The Wikipedia article seems heavily slanted. It diligently lists all the problems the UN inspectors faced, but avoids mentioning their main conclusion. Let's go to some sources. The Hindu:
"Contrary to Western intelligence claims about Iraq's supposed arms capability in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the fact was that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and dismantled the infrastructure after the 1991 Gulf War, according to the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. Giving evidence before the Iraq inquiry committee here on Tuesday, Mr. Blix was emphatic that Iraq had “no weapons” by 2003."
"The Government's case for war against Saddam Hussein was undermined further yesterday when the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said that Iraq had probably destroyed its most deadly weapons of mass destruction more than a decade ago.
Mr Blix, who retired in June, told the Australian state broadcaster ABC: "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991. [...]
Mr Blix's remarks are in contrast to the claims made by London and Washington in the run-up to the war that Saddam was harbouring a large cache of deadly weapons, which could be deployed easily and quickly.[...]
Another weapons expert and former UN inspector, David Albright, said last night that the Iraq Survey Group had apparently failed to find anything significant. They are "not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find, large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war", he said."
c6gunnr wrote:
Ah, yes, that hotbed of political insight, The Onion. Well clearly I must be wrong, then.
You're missing the point. The question was if people, outside of the Bush administration, doubted the claims of WMDs even before the war. And they did. To many outsiders, it was perfectly clear how ridiculous the claims were.
I think the legal argument has some weight. If everyone picked and chose which laws to follow, there would be chaos. This was pointed out as early as Plato.
Unfortunately, the argument is diminished when the military (and the government in general) themselves flaunt the law when they think they can get away with it. It's hard to argue that you should follow the law to preserve the integrity of a system which is already corrupt.
Lastly, I wasn't talking about all civilian casualties in that statement. These releases are due to an expansion of the self-justification wikileaks made for the release of the helicopter-attack video. Since then it's decided that it has the right to risk the lives of thousands of people to make a political point, rather than dealing with it in a legal manner, when right there in the law it says that it's illegal to punish people for dealing with it in a legal manner.
Assange has dealt it with a legal manner. He has exercised his freedom of speech in full accordance with the letter and intent of Australian law. There is nothing in Australian law which prohibits Australian citizens from disseminating the state secrets of other states on Australian soil.
Or are you seriously suggesting that all people in the entire world should follow US law? Good luck with that. You may be the most powerful nation on Earth, but you're not more powerful than all the others put together.
Saying that Wikileaks has risked the lives of "thousands of people" is a gross exaggeration. They removed all names of informants. There may be some informants whose identity can be inferred from context, but that is yet to be proven. That the US military has sacrificed hundreds of Afghan civilians as collateral damage is pretty certain, though.
First, because there is no precedence for treating information like property in courts of law.
Second, because it wouldn't make sense. For example: You can return physical property to your employer, but you can't, strictly speaking, return a password which you have in your head. When you tell the password to your employer, you are creating a new copy of it, but you still have the copy in your own head. You can't be court-ordered to forget it. However, if you *did* forget a password you were supposed to consider, it would be considered vandalism.
You're a fool for getting hung up on the physical. The courts have been treating digital equivalents to physical objects exactly the same as their physical counterparts for years now.
I doubt that. If someone tells you a password, and you forget it, can you be charged with vandalism, since you destroyed the only remaining copy? If you accidentally overhear a secret, can you be court ordered to forget it, since you have information in your possession which you do not own?
Information can't be, and isn't, treated like property. At first glance, "intellectual property" might seem like ownership of information, but it isn't. Owning the copyright to a book, for example, only means owning the exclusive legal rights to manufacture copies of it. The information itself cannot be owned.
While it is true that nobody intends for prisoners to get raped, society has a responsibility for what happens in a badly kept prison. It's not intent, but in many cases it may be willful neglicence.
On the planet Rule-of-law, where courts decide upon people's guilt according to a predetermined, precise set of rules, not on a subjective judgement of their moral failings.
My password for work computers is not my boss' property, it's my own. I should never, under absolutely any circumstance, hand over my passwords to anyone, even those that pay me.
