Here is a major part of copyright / IP rulings like this that many slashdotters seem to completely misunderstand.
Copyright law / rulings are *PRACTICAL* *INTERPRETATIONS* made for a particular moment in time, NOT "cast in stone" truths.
For example, many people might be familiar with some variation of the notion that "photocopying x pages from a book is ok, but x+1 is not" based on some particular norm or interpretation. of course such an interpretation is arbitrary, decided by some judge or other as as a reasonable tipping point where the rights of authors are balanced against the rights of contentholders.
however, should circumstances change, that tipping point may have to move to preserve that tipping point. this is why, for example, napster failed. sharing to one person, it had long been ruled, was fine; but claiming that this was some sort of "iron law" that could then be exploited to create napster-like services clearly wouldnt work, as by any reasonable interpretation this technologial advance had moved the tipping point.
Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point. however, contentholders may come back after some period of time and try to make a case that "you know, things have really changed--this has led to significant erosion of our copyrights and we ask the court again to consider this as de facto infringement because we have x, y, and z evidence collected in the interim now" and the court may re-examine it.
think about this whenever you see any "loophole" plan mentioned by some genius here on how to defeat copyright, such as each user collecting 10 second samples of a song and then the 10 second samples being recombined or some plan where random people each share one page of a copyrighted book or whatever similar nonsense plan they come up with. all such plans basically have the same structure:
find some legitimate characteristic of current "fair use" interpretation
exploit that characteristic, usually through some scale trick that the internet enables
without realizing that the "interpretation" is just that.. an interpretation that is subject to change.
What happens then is
3. copyrightholders appeal, interpretation changes to restore the tipping point
4. in other words, rights are necessarily curtailed. nobody wants this, but what choice is there?
5. slashdot story comes out, usual slashbots complain.
Key point: copyright interpretations are changeable, not iron laws.
I think y'all missed the point (well, the torpedo bit was my main point, the belgrano a second)
Right or wrong, the sinking of the belgrano brougth shame and embarassment to the UK. this is irrespective of the tactical, strategic, or political significance of the event.
yes, it's clear that we need to be spending a lot more money on torpedoes these days since we as a world have fallen way behind in torpedo knowledge.
and by this, i mean that the total number of torpedoes fired in anger in the last 60 years has essentially been three, all aimed at the same ship (the general belgrano) and all of which (well, except for the one that missed) have brought only shame and embarassment to the country that fired them (old blighty).
perhaps i am wrong about the number of submarine torpedoes launched in anger--anybody know of any others?
How do you know this? Do you have empirical data? because without empirical data, you are just talking out of your ass.
Take the case of north korea: there is, to say the least, a constant drive by the government to keep its citizens in the dark and, while I would not be so bold as to say that the average NK citizen loves its government, that this has led to more anti-government feelings is not at all clear--if anything, a prima facie it would not be unreasonable to suggest that their tight control of information has been largely working.
Likewise, I think an argument can be made that China has enjoyed huge patriotic feelings by its populace in the same time that massive information suppression was taking is. I think few knowledgeable people would disagree in my statement that the Chinese are amongst the most patriotic people in the world.
There are two worlds: that which you wish existed and that which IS. your non-insightful comment is squarely from the former.
Of all the bullshit logic we see on slashdot, this has got to be the most persistent and annoying kind... the sort of logic that supposes that if something doesn't provide absolute security, then the security it provides must be worthless.
In practice, this is a nonsense argument. For example, most people here know that WinXP copy protection can be broken with the help of a few google searches that lead to a few russian websites. there are trivial ways to defeat masterlocks and the ordinary sort of locks that 'secure' house doors. modern money *can*, with enough patience and technical skill, be counterfeited.
And yet microsoft continues to have a keycode unlock to winxp, houses continue to have locks, and treasury departments still spend quite a bit per bill to give them 'security features.' why?
Because as anybody who would rather think about this for two seconds (rather than just whoring up for +5 insightful, as you have) could see, protection in a real and complex world is not about *absolute* protection, it's about decreasing the *rate* of violation/infringement.
I know several people who have bought XP where they pirated 95/98/whatever because of their fear of the online activation system. People continue to have locks on their houses because it will make their house less likely to be burgled, and the counterfeit protection on money stops all but the most determined counterfeiters.
