When you put something on the internet, you are intentionally making it available for anyone to access and do pretty much whatever they want with it.
Unfortunately, while you may WISH this to be the case, this is not what the law says. Your wishful thinking doesn't make your statement true. You've basically invented your theory out of whole cloth, or, put another way, pulled it out of your ass.
It seems a stretch to argue that Google is providing this service for financial gain. For starters, when a user pulls up a Google cached page, they don't get Google's ads on that page.
Nonsense. Google gains by drawing attention to itself and its other offerings. Let me ask you this simple question: if google doesn't gain financially, even if indirectly, why do they do it? Goodwill? Poppycock.
They get, as you noted, the actual site as it was when Google cached it, complete with that site's ads, if there are any.
Not really. For, as you mentioned in your next statement, the cached site loses its visual look and feel, including often graphics which can be ads. At the very least, it could be seen as damaging the site.
But, forget that - the real issue is control. You are basically saying that GOOGLE has the right to display YOUR content as GOOGLE sees fit. Regardless of whether you think google's cacheing of entire web pages is good, bad, or indifferent for web sites on the whole, the decision of whether to allow this should be only with the web sites and the DEFAULT situation, therefore, should be "NO." OF COURSE multi-billion dollar companies like yahoo have the necessary soapbox and budget to convince people to put "CACHEME=YES" tags.
I remind you, for example, that no-cache tags are followed only as a courtesy. According to this ruling, there is no particular reason (as I understand it) that a search engine or anybody else would need to honor this ("oh - we don't understand that particular nocache tag - for us not to cache you, you need to use the NoCacheXYZ tag").
Finally, your argument about "the site being down" holds no water. Often, the site is down BECAUSE THE MAINTAINER WANTS TO BRING IT DOWN. This should be the site owner's right. In the google cache situation, the owner effectively loses that right. Again, if you think that having a cache of your site for when your site is unavailable is wonderful, then agree with google to have a CACHEME=YES tag. It's a win-win and mutually agreed upon contract at that point.
In other news, explain to me again why if this is fair use, why i can't make photocopies of every book in the bookstore (for example, without photos) and offer them for free reading in my coffeeshop? remember, we're not talking about one or two books for the interested reader - we're talking about a basically free borders or barnes and noble. you'd be free to read the entire book at your leisure - for books consisting mostly of text, you'd be basically getting the whole thing free. and, if you buy some coffee, that's great too. look - i know real world analogies to the internet don't often make sense, but in this case i think my giant coffee shop isnt too far off.
Intellectually, I don't like this ruling one bit. "Fair Use" is broadly supposed to have minimal to nil financial effects on the copyrightholder and in general the "fair user" is doing the using for personal reasons. Google's cache is basically a large-scale financial transfer from the copyrightholders (who serve to benefit from the ads they serve and other interaction they get from end-users visitng their site) to google, who benefits directly by keeping people longer on google's site and thus, basically, shucks them more ads. Rememeber folks, in terms of the cache here, we're referring to google's ability to serve content IN ITS ENTIRETY to end-users - we're not talking about those tiny snippets needed to make search engine results useful.
Those of you who do the "yesbutNOCACHEtag" dance have got it backwards to: it's not the responsibility of the copyrightholder to sing to the tune of whatever the latest fad is. Rather, it's the other way around - google should convince people that it's in their interest to put a "CACHEME!" tag.
How is obeying the laws of China when trying to do business in China "doing evil"?
Look, folks! It's one of those caricature liberal moral relativists that geniuses like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are always railing against. As much as I thought Rush and Ann were idiots (and, believe me, I still do), I give them a smidgen more respect today since I would never have thought that anybody who wrote nonsense such as you did (above) actually existed.
Unless you're just trolling, which seems equally likely.
Of course, you were somehow marked "insightful", in yet another slashdot coup.
That's not what I'm saying at all. Have you ever tried to filter the Internet? It CAN'T be done effectively.
It doesn't have to be done effectively. If only 20% of people who try to look up banned stuff get taken away to prison - are you going to bother trying? The filterers only have to be lucky once - you'd have to be lucky EVERY TIME.
Make a list of a dozen people you know that are over the age of 20 or so.
Now, look at your list. How many of those are college educated?
