The more money politicians can take out of 'foreigners', the less they need from their constituants (including businesses), which helps keep them in office.
I don't doubt that this is the theory, but it's one of questionable utility even in the real world with people driving through with a car. People might really want to visit Hollywood or San Francisco or Monterrey, and might find that driving to New Mexico or Louisiana or Taiwan is an unacceptable alternative for their vacation or work venture.
However, on the net, it isn't an either/or proposition. Another supplier of the same merchandise is probably just a click away, and if they think people will pay for something taxed when the same item is still available untaxed somewhere else, they're going to find out pretty fast just how versatile the average consumer is with a mouse.
In Massachusetts, there's sales tax and in New Hampshire (which is adjacent) there isn't. This hurts Massachusetts businesses on the border a LOT because it creates an incentive for people to drive a little farther and buy out of state. On the Internet, the "drive" to another state is even shorter.
Doesn't California have a state income tax? Why isn't it enough that the state makes money on the income of the business that is able to make the sale? I've never understood this. How many different ways does the government have to tax the exact same transaction before it becomes too much?
GO Video offers a dual drive VCR within the US that does pretty good tape to tape copies. Their introductory tape explains how this is probably something you'll be using to copy your homemade video cassettes of your skiing vacation to send to friends.
But the sad thing is that it seems to me that there are fair uses for this technology that involve copyrighted material, but they have to shy away from mentioning such, lest they open themselves to a claim that they exist to support people who are making knockoff copies for sale.
The court has already recognized time-shifting. But it's a well-known truth that people re-watch things they tape, and that people tape their favorite shows for permanent access. The industry may make noise like this is bad, probably just to keep people in line, but I'm quite sure that the pricing over the years has shifted to take this into account, such that HBO probably pays more in royalties for the showing of a movie given the knowledge of home video tapers out there than it would if it were sure there were no home video tapers, since they know they are eating up a little bit of their commercial tape market this way. As such, it would be an error in the extreme for a court to ever claim that keeping a tape of one's favorite show for multiple viewings was wrong, even though I'm not sure this has been tested. Cable companies would not get away with saying "Set your VCR. Your favorite movies are coming." if the makers of the movies they showed were even slightly at risk of suing them as complicit in an illegal act.
Once you acknowledge that people might want to do this, and that the system both tacitly accepts this and extracts and appropriate fee (through your cable bill rather than through your video tape costs), then you immediately confront two other reasonable things: (a) the need to upgrade the media to avoid fading and (b) the fact that often you have a 6 hour tape with only one or two hours on it.
I had a GO video recorder and all I ever did with it was 'compact' my tapes (move shows from one tape to another, so I could recycle one of the two tapes) becaues VHS cassettes are so darned physically large that if you get a lot of them, it takes a whole room to hold them. I didn't make copies for friends, but I wanted 6 Perry Mason's per tape, not just one. There are 270 of them, after all.
I wonder how this entire conversation would be different if the VHS tapes had copyright enforcement like everyone's making now under DMCA. Most of the preservation techniques discussed here sound like they're "fair use", but in the future will they even be possible?
Re:Brain Scanners Work On Politicians - No Problem
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Brain Privacy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure that brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.
However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.
One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")
Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position, though there must surely be others.
I want this for a programming tool...
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Brain Privacy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The most conservative view of the brain's power say that it's a computer program. The most elaborate theories also envision that there are other structures like souls that can't be 'caught on tape'. Strangely, I'd be the hardcore conservatives wanting to use this technology are statistically more likely to be those who say we have unmeasurable souls. Just a guess. But if it's so, I wonder how they rationalize that.
But let's take the conservative view--that the brain is just a computer program that is trillions or quadrillions of times more complex than your average programming project for work. Now we're talking about hooking us up to a machine that has no idea what a single line of source looks like, no idea what data has been preloaded, and is just going to watch the approximate equivalent of the blinking lights on the console and tell me if my program is not only functioning correctly now, but whether it's predicted to function correctly in the future?
Geez, forget core dumps, stack debuggers, tracing tools, and all that. I just want one of these cool push-button debugging tools for writing programs!! People pay enormous amounts for teams of people to pour over source code for days or weeks or more on projects so trivial as today's... and it's apparently all wasted. We could have solved the whole Y2K problem by just letting this machine watch the blinky lights on the front of some COBOL boxes and tell us that the planes wouldn't crash and the elevators wouldn't stop. Why didn't we rush them into production if they were this close to ready?
Or is it possible that the effectiveness is slightly oversold?
If they were good products (i.e. worth their price), people would be willing to pay for them.
The burden is yours to show that this is so. From where I stand, people take a 90% product for free over a 100% product for cost any day. And if the for-cost people try to provide 90%, the same people whine excessively that 90% isn't good enough because they paid real money and deserve better.
Everyone wants free stuff because they have no money to buy it. They have no money to buy it, of course, because they don't charge for what they themselves make. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
Well, that's a market. It doesn't care about individuals but about society.
Actually, markets don't care about anything at all. They simply have effects, and when they have effects that are societally bad, we try to herd the market in a new direction. Right now we're headed as if our compass was set for 'please economically disempower all programmers'. One day we'll all be able to program and none of us will be able to make a living at it.
It will be like gardening. We can all buy tomato seeds for our garden, but none of us can be a commercial farmer any more, not really. Because commercial farming means global delivery, and that market is all locked up by people with the commercial capital to sustain it. Arthur Daniel Midlands can do it, but mere mortals cannot. We won't have commercial capital, because we have no economic power, because we've (as a group) given away everything we have of value and said "please don't pay us for it--it's your right to take and not ours to benefit". That's no future I aspire to.
They've just shown they don't have to care about costs.
Ummm... That means that their costs are lower. If by harnessing the spare cycles of grad students and sysadmins one can write an app which may be given away, then one has lower costs.
If I were funding such a university, I'd stop giving it money if I found it was giving out value rather than charging for it, while still coming to me and telling me how hungry it was for money.
But also, I rely on the capitalistic free market to weed out ways of doing things that cost too much. The problem is that this can weed out commercial offerings (no matter how reasonably priced, no matter what quality), but nothing in commerce can weed this out (no matter what its quality). As a consequence, I think, this has a corrosive effect not just on products but on commerce itself insofar as commerce is about 'the product'. This means that good products will either be killed or will never be made. Many (not all) free software advocates not only admit this, but take glee in it, as if this were the whole point. (Usually in the same conversation, Microsoft is mentioned, as if all companies were Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to exist and the many companies that are not Microsoft and never will be are being injured.)
I'm not concerned about their injury per se. I'm concerned about my injury as a consumer, not having access to the fine products these injured companies would have produced because the market has become inhospitable for people to earn an honest buck making and selling software.
Software should be free.
This is an interesting notiion of premise, but I don't agree. Do you agree that the world should have no secrets? No privacy? If information is always free, are you unable to receive information on condition of not sharing it? If so, you should declare this to your friends and employers so they know never to trust you with a secret. If there is the possibility of accepting information on condition of limited use, then software is no different.
This necessarily means that producers of proprietary software will need to do honest work once more.
Honest work? What is dishonest about the work they are doing?
Absolutely. I can't say enough good things about EPIC. I've given money to them regularly over the years and it's some of the best money I've ever spent. It's sometimes hard to tell when giving to a charity is really making a dent in anything at all, but it's easily apparent that this organization is using its money wisely and producing quality results.
This is not to say that the EFF is bad in any way. They also do quite good work. They just have a different charter, which is more diversified than just privacy issues.
The function of copyright is... to separate the notions of "sharing" ("showing") from "giving".
