The summary, and the article, come across clearly that this is a double-edged sword. By taking the opposite extreme in an attempt to balance out the DMCA, this bill may cause extrodinary harm to the businesses who produce the content that consumers want to have fair use rights over.
It comes across clearly that the author thinks it is a double-edged sword, but it isn't clear that it is.
His claim is that consumers could legally hack any DRM scheme by claiming fair use, which "isn't codified". That's wrong. There may not be a clear line in some cases, but it is absolutely codified and has a lot of case history involved, and the kind of copying the businesses we're talking about are worried about does clearly fall in the not-fair-use side. So he's also wroing in that a person could not legally claim fair use and hack the DRM for any reason they want.
His argument boils down to: Consumers "purchas[ing] exactly the amount of use they need" from big content industry is "innovation", big content won't distribute content without DRM, and allowing citizens to exercise fair use rights without being sued for breaking DRM in doing so is the same as not having DRM at all.
Like you, I don't think we can really say what the result will be without at least reading the law, and then seeing how it is played out in reality. But based this article's take on what the bill does, this article's take on the result is utter crap.
None the less, the DMCA has not had as chilling of an effect as was once expected.
I know! People were predicting that someone could be arrested merely for discussing a security flaw, resulting in security researchers being afraid to visit the U.S., and what a load of hogwash that turned out to be.
But in all seriousness, I think the extent to which the DMCA has failed to have a "chilling effect" is the extent to which people have either ignored it or not been under the jurisdiction of the government that created it. Mostly the latter. Where did DeCSS come from again? And why isn't it in my us.debian.org apt repository, or any other U.S. distro?
As the Lexmark vs. SCC case has shown, courts are beginning to find in favor of fair use, slowly erroding the power of the DMCA by way of precident.
All the Lexmark case showed was that a company can't use the DMCA for whatever the fuck it wants whenever it wants. Lexmark was essentially claiming that the chip on their cartridges was an access control mechanism to protect the copyrighted code on the chip on their cartridges, so making a compatible interface was a DMCA violation. If the courts had bought this, it would have been an expansion of the power of the DMCA. Not expanding isn't the same as eroding at all.
"... and we're getting reports that the New York skyline has vanished entirely, replaced by giant, blinking pink letters that say 'Hacked by Chinese!'"
I think he's made himself a nice chunk of change, mostly from working at Transmeta*. In his biography "Just for Fun", the author notes that Linus picks him up in a new sports car and they're living in a nice house in northern Cali.
Transmeta was crazily lucrative to work for in the time before the bubble burst. Second hand story, disclaimers apply, but a friend of a friend apparently made about a million bucks off stock options he received as a summer intern. Not unreasonable given the curve their stock was on for a while -- right place right time deal to be sure.
Note that in the US, running a program is thought to include an act of copying it from storage to RAM, and hence fall under the purview of copyright law.
I think it is important to note that while copying a program from storage to RAM is in fact considered copying in U.S. law, this copy is not considered an exclusive right of the copyright owner and thus does not require permission. From Title 17, Chapter 1, p 117: " it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: 1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner,"
Copying a program from storage to RAM is an essential step in the utilization of the computer program, and thus is not copyright infringement. It is also not infringement to make a copy for archival purposes (same section).
U.S. copyright laws are at least that sane. Sadly things took a turn for the worse since the DMCA, which would make doing either of those things a crime if you had to circumvent copy protection to do them.
How could Bush have known unless... he's from the future! That, and the fact that they've never been seen together, is the strongest proof yet that George W. Bush is actually John Titor.
Oh no, you don't. I stated that we're discussing the *entire category* of election fraud, and that you're trying to select out a subset (coersion and bribery to vote for someone who share different views than you).
You stated "ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general", not "election fraud", but whatever. I said in particular that subset, which is true: practically everything we've been saying relates to it, as it's the kind of election fraud that involves both absentee ballots and online "verification" -- your position is vulnerable to fraud through coercion, so unless you're dropping your stupid idea, then it definitely is the main topic. Do you deny this? Or do you just want to keep the field open so you can inject irrelevent points when you have nothing substantive to say? Speaking of which, do you consider the Nader/Gore vote exchange to be fraud or not and why, and either way what was your point in bringing it up?
Absentee ballots *Give You The Option* to break your anonimity. This system gives you a *different way you can break your anonimity*. It does NOT apply it to "all ballots" - only to those who request it when they register (just like happens to people who request it via requesting an absentee ballot).
Hilarious. People are only exposed if they decide to actually use this "feature", which is what you are advocating because it gives "verification". That's a great argument: the size of the problem is directly proportional to the number of people who buy into your idea.
I'd love to see your defense in the Happy Fun Ball lawsuits: "But it only blows up in your face if you choose to use it as intended!"
Oh, I was just quite amused by you inserting a brand new, completely different argument half a dozen posts into the debate.:) Pardon me for expressing my amusement.
The hilarity of THIS statement will also be addressed. Stick around!
Oh, what the heck, I'll do it now.:)
"Otherwise, looking up your vote online is useless. You'll never know if the vote they show you on the website is the same as the one they use when counting the vote, and trying to recreate the election results from that information is essentially re-running the elections."
That was in the very post that I was replying to when I made the smart-arse comment about how you were changing your tactics in the middle of the debate. Check the parent of the post that you just replied to.
Great job there Steven Hawking.;) You just quoted the post I was replying to when I made my comment about you adding the new argument in.
Oh, snap! goes your dignity.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my goodness. I would have thought that after I schooled you on not reading posts carefully, you would have been more careful in your response, but you didn't even check, did you? If you had, you would have noticed that what you first replied to and what I quoted aren't even close. Your are bound and determined to look as stupid as possible, aren't you?
This is the post I quoted, in nested form so your stupidity is laid out on one page for easy reference. Note the last two sentences are what I quoted. Scroll down or click here for your reply. Notice no mention of me adding new arguments, and in fact no response or reference to the quoted part at all! Scroll way down or click to see FOUR POSTS LATER where you accuse me of adding a "new" argument.
You were too stupid to read my post and reply to the argument in the first place, you were too stupid to che
Oh, great - we even disagree on what we're discussing. Lovely.
Um... If you didn't think we were discussion election fraud, why did you link to the Wikipedia entry on it? Why has every paragraph except (possibly, depending on how you view it) the vote exchange been about election fraud?
It will not work to make someone vote for someone they don't agree with.
Absentee ballots can.
Exactly! Absentee ballots break anonymity! Now you want to apply this to all ballots, extending the flaw from a tiny portion of the overall ballots to every single one!
