But you are talking about physical property. Publishing information that is already in the wild is neither "stealing" nor "receiving stolen property", no matter how much you want to bend the words.
I am sure they thought of it. They will probably just open a micro-wormhole into the future and send Gordon Freeman, PhD, to smash the God particle with a crowbar as it starts moving back in time.
Hey, I have a soft spot for programmable ones too, I used to have one when I was a kid (a real Eastern European beast). Nothing wrong with calculators, just no point in mandating them for school.
IMHO, there is no need. I taught math in a university for several years now, and I am convinced that calculators should be phased out. There is just no point: their only justified use in while testing. And since many students are expected to bring a general purpose networked computer to class (a smartphone), we could as well start conducting tests in Faraday cages: first classrooms, and later individual students. And once everyone is in a cage, there is just no point anymore not to allow a modern OS, with all of its pythons and gnuplots and what not. In the future, there won't be a point in not having a very personal wearable computer, a cyberbrain of sorts, either networked or not. So there is no reason to test people while deprived of it, unless they are in exotic professions.
And after centuries of tireless efforts, astronomers finally discovered that the central structure of the Milky Way is bar-shaped. Let's see how long it will take for them to substantiate the claim that it's also delicious.
and they have been suspected in supporting terrorism
What does supporting terrorism have to do with the freedom of expression? By your logic, we should not host anything in USA or UK because these countries went far beyond supporting: they are actively terrorizing in broad daylight and on an international scale.
If my N900 was a woman... You can guess what would happen next.
This example clearly shows what can be done with free software (running alongside of some proprietary device drivers and such, but that's a different issue). Unrooted, it functions like a super-awesome consumer smart-phone with a gecko browser + firefox addons. Rooted (which takes a good part of a minute), it runs much of the GNU userland, python, bash, vim, emacs, ssh(d), fennec (firefox), lynx, pidgin, even latex, which I cannot possibly imagine to be useful to anyone on that screen. Oh, and a few more hundred free applications. One can run most of these while still unrooted, of course, but why? My biggest and pretty much the only gripe is insufficient RAM.
I hope that Nokia won't give up and will deliver MeeGo running on beefed up hardware, with less, or preferably none of the proprietary crap. I don't mind paying more, since I do get some of the best hardware available.
I tell you, dude, this shit is the same sugar and spice, but they make us pay twice. And I am not even saying I am not guilty of it, I rather enjoy Pepsi. Better is subjective. These are the things we learned to like when we were young.
Then it's a problem for the entire state of Tennessee: they should have put the fire out just to make sure that no humans were trapped inside, and that is just one example of a humanitarian disaster just waiting to happen. If what you are saying is true and the system is preventing them from putting out fires regardless of circumstances, then they may want to reconsider the system.
Yes, yes they do. They literally go out of their way to reduce the value you are getting. EVERY big commercial content producer compels or allows distributors to do at least some of the following to the content: censor it, splice it with ads, stream it without an option to save to disk, put DRM on it, purge alternative versions of it, scale down its resolution, make it incompatible with free software—actually, make it incompatible with anything besides program A on a platform B, both proprietary. They further reduce the value indirectly, by collecting your personal data (finances, preferences) and sharing it with all of their buddies. Then they reduce the value even further by fragmenting the marketplace, so that a title A is only available from a store B. And after they are finally happy with how little you are getting, they charge you an arm and a leg. It simply amazes me how what we see in torrents is so hands-down better in pretty much every respect than whatever we can get via legitimate means.
This is probably just as false as "I never make spelling mistakes".
Advertising drives down prices because as more people buy the item, its per item cost drops.
On the face of it, it looks false in almost all high-volume cases. To take something off the top, why Coke and Pepsi are twice as expensive as generic sodas? There is no "secret formula", the expensive components are identical, and the taste is subjective. Why are brand-name drugs more expensive than their generic counterparts? I tried every cold medicine out there by now, and I can't tell the difference to save my life. Or my latest favorite: laundry detergents. It's just freaking soap, man, it's the same in every brand, they just smell different.
Figures. I am becoming more convinced that a good way to go would be to disguise an encrypted file as a one-time-pad, possibly with having a decoy file encrypted with that pad as well. That way, a pad would look like a key, with no evidence pointing to the fact that it itself can be decrypted.
Every time someone pirates they are actually hurting FOSS. When someone pirates a piece of software they are saying "this program is too valuable to live without but I am not going to pay for it."
I mostly agree, and especially for software examples you've given. If I may just add a little exception: games. Even RMS believes that proprietary games are comparable in "goodness" to free games, since their value is almost purely subjective and they fall under entertainment rather than utility.