No, the function of copyright is to encourage innovation by giving (supposedly temporary) monopolies over ideas (RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM) in hopes that people will innovate more if they get to own their ideas for a while.
I'll take up the terminology problem below, but as to the issue of function, we are not in disagreement here, except that you are not recognizing that the manner in which it implements the function you describe is indeed to separate the notion of sharing from the notion of giving. In practice, copyright protects 'sweat of the brow', by saying that the creation act is most easily identified by the individuality of expression, and that others are entitled to do a similar thing, but that they must use their own sweat. Copyright does not stop ideas, but it does stop one person who puts in a lot of energy from being exploited by another who does not. You paper this up as 'freedom', but I see 'right to exploit'. It's funny that you don't see your swinging fist analogy applying here, because I think your freedom needs to stop at the point where you are free to exploit my work.
I have a feeling about what freedom means and it's different than yours. I don't so much object to your having your feelings about it, what I object to is your not allowing me to have my own term. When I say the use of the term 'freedom' is misleading it's because you are using the unadorned, unmodified term 'free' to identify a political slant on something where both sides believe they are defending freedom. I don't consider this fair. I do not, by contrast, use the term freedom to identify my slant on things, exactly because that would also be misleading. I raise my notion of freedom in discussion with you not to assert "mine is better than yours" but to assert "there is legitimate ambiguity and/or political difference".
I wouldn't even object if you called it "one kind of free software". But it's not that way. The entire movement seems deadset on explaining that their notion of freedom is the right one. I want the freedom to define freedom my way, and at the point you co-opt the idea that there can be no free software other than gnu-approved free software, there is a problem. When you want a trademark, pick a non-word to identify. Do not pick an English term and start twisting its meaning to suit.
There are more kinds of "windows" on a computer than those given by microsoft. That doesn't mean they don't have windows. I'm fine with them using the term MS/Windows. I'm not fine with them crowding out others who just want to use the term Windows.
idea monopolies
Cute, albeit misleading term.
The term "monopoly" is super-charged emotionally, but your usage of it is not in the sense of the kind of monopoly that led to that idea. The monopoly, such as it is, is entirely on something of my own creation. If I write a book and do not share it, I still have a monopoly on it. Even in the absence of copyright law. My mere ownership of the physical object entitles me to a monopoly. Will your next position be to start calling property "object monopolies", or are you smart enough to see that this abuses (again) the term monopoly.
And as to the other word in this charged and misleading phrase, "idea", I'll just say that you're wrong on the facts here, pure and simple. Copyright protects the form of presentation, not the idea itself. Not only does copyright not grant "idea monopolies" but in fact it expressly doesn't grant any control over ideas at all. I quote the US Code (Copyright) here (bold mine):
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship...
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
The problem you keep ignoring is that keeping the "freedom to make people less free through copyright restrictions" makes people as a whole less "free" overall. It is in principle exactly like the freedom to be a ruthless tyrant: it is an individual freedom that is incompatible with freedom for all actors in a society.
I don't keep ignoring this. You keep assuming people would create the same things whether there was copyright law or not. But I don't agree. Smart/creative people spend their time where they can make money. If you take away copyright, and so their ability to command a decent return from their investment in their creations (some of which may flop, btw, and get nothing, some of which may take time to produce), they won't sit there and say "well, I guess I'll just make things for free". They'll either get a job flipping burgers or they'll find a way to invest their talents where people will pay, like writing advertising jingles and doing other "commercial" art that pays better. Or having private showings. Or just changing careers and applying their creative nature elsewhere. Legitimate innovators do not blame their lack of available "free stuff" from other innovators for their lack of innovation. They work with what they have.
The function of copyright is not to "keep people from innovating" but to separate the notions of "sharing" ("showing") from "giving". If showing my work to you means giving it to you, then I'm not likely to share it in that way. Even in a copyright free world, I can still be a tyrant by not innovating anything for you to build on. Then you still are left "free" only to innovate on what others have given freely (which is all the public domain offers). GPL doesn't incentivize anything because it is anti-author; it takes away all the rights of the author and gives them to people who've done nothing. If they had done something, they'd have been paid for it, and if they'd been paid, they'd have money to buy the copyrighted version.
In the end, the makers of content need to be rewarded, and GPL does not do that. The whole original purpose of copyright is to assure that the content creators have an incentive to share their ideas. Take away that incentive and see what those with the legitimate talent of creation (rather than the dubious talent of merely frobbing the parameters of what others have done) will make.
Stallman, in his book ("Free Software, Free Society", top of page 38) makes the bold claim:
Actually, many people will program with absolutely no monetary incentive. Programming has an irresistable fascination for some people, usually the people who are best at it. There is no shortage of professional musicians who keep at it even though they have no hope of making a living that way.
...So the right question is, will anyone program with a reduced monetary incentive? My experience shows that they will.
I find that claim unconscionable for two reasons. First, it implicitly asserts that content creators are interchangeable and that if you lose some, the others that surface to replace them are just as good. But second, it explicitly says that it's ok not to reward content creators because they're compulsive and you can take financial advantage of this compulsion.
Commerce is not an evil. It's what feeds the world. And feeding people is not evil. It frees them to do the things they want to do. I want the world's authors to be able to make a living on it so they will do lots of it. I don't want them working in a grocery store all day and only writing at night, because it means I won't get a lot of good stuff (whatever kind of content they create) out of them before they die. I'd rather they make something I pay for fairly than not make something because they can't afford to or because they feel exploited.
I may regret continuing this, but these arguments you make are new (to this subthread) and require their own response...
Freedom dissolves into your paradox unless you have a rule like "my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose".... Your proscription is for Anarchy,...
This is just confused. No anarchy results from providing things into the public domain, nor from building on something that has been placed there. People build on the works of Mozart and Shakespeare all the time, both commercial and otherwise, and no 'anarchy' results.
The quote about swinging the fist sounds good in isolation but has no relevance to this discussion.
Again your theory of freedom leaves no room for copyright/patent/etc., since they represent constraints against actions.
I didn't say there was any problem with constraints on actions. I just don't like calling that 'freedom'.
The public domain certainly leaves room for copyright. The fact that the public domain exists does not mean all works must be in the public domain. (Perhaps you're confused by talking to too many people who seem to believe that the fact of the GPL's existence implies that all works should be in that.;)
You can make a derivative work of another work that's in the public domain. You can make your own "Annotated Shakespeare", and you can either put that in the public domain (if you want people to build on it for free) or you can claim a copyright (if you want to control your work. But it's your work, so you're entitled.
If what you have done is trivial, a similar work can be easily created by another who wants to offer it under different terms. They cannot copy your book, but they can do something based on the same idea. Ideas are not the subject of copyright; only the actual textual form of the work is protected, and the probability of two people writing the same words without having copyied is very, very low.
If what you have done is not trivial, then the fact that it is difficult for someone else to make a similar work suggests it is worthy of a fair price in its own right. If the price is still excessive, competition will typically fix the problem. If the price is not excessive, people will likely just pay it. That's what commerce is about.
All the while, the original work (Shakespeare's plays in this case) remains in the public domain. The GPL is just like public domain but it restricts the freedom to do some of these things. If Shakespeare were somehow GPL'd, writers and actors would have even less ability to make money than they already do--I don't see any point to that at all.
The availability of the public domain is sufficient to assure freedom. The GPL is certainly a legitimate vehicle for people to use; I just object to its coopting the term 'free'. Cute quotes aside, people cannot be injured by the public domain, and so neither bullies nor anarchy result.