But in this case, it wasn't the password for Childs user account, it was the passwords he had created for hundreds of routers and other Internet devices on his employer's network.
*sigh* There seems to be a fairly common belief that any piece of information can be considered "intellectual property". That is not true. "Intellectual property" consists of a number of more-or-less strictly defined categories, like copyrights, patents and protected patterns.
Information in general can't be owned. Passwords are not property, since they don't fall under any of the categories of intellectual property. And even if they *were* considered intellectual property, that would only make it illegal to *copy* them - not to keep them secret.
I find it doubtful that refusal to perform a service for your employer can be considered theft. Isn't "stealing a service" when you, for example, sneak into a theater without paying?
A schematic is a physical object, so taking it is theft. It might be some other crime too, like industrial espionage, but taking the schematic itself is theft.
the UN inspector concluded that Iraq's weapons of mass desctruction had been destroyed. That Iraq was a few weeks late with some demands, and small amounts of nerve gas was missing due to an accounting error, doesn't change the conclusion.
Where I live, in Northern Europe, everybody knew that. It was all over the news, long before USA decided to invade. Wasn't it made clear in the Canadian news?
It was well established that Iraq had not been involved in terrorism against the USA. Bush himself was well aware of this, so he never claimed it. He just made sure to connect "Iraq" to "terrorism" by mentioning them together in his speeches, and a lot of the US-American public seem to have believed Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But anyone who had watched the news carefully knew it wasn't so.
Even in the USA there were a lot of people who saw that Bush had decided to invade Iraq and was looking for an excuse. For example, The Onion satirised it in a news story where Iraq "provoked" Bush by complying with his every demand.
As I interpret it, the state law does not override the federal law, it merely amends it. The federal law says that the creator has an exclusive right for X years; the state law says that he has an exclusive right for Y years, where Y > X. Since having a right for X years does not contradict having it for X years plus some additional years, both laws can hold at the same time.
I was ambivalent on the copyright issue for a long time. Then I read about the economic theory behind copyright, and realised that it was actually harmful to society at large.
From an economic point of view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a person, A, getting something for free (for example, by copying a computer program). It essentially means that a value has been created from nothing - that value has been added to the total value produced by society. Nobody would be better off if A was deprived that value. If the software A copies helps them in their work (for example, the program helps them produce better computer graphics), other people also get an added value from A's copying.
There is nothing inherently good or necessary about giving the producers income from every use of their work. It merely redistributes economic resources from the consumers to the producers, and doesn't affect the total amount of goods produced.
The only situation where copying might be bad, is when it reduces the profits of the producer so much, they stop producing the goods. As long as that doesn't happen, copying is only good.
Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.
So to sum it up: Getting things for free is good for you. It is good for society as a whole. By seeding a torrent, you are helping others to create values, increasing the total amount of goods produced by society. And if the contents of the torrent is a few years old, the economic loss for the creators is usually negligible.
There are strong indications that unauthorised copying does not affect the income of the (movie, music, software) industry as a whole, since those who pirate tend to use their money on another (movie, music, software) product instead, not save them up. If that is true, you don't even need to have a bad conscience for copying brand spanking new products, but the proof is not conclusive yet.
The new findings are not a disaster, it's just yet another example of the ongoing insanity that copyright has become.
So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.
There is nothing truly new. Even the most original composer is 90% influenced by the music he has already heard. Getting a jazz musician to play your newly composed jazz solo costs time and money. Sampling is a way for musicians without oodles of money (i.e 90% of them) to make decent music easier. It makes more people able to participate in the creation of our culture.
So, hopefully, some student whose research involves early recordings can't find what he needs on the Internet and visits a library for only the second or third time in his life, and a hundred news worlds are opened to him.
Why force people to use a less efficient tool (vinyl records and CDs at the library) when modern information technology is available in most homes?
Working hard is not an end in itself. If something can be done easier (and probably better), let people do it the easy way, and spend their efforts where they're needed.
