Section 8 is terrifically difficult to get here in Los Angeles County because there are a very limited amount of subsidies vs. the large amount of applicants. However, judging by advertising I've seen for apartments for rent, it's not too hard to find a landlord willing to take Section 8 renters. Why should it be? It's stable, guaranteed rent.
The debate is on whether the hacker should be absolved of responsibility for system penetration just because it highlights a problem.
No, the issue, at least in the article, is to what degree do we punish or encourage system penetration, and should punishment fit actual damage rather than simple penetration.
There's nothing wrong with your opinion in and of itself, but perhaps you should actually read the entire article (for comprehension) before commenting on it. The author never suggests that there should never be any responsibility for system penetration.
I'm not saying the potential isn't there for people to get help/help themselves. But having and using a bare bones cell phone is a far cry from having a wireless laptop. And in any case, there is a need for social programs to help the homeless that internet access is not going to alleviate. (I can't believe that I, a fiscal conservative, just said that.) It's actually more cost effective to give people a housing subsidy than it is to give them a bed in a shelter. I think the figures I saw were on the order of $6000 a year for a Section 8 subsidy vs. $35,000 a year per bed in a shelter. And this doesn't even count the costs to local governments for institutionalizing those with mental problems that could be placed into proper (privately run) board and care facilities through such programs.
If it never worked in the "War on Drugs", what makes you think it will work in the "War on Piracy"?
The Nazis wiped out entire villages and it didn't stop resistance during WW2. Is the RIAA going to start executing people to stop unauthorized copying?
Plus freaking out the other business class passengers when we set up a live stream and demonstrated the various positions you can put the seat into live from 30,000 feet to our friends back home.
There should be some badge or other distinction you get from the Mile High Club for broadcasting the various positions you tried out with your girlfriend.
I found the article to be pretty fascinating, but I'm really curious as to how they've modeled hurricane winds. The hardware details are pretty mundane, but the algorithms they've used to model a hurricane would be a very interesting subject.
there needs to be a workaround easy enough for normal people to implement.
Sounds like a technical problem, not a legal one. If DRM is too onerous for a person, that person will find an alternative, whether that alternative be a workaround, non-DRM media, or using an OS that doesn't enable DRM technology (or defeats it). If those alternatives are too hard to use, maybe all the anti-DRM folks should get together and make them easier to use.
DRM doesn't prevent you from creating your own cultural works. It doesn't prevent you from building on previous cultural works to a meaningful degree. If you want to make sure that your work can be shared, release it under one of the Creative Commons licenses.
With an estimated billion people with internet access world wide, how can the DMCA ever be widely enforceable? There aren't enough police and there aren't enough courts in the world to be able to do that.
The article specifically stated that she was sleeping on benches and that she went to the shelter for internet access. But beyond that, how can you equate living in a shelter with having a home?
Yeah, this article is pretty misleading, containing a handful of anecdotes while there are millions of homeless people worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in the US (one count is at over 700,000. I find it hard to believe that the majority of those people have email addresses that they use on a regular basis to improve their lives to any significant degree. I find it hard to believe that the majority of them have laptops or use their cell phones to browse the web. The article repeatedly uses the word "many", but doesn't tell us what numbers they mean by "many".
The point of the article is not that we need to weed out the weak, but that hackers serve the purpose of revealing vulnerabilities in our systems, and allow us to take action to secure our systems. If they use non-destructive methods to reveal these system weaknesses, they should either not be punished, or their punishment should be proportionate (to what it might be if their attack was destructive). The point is that if we are continually having our systems tested by hackers and then fixing the weaknesses thus revealed, we stand a better chance of withstanding a catastrophic and crippling attack, presumably by terrorists or an enemy nation.
I was under the impression that buggers was a verb, implying that it was healthful for a child to perform oral sex on a person who performs anal sex on him or her. Unless the poster meant burgers. Who knew that eating fast food could be healthy?
While I have slight disagreement about equating "anti-freedom" with not being "anti-DRM", I agree with pretty much everything else you state (and state very clearly).
Furthermore, beyond the CC licenses (which are very important), the technology of both production and distribution has put the individual on par with the major "creative" industries to a great extent. The tools are there, and many of them are OSS. I suspect that in time DRM will become irrelevant. I consider this current anti-DRM campaign to be wrongheaded and barking up the wrong tree. It's a waste of resources while there are much more serious threats to our freedoms.
Can you give an example of such hardware lock-in? What devices that run Windows can prevent you from running another OS, say Linux? Yes, yes, we've all heard about the Trusted Computing Platform. You can run Linux on it, if you so choose.
