There's two differences here, though. For one, unlike in real-life situations, it actually is possible to lock the proverbial door perfectly so that, barring design failures, people *will* not be able to enter.
What I think is more important, though, is the fact that your house, your garden, your car and all these things are actually your *property*, which is something you can't say about your wireless LAN. Sure, the equipment belongs to you, but the actual abstract concept of the network that is created when you use it is not something that can be owned, by its very nature.
I think the analogy given by someone else higher up in the thread is quite good: if you put a lamp on your front porch and someone sits on the street and uses the light shining over from your lamp to read, then you can't claim that they're stealing your light and sue them.
It's not entirely the same, of course, as you're losing bandwidth when somebody else is using your net connection, but here's another interesting comparison: in Germany (West Germany, at that time), there was a high-profile court case in the 70s (I think - maybe it was earlier than that, too) where several people were sued for "stealing" electricity from a nearby radio mast - I don't know the technical details, but they had managed to convert the energy of the radio waves into regular electricity and used that. (Notice the similarity to this case: you're taking away something that then can't be used anymore by the original "owner", even though it's not a tangible thing).
Anyhow - what's important here is that they successfully argued that energy is just that - energy -, not a tangible thing, and thus the law regarding theft could not be applied, because if you steal something, then that something has to be a tangible thing first. The case attracted quite a lot of attention, and ultimately led to a new law being enacted that made it illegal to withdraw electric energy (without permission etc., of course).
This case really seems to be the same. It's not theft - he did not steal anything tangible. It's also not trespassing, for the same reason. It still is unauthorized access, of course, which probably is illegal, but I don't think your comparison is valid.
If coders *only* do what they must to get the job done, then how do you explain Perl poetry, for example? What about Perl golf?
How about things like quines, or programs that are valid and working programs in more than one language at once?
Aren't these things art? If not, why not? A programming language is, per se, just a tool - just like a brush. You can use brushes to simply coat things with paint, and there are many people who do just that for a living; but you can also use them to create art. The same goes for programming languages, doesn't it?
True.:) But it should be said that if you go beyond the basic system and add packages, OpenBSD can suffer from the same problem - packages *do* get fixed when security holes are found, of course, but they're not generally taken as seriously as the base system.
Of course, the fact that there *is* a base system that does not come in the form of packages (in the sense of pkg_addable ones, that is - the base system tarballs don't count as packages in that regard) is one thing that sets OpenBSD (and, from what I gather, *BSD in general) apart from Linux distros. Debian would probably be well-advised to adopt a similar policy, where more important packages get priority, if they don't have one in place already.
The idea, I think, is that new versions of a program might introduce behaviour changes that you don't want to force on people running production systems and just updating packages to fix security holes - so yes, that's what I'd say "stable" means. It not only tells you that the software is (supposedly) tested and tried, but also that you will not get unrelated changes even when you update within that branch.
This is why projects will often release updates to older branches when a security hole is found, too.
It's just a random thought, but have the Debian people ever contemplated whether their problems in this regard may stem from the fact that they have too many packages? The package list for the latest stable lists an incredible 16834 individual packages, and even though there are many programs which come in different flavours and thus contribute as more than one package, this still is a huge number.
I can certainly see why security management gets a problem here. Maybe the Debian project should cut down on these and see just how many packages are really needed.
Have you read RMS' "Right to read"? It talks about debuggers a bit, which one might see as the software equivalent of soldering irons and oscilloscopes.
Definitely a thought-provoking piece, and you really have to wonder just how visionary RMS really was when he wrote it. I hope that he wasn't, for obvious reasons, but it's rather scary to see that the things he writes about are already here, even though applied on a different level (hardware instead of software).
I haven't RTFA, so maybe it's explained in there, but what makes everyone think that "80 games" are automatically "80 illegally-copied games"? Why couldn't it have been, say, TuxRacer, SuperTux and 78 more free games that run on Linux (which is ported to the X-Box)?
I'm not sure whether that's likely or whether it's more reasonable to assume that it was in fact illegally-copied games, but as they say - in dubio pro reo.
