Also, if the party puts "scummy people" on the list of candidates, then people will not vote for the party as a whole. (Obviously, they have to present the candidates before the election.)
With proportional representation the party leaders choose who represent you and you have no way to say no to a scummy person.
Not that I am an expert in electoral systems, but those I know of that have proportional representation also let you vote for individual candidates within the party you vote for. In Sweden for example, you can choose to vote for individual candidates if you like, and before this system was introduced you could strike off those from the list proposed of candidates you didn't like (for precisely the reason you give). I actually liked the previous system better since it effectively allowed you to vote for many candidates simultaneously, albeit not reorder the prioritisation.
Yeah, I admit my calculations contain quite a bit of hand waving. The satellite might be a few times heavier, we certainly have an energy cost for producing the rocket, I suspect I overestimated the rocket efficiency, we might need maintenance, and so on. Nevertheless, with four orders of magnitude to spare I'm pretty confident none of these will add up to a total net loss (energy wise that is -- the economical side is a whole different matter).
Enough with these (non-numerical) speculations; I did some number crunching.
Geostationary orbit is at a radius of 42170 km. For simplicity, assume the satellite weighs 1000 kg. Lifting this mass from 6378 km (Earth radius at the equator) to the orbit requires about 53 GJ.
The required speed to remain in geostationary orbit is 3075 m/s. This amounts to another 4.7 GJ.
Now, I have no idea how efficient a rocket lift is, but considering that the weight of the rocket itself and its fuel must be lifted along with the payload I am guessing not more than 1 %.
This means we need to spend about 5.7 TJ of energy to get the satellite in place. Running at 200 MW for 15 years, the power plant would produce about 95000 TJ of energy during its lifespan. That is, about 15000 times as much energy.
That's the real question for the Pirate party as well: will they join a coalition?
Before the election, the Pirate Party stated that they would join either the green group or the liberal group, depending on where they will be offered the most influence. The strategy is to vote along with the group on all issues not immediately covered by the party's written principles, in exchange for being listened to on their own issues.
I understand perfectly well how exceptions work. RAII is a good practice in C++ regardless of whether you have exceptions enabled or not, because it enforces resource reclamation. It's just that exceptions in C++ won't let you get away with having bad habits.
I don't understand what you mean when you are talking about objects being wrapped. Yes, you must never throw exceptions from destructors -- but if you follow that basic law, stack unwinding will work fine even when objects are wrapped in each other.
Sure, you can argue that the compiler should forbid you from throwing exceptions in destructors, and I won't dispute you if you say that exceptions in C++ really is a rather complicated matter. But that completely misses the point. There is nothing inherent in scope based resource management that prevents reliable exception handling. C# has it with the "using" statement.
The problem with only having close() or equivalent is that it adds one more way to break the logic of the program if you're not very careful all the time. And makes it impossible to implement "fool proof" interfaces around external resources. (And by the way, there is nothing that prevents you from having both a close() function and a destructor doing the same thing. On the contrary, this is usually the norm.)
If your functions take 5 minutes to return and are cluttered with "artificial" blocks I'm guessing you're writing way to big functions. Try breaking them apart. I rarely find the need to add blocks to enclose RAII allocations, but when I do it usually makes the code a lot clearer. For instance if you lock a mutex to protect a number of statements inside a function.
The problem is that you can't do what you were doing before, just by not calling it finalize. In C++ it is a common practice to rely on the stack for resource management (this is where it differs from C), and the reason that you can do this is because you have destructors. And yes, you can do this even when you allocate on the heap (see scoped_ptr). There is no equivalent way to track resources in Java.
Now, you might say that this is not an issue, since the GC will reclaim all memory anyway. But what you have overlooked is that heap space is not the only resource you have to manage. There are various other types of resources (file handles, network connections, hardware interfaces, to name a few). So, ironically, the garbage collection approach in Java actually results in most types of resources becoming explicit in Java where they are, in essence, implicit C++.
I'm not saying that this is a huge problem, but it is something I find lacking when I develop in Java and other GC based languages.
For the vast majority of users, that lack the technical aptitude you have, the choice is between:
1. Doing what the manufacturer meant you to do.
2. Putting something strange into your computer that isn't supposed to be there, possibly resulting in all sorts of trouble.
Think of it like putting custom engine parts some friend gave you into your new and shiny BMW. Would you take the risk? And this is only if they actually realise that there even is a choice.
