Also, I laugh at the hypocrisy of 'Anonymous', who battle scientologists but not Islam.
And how do you know that people protesting Scientology don't have similar views about fundamentalist Islam?
How an earth is it hypocrisy? Is 'Anonymous' made up of people who also like to protest against offensive cartoons in their spare time? I don't think so.
I think the main reason in the minds of those who have traditionally been strongly against various religions to not target Islam is simply fear
So give us specific examples of people who criticise religion, except Islam, or are you just building a strawman?
Why would I want to send a photo by MMS (and have to have a MMS-supporting plan or pay my service provider per-message) when I can send it in its original format and size as an email attachment for free?
Because the person I'm sending it to doesn't have a computer/Internet connection chained to his ankle, but he does have his phone on him?
but what's actually there is better.
I'd rather have the choice of both.
(Can the iphone at least receive MMS at least? Or does it not even do that?)
You might not see a difference, but many people do - hence there's not a double standard.
Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit?
No.
What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits?
If it's a commercial website, then sure, you'd be profiting from it.
Also there's a point of using their own rules against them. If individuals are expected to abide by copyright laws, it's a double standard if their IP is ripped off by corporations.
Proper nutrition is essential in your formative years. Your stunted brain development can't be reversed.
Malnutrition and stunting brain development I would consider should be illegal too.
The point is that there is no demonstrated effect on someone who receives a male circumcision - good or bad.
Except for the fact that they no longer have a heathly part of their body. It would be assault if I forcably did that to you, why is it okay for babies?
It's certainly no better or worse than people who have their genitals pierced, and people routinely have baby girl's infants pierced. Again, it's not a big deal.
Piercing a baby's genitals is okay??? I don't think body piercing for babies (anywhere, let alone genital) should be legal.
Then all of the sudden you want it to be illegal. People like you are exactly why we can't have real democracy.
No, we want assault against non-consenting participants to be illegal. Consenting adults should be able to do what they like.
In fact, that just shows how screwed up things are, in that some acts of injury can be legal to do to a non-consenting child, but not between consenting adults (at least in the UK).
What this means is that when Opera servers are overloaded your pages load slowly.
I suppose the question is whether any lag due to Opera servers is greater than the saving from reducing the amount you have to download... I don't know if any tests have been done comparing it to normal browsers.
I've never seen a Wii so I don't know. All I know is that Opera Mini (not Mobile, which I've not tried) is great on my phone. Do you have any specific examples of how the iphone's browser is worth paying out the couple of hundred pounds extra for?
Good for you - but just like all the other basic features that the iphone seems to lack (MMS etc), the point is that even if I use them rarely, I still expect them to be there for the one time I need it. I don't want to go "Oh, I can't do that, because I got an iphone".
I might make compromises for a cheap phone, but not for one that's way more expensive! I just don't get it.
Without the (comparatively) large, high-res screen and multitouch interface, I'm skeptical
Well that's a separate issue - if things like that are important, I believe there are other phones out there that can do that (well okay, not sure off-hand about multitouch interface). But you shouldn't have to limit yourself purely to the quality of the built in web browser, is what I mean.
(And to be honest, I'm sceptical anyway - people I've known with other smartphones seem to have no trouble doing ordinary web browsing, it's only the dirt cheap phones that have rubbish built in browsers.)
But I find OperaMini does work very well even on small screens - it does a good job of organising the webpage so it fits properly, and with a reasonable amount of clearly readable text.
Sorry to be questioning, I'm genuinely curious for confirmation here - does the iphone really miss out on this basic feature, or am I misunderstanding?
One sick of phones having nearly-useless web browsers, when the only phone with a useful one is locked.
Any cheap old phone can run Opera Mini. I too was annoyed by the poor quality of my phone's built in browser, but now I never have any trouble. It even has features like server-side downscaling of image sizes, thus reducing download times (and costs) - so even if your phone does have a decent browser, it's worth a look.
All of them except the one you've got on the back burner.
To steal is to acquire without authorization or right. To take, get, or win surreptitiously. To pass off as one's own.
"Take" still implies depriving the original owner of it. "Pass of as one's own" doesn't fit here. Dictionary references for "acquire", or "get, or win surreptitiously"?
It's not theft; it's copyright infringement
So we agree!
Getting your panties into a knot over the moral implications of that is beside the issue entirely. Not all stealing is automatically immoral.
Who's getting their panties into a knot? I think you'll find that those people calling it stealing usually do think it immoral, and just as bad as the other meaning of the word "stealing".