Likewise, biometric data will NOT "prevent" or "halt" illegal immgrigration in an absolute sesns and it is unreasonable to claim that's what it's "meant to do." Rather, it will SLOW THE RATE of illegal immigration (if not terrorism--that is obviously less of a statistical process because of the smaller data set). What is stopping them from getting a *real* passport with teh correct biometrics in a different name? have you ever tried getting an illegal passport of the regular kind? it's not easy! now, try finding somebody who provides an illegal passport with an embedded chip in it! not easy at ALL, especially given that for example, you know, when a UK passport is scanned at a US border, the US queries (or can query) the UK systems to vouch for the authenticity of the passport.
To claim that anybody who wants to "immigrate enough" is bullshit. Sure, there will always be the top n% who are determined, clever, and connected enough to beat any system. But with inceased smart security such as biometrics in concert with other ideas, this n% becomes smaller and smaller.
If you buy something that has licensing restrictions, then there is no *should*. There's either "I agree to the licensing restrictions and buy the product", or I tell (whoever) that their bargain is insufficient for me and I tell them to fuck off and dont give them any money for the good/service they are offering.
Think about buying an airline ticket--if I buy an airline ticket from new york to london for $256, then I accept the fact that the dates and times are non-changeable and that the ticket is non-refundible. I understand and accept that this is true even though the guy sitting next to me on the same plane and eating the same airline meal and watching the same movie COULD HAVE changed his dates and times or could have gotten 100% of his money back. Of course, he paid $1900 for his ticket.
MOD PARENT DOWN
You weren't forced to buy anything; you chose to buy a laptop with such restrictions and now are bitching about it.
Your english may be better than my german, but your logic is still crap.
There was basically no IPR in most of the ancient world because the cost of copying was too high. Books had to be copied by hand, for example. And even so, you shoot down your own argument with your example of a good copy of a masters painting being considered just as worthy as an original - if this is true, why would anybody take the time and effort to become a master?
Your "spiritual monopoly" (whatever the hell that is) argument is bullshit. A strong patent system has proven time and again to drive innovation over the long run. Consider some of the most "hated" of patents -drug patents. Did you know that in an average of 20 years, when patents expire, the drugs effectively become public domain
? This has led to innumerable drugs being developed on a for-profit basis that otherwise would not have been developed (or otherwise would have taken much longer to be developed) that have since lengthened and improved the lives of billions of people.
Copyright (and all IPR) is not a 'natural law.' (if there is such a thing)--it is a social construct. but it is a GOOD social construct; you can take your bullshit chinese example and stick it up your ass.. it is irrelevant.
A lock has one function and about 10 or less pieces. A computer operating system has about severn billion functions and about a million pieces. big difference.
Furthermore, any masterlock can be cracked through the means easily available on the internet (do some google searches). Yet masterlock is not deemed irresponsible. the last two paragraphs of my previous post (parent) to get my point yet again.
If you leave the doors to your house open and a large neon sign over the threshold saying 'welcome'.
Actually, those are two completely separate issues.
Let's say you left your house and left your door unlocked. If a thief happened by, saw that it was unlocked, and came in and stole all of your belongings, the law in every jurisdiction that I know of is unequivocal: the thief is solely to blame.
On the other hand, if you put up a sign that said "welcome", then that could be construed as an explicit invitation to enter and the corresponding legal judgement would be less clear. You may recall cases way back when when some FTP sites said "Welcome To Private FTP site! Username: Password: ".. well.. some were broken into using brute force un pw attacks. The attackers were subsequently found and based their (largely successful) defense on the fact that it said "welcome!"
Now, about the rest of your point: about people being liable and microsoft being liable; basically, it's wishful thinking from you, who knows nothing. I dare you to build me a house that can not be broken into. It is NOT possible. the windows OS has arguably hundreds of thousands of parts and interfaces and it is not reasonable to expect that every aspect has been checked for every possible potential flaw. I remind you that but a few weeks ago, a new flaw was found in TCPIP, arguably one of the most "eyeballed" standards in the history of computing.
every window in your house can be broken, and a thief can enter by breaking it. the lock on your front door can be opened with a jimmy tool, your electric garage door opener signal can be captured and copied. your hidden key under the bushes can be found. your chimney may be a more or less perpetually open entrance, and yet nobody blames house builders or even home owners of gross negligence in such cases.
the fact is that in a society we recognize the inherent limits of any sort of physical protection. as many on slashdot here have observerd in other contexts (DRM), "if it can be broken, it will be" and "there are no unbreakable protection schemes."