Obviously their fears are mostly unwarranted, but this is how most people see it. And it is hardly surprising. If you have something that is extremely complicated that you don't understand, but works well enough when you use it, you usually wouldn't mess with it. Even if someone tells you this flamy fox thing is better.
"Different driving culture"
That's hardly to adscribe to highways themselves.
"Different distribution of car models (lots of BMW and Mercedes"
That might be a reasonable difference but then, is more or less the same distribution you can find in the rest of Europe.
"how do you explain that accident rates are even lower in Sweden or the Netherlands"
Basically two words: weather and topography.
So you do agree that there are other factors than the speed limit that could explain the difference in death toll between American highways and the Autobahn.
Basically yes: same tarmac, same lane width; same radius on turns; same rates of climbing... Or do you have other information you can share with us?
Different driving culture, for starters. Different distribution of car models (lots of BMW and Mercedes, not so many Chrysler etc).
But none of this really matters. I was not the one who made a rather far-reaching and counter-intuitive conclusion based on the assumption that the all conditions are exactly identical in Germany and USA, so the burden of proof is certainly not mine.
And by the way, if conditions really are the same in different countries, how do you explain that accident rates are even lower in Sweden or the Netherlands (less than half the number of casualties per car or person compared to USA)?
People who believe speed is the cause of all problems don't understand its use in emergency manoeuvres.
Forgive me, but this is one of the most extreme straw men I've seen for a while. Who exactly is it you think believe that "speed is the cause of all problems"?
Of course, the lower accident rate on highways that went to 75mph instead of 55, or the lower death toll on the the Autobauhn than on many American highways confuses them too.
Well, what was that thing about correlation and causation again...? Surely, the only difference between Autobahn and American highways is the speed limit.
Secondly, lower speed limit is not the same thing as lower speed. Maybe some were already driving 75 before they increased the limit, and the uneven traffic pace caused accidents. If everyone actually were driving 55 perhaps there would be fewer accidents. Think about it logically for a moment: If something happens and you drive 55 instead of 75, you will have roughly half the breaking distance and 1.5 more seconds to react. When the 55 mph driver has reached complete stop, the 75 mph driver will still be going 55 mph. In this situation, speed definitely is a factor.
Third, the rate of accidents isn't the relevant measure here. You need to account for severity as well. People bumping into each other in traffic jams doesn't cause as much harm as a few fatal crashes. Going from 55 to 75 you will carry twice as much kinetic energy, and that needs to go somewhere if you crash.
For the nay-saysers, speed isn't implicitly causing accidents, poor driving and/or unforseen circumstances are.
And when people drive poorly or you encounter unforeseen circumstances, speed makes no difference as to whether you will be able to handle the situation or how dangerous a collision is? Is that what you're saying?
The only speed that is nearly guaranteed not to cause an accident is zero. By getting in the car at all, you've increased your odds of being in a collision far more than the subsequent increase caused by speeding.
I'm sorry, I'm not following you here. What exactly is your point? That since you are already taking a non-zero risk, there is no difference taking a significantly bigger risk? That simply doesn't make sense.
"Re-inventing the wheel" can be a good way to learn & understand how something works and why it's built/programmed etc. in a certain way.
It certainly can. But it can also be a way of teaching students the wrong way to solve a problem. In the "real world" that involves money, you must never ever re-invent anything until you have made completely sure that there is no better alternative. It is far too common that graduates don't realize this when they enter into professional life.
Besides, maybe the alternative would be to invent something completely new and more advanced using the "plug'n'play" components. That could teach you equally much, if not even more, about how the technology works. And what's more, it could actually be applicable knowledge that is useful for something.
Say I have $50 to spend, and used games sell for $25. So I can buy one game for $50, you pirate the same game, that's it. Or I buy a game for $50, three months later you buy it used for $25, I buy another game for $50, three months later you buy it used for $25, so it cost me the same $50, but the manufacturer got $100.
Er... no. Alternative A is: You buy one game for $50. I pirate the same game (copying yours, perhaps). I have $50 left. I buy another game for $50. The publisher still got $100.
The only thing that matters is the total amount of dollars you and me combined are willing to spend on games. Any transactions between us are irrelevant. Non-authorized duplication won't somehow drain money from the system.
I consider it a need and responsibility to procure, but not a right that I expect others to provide for me.