If you're like most people here, probably at least half of those people are college educated.
Whatever you think of the Book "The Bell Curve" on race and IQ, the authors make this interesting point: had you chosen 12 people at random in the USA (and the ratios in europe and elsewhere are doubtlessly in the same general ballpark), the change that 6 of them would be college educated is something like 1 in 5,000. The change that all 12 of them would be would be like 1 in a million.
So, while you may wonder why it is that there are so many people who don't subscribe to evolution, just remember that most people are not like you. Keep that in mind while being "shocked" at the UK's creationists, or what have you.
I scoff at Bill Gates' "efforts" to reduce spam. What has he done precisely?
wow. if ever a post gave me the image of a comic-book-guy type fatass sitting behind his PC playing armchair expert, it's yours. and that says a lot, given that this is slashdot.
Is this Irony Day on Slashdot, where we see copyright infringement being rightly condemned, instead of the usual "wink-wink P2P has alternative uses" and usual piracy-justifying abuse of economic "logic" that would put most creationism abuses of "science" to shame? Did I miss the memo?
utter rubbish. Go back to Economics 101, do not pass go..
First, the cost is not "near zero." Rather, the MARGINAL cost of production of goods such as digital music is "near zero."
There is a BIG difference between the two....
however, what is more true is that the model of low marginal cost of production applies for virtually ALL industries from CPUs to newspapers to what-have-you and yet we far more rarely see the idiot economic justifications for piracy/theft in those areas that we see for music. i mean - if it basically doesnt cost AMD anything to build the 10,000,000 th CPU (as is the case), shouldnt it be ok to steal one and maybe mail them a dollar or two for the actual marginal cost? nobody but the insane would think that that makes economic sense, and yet the same logic is routinely heard here when it applies to music..
I own TWO ipods, not just one. I paid for two. That they sit on my girlfriend's side of the bed is a technicality.
You claim that the fact that "i don't appear to like ipods" is a reason for marking me a troll. wow. that is just idiotic.
virtually every other gadget in my collection i can get working within a half hour or so. i certainly expect an end-user, ease-of-use focused music player to be the same. i found the ipod software clunky and counterintuitive, and the ui marginal at best. i dont understand how this honest experience qualifies as s troll. it might be counter to your own experience. but it is certainly not a troll.
i dont see ipods in major cities. again, this is my personal observation. again, certainly not a troll. I mean.. troll for what? people telling me "but i live in city Y and I do see ipods?"
I dont finish with a ranting observation. i finish with a summary. the summary is that, based on my experiences, i dont find the ipod useful, and in general there are better alternatives out there.
while I thank you for writing a detailed response, you do not appear in any way to have justified the troll rating. at all. zero. nil.
Rather, you have just emphasized the idiot belief on slashdot that 'troll' is shorthand for 'you disagree with my view on this particular product.' in fact, you pretty much come out and say this. pathetic.
explain to me again why this device is so special?
i own two of these things by proxy - i bought my girlfriend one of the 4g variety and of the tiny variety in japan about a year ago (she asked, i paid). i am a busy guy generally and quite technologically adept (I run a software company, for god's sake), but spent about half an hour fumbling with the software and, while i got some of her music loaded on them, in general found the whole experience to be poor. the 4g unit's metal casing is basically designed to scratch and the UI is.. well, pretty junky. these things mostly just sit in the shelf.
we spend our time between london, new york, and tokyo... which are, at least in theory, "cool" cities. yet, despite the theoretical ubiquitousness of these things, i rarely see them out there on the field in practice. i do see a lot of people giving steve jobs credit for a device that he markets, but did not invent. i do see a lot of magazines and television shows providing free advertising for this thing. so, i am not surprised that the sales are good (phenomenal, even). I just dont see a particularly special piece of hardware or software. as somebody else has mentioned, there are a number of clones that just seem to be much better at a much better pricepoint. indeed, i felt like a complete tool going to the fancy apple/ipod displays around akihabara paying a high markup for marketing fluff while passing over a number of quite nice units for sale elsewhere.
Do the "editors" even try to pretend that these aren't blatent ads any more?