Hell, you can even run Rockbox on an iPod instead of the proprietary Apple iPod OS, if you want a DRM free iPod.
There are choices other than MS. There's this thing called Linux. If Trusted Computing hardware becomes common, don't you think someone will come up with a distro that runs on it and doesn't support/enable the DRM features? Do you really think that it will become difficult or impossible to get non-Trusted Computing hardware, so long as there is a profit to be made? Can our government prevent such hardware from entering the US? (No.)
You're running about, crying out that "the sky is falling". You need Goosey Lucy to give you a good slap.
You missed the most glaringly offense bit, and the part that leads me to believe that no real dialogue is possible with some people: the whole for-us-or-against-us thing embodied in the phrase "anti-freedom agenda". See, if you don't agree with the FS philosophy, you obviously hate freedom. Sound familiar?
There aren't police resources to keep everyone from opening up his or her car's hood, if it were illegal. The Car Industry Association of America might try to prosecute individuals on a case by case basis, but those cases would be the vast minority. There wouldn't be enough courts in the world if the CIAA could prosecute everyone.
Well, you didn't call people "sheeple", but you might as well have.
DRM is a non-issue, and RMS is tilting at windmills. DRM is and always will be technically flawed and there is no effective way to enforce it, legal or otherwise. There will always be technical workarounds and there will be a momentum towards those platforms that don't disallow those workarounds. DRM cannot be legally enforced on a wide basis; there aren't the resources worldwide in terms of police or courts.
Net neutrality is the most serious issue before us (with patent law being a close second), DRM is a red herring. Onerous DRM and Trusted Computing would actually be a good thing for linux adoption, as more people would have an incentive to move to platforms that supported DRM workarounds.
But they delivered the feature, they didn't drop it. It's there for any developer to use should they want to, and I'm sure some will going forward. Contrast with WinFS, which has been promised since, what, 1995 or thereabouts? One feature exists, the other doesn't.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be in a reality distortion field of your own devising.
Since we've both linked to the same article, I suggest that you actually go read it.
Slashdot Mirror
Section 8 is terrifically difficult to get here in Los Angeles County because there are a very limited amount of subsidies vs. the large amount of applicants. However, judging by advertising I've seen for apartments for rent, it's not too hard to find a landlord willing to take Section 8 renters. Why should it be? It's stable, guaranteed rent.
The debate is on whether the hacker should be absolved of responsibility for system penetration just because it highlights a problem.
No, the issue, at least in the article, is to what degree do we punish or encourage system penetration, and should punishment fit actual damage rather than simple penetration.
There's nothing wrong with your opinion in and of itself, but perhaps you should actually read the entire article (for comprehension) before commenting on it. The author never suggests that there should never be any responsibility for system penetration.
I'm not saying the potential isn't there for people to get help/help themselves. But having and using a bare bones cell phone is a far cry from having a wireless laptop. And in any case, there is a need for social programs to help the homeless that internet access is not going to alleviate. (I can't believe that I, a fiscal conservative, just said that.) It's actually more cost effective to give people a housing subsidy than it is to give them a bed in a shelter. I think the figures I saw were on the order of $6000 a year for a Section 8 subsidy vs. $35,000 a year per bed in a shelter. And this doesn't even count the costs to local governments for institutionalizing those with mental problems that could be placed into proper (privately run) board and care facilities through such programs.
No, seriously, he is. Anyone have any idea on how to get him out?
If it never worked in the "War on Drugs", what makes you think it will work in the "War on Piracy"?
The Nazis wiped out entire villages and it didn't stop resistance during WW2. Is the RIAA going to start executing people to stop unauthorized copying?
Plus freaking out the other business class passengers when we set up a live stream and demonstrated the various positions you can put the seat into live from 30,000 feet to our friends back home.
There should be some badge or other distinction you get from the Mile High Club for broadcasting the various positions you tried out with your girlfriend.
I found the article to be pretty fascinating, but I'm really curious as to how they've modeled hurricane winds. The hardware details are pretty mundane, but the algorithms they've used to model a hurricane would be a very interesting subject.
This should be a boon for the phone sex industry.
there needs to be a workaround easy enough for normal people to implement.
Sounds like a technical problem, not a legal one. If DRM is too onerous for a person, that person will find an alternative, whether that alternative be a workaround, non-DRM media, or using an OS that doesn't enable DRM technology (or defeats it). If those alternatives are too hard to use, maybe all the anti-DRM folks should get together and make them easier to use.
DRM doesn't prevent you from creating your own cultural works. It doesn't prevent you from building on previous cultural works to a meaningful degree. If you want to make sure that your work can be shared, release it under one of the Creative Commons licenses.