Patent, by contrast, is a wholly different beast that is ill-formulated for software and I have a wholly different set of reservations about. (FWIW, I would reduce the length of patent to 3 years and would allow independent invention to be an 'obviousness' defense, not an infringement.) However, the GPL does not address patent issues, so this is way off topic here and if we were to pursue it would only muddy the issues.) Patent and copyright should not be casually discussed in the same discussion; the issues are separable but easily confused.
the GPL preserves freedom for "everyone" by protecting everyone else against "you". The only thing it constrains "you" from doing is telling other "you"'s that they aren't entitled to the same freedoms "you" were.
Preserving the freedom to not be commercial is not preserving an unconditional freedom. Suppose I gave you the right to use a certain piece of software on Wednesday provided that you also require other users of your software to also use their software only on Wednesday... would that also be freedom? (It's just a rhetorical question. I don't plan to continue this useless debate with you, regardless of your reply. I've made my point and I'm done.)
Public domain code is like a common grazing ground- anyone can use it so no one individually has an incentive to preserve it. So people monopolize little bits of it until the gutted shell that used to be the burgeoning commons is worthless.
This is just not true. Anyone can use things that are in the public domain, but the public domain is unchanged by their having done so. Everything that was there continues to be there and to be accessible. What GPL fans don't like about the public domain is that it doesn't force derived things, things to which an author is entitled to new copyright protection, to also be in the public domain. But that's what it means to really be free.
The GPL is a way of saying "no you may not expand your little fiefdom onto my idea, but you may certainly graze reasonably so long as you share."
Right. Nothing wrong with wanting to constrain the products of your efforts that way. Just don't call such constraint "freedom" or expect me to balk. In spite of what you said, "Freedom = Constraint" is the essence of Newspeak.
The GPL has vaccine-like properties. Virii have the connotation of being malicious. The GPL ensures that software, once freed, stays free.
Software is not a thinking entity. Software only propagates when a thinking entity picks it up and uses it. In that sense, it has viral properties, in the sense that it is incapable of propagating of its own volition.
(Debate note: You can't disprove that something has [some] properties of X by showing that there is a property of X that the something does not have. You have to show that there is no property of X. The word "like" creates a simile, which is not the same as a direct equivalence.)
Additionally, this use of the word "free", while popular in sites like Slashdot, is still politically biased. It is people, not code, that are either free or not. GPL'd code is constrained by a license that encourages certain activities (the creation of non-proprietary software) and discourages others (the creation of proprietary applications). This is only "free" in any traditional sense that you aren't bound by its rules unless you freely enter into its contract; but then, if that's your use of free, Microsoft's EULA is similarly free (if you assume it is, likewise, freely entered into). If you think that the space of all existing operating systems is too small for people to use any of them in any way other than grudgingly, then neither Microsoft nor GPL licenses are very free.
The sense of "free" meaning "lets you do what you want" is not true of GPL'd software since it only lets you do what you want if what you want is consistent with what the GPL wants. To ignore creation of commercialware as a possible thing a free person might want is to have a huge blindspot.
Code in the public domain is arguably much more free in that it does not force a particular use.
One of the curious paradoxes of freedom is that a free people can disable their own freedom. Only by restricting freedom could you prevent this, and then you don't have freedom in the first place. That's what the GPL offers--a kind of pseudo-freedom and a funny use of the term "freedom" that tries to hide the lacks of freedom in a terminology shift reminiscent of 1984's newspeak.
Yes, learn accounting. Not so you can be your own accountant, necessarily, for tax purposes. But because accounting will help you understand just how much it costs to make things and to be in business. And it will reduce the amount you pay to a real accountant if you have your affairs basically organized when you go to see them.
Good accounting will hopefully keep you from doing something deadly like offering software you took weeks or months to create out under GPL because you heard this was "good". Someone may make money on it, but you will almost certainly not. Use all the free software you can find (not everyone is smart enough not to give away their hard work), and when you're rich, give money back to people who helped you. But don't expect generous checks from people who got rich off of your generous free software contribution to arrive in time for the mortgage. And don't assume that you, as a single individual, can be a competent support business unless you've solved the cloning problem and unless you know a lot about queueing theory, process scheduling, etc.
In some areas, zoning notwithstanding, it may be that the government can't keep you from making a living. As long as what you're doing doesn't attract customers to the house, there may not be an issue. This comes up, for example, in what kind of insurance you get. For that matter, what it means to be a business for zoning purposes, for IRS purposes, for insurance purposes, and for the purposes of making income may vary, meaning you might be a business for some purposes and not for others. Read the definitions each separately and don't necessarily assume they all have to agree.
If you have money in a 401k plan, it is possible (as of tax year 2002) to own your very own 401k plan even if you are just an S-Corporation. For most purposes, an IRA or a SEP will suffice if all you want to do is make tax-free contributions. But a 401k plan is the only one I know of that will let you borrow against it (up to 50% of your vested stake)... and the interest you pay back becomes your earnings under the plan.
Don't be afraid to consult a lawyer or other professional for things you don't understand. As a single-person business, there is not time to be an expert at everything. Lawyers may seem expensive, but making mistakes can be more expensive. Package up your question so it's clear and you don't have to waste a lot of their time explaining what you want. Choose a lawyer who has the appropriate kinds of competences.
We're talking about posting on Amazon, not just reading it. Putting a large warning on the front page, especially when unnecessary, would NOT help their business.
Certainly. But their "defense" is that they are an adult site. This is simply not so. If they are an adult site, let them mention it in other than the legalese. If they are not, let them not defend their actions by saying they only expect adults there.
If they want to filter registration only, or posting only, they can do so. And then they won't even have to claim that the whole site is adult-only. But I suspect the reason they have the adult-only restriction in the legalese is to avoid having to do issue-by-issue analysis of how each of their site's actions affects minors. And that's just not reasonable. Even a one-person business has to worry about such matters--at least Amazon can afford a proper legal staff and software staff to do this right. And they should.
If they can't do it right, they should be in Congress saying "even a big company can't do this right" and trying to get the law changed. Not trying to claim there's nothing wrong with what they're doing.
What should happen is that EPIC should work with the companies and the sites before going to the FTC.
(I should mention that I'm a strong believer in and a consistent financial supporter of EPIC, so perhaps I am biased in their favor.)
Are you sure that if someone called up Amazon and told them they're in violation, they'd say "oh, we'll get on it right away?" These FTC rules against marketing to children are not a secret, and Amazon is not a tiny company. My personal guess, and as I said, I might be biased, is that they just shrug unless faced with a lawsuit. But, as I said, I could be wrong.
Slashdot also could be considered in violation of COPPA
And so you're saying we should give Amazon a pass or we should contact EPIC about Slashdot? (That's a serious question, btw, not just a rhetorical one. In the process of answering, I hope you'll include a justification of your answer, too, since that's the part I'm really curious about.)
Amazon does have the policy that those under 18 need parental permission to use their services, but it's not exactly prominently displayed. And technically they may seem to be on the wrong side of at least the letter of the law.
Right. They bury the information on their legalese page. Now what kid is going to look there? What adult is going to look there?
The thing they are not doing is putting a big sign on the front page like the porn sites do that says "By clicking here I assert that I am 18 years of age or accompanied by an adult." And there is definitely no "Only adults beyond this point" or "Kids keep out" sign. So they obviously want kids to enter and think it would be bad for business to say otherwise.
The thing they are not doing is putting a big sign on the front page like the porn sites do that says "By clicking here I assert that I am 18 years of age or accompanied by an adult." And there is definitely no "Only adults beyond this point" or "Kids keep out" sign. So they obviously want kids to enter and think it would be bad for business to say otherwise.