The real irony here is that one of the core mantras of a lot of slashdotters is that microsoft is objectively inferior and that it is basically gliding on the fact that it has a giant userbase that is self-reinforcing. i fail to see how this criticism would not apply equally to slashdot at this point.
Now the question is, why not the death?
If they are dead they cannot make any more IP and hence laws of that natue should not be used.
Because it would lead to age discrimination and overall unnecessary risk for purblishers. Publishers would not sign up old artists as they would run a disproportionate risk of those artists dropping dead and the publisher's complete business disappearing instantly.
There was a time when you could have said the same thing about the idea that it was wrong for white people to own black people. In other words, "it's always been that way" is never adequate justification for a particular policy
just because YOU are ignorant of the mountains of academic theory and experiment and historical evidence that supports the basic idea of having IP regulation mechanisms for a healthy economy doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And please do remember, just like there is a nobel prize waiting if somebody manages to disprove evolution (or prove creatioism.. whatever). there is certainly a nobel prize in economics waiting for somebody who can provide a compelling working framework for a modern economy to function and have the necessary incentives in place for a similarly vibrant econmic system without IP regulations.
Hint: many have tried, nobody has come close. just like in creationism, there are a few woo-woos with work that has not stood up to serious, honest, intellectual scrutiny.
In short, despite your pathetic appeal to try to compare me to early racists or whatever the hell you were trying to do, you are basically a creationist, economically speaking.
A philosophical/political stance of being against all forms of intellectual property is basically an analog of Creationism. It will get you some press and generate some internet flamewars, but the idea of doing away with the idea of intellectual property alltogether does not pass even the most cursory "smell" test of history, economics, or public policy, either in theory or in practical experience.
However, a much more reasonable and economically sound stance is to make one case or another for a normalization / rethinking or protection terms and conditions. The most obvious candidate for this, as far as the US is concerned, is the ever-lengthening copyright duration (it stands to note that the "around 20 year" length for patents is actually pretty good on average - it can be improved by specifically making it more or less for certain industries or types of inventions, but as a mean figure it's actually quite good in terms of stimulating inonvation and econommic activity).
I personally tend to think that 40 years from initial publication, irrespective of the death or lack thereof of the author, is a reasonable copyright duration for most works.
Those of you bragging about your 'anonmous proxies' just dont get it. If you're smart enough to know what an anonymizing proxy is, then the warning on the website was not directed at you.
For the 1000000th time, people: ANTI PIRACY MEASURES ARE ABOUT REDUCING THE RATE OF PIRACY, NOT ABOUT REDUCING IT ABSOLUTELY IN ONE FELL SWOOP. The most technologically savvy pirates will likely be the last (or least likely) to fall, but if a relativey simple measure such as grokster's (however noble or ig the intentions might be) might reduce P2P use by a few people, then some measure of success has been achieved. You might argue that while 100 people fewer might use P2P because of this, 1000 new ones might have signed up anyway, but this is irrelevant to the basic argument, which is that this is a war of attrition, and so both sides use weapons of attrition meant to wear down the other side, not win in one blast
Irrensponsible Tabloid Journalism on Slashdot?
on
Google PC to Hit Walmart?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You see, the subject matter of my post is not a sensationalistic troll because of the trailing question mark.
The people who took advantage of this loophole did so with a clear economic motive. This is because the loophole is used basically to a) install spysherriff, a bogus anti-spyware program and try to get the user to pay for it with a credit card b) install surfsidekick and other idiot spyware programs c) install a spam sender, in order to make a few more billionths of a cent.
In other words, whatever asshat took advantage of this loophole did so because he thought he could make a buck. If his goal was simply to bring Windows to its knees, cause havoc, or make a political/economic statement of some sort, he would have chosen something else. Wiping out My Documents of all the infected machines, for example.
Whoever did this is obviously deluded. While some money will of course ultimately flow from this nonsense to the "see no evil" people who are the beneficiaries of spamvertisements, spyvertisements and so forth, the actual exploiter basically has little to know chance of getting it (even if he is in Russia, as I'd suspect is a good bet) as his affiliate commission links will be tracked, as will wherever the hell that credit card box for SpySherriff was pointing to and so forth.
