Won't most free software end up as half-finished, hard-to-use, perpetual betaware?
Perpetual betaware: there's over 2500 packages in Debian alone which are stable release versions. Ok, many of these merely support something else but that still leaves hundreds.
Hard-to-use: GDE and Knome are truly obvious counterexamples.
Half-finished: you're on to something here. Almost all software is *always* unfinished. That's because user's needs expand with the program's functionality. Software is not an artifact it is a process. Propriatory software companies sometimes have a hard time admitting this.
I believe you are mistaken. [...] If I want better sound quality I have to buy the cd.
Ok, you may be right - the case law is different in different countries, even though there is the Bern Convention. However, in the case of old CDs which have become worn, you definitely *are* entitled to a new copy. The music industry has told consumers that, correctly used, CDs will "provide a lifetime of listening enjoyment". This is an implicit guarantee that, if you have been reasonably careful with your CD but it has got old and worn and stopped working, then you are entitled to a new one. Something similar may apply to vinyl and cassettes, I don't know what claims were made about their quality and durability at the time.
I don't think Jon Katz was suggesting that Metallica are outside of their *legal* rights.
Nobody can [] say that [] MP3 trading of stuff you didn't buy is not illegal. [...] Their arguments come down to knowing it's a bad thing, but, like the verse says "I like it."
I think you are confusing "illegal" with "morally wrong". I agree nobody can deny it's illegal. But whether it's morally wrong is a matter of opinion. For instance, there's a point of view that says downloading mp3s purely for try-before-you-buy purposes is morally ok. I might certainly believe, in some circumstances, that an avid fan who had no money would be acting morally soundly if he obtained some copied music.
What Katz seemed to be saying is that Metallica were being cruel and stupid. As has been pointed out, many of those 335K users may be acting legally or trying before they buy. Metallica can't possibly have examined each of these 335K cases in detail, so they're bound to be burning the fingers of plenty of true fans as well as all the casual users. I hope (probably in vain) that they find that their CD sales and concert audiences drop and then put two and two together and stop doing this. Using the law to kick fans who really, really like you is stupid, shortsighted and (I think) somewhat gratuitously nasty.
The only people who would really need to download an MP3 are the people who don't already have the CD
I have a few CDs which, through years of use and the occasional droppage, have become scratched. As the technology ages, this will become more common. Mp3 download sites are one of the best ways for me to exercise my legal right to obtain a working copy of the CD I bought without paying royalties again.
There is no right to free music, no right to free television, no right to free books.
I couldn't fail not to disagree less. I think that everyone has a right to decent access to the arts. It is an opinion held by many great thinkers throughout history (including the authors of the US constitution, who stated that copyright should be for a limited period to ensure that everything comes into the public domain eventually).
I'm not suggesting that you should agree with me about this. I just think you shouldn't assume that anyone who holds this opinion does so selfishly.
the fact that Metallica was able to find 335,000 people illegally trading their songs sounds like it would take the wind out of the sails of people like Katz.
They have no way of knowing how many of those people are actually acting legally, i.e. have already bought the song. If I have an album on cassette/vinyl, and "upgrade" it to mp3 via Napster, it's completely legal. Metallica may hate it if they want people pay for albums all over again on CD, but that's just tough.
Is there no conceivable situation that will cause him or those like him to say 'oops, I guess people are ripping off artists'?
What if some people *are* acting illegally, but would never actually have bought the album at the monopoly CD price, even if mp3 did not exist? Then Metallica is losing precisely nothing from these people copying their music. Whether or not you think illegal copying is morally wrong, you can't claim that every instance of copying denies the copyright holder another royalty payment.
Taking both of the above into account, that 335,000 figure probably needs a substantial reduction. I hope that people in the first category I mentioned don't get their accounts shut down due to Metallica's threats, without anyone bothering to discover that they aren't actually breaking the law.
Yes, there is something wrong in America [causing high prison rates], but it is not a legislative problem so much as it is a social one.
Do you really believe that the reason your incarceration rates are so much higher than ours is because you've got more nasty people? I would fundamentally reject the notion that Europeans are any less likely to be bad people than Americans. Maybe things like higher poverty, greater availability of guns etc. give Americans more opportunity / motive to become criminals, but that is surely a legislative issue and not a social one.
I had no idea that RMS was so ideologically aligned with the far-left in this country.
