasonable rate of pay, if the whole industry is allowed to establish a culture where 50-60 hour weeks are the norm, and everyone is expected to opt out of the working time regulations the day they join?
The situation is similar to the competition regulations in industry: if you don't have them, then the big players can take advantage of their size to beat the smaller players down. Similarly, if you don't have the government acting for the people to restrict employers, there will be a natural tendency to exploitation. Hence we see many countries imposing restrictions on things like working hours, minimum wages, health and safety requirements and the like. You can call it beaurocracy if you like; I call it levelling the playing field.
And before you talk about the supposed "corporate-driven slave-worker culture" you keep hearing about, you might want to visit the US and see for yourself. I honestly don't think those of you in Europe get a very clear picture of what the US is like, beyond what you're told to believe.
Then please feel free to fill me in. Let's try a few objective questions first:
How many hours per week does the average US employee work?
How many days of paid holiday do US workers typically get?
How much notice are employers required to give employees before terminating their employment?
For what reasons can you employment be terminated in the US?
How much support do employees who become ill get in the US?
How much support do employees who have dependents get in the US?
Once we've dealt with those, we'll get onto more cultural things, like having a fixed number of sick days and routinely taking those as extra holiday, or US companies commonly claiming rights to things their staff do out-of-hours.
Next, we'll address to fact that some US workers actually believe they've got good conditions, while corporations can basically buy the government to ensure the situation doesn't change against their interests.
What, EU's 10-15% unemployable flexibility? [...] Why do you think the top intellectuals from Europe eventually leave?
I live in Cambridge, UK. Right now, we have near-record levels of employment in this country. Also, our university is one of the best regarded in the world, with plenty of top-class students and researchers coming here from other countries, and several past winners of Nobel prizes, Fields medals and the like still researching here after several decades. I don't know which Europe you're talking about, but it isn't the one where I live.
Nanny states do not breed innovation, they only breed stagnation.
Regulation does not create a nanny state if the regulation is created for the benefit of the people and with their consent.
Does that also apply to the Internet? Should we wait another 2 decades (at least) to decide whether we should use that?
No, but you probably want to wait a while before switching off all the phone lines into government buildings and ditching all the paper-based alternatives.
You, sir, are either a moron or a troll.
I'm guessing he's just a realist who's being cautious about using a new and mostly unproven strategy in critical parts of the national infrastructure, instead of evangelising based more on his personal faith in OSS than objective evidence of its long-term viability. It's too bad we don't have more people who look before they leap in government; we'd all do better if we did.
We're talking about Europe though, land of the government enforced 35 hour work week. They never met a regulation they didn't like.
That wasn't insightful, it was simply wrong. On both counts, actually.
For a start, the limit is 48 hours, not 35, and there's currently an opt-out that many European nations are keen to retain. This isn't a great example of over-regulation anyway: there's a pretty good case for enforcing a 48 hour limit and removing the opt-out, based on solid information about both abuse of workers and the performance of overworked staff, and if you're going to do something like that in a relatively open labour market, it makes sense to do it on a common basis.
In any case, you may not have noticed but a couple of European nations just voted down the whole Euro constitution in referenda, and some major government figures have left their posts as a result. It's pretty clear what the people think about European over-regulation and beaurocracy at this point.
I think that a lot of Europe thinks capitalism and free markets are a fad.
There's a difference between thinking something's a fad and simply not trusting your whole economy/culture to it. If slavish adherence to a capitalist dogma results in the kind of corporate-centric, slave-worker culture that we keep hearing about across the Atlantic, then personally I'm quite happy if a more flexible approach is taken, thanks.
Can we agree then, that the first stage in regulating society should be social education, expectations, and peer pressure, and etiquette, with legal measures and other "stick-based" approaches as secondary?
My local Subaru dealer is The Welch Group (with the 'c'). Obviously they're interested in high performance and powerful vehicles, and they do have several other companies in the group as well as the car dealerships. I was wondering what I'd missed when I went in to get my Scooby serviced the other day...
Ah, see, now you're showing bias -- you like the ability (not present in anonymous systems) of the majority to punish the minority for views that the majority does not agree with.
I don't think I've made any secret of my position in this thread. What you describe is necessary for the existence of law, and I don't believe society would be a better place without a legal system. As I've acknowledged throughout this discussion, it's not perfect; it's just the best we've got.