Therefore, we must resort to law and the threat of punishment. It's not perfect, but it's what we have to do.
have you done a milisecond of research before blathering on in your "activist" glory to see what happened in times past when activists got the upper hand and abolished IPR?
basically, from revolutionary france on up, IPR was reinstated within months as it became obvious that IPR was and is necessary. Sure, it's not perfect, especially often in implementation, but not having any IPR is pretty much as dumb as saying that there shouldnt be any municipal water supplies.
Actually, I'm quite happy to see that you were (correcty) modded down as a troll. There's always a danger on slashdot of your kind of claptrap being modded as insightful.
Yes, everybody are idiots except for the geniuses on slashdot and the 4 or so people who showed up at the most recent "anti software patent 'protest rally'.
The thing is, when it comes down to it, most of you would agree that software patents are fine; you just have issues with some of the various implementations of them in particularly egregious and/or marginal cases just like patents for other things are fine. If instead of juvenile rants against all IPR in general like we see continuously here, we'd instead see intelligent proposals being written to help guide lawmakers on exactly how fair software patent guidelines should look like, this community would have much more credibility.
I am suspicious of why TechWorld could so blatantly take Microsoft's quote so out of context.
Maybe because there are about a zillion similar journals / websites / magazines with nearly identical bland names that few ever read except when they pull a stunt like this?
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment), but this is for a simple reason: the process is self-selective. those who are excited and passionate about home schooling do it, and thus no wonder their kids turn out better than average.
homeschooling simply doesn't scale to a population. period.
umm, yes, you're right, I should have said "natural" life or something like that. also of course the young tend to get murdered more than the old (the averag age of the murdered is less than the median age of the world populaton), but this is a technicality since my argument is so back of the envelope anyway. my point was really to introduce the idea of quality of life year equivalence to slashdot.. and judging by the knee-jerk igorance of most of the responses (not yours), I have failed spectacularly!
You people who responded to my post either a) didn't understand it or b) have no business making or discussing any sort of government policy ever.
Basically, all the whiny "how can you compare this murder is much worse.. which would you rather be murdered or spammed posts" were written by idiots. While I fully accept that my analysis was very back of the envelope and certainly attackable from that standpoint, your objections just highlight your inability to think systemically.
the point of the matter is (using my specious numbers, for a moment) that murderers currently take away 1/5000 of each person's life on average. my argument is that for me (and many others--perhaps even 'society as a whole') that spammers currently take away MORE than 1/5000 of my life. therefore, to a given population of people, a spammer takes away MORE life (or, in proper terminology, more QOLYs (Quality Of Life Years).) You can even take into account the fact that murderers affect not just those they kill, but others as well (I did that--in a very quick fashion) and also the fact that the deceased' life ends right there (I did that too), but at the end of the day these are just error terms to the main argument.
Now, I can't believe that idiot who wrote something to the extent that the time spent deleting spam is time not wasted since we'd probably be, you know, jabbing at our own eyes with a fork or something otherwise got modded up "insightful." Nevertheless, who is to say that a murdered person wouldnt be doing the same..
To the person said something about killing stupid people because they waste your time - well.. perhaps. but clearly the stupid people's have their own innate to live. spam is much more a positive choice of an action than stupidity is.
let's say there is one murder per 50,000 in the population. let's say that the murder of this person affects 5 people (including the deceased) so badly that the rest of their life is ruined.
on average, this will happen to each involved at the midpoint of their lives (let's say).
So, in total, murderers remove roughly 1/5000 of life from each individual in society.
Do *you* spend more than 1/5000 of your life (roughly 20 seconds per day) dealing with spam? I do.
So, based on that (admittedly very rough) metric, who is worse?
hey! You can't say that! this is slashdot, where "conventional" sociology, psychology, economics, and so forth are looked down upon because those are soft things thought about by people who don't know vi or even recompiled their kernel!
I mean, if those "normals" can't even do those simple tasks, then we all know that the typing-speed back of the envelope "out of the box" thinking by slashdot geeks is guaranteed to be more enlightened and superior.
and attendance would be even higher if they gave out free beer and blowjobs.
the point of a library isnt to increase raw attendance, it's to provide access to a large quantity of books that the majority of people could not purchase or conveniently locate on their own.