So we have somebody smart enough (and make no mistake, it takes some smarts) to either discover or be in a small clique of people discovering a quite obscure loophole (it must be obscure, given just how old the affected.dll is), but have ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CLUE how to go about exploiting it other than in the most juvenile and unlikely way to fail imaginable. Furthermore, even though it is likely to fail, the guy has shown himself to basically be a psychopath, with little to no concern about the hundreds of thousands of hours (read: PEOPLE-LIFE-EQUIVALENTS) that will be spent agonizing over and fixing this.
Whoever that person is, they are human filth. But, there's a lot of human filth out there. The sad thing is that this person obviously has potential to do so much more but simply pisses it away intead.
Pathetic.
computer systems should not be released until they pass some theoretical threshold of security
and if the above is not done, then the authors of said systems shall be held (financially? criminally?) liable.
In other words, you have just basically killed off free (both as in beer and as in speech) software as we know it.
Not to mention about the fact that we're talking about an exploit in an older DLL that has gone unnoticed for years. Exactly how many years until your theoretical notion of "reasonably" safe is met? If you dont think (OS of your choice) has similar weaknesses, you are deluding yourself. And so what if it 'affects only one user, not the whole system?' To that user, that IS his world.
I'm surprised at this point that nobody's mentioned just how bizzare the topic is in some sense.
I mean, Securing IM is a legitimate and important thing for corporate IT departments and people with real responsibilities to concern themselves with.
On the other hand, "Securing P2P" is basically just another step forward in the arms race between those who would choose to flaunt copyright laws and those trying, however vainly, to stop them. Even if you would try to make the rather weak case that P2P has legitimate uses in some legitimate businesses somewhere, you'd be hard pressed to extend that into why, exactly, that your mythic "Linux Distribution ISOs" need to be encrypted.
(PS - try this at home, kids! Boot up eMule and do a search for "Linux." Amazingly, even under this keyword, at least 9 out of 10 search results when I tried this were actually PIRATED STUFF RELATED TO LINUX!) (in other words, manuals, videos, etc that are in no way under the GPL).)
The only thing inonsistent is that you accuse me of making unsupported statements right after you make the mother of them.
You accuse me of being a shill and then rant how it is I with the ad hominems. You can go fuck yourself, you simpleminded idiot. I have karma to burn. I actually provide decent arguments in most of my posts (READ my post history - go on.. do it!) instead of simply parroting the simpleminded self-serving bullshit of many slashdotters I actually have the balls (and the education, I might add) to be intellectually honest and confront the issues from a perspective that isn't all about (gasp) simply justifying my own P2p use by any means possible.
Here's another one for you, fuckwad:
"Human Motivation and Human Progress are inexorably linked."
You need to balance this against your "sharing" argument. Actually, it would almost be funny, if it wasn't so tragic, that one of your main heroes (if you've heard of him), Lessig, actually wrote a book called "Tragedy of the Commons" whose title alludes to the fact that SHARING AND HUMAN PROGRESS ARE *NOT* "obviously" linked in all situations. I hate to break this to your overinflated ego, but your fucking simpleminded idiot logic and pleasant little hallmark greeting of a statement does NOT, in fact, trump decades of SOLID economic study and understanding which has concluded in no uncertain terms that intellectual property laws, while certainly they have been abused at times and need fine tuning, HAVE contributed to the advancement of human progress. All you have to do is take look at the rate of innovation of X in (ANY COUNTRY WITH STRONG IP LAWS) compared to (ANY COUNTRY WITHOUT STRONG IP LAWS). From medicine to industrial development to process devleopment to chemicals to automobiles to transport to even fucking academic research, the countries that have had IP laws to encourage innovation and promote the useful arts have made more innovations and their citizens have been, over time, the beneficiaries. I am not going to argue this basic point of economics with you, since to anybody who has ANY experience with this this is as basic as the basic facts of evolution to the biologists while you are living in fucking woo-woo creationism land.
SHAME SHAME and TRIPLE SHAME to whoever modded this ABSOLUTE NONSENSE as "Insightful".
Statements such as these:
Names don't matter, it is all about training and then familiarity
it gets down to user training
are not just "not insightful", they are so 180 degrees, 100% wrong the fact that they would even be modded as anything close to "insightful" brings more disrepute than usual to slashdot.
Ok, now that I've raised the alarm, let me justify it.
