I didn't say that you committed the fallacy. But you basically stated that most readers here will commit the fallacy. So your chain of reasoning went from "incompetent people are likely to use this defense" directly to "Slashdot readers are likely to conclude that a person using this defense is incompetent".
I just wish I had that crystal ball of yours, so that I can dumb down my future posts for people who cannot reason rationally.
Yeah, and your post is an example of a statistical fallacy where from "an incompetent person is likely to use this defense" you
conclude that "a person who uses this defense is likely to be incompetent". Classic.
People are outraged for no good reason. If one uses GPS, one has a reasonable expectation of
being tracked, if only by the GPS provider! What we really need is a free-as-in-freedom mobile device
which allows us to turn the GPS on and off whenever we please. Android may be OK, especially the
unlocked one, and Nokia's Maemo devices are even better.
Right now I have a low-end cell phone with no features but voice. I am not upgrading until I can
have vanilla GNU/Linux. Basically, I am waiting for this beast (or something like it) to drop in price
and gain in battery life.
Unless your suggesting that Microsoft or Apple have some sort of hidden backdoors in their operating systems, which seems pretty ludicrous in this day and age.
What is so ludicrous about suggesting it as a possibility? Why discard a vendor's very real ability to insert a backdoor at any time in the future? They will do it as soon as they conclude that it maximizes their revenue, or as soon as there is enough pressure from affiliated groups. And you will have to either live with it or to leave the platform. That is if you ever find out about it. And no, there won't be a class-action, because it will be done in the name of security and the courts will side with clueless users, who constitute the overwhelming majority and who simply won't care. I mean, it is done today to nearly every cell phone out there, and no one even blinks an eye, except for RMS. This is where proprietary computing wants to be, and where it ever leans, simply because the temptation is too great.
The vector is in simulating a familiar program which is known to ask for a privilege escalation. Simulating a dialog is pointless, as others pointed out above.
The fix is to forbid core programs to ask for privilege escalation regularly, as a matter of system policy. Updates, for example, should either be
fully automatic or fully manual: the current default policy (which, I believe, pops up and prompts regularly) is the least safe one for a lay user. Ideally, that user should not be needing root at all. This lofty goal may be unreachable, but bugging a user with update prompts twice a week ain't making her any safer.
Man, in Windows you do not have to fake anything. The user will happily click on the OK prompt right after downloading a game release from TPB. Millions of computers in Windows botnets are a direct result of that policy (google for "pay per install"). Windows is easy to use like that.
What you are saying is true in a way. Given the current level of expertise of an average Ubuntu user, this scenario sounds far-fetched, but we are reaching out to the masses now. We must be ready for a user who does not understand what an OS or a WM is at all. For that guy, a system is a sum of applications and a computer is a sum of peripherals. And in distributions like Ubuntu, whose goal is to be a system for everyone, the default code execution policy must guard this user reasonably well.
That code does not have to be installed, it can simply be downloaded. Currently, one can wrap it in a shell script. Then a (clueless) user can download it and start it from his desktop in just a few clicks.
The file above is a tarball. A user may be instructed to (1) Click it in Firefox and open with file-roller, which is the default behavior of Ubuntu and Firefox combo (2) drag the file inside onto the desktop (3) double-click the file, get prompted and choose "Run". (4) Ta-daaaa.
Here tar preserves x attribute, but other ways are available to achieve the same. The process may perform a task it is claimed to perform (e.g., install GoogleEarth, which is btw distributed precisely in a way described, sans the tar part), while a fork is waiting in the background just to come up with the payload hours later, thereby looking completely authentic.
Not as easy as Windows, but only a few drags and clicks, none of that scary CLI mojo. I can totally see a clueless user being enticed, while lured in by some too-good-to-be-true offer on a website or in an email.
You are right about exclusivity, that is a pretty fundamental difference. But even so, it's not the one that necessitates the monopoly institution. The reason is: the first copy still commands a higher price than every subsequent copy. That is how artists can (and, imho, should) make money, and that is a sufficient incentive to create. Copyright is an unnecessary evil; not a great evil, but a somewhat major annoyance and an overhead on all art production.