I am one of those people that believes that it is possible to have an anonymous data transfer system that is useful and can provide a valuable set of services.
So am I. What I'm challenging is the assumption that the price is worth paying.
So? Why should the actions of the majority affect my individual rights?
The actions of the majority will always affect your individual rights. That's the nature of our society. If you don't like it, feel free to move away to an isolated island in the middle of nowhere and take your chances alone.
What 'trust'? Who's trusting me, and why should I feel obligated to them? When did I agree to trade my freedom to download stuff for other freedoms - and why should there be a correlation anyway? The word 'trust' imposes a burden on me that I never agreed to. This exchange you speak of - I don't remember agreeing to that.
You probably didn't agree not to murder anyone either, yet society will condemn you if you do. This is the basic principle of law: rules are established that are acceptable to most people, and those who violate them are punished by the majority. Of course it's not perfect. Sometimes the system gets it wrong, or the will of the people changes, and it's necessary to add or remove or change laws to reflect this. But that's the system, and as long as you live in it, you have to play by those rules. If you don't like them, you can try to get them changed, and if the majority of the people support you then sooner or later you will.
Again, so? I don't care how many people abuse the system, or get away with it.
Perhaps you've never seen counselling for a child who was sexually abused, or talked to an elderly person who was tricked out of their life savings. When you have, your perspective changes. It's easy to make an AC post to Slashdot and proclaim that you will never negotiate with terrorists, but not many people could say that if the gun was pointing at their child's head. Perhaps society would be a better place if we could all be so principled and dispassionate, and I'm sure a few of the people who advocate such principles here genuinely believe in them. Sadly, I suspect that most of them are more concerned with being able to selfishly abuse the system under a smokescreen of legitimacy than with bettering society.
New laws aren't going to stop spam, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, etc.
No, but locking a few up and throwing away the key would help, and being able to track down where the illegally obtained money went would go a long way to undoing the damage.
As we can see everyday, the usefulness and correctness of such a pragmatic liberal system ultimately depend on the powers who are appointed to enforce it.
Indeed. Any society must trust some representatives to act in the interests of that society at some stage. If these representatives do a good job, things work well. If they take advantage of their position and don't get caught, then society gets screwed. This is the weakness of the system, and the only defence we have against it is an adequate set of checks and balances, which is why principles such as separation of powers are so important.
I am sure you would not find it inappropriate for a Chinese to use anon & crypto to defend himself from his own gov't, even though these tools are effectively making him immune to the law.
No, I personally have no moral objection to that. My point on this subject is that the tools provide little more than theoretical benefits to someone under such a regime. If the state finds you've even got the technology for anonymous communication, it's like to decide that you're a threat without further consideration, and it will happily send you to sleep with the fishes for it. Anonymity doesn't help much in the absence of oxygen.
I have always acknowledged that there are genuinely beneficial uses for anonymity; my feeling is simply that they are mostly illusory since it's unlikely many people will ever be able to take advantage of them, while the genuine benefits of not granting total anonymity are real and widespread. Ultimately, there's no one right answer here, and all you can do is try to balance the pros and cons to get the maximum benefit possible.
I appreciate your point about good laws, but please consider this: if anyone can be anonymous if they wish, how will you ever enforce any law against them, even the good ones?
Just because it didn't make it to court doesn't mean the case is without merit. In fact quite the opposite. The GPL violators caving before court suggests that they figured there was a good chance they wouldn't win.
It's funny, someone was saying exactly the opposite in yet another RIAA/copyright-related thread just a few hours ago.
It's not clear to me exactly what the requirements for this course are. Some more information about the context would be useful.
As a personal example, not long ago some colleagues and I reworked a reasonably complex web site (say 20-30 major pages with unique content and design, backed by a few hundred minor pages). The aim of the reworking was partly to improve the appearance and usability of the site, and partly to increase the range of content. Some of the bigger design/UI issues we touched on during the work were:
usability (both the concept of studying user behaviour formally, and knowledge of existing research in this area)
accessibility (always an under-rated issue, and never more important in web design than it is now there are anti-discrimination laws coming into effect)
graphic design for the web (colour, alignment, etc. in the context of fluid layouts that will be displayed on-screen, and also web typography)
navigation techniques (specific things like providing breadcrumbs for sites with a hierarchical structure, and more general concepts like designing good site maps and search functions).
and of course things like standards and browser compatibility issues.