DRM is a non-issue.
With an estimated billion people with internet access world wide, how can the DMCA ever be widely enforceable? There aren't enough police and there aren't enough courts in the world to be able to do that.
This is great, if you define all words as "The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error."
The article specifically stated that she was sleeping on benches and that she went to the shelter for internet access. But beyond that, how can you equate living in a shelter with having a home?
Yeah, this article is pretty misleading, containing a handful of anecdotes while there are millions of homeless people worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in the US (one count is at over 700,000. I find it hard to believe that the majority of those people have email addresses that they use on a regular basis to improve their lives to any significant degree. I find it hard to believe that the majority of them have laptops or use their cell phones to browse the web. The article repeatedly uses the word "many", but doesn't tell us what numbers they mean by "many".
OK, let's say someone steals your car, but not for personal gain, only so they can figure out how internal combustion works . . .
I have no real point here. I just wanted to work a car analogy into the conversation. =)
The point of the article is not that we need to weed out the weak, but that hackers serve the purpose of revealing vulnerabilities in our systems, and allow us to take action to secure our systems. If they use non-destructive methods to reveal these system weaknesses, they should either not be punished, or their punishment should be proportionate (to what it might be if their attack was destructive). The point is that if we are continually having our systems tested by hackers and then fixing the weaknesses thus revealed, we stand a better chance of withstanding a catastrophic and crippling attack, presumably by terrorists or an enemy nation.
I was under the impression that buggers was a verb, implying that it was healthful for a child to perform oral sex on a person who performs anal sex on him or her. Unless the poster meant burgers. Who knew that eating fast food could be healthy?
While I have slight disagreement about equating "anti-freedom" with not being "anti-DRM", I agree with pretty much everything else you state (and state very clearly).
Furthermore, beyond the CC licenses (which are very important), the technology of both production and distribution has put the individual on par with the major "creative" industries to a great extent. The tools are there, and many of them are OSS. I suspect that in time DRM will become irrelevant. I consider this current anti-DRM campaign to be wrongheaded and barking up the wrong tree. It's a waste of resources while there are much more serious threats to our freedoms.
Oh, forgot to mention iPodLinux, as well, fwiw.
Can you give an example of such hardware lock-in? What devices that run Windows can prevent you from running another OS, say Linux? Yes, yes, we've all heard about the Trusted Computing Platform. You can run Linux on it, if you so choose.
Hell, you can even run Rockbox on an iPod instead of the proprietary Apple iPod OS, if you want a DRM free iPod.
There are choices other than MS. There's this thing called Linux. If Trusted Computing hardware becomes common, don't you think someone will come up with a distro that runs on it and doesn't support/enable the DRM features? Do you really think that it will become difficult or impossible to get non-Trusted Computing hardware, so long as there is a profit to be made? Can our government prevent such hardware from entering the US? (No.)
You're running about, crying out that "the sky is falling". You need Goosey Lucy to give you a good slap.
You missed the most glaringly offense bit, and the part that leads me to believe that no real dialogue is possible with some people: the whole for-us-or-against-us thing embodied in the phrase "anti-freedom agenda". See, if you don't agree with the FS philosophy, you obviously hate freedom. Sound familiar?
There aren't police resources to keep everyone from opening up his or her car's hood, if it were illegal. The Car Industry Association of America might try to prosecute individuals on a case by case basis, but those cases would be the vast minority. There wouldn't be enough courts in the world if the CIAA could prosecute everyone.
Well, you didn't call people "sheeple", but you might as well have.
DRM is a non-issue, and RMS is tilting at windmills. DRM is and always will be technically flawed and there is no effective way to enforce it, legal or otherwise. There will always be technical workarounds and there will be a momentum towards those platforms that don't disallow those workarounds. DRM cannot be legally enforced on a wide basis; there aren't the resources worldwide in terms of police or courts.
Net neutrality is the most serious issue before us (with patent law being a close second), DRM is a red herring. Onerous DRM and Trusted Computing would actually be a good thing for linux adoption, as more people would have an incentive to move to platforms that supported DRM workarounds.
But they delivered the feature, they didn't drop it. It's there for any developer to use should they want to, and I'm sure some will going forward. Contrast with WinFS, which has been promised since, what, 1995 or thereabouts? One feature exists, the other doesn't.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be in a reality distortion field of your own devising.
Since we've both linked to the same article, I suggest that you actually go read it.
Did anyone notice the trackback to a blog named Fuckthemusic.biz.
It's pretty juvenile of me, but I thought it was hilarious to see the word "fuck" in the Washington Post.