First of all, USABILITY MATTERS. This is no longer 1986, or 1994 for that matter. We know now that the usability of a system is a key to its successful deployment.
Second, the opposite of usability is "that which needs training or re-learning when it shouldn't."
A pilot needs training to fly a 747. However, Boeing works damned hard and invests millions of dollars to make the systems as intuitive and usable as possible nevertheless, as this will lead to:
fewer accidents
fewer training and re-training costs for the airlines, their customers
better day to day operation
Nobody at boeing says "the pilots are professionals. let's name the #3 engine Hi pressure bleed air valve malfunction switch "Xooomer". for that matter, let's give their FMS a CLI, since a well trained pilot can be faster with this than with a modal, menu-based FMS."
These basic, BASIC principles of design are well known in virtually all fields of engineering. And, I (following in the footsteps of tongue-in-cheek works like the unix haters handbook) have been banging this drum in the linux world since at least 1995. And yet, just as it seems that a little light is shining through, in the form of a slashdot headline that actually says (gasp) intelligent things about usability, we open up the comments to find the same old nonsense from users that "it's not a usability problem, it's a training issue" being modded +5 insightful, which basically tells me that a lot of people still aren't getting it.
#1: Calling this amphiboly is inappropriate because Sharing, copying, and Human Advancement ARE as logically linked as they are intuitively. There is no ambiguity in his statement.
#2: The dead give-away that you are a shill:Your blind assertions without any evidence to back up your statements.
You fucking idiot. Couldn't even be consistent for two sentences.
the EU has been going away from an offensive army a long time ago and formed towards defensive and humanistic purposes.
Yes, Europe now prefers to cause ruin and misery throughout the developing world via its common agicultral policies and willful statist blindness rather than the good old american way.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, while you may WISH this to be the case, this is not what the law says. Your wishful thinking doesn't make your statement true. You've basically invented your theory out of whole cloth, or, put another way, pulled it out of your ass.
Nonsense. Google gains by drawing attention to itself and its other offerings. Let me ask you this simple question: if google doesn't gain financially, even if indirectly, why do they do it? Goodwill? Poppycock.
They get, as you noted, the actual site as it was when Google cached it, complete with that site's ads, if there are any.
Not really. For, as you mentioned in your next statement, the cached site loses its visual look and feel, including often graphics which can be ads. At the very least, it could be seen as damaging the site.
But, forget that - the real issue is control. You are basically saying that GOOGLE has the right to display YOUR content as GOOGLE sees fit. Regardless of whether you think google's cacheing of entire web pages is good, bad, or indifferent for web sites on the whole, the decision of whether to allow this should be only with the web sites and the DEFAULT situation, therefore, should be "NO." OF COURSE multi-billion dollar companies like yahoo have the necessary soapbox and budget to convince people to put "CACHEME=YES" tags.
I remind you, for example, that no-cache tags are followed only as a courtesy. According to this ruling, there is no particular reason (as I understand it) that a search engine or anybody else would need to honor this ("oh - we don't understand that particular nocache tag - for us not to cache you, you need to use the NoCacheXYZ tag").
Finally, your argument about "the site being down" holds no water. Often, the site is down BECAUSE THE MAINTAINER WANTS TO BRING IT DOWN. This should be the site owner's right. In the google cache situation, the owner effectively loses that right. Again, if you think that having a cache of your site for when your site is unavailable is wonderful, then agree with google to have a CACHEME=YES tag. It's a win-win and mutually agreed upon contract at that point.
In other news, explain to me again why if this is fair use, why i can't make photocopies of every book in the bookstore (for example, without photos) and offer them for free reading in my coffeeshop? remember, we're not talking about one or two books for the interested reader - we're talking about a basically free borders or barnes and noble. you'd be free to read the entire book at your leisure - for books consisting mostly of text, you'd be basically getting the whole thing free. and, if you buy some coffee, that's great too. look - i know real world analogies to the internet don't often make sense, but in this case i think my giant coffee shop isnt too far off.
Those of you who do the "yesbutNOCACHEtag" dance have got it backwards to: it's not the responsibility of the copyrightholder to sing to the tune of whatever the latest fad is. Rather, it's the other way around - google should convince people that it's in their interest to put a "CACHEME!" tag.