Well, as someone living in a country with extensive public health care, I can tell you that the idea is not that I expect others to provide anything for me. It is an agreement between me and my fellow citizens that if any one of us gets sick or hurt, the rest of us will be there to help out. Because non of us knowns beforehand who might become unfortunate. And this notion extends to genetics too. I wouldn't mind helping you if you happen to have a genetic decease (or predisposition for one) -- you didn't have any influence over what genes you got. I would be happy if you would do the same for me. Then we could call it solidarity.
I don't know about swedish law, but under the American system, ignorance of the law is no defense. I think what was actually at issue was whether they were breaking the law (ie, whether the law prohibited their actions), and not whether they intended to break it, which is irrelevant.
To be fair, it is not at all obvious that what the people behind TPB did is against Swedish law. It is nowhere explicitly forbidden (as far as I know), and no precedence exists. In fact, it is highly probable that the case will be appealed all the way to the Swedish Supreme Court, and until they pass their verdict none of us really knows whether it is legal or not. Given that situation, TPB says they consulted legal expertise to make sure what they did was legal. You can hardly accuse someone of being ignorant of the law under such circumstances.
As you say, they knew their service was contributing to infringement (or likely was). Thus, they had a culpable state of mind for that action. The issue is whether providing a service that contributes (or likely contributes) to infringement is actually against the law.
Well, I understand were you are getting at, but that is actually not exactly what I said. They likely knew copyright infringement took place (albeit maybe not in the particular cases for which they were convicted, but that is a different story), but that is not the same thing as realising you are committing the act of contribution to copyright infringement. (It's hard to separate the action from the law here, since copyright is a legal construct.)
The question is, does simply running a tracker constitute contributing to infringement, even if infringement takes place on it? It seems TPB thought it does not, i.e. they thought they did not contribute to infringement, in the same way that a hand gun manufacturer does not contribute to bank robberies. And I don't see how mocking people that sends take-down notices citing irrelevant (foreign) law makes this any different.
Now, I don't know if it matters from a technically judicial standpoint when the law is so unclear that you can easily be fooled into thinking you are following it, or if you are somehow supposed to know in advance that the courts will rule it illegal. But common sense dictates that a person should at least be less culpable in that situation than in a clear cut case.
Suppose for example that a court suddenly decides that ISPs contribute to copyright infringement as well. Would you hold it against them if they prior to that refused to disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement, even if they did so with a bit of an attitude?
For most crimes, negligence isn't a culpable state of mind. If you didn't know the stuff you took didn't belong to you, but a hypothetical "reasonable person" in your situation would have known it probably didn't belong to you, then you're negligent. But you didn't commit a crime. On the other hand, if you were reckless about it (and the prosecution can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt), then you did commit a crime. [...] The Pirate Bay was clearly at least reckless - more likely, knowing, which is more culpable - where as mininova is probably trying to show that they were just negligent, and that their action in putting up a filter is an attempt to correct that negligence.
There is a big difference between your example about stealing, and the actions of TPB. If you take something that you think belong to you, you are not in a culpable state of mind because you didn't intend to nor knew you were breaking the law. You are negligent not to realise you are stealing, which you know is a crime.
In the case of TPB, they certainly knew copyrighted material was shared using their site. However, they claim they did not intend to break the law and did not know they were breaking the law. Unless this assertion can be proven in court to be false, we must assume that their state of mind was essentially the same as that of your hypothetical thief with regard to the crime. Their attitude is not an indication of their intent to break the law (on the contrary, many of their responses to take-down notices were basically variations of "haha, what we're doing is legal"), and should therefore not really imply culpability.
If they feel strongly enough about something that they spend their spare time lobbing to get laws passed supporting it there is almost certainly going to be bias in judgments they make involving those issues.
Not to mention that in Sweden there just have to be circumstances that could cast doubt about a judge's impartiality for him/her to be regarded improper. He doesn't actually have to be biased. The fact that we are having this discussion is indication enough that he should not have taken this case. We could be looking at a mistrial.
I'm not a physicist, but if you're talking about single photons I'm fairly certain that is impossible. To determine the polarization of the photon, you'll essentially have to "test" one direction, and by doing that you destroy its state.
The.torrent files are downloaded from their website. So, yes, they are provided by TPB.