[I misunderstood that for a moment - in Britain, "far-left" neccessarily means anti-democratic:-)]
Wait - those were (IIRC) personal views given in reply to specific questions about his personal views. AFAICT he ain't advocating those views, just stating personal beliefs when asked. Wheras he actively advocates his views on free software. I don't think he's claiming to be a world expert on anti-drug policy, just responding to questions about what he himself thinks.
David Friedman has written on the idea that common law is efficient [because it has been honed over 000s of years].
There's no such thing as "efficient". There's only "efficient in a certain environment". Common law may be great for things like murder, where the issue hasn't altered for centuries. However it has not had chance to adapt to this fairly new environment where the cost of distributing information is nearly zero.
I totally disagree with the socialists who sit around whining "information wants to be free".
IANAS. The problem with ideas is that they're often dependent on lots of other ideas to be useful. This particularly applies to software. If I have an idea which relies on 6 other patented ideas, then there is no way I can use my idea without collaborating with all six patent holders. If someone wants to market a replacement for my idea, they also have to replace the functionality of the six other ideas I drew on. This creates enormous barriers to entry into the market for ideas, and so makes monopoly control very likely. If you wanted to market a replacement for Recycle Bin for Windows, you'd have to recreate the whole of the rest of the OS. A reasonably low barrier to entry is a fundamental axiom needed for free market economics to work. If you don't ensure that the barrier is low, you can kiss goodbye to all the efficiency optimisation which the free market performs.
without some sort of intellectual property system, corporations will lock up their code even more tightly, because the enhanced copy-protection systems they'd have to put into software [...] would be difficult to implement if anyone outside the company can see the code
But there'd be very little incentive for a company to lock up its code, if the binary can be freely distributed. A monopoly on source code is not actually all that useful if you can't control the binary. (I'm presuming that more insidious methods of copy protection, such as compiling against a particular processor serial number, would be illegal under fair trade laws or whatever). And if your product is so vital that binary copies aren't good enough to prevent you having a good monopoly (say windows), large companies would reverse engineer and clone your program bit by bit, safe in the knowledge that it would be legal. (I'm also assuming that a deliberately obfuscating APIs would be explicitly illegal for companies with high market share, under antitrust law, which is a bit of a change from today).
In a world where this sort of copying and reverse-engineering/cloning was legal and normal, people would be much more wary of uncloned closed-source software because buying into a monopoly market is usually a bad idea unless you have no choice.
It might take a few years before everyone recalculated their enlightened self-interest, but eventually open-source would become the norm and (in most cases) binary-only distribution would be regarded as a possible sign that the vendor was out to con you.
How can GNU be so holy if the little copyright "c" is meaningless?
Ok, there's two separate concepts. Morally meaningless, and Legally meaningless. Some people believe that the concept of IP, as the law sees it today, is Morally meaningless, because nobody has a right to restrict copying and distribution. But it is definitely not Legally meaningless, cos if you copy enough stuff you'll be in trouble. To ensure that free software stays free, you use your Legal rights over the software. You say people can only use it if they don't restrict others' Moral rights by putting burdensome Legal obligations on them not to copy it.
If, as some people advocate, copyright law were to be dismantled, the Legal protection given to your Moral rights by the GPL would vanish. However, also the ability to put burdensome Legal obligations on people would vanish, so there would be no need for a GPL. Until/unless that happens, the GPL is a good Legal tool for protecting Moral rights.
I think there's no conflict, as long as you get the distinction between Legal and Moral clear.
I am more inclined to buy [3dfx's] products for my Linux box because of their support of the GPL. While people like myself are the minority, we're very vocal about these things.
If the general linux public takes a different view then maybe they are mistaken. If NVIDIA go bust, or choose to stop supporting Linux, who will keep support for their card up to date? Now ask the same about 3dfx. Open source means more future-proof. Of course, it depends how long you want the hardware to last.
The British government did a survey of collieries in about 1860, and ministers (from the south of England) had to hire interpreters to understand Durham miners (from the north of England). I dunno if regional dialects are merging, but I think Radio and TV has definitely ensured that nearly everyone brought up in the UK understands "Standard English" (a somewhat artificial dialect loosely based on posh southern speak). If yget two people, one from Glasgow and one from Bradford, who can't understand each other's natural speak, they can be observed to resort to Standard English, even if it's completely different to what either of them speak.
So-called "dialects" of English are unintelligible to other English speakers.