In practical terms, I totally agree with you: our first priority today should be to take a moderate political position and to reduce terms to sensible levels. We can do so gradually over the next decade or two. In the end, a term of under 2 years would be great, and anything over 5 is just plain overkill. Make that retroactive (apparently, it is OK for extending the term). This will create an entire new world of free culture, while giving big players a cushion as they adjust their business process.
But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion.
IMHO, you are trolling. I did explain it, and I don't see a point in trying again.
The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily,
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already?
Do you really not get it? By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many, and the most notable ones are (1) reliance on legacy solutions that are "good enough" and would be very expensive to replace with superior ones, (2) software vendor lock-in due to a monopolist practice (guess who), (3) confused consumers making their decisions based on ads, as opposed to technical merits (which is the reason why MS and Apple will never go out of business, even though they will never again produce anything superior to FOSS).
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
Well, since we agree that the status quo in copyright is out of whack, may be our positions are not very far from each other anyway.
Its whole purpose is to help white-hat hackers point out that a Linux system can be turned into a botnet client
It would be nice to see the code. As it stands, I am surprised that this "news" made it this far, with no links of any kind.
No one credible claims that malware is impossible in GNU/Linux or *BSD. In fact, since UNIX is a much more robust
networking OS, maintaining a botnet should be helluva lot easier than on Windows. What we have with a free OS, though,
is something that proprietary OS users will never have: a complete and total control over our security policy and every
other aspect of our software environment. When and if a vector is identified, our security policy will promptly change to
nip it in the bud.
A Speculative Example
Lately I've been thinking about one major vector: the human-assisted privilege escalation. Take the latest Ubuntu
and imagine a piece of software which runs with user privileges and does the following: it tricks the user into thinking
that it is the automatic updater. Lacking in both expertise and time, I am not going to do a proof of concept, but
how hard can it be? You just need to draw a window named "Update Manager" using the standard Gnome API, list a few bogus updates anyone would
find legit, with version number irrelevant to their day-to-day life (e.g. binutils), wait for the user to click [Install Updates],
and then "gksu pwn_you.sh". The user will enter the password, and your work is done. Then, of course, you still need to draw
some progress bars to lull the user into believing that an update is going on, but that's all just an icing on the cake.
If anyone can see why this won't work, I would like to hear it.
Looks scary, right? Wrong. Because the solution is as simple as changing the default policy. Make it so that the
default behavior is to notify only. On every system update the user should be told: "Go start the updater via the system menu. By the way, if you
EVER see an "updater" you didn't start yourself, you are being pwned." Make sure that the system menu is strictly read-only, and even the dimmest user will be safe.
This won't be implemented in Windows. Why? I really cannot guess why Microsoft's security policy seems to be designed
from ground up to fuck the user, but it is. The usual excuse seems to be: "it's easy to use". But whatever is the reason,
you just cannot make a proprietary platform secure because you cannot pop the hood open. With a free OS, you can.
ABP is the single most useful FF plugin to date. The rumor is, it would be incorporated within the main FF tree by now if not
for Mozilla's agreement with Google. My second must-have is NoScript. It evades my imagination why anyone would want to run
a single line of code from an untrusted source, or even to run anything that is not absolutely essential to YOUR browsing needs RIGHT NOW.
These are your CPU cycles, people, and your time wasted on loading and running KiBs (I am surprised it's not MiBs) of useless scripted evil benefitting
no one but advertisers.
For the lazy, there is a toolbar button which enables everything on the current page. Remember that feeling when you browsed
with ABP for the first time? It takes more time to recognize the impact of NoScript, but you will realize that it is actually much more profound.
For instance, I found out that many sites
require the temp button to be pressed twice or more before nothing is blocked, meaning (I suppose) that many ad-related scripts actually pull
and execute yet more scripts from entirely different sites, which in turn pull more scripts!
And to the AC who keeps posting about the hosts file: STFU. The beauty of NoScript is in that it bans ALL untrusted scripts,
not just the ones in your 100'000 lines of/etc/hosts, which is now entirely unmanageable by a human, almost certainly an absolute overkill,
and does nothing to protect you from scripts hosted by botnets.
The only sane answer to the remote code execution is whitelisting, preferably by cryptographically secure means. There is no middle ground.