But the point is that no one is complaining about who's browsing Amazon. They're complaining about the later marketing practices. Those things require a conscious decision to address a market that they themselves are claiming are not even shoppers. The poetry press release says "...leading online bookseller Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is calling on all kids 12 and under...", not "... calling on all parents of kids...". The Harry Potter thing says "Twenty thousand magical candy ideas submitted by children from all over North America", not "...parents of children..." The clear belief is that they are interacting directly with children.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how much more they could do and this seems to be a nasty ploy by the group opposing them. I'm not a big fan of Amazon, but I do think they are being unfairly targeted here.
Unfairly targeted? There's a law that says they have to get a parent's consent. Have they even tried? Looks to me like no one is accusing them of doing a bad job--they are accusing them of not making any attempt at all.
Current methods of dealing with the problem might probably be reformed, but I can't see kidpr0n as harmless because of the nature of its use and the set of ideas to which the idea of its being harmless leads.
Fair enough. But I'm not saying it should be "ok". I'm saying I don't have a moral problem with people looking at non-real images just because of the topic matter. And I'd rather they look at non-real images than at kids.
The US is a grand experiment in the trading of safety for liberty. Singapore, if memory serves, is just the opposite--an intentional trade of liberty for safety. I suppose in some abstract sense it all comes down to deciding where you'd rather live, and I'd hope anyone who didn't like it where they were could always move. But I know which world I'd rather live in.
Incidentally, there are tons of kinds of materials that I think make the world less safe. Organizational information about Naziism doesn't make me happy nor does letting it go unchallenged make me feel safer. But I'd rather let that go unchallenged and know I live in a free society than have it policed up and wonder what thoughts of mine were next to be policed. That's a far cry from saying it's "ok". We need more elaborate terminology than binary "good/bad" to really discuss things fairly here.
A person who has a desire to stab another has taken a step in that direction by buying a carving knife, but we still don't lock up people for having carving knives.
Society would be more honest about how it felt about this issue if it just hauled every male citizen into police stations once a year, showed them a picture of kiddie porn, and gave a lethal injection to everyone who has an erection.
But instead, since no one wants to face the fact of this underlying bloodlust openly, they find ways of gradually sticking spears in the people they suspect of this, like picadors stabbing a bull in a ring, until finally the bull charges and they feel justified saying "he was coming after us". If you knew it was going to come after you, just do it in from the start. And if you don't know, then wait. But don't do something intermediate and please don't set bad precedents for what laws should look like and what powers government should have. This country is thick with laws about "no prior restraint", and undoing that will surely make us safer but it will not leave us free.
Sounds to me like it's all black and white to you. Beat down the loopholes, then nail these suckers to the wall. But what's the difference between a "virus" doing the downloading and the browser cache doing it? What if you clicked on a link you didn't intend to, or what if you were just curious where something that was vaguely named went to? Now you've got pictures of people on your screen that you didn't want. And in your browser cache. So, loopholes all having been gotten rid of, how will you defend yourself? I'd like to defend myself by saying, "but I didn't do anything" not by having someone say "but I imagine you would have". Because what you imagine I'm going to do and what I am in fact going to do might be very different.
What I see as successful are the projects that do something that already being done by a successful commercial application, only doing it cheaper and very well.
I think this is wrong.
I think that when a successful commercial application exists, open source projects have no business meddling unless that commercial application is failing to address market needs at a reasonable price.
The goal of open source should not be to destroy the commercial market for software.
Sure, sometimes an area is charging prices that are substantially too high for too long. The database community, I think did this, and I have no major concern about open source databases injuring the database community. But that's the exception. There are a dozen or two major products that are always cited in these debates because we all know them, but they are also anomalous exactly for the same reason. In most cases, commercial software companies are just barely getting by, already charging the minimum they can in order to attract a maximal audience, and anything you do to create downward pressure on their prices will just as likely sink them as cause them to respond with better pricing.
I'm all for free competition, but only among people who are really trying to account for the costs of production. Companies that are trying to sell their software are accounting for costs. Open software created by people with too much time on their hands or funding that does not have to be accounted for like to believe they have created a cheaper offering, but they haven't shown me that their cost was, in fact, lower. They've just shown they don't have to care about costs. And that not only means they may be very wrong in assessing a proper price point, but it also means they may not be able to sustain their involvement over the long term in the way a commercial company by its nature would have been willing to.
There are plenty of areas not served by computer science, and there is no need to pick one that already is. Doing so, and putting a commercial business out of business as a result, is nothing to be applauded or emulated. It is a failure of the paradigm and garners no respect from me.
Thinking this through...
on
The Virus Did It
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.
And drinking is the interesting analogy because you generally begin sober and aware that drinking will lead to a lack of accountability. In many jurisdictions, this knowledge means you are still liable because the ultimate consequences are forseeable.
So now, what if I offered a site that wanted to distribute a banned kind of material (kiddie porn, secure encryption technology, that kind of thing) and it was known that anyone connecting could not legally ask for what they surely wanted. Isn't the obvious solution for me to make a virus that will "helpfully" download it for you? You'd just pay for "time at my site" browsing my fine HTML pages, not for the content. But, magically, the content would just get thrust upon you. Escort services use this dodge. Customer pays for time, not service. But customers get service, typically, or they don't come back. Still, legally, the transaction may be quite distinct from prostitution (so I'm told).
Then again, the escort service model obliges me to come to the issue of "victimless crime". Driving drunk and injuring someone has a victim, and we want to fix the legal system to minimize such cases. Escort services have no obvious victim, IMO, and so I'd argue the other way--that perhaps the simpler solution is just to legalize prostitution.
Child porn is caught in between these two scenarios, I think, with some parts of it falling into one scenario and some into the other. Certainly, if the pics are of real children, then that's bad. But it's within range of technology to make the entire industry based on fabricated images. Then who would be the victim? If no child was abused in the taking of the pictures, for all we know, the people in possession of them are sublimating urges they might otherwise carry out. Is taking the photos away going to cause them to not have the urge? Or just cause them to be out on the street seeking real children? We're so quick to make assumptions in this area, I just don't know why we don't just make a death penalty for anyone even suspected of child abuse or kiddie porn and be done with it mercifully, because nothing the person can do for the rest of their life after they're found in possession of something like this will ever be normal.
When I see a child being abused, it's not erotic to me. That it is to someone shouldn't make it a crime for me to see it--maybe I and all of us need to see that picture to understand someone's outrage about a crime. How do we know when someone is seeing something for a "legitimate" reason or not? There may be pictures of murders that arouse people, but we distinguish between "snuff films" (which are illegal because of their filming technique, not their content) and other films about murder, because murder is a fact of life we need to understand. I am alarmed at the concept that the mere possession of certain kinds of topic material, in and of itself, a crime. Who will study this crime if no one may possess its materials? Will images of murder, of feces, or other things that turn others on but not me one day also be illegal to possess? Where does it stop?
Sure--people are legitimately angry at people who harm children, and they want someone to punish. They can't catch the guy who makes it, so they find someone else to lash out at. (The drug war is the same way. Sometimes drugs cause problems, so we make all uses of drugs illegal whether they hurt anyone or not, just so there's always someone handy to punish when we're mad.) I just hope that in our rush to make it possible to punish people who too easily elude our present systems, we don't take away rights which are not causally related to any kind of harm. And I have to say, the idea of criminalizing the viewing a picture, any picture, in privacy, whether it's a field of daisies or a torture chamber somewhere, is
If I simply send everything encrypted AND send lots of fake packets... I.E. random sized files that consist of the contents of/dev/random to all my comrades they will never EVER figure it out.