Wow, that's great. By the same reasoning, I could conclude that merely *receiving* spam that promises me to "3NLAGRE YUR P3N1S!" etc., my penis will indeed grow.
Seems far-fetched? It's basically the same claim.
He didn't get fired for sharing anything. He got fired because he earlier run what seems to have been a BitTorrent tracker in his spare time, was sued over it (in a civil case, not a criminal case), and didn't tell his employer when they interviewed him, so they only found out when he talked about it on a TV show.
He argues that he didn't have to mention it since it doesn't have anything to do with his employer, and I think depending on how the interview went exactly, he's probably right. If they actually asked him about whether there were any civil cases pending against him and he lied and said no, then it's understandable that he got fired (it's not like it's a personal question, after all); but if they didn't, then I really think it's their own fault, and he's right in any case when he says that the whole thing simply doesn't affect his employer in any way.
In any case, it's important to note that he did not himself share any files.
I don't think your conclusions are valid, even though your observations are interesting.
What we've essentially seen is a kind of oscillation between simple and complex - new observations require changes to be integrated into the existing theories, which are then getting more complex, until someone comes along and simplifies them again. Lather, rinse, repeat - the whole thing just keeps on repeating.
What you fail to realize, though, is that "simpler" does not necessarily mean "simple". I do agree that Occam's razor is a reasonable principle, but it does not make any statements about how simple the (likely) solution is in absolute terms - it could still be incredibly convoluted, as long as the other candidates are even more so. As an example, take vertex operator algebras - they're a relatively complicated construct that seems somewhat artificial when you first encounter it, yet they're not only an invaluable tool but also come up naturally when you investigate conformal field theories.
The comparison with algorithms/programming is also weak, since it is perfectly possible to have two different algorithms (with different complexity, in all senses of the word) who do solve exactly the same problem, but it is arguably not possible that you have two different physical theories explaining the same phenomenon that are both true at the same time (although I guess this is a rather philosophical question).
As such, the assertion that string theory must not be incorrect (i.e., not true) simply because it seems too complicated is wrong. String theory may well not be the end of it all, but to dismiss a good working hypothesis that has proven highly useful *only* because the math behind it seems too "complicated" is, simply put, rubbish.
The reason why - for example - Tom and Jerry, despite the cartoon's rampant violence, never make anyone worry about their kids is that said violence is highly stylized, with noone actually ever taking any real damage.
For example, while Jerry might drop an anvil on Tom's head at any given second, even if he does, Tom will be perfectly fine again two seconds later after being momentarily flattened in a humorous way.
Another difference is that cartoons usually make sure to only show violence in ways that kids can't reproduce; so for example, dropping an anvil or a piano on a character's head is perfectly OK, while hitting a character with a mallet would probably be something that'd be changed before the cartoon is actually aired.
These two things *do* make a whole lot of a difference - namely, all the difference between Tom and Jerry on one hand and Itchy and Scratchy (from the Simpsons) on the other. And even Itchy and Scratchy usually (or at least often) do heed the second rule and show things that you simply can't do in real life.
Because ICANN is the follow-up organization to the IANA - the Internet Authority for Assigned Names and Numbers. That's a good part of what DNS is about, isn't it?
I think the real question is "why does the USA want the DNS root servers" (most of them, anyway)?
That doesn't explain it. The fact remains that neither being able to memorize 50 digits of pi nor actually doing so is in any way a remarkable feat, so applications for list inclusion like that should simply be rejected on the grounds that they're not noteworthy.
Why does the rank list go down to 50 digits? Surely there are many people in the world who can recite more than 50 digits of pi that aren't listed here, so unless these people are noteworthy for some other reason, their inclusion seems a bit pointless.
You don't get access to the full database; rather, you can provide email addresses yourself and have them checked to see if they're in the database or not.
So you really don't gain any new email addresses you didn't have before.
So I could be sued (successfully) for copyright infringement even though I do not know that I am committing copyright infringement, *cannot* know that I am, and in fact do not have intentions to do so, either? Scary.