Obviously there's also a whole host of technologies involved; off the top of my head, we're using XML and XSLT combined with makefiles as a kind of GeekCMS, generating the XHTML that actually gets sent down the line with some CSS and occasional Javascript, along with CGI scripts written in Perl to access MySQL database stuff on a few of the pages and PHP to do similar things in other places. I'm not sure whether any of that, other than perhaps the existence of the various layers and the basic relationships between the technologies, is within the scope of the course here, though. If it's a post-grad course, give them a bibliography and some direction, and let them learn the different tools as they need them.
"No, it doesn't. But the vast, vast majority of people using a tool like this are doing so because it shields their illegal activities."
and my point is....So what?
So not only do the copyright infringers (arguably the lowest threat on the scale) get away with it, but also all the other less savoury types I've mentioned in this thread (many of whom do real damage to real victims).
You do know that alcohol USED to be illegal too right?
And look how long that lasted, without requiring anonymous communication over the Internet to topple it. No government can maintain prolonged oppressive laws against the will of the population for extended periods. Even the most undemocratic nations of the world are starting to realise this, and history is littered with revolutions (and a very occasional peaceful transition to democracy) that tell how these stories will end.
Civil Disobedience lives
As the other reply to your post mentioned, civil disobedience doesn't mean ignoring the law and pretending it doesn't apply to you, it means wilfully breaking it with as much attention on you as possible, and accepting the consequences to demonstrate how unjust they are. Being identifiable and accepting responsibility for your actions is at the very heart of civil disobedience.
I debated whether to reply to your post or not, but in an attempt to maintain civil debate I'll give it a go.
First things first: yes, I'm quite serious, and the fact that your views apparently differ from mine is neither a counter to my argument nor a demonstration that I am trolling.
Moreover, the legal case doesn't rest on the Betamax ruling for anyone outside the US, and even for those within the US there are ongoing challenges to the conclusions of that case. Regardless, this discussion is about what the law should be, not what it is, and I'm sure we'd all agree that the law is not perfect at present.
This is the first point I really want to address, though:
You want to know how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, frausters, copyright violators, organized criminals, paedophiles and terrorists I'm willing to let get away with it? All of them. Because even in toto, they don't add up to the danger of one fascist.
The problem is, that's just not true. In fact, if you've ever seen the way a counsellor deals with a child who has been subject to that kind of abuse, you'll know that the scars last for many years, sometimes the rest of their life. Having your identity stolen is also a profoundly disturbing experience that can do huge psychological damage. Talking to an elderly person who's tricked out of their life savings by a professional con artist doesn't make you think it's all going to be for the best.
These things -- physical abuse, being "disappeared", losing your assets -- sound all too close to the kind of thing you can suffer under a fascist dictatorship to me. The only difference is that these things are happening, in your home town, right now. Ironically, both your country (assuming you're from the US) and mine (the UK) are slowly sliding towards a lot of the other characteristics we associate with fascist dictatorships as well, and a major driver for this process is precisely the lack of accountability I oppose, but that's another story.
I have just one final point for you:
In case you hadn't noticed, there are plenty of laws already to deal with crimes. What you want is not to deal with crimes, but with criminals. And you're willing to sacrifice other people's rights to do it.
On what basis do you claim the right to be anonymous? It's not natural for humans to be anonymous; you can normally be seen and heard every time you interact with someone else. It's not a legal right, even in a country as proud of its constitutional heritage and citizens' rights as the US. In the natural order, and indeed according to both your legal system and mine, if you piss someone off, you will be held responsible for your actions.
In other words, why do you feel you have a right to be above the law?
Slashdot Mirror
Technical evidence is being submitted without information about how it was gathered, leaving no way for a court to assess its reliability? I'd say that should be a pretty strong defence, actually, probably enough to instruct a jury to disregard that evidence entirely.
Indeed, the title is deeply misleading. A court requiring evidence about how software works is not the same as requiring the software to be Open Source, nor anything close to it.
It seems to me that one place this could really matter would be if a precedent were set that affected all the electronic voting machines cropping up in recent elections (with not such a great reputation so far, IME).
Yes, several of my colleagues at work do that sort of thing. However, they generally have one main monitor that's central, and a secondary monitor off to one side for when it's useful. The displays here appear to be identical, and the stand appears to position them left-and-right (with central seam) rather than principal-and-secondary, which sounds like a recipe for horrible eye and/or neck strain after not very much time using them to me.
