I'd gladly block all email coming from an overseas country which does not respect the US do-not-spam list. I don't get any important email from outside the US anyway.
You're right. The answer is not a technological solution, the answer is a contractual one. Spammers are using the property of the ISPs. They are not permitted to use that property without the permission of the ISPs. Therefore it should be the duty of the ISPs to police spam, not the duty of the government.
You're confusing freedom of speech with freedom of the press. Hustler is press.
And email isn't?
Hustler Magazine v. Falwell was about freedom of speech. The question presented was "Does the First Amendment's freedom of speech protection extend to the making of patently offensive statements about public figures, resulting perhaps in their suffering emotional distress?" Emphasis mine, obviously.
Learn something about the law before you make idiotic statements. The First Amendment protects commercial speech as well as non-commercial speech, it just happens to protect commercial speech less than non-commercial speech.
You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean.
No I didn't. I made a warranted assumption (based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics) that using that energy is not clean.
You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it.
But that's what they want to do with this guy's project is the former.
No, the government wants to force him not to distribute it. If they merely refrained from distributing it themselves, he would still distribute it.
The analogy still fits because like the rootkits & other scripts, the project described in the article drastically reduces the skill & time needed to find vulnerabilities.
No, it doesn't. Like I said, the rootkits are tools, this is merely information, or I'll even give you instructions. The rootkits are harder to use for good than for bad. I think it's a bad analogy. But in any case, like I said, it should be legal to distribute them as well.
this sort of thing would be great for those whose job it is to secure these locations.
Maybe if it's distributed as source code. I still think this guy's project is more useful, and less harmful.
I think there would be more people wanting to get at a tool & data collection like this for mischievious purposes than those who would use it for positive reasons.
I definately think there are vastly more people who would want to use this information for good than for bad. The only place I hesistate is when I ask myself whether the amount of bad those few people could do greatly outweighs the amount of good those many people could do. I think in this particular case that's untrue.
Of the truly dangerous uses, the only one I can imagine is cutting power lines. And if that information was already public already, I don't see how it could be that difficult to compile it again, for a particular area. And that information, about the vulnerabilities of the power lines where I live, is something I definately feel I have a right to not have censored. It's also something that the local governmental departments should know, the local private hospitals should know, etc.
So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce?
No. I'm taxing pollution to simplify the job for the judges so they don't have to handle millions of class-action lawsuits.
Well, where's the money going to go?
We could reduce income taxes.
Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug.
I don't think there's a cause and effect relationship there.
A lot of countries wouldn't go along with that, especially if they can gain an economic advantage through lower taxation.
Well if those countries want to destroy the earth then I guess we'll have to destroy them before they get the chance, eh?
Copying unix source code is only one of the many things which is regulated by copyright law. Clearly RMS would like to severely change copyright law, especially with regard to software and software documentation, but it's also clear that he wouldn't want to eliminate it completely. The GPL, the GFDL, and the copyright of the GPL itself all impose restrictions beyond that which would be caused by the elimination of copyright. If RMS really believed in the elimination of copyright these licenses would all look more like this.
Not necessarily. With cheaper energy you can afford to create more efficient products.
the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power.
I'm not sure the current power grid would be the best way to distribute energy any more. Transportation costs would drop to nearly nothing, and I think I'd personally rather pick up my energy already stored and than deal with the monopoly electric company.
Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
Food supply too. Hydroponics will be virtually free. And I read somewhere that using expensive growlights one can grow plants at extremely fast rates. We might not even need to buy fruits and vegetables at the store any more. We could grow our own organically in our backyard greenhouse.
many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight
I see no reason that the cost of plane flights wouldn't drop as well. Might take a while, since more pilots would have to be trained and more planes would have to be built, but a lot of the cost is in the fuel.
First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.
No way. If the cost of power goes down, the cost of storage and distribution goes down too. In the short run, cheaper yet less efficient methods of energy distribution can be used. In the long run, the costs of building new infrastructure falls.
the feds would be in charge of coordinating it and providing the data as needed to the local officials that need it as well as working on the major sites.