Adding a new argument in since your other ones are kind of falling apart in the face of what currently goes on, I see.
The hilarity of this weak rhetorical device will be addressed soon. Please stick around!
What's one more thing that has *no penalties that don't already exist*, that offers a benefit. Let me guess - if you were in computer security, and you had a requirement that users be able to connect to your network with unencrypted passwords that you didn't like, and I proposed a different way users could connect with unencrypted passwords that gave them benefits over the old unencrypted method, you'd oppose it. Because, that's effectively what you're doing here with voting.
YES! Because then you'd have TWO problems that need fixing instead of just one! If we fixed the first one, the second would still exist -- more to the point, you see the insecurity of your method as a feature and would resist its removal! A system where an unsecured password is considered an essential feature? How is that not retarded? Then there's the fact that the first password system is used by a small fraction of users, while your proposed second system would be used by everyone. No, no increase in insecurity there!
Let me correct your analogy: "My computer has one exploit for a service running on one port for which every black hat in the world knows about (and have thousands have hacked me through it regularly); having the same widely publicized exploit from a service running on a different port is no different." And the answer is of course it's no different - and if opening up that second service on a different port provides tangible benefits to your users, seing as it doesn't change your security situation, *Do It*.
That would be utterly retarded if a) the exploit allowed you to hijack a single connection, and that's what you care about and b) the first service had 1% as many connections as the second.
Especially when the alleged advantage of the second system is the exploit.
Shoe polishing is special because you can learn who people voted for without them knowing that you know. It also works where there are no absentee ballots.
Good point on the first part, but can't your flaw, er feature, be used where there are no absentee ballots as well?
Go ahead and propose them! Don't just say "it should be done". Make sure that you don't disenfranchise the elderly, overseas servicemen/women, peace corps volunteers (I have a friend in Africa for whom the only way he can reach the outside world is mail once every three-four weeks), et al.
I don't have a ready solution for that tricky problem, I'll readily admit. Do we agree at least that it is a problem that should be solved if possible? It's much easier to argue against adding new flaws, so that's what I'm doing. Especially because if we did find a solution to the absentee problem, your "feature" would still exist and be a thousand times more prevalent.
And absentee ballots can be done before the election. Is "after the election" somehow inherently more evil than before the election? And you act like "requesting the ballot in advance" is some sort of big deal,
Where do absentee ballots usually get sent? Your house, I would gather? So your boss has to get you to get one, bring it into to work, make you fill it out, th
I think the point is that Diebold is capable of making a secure machine for a task as important as banking, and therefore should be capable of making a secure machine for voting.
ATM machines have to have printers and provide a receipt at least as an option. Most of Diebold's machines have no printer and no option to get a receipt.
Even if the customer doesn't print a receipt, there is a receipt printed internally. There is no way the banks would trust the system otherwise.
A paper receipt, verifiable by the voter, deposited in a lock box and subjet to very random recounts would solve most of the uncertainty in electronic voting.
It sure would. And Diebold said repeatedly that such a thing isn't necessary. Even though it is obviously necessary in the banking case.
The conclusion, to me, is that since Diebold is capable of making secure machines, and has denied the need for what is an integral part in their own secure machines, the must not want to create secure voting machines.
It's really a scary conclusion, but what else fits?
Since when? We've been discussing ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general. Why did you just narrow down the discussion there to a particular subset?
No, we've been discussing election fraud, in particular in the form of coercion or bribery. If we were talking about "ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general" we'd be talking about campaign advertisements, political blogs, and the evening news.
More to the point: Anonymous voting means the vote exchange only works if both parties are completely uncoerced and actually desire to vote in the given way. It will not work to make someone vote for someone they don't agree with. Thus it is completely different than every single other situation we are talking about.
You know very well that this isn't intended to be a solution against vote buying; it's to be a solution against disenfranchisement.
Since it doesn't work to prevent disenfranchisement, and does work to allow vote buying, I'm going to say the "intent" is irrelevent.
Verified vote buying is already incredibly easy thanks to absentee ballots (in addition to half a dozen other methods) - want to outlaw absentee voting?
Well gee, then, what's one more form of fraud? Is this the way you view everything? My computer has one exploit, having two is no different? And if absentee ballots are the end-all of election fraud, why did the shoe polish or other methods of fraud ever exist?
I do think we should seriously consider ways in which to improve absentee voting, yes. Using the flaws in absentee voting to justify introducing more flaws is completely backwards.
It's, at best, the *same* amount of work as watching them fill out an absentee ballot and hand it to you.
Except it can be done after the election, and doesn't require you to get the ballots in advance. It's more like the shoe polish method in that respect.
You lose nothing (it doesn't make vote buying any easier than absentee ballots do)
You think that adding another method of fraud as easy as the other is "losing nothing"? Do you think having two holes in your dyke is the same as one as long as the second hole is the same size? Besides, I'm thinking it would be less suspicious for employees to vote normally and have their boss check their vote than for every employee to vote absentee. If you think there aren't people who wouldn't take advantage of this new form of fraud, you are simply naive.
You gain voter verification
No you don't. What, you think because some website says you voted for whoever means the counting algorithm uses the same value, or counts your vote at all?
The only way to actually verify the vote is to have the voter come in and personally verify the printed ballot that is going to be used in the recount -- at which point you may as well re-run the election, because when you bring everyone in with possibility of contesting their recorded vote that's what you're doing.
What is your problem with that?
If it were true, nothing. Since what I'm losing is anonymity, and what I gain is just a false sense of security and a new form of election fraud -- I have a big problem with that.
In the case of the Gore-Kerry/Nader exchanges, both sides had roughly equivalent political views, so there was little reason to suspect, so most people didn't even bother with things like that.
Well then since what we are talking about is getting someone to vote against their own views, why did you even bring this up?
Vote buying/exchanging? There's a long history, although intimidation is a much easier way to rig an election. Four-legged voting, ID-borrowing, shoepolishing, and all sorts of techniques have been used.
What do shoe polish, four-legged voting, and getting people to fill out absentee ballots have in common? They all are ways to remove anonymity from the voter. So your bright idea is to add another way for this to be done?
You acknowledge that vote buying and voter intimidation are a problem when you can verify who the voter voted for, and impossible if you cannot. So where is the disconnect between your proposal for removing anonymity and all these other methods of doing exactly the same thing?
Going around coercing people to fill out absentee ballots is a valid concern, but going around coercing people to show you who they voted for is too much work? I'm not really following.
Even assuming you are correct on that point, that doesn't justify adding another way to lose anonymity. You are deliberately adding another method of election fraud! And you have yet to give a reason why this change would be a good thing to balance out the obvious (even if in your mind unlikely, you still must recognize that it exists) downside of allowing vote coercion by verifying how people voted.