Invest your energy in making it so that it's not the illegal kind of stealing instead of fighting stupid battles that only make you look clueless.
Ah, so we resort to insults! Nowhere have I stated that copyright infringement should be legal. I'm fine with the law as it is - it's you who perhaps should be spending your energy to make copyright infringment legally a form of stealing. And you are the one who started this argument, I merely replied - so don't accuse me of spending too much effort on it.
Your making a moral argument while pretending it's a semantic one is dishonest at best.
But that's exactly what you are doing - trying to make the claim that copyright infringement is stealing, whilst passing this off as a simple semantic issue. I'm saying that copyright infringement is not theft/stealing, either legally, nor is it by definition the same thing as when "theft" is used to refer to physical products. Personally I also agree with the law in that copyright infringement is not as ethically bad as theft, but even if you do think that two things are morally just as bad, that still doesn't make them the same thing.
Do you think I'm committing murder btw, because I so desperately want that beer?
If you disagree with this as well, good. Tell your senator as much. Apple isn't to blame, though.
Does that argument work with Microsoft or the MPAA or RIAA?
Politicians may have created the laws, but it is still reasonable to object to companies who choose to take advantage of such laws. The issue isn't about whether they have a legal "right" to do it - of course they do, that doesn't mean we can't make ethical judgements. Just about every company that appears on a Slashdot is in their legal rights to do what they do. That's not the point though. I don't see why Apple should be different.
There are just too many definitions where 'steal' is valid for the situation to complain
Example?
If you want to say that it's not theft in the traditional sense, you're right.
It's not about in the traditional sense. The point is that even if you do find a definition of "steal" which fits - just because a word has more than one definition doesn't make those definitions the same.
I could murder a beer, but it would be nonsensical to suggest that this was anything to do with the crime of murder. When people refer to copyright infringement as theft or stealing, you can bet that they intend to make the suggestion that they are the same.
It's not a site for tech professionals any more, it's a circlejerk for pirates seeking moral justification from each other. Hey guys, if it's fine to break an IP license for a movie, song or game, it's fine to break it for the Linux kernel as well, since that "property" is no less "imaginary".
Really? Find me a story about a company sending a Cease and Desist against someone who has released tools to remove DRM on GPL software, and I bet that people are mostly against it there too. Or any company suing end users over GPL software, or trying to lobby for new laws, or any other typical RIAA/MPAA tactic?
The only occasions where people support the IP of GPL software tends to apply to closed-sourced companies who violate the GPL, in which case (a) it's a case of playing by their own rules - if they would sue other people for violating their IP, it's unfair for them to violate other people's, and (b) if a company was pirating non-free software for profit, I suspect that there'd be little support for them either.
I'm not going to sign this one because I already know what the reply will be.
True (and on the whole, I wish the Government ignored all petitions - many bad laws come from petitions). But petitions have other uses - most notably gaining publicity for the cause.
Of course, that'll never happen if people just say "I'm not signing, there's no point".
By all means, write to your MP instead of not signing a petition. But replying on Slashdot instead of signing a petition won't help at all.
Those CAD operators would always be "noticing" their computers (to use the other poster's terminology) if they were using Macs, if they had to use the Caps Lock key so often...
Then it makes all your alpha characters upper case, as expected.
I meant how does it know if you intend to hit it or not? If it requires you to hold down, whilst it's an interesting idea, I'd find that annoying in itself (it would be "noise", if you like). Can the behaviour be turned off?
That's fine, if true, although I suspect it's not actually true.
- snip long ramble about noise and noticing computers -
Yes, I'm obviously a liar.
I'm still not sure what you mean. If I watch a movie, I watch a movie. I don't notice my computer just because it runs Windows, nor would I if it ran BeOS, AmigaOS or whatever else.
Can you give me specific examples, rather than just making vague claims and labelling anyone who disagrees as a liar?
I realize that no matter *what* you're doing on a computer, and no matter *how* you interact with it, you are giving it detailed instructions, but there's something quite different about using a command-line utility to resize a photo, and dragging a photo to resize it.
???
I'm not Linux a fan, but I figured you didn't need a command line to resize an image. Even Apple finally decided their users were grown up enough to use an OS that had a command line (as opposed to the joke that was classic MacOS) - a command line is there as an additional way to do things, which may be better for some purposes.
Uh, paying for something after stealing it is not right and childish logic at best.
The issue under debate here was not whether it is right, but the claim that supposedly "The content developers/distributors lose sales". And we're not talking about stealing anyway.