Look, folks! It's one of those caricature liberal moral relativists that geniuses like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are always railing against. As much as I thought Rush and Ann were idiots (and, believe me, I still do), I give them a smidgen more respect today since I would never have thought that anybody who wrote nonsense such as you did (above) actually existed.
Unless you're just trolling, which seems equally likely.
Of course, you were somehow marked "insightful", in yet another slashdot coup.
It doesn't have to be done effectively. If only 20% of people who try to look up banned stuff get taken away to prison - are you going to bother trying? The filterers only have to be lucky once - you'd have to be lucky EVERY TIME.
Now, look at your list. How many of those are college educated?
If you're like most people here, probably at least half of those people are college educated.
Whatever you think of the Book "The Bell Curve" on race and IQ, the authors make this interesting point: had you chosen 12 people at random in the USA (and the ratios in europe and elsewhere are doubtlessly in the same general ballpark), the change that 6 of them would be college educated is something like 1 in 5,000. The change that all 12 of them would be would be like 1 in a million.
So, while you may wonder why it is that there are so many people who don't subscribe to evolution, just remember that most people are not like you. Keep that in mind while being "shocked" at the UK's creationists, or what have you.
wow. if ever a post gave me the image of a comic-book-guy type fatass sitting behind his PC playing armchair expert, it's yours. and that says a lot, given that this is slashdot.
Is this Irony Day on Slashdot, where we see copyright infringement being rightly condemned, instead of the usual "wink-wink P2P has alternative uses" and usual piracy-justifying abuse of economic "logic" that would put most creationism abuses of "science" to shame? Did I miss the memo?
First, the cost is not "near zero." Rather, the MARGINAL cost of production of goods such as digital music is "near zero."
There is a BIG difference between the two....
however, what is more true is that the model of low marginal cost of production applies for virtually ALL industries from CPUs to newspapers to what-have-you and yet we far more rarely see the idiot economic justifications for piracy/theft in those areas that we see for music. i mean - if it basically doesnt cost AMD anything to build the 10,000,000 th CPU (as is the case), shouldnt it be ok to steal one and maybe mail them a dollar or two for the actual marginal cost? nobody but the insane would think that that makes economic sense, and yet the same logic is routinely heard here when it applies to music..
while I thank you for writing a detailed response, you do not appear in any way to have justified the troll rating. at all. zero. nil.
Rather, you have just emphasized the idiot belief on slashdot that 'troll' is shorthand for 'you disagree with my view on this particular product.' in fact, you pretty much come out and say this. pathetic.
Nice to see slashdot idiocy still in full force. I post a negative experience with an ipod, and i am branded a troll.
i own two of these things by proxy - i bought my girlfriend one of the 4g variety and of the tiny variety in japan about a year ago (she asked, i paid). i am a busy guy generally and quite technologically adept (I run a software company, for god's sake), but spent about half an hour fumbling with the software and, while i got some of her music loaded on them, in general found the whole experience to be poor. the 4g unit's metal casing is basically designed to scratch and the UI is.. well, pretty junky. these things mostly just sit in the shelf.
we spend our time between london, new york, and tokyo... which are, at least in theory, "cool" cities. yet, despite the theoretical ubiquitousness of these things, i rarely see them out there on the field in practice. i do see a lot of people giving steve jobs credit for a device that he markets, but did not invent. i do see a lot of magazines and television shows providing free advertising for this thing. so, i am not surprised that the sales are good (phenomenal, even). I just dont see a particularly special piece of hardware or software. as somebody else has mentioned, there are a number of clones that just seem to be much better at a much better pricepoint. indeed, i felt like a complete tool going to the fancy apple/ipod displays around akihabara paying a high markup for marketing fluff while passing over a number of quite nice units for sale elsewhere.
The real irony here is that one of the core mantras of a lot of slashdotters is that microsoft is objectively inferior and that it is basically gliding on the fact that it has a giant userbase that is self-reinforcing. i fail to see how this criticism would not apply equally to slashdot at this point.