Any other policy is simply madness.
You should stick your head out into the so called real world and see if your argument makes any sense at all.
There are thousands of tracks on Jamendo, all free-as-in-freedom. I listened to them, and some of the electronic music there is quite good (I cannot speak for the rest). Here is music made by people who are hoping to be listened to, liked, and being donated to. I bet that you can get another order of magnitude of tracks out of it if you take interest in Jamendo artists and send them a few Washingtons in the mail.
And this is just Jamendo! This is only one, and probably not even the most trendy way to market free-as-in-freedom music. I hate to break it to the "back to patronage" crowd, but the Internet offers other ways to market art: ways that even the copyright cannot provide.
And it's funny that you bring up the radio: these days I turn it on when I want to hear music that maximizes revenues for a few execs in LA, and it does so by training the consumer to recognize a few key brands. Given a choice, I would much rather listen to music commissioned by a few rich white men, since at least a few of them will have good taste.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright. This is the single greatest flaw in your argument, and the one you are great at ignoring. In order to justify a monopoly on production of copies, you have to show us that the market with the monopoly actually works better than the market sans the monopoly. You cannot get away by saying that the market is big. You have to show that it is bigger.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
But I don't think I need to cite anything here. The proponent of copyright is the one who needs to prove, using sound statistics, that artistic output is spurred by longer or non-zero copyright terms. After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries, including those where initial investment has to be recouped over many years, so why the same should be false for monopoly on ideas?
[snip]
If you think that producing a good pizza requires a few minutes and no special skill or talent, I am deeply sorry for your taste buds and your stomach.
[snip]
Your stabs at FOSS are nothing but pathetic. Anyone with a shred of expertise knows that Ubuntu dwarfs every proprietary commodity OS on technical grounds and costs less or as much to deploy and maintain.
Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator.
There are better ways to do that (see below). They accomplish the same goal while adding art to the public domain, which is what US copyright is supposed to do, and which it fails to do by design.
If you can show me evidence of even a single successful Hollywood-blockbuster-scale movie being funded through another mechanism, I will be impressed.
I can tell you how they can be done. (A more detailed view is presented in the quoted source.) One way is escrow, whereas a bunch of big-name film makers collect cash from "viewers like you" and then release the movie into the public domain. Don't tell me that it's impossible. Obviously, if people are running out to stinky theaters and later to buy an overpriced DVD, while they could about as easily download it from TPB, the demand is there. The same pop-art lovers will sign up for "Spielberg-Lucas-JarJarBinx" escrow and supply them with annual donations. Why wouldn't they? Because "they'll just wait till others pay for it"? Bullshit. If that was the attitude, then they would "just wait" till their friends got a DVD and then borrowed it... Wait a second, they are already doing it today, and the movie industry still reports record profits. Admit it: there are enough people who really love artists and are willing to pay for art, and copyright law does nothing but create artificial scarcity and make art more expensive for everyone.
If you really think that we need the copyright because it is the only way to produce $300 million movies, then your argument does not hold any water. There is no consensus on what is "good art". Even if you are right (and IMHO, you are not) and $300 movie becomes impossible to produce, this by itself means nothing, as long as there is still market for artists. May be more artists will
I think we actually agree. I should have said that a 3 strikes law is fine as long as people get a chance to defend themselves in court before being disconnected. A law that punishes people without due process is just a bad law and copyright has nothing to do with it.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy. Why does a pizza parlor owner have to bake pizzas to make a living and an artist can sit on his hands after drawing just one painting? If you try to address this issue, you will probably say something about inability to recoup costs in case of big-budget projects like movies, but this is bullshit. You will still have to explain why a monopoly is the best way (for a consumer!) to pay for these projects, while other perfectly sound ways of raising funds are known and used today (citation on request).
By successfully censoring commercial art and removing it from the Internet, these clowns
only help us to popularize the free-as-in-freedom art. I agree: let them pass more copyright laws
if they so desire. Unlike with patents, nothing of value will be lost.
May be we should build a big-bang-powered plant? The domesticated version will of course be known as "small bang" and will provide enough energy to maintain an auxiliary universe. As the tech matures, every person will be able to afford a little universe of their own.