Would it be copyright infringement if someone broke into your computer and copied your personal pictures to put online and share with whoever wanted them without your permission?
Yes it would be copyright infringement. And breaking and entering. And possibly other crimes too. I don't see the value in mislabelling crimes ("Someone broke into my house - that's murder!")
Now what if you were a professional photographer? What if you developed training slideshows as your main source of income? Copyright infringement wasn't developed to stop direct theft it was to stop misuse of another competing product.
Yes those are copyright infringement, and copyright infringement was intended to handle these cases. Theft wasn't. Consider how laws against theft existed long before the introduction of copyright laws, but theft still didn't cover cases where someone's music was ripped off, for example.
You choose not to and download the song without paying the artist who created it. For any physical good this would be theft,
For any physical good I downloaded, it would be theft? Maybe once Star Trek replicators are invented, we can revisit this point to see whether you are right or not.
And just a side note, why do they call it identity theft if all they steal is information? Isn't the act of impersonating fraud?
Yes, I agree that identity theft is also a misleading term, and yes, I believe the actual laws broken are usually things like fraud. I would be annoyed at anyone who claimed that, just because we casually called it "identity theft", it was therefore no different to stealing from a shop. They're different things - whether they are just as bad, or one is worse than another, is a matter to debate.
With that logic, black men and women still shouldn't have any rights.
He's not saying that the majority should decide the law - but that there are problems if you bring in a law against what a large proportion of the population is doing. I don't see that applies to rights of black people.
Cut of the Internet connection of 10% of the population?
There are WAY more people who go above speed limits than there are file sharers.
Citation needed? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's not obvious to me. Everyone I know happily admits to copying in one form or another (if they don't download, it's only because they've yet to get broadband). I don't know anyone who ignores speed limits.
Slashdot Mirror
'Anonymous' said:
Also, I laugh at the hypocrisy of 'Anonymous', who battle scientologists but not Islam.
And how do you know that people protesting Scientology don't have similar views about fundamentalist Islam?
How an earth is it hypocrisy? Is 'Anonymous' made up of people who also like to protest against offensive cartoons in their spare time? I don't think so.
I think the main reason in the minds of those who have traditionally been strongly against various religions to not target Islam is simply fear
So give us specific examples of people who criticise religion, except Islam, or are you just building a strawman?
It's nice to see that some dude pocketed $20,000 because he took a picture of a public building and sued someone.
See, the difference is that if he behaved like the RIAA, he'd have sued them for a million billion dollars, or something.
Why would I want to send a photo by MMS (and have to have a MMS-supporting plan or pay my service provider per-message) when I can send it in its original format and size as an email attachment for free?
Because the person I'm sending it to doesn't have a computer/Internet connection chained to his ankle, but he does have his phone on him?
but what's actually there is better.
I'd rather have the choice of both.
(Can the iphone at least receive MMS at least? Or does it not even do that?)
Pirate Bay uses music as a means of attracting people to their website. On their website they have adverts that they earn revenue from.
Does the Pirate Bay have mp3s on their servers you can download?
I fail to see the difference.
You might not see a difference, but many people do - hence there's not a double standard.
Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit?
No.
What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits?
If it's a commercial website, then sure, you'd be profiting from it.
Also there's a point of using their own rules against them. If individuals are expected to abide by copyright laws, it's a double standard if their IP is ripped off by corporations.
How does this pinky thing keep coming up? NO ONE CUTS OFF THEIR PINKY!
It keeps coming up because it's another example of something which doesn't cause significant harm. So why is one okay, but not the other?
Proper nutrition is essential in your formative years. Your stunted brain development can't be reversed.
Malnutrition and stunting brain development I would consider should be illegal too.
The point is that there is no demonstrated effect on someone who receives a male circumcision - good or bad.
Except for the fact that they no longer have a heathly part of their body. It would be assault if I forcably did that to you, why is it okay for babies?
It's certainly no better or worse than people who have their genitals pierced, and people routinely have baby girl's infants pierced. Again, it's not a big deal.
Piercing a baby's genitals is okay??? I don't think body piercing for babies (anywhere, let alone genital) should be legal.
Then all of the sudden you want it to be illegal. People like you are exactly why we can't have real democracy.
No, we want assault against non-consenting participants to be illegal. Consenting adults should be able to do what they like.
In fact, that just shows how screwed up things are, in that some acts of injury can be legal to do to a non-consenting child, but not between consenting adults (at least in the UK).