Following on this, you might find Ron Rivest's chaffing idea to be interesting. (Rivest is the R in "RSA".)
Slashdot Mirror
As many as it takes to make the individual amounts of the taxes look small enough to the average consumer.
I guess I think I more or less had it in my head that this was, so but I've not seen it articulated so crisply...
I tend to favor something like fairtax proposes.
I'll peruse that more later, but at first blush it looks quite interesting. Thanks for the pointer!
(IMO, somebody with moderator points should mod up the parent of this message as 'informative' and/or 'insightful'.)
The more money politicians can take out of 'foreigners', the less they need from their constituants (including businesses), which helps keep them in office.
I don't doubt that this is the theory, but it's one of questionable utility even in the real world with people driving through with a car. People might really want to visit Hollywood or San Francisco or Monterrey, and might find that driving to New Mexico or Louisiana or Taiwan is an unacceptable alternative for their vacation or work venture.
However, on the net, it isn't an either/or proposition. Another supplier of the same merchandise is probably just a click away, and if they think people will pay for something taxed when the same item is still available untaxed somewhere else, they're going to find out pretty fast just how versatile the average consumer is with a mouse.
In Massachusetts, there's sales tax and in New Hampshire (which is adjacent) there isn't. This hurts Massachusetts businesses on the border a LOT because it creates an incentive for people to drive a little farther and buy out of state. On the Internet, the "drive" to another state is even shorter.
Doesn't California have a state income tax? Why isn't it enough that the state makes money on the income of the business that is able to make the sale? I've never understood this. How many different ways does the government have to tax the exact same transaction before it becomes too much?
GO Video offers a dual drive VCR within the US that does pretty good tape to tape copies. Their introductory tape explains how this is probably something you'll be using to copy your homemade video cassettes of your skiing vacation to send to friends.
But the sad thing is that it seems to me that there are fair uses for this technology that involve copyrighted material, but they have to shy away from mentioning such, lest they open themselves to a claim that they exist to support people who are making knockoff copies for sale.
The court has already recognized time-shifting. But it's a well-known truth that people re-watch things they tape, and that people tape their favorite shows for permanent access. The industry may make noise like this is bad, probably just to keep people in line, but I'm quite sure that the pricing over the years has shifted to take this into account, such that HBO probably pays more in royalties for the showing of a movie given the knowledge of home video tapers out there than it would if it were sure there were no home video tapers, since they know they are eating up a little bit of their commercial tape market this way. As such, it would be an error in the extreme for a court to ever claim that keeping a tape of one's favorite show for multiple viewings was wrong, even though I'm not sure this has been tested. Cable companies would not get away with saying "Set your VCR. Your favorite movies are coming." if the makers of the movies they showed were even slightly at risk of suing them as complicit in an illegal act.
Once you acknowledge that people might want to do this, and that the system both tacitly accepts this and extracts and appropriate fee (through your cable bill rather than through your video tape costs), then you immediately confront two other reasonable things: (a) the need to upgrade the media to avoid fading and (b) the fact that often you have a 6 hour tape with only one or two hours on it.
I had a GO video recorder and all I ever did with it was 'compact' my tapes (move shows from one tape to another, so I could recycle one of the two tapes) becaues VHS cassettes are so darned physically large that if you get a lot of them, it takes a whole room to hold them. I didn't make copies for friends, but I wanted 6 Perry Mason's per tape, not just one. There are 270 of them, after all.
I wonder how this entire conversation would be different if the VHS tapes had copyright enforcement like everyone's making now under DMCA. Most of the preservation techniques discussed here sound like they're "fair use", but in the future will they even be possible?
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure that brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.
However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.
One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")
Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position, though there must surely be others.
The most conservative view of the brain's power say that it's a computer program. The most elaborate theories also envision that there are other structures like souls that can't be 'caught on tape'. Strangely, I'd be the hardcore conservatives wanting to use this technology are statistically more likely to be those who say we have unmeasurable souls. Just a guess. But if it's so, I wonder how they rationalize that.
But let's take the conservative view--that the brain is just a computer program that is trillions or quadrillions of times more complex than your average programming project for work. Now we're talking about hooking us up to a machine that has no idea what a single line of source looks like, no idea what data has been preloaded, and is just going to watch the approximate equivalent of the blinking lights on the console and tell me if my program is not only functioning correctly now, but whether it's predicted to function correctly in the future?
Geez, forget core dumps, stack debuggers, tracing tools, and all that. I just want one of these cool push-button debugging tools for writing programs!! People pay enormous amounts for teams of people to pour over source code for days or weeks or more on projects so trivial as today's... and it's apparently all wasted. We could have solved the whole Y2K problem by just letting this machine watch the blinky lights on the front of some COBOL boxes and tell us that the planes wouldn't crash and the elevators wouldn't stop. Why didn't we rush them into production if they were this close to ready?
Or is it possible that the effectiveness is slightly oversold?
If they were good products (i.e. worth their price), people would be willing to pay for them.
The burden is yours to show that this is so. From where I stand, people take a 90% product for free over a 100% product for cost any day. And if the for-cost people try to provide 90%, the same people whine excessively that 90% isn't good enough because they paid real money and deserve better.
Everyone wants free stuff because they have no money to buy it. They have no money to buy it, of course, because they don't charge for what they themselves make. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
Well, that's a market. It doesn't care about individuals but about society.
Actually, markets don't care about anything at all. They simply have effects, and when they have effects that are societally bad, we try to herd the market in a new direction. Right now we're headed as if our compass was set for 'please economically disempower all programmers'. One day we'll all be able to program and none of us will be able to make a living at it.
It will be like gardening. We can all buy tomato seeds for our garden, but none of us can be a commercial farmer any more, not really. Because commercial farming means global delivery, and that market is all locked up by people with the commercial capital to sustain it. Arthur Daniel Midlands can do it, but mere mortals cannot. We won't have commercial capital, because we have no economic power, because we've (as a group) given away everything we have of value and said "please don't pay us for it--it's your right to take and not ours to benefit". That's no future I aspire to.
They've just shown they don't have to care about costs.
Ummm... That means that their costs are lower. If by harnessing the spare cycles of grad students and sysadmins one can write an app which may be given away, then one has lower costs.
If I were funding such a university, I'd stop giving it money if I found it was giving out value rather than charging for it, while still coming to me and telling me how hungry it was for money.
But also, I rely on the capitalistic free market to weed out ways of doing things that cost too much. The problem is that this can weed out commercial offerings (no matter how reasonably priced, no matter what quality), but nothing in commerce can weed this out (no matter what its quality). As a consequence, I think, this has a corrosive effect not just on products but on commerce itself insofar as commerce is about 'the product'. This means that good products will either be killed or will never be made. Many (not all) free software advocates not only admit this, but take glee in it, as if this were the whole point. (Usually in the same conversation, Microsoft is mentioned, as if all companies were Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to exist and the many companies that are not Microsoft and never will be are being injured.)
I'm not concerned about their injury per se. I'm concerned about my injury as a consumer, not having access to the fine products these injured companies would have produced because the market has become inhospitable for people to earn an honest buck making and selling software.
Software should be free.
This is an interesting notiion of premise, but I don't agree. Do you agree that the world should have no secrets? No privacy? If information is always free, are you unable to receive information on condition of not sharing it? If so, you should declare this to your friends and employers so they know never to trust you with a secret. If there is the possibility of accepting information on condition of limited use, then software is no different.
This necessarily means that producers of proprietary software will need to do honest work once more.
Honest work? What is dishonest about the work they are doing?