Yes, from the Russian Wikipedia page it is clear that he does enjoy significant media attention. His clips were shown by and , which is pretty darn mainstream.
He will probably do fine. He is enjoying media attention right now and has a strong populist appeal.
He got offered a meeting with the Minister of the Internal Affairs, and refused: he wants an
audience with Putin. And he is not a kind of a whistle-blower who exposes a particular case of corruption,
he mostly talks about how militsia (police) sucks, how it's ineffecient, does not protect people,
does not reward its own employees. What drove him to the edge, in his own words, is also telling:
He has a [6-yo] step-daughter Diana. She has a computer. And his own computer broke.
He needed to do some urgent job -- something with narcotics. He asked to use his daughter's computer.
She gave it to him, of course, and he brought the computer to work. For a few days it was used
by the staff to work with documents. Then his daughter asked for her computer back, and they went to get it
together. "Me and my daughter are walking down the hall. I have the monitor and she has the wires. We meet
my boss, and he says: where are you taking the computer? I explained that it was my daughter's and I am taking it home.
He nodded and we left the building and went to a bus stop. Then the inventory guy cought up with us and started yelling that
we need to take the computer back. 'You don't have the right to take it out! Where are the documents about entry?'
They took the computer and told me to get an official statement. All of this was very unpleasant, especially because
the humiliation in front of the daughter."
http://echo.msk.ru/blog/video/634214-echo/
It's a big drama about a clueless cop who got fed up by rules and regulations and went on to
rant mostly about shitty working conditions and insufficient compensation. And drama is just
what Russians like instead of actual politics, so I predict great things for this guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that you committed the fallacy. But you basically stated that most readers here will commit the fallacy. So your chain of reasoning went from "incompetent people are likely to use this defense" directly to "Slashdot readers are likely to conclude that a person using this defense is incompetent".
I just wish I had that crystal ball of yours, so that I can dumb down my future posts for people who cannot reason rationally.
Yeah, and your post is an example of a statistical fallacy where from "an incompetent person is likely to use this defense" you conclude that "a person who uses this defense is likely to be incompetent". Classic.
?Yambe sit-a-jast fo tammer casle
People are outraged for no good reason. If one uses GPS, one has a reasonable expectation of being tracked, if only by the GPS provider! What we really need is a free-as-in-freedom mobile device which allows us to turn the GPS on and off whenever we please. Android may be OK, especially the unlocked one, and Nokia's Maemo devices are even better.
Right now I have a low-end cell phone with no features but voice. I am not upgrading until I can have vanilla GNU/Linux. Basically, I am waiting for this beast (or something like it) to drop in price and gain in battery life.
Easy, mon amie. I run 7 virtualized inside Emacs.
Screenshot here.
An illustration.
I totally agree. I address the issue here.
Unless your suggesting that Microsoft or Apple have some sort of hidden backdoors in their operating systems, which seems pretty ludicrous in this day and age.
What is so ludicrous about suggesting it as a possibility? Why discard a vendor's very real ability to insert a backdoor at any time in the future? They will do it as soon as they conclude that it maximizes their revenue, or as soon as there is enough pressure from affiliated groups. And you will have to either live with it or to leave the platform. That is if you ever find out about it. And no, there won't be a class-action, because it will be done in the name of security and the courts will side with clueless users, who constitute the overwhelming majority and who simply won't care. I mean, it is done today to nearly every cell phone out there, and no one even blinks an eye, except for RMS. This is where proprietary computing wants to be, and where it ever leans, simply because the temptation is too great.
The vector is in simulating a familiar program which is known to ask for a privilege escalation. Simulating a dialog is pointless, as others pointed out above.
The fix is to forbid core programs to ask for privilege escalation regularly, as a matter of system policy. Updates, for example, should either be fully automatic or fully manual: the current default policy (which, I believe, pops up and prompts regularly) is the least safe one for a lay user. Ideally, that user should not be needing root at all. This lofty goal may be unreachable, but bugging a user with update prompts twice a week ain't making her any safer.
Man, in Windows you do not have to fake anything. The user will happily click on the OK prompt right after downloading a game release from TPB. Millions of computers in Windows botnets are a direct result of that policy (google for "pay per install"). Windows is easy to use like that.