Which is complete bullshit. The feds don't have any right to tell local officials which information they're allowed to have and which they aren't. It also will be far too time consuming and expensive to cut through all the red tape.
my guess is that local municipalities probably already have some of this information (and were probably the source of it), so access to the entire thing is not needed.
If it's like most GIS information, in many cases the local governmental agencies have to buy it just like everyone else. Plus the information provided here has been compiled and analyzed.
allowing a local emergency management offical access to data that is pertinant to their area of responsibility is one thing. publishing a nice big picture view with easy to use drill down to the details so that any tom, dick or harry can use it for any purpose, is irresponsible.
We disagree. Yes, there are potential negatives, but in this case I think the potential positives outweigh them.
it would be like distributing a nice gui that can launch the latest & greatest exploits against a wide number of services for script kiddies to use.
Why do you have to produce an analogy rather than argue on the merits of your argument on the actual situation? Distributing a gui that can launch exploits is much different from distributing the information which could be used to create that information. Either way, that shouldn't be illegal either.
Your address is probably in some public domain data repository, but you don't want to put it in your/. sig line, now do you?
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it. Not putting my address in my sig is the former. The government wants to do the latter.
Stallman doesn't think copyright is immoral. The GPL is copyrighted.
Re:Was this a joke?
on
Open Source Law
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The question is whether their copyright survives the process of being adopted by governmental entities
Sort of, but not exactly. The court agrees that their copyright survives the process of being adopted by government entities. However, it also becomes an uncopyrightable fact, in its entirety and without modification.
It's kind of an anomoly of copyright law. If two people independently come up with the exact same poem (for instance), they both have independent copyrights on the exact same text. This ruling creates something similar. As law, it is public domain, but as model codes, the copyright stands.
Someone should slip the source code for Linux in one of those mamoth appropriation bills Congress passes right before the end of session.
Wouldn't work. The work would be public domain as law, but it would be copyrighted as code. When you compile, you'd still be creating a derivative work, and would still be violating the copyright.
Yet. Classifying the title and subject matter of sensitive information has been done in the past. Obviously with the publicity surrounding Gorman's work, it would be difficult to classify in this manner at this point.
So like I said, this information will not be classified. Not yet, not ever.
How do you know what Sean Gorman wants?
Beause Sean Gorman himself says he wants to graduate with his degree, publish and continue academic research in the article:
I don't see where it says he wants to continue academic research. It looks to me like he wants to get a job (hence the "get hired" quote).
But what happens when a terrorist group that specializes in coordinated, synchronized attacks kills a key bit of infrastructure at the same time they kill a lot of people? A piece of infrastructure that the emergency responders depend on?
You don't need this kind of document to do that. Emergency response is local, not national.
Also, consider what happens in New York every time there's a blackout -- massive looting.
Is there really? I'd imagine they would have solved that problem by now.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay for spam: indirectly through my ISP's fees
Are you implying that none of your upstream ISPs have spammers as their downstream customers?
You pay indirectly for the ads which are sent to you on television, as well, through higher product costs. Should we ban that too?
Hint to advertisers: your First Amendment would not be abridged. Rent a billboard. Buy a newspaper ad. Set up a website.
Just because there are alternative methods of communication doesn't mean that your First Amendment rights aren't being abridged.
Use your own damn money to push your agenda--don't waste mine.
All the spammers which are spamming legally already are using their own damn money to push their agenda. Email accounts cost money, after all.
I'd gladly block all email coming from an overseas country which does not respect the US do-not-spam list. I don't get any important email from outside the US anyway.
You're right. The answer is not a technological solution, the answer is a contractual one. Spammers are using the property of the ISPs. They are not permitted to use that property without the permission of the ISPs. Therefore it should be the duty of the ISPs to police spam, not the duty of the government.
You're confusing freedom of speech with freedom of the press. Hustler is press.