Nobody is disputing that the.torrent files can be downloaded form their website. Although, the files may very well refer you to another tracker, and.torrent files from other places may refer you to TPB's tracker.
The.torrent files do contain the critical information needed to setup a torrent swarm with the TPB tracker. So, again yes, TPB is aiding and abetting copyright infringement.
Well, it is not illegal to provide a tool that can aid in commiting copyright infringement. ISPs are also critical for a swarm to function, yet they are exempt from liability. The reason is that they are covered by the European 2000/31/EC directive, concerning the legal aspects of information society services. In fact, the court establishes that TPB is indeed also an information society service, with regard to the directive. The reason TPB is not let off the hook, the court argues, is basically that a service provider is only allowed to keep copies of data for the duration required by the transmission, if they are to be held without responsibility. And TPB keeps.torrent files.
What is not immediately obvious to me, is that the.torrent files are part the data that the directive refers to.
This is the key. Did they know about the infringement taking place using their service? It is quite clear they did.
They knew that infringement took place, correct. It has not been established that they knew of these specific files, however. You can bet YouTube knows that copyrighted material is being distributed on their site as well, even if they remove specific clips brought to their attention. Because they act on takedown notices, their situation is different from TPBs. But where do you draw the line? How much effort is required preventing infringement? That, we do not know.
If you set up a public BitTorrent tracker/search engine, you can be sure people will use it for copyright infringement. What this verdict says is that you can not take a neutral stance as to what people are doing with this service (like slashdot does with comments, for instance).
If you generalize enough, you can remove all significant distinctions from everything.
We seem to disagree somewhat as to whether there are significant principal distinctions, aside from the technical ones.
According to the court, which specifically addresses these issues in the verdict, the difference between services like Google and TPB is essentially that TPB allocates storage space on their servers for.torrent files, and that the storage of these is not to be considered transient.
The question, of course, is whether or not the.torrent files really should be considered part of the information that is transmitted through the service. It would seem that according to the court, providing the.torrent file relating to copyrighted material constitutes making that material available, or at least helping in making it available. It should be interesting to see what the appeals court might have to say.
No, but nobody is banning all BitTorrent trackers, just as they aren't banning all search engines.
Maybe not, but I would certainly think twice before running a tracker today. The people behind TPB were convicted for helping making 33 specific films/music albums available, even though they were not aware of these particular files. It is not clear to me exactly what measures you are required to take to remain inculpable.
The WWW would not function without DNSs and search engines like Google
The web would function without Google, it just wouldn't be very useful. Services like Google make it more pleasant to use. Without Google, I can still access any publicly available website.
BitTorrent would not function without trackers and search engines like TPB.
That is correct. Without a tracker and a.torrent file, there would be no way to find peers and piece together the shared content.
Well, if you don't have a DNS, which in a sense are the trackers of the web, you would have to know the (current) IP of the site you want to connect to.
Regardless, I thought your point was that Google and similar services are an integral and necessary part of the web, and therefore should be treated leniently. That is, since there is no real alternative, we have to accept what bad it brings. Maybe I misunderstood?
My point was that services such as TPB are equally important for BitTorrent to function. Should we accept effectively banning one way of exchanging information and not the other? To me, that seems arbitrary.
So it's their attitude that is the problem?
As I've said in other posts, your willingness to cooperate can help your case. There is a difference between breaking the law and breaking the law with contempt.
Certainly, I agree. But my question is, should the attitude make the difference between breaking the law and not breaking the law? Especially if you do not think what you are doing is illegal.
"Paying for it once" is specious. Networks require ongoing maintenance, administration and upgrades. It is the gift that keeps on giving.
Of course it does, in the same way that water pipes and sewers cost money to maintain. The point is that we don't have to pay for the maintenance of multiple networks/water pipes/sewers where there could be one.
Because I assure you, someone is paying for all those UMTS base stations hanging in groups besides each other where a single would suffice. And as customers, that someone is you and me.
IMHO, if there is anything the government should invest in, it is infrastructure. It's just a plain waste of resources having lots of parallel networks unless it is needed for redundancy reasons, for the same reason that you wouldn't build triplicate roads or railways between two cities. Add to that the vendor lock-in which usually follows when they're privately owned.
You can still have private companies build and operate the networks, if you think they will do it more efficiently than the government could. The only difference is that we pay for it once and get a clear and open playing field where competition can flourish.
One could argue that the WWW would not be able to function without search engines like Google.