Sure, but they're not really comparable. For a start, books are designed so that you can read one page then the other (with most people rotating the book so the page they're reading is actually central to their eyes), with a column width chosen to promote reading ease and reduce eye strain.
Isn't two LCDs exactly the wrong number to combine, since it puts the seam dead centre (or at least, that's how the image on their site looks to me)? I can see arguments for one large LCD, or possibly for a main central display flanked by secondary displays on either side, but two equivalent displays just seems awkward.
Sorry, but what is the relevance of that page -- basically a starting point for interested euro-sceptics -- to your position that the UK is not a real part of the EU? We have far more ties to the EU than many of the other states that belong. We are a net contributor in financial terms. We have trade agreements, financial agreements and many more with other EU nations.
You seem to be looking at this as black-and-white, as if the only options available are complete independence and a United States of Europe, and then concluding from the fact that we don't agree with everything being done centrally that we're on the complete independence side. That's not true of us, nor indeed any other country in Europe that I know of.
Of course, but high performance is a prerequisite.
FWIW, when I was commenting on my local dealer having an interest in powerful vehicles, I was actually thinking about the Isuzu trucks and the larger Subarus, rather than the Impreza that's all about performance.
Nevertheless, I'm betting the STi has performance and handling that pretty much blow your family sedan away regardless of the theoretical numbers. It'll outrace a lot of "fast" cars even in a straight line, and straight lines are hardly its speciality...
I'm not sure I agree with that as an absolute. If you'd said people who never contribute to society, maybe, but I can think of any number of people who might not be working temporarily for good reasons though they have worked in the past and/or will do so in the future: those in education (both young and old), those with health problems, those who've given most of a lifetime of service but have now retired, etc. And of course many people contribute in ways that don't attract an hourly rate, through everything from raising a family to doing charity work. All of these people would be classified as unemployed and might be attracting subsidy from the state, but I certainly don't object to my taxes providing those subsidies, both from the point of view of bettering society as a whole, and from the "if I were them" perspective.
No, they'll probably just notice that technology has advanced over the past few decades, and now it would only be necessary for a working population of the same size to work 3-4 day weeks to produce results that required 5 day weeks a few years ago. (Alternatively, the same productivity can be achieved by a working population significantly smaller working the same 5 day weeks.) The mundane stuff can increasingly be automated, leaving humans to focus on the thinking, creative, judgement and supervisory (of machines as well as people) work.
Moreover, with shorter working weeks, our workers will be able to sustain their productivity throughout their working lives (which are extending as health and working conditions improve). Countries who rely on absurdly long working weeks, as well as wasting a lot of worker time since you get dramatically diminishing and eventually negative returns here, will also develop burnt out populations who are incapable of maintaining anything close to their potential productivity in a few years' time, and whose health and life expectancy (both working life and actual life) are worse.
In fact, if they're not careful, that'll happen just after their populations realise that they're being underpaid for their time as part of the world economy and drive pay rates up, ultimately making those workforces poorer value for money in the medium term than those who take a more cautious approach throughout.
Why?
As another poster already pointed out to you, working for absurdly long hours does not equate to working hard. It does, however, equate to dramatically reduced productivity, dramatically increased rate of making mistakes, burning out, reduced quality of life for both the worker and their family and friends, and various other unpleasant side effects.
As far as the liberty and freedom thing goes: where's my freedom to work for a reasonable amount of time in exchange for a reasonable rate of pay, if the whole industry is allowed to establish a culture where 50-60 hour weeks are the norm, and everyone is expected to opt out of the working time regulations the day they join?
The situation is similar to the competition regulations in industry: if you don't have them, then the big players can take advantage of their size to beat the smaller players down. Similarly, if you don't have the government acting for the people to restrict employers, there will be a natural tendency to exploitation. Hence we see many countries imposing restrictions on things like working hours, minimum wages, health and safety requirements and the like. You can call it beaurocracy if you like; I call it levelling the playing field.
Then please feel free to fill me in. Let's try a few objective questions first:
Once we've dealt with those, we'll get onto more cultural things, like having a fixed number of sick days and routinely taking those as extra holiday, or US companies commonly claiming rights to things their staff do out-of-hours.
Next, we'll address to fact that some US workers actually believe they've got good conditions, while corporations can basically buy the government to ensure the situation doesn't change against their interests.