What this means is that when Opera servers are overloaded your pages load slowly.
... I don't know if any tests have been done comparing it to normal browsers.
I suppose the question is whether any lag due to Opera servers is greater than the saving from reducing the amount you have to download
I've never seen a Wii so I don't know. All I know is that Opera Mini (not Mobile, which I've not tried) is great on my phone. Do you have any specific examples of how the iphone's browser is worth paying out the couple of hundred pounds extra for?
Good for you - but just like all the other basic features that the iphone seems to lack (MMS etc), the point is that even if I use them rarely, I still expect them to be there for the one time I need it. I don't want to go "Oh, I can't do that, because I got an iphone".
I might make compromises for a cheap phone, but not for one that's way more expensive! I just don't get it.
Without the (comparatively) large, high-res screen and multitouch interface, I'm skeptical
Well that's a separate issue - if things like that are important, I believe there are other phones out there that can do that (well okay, not sure off-hand about multitouch interface). But you shouldn't have to limit yourself purely to the quality of the built in web browser, is what I mean.
(And to be honest, I'm sceptical anyway - people I've known with other smartphones seem to have no trouble doing ordinary web browsing, it's only the dirt cheap phones that have rubbish built in browsers.)
But I find OperaMini does work very well even on small screens - it does a good job of organising the webpage so it fits properly, and with a reasonable amount of clearly readable text.
Correction to my previous post - apparently that's "any old phone except the iphone", since OperaMini requires Java...
Wait - the iphone doesn't do Java?
Sorry to be questioning, I'm genuinely curious for confirmation here - does the iphone really miss out on this basic feature, or am I misunderstanding?
One sick of phones having nearly-useless web browsers, when the only phone with a useful one is locked.
Any cheap old phone can run Opera Mini. I too was annoyed by the poor quality of my phone's built in browser, but now I never have any trouble. It even has features like server-side downscaling of image sizes, thus reducing download times (and costs) - so even if your phone does have a decent browser, it's worth a look.
All of them except the one you've got on the back burner.
To steal is to acquire without authorization or right. To take, get, or win surreptitiously. To pass off as one's own.
"Take" still implies depriving the original owner of it. "Pass of as one's own" doesn't fit here. Dictionary references for "acquire", or "get, or win surreptitiously"?
It's not theft; it's copyright infringement
So we agree!
Getting your panties into a knot over the moral implications of that is beside the issue entirely. Not all stealing is automatically immoral.
Who's getting their panties into a knot? I think you'll find that those people calling it stealing usually do think it immoral, and just as bad as the other meaning of the word "stealing".
Invest your energy in making it so that it's not the illegal kind of stealing instead of fighting stupid battles that only make you look clueless.
Ah, so we resort to insults! Nowhere have I stated that copyright infringement should be legal. I'm fine with the law as it is - it's you who perhaps should be spending your energy to make copyright infringment legally a form of stealing. And you are the one who started this argument, I merely replied - so don't accuse me of spending too much effort on it.
Your making a moral argument while pretending it's a semantic one is dishonest at best.
But that's exactly what you are doing - trying to make the claim that copyright infringement is stealing, whilst passing this off as a simple semantic issue. I'm saying that copyright infringement is not theft/stealing, either legally, nor is it by definition the same thing as when "theft" is used to refer to physical products. Personally I also agree with the law in that copyright infringement is not as ethically bad as theft, but even if you do think that two things are morally just as bad, that still doesn't make them the same thing.
Do you think I'm committing murder btw, because I so desperately want that beer?
If you disagree with this as well, good. Tell your senator as much. Apple isn't to blame, though.
Does that argument work with Microsoft or the MPAA or RIAA?
Politicians may have created the laws, but it is still reasonable to object to companies who choose to take advantage of such laws. The issue isn't about whether they have a legal "right" to do it - of course they do, that doesn't mean we can't make ethical judgements. Just about every company that appears on a Slashdot is in their legal rights to do what they do. That's not the point though. I don't see why Apple should be different.
There are just too many definitions where 'steal' is valid for the situation to complain
Example?
If you want to say that it's not theft in the traditional sense, you're right.
It's not about in the traditional sense. The point is that even if you do find a definition of "steal" which fits - just because a word has more than one definition doesn't make those definitions the same.
I could murder a beer, but it would be nonsensical to suggest that this was anything to do with the crime of murder. When people refer to copyright infringement as theft or stealing, you can bet that they intend to make the suggestion that they are the same.
