Don't forget that people have to test the DNA in labs to see if it matches. What about corruption there? Who's making the lab technicians accountable for mistakes that could potentially put an innocent man to death? This is essentially the only problem I have with DNA evidence being used in court right now.
And how does copying someone else's game help advance the progress of the sciences and useful arts?
I think you're missing something key here. They did not just copy Hasbro's game. They significantly innovated on it by providing networked play that actually works, something Hasbro itself would/could not deliver. In this case, there is an actual innovation which is being threatened to be buried by litigation.
Rating machines based on MIPS has always been part of the old RISC vs CISC debate. MIPS ratings give RISC machines an advantage because the instructions are simpler and execute faster. If a valid comparison were to be made, it'd have to take into account the decomposition of CISC instructions to internal RISC operations that the P4's microcode/trace cache performs. Good luck getting any information on that, though.
The N64's software is all 32-bit except for the coprocessor (but almost everyone has a FPU capable of double precision or better now). The official devkit uses ILP=32. 64-bit pointers would make little sense since the machine's memory map is entirely contained within a 32-bit address space. I guess 64-bit integers were either not useful for typical applications, or the toolchains back then didn't support them. SGI, for instance, didn't have an ABI until 'n32' that both supports 32-bit pointers and 64-bit (mips3) instructions.
Perhaps. It could just as well be argued that in a regulated market that provides "weak" stuff, cannabis users will flock to the highly potent illegal stuff.
I meant that a regulated market would include mandatory labeling, like the proof number on alcohol containers. Both strong and weak varieties would be sold, and labeled as such. That way people don't become surprised with what they get. For example, someone who drinks only 150 proof liquor should know that he needs to moderate his use more cautiously than the one who drinks beer.
The harm is certainly not limited to the user. IMHO that's a solipsistic and naive view.
I'd say you have a strange definition of harm if it includes withdrawal. Yes, in _certain_ cases, this can be harmful, like if the person leaves a family behind for drugs. But to have harm, there must be at least one identifiable victim and a measureable amount of damage. A person smoking their days away in their apartment hardly qualifies.
Sometimes you just need one bad apple to spoil the batch.
I don't really see what this witticism has to do with the matter. If a user decides to center his life around cannabis use instead of employing moderation, others are going to ignore him, pity him, or maybe try to help him, rather than be "spoiled" by him.
But the legalization movement needs to find a message which goes beyond "cannabis leads to world peace".
I'm having trouble identifying any cannabis legalization proponents who both advocate responsible use and promote such a statement. To me, that would sound like claiming that the more cannabis one uses, the better off everyone is, which would be a very difficult claim to substantiate. Furthermore, it would fly in the face of groups like NORML, MPP, etc, whose primary reform plank is that of legalizing responsible cannabis use by adults in private establishments.
In fact, I think "prohibition causes more harm than good" would be a more accurate summary of legalization efforts today. Notice that legalization groups rely heavily on data collected by the US government itself to promote their agenda. This isn't a bunch of long-hairs in tie-dye who are protesting ten other things at the same time. For the most part, these advocacy groups are reasonable people who have been convinced by the evidence that prohibition is no good.
I agree that there are certain individuals that do not employ a rational and responsible approach to quieting others' fears about drugs legalization, and such individuals would probably say something like what you've quoted. But there are irrational and irresponsible people on both sides of the fence, and that is no reason to marginalize sensible arguments just because some senseless shouting idiots happen to share their point of view.
They could argue that without unauthorized invervention, the DRM would have inevitably been applied to the file, so breaking that chain of cause and effect is equivalent to circumvention.
Really: if you don't like copyright restrictions on works, choose alternatives, don't steal and then try to use a "robin hood" style argument to justify "public good". If you were stealing essential foodstuffs from wealthy to feed the poor, I could understand.