This was answered on New Scientist's "Last Words" page at some point. I don't recall when, but it might be worth checking your local library for back issues - or maybe inquire to them and ask which issue it was.
Disclaimer: IANAL. I only learned about this in school, and that's been a couple of years; what's more, I'm not from Sweden/the USA/..., so things may be different for you. Finally, I'm not a native English speaker, either, so I'm just trying to translate these concepts - in reality, there's probably other terms that'd be used in English.
Anyhow...
In legal theory, there's two distinct things when it comes to evaluating whether a certain offense was committed or not, namely the subjective and the objective offense.
The objective offense is essentially what's written into the law - for example, that copying movies without permission from the copyright holder is illegal.
The subjective offense is what you think you're doing when you do it - so if you, for example, download a movie because you think/expect it to be "Lord of the rings", you'd be guilty, basically, but when you think it really is footage from someone's wedding, you wouldn't. The name of the torrent etc. would probably be used as evidence for determining what's the case - if the torrent really was labelled "Fred's Wedding (1996).torrent", then you'd have a much better chance of arguing that you really thought it was a wedding video than if it was labelled "lord_of_the_rings_2003.torrent".
IIRC, it's typically necessary that both kinds of offense are present in order to have a case. Without a subjective offense, you could be sued for doing something when you had no intention to do so and in fact didn't even know you were doing it; without an objective offense, you aren't actually *doing* anything that's wrong, so if you'd be successfully sued nonetheless, that'd border on creating thought crimes.
Again, take all this with a grain of salt, but I think that's more or less what things are like.
Considering that they only distribute torrents, I doubt it - they don't themselves offer any copyrighted material, after all.
Of course, one may well argue that what they're doing is still illegal (although I have no idea whether it really is under Swedish law or not), but if it is, then it probably was before this law came into effect, too, considering that uploading copyrighted material seems to always have been illegal.
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There's two differences here, though. For one, unlike in real-life situations, it actually is possible to lock the proverbial door perfectly so that, barring design failures, people *will* not be able to enter.
:)
What I think is more important, though, is the fact that your house, your garden, your car and all these things are actually your *property*, which is something you can't say about your wireless LAN. Sure, the equipment belongs to you, but the actual abstract concept of the network that is created when you use it is not something that can be owned, by its very nature.
I think the analogy given by someone else higher up in the thread is quite good: if you put a lamp on your front porch and someone sits on the street and uses the light shining over from your lamp to read, then you can't claim that they're stealing your light and sue them.
It's not entirely the same, of course, as you're losing bandwidth when somebody else is using your net connection, but here's another interesting comparison: in Germany (West Germany, at that time), there was a high-profile court case in the 70s (I think - maybe it was earlier than that, too) where several people were sued for "stealing" electricity from a nearby radio mast - I don't know the technical details, but they had managed to convert the energy of the radio waves into regular electricity and used that. (Notice the similarity to this case: you're taking away something that then can't be used anymore by the original "owner", even though it's not a tangible thing).
Anyhow - what's important here is that they successfully argued that energy is just that - energy -, not a tangible thing, and thus the law regarding theft could not be applied, because if you steal something, then that something has to be a tangible thing first. The case attracted quite a lot of attention, and ultimately led to a new law being enacted that made it illegal to withdraw electric energy (without permission etc., of course).
This case really seems to be the same. It's not theft - he did not steal anything tangible. It's also not trespassing, for the same reason. It still is unauthorized access, of course, which probably is illegal, but I don't think your comparison is valid.
Just some food for thought.
If coders *only* do what they must to get the job done, then how do you explain Perl poetry, for example? What about Perl golf?
How about things like quines, or programs that are valid and working programs in more than one language at once?
Aren't these things art? If not, why not? A programming language is, per se, just a tool - just like a brush. You can use brushes to simply coat things with paint, and there are many people who do just that for a living; but you can also use them to create art. The same goes for programming languages, doesn't it?
True. :) But it should be said that if you go beyond the basic system and add packages, OpenBSD can suffer from the same problem - packages *do* get fixed when security holes are found, of course, but they're not generally taken as seriously as the base system.