Where were you during the huge Nader/Gore and Nader/Kerry vote exchange campaigns?
I was sitting around wondering how you would ever prove that either person actually voted the way they had agreed to.
You *do* keep anonymity, *at your option*. I should have the right to give up *my* anonymity if I choose to.
No. The system must be anonymous (I think my pronouns were off, I'll be more careful), and it cannot be optional. If you meaning the voter can "voluntarily" give up your anonymity, then you can be bought or coerced into voting how someone else wants and then proving you did so.
If you cannot prove who you voted for to a third party, then they cannot buy your vote, because you can say you voted for whoever you like and they know it.
That is a feature, and you had better have a damn good reason for throwing that away. Anonymous ballots are one of the fundamentals of a fair election. If all you want to do is have the choice to give up anonymity, then just tell people who you voted for, and you and they can deal with the fact that they'll have to take your word for it. Otherwise, looking up your vote online is useless. You'll never know if the vote they show you on the website is the same as the one they use when counting the vote, and trying to recreate the election results from that information is essentially re-running the elections.
You're still anonymous; it's your choice as whether or not to violate your own anonymity.
Right, and as long as someone knows that you can "choose" to violate your own anonymity, they can coerce you into doing it. Was my little dialogue not clear enough on that?
The former part of what you mentioned is illegal, and can (and is) done without such a voting system.
Yeah, I'm thinking it's illegal too. Now how do you do it if there is no way to verify that a certain person voted for a certain candidate? How does that version of the evil plan work?
"Okay, Burke, did you vote for Rei like I suggested? My pal Louis ville Slugger wants to know." "Oh yeah, I distinctly remember doing so!" "Um... okay then, here's your money. Damn, I wish I could prove that. Have a nice day."
One can't decide not to improve technology over rare to nonexistant threats.
Who said anything about not improving technology? I said you must keep anonymity as part of the system. Removing anonymity is breaking the system, not improving it. The presence of anonymity in the current system -- even the broken Diebold one -- is the reason why vote buying is in fact very rare. It's easier to raise a person from the dead or create a new one than to buy an actual voter because you can't prove they did it, protecting the vast majority which are the real votes.
The necessary components of a good computer voting system look like this: * When the voter makes their choice, it is both stored in a database and printed out for the voter to see that it is correct. * There must be nothing that can associate the voter with the ballot. * The text on the printed ballot must be both human and machine readable, the same text, so the voter knows the computer-readable version is the same. This is to allow, should the need arise, both fast computer recounts and manual recounts by independent machines/inspectors.
This isn't perfect. You still have the physical security issues involved with the paper ballots. You still have the issue of voter registration/zombie voters. Every voting system has these issues. Yet without the above things the voting system is broken.
I'm not against progressing technology (it is to laugh), I'm against progressing technology in a way that is worse than what we had before.
You're expecting politicians to hire "enforcers" - gee, *that* wouldn't hurt their reputation if the word got out. Politicians with thousands of thugs threatening everyone in the district...:)
Fine, if the hired goon version doesn't appeal to you, then the evil politicians just pay poor people to vote for them. Are you really unable to see how easily a non-anonymous voting system can be abused?
for example, one method which I read about not only keeps a paper record (which the user never has to handle, but is there for recounts)
Though hopefully they can see this paper, so they can verify that it is correct before it is automatically placed in the box. This is where the verification takes place, and after that you have all the usual physical security issues.
but prints out a tracking number that the user can enter on the election board's website and verify that their vote is in the system and who it is listed as being for.
Aaaaaaaaargh! Nooooo!
"Hello, Rei. If you could please verify for me that you voted for Mr. Burke, so I can give you the fifty dollars like I promised? If not, I'll just have to break your kneecaps, as I also promised." -- One of my campaign staff enforcement officers.
Anonymity is one of the parts you can't leave out of the system, okay?
Let's see... The Norwegians are attacking via kayak?
No, wait, it's a Wednesday... The pork at the department picnic is undercooked, try the potato salad instead?
Oops, odd numbered year... Um... Oh my God! Purple doggies are tracing CIA operative Park Wilmington! Those damn purple dogs; I thought we took care of them in Guatemala! I never should have trusted the operative who said he was sure the one that fell over the cliff was dead!
You are being disingenous here. Iraq did not attack the U.S., but it did violate a cease-fire agreement. A cease-fire is not a peace treaty. When a cease-fire is violated, the shooting can start again. This "Gulf War II" is really no such thing, it is a long overdue continuation of Gulf War I, which was fully, legally sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council by unanimous vote.
And which never included the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Saying this is just a continuation of GWI is disengenious, because it is really no such thing, even if a tenous legal argument could be made that it is. That the legal argument depends on U.N. support is funny -- why didn't we have that support for our "continuation" then? Okay, I actually know the answer and the politics involved; my point is regarding the use of the U.N. to legitimize an action while simultaneously rejecting the need for such legitimacy when they won't grant it.
Fighting the insurgency in Iraq has cost more than the Marshall plan.
I'd like to see you prove that. You can't, but I'd like to see you try.
Are you joking?! Saddam Hussein was removed from power in 2003. Since that time, just over two years, how much has been devoted to the war? More than the $100 billion you said the Marshal Plan spent in four! Bush has asked for more than that as extra funding in addition to the normal Defense Department budget.
It seems you are unaware of the definition of the word "lie." A lie is a statement made with the knowledge that it is not true. Bush made his decision based upon the intelligence data available at the time
Bush knew much of the data he used to justify the war was suspect. The statements made by Powell before the U.N. were known to be of dubious nature. No qualification regarding the warnings that had been given regarding this intelligence were shared. Thus, they were lies.
The U.N. report from Hans Blix and Baradei specifically found Iraq in "material breach" of its agreements, which was all the pretext needed in order to bring military force to bear.
And those material breaches were not similar in any way to the statements made by the government about Iraq's WMD's, including the infamous "we know where they are" statement.
Talk about disengenious. But thanks for acknowledging that it was all about finding a pretext. Too bad they couldn't find a pretext that was both true and would convince the American people of the need to go to war, eh?
That's funny, because just last week Bush announced "we will stay the course and finish the job."
That's not a plan. A plan is a method for getting the job done. That's just a statement that he's not quitting, or changing strategies, or admitting imperfection in any way. That's great.
"Stay the Course" is stupid when you are on the wrong course. When your raft is headed towards a waterfall, and your captain says "Stay the Course", you remove him from command because he is obviously insane.