What you are saying is true in a way. Given the current level of expertise of an average Ubuntu user, this scenario sounds far-fetched, but we are reaching out to the masses now. We must be ready for a user who does not understand what an OS or a WM is at all. For that guy, a system is a sum of applications and a computer is a sum of peripherals. And in distributions like Ubuntu, whose goal is to be a system for everyone, the default code execution policy must guard this user reasonably well.
That code does not have to be installed, it can simply be downloaded. Currently, one can wrap it in a shell script. Then a (clueless) user can download it and start it from his desktop in just a few clicks.
Try it.
The file above is a tarball. A user may be instructed to (1) Click it in Firefox and open with file-roller, which is the default behavior of Ubuntu and Firefox combo (2) drag the file inside onto the desktop (3) double-click the file, get prompted and choose "Run". (4) Ta-daaaa.
Here tar preserves x attribute, but other ways are available to achieve the same. The process may perform a task it is claimed to perform (e.g., install GoogleEarth, which is btw distributed precisely in a way described, sans the tar part), while a fork is waiting in the background just to come up with the payload hours later, thereby looking completely authentic.
Not as easy as Windows, but only a few drags and clicks, none of that scary CLI mojo. I can totally see a clueless user being enticed, while lured in by some too-good-to-be-true offer on a website or in an email.
Your post is very thoughtful.
You are right about exclusivity, that is a pretty fundamental difference. But even so, it's not the one that necessitates the monopoly institution. The reason is: the first copy still commands a higher price than every subsequent copy. That is how artists can (and, imho, should) make money, and that is a sufficient incentive to create. Copyright is an unnecessary evil; not a great evil, but a somewhat major annoyance and an overhead on all art production.
In practical terms, I totally agree with you: our first priority today should be to take a moderate political position and to reduce terms to sensible levels. We can do so gradually over the next decade or two. In the end, a term of under 2 years would be great, and anything over 5 is just plain overkill. Make that retroactive (apparently, it is OK for extending the term). This will create an entire new world of free culture, while giving big players a cushion as they adjust their business process.
But in the system I am advocating, it is clear how those people get paid so they can continue to do their creative work.
In my system (and it's not really my system, but a system we use for material goods), it is clearer: people will produce things in hopes of making money for selling the first copy, just like they do for everything else.
No-one else has yet explained how the same thing is going to happen in any of the serious alternatives mentioned so far in this discussion.
IMHO, you are trolling. I did explain it, and I don't see a point in trying again.
The only other way to sustain output would be for people to produce the same things voluntarily,
Because under copyright they do it involuntarily? You lost me here.
I actually laughed out loud at your comments on Ubuntu, by the way: if it were really so superior to all the commercial alternatives, how come the whole world didn't move to it already?
Do you really not get it? By your logic, everyone should have moved on from FORTRAN by now, but obviously they didn't. The reasons are many, and the most notable ones are (1) reliance on legacy solutions that are "good enough" and would be very expensive to replace with superior ones, (2) software vendor lock-in due to a monopolist practice (guess who), (3) confused consumers making their decisions based on ads, as opposed to technical merits (which is the reason why MS and Apple will never go out of business, even though they will never again produce anything superior to FOSS).
I'm not really sure how to answer your final few comments: you seem to contradict yourself repeatedly, and about half of what you wrote actually supports my argument more than yours.
Well, since we agree that the status quo in copyright is out of whack, may be our positions are not very far from each other anyway.
Its whole purpose is to help white-hat hackers point out that a Linux system can be turned into a botnet client
It would be nice to see the code. As it stands, I am surprised that this "news" made it this far, with no links of any kind.
No one credible claims that malware is impossible in GNU/Linux or *BSD. In fact, since UNIX is a much more robust networking OS, maintaining a botnet should be helluva lot easier than on Windows. What we have with a free OS, though, is something that proprietary OS users will never have: a complete and total control over our security policy and every other aspect of our software environment. When and if a vector is identified, our security policy will promptly change to nip it in the bud.