There are international treaties regarding copyright that many countries, including the UK and the US, have signed. But that only means each country has to follow what the treaty says; it doesn't mean a law in one country automatically becomes law in the other.
Are you serious? Israel doesn't seem to give a shit about killing people recently. We should be far more scared of Israel than Iran. Considering what we have done to and for each country, Israel has killed more US citizens than Iran.
As much as I dislike Israel's actions against the Palestinians, it is still a democracy, and as such, has a few built-in safeguards against senseless war that theocracies and dictatorships tend to lack. When the power is in the hands of many people, it's harder to do the really bloody obvious stupid things.
Just from a few seconds of thought about the recent past: constant threats, sending money to Hamas, sending officers to train terrorists in Iraq, abducting that British ship a few years back.
The USA does that too, on a regular basis, besides waging war. Constant threats of invasion and military action, providing groups who aim to overthrow local governments with money, weapons and training, abducting foreign citizens, and so on.
Well, no shit. Israel has no reason to use a nuke, would in no way benefit from using a nuke, and has made no statements claiming it would use (or even has) a nuke. Iran, on the other hand, makes plenty of Death To America style announcements every week, and keeps bragging about its missile program.
Every country makes sure to show off the weapons they have (and don't want to keep secret) in order to deter attackers. In light of Israel's nuclear weapons, I can't really blame them for making sure everyone knows they can defend themselves. Even if I think their government is a dictatorial bunch of religious hypocrites, and would be glad if they were overthrown by their own people.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn! They got to him before he posted!
Of course we don't have any of the quantum computers the grey aliens ga... eh, I mean, we haven't come that far yet.
c6gunnr wrote:
Ok, then everybody is wrong. [wikipedia.org]
The Wikipedia article seems heavily slanted. It diligently lists all the problems the UN inspectors faced, but avoids mentioning their main conclusion. Let's go to some sources.
The Hindu:
"Contrary to Western intelligence claims about Iraq's supposed arms capability in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the fact was that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and dismantled the infrastructure after the 1991 Gulf War, according to the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. Giving evidence before the Iraq inquiry committee here on Tuesday, Mr. Blix was emphatic that Iraq had “no weapons” by 2003."
The Independent (UK):
"The Government's case for war against Saddam Hussein was undermined further yesterday when the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said that Iraq had probably destroyed its most deadly weapons of mass destruction more than a decade ago.
Mr Blix, who retired in June, told the Australian state broadcaster ABC: "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991. [...]
Mr Blix's remarks are in contrast to the claims made by London and Washington in the run-up to the war that Saddam was harbouring a large cache of deadly weapons, which could be deployed easily and quickly.[...]
Another weapons expert and former UN inspector, David Albright, said last night that the Iraq Survey Group had apparently failed to find anything significant. They are "not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find, large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war", he said."
c6gunnr wrote:
Ah, yes, that hotbed of political insight, The Onion. Well clearly I must be wrong, then.
You're missing the point. The question was if people, outside of the Bush administration, doubted the claims of WMDs even before the war. And they did. To many outsiders, it was perfectly clear how ridiculous the claims were.
I think the legal argument has some weight. If everyone picked and chose which laws to follow, there would be chaos. This was pointed out as early as Plato.
Unfortunately, the argument is diminished when the military (and the government in general) themselves flaunt the law when they think they can get away with it. It's hard to argue that you should follow the law to preserve the integrity of a system which is already corrupt.
Lastly, I wasn't talking about all civilian casualties in that statement. These releases are due to an expansion of the self-justification wikileaks made for the release of the helicopter-attack video. Since then it's decided that it has the right to risk the lives of thousands of people to make a political point, rather than dealing with it in a legal manner, when right there in the law it says that it's illegal to punish people for dealing with it in a legal manner.
Assange has dealt it with a legal manner. He has exercised his freedom of speech in full accordance with the letter and intent of Australian law. There is nothing in Australian law which prohibits Australian citizens from disseminating the state secrets of other states on Australian soil.