Unfortunately for your argument, the legend of Robin Hood had nothing to do with class warfare, and everything to do with challenging the arbitrary and unaccountable authority of King John and the Sheriff. The money Robin Hood was "stealing" from King John? Taxes, that were unfairly collected from the people without representation. He also made it a point to bust people out of debtor's prison. Hardly the cutpurse you make him out to be.
I don't think that's true. I will grant you that the price would have to be fair. But if you make it clear that continued development of the software depends on paying users, I'm sure you'd find more than a few takers.
It's the same idea as people who buy music that they've already downloaded and listened to. The realization that the purchase is what gives the creators a financial incentive to keep creating is what ends up prompting the sale.
I appreciate the need to counter drug-war propaganda, but questioning the adverse effects of sustained, high-dose cannabis use is probably not the best way to do that.
There's no question that it is possible to abuse cannabis. The drug warrior claim, however, is that "psychosis" is an effect of cannabis use in general. This is the correlation they want to stick in people's minds - the reefer madness theme.
Also, the number of people seeking help to overcome their cannabis habit has skyrocketed in recent years.
We have the same statistic quoted in the USA as proof of a cannabis epidemic. Unfortunately, this rise in patients at treatment centers is also strongly correlated with increased prohibition enforcement. One cannot help but wonder what the real cause of increasing treatment visits are - is it people voluntarily checking themselves into treatment because they know they have a problem, or is it people checking themselves into treatment to avoid a prison sentence?
This is tentatively attributed, in part, to new, powerful skunk strains like Northern Light, Kali Mist, AK47, etc.
I'm familiar with the "this isn't your father's cannabis" scare. But this is more of an argument for a regulated legal market than anything. And high concentrations of THC are nothing new - haschish has been around history for quite a while.
It's also been established beyond doubt that people who are under psychiatric treatment for suffering a psychotic episode, and who keep smoking cannabis, are something like an order of a magnitude more likely to experience another psychotic episode than people who refrain from smoking.
That's possible; after all, the claim was never that people diagnosed as mentally ill should continue to use cannabis. It's that the studies attempting to show that cannabis use causes mental illness in the first place are terribly flawed.
There's a big difference between the effects of the occassional toke and structural cannabis abuse.
Of course. But in any case, the harm is limited to the user. It remains a poor rationale for criminal prohibition.
How can pot make you have antisocial behavior? That's absurd.
Of course, "antisocial" is loaded here. Being labeled as such usually just means that you don't conform to the rules and/or expectations of society. Which is obvious, if you are a known pot smoker - you are both breaking the law openly and engaging in an activity which many people find to be a sign of weakness rather than something positive.
Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium. It is further bolstered by the common drug warrior association of marijuana use with onset of latent schizophrenia (no cause and effect has been established here, though a correlation is always good enough for drug warrior usage). As for the psychosis claim, the evidence quoted is one of two studies, one done in the UK and one in NZ. Unfortunately, neither of these studies can be fact checked by the layman, since they are published in journals to which access is restricted to professionals in the field. However, both of them have been refuted when someone knowledgeable about cannabis eventually gained access to the studies.
The problem is that the studies used questionnaires to collect their data, instead of relying on diagnoses of psychosis by medical professionals. I can't recall the exact questions that were asked (and a link is eluding me at the moment), but some stick out in my mind:
Do you feel like you and society do not have much in common?
Do you sometimes feel like you are being persecuted?
Point being, the questions were loaded, and anyone who has used cannabis would recognize the "psychotic symptoms" indicated as normal effects of cannabis use.
Of course, these "scientists" were likely well paid for their work. Again, all a drug warrior needs is a vague association to continue to push their propaganda. If they are ever called out on it, they can innocently claim they were misinformed rather than that they were lying. Of course what they would like you to ignore is that they used your money to pay for vacuous studies specifically crafted to support their lies.
You don't get to judge whether it's trivial or not.
Of course I do. Why don't I? I'm as entitled to an opinion as anybody else.