With the internet, this dynamic does not occur; I am guessing that the vast majority of people who use library PCs for internet access could reasonably get it (or, more accurately, already have it) in some other fashion at home, but prefer the coffeehouse / social aspect of being out of the house while doing their web surfing.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law / rulings are *PRACTICAL* *INTERPRETATIONS* made for a particular moment in time, NOT "cast in stone" truths.
For example, many people might be familiar with some variation of the notion that "photocopying x pages from a book is ok, but x+1 is not" based on some particular norm or interpretation. of course such an interpretation is arbitrary, decided by some judge or other as as a reasonable tipping point where the rights of authors are balanced against the rights of contentholders.
however, should circumstances change, that tipping point may have to move to preserve that tipping point. this is why, for example, napster failed. sharing to one person, it had long been ruled, was fine; but claiming that this was some sort of "iron law" that could then be exploited to create napster-like services clearly wouldnt work, as by any reasonable interpretation this technologial advance had moved the tipping point.
Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point. however, contentholders may come back after some period of time and try to make a case that "you know, things have really changed--this has led to significant erosion of our copyrights and we ask the court again to consider this as de facto infringement because we have x, y, and z evidence collected in the interim now" and the court may re-examine it.
think about this whenever you see any "loophole" plan mentioned by some genius here on how to defeat copyright, such as each user collecting 10 second samples of a song and then the 10 second samples being recombined or some plan where random people each share one page of a copyrighted book or whatever similar nonsense plan they come up with. all such plans basically have the same structure:
- find some legitimate characteristic of current "fair use" interpretation
- exploit that characteristic, usually through some scale trick that the internet enables
without realizing that the "interpretation" is just that.. an interpretation that is subject to change.What happens then is
3. copyrightholders appeal, interpretation changes to restore the tipping point
4. in other words, rights are necessarily curtailed. nobody wants this, but what choice is there?
5. slashdot story comes out, usual slashbots complain.
Key point: copyright interpretations are changeable, not iron laws.
Right or wrong, the sinking of the belgrano brougth shame and embarassment to the UK. this is irrespective of the tactical, strategic, or political significance of the event.
like dresden.
dresden apologists posting in 3.. 2.. 1..
and by this, i mean that the total number of torpedoes fired in anger in the last 60 years has essentially been three, all aimed at the same ship (the general belgrano) and all of which (well, except for the one that missed) have brought only shame and embarassment to the country that fired them (old blighty).
perhaps i am wrong about the number of submarine torpedoes launched in anger--anybody know of any others?
hint: yes, you do.
'nuff said.
Take the case of north korea: there is, to say the least, a constant drive by the government to keep its citizens in the dark and, while I would not be so bold as to say that the average NK citizen loves its government, that this has led to more anti-government feelings is not at all clear--if anything, a prima facie it would not be unreasonable to suggest that their tight control of information has been largely working.
Likewise, I think an argument can be made that China has enjoyed huge patriotic feelings by its populace in the same time that massive information suppression was taking is. I think few knowledgeable people would disagree in my statement that the Chinese are amongst the most patriotic people in the world.
There are two worlds: that which you wish existed and that which IS. your non-insightful comment is squarely from the former.
In practice, this is a nonsense argument. For example, most people here know that WinXP copy protection can be broken with the help of a few google searches that lead to a few russian websites. there are trivial ways to defeat masterlocks and the ordinary sort of locks that 'secure' house doors. modern money *can*, with enough patience and technical skill, be counterfeited.
And yet microsoft continues to have a keycode unlock to winxp, houses continue to have locks, and treasury departments still spend quite a bit per bill to give them 'security features.' why?
Because as anybody who would rather think about this for two seconds (rather than just whoring up for +5 insightful, as you have) could see, protection in a real and complex world is not about *absolute* protection, it's about decreasing the *rate* of violation/infringement.
I know several people who have bought XP where they pirated 95/98/whatever because of their fear of the online activation system. People continue to have locks on their houses because it will make their house less likely to be burgled, and the counterfeit protection on money stops all but the most determined counterfeiters.