Absolutely. I can't say enough good things about EPIC. I've given money to them regularly over the years and it's some of the best money I've ever spent. It's sometimes hard to tell when giving to a charity is really making a dent in anything at all, but it's easily apparent that this organization is using its money wisely and producing quality results.
This is not to say that the EFF is bad in any way. They also do quite good work. They just have a different charter, which is more diversified than just privacy issues.
No, the function of copyright is to encourage innovation by giving (supposedly temporary) monopolies over ideas (RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM) in hopes that people will innovate more if they get to own their ideas for a while.
I'll take up the terminology problem below, but as to the issue of function, we are not in disagreement here, except that you are not recognizing that the manner in which it implements the function you describe is indeed to separate the notion of sharing from the notion of giving. In practice, copyright protects 'sweat of the brow', by saying that the creation act is most easily identified by the individuality of expression, and that others are entitled to do a similar thing, but that they must use their own sweat. Copyright does not stop ideas, but it does stop one person who puts in a lot of energy from being exploited by another who does not. You paper this up as 'freedom', but I see 'right to exploit'. It's funny that you don't see your swinging fist analogy applying here, because I think your freedom needs to stop at the point where you are free to exploit my work.
I have a feeling about what freedom means and it's different than yours. I don't so much object to your having your feelings about it, what I object to is your not allowing me to have my own term. When I say the use of the term 'freedom' is misleading it's because you are using the unadorned, unmodified term 'free' to identify a political slant on something where both sides believe they are defending freedom. I don't consider this fair. I do not, by contrast, use the term freedom to identify my slant on things, exactly because that would also be misleading. I raise my notion of freedom in discussion with you not to assert "mine is better than yours" but to assert "there is legitimate ambiguity and/or political difference".
I wouldn't even object if you called it "one kind of free software". But it's not that way. The entire movement seems deadset on explaining that their notion of freedom is the right one. I want the freedom to define freedom my way, and at the point you co-opt the idea that there can be no free software other than gnu-approved free software, there is a problem. When you want a trademark, pick a non-word to identify. Do not pick an English term and start twisting its meaning to suit.
There are more kinds of "windows" on a computer than those given by microsoft. That doesn't mean they don't have windows. I'm fine with them using the term MS/Windows. I'm not fine with them crowding out others who just want to use the term Windows.
idea monopolies
Cute, albeit misleading term.
The term "monopoly" is super-charged emotionally, but your usage of it is not in the sense of the kind of monopoly that led to that idea. The monopoly, such as it is, is entirely on something of my own creation. If I write a book and do not share it, I still have a monopoly on it. Even in the absence of copyright law. My mere ownership of the physical object entitles me to a monopoly. Will your next position be to start calling property "object monopolies", or are you smart enough to see that this abuses (again) the term monopoly.
And as to the other word in this charged and misleading phrase, "idea", I'll just say that you're wrong on the facts here, pure and simple. Copyright protects the form of presentation, not the idea itself. Not only does copyright not grant "idea monopolies" but in fact it expressly doesn't grant any control over ideas at all. I quote the US Code (Copyright) here (bold mine):
I don't keep ignoring this. You keep assuming people would create the same things whether there was copyright law or not. But I don't agree. Smart/creative people spend their time where they can make money. If you take away copyright, and so their ability to command a decent return from their investment in their creations (some of which may flop, btw, and get nothing, some of which may take time to produce), they won't sit there and say "well, I guess I'll just make things for free". They'll either get a job flipping burgers or they'll find a way to invest their talents where people will pay, like writing advertising jingles and doing other "commercial" art that pays better. Or having private showings. Or just changing careers and applying their creative nature elsewhere. Legitimate innovators do not blame their lack of available
"free stuff" from other innovators for their lack of innovation. They work with what they have.
The function of copyright is not to "keep people from innovating" but to separate the notions of "sharing" ("showing") from "giving". If showing my work to you means giving it to you, then I'm not likely to share it in that way. Even in a copyright free world, I can still be a tyrant by not innovating anything for you to build on. Then you still are left "free" only to innovate on what others have given freely (which is all the public domain offers). GPL doesn't incentivize anything because it is anti-author; it takes away all the rights of the author and gives them to people who've done nothing. If they had done something, they'd have been paid for it, and if they'd been paid, they'd have money to buy the copyrighted version.
In the end, the makers of content need to be rewarded, and GPL does not do that. The whole original purpose of copyright is to assure that the content creators have an incentive to share their ideas. Take away that incentive and see what those with the legitimate talent of creation (rather than the dubious talent of merely frobbing the parameters of what others have done) will make.
Stallman, in his book ("Free Software, Free Society", top of page 38) makes the bold claim:I find that claim unconscionable for two reasons. First, it implicitly asserts that content creators are interchangeable and that if you lose some, the others that surface to replace them are just as good. But second, it explicitly says that it's ok not to reward content creators because they're compulsive and you can take financial advantage of this compulsion.
Commerce is not an evil. It's what feeds the world. And feeding people is not evil. It frees them to do the things they want to do. I want the world's authors to be able to make a living on it so they will do lots of it. I don't want them working in a grocery store all day and only writing at night, because it means I won't get a lot of good stuff (whatever kind of content they create) out of them before they die. I'd rather they make something I pay for fairly than not make something because they can't afford to or because they feel exploited.
I may regret continuing this, but these arguments you make are new (to this subthread) and require their own response...
... Your proscription is for Anarchy, ...
;)
Freedom dissolves into your paradox unless you have a rule like "my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose".
This is just confused. No anarchy results from providing things into the public domain, nor from building on something that has been placed there. People build on the works of Mozart and Shakespeare all the time, both commercial and otherwise, and no 'anarchy' results.
The quote about swinging the fist sounds good in isolation but has no relevance to this discussion.
Again your theory of freedom leaves no room for copyright/patent/etc., since they represent constraints against actions.
I didn't say there was any problem with constraints on actions. I just don't like calling that 'freedom'.
The public domain certainly leaves room for copyright. The fact that the public domain exists does not mean all works must be in the public domain. (Perhaps you're confused by talking to too many people who seem to believe that the fact of the GPL's existence implies that all works should be in that.
You can make a derivative work of another work that's in the public domain. You can make your own "Annotated Shakespeare", and you can either put that in the public domain (if you want people to build on it for free) or you can claim a copyright (if you want to control your work. But it's your work, so you're entitled.
If what you have done is trivial, a similar work can be easily created by another who wants to offer it under different terms. They cannot copy your book, but they can do something based on the same idea. Ideas are not the subject of copyright; only the actual textual form of the work is protected, and the probability of two people writing the same words without having copyied is very, very low.
If what you have done is not trivial, then the fact that it is difficult for someone else to make a similar work suggests it is worthy of a fair price in its own right. If the price is still excessive, competition will typically fix the problem. If the price is not excessive, people will likely just pay it. That's what commerce is about.
All the while, the original work (Shakespeare's plays in this case) remains in the public domain. The GPL is just like public domain but it restricts the freedom to do some of these things. If Shakespeare were somehow GPL'd, writers and actors would have even less ability to make money than they already do--I don't see any point to that at all.
The availability of the public domain is sufficient to assure freedom. The GPL is certainly a legitimate vehicle for people to use; I just object to its coopting the term 'free'. Cute quotes aside, people cannot be injured by the public domain, and so neither bullies nor anarchy result.