A Speculative Example
Lately I've been thinking about one major vector: the human-assisted privilege escalation. Take the latest Ubuntu and imagine a piece of software which runs with user privileges and does the following: it tricks the user into thinking that it is the automatic updater. Lacking in both expertise and time, I am not going to do a proof of concept, but how hard can it be? You just need to draw a window named "Update Manager" using the standard Gnome API, list a few bogus updates anyone would find legit, with version number irrelevant to their day-to-day life (e.g. binutils), wait for the user to click [Install Updates], and then "gksu pwn_you.sh". The user will enter the password, and your work is done. Then, of course, you still need to draw some progress bars to lull the user into believing that an update is going on, but that's all just an icing on the cake.
If anyone can see why this won't work, I would like to hear it.
Looks scary, right? Wrong. Because the solution is as simple as changing the default policy. Make it so that the default behavior is to notify only. On every system update the user should be told: "Go start the updater via the system menu. By the way, if you EVER see an "updater" you didn't start yourself, you are being pwned." Make sure that the system menu is strictly read-only, and even the dimmest user will be safe.
This won't be implemented in Windows. Why? I really cannot guess why Microsoft's security policy seems to be designed from ground up to fuck the user, but it is. The usual excuse seems to be: "it's easy to use". But whatever is the reason, you just cannot make a proprietary platform secure because you cannot pop the hood open. With a free OS, you can.
ABP is the single most useful FF plugin to date. The rumor is, it would be incorporated within the main FF tree by now if not for Mozilla's agreement with Google. My second must-have is NoScript. It evades my imagination why anyone would want to run a single line of code from an untrusted source, or even to run anything that is not absolutely essential to YOUR browsing needs RIGHT NOW. These are your CPU cycles, people, and your time wasted on loading and running KiBs (I am surprised it's not MiBs) of useless scripted evil benefitting no one but advertisers.
For the lazy, there is a toolbar button which enables everything on the current page. Remember that feeling when you browsed with ABP for the first time? It takes more time to recognize the impact of NoScript, but you will realize that it is actually much more profound. For instance, I found out that many sites require the temp button to be pressed twice or more before nothing is blocked, meaning (I suppose) that many ad-related scripts actually pull and execute yet more scripts from entirely different sites, which in turn pull more scripts!
And to the AC who keeps posting about the hosts file: STFU. The beauty of NoScript is in that it bans ALL untrusted scripts, not just the ones in your 100'000 lines of /etc/hosts, which is now entirely unmanageable by a human, almost certainly an absolute overkill,
and does nothing to protect you from scripts hosted by botnets.
The only sane answer to the remote code execution is whitelisting, preferably by cryptographically secure means. There is no middle ground. Any other policy is simply madness.
You should stick your head out into the so called real world and see if your argument makes any sense at all.
There are thousands of tracks on Jamendo, all free-as-in-freedom. I listened to them, and some of the electronic music there is quite good (I cannot speak for the rest). Here is music made by people who are hoping to be listened to, liked, and being donated to. I bet that you can get another order of magnitude of tracks out of it if you take interest in Jamendo artists and send them a few Washingtons in the mail.
And this is just Jamendo! This is only one, and probably not even the most trendy way to market free-as-in-freedom music. I hate to break it to the "back to patronage" crowd, but the Internet offers other ways to market art: ways that even the copyright cannot provide.
And it's funny that you bring up the radio: these days I turn it on when I want to hear music that maximizes revenues for a few execs in LA, and it does so by training the consumer to recognize a few key brands. Given a choice, I would much rather listen to music commissioned by a few rich white men, since at least a few of them will have good taste.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
This does not prove that fewer people would be employed sans copyright. This is the single greatest flaw in your argument, and the one you are great at ignoring. In order to justify a monopoly on production of copies, you have to show us that the market with the monopoly actually works better than the market sans the monopoly. You cannot get away by saying that the market is big. You have to show that it is bigger.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal08.pdf
from
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
But I don't think I need to cite anything here. The proponent of copyright is the one who needs to prove, using sound statistics, that artistic output is spurred by longer or non-zero copyright terms. After all, economists agree that monopolies are bad in all other industries, including those where initial investment has to be recouped over many years, so why the same should be false for monopoly on ideas?
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If you think that producing a good pizza requires a few minutes and no special skill or talent, I am deeply sorry for your taste buds and your stomach.