Or are you seriously suggesting that all people in the entire world should follow US law? Good luck with that. You may be the most powerful nation on Earth, but you're not more powerful than all the others put together.
Saying that Wikileaks has risked the lives of "thousands of people" is a gross exaggeration. They removed all names of informants. There may be some informants whose identity can be inferred from context, but that is yet to be proven. That the US military has sacrificed hundreds of Afghan civilians as collateral damage is pretty certain, though.
First, because there is no precedence for treating information like property in courts of law.
Second, because it wouldn't make sense. For example:
You can return physical property to your employer, but you can't, strictly speaking, return a password which you have in your head. When you tell the password to your employer, you are creating a new copy of it, but you still have the copy in your own head. You can't be court-ordered to forget it.
However, if you *did* forget a password you were supposed to consider, it would be considered vandalism.
You're a fool for getting hung up on the physical. The courts have been treating digital equivalents to physical objects exactly the same as their physical counterparts for years now.
I doubt that. If someone tells you a password, and you forget it, can you be charged with vandalism, since you destroyed the only remaining copy? If you accidentally overhear a secret, can you be court ordered to forget it, since you have information in your possession which you do not own?
Information can't be, and isn't, treated like property. At first glance, "intellectual property" might seem like ownership of information, but it isn't. Owning the copyright to a book, for example, only means owning the exclusive legal rights to manufacture copies of it. The information itself cannot be owned.
While it is true that nobody intends for prisoners to get raped, society has a responsibility for what happens in a badly kept prison. It's not intent, but in many cases it may be willful neglicence.
On the planet Rule-of-law, where courts decide upon people's guilt according to a predetermined, precise set of rules, not on a subjective judgement of their moral failings.
But in any case, a password is not property.
My password for work computers is not my boss' property, it's my own. I should never, under absolutely any circumstance, hand over my passwords to anyone, even those that pay me.
But in this case, it wasn't the password for Childs user account, it was the passwords he had created for hundreds of routers and other Internet devices on his employer's network.
*sigh* There seems to be a fairly common belief that any piece of information can be considered "intellectual property". That is not true. "Intellectual property" consists of a number of more-or-less strictly defined categories, like copyrights, patents and protected patterns.
Information in general can't be owned. Passwords are not property, since they don't fall under any of the categories of intellectual property. And even if they *were* considered intellectual property, that would only make it illegal to *copy* them - not to keep them secret.
Whether Childs is an asshole is a separate issue.
I find it doubtful that refusal to perform a service for your employer can be considered theft. Isn't "stealing a service" when you, for example, sneak into a theater without paying?
A schematic is a physical object, so taking it is theft. It might be some other crime too, like industrial espionage, but taking the schematic itself is theft.
According to the ISO standard, it should be written "2010-09-08".
(ISO 8601)
c6gunner,
the UN inspector concluded that Iraq's weapons of mass desctruction had been destroyed. That Iraq was a few weeks late with some demands, and small amounts of nerve gas was missing due to an accounting error, doesn't change the conclusion.
Where I live, in Northern Europe, everybody knew that. It was all over the news, long before USA decided to invade. Wasn't it made clear in the Canadian news?
It was well established that Iraq had not been involved in terrorism against the USA. Bush himself was well aware of this, so he never claimed it. He just made sure to connect "Iraq" to "terrorism" by mentioning them together in his speeches, and a lot of the US-American public seem to have believed Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But anyone who had watched the news carefully knew it wasn't so.
Even in the USA there were a lot of people who saw that Bush had decided to invade Iraq and was looking for an excuse. For example, The Onion satirised it in a news story where Iraq "provoked" Bush by complying with his every demand.
Perhaps opinions were different in Canada.
No, I think five or ten years would be enough. (For software even less, maybe three to five years.)
Um, pretty much every big Hollywood adaptation in the last oh, 20 years has been from books or comics that are well over 14 years old.
Yes, but how many writers have had their book adapted into a film?
If the revenue from most film adaptations was lost, it would still only affect a very small number of writers.