As an adult native English speaker, I can say that I have never, ever met another adult native English speaker whose English was so different from mine that we couldn't understand each other if we both made an effort. I'd be surprised if this was untrue for many contemporary native English speakers.
On the other hand, something like chinese is completely different. If a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker try their hardest to have a conversation, they won't get very far. Unless they have a pen and paper handy, that is.
The thing people often miss is that the Internet (as it currently stands) does not create much opportunities for real-time language use - composing text like I'm doing now is much more common. That makes it a lot easier to use a foreign language, cos you don't have to be able to parse it particularly fast. Assuming this phenomenon continues, I think this may well give rise to the first genuinely natural evolution of a written language. You can already see the behaviour emerging on things like IRC channels. There's new vocab, but more importantly the grammar people use is different from normal writing (or normal speaking).
Is this the same game? Played on a chess board but only using the white squares, where pieces move one square diagonally forwards and take by hopping over their victim, but can move diagonally backwards too once they've reached the far end.
You state your opinion as fact - that Scientology is not a religion. [...] You are far more frightening in the narrowness of your vision than Scientology is.
Hmmm, I think I'm feeding a troll, but I'll bite just in case.
Scientology is a "fake religion" in the sense that the guy who set it up and the people running it now almost certainly didn't and don't believe what they tell people. A lot of what the CoS says about him is a pack of lies.
Convictions total about seven and they are for "stealing xerox paper" or some other crap.
Lisa McPherson was covered in bruises and left dehydrated for days - in a Scientology "Hotel"! See photos of the autopsy on the Web if you like.
Hey, I can quote a few religious books with the best of them. Do you want me to start quoting from the "bad" parts of the Bible? Visit one of the religion recovery groups on usenet and try and make that statement again without knowing you'd be lying.
I can only speak from my personal experience. When I was 8, a Christian "evangelist" persuaded my (non-Christian) parents to send me for "lessons". She then convinced me that my parents were evil and would go to hell. I was quite shaken up till a few months after I finally stopped going. Now I'm not going to argue about whether what she was saying was true or not. It wasn't the right thing to tell me when I was 8, because it left me with a terror which I had no way of handling at the time.
However, my point is that I can safely live openly today as a non-Christian without fear of retribution. And most mainstream Christians will not try to prevent "heretics" from peacefully coexisting in society (in the UK, anyway). If I'd had a Scientologist indoctrinating me, and then left the Church of Scientology, I would probably have suffered intimidation and quite possibly violence. And that's the difference.
[Scientology is] a cult, and trying to stay around long enough to be taken seriously and have the lawyers to make it stick...from Cult to religion; it happens all the time.
I quite agree. If I was talking about Christianity as it was practised in the 14th Century in Europe, I would call it an extremist cult without hesitation. If Scientology ever matures to be as inoffensive as modern, mainstream Christianity, I will stop calling it a cult. Until then, it must be fought tooth and nail.
[Metallica] make their money from performing for their fans.
Hahaha! No they don't!
Actually, Metallica have been known to make more revenue from T-shirt sales than from CDs on some years. Maybe that's partly to do with the pathetic cut that music publishers give artists.
If bands are serious about their music and not money, this is how it should be.
Yet another person who likes to criticize an artist's integrity if [... they are] the least bit concerned about finances. You know most musicians out there aren't rich and successful megastars.
True. But Metallica *are* rich and successful.
BTW, "unlicensed" music is sometimes in accordance with the law. I've just ordered an album which will take weeks to get shipped to me. I'm listening to the mp3s right now. That's "fair use". I'm just "time-shifting" my album to somewhen more convenient. I couldn't have done that without a so-called "illegal" site.
As someone who is neither, I am highly offended by your comment. [...] What about my Christian friends? Have we all been brainwashed with garbage? [...] Let me guess: anyone who does not conform to your particular religious beliefs is branded an extremist idiot without a second thought.
Scientology is fundamentally different from Christianity because it believes it is OK to lie to people when you're trying to convert them. For instance, scientologists will tell a Christian that scientology and Christianity are compatible. Let me give you some comparative quotes.
"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who ill-treat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also." -- Jesus
"This is the correct procedure:
Spot who is attacking us.
Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse using our own professionals, not outside agencies.
Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.
DON'T EVER tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way." -- L. Ron Hubbard, Penalties for Lower Conditions.
"[making money from religion is for] men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain." -- St Paul
"I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is.