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Your stabs at FOSS are nothing but pathetic. Anyone with a shred of expertise knows that Ubuntu dwarfs every proprietary commodity OS on technical grounds and costs less or as much to deploy and maintain.
Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator.
There are better ways to do that (see below). They accomplish the same goal while adding art to the public domain, which is what US copyright is supposed to do, and which it fails to do by design.
If you can show me evidence of even a single successful Hollywood-blockbuster-scale movie being funded through another mechanism, I will be impressed.
I can tell you how they can be done. (A more detailed view is presented in the quoted source.) One way is escrow, whereas a bunch of big-name film makers collect cash from "viewers like you" and then release the movie into the public domain. Don't tell me that it's impossible. Obviously, if people are running out to stinky theaters and later to buy an overpriced DVD, while they could about as easily download it from TPB, the demand is there. The same pop-art lovers will sign up for "Spielberg-Lucas-JarJarBinx" escrow and supply them with annual donations. Why wouldn't they? Because "they'll just wait till others pay for it"? Bullshit. If that was the attitude, then they would "just wait" till their friends got a DVD and then borrowed it... Wait a second, they are already doing it today, and the movie industry still reports record profits. Admit it: there are enough people who really love artists and are willing to pay for art, and copyright law does nothing but create artificial scarcity and make art more expensive for everyone.
If you really think that we need the copyright because it is the only way to produce $300 million movies, then your argument does not hold any water. There is no consensus on what is "good art". Even if you are right (and IMHO, you are not) and $300 movie becomes impossible to produce, this by itself means nothing, as long as there is still market for artists. May be more artists will
I think we actually agree. I should have said that a 3 strikes law is fine as long as people get a chance to defend themselves in court before being disconnected. A law that punishes people without due process is just a bad law and copyright has nothing to do with it.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy. Why does a pizza parlor owner have to bake pizzas to make a living and an artist can sit on his hands after drawing just one painting? If you try to address this issue, you will probably say something about inability to recoup costs in case of big-budget projects like movies, but this is bullshit. You will still have to explain why a monopoly is the best way (for a consumer!) to pay for these projects, while other perfectly sound ways of raising funds are known and used today (citation on request).
By successfully censoring commercial art and removing it from the Internet, these clowns only help us to popularize the free-as-in-freedom art. I agree: let them pass more copyright laws if they so desire. Unlike with patents, nothing of value will be lost.
May be we should build a big-bang-powered plant? The domesticated version will of course be known as "small bang" and will provide enough energy to maintain an auxiliary universe. As the tech matures, every person will be able to afford a little universe of their own.
This hairdryer?
Yes, from the Russian Wikipedia page it is clear that he does enjoy significant media attention. His clips were shown by and , which is pretty darn mainstream.
He will probably do fine. He is enjoying media attention right now and has a strong populist appeal. He got offered a meeting with the Minister of the Internal Affairs, and refused: he wants an audience with Putin. And he is not a kind of a whistle-blower who exposes a particular case of corruption, he mostly talks about how militsia (police) sucks, how it's ineffecient, does not protect people, does not reward its own employees. What drove him to the edge, in his own words, is also telling:
He has a [6-yo] step-daughter Diana. She has a computer. And his own computer broke. He needed to do some urgent job -- something with narcotics. He asked to use his daughter's computer. She gave it to him, of course, and he brought the computer to work. For a few days it was used by the staff to work with documents. Then his daughter asked for her computer back, and they went to get it together. "Me and my daughter are walking down the hall. I have the monitor and she has the wires. We meet my boss, and he says: where are you taking the computer? I explained that it was my daughter's and I am taking it home. He nodded and we left the building and went to a bus stop. Then the inventory guy cought up with us and started yelling that we need to take the computer back. 'You don't have the right to take it out! Where are the documents about entry?' They took the computer and told me to get an official statement. All of this was very unpleasant, especially because the humiliation in front of the daughter."
http://echo.msk.ru/blog/video/634214-echo/
It's a big drama about a clueless cop who got fed up by rules and regulations and went on to rant mostly about shitty working conditions and insufficient compensation. And drama is just what Russians like instead of actual politics, so I predict great things for this guy.