What do you want, flow charts and diagrams? We're going to stay as long as needed and do whatever is needed in order to see Iraq through. You want details? That's laughable. "No plan survives first contact with the enemy" said Napoleon Bonaparte, and it remains true today
Why assume they have a plan at all? They obviously didn't have a plan for the occupation, because our Secretary of Defense and his planners didn't think there would be an insurgency. Let me repeat that in bold: They didn't think there would be an insurgency. And I'm supposed to just trust these idiots that they can "stay the course" -- meaning continue making the same stupid decisions they've been making all along -- and win? HA!
"No plan survives first contact with the enemy" said Napoleon Bonaparte, which are wise words for a great general like him, but for this crew it should be "No plan survives first contact with the civilian administration".
A robot must protect itself, as long as that protection doesn't violate either the first or second law. Hmmm, this one sort of limits how many robots will be in the ICU in the first place eh?
A robot must deliberately place itself in harms way at least once a month as long as the harm does not violate the first or second law, and the harm is limited to that which can be fixed by a medical intern.
If a player shows a preference for attacking with one particular type of unit, the AI should "realize" it and start building counterunits.
Alpha Centauri (another Sid Meier game, Civ on an alien world, in case you weren't aware) did this. For example, after I would develop aircraft I would normally tear up my opponents for a decade or so before they started fielding enough anti-air troops that my airforce was nearly useless, unless I could beat up on them first with ground troops. This basically forced you into fielding diverse armies. It also allowed for another level of strategy where you would switch what you were attacking with suddenly to take advantage of the AI's lag time in changing strategies to producing troops, which in some ways makes such "trainability" a disadvantage for the AI.
I think a cool AI feature of a game would be for the AI to "learn" how a player plays over the course of the player's games.
I agree, I've always wanted features like that. I may be mistaken, but I think the Descent series used some form of this, where the robots would learn what direction you tended to dodge shots in and such.
I guess what I'm saying is that if we could get to the point where computers are "thinking" like humans, I can finally shed the last vestiges of my need for friends to play with, and that can't be a bad thing, right?:-)
It's funny... In a lot of games, mostly strategy games and fighting games, I actually do better against humans because I can work with the human's weaknesses and try to steer how the human thinks. With standard game AI, it's more about figuring out the secret algorithm used.
I know I'll get modded troll for this, but I hate gamers that insist upon there being a Linux version.
What do you expect me to do to avoid your hate, then, being a Linux user?
is it too much to ask for you to either dual boot Windows or have a separate box for your Wintendo?
Oh, you want me to shell out the $ for Windows just to use it as a program launcher for games. Yes, purchasing Windows and devoting either a partition or an entire freaking machine to it is too much to ask. I do not have windows, I'm not going to buy windows, I'm not going to run windows.
I'd rather see the game developer focus more on making a quality game than have a lesser game that is cross-platform.
False dichotomy. First, many of the things you need to make a cross-platform game are based on up-front decisions that in the long term have basically no impact. E.g. OpenGL vs DirectX, STL vs MFC. Games made with cross-platform in mind from the beginning -- or even those without, that just happened to make the right choices -- can be simple to port. Especially because, as you note, it runs on the same hardware. Second, many of the things you need to make a cross-platform game involve using good programming practices. Thus the conclusion that a team that spent the time to port to Linux would necessarily be a lower quality game is false.
I suppose you're going to argue that UT2k4 is a worse game than it could have been because it supports Mac and Linux? I suppose the port to Linux is what kept Doom3 from having truly innovative gameplay in addition to graphics, maybe?
The only valid resource-related argument against porting is support. The extra training and possibly extra staff needed to handle support can actually matter, as opposed to just choosing the right libraries to make cross-platform practical. The support issue however doesn't relate to the game quality issue.
Of course, if the downloaders turn around and share, it will be another story (which will be true with bittorrent).
I'd say the same logic applies: If you make your work available over bittorrent, you are implicitly granting permission not only for people to download your work, but to also share it with other downloaders, since this is what bittorrent does.
Well, I'm not sure, but I don't think it would be entrapment. Entrapment is what the law enforcement officer pretending to be a hooker is afraid of; they can't solicit you to commit a crime, they have to wait for you to solicit them.
With a private citizen "pretending" to be a hooker to trap a john, it wouldn't be entrapment, it'd be solicitation for prostitution. Offering your copyrighted material over BT to lure downloaders into copyright infringement wouldn't be entrapment, it'd be you offering a download of your copyrighted material, and thus not copyright infringement.
Re:It also appers to mandate s/w features
on
RMS Previews GPL3 Terms
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Only one feature. The previous paragraph from TFA:
Some companies, such as Google, use code covered by GPL to offer their services through the Web. Do you plan to extend GPL 3 copyleft to request code publication in this case too, considering this behavior like a product distribution?
Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.
But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.
So the "such a command" phrase in the paragraph you quoted does not mean "any command". It refers to a specific command to allow source download of a web-app. It doesn't say whether this command would have to still exist if you didn't use your modification as a web-app.
I'm not sure I like that kind of clause, but it is very different than what you said. You statement made me worry that RMS would do something as foolish as mandate an unchanging feature set and interface, but that isn't true.
Tivo is great, and a few days of using it is the reason why I've been unable to watch TV without a PVR since. But for my own use, it's all about MythTV, and this story is exactly the reason. Pick whatever free PVR you want if you don't like Myth.
And if you don't like any free PVR, and are going to say something like "Free PVR X is too difficult to set up" or "X has a crappy interface compared to Tivo", I'm going to agree. But consider that in five years your Tivo is going to have the same usability and fewer features, while the free PVR will get easier to set up and use, will have more features, and above all will still be Free.
Tivo was all about taking control of your TV experience. The industry doesn't like that, and they are slowly going to take that control back. The Free PVRs, much like Free Software itself, is a way for you to keep that control.
I use light mode for the same reasons (and I think it looks better than normal slashdot... still does, really), so I too would like a light mode that I can leave enabled both on a desktop browser or mobile browser.
IF survival of the fittest was true (evolution) then why is there such a biodiversity?
It's not actually survival of the fittest. It is more like "survival of the sufficiently fit".
If you can survive and reproduce, then you have passed the fitness test. Since there are very many ways to survive, there are very many different species that have evolved.
There's a difference between a crowd and an angry mob. For instance, an angry mob is more likely to be armed.
The rougher the neighborhood, the faster they disperse (because they know the drill, and what guns can do in crowds, better than anyone).
And why would that be? Maybe because there are more shootouts between people living there, and the people and the police?