Patent, by contrast, is a wholly different beast that is ill-formulated for software and I have a wholly different set of reservations about. (FWIW, I would reduce the length of patent to 3 years and would allow independent invention to be an 'obviousness' defense, not an infringement.) However, the GPL does not address patent issues, so this is way off topic here and if we were to pursue it would only muddy the issues.) Patent and copyright should not be casually discussed in the same discussion; the issues are separable but easily confused.
the GPL preserves freedom for "everyone" by protecting everyone else against "you". The only thing it constrains "you" from doing is telling other "you"'s that they aren't entitled to the same freedoms "you" were.
Preserving the freedom to not be commercial is not preserving an unconditional freedom. Suppose I gave you the right to use a certain piece of software on Wednesday provided that you also require other users of your software to also use their software only on Wednesday... would that also be freedom? (It's just a rhetorical question. I don't plan to continue this useless debate with you, regardless of your reply. I've made my point and I'm done.)
Public domain code is like a common grazing ground- anyone can use it so no one individually has an incentive to preserve it. So people monopolize little bits of it until the gutted shell that used to be the burgeoning commons is worthless.
This is just not true. Anyone can use things that are in the public domain, but the public domain is unchanged by their having done so. Everything that was there continues to be there and to be accessible. What GPL fans don't like about the public domain is that it doesn't force derived things, things to which an author is entitled to new copyright protection, to also be in the public domain. But that's what it means to really be free.
The GPL is a way of saying "no you may not expand your little fiefdom onto my idea, but you may certainly graze reasonably so long as you share."
Right. Nothing wrong with wanting to constrain the products of your efforts that way. Just don't call such constraint "freedom" or expect me to balk. In spite of what you said, "Freedom = Constraint" is the essence of Newspeak.
The GPL has vaccine-like properties. Virii have the connotation of being malicious. The GPL ensures that software, once freed, stays free.
Software is not a thinking entity. Software only propagates when a thinking entity picks it up and uses it. In that sense, it has viral properties, in the sense that it is incapable of propagating of its own volition.
(Debate note: You can't disprove that something has [some] properties of X by showing that there is a property of X that the something does not have. You have to show that there is no property of X. The word "like" creates a simile, which is not the same as a direct equivalence.)
Additionally, this use of the word "free", while popular in sites like Slashdot, is still politically biased. It is people, not code, that are either free or not. GPL'd code is constrained by a license that encourages certain activities (the creation of non-proprietary software) and discourages others (the creation of proprietary applications). This is only "free" in any traditional sense that you aren't bound by its rules unless you freely enter into its contract; but then, if that's your use of free, Microsoft's EULA is similarly free (if you assume it is, likewise, freely entered into). If you think that the space of all existing operating systems is too small for people to use any of them in any way other than grudgingly, then neither Microsoft nor GPL licenses are very free.
The sense of "free" meaning "lets you do what you want" is not true of GPL'd software since it only lets you do what you want if what you want is consistent with what the GPL wants. To ignore creation of commercialware as a possible thing a free person might want is to have a huge blindspot.
Code in the public domain is arguably much more free in that it does not force a particular use.
One of the curious paradoxes of freedom is that a free people can disable their own freedom. Only by restricting freedom could you prevent this, and then you don't have freedom in the first place. That's what the GPL offers--a kind of pseudo-freedom and a funny use of the term "freedom" that tries to hide the lacks of freedom in a terminology shift reminiscent of 1984's newspeak.
Yes, learn accounting. Not so you can be your own accountant, necessarily, for tax purposes. But because accounting will help you understand just how much it costs to make things and to be in business. And it will reduce the amount you pay to a real accountant if you have your affairs basically organized when you go to see them.
Good accounting will hopefully keep you from doing something deadly like offering software you took weeks or months to create out under GPL because you heard this was "good". Someone may make money on it, but you will almost certainly not. Use all the free software you can find (not everyone is smart enough not to give away their hard work), and when you're rich, give money back to people who helped you. But don't expect generous checks from people who got rich off of your generous free software contribution to arrive in time for the mortgage. And don't assume that you, as a single individual, can be a competent support business unless you've solved the cloning problem and unless you know a lot about queueing theory, process scheduling, etc.
In some areas, zoning notwithstanding, it may be that the government can't keep you from making a living. As long as what you're doing doesn't attract customers to the house, there may not be an issue. This comes up, for example, in what kind of insurance you get. For that matter, what it means to be a business for zoning purposes, for IRS purposes, for insurance purposes, and for the purposes of making income may vary, meaning you might be a business for some purposes and not for others. Read the definitions each separately and don't necessarily assume they all have to agree.
If you have money in a 401k plan, it is possible (as of tax year 2002) to own your very own 401k plan even if you are just an S-Corporation. For most purposes, an IRA or a SEP will suffice if all you want to do is make tax-free contributions. But a 401k plan is the only one I know of that will let you borrow against it (up to 50% of your vested stake)... and the interest you pay back becomes your earnings under the plan.
Don't be afraid to consult a lawyer or other professional for things you don't understand. As a single-person business, there is not time to be an expert at everything. Lawyers may seem expensive, but making mistakes can be more expensive. Package up your question so it's clear and you don't have to waste a lot of their time explaining what you want. Choose a lawyer who has the appropriate kinds of competences.
We're talking about posting on Amazon, not just reading it. Putting a large warning on the front page, especially when unnecessary, would NOT help their business.
Certainly. But their "defense" is that they are an adult site. This is simply not so. If they are an adult site, let them mention it in other than the legalese. If they are not, let them not defend their actions by saying they only expect adults there.
If they want to filter registration only, or posting only, they can do so. And then they won't even have to claim that the whole site is adult-only. But I suspect the reason they have the adult-only restriction in the legalese is to avoid having to do issue-by-issue analysis of how each of their site's actions affects minors. And that's just not reasonable. Even a one-person business has to worry about such matters--at least Amazon can afford a proper legal staff and software staff to do this right. And they should.
If they can't do it right, they should be in Congress saying "even a big company can't do this right" and trying to get the law changed. Not trying to claim there's nothing wrong with what they're doing.
What should happen is that EPIC should work with the companies and the sites before going to the FTC.
(I should mention that I'm a strong believer in and a consistent financial supporter of EPIC, so perhaps I am biased in their favor.)
Are you sure that if someone called up Amazon and told them they're in violation, they'd say "oh, we'll get on it right away?" These FTC rules against marketing to children are not a secret, and Amazon is not a tiny company. My personal guess, and as I said, I might be biased, is that they just shrug unless faced with a lawsuit. But, as I said, I could be wrong.
Slashdot also could be considered in violation of COPPA
And so you're saying we should give Amazon a pass or we should contact EPIC about Slashdot? (That's a serious question, btw, not just a rhetorical one. In the process of answering, I hope you'll include a justification of your answer, too, since that's the part I'm really curious about.)
Amazon does have the policy that those under 18 need parental permission to use their services, but it's not exactly prominently displayed. And technically they may seem to be on the wrong side of at least the letter of the law.
...", not "... calling on all parents of kids ...". The Harry Potter thing says "Twenty thousand magical candy ideas submitted by children from all over North America", not "...parents of children..." The clear belief is that they are interacting directly with children.
Right. They bury the information on their legalese page. Now what kid is going to look there? What adult is going to look there?
The thing they are not doing is putting a big sign on the front page like the porn sites do that says "By clicking here I assert that I am 18 years of age or accompanied by an adult." And there is definitely no "Only adults beyond this point" or "Kids keep out" sign. So they obviously want kids to enter and think it would be bad for business to say otherwise.
The thing they are not doing is putting a big sign on the front page like the porn sites do that says "By clicking here I assert that I am 18 years of age or accompanied by an adult." And there is definitely no "Only adults beyond this point" or "Kids keep out" sign. So they obviously want kids to enter and think it would be bad for business to say otherwise.