The WWW would not function without DNSs and search engines like Google in the same way that BitTorrent would not function without trackers and search engines like TPB. The WWW is just a bunch of protocols used to connect people with each other to exchange information. That principle is no different from BitTorrent. The only difference is that the information storage can be scattered with BitTorrent, and that the connectivity of an average peer is generally less reliable (PCs instead of servers).
Google also removes content they don't necessarily have to, like Google Streetview images, when requested.
Now you're talking about content that Google stores. The correct equivalent would be Google removing links from search results.
TPB consistently refuses to remove content brought to its attention, and often responds with rude, immature, and insulting remarks.
Anyway my point is we should try and mimic the brain's workings if we want to achieve the brain's results, and I think trying to leap ahead to AI development is probably going to be premature if we don't first understand how the brain does it.
Yes, I agree that our ability to emulate the human brain is probably tightly coupled with our understanding of it. However, I'm not sure one must come before the other. I still think AI research merited, in part because it has other applications than achieving human-like intelligence, but also because I think it will help us understand how the human brain works, by giving us new insights.
In any case, my original point was that when we have enough processing power at our disposal, perhaps it will turn out that it wasn't primarily our frameworks and models that were lacking and holding us back, but that we couldn't feed them with enough data. I'm not a meteorologist either, but I suppose weather forecasting was pretty much a black art until we got computers and realised it was "just" a matter of collecting masses of data and stuffing them all into one humongous differential equation system. Fluid dynamics must have been at least a century old at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if the party puts "scummy people" on the list of candidates, then people will not vote for the party as a whole. (Obviously, they have to present the candidates before the election.)
Not that I am an expert in electoral systems, but those I know of that have proportional representation also let you vote for individual candidates within the party you vote for. In Sweden for example, you can choose to vote for individual candidates if you like, and before this system was introduced you could strike off those from the list proposed of candidates you didn't like (for precisely the reason you give). I actually liked the previous system better since it effectively allowed you to vote for many candidates simultaneously, albeit not reorder the prioritisation.
Yeah, I admit my calculations contain quite a bit of hand waving. The satellite might be a few times heavier, we certainly have an energy cost for producing the rocket, I suspect I overestimated the rocket efficiency, we might need maintenance, and so on. Nevertheless, with four orders of magnitude to spare I'm pretty confident none of these will add up to a total net loss (energy wise that is -- the economical side is a whole different matter).
Enough with these (non-numerical) speculations; I did some number crunching.
Geostationary orbit is at a radius of 42170 km. For simplicity, assume the satellite weighs 1000 kg. Lifting this mass from 6378 km (Earth radius at the equator) to the orbit requires about 53 GJ.
The required speed to remain in geostationary orbit is 3075 m/s. This amounts to another 4.7 GJ.
Now, I have no idea how efficient a rocket lift is, but considering that the weight of the rocket itself and its fuel must be lifted along with the payload I am guessing not more than 1 %.
This means we need to spend about 5.7 TJ of energy to get the satellite in place. Running at 200 MW for 15 years, the power plant would produce about 95000 TJ of energy during its lifespan. That is, about 15000 times as much energy.
Before the election, the Pirate Party stated that they would join either the green group or the liberal group, depending on where they will be offered the most influence. The strategy is to vote along with the group on all issues not immediately covered by the party's written principles, in exchange for being listened to on their own issues.
I understand perfectly well how exceptions work. RAII is a good practice in C++ regardless of whether you have exceptions enabled or not, because it enforces resource reclamation. It's just that exceptions in C++ won't let you get away with having bad habits.
I don't understand what you mean when you are talking about objects being wrapped. Yes, you must never throw exceptions from destructors -- but if you follow that basic law, stack unwinding will work fine even when objects are wrapped in each other.
Sure, you can argue that the compiler should forbid you from throwing exceptions in destructors, and I won't dispute you if you say that exceptions in C++ really is a rather complicated matter. But that completely misses the point. There is nothing inherent in scope based resource management that prevents reliable exception handling. C# has it with the "using" statement.
The problem with only having close() or equivalent is that it adds one more way to break the logic of the program if you're not very careful all the time. And makes it impossible to implement "fool proof" interfaces around external resources. (And by the way, there is nothing that prevents you from having both a close() function and a destructor doing the same thing. On the contrary, this is usually the norm.)