Of course, the fact that there *is* a base system that does not come in the form of packages (in the sense of pkg_addable ones, that is - the base system tarballs don't count as packages in that regard) is one thing that sets OpenBSD (and, from what I gather, *BSD in general) apart from Linux distros. Debian would probably be well-advised to adopt a similar policy, where more important packages get priority, if they don't have one in place already.
The idea, I think, is that new versions of a program might introduce behaviour changes that you don't want to force on people running production systems and just updating packages to fix security holes - so yes, that's what I'd say "stable" means. It not only tells you that the software is (supposedly) tested and tried, but also that you will not get unrelated changes even when you update within that branch.
This is why projects will often release updates to older branches when a security hole is found, too.
It's just a random thought, but have the Debian people ever contemplated whether their problems in this regard may stem from the fact that they have too many packages? The package list for the latest stable lists an incredible 16834 individual packages, and even though there are many programs which come in different flavours and thus contribute as more than one package, this still is a huge number.
I can certainly see why security management gets a problem here. Maybe the Debian project should cut down on these and see just how many packages are really needed.
Have you read RMS' "Right to read"? It talks about debuggers a bit, which one might see as the software equivalent of soldering irons and oscilloscopes.
Definitely a thought-provoking piece, and you really have to wonder just how visionary RMS really was when he wrote it. I hope that he wasn't, for obvious reasons, but it's rather scary to see that the things he writes about are already here, even though applied on a different level (hardware instead of software).
I haven't RTFA, so maybe it's explained in there, but what makes everyone think that "80 games" are automatically "80 illegally-copied games"? Why couldn't it have been, say, TuxRacer, SuperTux and 78 more free games that run on Linux (which is ported to the X-Box)?
I'm not sure whether that's likely or whether it's more reasonable to assume that it was in fact illegally-copied games, but as they say - in dubio pro reo.
Wow, that's great. By the same reasoning, I could conclude that merely *receiving* spam that promises me to "3NLAGRE YUR P3N1S!" etc., my penis will indeed grow. Seems far-fetched? It's basically the same claim.
He didn't get fired for sharing anything. He got fired because he earlier run what seems to have been a BitTorrent tracker in his spare time, was sued over it (in a civil case, not a criminal case), and didn't tell his employer when they interviewed him, so they only found out when he talked about it on a TV show.
He argues that he didn't have to mention it since it doesn't have anything to do with his employer, and I think depending on how the interview went exactly, he's probably right. If they actually asked him about whether there were any civil cases pending against him and he lied and said no, then it's understandable that he got fired (it's not like it's a personal question, after all); but if they didn't, then I really think it's their own fault, and he's right in any case when he says that the whole thing simply doesn't affect his employer in any way.
In any case, it's important to note that he did not himself share any files.
There's a bugmenot extension for Mozilla that will save you the hassle. :) Do give it a try, it's nice.
Lenin? I think you're thinking of Joseph Stalin. Lenin certainly isn't innocent, but he didn't kill millions, like Hitler and Stalin did.
I don't think your conclusions are valid, even though your observations are interesting.
What we've essentially seen is a kind of oscillation between simple and complex - new observations require changes to be integrated into the existing theories, which are then getting more complex, until someone comes along and simplifies them again. Lather, rinse, repeat - the whole thing just keeps on repeating.
What you fail to realize, though, is that "simpler" does not necessarily mean "simple". I do agree that Occam's razor is a reasonable principle, but it does not make any statements about how simple the (likely) solution is in absolute terms - it could still be incredibly convoluted, as long as the other candidates are even more so. As an example, take vertex operator algebras - they're a relatively complicated construct that seems somewhat artificial when you first encounter it, yet they're not only an invaluable tool but also come up naturally when you investigate conformal field theories.
The comparison with algorithms/programming is also weak, since it is perfectly possible to have two different algorithms (with different complexity, in all senses of the word) who do solve exactly the same problem, but it is arguably not possible that you have two different physical theories explaining the same phenomenon that are both true at the same time (although I guess this is a rather philosophical question).