Who do you think comprised the mobs in the L.A. riots?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear the first time. The point isn't whether or not the crowd disperses when the cop fires. Of course they will. That's irrelevent next to the question of whether anyone in the mob shoots back.
In light of the GGP, which was about how stupid it would be for a pair of cops to try to intervene with the mobs with regards to their own safety, do you still think it would be wise to open fire?
Do you really think gunfire from police during the L.A. riots would have gone unanswered? Pshaw.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary, and the article, come across clearly that this is a double-edged sword. By taking the opposite extreme in an attempt to balance out the DMCA, this bill may cause extrodinary harm to the businesses who produce the content that consumers want to have fair use rights over.
It comes across clearly that the author thinks it is a double-edged sword, but it isn't clear that it is.
His claim is that consumers could legally hack any DRM scheme by claiming fair use, which "isn't codified". That's wrong. There may not be a clear line in some cases, but it is absolutely codified and has a lot of case history involved, and the kind of copying the businesses we're talking about are worried about does clearly fall in the not-fair-use side. So he's also wroing in that a person could not legally claim fair use and hack the DRM for any reason they want.
His argument boils down to: Consumers "purchas[ing] exactly the amount of use they need" from big content industry is "innovation", big content won't distribute content without DRM, and allowing citizens to exercise fair use rights without being sued for breaking DRM in doing so is the same as not having DRM at all.
Like you, I don't think we can really say what the result will be without at least reading the law, and then seeing how it is played out in reality. But based this article's take on what the bill does, this article's take on the result is utter crap.
None the less, the DMCA has not had as chilling of an effect as was once expected.
I know! People were predicting that someone could be arrested merely for discussing a security flaw, resulting in security researchers being afraid to visit the U.S., and what a load of hogwash that turned out to be.
But in all seriousness, I think the extent to which the DMCA has failed to have a "chilling effect" is the extent to which people have either ignored it or not been under the jurisdiction of the government that created it. Mostly the latter. Where did DeCSS come from again? And why isn't it in my us.debian.org apt repository, or any other U.S. distro?
As the Lexmark vs. SCC case has shown, courts are beginning to find in favor of fair use, slowly erroding the power of the DMCA by way of precident.
All the Lexmark case showed was that a company can't use the DMCA for whatever the fuck it wants whenever it wants. Lexmark was essentially claiming that the chip on their cartridges was an access control mechanism to protect the copyrighted code on the chip on their cartridges, so making a compatible interface was a DMCA violation. If the courts had bought this, it would have been an expansion of the power of the DMCA. Not expanding isn't the same as eroding at all.
"... and we're getting reports that the New York skyline has vanished entirely, replaced by giant, blinking pink letters that say 'Hacked by Chinese!'"
I think he's made himself a nice chunk of change, mostly from working at Transmeta*. In his biography "Just for Fun", the author notes that Linus picks him up in a new sports car and they're living in a nice house in northern Cali.
Transmeta was crazily lucrative to work for in the time before the bubble burst. Second hand story, disclaimers apply, but a friend of a friend apparently made about a million bucks off stock options he received as a summer intern. Not unreasonable given the curve their stock was on for a while -- right place right time deal to be sure.
Note that in the US, running a program is thought to include an act of copying it from storage to RAM, and hence fall under the purview of copyright law.
I think it is important to note that while copying a program from storage to RAM is in fact considered copying in U.S. law, this copy is not considered an exclusive right of the copyright owner and thus does not require permission. From Title 17, Chapter 1, p 117: " it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: 1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner,"
Copying a program from storage to RAM is an essential step in the utilization of the computer program, and thus is not copyright infringement. It is also not infringement to make a copy for archival purposes (same section).
U.S. copyright laws are at least that sane. Sadly things took a turn for the worse since the DMCA, which would make doing either of those things a crime if you had to circumvent copy protection to do them.
How could Bush have known unless... he's from the future! That, and the fact that they've never been seen together, is the strongest proof yet that George W. Bush is actually John Titor.
You stated "ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general", not "election fraud", but whatever. I said in particular that subset, which is true: practically everything we've been saying relates to it, as it's the kind of election fraud that involves both absentee ballots and online "verification" -- your position is vulnerable to fraud through coercion, so unless you're dropping your stupid idea, then it definitely is the main topic. Do you deny this? Or do you just want to keep the field open so you can inject irrelevent points when you have nothing substantive to say? Speaking of which, do you consider the Nader/Gore vote exchange to be fraud or not and why, and either way what was your point in bringing it up?
Absentee ballots *Give You The Option* to break your anonimity. This system gives you a *different way you can break your anonimity*. It does NOT apply it to "all ballots" - only to those who request it when they register (just like happens to people who request it via requesting an absentee ballot).
Hilarious. People are only exposed if they decide to actually use this "feature", which is what you are advocating because it gives "verification". That's a great argument: the size of the problem is directly proportional to the number of people who buy into your idea.
I'd love to see your defense in the Happy Fun Ball lawsuits: "But it only blows up in your face if you choose to use it as intended!"
Oh, I was just quite amused by you inserting a brand new, completely different argument half a dozen posts into the debate.
The hilarity of THIS statement will also be addressed. Stick around!
Oh, what the heck, I'll do it now.
That was in the very post that I was replying to when I made the smart-arse comment about how you were changing your tactics in the middle of the debate. Check the parent of the post that you just replied to.
;) You just quoted the post I was replying to when I made my comment about you adding the new argument in.
Great job there Steven Hawking.
Oh, snap! goes your dignity.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my goodness. I would have thought that after I schooled you on not reading posts carefully, you would have been more careful in your response, but you didn't even check, did you? If you had, you would have noticed that what you first replied to and what I quoted aren't even close. Your are bound and determined to look as stupid as possible, aren't you?
This is the post I quoted, in nested form so your stupidity is laid out on one page for easy reference. Note the last two sentences are what I quoted.
Scroll down or click here for your reply. Notice no mention of me adding new arguments, and in fact no response or reference to the quoted part at all!
Scroll way down or click to see FOUR POSTS LATER where you accuse me of adding a "new" argument.
You were too stupid to read my post and reply to the argument in the first place, you were too stupid to che
Oh, great - we even disagree on what we're discussing. Lovely.
Um... If you didn't think we were discussion election fraud, why did you link to the Wikipedia entry on it? Why has every paragraph except (possibly, depending on how you view it) the vote exchange been about election fraud?
It will not work to make someone vote for someone they don't agree with.
Absentee ballots can.
Exactly! Absentee ballots break anonymity! Now you want to apply this to all ballots, extending the flaw from a tiny portion of the overall ballots to every single one!
Adding a new argument in since your other ones are kind of falling apart in the face of what currently goes on, I see.