If your functions take 5 minutes to return and are cluttered with "artificial" blocks I'm guessing you're writing way to big functions. Try breaking them apart. I rarely find the need to add blocks to enclose RAII allocations, but when I do it usually makes the code a lot clearer. For instance if you lock a mutex to protect a number of statements inside a function.
The problem is that you can't do what you were doing before, just by not calling it finalize. In C++ it is a common practice to rely on the stack for resource management (this is where it differs from C), and the reason that you can do this is because you have destructors. And yes, you can do this even when you allocate on the heap (see scoped_ptr). There is no equivalent way to track resources in Java.
Now, you might say that this is not an issue, since the GC will reclaim all memory anyway. But what you have overlooked is that heap space is not the only resource you have to manage. There are various other types of resources (file handles, network connections, hardware interfaces, to name a few). So, ironically, the garbage collection approach in Java actually results in most types of resources becoming explicit in Java where they are, in essence, implicit C++.
I'm not saying that this is a huge problem, but it is something I find lacking when I develop in Java and other GC based languages.
For the vast majority of users, that lack the technical aptitude you have, the choice is between:
1. Doing what the manufacturer meant you to do.
2. Putting something strange into your computer that isn't supposed to be there, possibly resulting in all sorts of trouble.
Think of it like putting custom engine parts some friend gave you into your new and shiny BMW. Would you take the risk? And this is only if they actually realise that there even is a choice.
Obviously their fears are mostly unwarranted, but this is how most people see it. And it is hardly surprising. If you have something that is extremely complicated that you don't understand, but works well enough when you use it, you usually wouldn't mess with it. Even if someone tells you this flamy fox thing is better.
So you do agree that there are other factors than the speed limit that could explain the difference in death toll between American highways and the Autobahn.
Different driving culture, for starters. Different distribution of car models (lots of BMW and Mercedes, not so many Chrysler etc).
But none of this really matters. I was not the one who made a rather far-reaching and counter-intuitive conclusion based on the assumption that the all conditions are exactly identical in Germany and USA, so the burden of proof is certainly not mine.
And by the way, if conditions really are the same in different countries, how do you explain that accident rates are even lower in Sweden or the Netherlands (less than half the number of casualties per car or person compared to USA)?
Forgive me, but this is one of the most extreme straw men I've seen for a while. Who exactly is it you think believe that "speed is the cause of all problems"?
Well, what was that thing about correlation and causation again...? Surely, the only difference between Autobahn and American highways is the speed limit.
Secondly, lower speed limit is not the same thing as lower speed. Maybe some were already driving 75 before they increased the limit, and the uneven traffic pace caused accidents. If everyone actually were driving 55 perhaps there would be fewer accidents. Think about it logically for a moment: If something happens and you drive 55 instead of 75, you will have roughly half the breaking distance and 1.5 more seconds to react. When the 55 mph driver has reached complete stop, the 75 mph driver will still be going 55 mph. In this situation, speed definitely is a factor.
Third, the rate of accidents isn't the relevant measure here. You need to account for severity as well. People bumping into each other in traffic jams doesn't cause as much harm as a few fatal crashes. Going from 55 to 75 you will carry twice as much kinetic energy, and that needs to go somewhere if you crash.
And when people drive poorly or you encounter unforeseen circumstances, speed makes no difference as to whether you will be able to handle the situation or how dangerous a collision is? Is that what you're saying?
I'm sorry, I'm not following you here. What exactly is your point? That since you are already taking a non-zero risk, there is no difference taking a significantly bigger risk? That simply doesn't make sense.
It certainly can. But it can also be a way of teaching students the wrong way to solve a problem. In the "real world" that involves money, you must never ever re-invent anything until you have made completely sure that there is no better alternative. It is far too common that graduates don't realize this when they enter into professional life.
Besides, maybe the alternative would be to invent something completely new and more advanced using the "plug'n'play" components. That could teach you equally much, if not even more, about how the technology works. And what's more, it could actually be applicable knowledge that is useful for something.
Er... no. Alternative A is: You buy one game for $50. I pirate the same game (copying yours, perhaps). I have $50 left. I buy another game for $50. The publisher still got $100.
The only thing that matters is the total amount of dollars you and me combined are willing to spend on games. Any transactions between us are irrelevant. Non-authorized duplication won't somehow drain money from the system.