Because it would lead to age discrimination and overall unnecessary risk for purblishers. Publishers would not sign up old artists as they would run a disproportionate risk of those artists dropping dead and the publisher's complete business disappearing instantly.
just because YOU are ignorant of the mountains of academic theory and experiment and historical evidence that supports the basic idea of having IP regulation mechanisms for a healthy economy doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And please do remember, just like there is a nobel prize waiting if somebody manages to disprove evolution (or prove creatioism.. whatever). there is certainly a nobel prize in economics waiting for somebody who can provide a compelling working framework for a modern economy to function and have the necessary incentives in place for a similarly vibrant econmic system without IP regulations.
Hint: many have tried, nobody has come close. just like in creationism, there are a few woo-woos with work that has not stood up to serious, honest, intellectual scrutiny.
In short, despite your pathetic appeal to try to compare me to early racists or whatever the hell you were trying to do, you are basically a creationist, economically speaking.
However, a much more reasonable and economically sound stance is to make one case or another for a normalization / rethinking or protection terms and conditions. The most obvious candidate for this, as far as the US is concerned, is the ever-lengthening copyright duration (it stands to note that the "around 20 year" length for patents is actually pretty good on average - it can be improved by specifically making it more or less for certain industries or types of inventions, but as a mean figure it's actually quite good in terms of stimulating inonvation and econommic activity).
I personally tend to think that 40 years from initial publication, irrespective of the death or lack thereof of the author, is a reasonable copyright duration for most works.
For the 1000000th time, people: ANTI PIRACY MEASURES ARE ABOUT REDUCING THE RATE OF PIRACY, NOT ABOUT REDUCING IT ABSOLUTELY IN ONE FELL SWOOP. The most technologically savvy pirates will likely be the last (or least likely) to fall, but if a relativey simple measure such as grokster's (however noble or ig the intentions might be) might reduce P2P use by a few people, then some measure of success has been achieved. You might argue that while 100 people fewer might use P2P because of this, 1000 new ones might have signed up anyway, but this is irrelevant to the basic argument, which is that this is a war of attrition, and so both sides use weapons of attrition meant to wear down the other side, not win in one blast
Or so goes the "logic."
In other words, whatever asshat took advantage of this loophole did so because he thought he could make a buck. If his goal was simply to bring Windows to its knees, cause havoc, or make a political/economic statement of some sort, he would have chosen something else. Wiping out My Documents of all the infected machines, for example.
Whoever did this is obviously deluded. While some money will of course ultimately flow from this nonsense to the "see no evil" people who are the beneficiaries of spamvertisements, spyvertisements and so forth, the actual exploiter basically has little to know chance of getting it (even if he is in Russia, as I'd suspect is a good bet) as his affiliate commission links will be tracked, as will wherever the hell that credit card box for SpySherriff was pointing to and so forth.
So we have somebody smart enough (and make no mistake, it takes some smarts) to either discover or be in a small clique of people discovering a quite obscure loophole (it must be obscure, given just how old the affected .dll is), but have ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CLUE how to go about exploiting it other than in the most juvenile and unlikely way to fail imaginable. Furthermore, even though it is likely to fail, the guy has shown himself to basically be a psychopath, with little to no concern about the hundreds of thousands of hours (read: PEOPLE-LIFE-EQUIVALENTS) that will be spent agonizing over and fixing this.
Whoever that person is, they are human filth. But, there's a lot of human filth out there. The sad thing is that this person obviously has potential to do so much more but simply pisses it away intead. Pathetic.
- computer systems should not be released until they pass some theoretical threshold of security
- and if the above is not done, then the authors of said systems shall be held (financially? criminally?) liable.
In other words, you have just basically killed off free (both as in beer and as in speech) software as we know it.Not to mention about the fact that we're talking about an exploit in an older DLL that has gone unnoticed for years. Exactly how many years until your theoretical notion of "reasonably" safe is met? If you dont think (OS of your choice) has similar weaknesses, you are deluding yourself. And so what if it 'affects only one user, not the whole system?' To that user, that IS his world.
I mean, Securing IM is a legitimate and important thing for corporate IT departments and people with real responsibilities to concern themselves with.
On the other hand, "Securing P2P" is basically just another step forward in the arms race between those who would choose to flaunt copyright laws and those trying, however vainly, to stop them. Even if you would try to make the rather weak case that P2P has legitimate uses in some legitimate businesses somewhere, you'd be hard pressed to extend that into why, exactly, that your mythic "Linux Distribution ISOs" need to be encrypted.