Do you still want to play?
I live in Cambridge, UK. Right now, we have near-record levels of employment in this country. Also, our university is one of the best regarded in the world, with plenty of top-class students and researchers coming here from other countries, and several past winners of Nobel prizes, Fields medals and the like still researching here after several decades. I don't know which Europe you're talking about, but it isn't the one where I live.
Regulation does not create a nanny state if the regulation is created for the benefit of the people and with their consent.
No, but you probably want to wait a while before switching off all the phone lines into government buildings and ditching all the paper-based alternatives.
I'm guessing he's just a realist who's being cautious about using a new and mostly unproven strategy in critical parts of the national infrastructure, instead of evangelising based more on his personal faith in OSS than objective evidence of its long-term viability. It's too bad we don't have more people who look before they leap in government; we'd all do better if we did.
That wasn't insightful, it was simply wrong. On both counts, actually.
For a start, the limit is 48 hours, not 35, and there's currently an opt-out that many European nations are keen to retain. This isn't a great example of over-regulation anyway: there's a pretty good case for enforcing a 48 hour limit and removing the opt-out, based on solid information about both abuse of workers and the performance of overworked staff, and if you're going to do something like that in a relatively open labour market, it makes sense to do it on a common basis.
In any case, you may not have noticed but a couple of European nations just voted down the whole Euro constitution in referenda, and some major government figures have left their posts as a result. It's pretty clear what the people think about European over-regulation and beaurocracy at this point.
There's a difference between thinking something's a fad and simply not trusting your whole economy/culture to it. If slavish adherence to a capitalist dogma results in the kind of corporate-centric, slave-worker culture that we keep hearing about across the Atlantic, then personally I'm quite happy if a more flexible approach is taken, thanks.
Always.
My local Subaru dealer is The Welch Group (with the 'c'). Obviously they're interested in high performance and powerful vehicles, and they do have several other companies in the group as well as the car dealerships. I was wondering what I'd missed when I went in to get my Scooby serviced the other day...
I don't disagree with that. I'm just more concerned about the word "almost" than you are. :-)
I don't think I've made any secret of my position in this thread. What you describe is necessary for the existence of law, and I don't believe society would be a better place without a legal system. As I've acknowledged throughout this discussion, it's not perfect; it's just the best we've got.
So am I. What I'm challenging is the assumption that the price is worth paying.
Blockquoth the AC:
The actions of the majority will always affect your individual rights. That's the nature of our society. If you don't like it, feel free to move away to an isolated island in the middle of nowhere and take your chances alone.
You probably didn't agree not to murder anyone either, yet society will condemn you if you do. This is the basic principle of law: rules are established that are acceptable to most people, and those who violate them are punished by the majority. Of course it's not perfect. Sometimes the system gets it wrong, or the will of the people changes, and it's necessary to add or remove or change laws to reflect this. But that's the system, and as long as you live in it, you have to play by those rules. If you don't like them, you can try to get them changed, and if the majority of the people support you then sooner or later you will.
Perhaps you've never seen counselling for a child who was sexually abused, or talked to an elderly person who was tricked out of their life savings. When you have, your perspective changes. It's easy to make an AC post to Slashdot and proclaim that you will never negotiate with terrorists, but not many people could say that if the gun was pointing at their child's head. Perhaps society would be a better place if we could all be so principled and dispassionate, and I'm sure a few of the people who advocate such principles here genuinely believe in them. Sadly, I suspect that most of them are more concerned with being able to selfishly abuse the system under a smokescreen of legitimacy than with bettering society.
No, but locking a few up and throwing away the key would help, and being able to track down where the illegally obtained money went would go a long way to undoing the damage.
Indeed. Any society must trust some representatives to act in the interests of that society at some stage. If these representatives do a good job, things work well. If they take advantage of their position and don't get caught, then society gets screwed. This is the weakness of the system, and the only defence we have against it is an adequate set of checks and balances, which is why principles such as separation of powers are so important.
No, I personally have no moral objection to that. My point on this subject is that the tools provide little more than theoretical benefits to someone under such a regime. If the state finds you've even got the technology for anonymous communication, it's like to decide that you're a threat without further consideration, and it will happily send you to sleep with the fishes for it. Anonymity doesn't help much in the absence of oxygen.