Well, as someone living in a country with extensive public health care, I can tell you that the idea is not that I expect others to provide anything for me. It is an agreement between me and my fellow citizens that if any one of us gets sick or hurt, the rest of us will be there to help out. Because non of us knowns beforehand who might become unfortunate. And this notion extends to genetics too. I wouldn't mind helping you if you happen to have a genetic decease (or predisposition for one) -- you didn't have any influence over what genes you got. I would be happy if you would do the same for me. Then we could call it solidarity.
To be fair, it is not at all obvious that what the people behind TPB did is against Swedish law. It is nowhere explicitly forbidden (as far as I know), and no precedence exists. In fact, it is highly probable that the case will be appealed all the way to the Swedish Supreme Court, and until they pass their verdict none of us really knows whether it is legal or not. Given that situation, TPB says they consulted legal expertise to make sure what they did was legal. You can hardly accuse someone of being ignorant of the law under such circumstances.
Well, I understand were you are getting at, but that is actually not exactly what I said. They likely knew copyright infringement took place (albeit maybe not in the particular cases for which they were convicted, but that is a different story), but that is not the same thing as realising you are committing the act of contribution to copyright infringement. (It's hard to separate the action from the law here, since copyright is a legal construct.)
The question is, does simply running a tracker constitute contributing to infringement, even if infringement takes place on it? It seems TPB thought it does not, i.e. they thought they did not contribute to infringement, in the same way that a hand gun manufacturer does not contribute to bank robberies. And I don't see how mocking people that sends take-down notices citing irrelevant (foreign) law makes this any different.
Now, I don't know if it matters from a technically judicial standpoint when the law is so unclear that you can easily be fooled into thinking you are following it, or if you are somehow supposed to know in advance that the courts will rule it illegal. But common sense dictates that a person should at least be less culpable in that situation than in a clear cut case.
Suppose for example that a court suddenly decides that ISPs contribute to copyright infringement as well. Would you hold it against them if they prior to that refused to disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement, even if they did so with a bit of an attitude?
There is a big difference between your example about stealing, and the actions of TPB. If you take something that you think belong to you, you are not in a culpable state of mind because you didn't intend to nor knew you were breaking the law. You are negligent not to realise you are stealing, which you know is a crime.
In the case of TPB, they certainly knew copyrighted material was shared using their site. However, they claim they did not intend to break the law and did not know they were breaking the law. Unless this assertion can be proven in court to be false, we must assume that their state of mind was essentially the same as that of your hypothetical thief with regard to the crime. Their attitude is not an indication of their intent to break the law (on the contrary, many of their responses to take-down notices were basically variations of "haha, what we're doing is legal"), and should therefore not really imply culpability.
(IANAL)
Not to mention that in Sweden there just have to be circumstances that could cast doubt about a judge's impartiality for him/her to be regarded improper. He doesn't actually have to be biased. The fact that we are having this discussion is indication enough that he should not have taken this case. We could be looking at a mistrial.
I'm not a physicist, but if you're talking about single photons I'm fairly certain that is impossible. To determine the polarization of the photon, you'll essentially have to "test" one direction, and by doing that you destroy its state.
The .torrent files are downloaded from their website. So, yes, they are provided by TPB.
Nobody is disputing that the .torrent files can be downloaded form their website. Although, the files may very well refer you to another tracker, and .torrent files from other places may refer you to TPB's tracker.
The .torrent files do contain the critical information needed to setup a torrent swarm with the TPB tracker. So, again yes, TPB is aiding and abetting copyright infringement.
Well, it is not illegal to provide a tool that can aid in commiting copyright infringement. ISPs are also critical for a swarm to function, yet they are exempt from liability. The reason is that they are covered by the European 2000/31/EC directive, concerning the legal aspects of information society services. In fact, the court establishes that TPB is indeed also an information society service, with regard to the directive. The reason TPB is not let off the hook, the court argues, is basically that a service provider is only allowed to keep copies of data for the duration required by the transmission, if they are to be held without responsibility. And TPB keeps .torrent files.
What is not immediately obvious to me, is that the .torrent files are part the data that the directive refers to.
This is the key. Did they know about the infringement taking place using their service? It is quite clear they did.
They knew that infringement took place, correct. It has not been established that they knew of these specific files, however. You can bet YouTube knows that copyrighted material is being distributed on their site as well, even if they remove specific clips brought to their attention. Because they act on takedown notices, their situation is different from TPBs. But where do you draw the line? How much effort is required preventing infringement? That, we do not know.