It's not a site for tech professionals any more, it's a circlejerk for pirates seeking moral justification from each other. Hey guys, if it's fine to break an IP license for a movie, song or game, it's fine to break it for the Linux kernel as well, since that "property" is no less "imaginary".
Really? Find me a story about a company sending a Cease and Desist against someone who has released tools to remove DRM on GPL software, and I bet that people are mostly against it there too. Or any company suing end users over GPL software, or trying to lobby for new laws, or any other typical RIAA/MPAA tactic?
The only occasions where people support the IP of GPL software tends to apply to closed-sourced companies who violate the GPL, in which case (a) it's a case of playing by their own rules - if they would sue other people for violating their IP, it's unfair for them to violate other people's, and (b) if a company was pirating non-free software for profit, I suspect that there'd be little support for them either.
I'd be more bothered by the fact that you have to give your full address and have it all sent in cleartext.
;)
Well there was http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/secure-https/ , but unfortunately not many people were willing to sign it...
I'm not going to sign this one because I already know what the reply will be.
True (and on the whole, I wish the Government ignored all petitions - many bad laws come from petitions). But petitions have other uses - most notably gaining publicity for the cause.
Of course, that'll never happen if people just say "I'm not signing, there's no point".
By all means, write to your MP instead of not signing a petition. But replying on Slashdot instead of signing a petition won't help at all.
Those CAD operators would always be "noticing" their computers (to use the other poster's terminology) if they were using Macs, if they had to use the Caps Lock key so often...
Then it makes all your alpha characters upper case, as expected.
I meant how does it know if you intend to hit it or not? If it requires you to hold down, whilst it's an interesting idea, I'd find that annoying in itself (it would be "noise", if you like). Can the behaviour be turned off?
That's fine, if true, although I suspect it's not actually true.
- snip long ramble about noise and noticing computers -
Yes, I'm obviously a liar.
I'm still not sure what you mean. If I watch a movie, I watch a movie. I don't notice my computer just because it runs Windows, nor would I if it ran BeOS, AmigaOS or whatever else.
Can you give me specific examples, rather than just making vague claims and labelling anyone who disagrees as a liar?
I realize that no matter *what* you're doing on a computer, and no matter *how* you interact with it, you are giving it detailed instructions, but there's something quite different about using a command-line utility to resize a photo, and dragging a photo to resize it.
???
I'm not Linux a fan, but I figured you didn't need a command line to resize an image. Even Apple finally decided their users were grown up enough to use an OS that had a command line (as opposed to the joke that was classic MacOS) - a command line is there as an additional way to do things, which may be better for some purposes.
Uh, paying for something after stealing it is not right and childish logic at best.
The issue under debate here was not whether it is right, but the claim that supposedly "The content developers/distributors lose sales". And we're not talking about stealing anyway.
Would it be copyright infringement if someone broke into your computer and copied your personal pictures to put online and share with whoever wanted them without your permission?
Yes it would be copyright infringement. And breaking and entering. And possibly other crimes too. I don't see the value in mislabelling crimes ("Someone broke into my house - that's murder!")
Now what if you were a professional photographer? What if you developed training slideshows as your main source of income? Copyright infringement wasn't developed to stop direct theft it was to stop misuse of another competing product.
Yes those are copyright infringement, and copyright infringement was intended to handle these cases. Theft wasn't. Consider how laws against theft existed long before the introduction of copyright laws, but theft still didn't cover cases where someone's music was ripped off, for example.
You choose not to and download the song without paying the artist who created it. For any physical good this would be theft,
For any physical good I downloaded, it would be theft? Maybe once Star Trek replicators are invented, we can revisit this point to see whether you are right or not.
And just a side note, why do they call it identity theft if all they steal is information? Isn't the act of impersonating fraud?
Yes, I agree that identity theft is also a misleading term, and yes, I believe the actual laws broken are usually things like fraud. I would be annoyed at anyone who claimed that, just because we casually called it "identity theft", it was therefore no different to stealing from a shop. They're different things - whether they are just as bad, or one is worse than another, is a matter to debate.
With that logic, black men and women still shouldn't have any rights.
He's not saying that the majority should decide the law - but that there are problems if you bring in a law against what a large proportion of the population is doing. I don't see that applies to rights of black people.
Cut of the Internet connection of 10% of the population?
There are WAY more people who go above speed limits than there are file sharers.
Citation needed? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's not obvious to me. Everyone I know happily admits to copying in one form or another (if they don't download, it's only because they've yet to get broadband). I don't know anyone who ignores speed limits.