Because this is triviality that is determined in court, according to the copyright code. Are you intentionally being dense, or what?
Correct, and in this case, the person in question has made the wrong individual moral decision
And here's the problem. Your moral system is different from his. Therefore, your judgement is irrelevant. Unfortunately, you seem to think he should care for some reason. In order for him to care, you would need to provide objective evidence that he is doing something that is wrong in both of your moral systems. You have failed to provide such evidence, so your claims are vacuous.
A better analogy would be to ask whether I have a problem with people who publish instructions on how to weaponize anthrax or build a bomb out of an artillery shell. That's the type of thing we're talking about here. Zero practical use, massive potential for harm.
I find it interesting that you are making a mountain out of a molehill in desperate defense. Anyway, you wouldn't find knowing how these things work to be of zero practical use if you were one attempting to defend yourself against them. You are operating under one of two assumptions:
such devices would not exist unless the instructions to create them were published, or
publishing the instructions would cause more people to attempt to build them, and the total damage of the weapons built according to the instructions would exceed the total damage prevented by people who made use of the instructions for defense.
And part of the solution to that social problem is for law-abiding people to wise up, take responsibility and stop providing thieves with the tools they need to steal things.
I don't know where you live, but in the USA, we are innocent until proven guilty. Presuming that each one of us is a thief just waiting for the right tools to come along is not going to be a popular opinion. It's even less popular when you fail to provide evidence that this is actually the case.
So you weren't persuaded by the whole "piracy is wrong,
No, not particularly. In fact, I believe it is beneficial in certain circumstances. I also happen to think casual nonprofit copying is the only thing keeping the media cartels alive at this point, but moving right along...
and such a tool can only be used for piracy" thing?
This is what you've repeately failed to demonstrate, which is not surprising, given that the original author cited a use which was not piracy - contradicting your position before you even started.
In any case, the published source code would be considered both speech and a tool. Would you have the same problem with a published set of steps in plain English to accomplish the same? The only difference is that one can be compiled and the other can't, but it seems to me that might be where you are hung up on this.
Or how about if the author happens to foresee an infringing use (or is warned by a busybody such as yourself), he places a disclaimer on the work stating that the information is not to be used for copyright infringement purposes. Somehow I think you'd have a problem with that too - "Oh, that'd just give them IDEAS!"
I guess now we're getting to see your underlying biases, huh?
That I think publishing information should not be restricted in the case that information might cause someone to make less money than they might have otherwise, and where no other pre-existing contract would have prevented it? Guilty as charged. My biases are very clearly laid out. I don't think this would be a reasonable restriction on speech at all. It would demolish open source development almost immediately,
Yeah, that's the Java one I was referring to in the original post. Thanks anyway.
Re:The responses to this post are fascinating
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Donald Knuth On NPR
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So the scientific work of atheists need be reviewed less rigorously? That is the logical implication of your statement.
Time is too limited to examine all claims with absolute scrutiny. On the one hand, we have people who absolutely trust science as the best way we have to find truth. On the other, there are people who trust science in one matter and not another, openly admitting that they are willing to accept certain claims without evidence.
As a scientist who is attempting to find previous work to build a lifelong pursuit upon, and where you do not have time to examine the entire existing body of work, whose claims will be evaluated first? Those of one who shares your faith in science and rejects claims which are either not testable, have contradictory evidence, or in which repeated experiments have turned up no supporting evidence; or those of one who admits to accepting some forms of nonsense, as long as the nonsense is appealing enough?
I don't use PHP, but just about every package I've installed from Red Hat has been a 2002 version of whatever it is, which is comparable to Debian stable. Only the 3rd party sources bother with maintaining up to date software, but they don't have the selection I've come to enjoy. I think the problem is that the RHEL distributions get largely ignored by the 3rd party packagers in favor of the RH desktop distributions (incl. Fedora Core).
So, you can be happy and piss off the Puritans or you can achieve permanent organ damage.
