I don't think OSS would flourish as much if there was true competition and openness in the software field, with "may the best win" instead of "may the one with the nastiest schemes screw everybody else over."
You may think that GPL is "ideological bullshit", but it is precisely the thing that allows for the goodness like "may the best win". Without GPL, we are left with proprietary, closed source software, protected to the max by copyrights and patents. The party with the most IP capital wins, innovation be damned.
It is also unclear to me how you concluded that free software would be unable to flourish on the level playing field, even though it is good enough to compete in the near-monopolized marketplace. It is like suggesting that the driving force behind free software initiative is the hatred of Microsoft. I beg you to differ. Linux became what it is today because millions of programmers needed an OS that would serve their needs, whereas Windows served the needs of Microsoft. No matter how well regulated the market is, the proprietary commodity software is always written to maximize someone's revenue, and so if the public wants something useful, the public must write its own OS.
This can be generalized for all commodity ideas. Wikipedia is a great example from another field. I reckon that it is the best encyclopedia that ever existed. Why haven't anyone publish a thing like this to make a lot of money? Because there were no money to be made. If there was a price associated with its use, the general public would not use it at all!
Free software is a product of a collective will to share. It will never make it into the niches, but it will eventually capture every market which deals with a commodity.
After reading other comments, I actually agree with you. It looks like they are not with RIAA because they don't want to. I have nothing to say against an independent publishing effort.
I was just surprised at the implication that UC made this deal to combat piracy.
IMHO, it doesn't makes perfect sense. Apple's DRM is a joke. There must be thousands of technically inept people out there who stripped it by mistake through the CD hole. Additionally, all of the popular music is already available on P2P. So what does the DRM matter? An Apple customer can share her music with her friends. If a Mindawn customer uses P2P, he runs a risk of getting busted. I don't see any difference.
I thought that parent is a troll, so I went and tossed a few querries. Couldn't get any results. So I browsed. It looks like they carry a few hundred of albums. Wow. I've seen personal collections bigger than that. They've got nothing on a university lan.
The funny thing is, most of what I was saying was a kneejerk response. I just got very pissed when P2P crowd was characterized as "greedy". Quite aside from the moral issue at hand, that is just plain incorrect. P2P users do not hoard, nor do they make profit. RI hoards and profits -- they are greedy, if anyone is.
My point is that the reward that we use to convince people to work in society is the carrot of purchases. If that carrot is no longer present, then it seems like society might cease producing goods.
What are these goods that will not be produced in the absence of strict copyright protection? Before we consider things like music recordings, we can look at software, as it helps to illustrate my opinion better. I think it was Stallman who wrote somewhere that 90% of all software development is funded before it begins, simply because it has to be customized to the customer's needs. The remaining piece is the commodity software, like OSes, text processors, and other popular applications. But it is evident that these kinds of software are developed right now, under copyleft, and that they are on par with their commercial counterparts. All in all, prohibition of non-commercial distribution apparently does nothing to encourage people to write new software. Small clients with special needs let programmers eat the carrot in advance, and commodity software magically gets written by volunteers in the face of competition. This magic is possible because the returns of producing commodity ideas are far greater than the investments. When nearly everyone demands an OS, there will be a few Linuses with ability and desire to write it. When everyone loves to hear electronic music, there will be some unemployed dude who will spend 8 self-gratifying hours in his parents' garage and come up with a single which will be enjoyed by the rest of the world.
Let us take another bunny trail before confronting arts. Let us talk about sciences, because copyrights in US are meant to encourage them. Even a cursory glance at the scientific research convinces us that it is blooming, while defying the copyright. It is commonly understood that the research cannot even proceed properly unless the exchange of ideas is unrestricted.
While the situation in arts was greatly convoluted by the publishers' propaganda, I believe that it is not very different. The key notion ignored by copyright pimps can be summarized as follows: the demand for art exists with or without the copyright; the demand for commodity art is tremendous, and will be met with or without the copyright. Not a day goes by without someone saying "artists deserve to get paid for their labour". If that is what it is all about, I have to throw my arms in the air. I fail to comprehend how artists can be so clueless that they cannot find a way to get paid for something that is in such a great demand. It is apparent to me that popular artists enjoy fame, love, and trust under any circumstances. Copyright or not, people are throwing money at them. Industries market with them. Young girls pack themselves in boxes and try to reach them by mail [true story] -- that is the kind of demand they are facing. Only a loon can be serious while saying that popular artists will not be able to get paid for their labour without draconian laws controlling the distribution of content.
As for the not-so-popular artists -- they were always poor, they are poor now, and so they will remain.