Likewise, biometric data will NOT "prevent" or "halt" illegal immgrigration in an absolute sesns and it is unreasonable to claim that's what it's "meant to do." Rather, it will SLOW THE RATE of illegal immigration (if not terrorism--that is obviously less of a statistical process because of the smaller data set). What is stopping them from getting a *real* passport with teh correct biometrics in a different name? have you ever tried getting an illegal passport of the regular kind? it's not easy! now, try finding somebody who provides an illegal passport with an embedded chip in it! not easy at ALL, especially given that for example, you know, when a UK passport is scanned at a US border, the US queries (or can query) the UK systems to vouch for the authenticity of the passport.
To claim that anybody who wants to "immigrate enough" is bullshit. Sure, there will always be the top n% who are determined, clever, and connected enough to beat any system. But with inceased smart security such as biometrics in concert with other ideas, this n% becomes smaller and smaller.
MOD PARENT DOWN as he has provided NO INSIGHT
If you buy something that has licensing restrictions, then there is no *should*. There's either "I agree to the licensing restrictions and buy the product", or I tell (whoever) that their bargain is insufficient for me and I tell them to fuck off and dont give them any money for the good/service they are offering.
Think about buying an airline ticket--if I buy an airline ticket from new york to london for $256, then I accept the fact that the dates and times are non-changeable and that the ticket is non-refundible. I understand and accept that this is true even though the guy sitting next to me on the same plane and eating the same airline meal and watching the same movie COULD HAVE changed his dates and times or could have gotten 100% of his money back. Of course, he paid $1900 for his ticket.
MOD PARENT DOWN
You weren't forced to buy anything; you chose to buy a laptop with such restrictions and now are bitching about it.
There was basically no IPR in most of the ancient world because the cost of copying was too high. Books had to be copied by hand, for example. And even so, you shoot down your own argument with your example of a good copy of a masters painting being considered just as worthy as an original - if this is true, why would anybody take the time and effort to become a master?
Your "spiritual monopoly" (whatever the hell that is) argument is bullshit. A strong patent system has proven time and again to drive innovation over the long run. Consider some of the most "hated" of patents -drug patents. Did you know that in an average of 20 years, when patents expire, the drugs effectively become public domain ? This has led to innumerable drugs being developed on a for-profit basis that otherwise would not have been developed (or otherwise would have taken much longer to be developed) that have since lengthened and improved the lives of billions of people.
Copyright (and all IPR) is not a 'natural law.' (if there is such a thing)--it is a social construct. but it is a GOOD social construct; you can take your bullshit chinese example and stick it up your ass.. it is irrelevant.
Furthermore, any masterlock can be cracked through the means easily available on the internet (do some google searches). Yet masterlock is not deemed irresponsible. the last two paragraphs of my previous post (parent) to get my point yet again.
Actually, those are two completely separate issues.
Let's say you left your house and left your door unlocked. If a thief happened by, saw that it was unlocked, and came in and stole all of your belongings, the law in every jurisdiction that I know of is unequivocal: the thief is solely to blame.
On the other hand, if you put up a sign that said "welcome", then that could be construed as an explicit invitation to enter and the corresponding legal judgement would be less clear. You may recall cases way back when when some FTP sites said "Welcome To Private FTP site! Username: Password: ".. well.. some were broken into using brute force un pw attacks. The attackers were subsequently found and based their (largely successful) defense on the fact that it said "welcome!"
Now, about the rest of your point: about people being liable and microsoft being liable; basically, it's wishful thinking from you, who knows nothing. I dare you to build me a house that can not be broken into. It is NOT possible. the windows OS has arguably hundreds of thousands of parts and interfaces and it is not reasonable to expect that every aspect has been checked for every possible potential flaw. I remind you that but a few weeks ago, a new flaw was found in TCPIP, arguably one of the most "eyeballed" standards in the history of computing.
every window in your house can be broken, and a thief can enter by breaking it. the lock on your front door can be opened with a jimmy tool, your electric garage door opener signal can be captured and copied. your hidden key under the bushes can be found. your chimney may be a more or less perpetually open entrance, and yet nobody blames house builders or even home owners of gross negligence in such cases.
the fact is that in a society we recognize the inherent limits of any sort of physical protection. as many on slashdot here have observerd in other contexts (DRM), "if it can be broken, it will be" and "there are no unbreakable protection schemes."
Therefore, we must resort to law and the threat of punishment. It's not perfect, but it's what we have to do.