As such, the assertion that string theory must not be incorrect (i.e., not true) simply because it seems too complicated is wrong. String theory may well not be the end of it all, but to dismiss a good working hypothesis that has proven highly useful *only* because the math behind it seems too "complicated" is, simply put, rubbish.
More info on the "Electric Universe" topic:
The reason why - for example - Tom and Jerry, despite the cartoon's rampant violence, never make anyone worry about their kids is that said violence is highly stylized, with noone actually ever taking any real damage.
For example, while Jerry might drop an anvil on Tom's head at any given second, even if he does, Tom will be perfectly fine again two seconds later after being momentarily flattened in a humorous way.
Another difference is that cartoons usually make sure to only show violence in ways that kids can't reproduce; so for example, dropping an anvil or a piano on a character's head is perfectly OK, while hitting a character with a mallet would probably be something that'd be changed before the cartoon is actually aired.
These two things *do* make a whole lot of a difference - namely, all the difference between Tom and Jerry on one hand and Itchy and Scratchy (from the Simpsons) on the other. And even Itchy and Scratchy usually (or at least often) do heed the second rule and show things that you simply can't do in real life.
Because ICANN is the follow-up organization to the IANA - the Internet Authority for Assigned Names and Numbers. That's a good part of what DNS is about, isn't it?
I think the real question is "why does the USA want the DNS root servers" (most of them, anyway)?
That doesn't explain it. The fact remains that neither being able to memorize 50 digits of pi nor actually doing so is in any way a remarkable feat, so applications for list inclusion like that should simply be rejected on the grounds that they're not noteworthy.
Isn't that more like $750?
Why does the rank list go down to 50 digits? Surely there are many people in the world who can recite more than 50 digits of pi that aren't listed here, so unless these people are noteworthy for some other reason, their inclusion seems a bit pointless.
You don't get access to the full database; rather, you can provide email addresses yourself and have them checked to see if they're in the database or not.
So you really don't gain any new email addresses you didn't have before.
So I could be sued (successfully) for copyright infringement even though I do not know that I am committing copyright infringement, *cannot* know that I am, and in fact do not have intentions to do so, either? Scary.
This was answered on New Scientist's "Last Words" page at some point. I don't recall when, but it might be worth checking your local library for back issues - or maybe inquire to them and ask which issue it was.
Why am I here? Why, to get first post on Slashdot, of course. :)
Disclaimer: IANAL. I only learned about this in school, and that's been a couple of years; what's more, I'm not from Sweden/the USA/..., so things may be different for you. Finally, I'm not a native English speaker, either, so I'm just trying to translate these concepts - in reality, there's probably other terms that'd be used in English.
Anyhow...
In legal theory, there's two distinct things when it comes to evaluating whether a certain offense was committed or not, namely the subjective and the objective offense.
The objective offense is essentially what's written into the law - for example, that copying movies without permission from the copyright holder is illegal.
The subjective offense is what you think you're doing when you do it - so if you, for example, download a movie because you think/expect it to be "Lord of the rings", you'd be guilty, basically, but when you think it really is footage from someone's wedding, you wouldn't. The name of the torrent etc. would probably be used as evidence for determining what's the case - if the torrent really was labelled "Fred's Wedding (1996).torrent", then you'd have a much better chance of arguing that you really thought it was a wedding video than if it was labelled "lord_of_the_rings_2003.torrent".
IIRC, it's typically necessary that both kinds of offense are present in order to have a case. Without a subjective offense, you could be sued for doing something when you had no intention to do so and in fact didn't even know you were doing it; without an objective offense, you aren't actually *doing* anything that's wrong, so if you'd be successfully sued nonetheless, that'd border on creating thought crimes.
Again, take all this with a grain of salt, but I think that's more or less what things are like.
Not just Danish - the letter Ø also appears in Norwegian and Faroese.
Considering that they only distribute torrents, I doubt it - they don't themselves offer any copyrighted material, after all.
Of course, one may well argue that what they're doing is still illegal (although I have no idea whether it really is under Swedish law or not), but if it is, then it probably was before this law came into effect, too, considering that uploading copyrighted material seems to always have been illegal.