And email isn't?
Hustler Magazine v. Falwell was about freedom of speech. The question presented was "Does the First Amendment's freedom of speech protection extend to the making of patently offensive statements about public figures, resulting perhaps in their suffering emotional distress?" Emphasis mine, obviously.
Learn something about the law before you make idiotic statements. The First Amendment protects commercial speech as well as non-commercial speech, it just happens to protect commercial speech less than non-commercial speech.
Spam is commercial speech, and as such is denied first amendment protections.
Yeah, cause Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine were completely non-commercial.
Moreover, it is not the content of the message that is the issue, it is the method of delivery that is being regulated.
I thought you said spam was only commercial speech. Sounds like you're restricting certain content, not just methods.
I cannot stand by your window with a bullhorn and shout my (otherwise protected) political opinions if you do not want me to
And yet, ironically, political opinions are generally restricted from spam laws.
...than a federal law.
You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean.
No I didn't. I made a warranted assumption (based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics) that using that energy is not clean.
You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.
Nuh uh. :)
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it.
But that's what they want to do with this guy's project is the former.
No, the government wants to force him not to distribute it. If they merely refrained from distributing it themselves, he would still distribute it.
The analogy still fits because like the rootkits & other scripts, the project described in the article drastically reduces the skill & time needed to find vulnerabilities.
No, it doesn't. Like I said, the rootkits are tools, this is merely information, or I'll even give you instructions. The rootkits are harder to use for good than for bad. I think it's a bad analogy. But in any case, like I said, it should be legal to distribute them as well.
this sort of thing would be great for those whose job it is to secure these locations.
Maybe if it's distributed as source code. I still think this guy's project is more useful, and less harmful.
I think there would be more people wanting to get at a tool & data collection like this for mischievious purposes than those who would use it for positive reasons.
I definately think there are vastly more people who would want to use this information for good than for bad. The only place I hesistate is when I ask myself whether the amount of bad those few people could do greatly outweighs the amount of good those many people could do. I think in this particular case that's untrue.
Of the truly dangerous uses, the only one I can imagine is cutting power lines. And if that information was already public already, I don't see how it could be that difficult to compile it again, for a particular area. And that information, about the vulnerabilities of the power lines where I live, is something I definately feel I have a right to not have censored. It's also something that the local governmental departments should know, the local private hospitals should know, etc.
After all, just like the Slashdot ad says, Oracle makes laptops unbreakable.
Does wanting to confiscate his laptop sound like a reaction to something which is unimportant?
No, but it might very well be trivial.
So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce?
No. I'm taxing pollution to simplify the job for the judges so they don't have to handle millions of class-action lawsuits.
Well, where's the money going to go?
We could reduce income taxes.
Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug.
I don't think there's a cause and effect relationship there.
A lot of countries wouldn't go along with that, especially if they can gain an economic advantage through lower taxation.
Well if those countries want to destroy the earth then I guess we'll have to destroy them before they get the chance, eh?
Copying unix source code is only one of the many things which is regulated by copyright law. Clearly RMS would like to severely change copyright law, especially with regard to software and software documentation, but it's also clear that he wouldn't want to eliminate it completely. The GPL, the GFDL, and the copyright of the GPL itself all impose restrictions beyond that which would be caused by the elimination of copyright. If RMS really believed in the elimination of copyright these licenses would all look more like this.
Appliances will be less efficient.
Not necessarily. With cheaper energy you can afford to create more efficient products.
the power grid must be expanded to carry the increase volume of power.
I'm not sure the current power grid would be the best way to distribute energy any more. Transportation costs would drop to nearly nothing, and I think I'd personally rather pick up my energy already stored and than deal with the monopoly electric company.
Less international conflict based on water supply - because desalination plants will be much cheaper to operate.