Score: Pandering Karma Whore -5
After something's patent period expires, it IS in the public domain, period. The unisys corporation's LZW algorithm is now its gift to the world.
basically, from revolutionary france on up, IPR was reinstated within months as it became obvious that IPR was and is necessary. Sure, it's not perfect, especially often in implementation, but not having any IPR is pretty much as dumb as saying that there shouldnt be any municipal water supplies.
Actually, I'm quite happy to see that you were (correcty) modded down as a troll. There's always a danger on slashdot of your kind of claptrap being modded as insightful.
The thing is, when it comes down to it, most of you would agree that software patents are fine; you just have issues with some of the various implementations of them in particularly egregious and/or marginal cases just like patents for other things are fine. If instead of juvenile rants against all IPR in general like we see continuously here, we'd instead see intelligent proposals being written to help guide lawmakers on exactly how fair software patent guidelines should look like, this community would have much more credibility.
Maybe because there are about a zillion similar journals / websites / magazines with nearly identical bland names that few ever read except when they pull a stunt like this?
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment), but this is for a simple reason: the process is self-selective. those who are excited and passionate about home schooling do it, and thus no wonder their kids turn out better than average.
homeschooling simply doesn't scale to a population. period.
parent "pilot" poster is pretty clearly a 50 hour wonder, albeit with good intentions
ooh.. i see that tinfoil conspirababble gets modded "+4 interesting" these days. Lovely.
Yes, I must be just as crazy as all these nuts.
what would you rather have:
A) no spam email worldwide forever
or
B) one less murder worldwide
Now, if you said "B of course, because all the spam in the world is not worth one human life" then I say to this:
yes, but what if deleting all this spam costs the equivalent of 10,000 lifetimes of people's lives?
If you still say "B", then, well, I hope you never get a job that matters. Certainly don't be president.
umm, yes, you're right, I should have said "natural" life or something like that. also of course the young tend to get murdered more than the old (the averag age of the murdered is less than the median age of the world populaton), but this is a technicality since my argument is so back of the envelope anyway. my point was really to introduce the idea of quality of life year equivalence to slashdot.. and judging by the knee-jerk igorance of most of the responses (not yours), I have failed spectacularly!
You people who responded to my post either a) didn't understand it or b) have no business making or discussing any sort of government policy ever.
Basically, all the whiny "how can you compare this murder is much worse .. which would you rather be murdered or spammed posts" were written by idiots. While I fully accept that my analysis was very back of the envelope and certainly attackable from that standpoint, your objections just highlight your inability to think systemically.
the point of the matter is (using my specious numbers, for a moment) that murderers currently take away 1/5000 of each person's life on average. my argument is that for me (and many others--perhaps even 'society as a whole') that spammers currently take away MORE than 1/5000 of my life. therefore, to a given population of people, a spammer takes away MORE life (or, in proper terminology, more QOLYs (Quality Of Life Years).) You can even take into account the fact that murderers affect not just those they kill, but others as well (I did that--in a very quick fashion) and also the fact that the deceased' life ends right there (I did that too), but at the end of the day these are just error terms to the main argument.
Now, I can't believe that idiot who wrote something to the extent that the time spent deleting spam is time not wasted since we'd probably be, you know, jabbing at our own eyes with a fork or something otherwise got modded up "insightful." Nevertheless, who is to say that a murdered person wouldnt be doing the same..
To the person said something about killing stupid people because they waste your time - well.. perhaps. but clearly the stupid people's have their own innate to live. spam is much more a positive choice of an action than stupidity is.
let's say there is one murder per 50,000 in the population. let's say that the murder of this person affects 5 people (including the deceased) so badly that the rest of their life is ruined.
on average, this will happen to each involved at the midpoint of their lives (let's say).
So, in total, murderers remove roughly 1/5000 of life from each individual in society.
Do *you* spend more than 1/5000 of your life (roughly 20 seconds per day) dealing with spam? I do.
So, based on that (admittedly very rough) metric, who is worse?
I mean, if those "normals" can't even do those simple tasks, then we all know that the typing-speed back of the envelope "out of the box" thinking by slashdot geeks is guaranteed to be more enlightened and superior.
the point of a library isnt to increase raw attendance, it's to provide access to a large quantity of books that the majority of people could not purchase or conveniently locate on their own.
With the internet, this dynamic does not occur; I am guessing that the vast majority of people who use library PCs for internet access could reasonably get it (or, more accurately, already have it) in some other fashion at home, but prefer the coffeehouse / social aspect of being out of the house while doing their web surfing.