(PS - try this at home, kids! Boot up eMule and do a search for "Linux." Amazingly, even under this keyword, at least 9 out of 10 search results when I tried this were actually PIRATED STUFF RELATED TO LINUX!) (in other words, manuals, videos, etc that are in no way under the GPL).)
You accuse me of being a shill and then rant how it is I with the ad hominems. You can go fuck yourself, you simpleminded idiot. I have karma to burn. I actually provide decent arguments in most of my posts (READ my post history - go on.. do it!) instead of simply parroting the simpleminded self-serving bullshit of many slashdotters I actually have the balls (and the education, I might add) to be intellectually honest and confront the issues from a perspective that isn't all about (gasp) simply justifying my own P2p use by any means possible.
Here's another one for you, fuckwad:
"Human Motivation and Human Progress are inexorably linked."
You need to balance this against your "sharing" argument. Actually, it would almost be funny, if it wasn't so tragic, that one of your main heroes (if you've heard of him), Lessig, actually wrote a book called "Tragedy of the Commons" whose title alludes to the fact that SHARING AND HUMAN PROGRESS ARE *NOT* "obviously" linked in all situations. I hate to break this to your overinflated ego, but your fucking simpleminded idiot logic and pleasant little hallmark greeting of a statement does NOT, in fact, trump decades of SOLID economic study and understanding which has concluded in no uncertain terms that intellectual property laws, while certainly they have been abused at times and need fine tuning, HAVE contributed to the advancement of human progress. All you have to do is take look at the rate of innovation of X in (ANY COUNTRY WITH STRONG IP LAWS) compared to (ANY COUNTRY WITHOUT STRONG IP LAWS). From medicine to industrial development to process devleopment to chemicals to automobiles to transport to even fucking academic research, the countries that have had IP laws to encourage innovation and promote the useful arts have made more innovations and their citizens have been, over time, the beneficiaries. I am not going to argue this basic point of economics with you, since to anybody who has ANY experience with this this is as basic as the basic facts of evolution to the biologists while you are living in fucking woo-woo creationism land.
Statements such as these:
Names don't matter, it is all about training and then familiarity
it gets down to user training
are not just "not insightful", they are so 180 degrees, 100% wrong the fact that they would even be modded as anything close to "insightful" brings more disrepute than usual to slashdot.
Ok, now that I've raised the alarm, let me justify it.
First of all, USABILITY MATTERS. This is no longer 1986, or 1994 for that matter. We know now that the usability of a system is a key to its successful deployment.
Second, the opposite of usability is "that which needs training or re-learning when it shouldn't."
A pilot needs training to fly a 747. However, Boeing works damned hard and invests millions of dollars to make the systems as intuitive and usable as possible nevertheless, as this will lead to:
- fewer accidents
- fewer training and re-training costs for the airlines, their customers
- better day to day operation
Nobody at boeing says "the pilots are professionals. let's name the #3 engine Hi pressure bleed air valve malfunction switch "Xooomer". for that matter, let's give their FMS a CLI, since a well trained pilot can be faster with this than with a modal, menu-based FMS."These basic, BASIC principles of design are well known in virtually all fields of engineering. And, I (following in the footsteps of tongue-in-cheek works like the unix haters handbook) have been banging this drum in the linux world since at least 1995. And yet, just as it seems that a little light is shining through, in the form of a slashdot headline that actually says (gasp) intelligent things about usability, we open up the comments to find the same old nonsense from users that "it's not a usability problem, it's a training issue" being modded +5 insightful, which basically tells me that a lot of people still aren't getting it.
Pity.
Mark parent down. Severely down. Please.
#1: Calling this amphiboly is inappropriate because Sharing, copying, and Human Advancement ARE as logically linked as they are intuitively. There is no ambiguity in his statement.
#2: The dead give-away that you are a shill:Your blind assertions without any evidence to back up your statements.
You fucking idiot. Couldn't even be consistent for two sentences.
Yes, Europe now prefers to cause ruin and misery throughout the developing world via its common agicultral policies and willful statist blindness rather than the good old american way.