The hilarity of this weak rhetorical device will be addressed soon. Please stick around!
What's one more thing that has *no penalties that don't already exist*, that offers a benefit. Let me guess - if you were in computer security, and you had a requirement that users be able to connect to your network with unencrypted passwords that you didn't like, and I proposed a different way users could connect with unencrypted passwords that gave them benefits over the old unencrypted method, you'd oppose it. Because, that's effectively what you're doing here with voting.
YES! Because then you'd have TWO problems that need fixing instead of just one! If we fixed the first one, the second would still exist -- more to the point, you see the insecurity of your method as a feature and would resist its removal! A system where an unsecured password is considered an essential feature? How is that not retarded? Then there's the fact that the first password system is used by a small fraction of users, while your proposed second system would be used by everyone. No, no increase in insecurity there!
Let me correct your analogy: "My computer has one exploit for a service running on one port for which every black hat in the world knows about (and have thousands have hacked me through it regularly); having the same widely publicized exploit from a service running on a different port is no different." And the answer is of course it's no different - and if opening up that second service on a different port provides tangible benefits to your users, seing as it doesn't change your security situation, *Do It*.
That would be utterly retarded if
a) the exploit allowed you to hijack a single connection, and that's what you care about and
b) the first service had 1% as many connections as the second.
Especially when the alleged advantage of the second system is the exploit.
Shoe polishing is special because you can learn who people voted for without them knowing that you know. It also works where there are no absentee ballots.
Good point on the first part, but can't your flaw, er feature, be used where there are no absentee ballots as well?
Go ahead and propose them! Don't just say "it should be done". Make sure that you don't disenfranchise the elderly, overseas servicemen/women, peace corps volunteers (I have a friend in Africa for whom the only way he can reach the outside world is mail once every three-four weeks), et al.
I don't have a ready solution for that tricky problem, I'll readily admit. Do we agree at least that it is a problem that should be solved if possible? It's much easier to argue against adding new flaws, so that's what I'm doing. Especially because if we did find a solution to the absentee problem, your "feature" would still exist and be a thousand times more prevalent.
And absentee ballots can be done before the election. Is "after the election" somehow inherently more evil than before the election? And you act like "requesting the ballot in advance" is some sort of big deal,
Where do absentee ballots usually get sent? Your house, I would gather? So your boss has to get you to get one, bring it into to work, make you fill it out, th
I think the point is that Diebold is capable of making a secure machine for a task as important as banking, and therefore should be capable of making a secure machine for voting.
ATM machines have to have printers and provide a receipt at least as an option. Most of Diebold's machines have no printer and no option to get a receipt.
Even if the customer doesn't print a receipt, there is a receipt printed internally. There is no way the banks would trust the system otherwise.
A paper receipt, verifiable by the voter, deposited in a lock box and subjet to very random recounts would solve most of the uncertainty in electronic voting.
It sure would. And Diebold said repeatedly that such a thing isn't necessary. Even though it is obviously necessary in the banking case.
The conclusion, to me, is that since Diebold is capable of making secure machines, and has denied the need for what is an integral part in their own secure machines, the must not want to create secure voting machines.
It's really a scary conclusion, but what else fits?
Since when? We've been discussing ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general. Why did you just narrow down the discussion there to a particular subset?
No, we've been discussing election fraud, in particular in the form of coercion or bribery. If we were talking about "ways which could cause a person to *alter their vote* in general" we'd be talking about campaign advertisements, political blogs, and the evening news.
More to the point: Anonymous voting means the vote exchange only works if both parties are completely uncoerced and actually desire to vote in the given way. It will not work to make someone vote for someone they don't agree with. Thus it is completely different than every single other situation we are talking about.
You know very well that this isn't intended to be a solution against vote buying; it's to be a solution against disenfranchisement.
Since it doesn't work to prevent disenfranchisement, and does work to allow vote buying, I'm going to say the "intent" is irrelevent.
Verified vote buying is already incredibly easy thanks to absentee ballots (in addition to half a dozen other methods) - want to outlaw absentee voting?
Well gee, then, what's one more form of fraud? Is this the way you view everything? My computer has one exploit, having two is no different? And if absentee ballots are the end-all of election fraud, why did the shoe polish or other methods of fraud ever exist?
I do think we should seriously consider ways in which to improve absentee voting, yes. Using the flaws in absentee voting to justify introducing more flaws is completely backwards.
It's, at best, the *same* amount of work as watching them fill out an absentee ballot and hand it to you.
Except it can be done after the election, and doesn't require you to get the ballots in advance. It's more like the shoe polish method in that respect.
You lose nothing (it doesn't make vote buying any easier than absentee ballots do)
You think that adding another method of fraud as easy as the other is "losing nothing"? Do you think having two holes in your dyke is the same as one as long as the second hole is the same size? Besides, I'm thinking it would be less suspicious for employees to vote normally and have their boss check their vote than for every employee to vote absentee. If you think there aren't people who wouldn't take advantage of this new form of fraud, you are simply naive.
You gain voter verification
No you don't. What, you think because some website says you voted for whoever means the counting algorithm uses the same value, or counts your vote at all?
The only way to actually verify the vote is to have the voter come in and personally verify the printed ballot that is going to be used in the recount -- at which point you may as well re-run the election, because when you bring everyone in with possibility of contesting their recorded vote that's what you're doing.
What is your problem with that?
If it were true, nothing. Since what I'm losing is anonymity, and what I gain is just a false sense of security and a new form of election fraud -- I have a big problem with that.
In the case of the Gore-Kerry/Nader exchanges, both sides had roughly equivalent political views, so there was little reason to suspect, so most people didn't even bother with things like that.
Well then since what we are talking about is getting someone to vote against their own views, why did you even bring this up?
Vote buying/exchanging? There's a long history, although intimidation is a much easier way to rig an election. Four-legged voting, ID-borrowing, shoepolishing, and all sorts of techniques have been used.
What do shoe polish, four-legged voting, and getting people to fill out absentee ballots have in common? They all are ways to remove anonymity from the voter. So your bright idea is to add another way for this to be done?
You acknowledge that vote buying and voter intimidation are a problem when you can verify who the voter voted for, and impossible if you cannot. So where is the disconnect between your proposal for removing anonymity and all these other methods of doing exactly the same thing?
Going around coercing people to fill out absentee ballots is a valid concern, but going around coercing people to show you who they voted for is too much work? I'm not really following.
Even assuming you are correct on that point, that doesn't justify adding another way to lose anonymity. You are deliberately adding another method of election fraud! And you have yet to give a reason why this change would be a good thing to balance out the obvious (even if in your mind unlikely, you still must recognize that it exists) downside of allowing vote coercion by verifying how people voted.