I am in the same boat as you: they can take their commercials and shove it. People always bring up how commercials help to pay for content. May be they do, it does not matter. The main reason for making us watch commercials is manufacturing demand: programming consumers' minds to buy shit they don't need, or to select irrationally the more expensive and less unreliable product on the market. When I see a commercial-supported media, I know that the target audience is stupid people. "We would not have free ______ without ads" is a myth. Commercials are effective. They work: brains do get reprogrammed and companies like Pepsi, Nike, and Apple are thriving in spite of their products. (Don't get me started on feel-good drugs.) Consumers end up brainwashed and pay for their "free" TV by making poor decisions in the marketplace. May be YOU don't because YOU are so smart, but WE do. And, frankly, one who seriously believes that ads have no effect on him is deluded twice.
Most of what you just said stands to reason, but I still have an issue with
If you are really militant pro gpl and FOSS then you would never pirate. Using closed source software even if you pay for it would be counter to your ideas.
Again, unrelated issues. Pro-FOSS and pro-copyleft means that proprietary software is inferior and that we should use the copyright law in order to build a hedge around the public domain. RMS thinks that even as much as using the proprietary software is unethical, but I think he is in the minority there, and this view should not be painted as mainstream. On top of that, RMS would probably agree that breaking the copyright law may in some instances be ethical (like, for all non-commercial uses to start with), while clearly illegal. So no, being a spokesperson for FOSS and GPL does not require one to think that we should give out or to respect monopolies on pure ideas.
You are right, most of the time they look sufficiently different: the challenge is longish and more scrambled, while the optional is shorter and looks like a shitty scan. Sometimes, though, they do look pretty damn identical. Guys, let's all write "fuck" in RECAPTCHA, that way we may actually make a difference.
the rabid RMS followers feel that selling software is immoral... they simply want Left4Dead but don't want to pay for it...
Hahaha, keep talking out of your ass, buddy, it's funny. RMS must have said, like, 1000 times
that monetizing software is not immoral. You don't even understand what he is saying, much less
why it's helping you. And conflating free software initiative with breaking copyright is also
golden, right out of RIAA's playbook. Nevermind that rabid RMS followers would not touch
either Windows or Left4Dead with a 13-foot pole.
Slashdot Mirror
But he was ardently Christian. IMHO, that was at least very ironic.
Wikileaks only releases stuff that is already in the wild. It's already out. They just put it on a website. Is this really hard to grasp?
C.S. Lewis was a lunatic: this quote applies directly to the mainstream Christian god.
Knowingly receiving stolen property
But you are talking about physical property. Publishing information that is already in the wild is neither "stealing" nor "receiving stolen property", no matter how much you want to bend the words.
I am sure they thought of it. They will probably just open a micro-wormhole into the future and send Gordon Freeman, PhD, to smash the God particle with a crowbar as it starts moving back in time.
This would only be news to people who never had a single friend. Wait, this is /., nevermind...
Hey, I have a soft spot for programmable ones too, I used to have one when I was a kid (a real Eastern European beast). Nothing wrong with calculators, just no point in mandating them for school.
IMHO, there is no need. I taught math in a university for several years now, and I am convinced that calculators should be phased out. There is just no point: their only justified use in while testing. And since many students are expected to bring a general purpose networked computer to class (a smartphone), we could as well start conducting tests in Faraday cages: first classrooms, and later individual students. And once everyone is in a cage, there is just no point anymore not to allow a modern OS, with all of its pythons and gnuplots and what not. In the future, there won't be a point in not having a very personal wearable computer, a cyberbrain of sorts, either networked or not. So there is no reason to test people while deprived of it, unless they are in exotic professions.
And after centuries of tireless efforts, astronomers finally discovered that the central structure of the Milky Way is bar-shaped. Let's see how long it will take for them to substantiate the claim that it's also delicious.
Dude, you should make a website. About analogies. Just like ideas are experienced.
Saturn rings are not nearly as exciting as the rings surrounding Uranus.
and they have been suspected in supporting terrorism
What does supporting terrorism have to do with the freedom of expression? By your logic, we should not host anything in USA or UK because these countries went far beyond supporting: they are actively terrorizing in broad daylight and on an international scale.
OH, and mplayer. Does your iPhone run mplayer? I din't think so...
If my N900 was a woman... You can guess what would happen next.
This example clearly shows what can be done with free software (running alongside of some proprietary device drivers and such, but that's a different issue). Unrooted, it functions like a super-awesome consumer smart-phone with a gecko browser + firefox addons. Rooted (which takes a good part of a minute), it runs much of the GNU userland, python, bash, vim, emacs, ssh(d), fennec (firefox), lynx, pidgin, even latex, which I cannot possibly imagine to be useful to anyone on that screen. Oh, and a few more hundred free applications. One can run most of these while still unrooted, of course, but why? My biggest and pretty much the only gripe is insufficient RAM.
I hope that Nokia won't give up and will deliver MeeGo running on beefed up hardware, with less, or preferably none of the proprietary crap. I don't mind paying more, since I do get some of the best hardware available.
First it's not twice expensive... just a few pennies more.