If you set up a public BitTorrent tracker/search engine, you can be sure people will use it for copyright infringement. What this verdict says is that you can not take a neutral stance as to what people are doing with this service (like slashdot does with comments, for instance).
If you generalize enough, you can remove all significant distinctions from everything.
We seem to disagree somewhat as to whether there are significant principal distinctions, aside from the technical ones.
According to the court, which specifically addresses these issues in the verdict, the difference between services like Google and TPB is essentially that TPB allocates storage space on their servers for .torrent files, and that the storage of these is not to be considered transient.
The question, of course, is whether or not the .torrent files really should be considered part of the information that is transmitted through the service. It would seem that according to the court, providing the .torrent file relating to copyrighted material constitutes making that material available, or at least helping in making it available. It should be interesting to see what the appeals court might have to say.
No, but nobody is banning all BitTorrent trackers, just as they aren't banning all search engines.
Maybe not, but I would certainly think twice before running a tracker today. The people behind TPB were convicted for helping making 33 specific films/music albums available, even though they were not aware of these particular files. It is not clear to me exactly what measures you are required to take to remain inculpable.
The WWW would not function without DNSs and search engines like Google
The web would function without Google, it just wouldn't be very useful. Services like Google make it more pleasant to use. Without Google, I can still access any publicly available website.
BitTorrent would not function without trackers and search engines like TPB.
That is correct. Without a tracker and a .torrent file, there would be no way to find peers and piece together the shared content.
Well, if you don't have a DNS, which in a sense are the trackers of the web, you would have to know the (current) IP of the site you want to connect to.
Regardless, I thought your point was that Google and similar services are an integral and necessary part of the web, and therefore should be treated leniently. That is, since there is no real alternative, we have to accept what bad it brings. Maybe I misunderstood?
My point was that services such as TPB are equally important for BitTorrent to function. Should we accept effectively banning one way of exchanging information and not the other? To me, that seems arbitrary.
So it's their attitude that is the problem?
As I've said in other posts, your willingness to cooperate can help your case. There is a difference between breaking the law and breaking the law with contempt.
Certainly, I agree. But my question is, should the attitude make the difference between breaking the law and not breaking the law? Especially if you do not think what you are doing is illegal.
"Paying for it once" is specious. Networks require ongoing maintenance, administration and upgrades. It is the gift that keeps on giving.
Of course it does, in the same way that water pipes and sewers cost money to maintain. The point is that we don't have to pay for the maintenance of multiple networks/water pipes/sewers where there could be one.
Because I assure you, someone is paying for all those UMTS base stations hanging in groups besides each other where a single would suffice. And as customers, that someone is you and me.
IMHO, if there is anything the government should invest in, it is infrastructure. It's just a plain waste of resources having lots of parallel networks unless it is needed for redundancy reasons, for the same reason that you wouldn't build triplicate roads or railways between two cities. Add to that the vendor lock-in which usually follows when they're privately owned.
You can still have private companies build and operate the networks, if you think they will do it more efficiently than the government could. The only difference is that we pay for it once and get a clear and open playing field where competition can flourish.
The WWW would not function without DNSs and search engines like Google in the same way that BitTorrent would not function without trackers and search engines like TPB. The WWW is just a bunch of protocols used to connect people with each other to exchange information. That principle is no different from BitTorrent. The only difference is that the information storage can be scattered with BitTorrent, and that the connectivity of an average peer is generally less reliable (PCs instead of servers).
Now you're talking about content that Google stores. The correct equivalent would be Google removing links from search results.
So it's their attitude that is the problem?
Yes, I agree that our ability to emulate the human brain is probably tightly coupled with our understanding of it. However, I'm not sure one must come before the other. I still think AI research merited, in part because it has other applications than achieving human-like intelligence, but also because I think it will help us understand how the human brain works, by giving us new insights.
In any case, my original point was that when we have enough processing power at our disposal, perhaps it will turn out that it wasn't primarily our frameworks and models that were lacking and holding us back, but that we couldn't feed them with enough data. I'm not a meteorologist either, but I suppose weather forecasting was pretty much a black art until we got computers and realised it was "just" a matter of collecting masses of data and stuffing them all into one humongous differential equation system. Fluid dynamics must have been at least a century old at the time.