Well, you know, these people want to know that their God is making you pay for your "sins" (identified by them). So while they openly advocate throwing users of marijuana or other relatively harmless psychedelics in prison, they give a free pass to legal vices which have widely known self-destructive effects (tobacco and alcohol). Same reason why cough syrups or opiate pills are loaded with Tylenol; not because the end result is more effective, but because Tylenol is the cheapest way for them to destroy your liver if you ever got the urge to use those medicines recreationally.
This type of thing comes a lot from the right-wing crowd. No freedom without responsibility, fine. But they take it a bit too far and manufacture consequences where there need not be any, in a misguided attempt to promote responsibility. Instead of making people more responsible, it just makes the proponents look like control freaks and zealots, and leads to distrust of anyone who advocates responsibility.
"Hippie", "burnout", etc, common articles of 'refutation' in anti-drug propaganda. Except that they don't actually refute anything, they just attempt to cast doubt on the opponent. This is also referred to as an ad hominem attack, and weakens your position with anyone who is accustomed to spotting such flawed reasoning.
Of course, our wonderful set of elected representatives has banned spending any federal money on studying the possibility that marijuana may have beneficial effects. "We don't know, and we don't want to know."
They already know. They've been trying to forget the 13 federal medical marijuana patients for years, because proof of marijuana's beneficial effects, and a contradiction of WoD dogma of the past 35 years, is something that the public should not know about. Nixon's advisory board recommended that marijuana be decriminalized. Reagan's recommended the same. Instead, we have the worst drug prohibition in history, for no particular good reason, and to no particular useful effect.
For some reason, people continue to believe that the status quo is better than the boogeyman world of the drug warriors, where everyone is running around stoned out of their minds on something or other and society as we know it ceases to exist. Never mind that before 1913 when opiates were banned and before 1937 when marijuana was banned, we didn't seem to be having all too many problems keeping society together. Maybe it has something to do with not persecuting people for how they choose to utilize their freedom.
...but I would like to see some sort of hardware-enforced secure context available on commodity computer systems.
What it comes down to is this. Can the user manage the keyring that is built into the hardware and manage himself which entities to trust and not to trust? If so, then TCPA is a fine solution and would have an excellent application in preventing cheating in online games.
However, from what I have read, the Palladium initiative includes a user-managed keyring, plus a secret keyring that the user can't modify, seeded with the keys of the content industries and big proprietary developers. Trusting these entities by default and not being able to change this behavior by the user, who may not want to have anything to do with these entities, is the big problem with Palladium.
"Sun has elected not to use an open-source license at this time because its commercial customers are concerned with "forking," or the creation of incompatible editions of the base Java software"
That's a lame excuse. They have a Java trademark which they can only allow implementations conforming to the Sun specification to use. Then they can tell those "commercial customers" to only buy Java products which carry the Java logo.
As for accidental confusion when a customer might not know whether a particular build is Java(TM) compliant or not? There are clauses common to many open source licenses that state that derivative versions must be clearly marked as such and that the original author disclaims any warranties for such work.
Combine trademark enforcement as an enforcement of the de-facto Java standard with a license that requires forks to be clearly marked as non-official forks, and where is Sun's problem now?
RHEL4 I'll give you, but RHEL3? You must be joking. It's at least as stale as Debian stable, if not moreso - plus you get the fun of compiling tons of crap from source because the base distro + 3rd party apt sources come nowhere close to Debian's breadth of packages. I have to admin a RHEL3 box unfortunately, so maybe the situation has improved with RHEL4.
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Don't forget that people have to test the DNA in labs to see if it matches. What about corruption there? Who's making the lab technicians accountable for mistakes that could potentially put an innocent man to death? This is essentially the only problem I have with DNA evidence being used in court right now.