But the point is that no one is complaining about who's browsing Amazon. They're complaining about the later marketing practices. Those things require a conscious decision to address a market that they themselves are claiming are not even shoppers. The poetry press release says "...leading online bookseller Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is calling on all kids 12 and under
On the other hand, I'm not sure how much more they could do and this seems to be a nasty ploy by the group opposing them. I'm not a big fan of Amazon, but I do think they are being unfairly targeted here.
Unfairly targeted? There's a law that says they have to get a parent's consent. Have they even tried? Looks to me like no one is accusing them of doing a bad job--they are accusing them of not making any attempt at all.
Current methods of dealing with the problem might probably be reformed, but I can't see kidpr0n as harmless because of the nature of its use and the set of ideas to which the idea of its being harmless leads.
Fair enough. But I'm not saying it should be "ok". I'm saying I don't have a moral problem with people looking at non-real images just because of the topic matter. And I'd rather they look at non-real images than at kids.
The US is a grand experiment in the trading of safety for liberty. Singapore, if memory serves, is just the opposite--an intentional trade of liberty for safety. I suppose in some abstract sense it all comes down to deciding where you'd rather live, and I'd hope anyone who didn't like it where they were could always move. But I know which world I'd rather live in.
Incidentally, there are tons of kinds of materials that I think make the world less safe. Organizational information about Naziism doesn't make me happy nor does letting it go unchallenged make me feel safer. But I'd rather let that go unchallenged and know I live in a free society than have it policed up and wonder what thoughts of mine were next to be policed. That's a far cry from saying it's "ok". We need more elaborate terminology than binary "good/bad" to really discuss things fairly here.
A person who has a desire to stab another has taken a step in that direction by buying a carving knife, but we still don't lock up people for having carving knives.
Society would be more honest about how it felt about this issue if it just hauled every male citizen into police stations once a year, showed them a picture of kiddie porn, and gave a lethal injection to everyone who has an erection.
But instead, since no one wants to face the fact of this underlying bloodlust openly, they find ways of gradually sticking spears in the people they suspect of this, like picadors stabbing a bull in a ring, until finally the bull charges and they feel justified saying "he was coming after us". If you knew it was going to come after you, just do it in from the start. And if you don't know, then wait. But don't do something intermediate and please don't set bad precedents for what laws should look like and what powers government should have. This country is thick with laws about "no prior restraint", and undoing that will surely make us safer but it will not leave us free.
Sounds to me like it's all black and white to you. Beat down the loopholes, then nail these suckers to the wall. But what's the difference between a "virus" doing the downloading and the browser cache doing it? What if you clicked on a link you didn't intend to, or what if you were just curious where something that was vaguely named went to? Now you've got pictures of people on your screen that you didn't want. And in your browser cache. So, loopholes all having been gotten rid of, how will you defend yourself? I'd like to defend myself by saying, "but I didn't do anything" not by having someone say "but I imagine you would have". Because what you imagine I'm going to do and what I am in fact going to do might be very different.
Required reading/viewing: The Minority Report
What I see as successful are the projects that do something that already being done by a successful commercial application, only doing it cheaper and very well.
I think this is wrong.
I think that when a successful commercial application exists, open source projects have no business meddling unless that commercial application is failing to address market needs at a reasonable price.
The goal of open source should not be to destroy the commercial market for software.
Sure, sometimes an area is charging prices that are substantially too high for too long. The database community, I think did this, and I have no major concern about open source databases injuring the database community. But that's the exception. There are a dozen or two major products that are always cited in these debates because we all know them, but they are also anomalous exactly for the same reason. In most cases, commercial software companies are just barely getting by, already charging the minimum they can in order to attract a maximal audience, and anything you do to create downward pressure on their prices will just as likely sink them as cause them to respond with better pricing.
I'm all for free competition, but only among people who are really trying to account for the costs of production. Companies that are trying to sell their software are accounting for costs. Open software created by people with too much time on their hands or funding that does not have to be accounted for like to believe they have created a cheaper offering, but they haven't shown me that their cost was, in fact, lower. They've just shown they don't have to care about costs. And that not only means they may be very wrong in assessing a proper price point, but it also means they may not be able to sustain their involvement over the long term in the way a commercial company by its nature would have been willing to.
There are plenty of areas not served by computer science, and there is no need to pick one that already is. Doing so, and putting a commercial business out of business as a result, is nothing to be applauded or emulated. It is a failure of the paradigm and garners no respect from me.
And drinking is the interesting analogy because you generally begin sober and aware that drinking will lead to a lack of accountability. In many jurisdictions, this knowledge means you are still liable because the ultimate consequences are forseeable.
So now, what if I offered a site that wanted to distribute a banned kind of material (kiddie porn, secure encryption technology, that kind of thing) and it was known that anyone connecting could not legally ask for what they surely wanted. Isn't the obvious solution for me to make a virus that will "helpfully" download it for you? You'd just pay for "time at my site" browsing my fine HTML pages, not for the content. But, magically, the content would just get thrust upon you. Escort services use this dodge. Customer pays for time, not service. But customers get service, typically, or they don't come back. Still, legally, the transaction may be quite distinct from prostitution (so I'm told).
Then again, the escort service model obliges me to come to the issue of "victimless crime". Driving drunk and injuring someone has a victim, and we want to fix the legal system to minimize such cases. Escort services have no obvious victim, IMO, and so I'd argue the other way--that perhaps the simpler solution is just to legalize prostitution.
Child porn is caught in between these two scenarios, I think, with some parts of it falling into one scenario and some into the other. Certainly, if the pics are of real children, then that's bad. But it's within range of technology to make the entire industry based on fabricated images. Then who would be the victim? If no child was abused in the taking of the pictures, for all we know, the people in possession of them are sublimating urges they might otherwise carry out. Is taking the photos away going to cause them to not have the urge? Or just cause them to be out on the street seeking real children? We're so quick to make assumptions in this area, I just don't know why we don't just make a death penalty for anyone even suspected of child abuse or kiddie porn and be done with it mercifully, because nothing the person can do for the rest of their life after they're found in possession of something like this will ever be normal.
When I see a child being abused, it's not erotic to me. That it is to someone shouldn't make it a crime for me to see it--maybe I and all of us need to see that picture to understand someone's outrage about a crime. How do we know when someone is seeing something for a "legitimate" reason or not? There may be pictures of murders that arouse people, but we distinguish between "snuff films" (which are illegal because of their filming technique, not their content) and other films about murder, because murder is a fact of life we need to understand. I am alarmed at the concept that the mere possession of certain kinds of topic material, in and of itself, a crime. Who will study this crime if no one may possess its materials? Will images of murder, of feces, or other things that turn others on but not me one day also be illegal to possess? Where does it stop?
Sure--people are legitimately angry at people who harm children, and they want someone to punish. They can't catch the guy who makes it, so they find someone else to lash out at. (The drug war is the same way. Sometimes drugs cause problems, so we make all uses of drugs illegal whether they hurt anyone or not, just so there's always someone handy to punish when we're mad.) I just hope that in our rush to make it possible to punish people who too easily elude our present systems, we don't take away rights which are not causally related to any kind of harm. And I have to say, the idea of criminalizing the viewing a picture, any picture, in privacy, whether it's a field of daisies or a torture chamber somewhere, is
If I simply send everything encrypted AND send lots of fake packets... I.E. random sized files that consist of the contents of /dev/random to all my comrades they will never EVER figure it out.
Following on this, you might find Ron Rivest's chaffing idea to be interesting. (Rivest is the R in "RSA".)