Where were you during the huge Nader/Gore and Nader/Kerry vote exchange campaigns?
I was sitting around wondering how you would ever prove that either person actually voted the way they had agreed to.
You *do* keep anonymity, *at your option*. I should have the right to give up *my* anonymity if I choose to.
No. The system must be anonymous (I think my pronouns were off, I'll be more careful), and it cannot be optional. If you meaning the voter can "voluntarily" give up your anonymity, then you can be bought or coerced into voting how someone else wants and then proving you did so.
If you cannot prove who you voted for to a third party, then they cannot buy your vote, because you can say you voted for whoever you like and they know it.
That is a feature, and you had better have a damn good reason for throwing that away. Anonymous ballots are one of the fundamentals of a fair election. If all you want to do is have the choice to give up anonymity, then just tell people who you voted for, and you and they can deal with the fact that they'll have to take your word for it. Otherwise, looking up your vote online is useless. You'll never know if the vote they show you on the website is the same as the one they use when counting the vote, and trying to recreate the election results from that information is essentially re-running the elections.
You're still anonymous; it's your choice as whether or not to violate your own anonymity.
:)
Right, and as long as someone knows that you can "choose" to violate your own anonymity, they can coerce you into doing it. Was my little dialogue not clear enough on that?
The former part of what you mentioned is illegal, and can (and is) done without such a voting system.
Yeah, I'm thinking it's illegal too. Now how do you do it if there is no way to verify that a certain person voted for a certain candidate? How does that version of the evil plan work?
"Okay, Burke, did you vote for Rei like I suggested? My pal Louis ville Slugger wants to know."
"Oh yeah, I distinctly remember doing so!"
"Um... okay then, here's your money. Damn, I wish I could prove that. Have a nice day."
One can't decide not to improve technology over rare to nonexistant threats.
Who said anything about not improving technology? I said you must keep anonymity as part of the system. Removing anonymity is breaking the system, not improving it. The presence of anonymity in the current system -- even the broken Diebold one -- is the reason why vote buying is in fact very rare. It's easier to raise a person from the dead or create a new one than to buy an actual voter because you can't prove they did it, protecting the vast majority which are the real votes.
The necessary components of a good computer voting system look like this:
* When the voter makes their choice, it is both stored in a database and printed out for the voter to see that it is correct.
* There must be nothing that can associate the voter with the ballot.
* The text on the printed ballot must be both human and machine readable, the same text, so the voter knows the computer-readable version is the same. This is to allow, should the need arise, both fast computer recounts and manual recounts by independent machines/inspectors.
This isn't perfect. You still have the physical security issues involved with the paper ballots. You still have the issue of voter registration/zombie voters. Every voting system has these issues. Yet without the above things the voting system is broken.
I'm not against progressing technology (it is to laugh), I'm against progressing technology in a way that is worse than what we had before.
You're expecting politicians to hire "enforcers" - gee, *that* wouldn't hurt their reputation if the word got out. Politicians with thousands of thugs threatening everyone in the district...
Fine, if the hired goon version doesn't appeal to you, then the evil politicians just pay poor people to vote for them. Are you really unable to see how easily a non-anonymous voting system can be abused?
for example, one method which I read about not only keeps a paper record (which the user never has to handle, but is there for recounts)
Though hopefully they can see this paper, so they can verify that it is correct before it is automatically placed in the box. This is where the verification takes place, and after that you have all the usual physical security issues.
but prints out a tracking number that the user can enter on the election board's website and verify that their vote is in the system and who it is listed as being for.
Aaaaaaaaargh! Nooooo!
"Hello, Rei. If you could please verify for me that you voted for Mr. Burke, so I can give you the fifty dollars like I promised? If not, I'll just have to break your kneecaps, as I also promised." -- One of my campaign staff enforcement officers.
Anonymity is one of the parts you can't leave out of the system, okay?
Purple doggy trace park Wilmington
*flips madly through his codebook*
Let's see... The Norwegians are attacking via kayak?
No, wait, it's a Wednesday... The pork at the department picnic is undercooked, try the potato salad instead?
Oops, odd numbered year... Um... Oh my God! Purple doggies are tracing CIA operative Park Wilmington! Those damn purple dogs; I thought we took care of them in Guatemala! I never should have trusted the operative who said he was sure the one that fell over the cliff was dead!
And which never included the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Saying this is just a continuation of GWI is disengenious, because it is really no such thing, even if a tenous legal argument could be made that it is. That the legal argument depends on U.N. support is funny -- why didn't we have that support for our "continuation" then? Okay, I actually know the answer and the politics involved; my point is regarding the use of the U.N. to legitimize an action while simultaneously rejecting the need for such legitimacy when they won't grant it.
I'd like to see you prove that. You can't, but I'd like to see you try.
Are you joking?! Saddam Hussein was removed from power in 2003. Since that time, just over two years, how much has been devoted to the war? More than the $100 billion you said the Marshal Plan spent in four! Bush has asked for more than that as extra funding in addition to the normal Defense Department budget.
It seems you are unaware of the definition of the word "lie." A lie is a statement made with the knowledge that it is not true. Bush made his decision based upon the intelligence data available at the time
Bush knew much of the data he used to justify the war was suspect. The statements made by Powell before the U.N. were known to be of dubious nature. No qualification regarding the warnings that had been given regarding this intelligence were shared. Thus, they were lies.
The U.N. report from Hans Blix and Baradei specifically found Iraq in "material breach" of its agreements, which was all the pretext needed in order to bring military force to bear.
And those material breaches were not similar in any way to the statements made by the government about Iraq's WMD's, including the infamous "we know where they are" statement.
Talk about disengenious. But thanks for acknowledging that it was all about finding a pretext. Too bad they couldn't find a pretext that was both true and would convince the American people of the need to go to war, eh?
That's funny, because just last week Bush announced "we will stay the course and finish the job."
That's not a plan. A plan is a method for getting the job done. That's just a statement that he's not quitting, or changing strategies, or admitting imperfection in any way. That's great.
"Stay the Course" is stupid when you are on the wrong course. When your raft is headed towards a waterfall, and your captain says "Stay the Course", you remove him from command because he is obviously insane.
What do you want, flow charts and diagrams? We're going to stay as long as needed and do whatever is needed in order to see Iraq through. You want details? That's laughable. "No plan survives first contact with the enemy" said Napoleon Bonaparte, and it remains true today
Why assume they have a plan at all? They obviously didn't have a plan for the occupation, because our Secretary of Defense and his planners didn't think there would be an insurgency. Let me repeat that in bold: They didn't think there would be an insurgency. And I'm supposed to just trust these idiots that they can "stay the course" -- meaning continue making the same stupid decisions they've been making all along -- and win? HA!