Rating machines based on MIPS has always been part of the old RISC vs CISC debate. MIPS ratings give RISC machines an advantage because the instructions are simpler and execute faster. If a valid comparison were to be made, it'd have to take into account the decomposition of CISC instructions to internal RISC operations that the P4's microcode/trace cache performs. Good luck getting any information on that, though.
The N64's software is all 32-bit except for the coprocessor (but almost everyone has a FPU capable of double precision or better now). The official devkit uses ILP=32. 64-bit pointers would make little sense since the machine's memory map is entirely contained within a 32-bit address space. I guess 64-bit integers were either not useful for typical applications, or the toolchains back then didn't support them. SGI, for instance, didn't have an ABI until 'n32' that both supports 32-bit pointers and 64-bit (mips3) instructions.
In fact, I think "prohibition causes more harm than good" would be a more accurate summary of legalization efforts today. Notice that legalization groups rely heavily on data collected by the US government itself to promote their agenda. This isn't a bunch of long-hairs in tie-dye who are protesting ten other things at the same time. For the most part, these advocacy groups are reasonable people who have been convinced by the evidence that prohibition is no good.
I agree that there are certain individuals that do not employ a rational and responsible approach to quieting others' fears about drugs legalization, and such individuals would probably say something like what you've quoted. But there are irrational and irresponsible people on both sides of the fence, and that is no reason to marginalize sensible arguments just because some senseless shouting idiots happen to share their point of view.
They could argue that without unauthorized invervention, the DRM would have inevitably been applied to the file, so breaking that chain of cause and effect is equivalent to circumvention.
CSS is covered by software patents, so any distributors would be opening themselves and their clients up to patent infringement suits.
It's the same idea as people who buy music that they've already downloaded and listened to. The realization that the purchase is what gives the creators a financial incentive to keep creating is what ends up prompting the sale.
Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium. It is further bolstered by the common drug warrior association of marijuana use with onset of latent schizophrenia (no cause and effect has been established here, though a correlation is always good enough for drug warrior usage). As for the psychosis claim, the evidence quoted is one of two studies, one done in the UK and one in NZ. Unfortunately, neither of these studies can be fact checked by the layman, since they are published in journals to which access is restricted to professionals in the field. However, both of them have been refuted when someone knowledgeable about cannabis eventually gained access to the studies.
The problem is that the studies used questionnaires to collect their data, instead of relying on diagnoses of psychosis by medical professionals. I can't recall the exact questions that were asked (and a link is eluding me at the moment), but some stick out in my mind:
- Do you feel like you and society do not have much in common?
- Do you sometimes feel like you are being persecuted?
Point being, the questions were loaded, and anyone who has used cannabis would recognize the "psychotic symptoms" indicated as normal effects of cannabis use.Of course, these "scientists" were likely well paid for their work. Again, all a drug warrior needs is a vague association to continue to push their propaganda. If they are ever called out on it, they can innocently claim they were misinformed rather than that they were lying. Of course what they would like you to ignore is that they used your money to pay for vacuous studies specifically crafted to support their lies.
Because this is triviality that is determined in court, according to the copyright code. Are you intentionally being dense, or what?
And here's the problem. Your moral system is different from his. Therefore, your judgement is irrelevant. Unfortunately, you seem to think he should care for some reason. In order for him to care, you would need to provide objective evidence that he is doing something that is wrong in both of your moral systems. You have failed to provide such evidence, so your claims are vacuous.
I find it interesting that you are making a mountain out of a molehill in desperate defense. Anyway, you wouldn't find knowing how these things work to be of zero practical use if you were one attempting to defend yourself against them. You are operating under one of two assumptions:
I don't know where you live, but in the USA, we are innocent until proven guilty. Presuming that each one of us is a thief just waiting for the right tools to come along is not going to be a popular opinion. It's even less popular when you fail to provide evidence that this is actually the case.
No, not particularly. In fact, I believe it is beneficial in certain circumstances. I also happen to think casual nonprofit copying is the only thing keeping the media cartels alive at this point, but moving right along...