As I interpret it, the state law does not override the federal law, it merely amends it. The federal law says that the creator has an exclusive right for X years; the state law says that he has an exclusive right for Y years, where Y > X. Since having a right for X years does not contradict having it for X years plus some additional years, both laws can hold at the same time.
I was ambivalent on the copyright issue for a long time. Then I read about the economic theory behind copyright, and realised that it was actually harmful to society at large.
From an economic point of view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a person, A, getting something for free (for example, by copying a computer program). It essentially means that a value has been created from nothing - that value has been added to the total value produced by society. Nobody would be better off if A was deprived that value. If the software A copies helps them in their work (for example, the program helps them produce better computer graphics), other people also get an added value from A's copying.
There is nothing inherently good or necessary about giving the producers income from every use of their work. It merely redistributes economic resources from the consumers to the producers, and doesn't affect the total amount of goods produced.
The only situation where copying might be bad, is when it reduces the profits of the producer so much, they stop producing the goods. As long as that doesn't happen, copying is only good.
Now, combine this understanding with the fact that most copyrighted products generate most of their income in the first few years after publication, or even less, and you realise that a copyright term of more than a few years has no benefits to society. It almost exclusively does harm, by preventing values to be produced for free.
So to sum it up: Getting things for free is good for you. It is good for society as a whole. By seeding a torrent, you are helping others to create values, increasing the total amount of goods produced by society. And if the contents of the torrent is a few years old, the economic loss for the creators is usually negligible.
There are strong indications that unauthorised copying does not affect the income of the (movie, music, software) industry as a whole, since those who pirate tend to use their money on another (movie, music, software) product instead, not save them up. If that is true, you don't even need to have a bad conscience for copying brand spanking new products, but the proof is not conclusive yet.
The new findings are not a disaster, it's just yet another example of the ongoing insanity that copyright has become.
So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.
There is nothing truly new. Even the most original composer is 90% influenced by the music he has already heard. Getting a jazz musician to play your newly composed jazz solo costs time and money. Sampling is a way for musicians without oodles of money (i.e 90% of them) to make decent music easier. It makes more people able to participate in the creation of our culture.
So, hopefully, some student whose research involves early recordings can't find what he needs on the Internet and visits a library for only the second or third time in his life, and a hundred news worlds are opened to him.
Why force people to use a less efficient tool (vinyl records and CDs at the library) when modern information technology is available in most homes?
Working hard is not an end in itself. If something can be done easier (and probably better), let people do it the easy way, and spend their efforts where they're needed.
There are international treaties regarding copyright that many countries, including the UK and the US, have signed. But that only means each country has to follow what the treaty says; it doesn't mean a law in one country automatically becomes law in the other.
Are you serious? Israel doesn't seem to give a shit about killing people recently. We should be far more scared of Israel than Iran. Considering what we have done to and for each country, Israel has killed more US citizens than Iran.
As much as I dislike Israel's actions against the Palestinians, it is still a democracy, and as such, has a few built-in safeguards against senseless war that theocracies and dictatorships tend to lack. When the power is in the hands of many people, it's harder to do the really bloody obvious stupid things.
Just from a few seconds of thought about the recent past: constant threats, sending money to Hamas, sending officers to train terrorists in Iraq, abducting that British ship a few years back.
The USA does that too, on a regular basis, besides waging war. Constant threats of invasion and military action, providing groups who aim to overthrow local governments with money, weapons and training, abducting foreign citizens, and so on.
Well, no shit. Israel has no reason to use a nuke, would in no way benefit from using a nuke, and has made no statements claiming it would use (or even has) a nuke. Iran, on the other hand, makes plenty of Death To America style announcements every week, and keeps bragging about its missile program.
Every country makes sure to show off the weapons they have (and don't want to keep secret) in order to deter attackers. In light of Israel's nuclear weapons, I can't really blame them for making sure everyone knows they can defend themselves. Even if I think their government is a dictatorial bunch of religious hypocrites, and would be glad if they were overthrown by their own people.
Or it could be something which is embarrassing to certain politicians, and perfectly legal to release.