I have always acknowledged that there are genuinely beneficial uses for anonymity; my feeling is simply that they are mostly illusory since it's unlikely many people will ever be able to take advantage of them, while the genuine benefits of not granting total anonymity are real and widespread. Ultimately, there's no one right answer here, and all you can do is try to balance the pros and cons to get the maximum benefit possible.
I appreciate your point about good laws, but please consider this: if anyone can be anonymous if they wish, how will you ever enforce any law against them, even the good ones?
It's funny, someone was saying exactly the opposite in yet another RIAA/copyright-related thread just a few hours ago.
It's not clear to me exactly what the requirements for this course are. Some more information about the context would be useful.
As a personal example, not long ago some colleagues and I reworked a reasonably complex web site (say 20-30 major pages with unique content and design, backed by a few hundred minor pages). The aim of the reworking was partly to improve the appearance and usability of the site, and partly to increase the range of content. Some of the bigger design/UI issues we touched on during the work were:
- usability (both the concept of studying user behaviour formally, and knowledge of existing research in this area)
- accessibility (always an under-rated issue, and never more important in web design than it is now there are anti-discrimination laws coming into effect)
- graphic design for the web (colour, alignment, etc. in the context of fluid layouts that will be displayed on-screen, and also web typography)
- navigation techniques (specific things like providing breadcrumbs for sites with a hierarchical structure, and more general concepts like designing good site maps and search functions).
and of course things like standards and browser compatibility issues.Obviously there's also a whole host of technologies involved; off the top of my head, we're using XML and XSLT combined with makefiles as a kind of GeekCMS, generating the XHTML that actually gets sent down the line with some CSS and occasional Javascript, along with CGI scripts written in Perl to access MySQL database stuff on a few of the pages and PHP to do similar things in other places. I'm not sure whether any of that, other than perhaps the existence of the various layers and the basic relationships between the technologies, is within the scope of the course here, though. If it's a post-grad course, give them a bibliography and some direction, and let them learn the different tools as they need them.
So not only do the copyright infringers (arguably the lowest threat on the scale) get away with it, but also all the other less savoury types I've mentioned in this thread (many of whom do real damage to real victims).
And look how long that lasted, without requiring anonymous communication over the Internet to topple it. No government can maintain prolonged oppressive laws against the will of the population for extended periods. Even the most undemocratic nations of the world are starting to realise this, and history is littered with revolutions (and a very occasional peaceful transition to democracy) that tell how these stories will end.
As the other reply to your post mentioned, civil disobedience doesn't mean ignoring the law and pretending it doesn't apply to you, it means wilfully breaking it with as much attention on you as possible, and accepting the consequences to demonstrate how unjust they are. Being identifiable and accepting responsibility for your actions is at the very heart of civil disobedience.
I debated whether to reply to your post or not, but in an attempt to maintain civil debate I'll give it a go.
First things first: yes, I'm quite serious, and the fact that your views apparently differ from mine is neither a counter to my argument nor a demonstration that I am trolling.
Moreover, the legal case doesn't rest on the Betamax ruling for anyone outside the US, and even for those within the US there are ongoing challenges to the conclusions of that case. Regardless, this discussion is about what the law should be, not what it is, and I'm sure we'd all agree that the law is not perfect at present.
This is the first point I really want to address, though:
The problem is, that's just not true. In fact, if you've ever seen the way a counsellor deals with a child who has been subject to that kind of abuse, you'll know that the scars last for many years, sometimes the rest of their life. Having your identity stolen is also a profoundly disturbing experience that can do huge psychological damage. Talking to an elderly person who's tricked out of their life savings by a professional con artist doesn't make you think it's all going to be for the best.
These things -- physical abuse, being "disappeared", losing your assets -- sound all too close to the kind of thing you can suffer under a fascist dictatorship to me. The only difference is that these things are happening, in your home town, right now. Ironically, both your country (assuming you're from the US) and mine (the UK) are slowly sliding towards a lot of the other characteristics we associate with fascist dictatorships as well, and a major driver for this process is precisely the lack of accountability I oppose, but that's another story.
I have just one final point for you:
On what basis do you claim the right to be anonymous? It's not natural for humans to be anonymous; you can normally be seen and heard every time you interact with someone else. It's not a legal right, even in a country as proud of its constitutional heritage and citizens' rights as the US. In the natural order, and indeed according to both your legal system and mine, if you piss someone off, you will be held responsible for your actions.
In other words, why do you feel you have a right to be above the law?