Sort by price: http://shop.netgrocer.com/shop.aspx?&sid=43258248&sid_guid=384448e9-c8d5-448f-88c1-ef9fbeee1095&strid=2D462&catl0=570&hasproducts=0&forcemenu=1&shopurl=browse.aspx&strtab=Grocery&ns=1
I tell you, dude, this shit is the same sugar and spice, but they make us pay twice. And I am not even saying I am not guilty of it, I rather enjoy Pepsi. Better is subjective. These are the things we learned to like when we were young.
Then it's a problem for the entire state of Tennessee: they should have put the fire out just to make sure that no humans were trapped inside, and that is just one example of a humanitarian disaster just waiting to happen. If what you are saying is true and the system is preventing them from putting out fires regardless of circumstances, then they may want to reconsider the system.
do they want me to get things from bit torrent?
Yes, yes they do. They literally go out of their way to reduce the value you are getting. EVERY big commercial content producer compels or allows distributors to do at least some of the following to the content: censor it, splice it with ads, stream it without an option to save to disk, put DRM on it, purge alternative versions of it, scale down its resolution, make it incompatible with free software—actually, make it incompatible with anything besides program A on a platform B, both proprietary. They further reduce the value indirectly, by collecting your personal data (finances, preferences) and sharing it with all of their buddies. Then they reduce the value even further by fragmenting the marketplace, so that a title A is only available from a store B. And after they are finally happy with how little you are getting, they charge you an arm and a leg. It simply amazes me how what we see in torrents is so hands-down better in pretty much every respect than whatever we can get via legitimate means.
I don't by anything advertised.
This is probably just as false as "I never make spelling mistakes".
Advertising drives down prices because as more people buy the item, its per item cost drops.
On the face of it, it looks false in almost all high-volume cases. To take something off the top, why Coke and Pepsi are twice as expensive as generic sodas? There is no "secret formula", the expensive components are identical, and the taste is subjective. Why are brand-name drugs more expensive than their generic counterparts? I tried every cold medicine out there by now, and I can't tell the difference to save my life. Or my latest favorite: laundry detergents. It's just freaking soap, man, it's the same in every brand, they just smell different.
Figures. I am becoming more convinced that a good way to go would be to disguise an encrypted file as a one-time-pad, possibly with having a decoy file encrypted with that pad as well. That way, a pad would look like a key, with no evidence pointing to the fact that it itself can be decrypted.
Every time someone pirates they are actually hurting FOSS. When someone pirates a piece of software they are saying "this program is too valuable to live without but I am not going to pay for it."
I mostly agree, and especially for software examples you've given. If I may just add a little exception: games. Even RMS believes that proprietary games are comparable in "goodness" to free games, since their value is almost purely subjective and they fall under entertainment rather than utility.
I am a bit confused about this law. In UK, dd if=/dev/urandom of=foo.bin count=1024 bs=1024 makes you a criminal?
I am in the same boat as you: they can take their commercials and shove it. People always bring up how commercials help to pay for content. May be they do, it does not matter. The main reason for making us watch commercials is manufacturing demand: programming consumers' minds to buy shit they don't need, or to select irrationally the more expensive and less unreliable product on the market. When I see a commercial-supported media, I know that the target audience is stupid people. "We would not have free ______ without ads" is a myth. Commercials are effective. They work: brains do get reprogrammed and companies like Pepsi, Nike, and Apple are thriving in spite of their products. (Don't get me started on feel-good drugs.) Consumers end up brainwashed and pay for their "free" TV by making poor decisions in the marketplace. May be YOU don't because YOU are so smart, but WE do. And, frankly, one who seriously believes that ads have no effect on him is deluded twice.
Most of what you just said stands to reason, but I still have an issue with
If you are really militant pro gpl and FOSS then you would never pirate. Using closed source software even if you pay for it would be counter to your ideas.
Again, unrelated issues. Pro-FOSS and pro-copyleft means that proprietary software is inferior and that we should use the copyright law in order to build a hedge around the public domain. RMS thinks that even as much as using the proprietary software is unethical, but I think he is in the minority there, and this view should not be painted as mainstream. On top of that, RMS would probably agree that breaking the copyright law may in some instances be ethical (like, for all non-commercial uses to start with), while clearly illegal. So no, being a spokesperson for FOSS and GPL does not require one to think that we should give out or to respect monopolies on pure ideas.
You are right, most of the time they look sufficiently different: the challenge is longish and more scrambled, while the optional is shorter and looks like a shitty scan. Sometimes, though, they do look pretty damn identical. Guys, let's all write "fuck" in RECAPTCHA, that way we may actually make a difference.
the rabid RMS followers feel that selling software is immoral ... they simply want Left4Dead but don't want to pay for it ...
Hahaha, keep talking out of your ass, buddy, it's funny. RMS must have said, like, 1000 times that monetizing software is not immoral. You don't even understand what he is saying, much less why it's helping you. And conflating free software initiative with breaking copyright is also golden, right out of RIAA's playbook. Nevermind that rabid RMS followers would not touch either Windows or Left4Dead with a 13-foot pole.
Keep the flames going.