This is what you've repeately failed to demonstrate, which is not surprising, given that the original author cited a use which was not piracy - contradicting your position before you even started.
In any case, the published source code would be considered both speech and a tool. Would you have the same problem with a published set of steps in plain English to accomplish the same? The only difference is that one can be compiled and the other can't, but it seems to me that might be where you are hung up on this.
Or how about if the author happens to foresee an infringing use (or is warned by a busybody such as yourself), he places a disclaimer on the work stating that the information is not to be used for copyright infringement purposes. Somehow I think you'd have a problem with that too - "Oh, that'd just give them IDEAS!"
That I think publishing information should not be restricted in the case that information might cause someone to make less money than they might have otherwise, and where no other pre-existing contract would have prevented it? Guilty as charged. My biases are very clearly laid out. I don't think this would be a reasonable restriction on speech at all. It would demolish open source development almost immediately,
Sorry for the late reply. What about something like gwyple?
Yeah, that's the Java one I was referring to in the original post. Thanks anyway.
As a scientist who is attempting to find previous work to build a lifelong pursuit upon, and where you do not have time to examine the entire existing body of work, whose claims will be evaluated first? Those of one who shares your faith in science and rejects claims which are either not testable, have contradictory evidence, or in which repeated experiments have turned up no supporting evidence; or those of one who admits to accepting some forms of nonsense, as long as the nonsense is appealing enough?
I don't use PHP, but just about every package I've installed from Red Hat has been a 2002 version of whatever it is, which is comparable to Debian stable. Only the 3rd party sources bother with maintaining up to date software, but they don't have the selection I've come to enjoy. I think the problem is that the RHEL distributions get largely ignored by the 3rd party packagers in favor of the RH desktop distributions (incl. Fedora Core).
If you want to continue extending that pattern, LSD was banned as the Vietnam conflict began to escalate.
This type of thing comes a lot from the right-wing crowd. No freedom without responsibility, fine. But they take it a bit too far and manufacture consequences where there need not be any, in a misguided attempt to promote responsibility. Instead of making people more responsible, it just makes the proponents look like control freaks and zealots, and leads to distrust of anyone who advocates responsibility.
"Hippie", "burnout", etc, common articles of 'refutation' in anti-drug propaganda. Except that they don't actually refute anything, they just attempt to cast doubt on the opponent. This is also referred to as an ad hominem attack, and weakens your position with anyone who is accustomed to spotting such flawed reasoning.
For some reason, people continue to believe that the status quo is better than the boogeyman world of the drug warriors, where everyone is running around stoned out of their minds on something or other and society as we know it ceases to exist. Never mind that before 1913 when opiates were banned and before 1937 when marijuana was banned, we didn't seem to be having all too many problems keeping society together. Maybe it has something to do with not persecuting people for how they choose to utilize their freedom.
Used to be delivered by bottle. As in cough syrup.
However, from what I have read, the Palladium initiative includes a user-managed keyring, plus a secret keyring that the user can't modify, seeded with the keys of the content industries and big proprietary developers. Trusting these entities by default and not being able to change this behavior by the user, who may not want to have anything to do with these entities, is the big problem with Palladium.
As for accidental confusion when a customer might not know whether a particular build is Java(TM) compliant or not? There are clauses common to many open source licenses that state that derivative versions must be clearly marked as such and that the original author disclaims any warranties for such work.
Combine trademark enforcement as an enforcement of the de-facto Java standard with a license that requires forks to be clearly marked as non-official forks, and where is Sun's problem now?
RHEL4 I'll give you, but RHEL3? You must be joking. It's at least as stale as Debian stable, if not moreso - plus you get the fun of compiling tons of crap from source because the base distro + 3rd party apt sources come nowhere close to Debian's breadth of packages. I have to admin a RHEL3 box unfortunately, so maybe the situation has improved with RHEL4.