-- L. Ron Hubbard, 1949.
The examples go on and on. Scientologists are told to lie to people to advance their point of view. For this reason, calling them "extremist" is totally, utterly different from using the word to describe anyone who disagrees with your religious beliefs.
I feel sorry for the dude who is not making some money on those things
Whilst I agree, I don't think that's the worse consequence of their sale being inhibited. It's vital that this kind of machine is publically available, so that members of the public can make an informed decision as to whether an e-meter could be effective for psychoanalysis or whether it is just a rheostat. If non-scientologists can't get hold of e-meters, it's harder to test the claims the "Church of Scientology" makes.
This article is principally about the DCMA and not about Scientology, but if you're wondering why the Church of Scientology behaves as it does, it's worth looking at www.xenu.net to get some of the picture. (This is an anti-scientology site; obviously, look at www.scientology.org for the other side of the argument then choose which you believe).
As far as the DCMA stuff goes, I can't believe that it can restrict this much liberty and not get blown out of the water by the US Supreme Court for being an overextension of the government's powers. Unfortunately, until that slow legal process is actually complete, people in the US have to assume the law is valid. It's a case of the legal process being far too slow, once again.
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Perpetual betaware: there's over 2500 packages in Debian alone which are stable release versions. Ok, many of these merely support something else but that still leaves hundreds.
Hard-to-use: GDE and Knome are truly obvious counterexamples.
Half-finished: you're on to something here. Almost all software is *always* unfinished. That's because user's needs expand with the program's functionality. Software is not an artifact it is a process. Propriatory software companies sometimes have a hard time admitting this.
Ok, you may be right - the case law is different in different countries, even though there is the Bern Convention. However, in the case of old CDs which have become worn, you definitely *are* entitled to a new copy. The music industry has told consumers that, correctly used, CDs will "provide a lifetime of listening enjoyment". This is an implicit guarantee that, if you have been reasonably careful with your CD but it has got old and worn and stopped working, then you are entitled to a new one. Something similar may apply to vinyl and cassettes, I don't know what claims were made about their quality and durability at the time.
I think you are confusing "illegal" with "morally wrong". I agree nobody can deny it's illegal. But whether it's morally wrong is a matter of opinion. For instance, there's a point of view that says downloading mp3s purely for try-before-you-buy purposes is morally ok. I might certainly believe, in some circumstances, that an avid fan who had no money would be acting morally soundly if he obtained some copied music.
What Katz seemed to be saying is that Metallica were being cruel and stupid. As has been pointed out, many of those 335K users may be acting legally or trying before they buy. Metallica can't possibly have examined each of these 335K cases in detail, so they're bound to be burning the fingers of plenty of true fans as well as all the casual users. I hope (probably in vain) that they find that their CD sales and concert audiences drop and then put two and two together and stop doing this. Using the law to kick fans who really, really like you is stupid, shortsighted and (I think) somewhat gratuitously nasty.
I have a few CDs which, through years of use and the occasional droppage, have become scratched. As the technology ages, this will become more common. Mp3 download sites are one of the best ways for me to exercise my legal right to obtain a working copy of the CD I bought without paying royalties again.
I couldn't fail not to disagree less. I think that everyone has a right to decent access to the arts. It is an opinion held by many great thinkers throughout history (including the authors of the US constitution, who stated that copyright should be for a limited period to ensure that everything comes into the public domain eventually).
I'm not suggesting that you should agree with me about this. I just think you shouldn't assume that anyone who holds this opinion does so selfishly.
They have no way of knowing how many of those people are actually acting legally, i.e. have already bought the song. If I have an album on cassette/vinyl, and "upgrade" it to mp3 via Napster, it's completely legal. Metallica may hate it if they want people pay for albums all over again on CD, but that's just tough.
What if some people *are* acting illegally, but would never actually have bought the album at the monopoly CD price, even if mp3 did not exist? Then Metallica is losing precisely nothing from these people copying their music. Whether or not you think illegal copying is morally wrong, you can't claim that every instance of copying denies the copyright holder another royalty payment.
Taking both of the above into account, that 335,000 figure probably needs a substantial reduction. I hope that people in the first category I mentioned don't get their accounts shut down due to Metallica's threats, without anyone bothering to discover that they aren't actually breaking the law.
So, by that argument, if a dictator rules that democracy is to take root in his country, then he's implicitly supporting his right to dictate?