"No plan survives first contact with the enemy" said Napoleon Bonaparte, which are wise words for a great general like him, but for this crew it should be "No plan survives first contact with the civilian administration".
A robot must protect itself, as long as that protection doesn't violate either the first or second law. Hmmm, this one sort of limits how many robots will be in the ICU in the first place eh?
A robot must deliberately place itself in harms way at least once a month as long as the harm does not violate the first or second law, and the harm is limited to that which can be fixed by a medical intern.
If a player shows a preference for attacking with one particular type of unit, the AI should "realize" it and start building counterunits.
:-)
Alpha Centauri (another Sid Meier game, Civ on an alien world, in case you weren't aware) did this. For example, after I would develop aircraft I would normally tear up my opponents for a decade or so before they started fielding enough anti-air troops that my airforce was nearly useless, unless I could beat up on them first with ground troops. This basically forced you into fielding diverse armies. It also allowed for another level of strategy where you would switch what you were attacking with suddenly to take advantage of the AI's lag time in changing strategies to producing troops, which in some ways makes such "trainability" a disadvantage for the AI.
I think a cool AI feature of a game would be for the AI to "learn" how a player plays over the course of the player's games.
I agree, I've always wanted features like that. I may be mistaken, but I think the Descent series used some form of this, where the robots would learn what direction you tended to dodge shots in and such.
I guess what I'm saying is that if we could get to the point where computers are "thinking" like humans, I can finally shed the last vestiges of my need for friends to play with, and that can't be a bad thing, right?
It's funny... In a lot of games, mostly strategy games and fighting games, I actually do better against humans because I can work with the human's weaknesses and try to steer how the human thinks. With standard game AI, it's more about figuring out the secret algorithm used.
I know I'll get modded troll for this, but I hate gamers that insist upon there being a Linux version.
What do you expect me to do to avoid your hate, then, being a Linux user?
is it too much to ask for you to either dual boot Windows or have a separate box for your Wintendo?
Oh, you want me to shell out the $ for Windows just to use it as a program launcher for games. Yes, purchasing Windows and devoting either a partition or an entire freaking machine to it is too much to ask. I do not have windows, I'm not going to buy windows, I'm not going to run windows.
I'd rather see the game developer focus more on making a quality game than have a lesser game that is cross-platform.
False dichotomy. First, many of the things you need to make a cross-platform game are based on up-front decisions that in the long term have basically no impact. E.g. OpenGL vs DirectX, STL vs MFC. Games made with cross-platform in mind from the beginning -- or even those without, that just happened to make the right choices -- can be simple to port. Especially because, as you note, it runs on the same hardware. Second, many of the things you need to make a cross-platform game involve using good programming practices. Thus the conclusion that a team that spent the time to port to Linux would necessarily be a lower quality game is false.
I suppose you're going to argue that UT2k4 is a worse game than it could have been because it supports Mac and Linux? I suppose the port to Linux is what kept Doom3 from having truly innovative gameplay in addition to graphics, maybe?
The only valid resource-related argument against porting is support. The extra training and possibly extra staff needed to handle support can actually matter, as opposed to just choosing the right libraries to make cross-platform practical. The support issue however doesn't relate to the game quality issue.
Of course, if the downloaders turn around and share, it will be another story (which will be true with bittorrent).
I'd say the same logic applies: If you make your work available over bittorrent, you are implicitly granting permission not only for people to download your work, but to also share it with other downloaders, since this is what bittorrent does.
Well, I'm not sure, but I don't think it would be entrapment. Entrapment is what the law enforcement officer pretending to be a hooker is afraid of; they can't solicit you to commit a crime, they have to wait for you to solicit them.
With a private citizen "pretending" to be a hooker to trap a john, it wouldn't be entrapment, it'd be solicitation for prostitution. Offering your copyrighted material over BT to lure downloaders into copyright infringement wouldn't be entrapment, it'd be you offering a download of your copyrighted material, and thus not copyright infringement.
Only one feature. The previous paragraph from TFA:
Some companies, such as Google, use code covered by GPL to offer their services through the Web. Do you plan to extend GPL 3 copyleft to request code publication in this case too, considering this behavior like a product distribution?
Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.
But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.
So the "such a command" phrase in the paragraph you quoted does not mean "any command". It refers to a specific command to allow source download of a web-app. It doesn't say whether this command would have to still exist if you didn't use your modification as a web-app.
I'm not sure I like that kind of clause, but it is very different than what you said. You statement made me worry that RMS would do something as foolish as mandate an unchanging feature set and interface, but that isn't true.
Tivo is great, and a few days of using it is the reason why I've been unable to watch TV without a PVR since. But for my own use, it's all about MythTV, and this story is exactly the reason. Pick whatever free PVR you want if you don't like Myth.
And if you don't like any free PVR, and are going to say something like "Free PVR X is too difficult to set up" or "X has a crappy interface compared to Tivo", I'm going to agree. But consider that in five years your Tivo is going to have the same usability and fewer features, while the free PVR will get easier to set up and use, will have more features, and above all will still be Free.
Tivo was all about taking control of your TV experience. The industry doesn't like that, and they are slowly going to take that control back. The Free PVRs, much like Free Software itself, is a way for you to keep that control.
I use light mode for the same reasons (and I think it looks better than normal slashdot... still does, really), so I too would like a light mode that I can leave enabled both on a desktop browser or mobile browser.
IF survival of the fittest was true (evolution) then why is there such a biodiversity?
It's not actually survival of the fittest. It is more like "survival of the sufficiently fit".
If you can survive and reproduce, then you have passed the fitness test. Since there are very many ways to survive, there are very many different species that have evolved.
There's a difference between a crowd and an angry mob. For instance, an angry mob is more likely to be armed.
The rougher the neighborhood, the faster they disperse (because they know the drill, and what guns can do in crowds, better than anyone).
And why would that be? Maybe because there are more shootouts between people living there, and the people and the police?
Who do you think comprised the mobs in the L.A. riots?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear the first time. The point isn't whether or not the crowd disperses when the cop fires. Of course they will. That's irrelevent next to the question of whether anyone in the mob shoots back.
In light of the GGP, which was about how stupid it would be for a pair of cops to try to intervene with the mobs with regards to their own safety, do you still think it would be wise to open fire?
Do you really think gunfire from police during the L.A. riots would have gone unanswered? Pshaw.