Food supply too. Hydroponics will be virtually free. And I read somewhere that using expensive growlights one can grow plants at extremely fast rates. We might not even need to buy fruits and vegetables at the store any more. We could grow our own organically in our backyard greenhouse.
many would choose a cheap two-day sea trip to cross the sea over an expensive and crowded plane flight
I see no reason that the cost of plane flights wouldn't drop as well. Might take a while, since more pilots would have to be trained and more planes would have to be built, but a lot of the cost is in the fuel.
This is starting to sound great.
First, it turns out that the cost of electric at the wall-socket is not dominated by the cost of production, but by the cost of the power grid. If the power were completely free, cost/kW-h at the home would only go down by about 50 percent.
No way. If the cost of power goes down, the cost of storage and distribution goes down too. In the short run, cheaper yet less efficient methods of energy distribution can be used. In the long run, the costs of building new infrastructure falls.
So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom?
Taxation.
the feds would be in charge of coordinating it and providing the data as needed to the local officials that need it as well as working on the major sites.
Which is complete bullshit. The feds don't have any right to tell local officials which information they're allowed to have and which they aren't. It also will be far too time consuming and expensive to cut through all the red tape.
my guess is that local municipalities probably already have some of this information (and were probably the source of it), so access to the entire thing is not needed.
If it's like most GIS information, in many cases the local governmental agencies have to buy it just like everyone else. Plus the information provided here has been compiled and analyzed.
allowing a local emergency management offical access to data that is pertinant to their area of responsibility is one thing. publishing a nice big picture view with easy to use drill down to the details so that any tom, dick or harry can use it for any purpose, is irresponsible.
We disagree. Yes, there are potential negatives, but in this case I think the potential positives outweigh them.
it would be like distributing a nice gui that can launch the latest & greatest exploits against a wide number of services for script kiddies to use.
Why do you have to produce an analogy rather than argue on the merits of your argument on the actual situation? Distributing a gui that can launch exploits is much different from distributing the information which could be used to create that information. Either way, that shouldn't be illegal either.
Your address is probably in some public domain data repository, but you don't want to put it in your /. sig line, now do you?
There's a big difference between refraining from distributing information and making it illegal to distribute it. Not putting my address in my sig is the former. The government wants to do the latter.
Stallman doesn't think copyright is immoral. The GPL is copyrighted.
The question is whether their copyright survives the process of being adopted by governmental entities
Sort of, but not exactly. The court agrees that their copyright survives the process of being adopted by government entities. However, it also becomes an uncopyrightable fact, in its entirety and without modification.
It's kind of an anomoly of copyright law. If two people independently come up with the exact same poem (for instance), they both have independent copyrights on the exact same text. This ruling creates something similar. As law, it is public domain, but as model codes, the copyright stands.
Someone should slip the source code for Linux in one of those mamoth appropriation bills Congress passes right before the end of session.
Wouldn't work. The work would be public domain as law, but it would be copyrighted as code. When you compile, you'd still be creating a derivative work, and would still be violating the copyright.
Thank you for your insightful input.
I'd tell 'em to classify it all they want, just looks BETTER on the resume...
No, we most certainly didn't.
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:mkRx2aiBJC0J: www.cybersource.com.au/users/conz/linux_vs_sco_mat rix.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Yet. Classifying the title and subject matter of sensitive information has been done in the past. Obviously with the publicity surrounding Gorman's work, it would be difficult to classify in this manner at this point.
So like I said, this information will not be classified. Not yet, not ever.
How do you know what Sean Gorman wants?
Beause Sean Gorman himself says he wants to graduate with his degree, publish and continue academic research in the article:
I don't see where it says he wants to continue academic research. It looks to me like he wants to get a job (hence the "get hired" quote).
But what happens when a terrorist group that specializes in coordinated, synchronized attacks kills a key bit of infrastructure at the same time they kill a lot of people? A piece of infrastructure that the emergency responders depend on?
You don't need this kind of document to do that. Emergency response is local, not national.
Also, consider what happens in New York every time there's a blackout -- massive looting.
Is there really? I'd imagine they would have solved that problem by now.