Do you really believe that the reason your incarceration rates are so much higher than ours is because you've got more nasty people? I would fundamentally reject the notion that Europeans are any less likely to be bad people than Americans. Maybe things like higher poverty, greater availability of guns etc. give Americans more opportunity / motive to become criminals, but that is surely a legislative issue and not a social one.
[I misunderstood that for a moment - in Britain, "far-left" neccessarily means anti-democratic :-)]
Wait - those were (IIRC) personal views given in reply to specific questions about his personal views. AFAICT he ain't advocating those views, just stating personal beliefs when asked. Wheras he actively advocates his views on free software. I don't think he's claiming to be a world expert on anti-drug policy, just responding to questions about what he himself thinks.
There's no such thing as "efficient". There's only "efficient in a certain environment". Common law may be great for things like murder, where the issue hasn't altered for centuries. However it has not had chance to adapt to this fairly new environment where the cost of distributing information is nearly zero.
IANAS. The problem with ideas is that they're often dependent on lots of other ideas to be useful. This particularly applies to software. If I have an idea which relies on 6 other patented ideas, then there is no way I can use my idea without collaborating with all six patent holders. If someone wants to market a replacement for my idea, they also have to replace the functionality of the six other ideas I drew on.
This creates enormous barriers to entry into the market for ideas, and so makes monopoly control very likely. If you wanted to market a replacement for Recycle Bin for Windows, you'd have to recreate the whole of the rest of the OS. A reasonably low barrier to entry is a fundamental axiom needed for free market economics to work. If you don't ensure that the barrier is low, you can kiss goodbye to all the efficiency optimisation which the free market performs.
But there'd be very little incentive for a company to lock up its code, if the binary can be freely distributed. A monopoly on source code is not actually all that useful if you can't control the binary. (I'm presuming that more insidious methods of copy protection, such as compiling against a particular processor serial number, would be illegal under fair trade laws or whatever). And if your product is so vital that binary copies aren't good enough to prevent you having a good monopoly (say windows), large companies would reverse engineer and clone your program bit by bit, safe in the knowledge that it would be legal. (I'm also assuming that a deliberately obfuscating APIs would be explicitly illegal for companies with high market share, under antitrust law, which is a bit of a change from today).
In a world where this sort of copying and reverse-engineering/cloning was legal and normal, people would be much more wary of uncloned closed-source software because buying into a monopoly market is usually a bad idea unless you have no choice.
It might take a few years before everyone recalculated their enlightened self-interest, but eventually open-source would become the norm and (in most cases) binary-only distribution would be regarded as a possible sign that the vendor was out to con you.
Ok, there's two separate concepts. Morally meaningless, and Legally meaningless. Some people believe that the concept of IP, as the law sees it today, is Morally meaningless, because nobody has a right to restrict copying and distribution. But it is definitely not Legally meaningless, cos if you copy enough stuff you'll be in trouble. To ensure that free software stays free, you use your Legal rights over the software. You say people can only use it if they don't restrict others' Moral rights by putting burdensome Legal obligations on them not to copy it.
If, as some people advocate, copyright law were to be dismantled, the Legal protection given to your Moral rights by the GPL would vanish. However, also the ability to put burdensome Legal obligations on people would vanish, so there would be no need for a GPL. Until/unless that happens, the GPL is a good Legal tool for protecting Moral rights.
I think there's no conflict, as long as you get the distinction between Legal and Moral clear.
If the general linux public takes a different view then maybe they are mistaken. If NVIDIA go bust, or choose to stop supporting Linux, who will keep support for their card up to date? Now ask the same about 3dfx. Open source means more future-proof. Of course, it depends how long you want the hardware to last.
The British government did a survey of collieries in about 1860, and ministers (from the south of England) had to hire interpreters to understand Durham miners (from the north of England).
I dunno if regional dialects are merging, but I think Radio and TV has definitely ensured that nearly everyone brought up in the UK understands "Standard English" (a somewhat artificial dialect loosely based on posh southern speak). If yget two people, one from Glasgow and one from Bradford, who can't understand each other's natural speak, they can be observed to resort to Standard English, even if it's completely different to what either of them speak.
As an adult native English speaker, I can say that I have never, ever met another adult native English speaker whose English was so different from mine that we couldn't understand each other if we both made an effort. I'd be surprised if this was untrue for many contemporary native English speakers.
On the other hand, something like chinese is completely different. If a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker try their hardest to have a conversation, they won't get very far. Unless they have a pen and paper handy, that is.
The thing people often miss is that the Internet (as it currently stands) does not create much opportunities for real-time language use - composing text like I'm doing now is much more common. That makes it a lot easier to use a foreign language, cos you don't have to be able to parse it particularly fast. Assuming this phenomenon continues, I think this may well give rise to the first genuinely natural evolution of a written language. You can already see the behaviour emerging on things like IRC channels. There's new vocab, but more importantly the grammar people use is different from normal writing (or normal speaking).
Is this the same game? Played on a chess board but only using the white squares, where pieces move one square diagonally forwards and take by hopping over their victim, but can move diagonally backwards too once they've reached the far end.
Cool, that means you can probably answer my question: what exactly is the difference between a Felony and a Crime?
Hmmm, I think I'm feeding a troll, but I'll bite just in case.
Scientology is a "fake religion" in the sense that the guy who set it up and the people running it now almost certainly didn't and don't believe what they tell people. A lot of what the CoS says about him is a pack of lies.
Lisa McPherson was covered in bruises and left dehydrated for days - in a Scientology "Hotel"! See photos of the autopsy on the Web if you like.
I can only speak from my personal experience. When I was 8, a Christian "evangelist" persuaded my (non-Christian) parents to send me for "lessons". She then convinced me that my parents were evil and would go to hell. I was quite shaken up till a few months after I finally stopped going.
Now I'm not going to argue about whether what she was saying was true or not. It wasn't the right thing to tell me when I was 8, because it left me with a terror which I had no way of handling at the time.
However, my point is that I can safely live openly today as a non-Christian without fear of retribution. And most mainstream Christians will not try to prevent "heretics" from peacefully coexisting in society (in the UK, anyway). If I'd had a Scientologist indoctrinating me, and then left the Church of Scientology, I would probably have suffered intimidation and quite possibly violence. And that's the difference.
I quite agree. If I was talking about Christianity as it was practised in the 14th Century in Europe, I would call it an extremist cult without hesitation. If Scientology ever matures to be as inoffensive as modern, mainstream Christianity, I will stop calling it a cult. Until then, it must be fought tooth and nail.
Actually, Metallica have been known to make more revenue from T-shirt sales than from CDs on some years. Maybe that's partly to do with the pathetic cut that music publishers give artists.
True. But Metallica *are* rich and successful.
BTW, "unlicensed" music is sometimes in accordance with the law. I've just ordered an album which will take weeks to get shipped to me. I'm listening to the mp3s right now. That's "fair use". I'm just "time-shifting" my album to somewhen more convenient. I couldn't have done that without a so-called "illegal" site.
Is that funny? To me, it seems just accurate/informative.
Scientology is fundamentally different from Christianity because it believes it is OK to lie to people when you're trying to convert them. For instance, scientologists will tell a Christian that scientology and Christianity are compatible. Let me give you some comparative quotes.
- Spot who is attacking us.
- Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse using our own professionals, not outside agencies.
- Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.
- Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.
DON'T EVER tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way." -- L. Ron Hubbard, Penalties for Lower Conditions.The examples go on and on. Scientologists are told to lie to people to advance their point of view. For this reason, calling them "extremist" is totally, utterly different from using the word to describe anyone who disagrees with your religious beliefs.
Whilst I agree, I don't think that's the worse consequence of their sale being inhibited. It's vital that this kind of machine is publically available, so that members of the public can make an informed decision as to whether an e-meter could be effective for psychoanalysis or whether it is just a rheostat. If non-scientologists can't get hold of e-meters, it's harder to test the claims the "Church of Scientology" makes.
This article is principally about the DCMA and not about Scientology, but if you're wondering why the Church of Scientology behaves as it does, it's worth looking at www.xenu.net to get some of the picture. (This is an anti-scientology site; obviously, look at www.scientology.org for the other side of the argument then choose which you believe).
As far as the DCMA stuff goes, I can't believe that it can restrict this much liberty and not get blown out of the water by the US Supreme Court for being an overextension of the government's powers. Unfortunately, until that slow legal process is actually complete, people in the US have to assume the law is valid. It's a case of the legal process being far too slow, once again.
Interesting - dúr means "stupid" in Irish as well.
In Welsh, "duron" is the last five letters of the word for "dictionary". But that's a bit more tenuous I suppose.