These and many other arguments convince me that copyright protection does nothing "to encourage the progress of arts". At the same time, the evidence for its harmful effects on the progress of arts is abundant and embarrassing (cf. Lessig). Moreover, I consider the non-profit distribution of ideas a human right. There are some, I am sure, who would like to argue, but they are all full of shit because they themselves exercise that right when they are arguing with us. I want to see the law reformed to get off our backs in that respect. I do not want it gone --
Moral absolutist? Hold on... [Thumbing through Wikipedia] No, I am most certainly not. In my view, answers are useful, but only questions really matter. If I was to neuter my worldview by attempting to describe it in one paragraph, I would say: I consider ideas, and therefore morals too, alive in a certain sense. Just like the known lifeforms they experience a sort of evolution. "Absolute truth", therefore, is nonsense (in that area I have been heavily influenced by the kind of Lao Tzu and Nagarjuna). An ordinary "truth" (as opposed to well defined truths in logic, law, etc.) is nothing more than a top dog -- an idea which happens to be strong enough to defeat opposing ideas, called "fallacies", and to occupy a significant place in the ecology, which largely consists of human minds. To be concrete, I will draw an example from morals. It is, arguably, true that "all persons are created equal". While we could go on for years discussing what the hell does that mean, it is undeniable that this idea is a t-rex among lemmings. At the time of Plato there were a few people hiding it in their closets. At the time of Jesus and shortly thereafter there were a few hundred thousands of people kicking it around. After the Civil War, a few millions of people were waving flags with "equality" on them. You may disagree, you may even have a great argument against "equality", but t-rex tends to win because he can eat you for lunch. At the same time it is not improbable that you have something new, something that will be able to eat t-rex or to make it obsolete. To that end we should be willing to understand our opponents and to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, in hope that we can replace our truths with better ones.
I do not understand the implied connection between CS/philosophy and moral absolutism. At any rate, I have a degree in CS, and at the time I am working on a degree in math. Throughout my life I was very interested in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. In these areas, I do not have much formal training under my belt, but enough, I think, to be dangerous.
In other news: Lucasfilm files a John Doe lawsuit against an unidentified Creator, alleging that he or she is using the copyrighted solar system design and setting without an explicit permission.
I own my computer, my sound system, my network equipment; I pay for my Internet connection. In the same sense of the word, I do not "own" any music simply because the concept of ownership does not apply to ideas.
We can admit that "own" acquires a new meaning when applied to the "intellectual property": to own an idea would amount to exercising control over its distribution. Even in that sense I hardly "own" anything, because I only participated in distribution once, which resulted in production of 2 copies -- both of them made without commercial gain to anyone. That is a far cry from "exercising control" over anything.
When I download stuff off the web or rip it off the library CDs, I am not driven by a desire to profit or to control distribution. I am driven solely by my love of music. Slap some labels on me, if you wish, but go slow with "covetous".
Finally, I am yet to hear a valid argument in opposition of my moral right to listen to whatever music I see fit. Nor have I heard a valid argument for doing what the current legislation does: prohibiting non-commercial distribution of artistic creations.
I can't afford to buy CD's because I'm a loser who can't stop smoking or playing on-line games even though I have no money...
So much is true:)
... I'll adopt a high-falutin' anti-copyright moral tone and just take whatever I feel like.
With some reservations, true again. It is really amazing how you turned everything upside down by inserting a single word "so" between these 2 sentences. I never connected them -- they are in the different posts even. I used the first one to show only that I am not greedy, and the second one stands on its own.
Please read more carefully. I do not use my financial situation as an excuse for breaking the law. I gave these figures to prove that I am not "greedy".
Seeing that/. left no stone unturned in the whole copyright issue, one would think that/. readers, out of all people, would not waste their time offering this analogy. You have just compared me to a robber -- not to a thief even, like the records companies do, but to someone who robs you of your food in a broad daylight. This analogy is flawed because when I choose to disrespect the copyright holder's exlusive distribution rights, I do not take anything from anyone. The opposite is the case: I create more goods. That, of course, deprives the holder of a potential profit, which is secured by nothing else than the copyright law.
Aside from your argument being weak, it is also misplaced. I clearly implied in my post that I do not consider copyright law ethical and that I wish it to be reformed. I choose to pass on options (1) and (2) you have given me and go for (3) non-violent resistance to the unjust law -- a resistance which gives me no profit and hurts only the richest and only very slightly; that coupled with raising awareness about the law's harmful effects and doing what I can to change it, or to get rid of it altogether.
I am sorry to sound kind, but that's the way life should be.
Your point about wasted time is well taken. But to be truthful with you, my finances are not exactly in ruins. Money comes and goes. Still, the figures I have given are accurate, and in this country they firmly place me into the category of people who cannot possibly afford to buy CDs and DVDs, while making it ethically acceptable for me to get (and so also invariably give with BT) illegitimate copies over the net, strictly for private use.
Illegitimate copying on P2P is not "greedy", nor should it be called "piracy". I am $400 in debt, and at the moment this number is greater than what I have in my bank account. Do I look greedy to you, when I opt out of buying a $15 CD and go for BT instead? I am not trying to to make money here. I just cannot possibly spare any cash on anything else besides activities that are essential to the functioning of my body: food, cigarettes, and WoW subscription.
If you listen to these "grumpy" people carefully, you will find out that many of them object to the copyright law (in its current state) on ethical grounds. The fact that some, like me, would rather reform that law and see less art in exchange for more freedoms should convince you again that we are anything but greedy.
This is not a paradox, if you accept that the opposite of lying is being sincere. If, for one, you know that "to lie" means "to tell something you know without an intention to deceive", i.e. "to be sincere", then there is no contradiction in the fact that you are sincerely stating "I am lying".
If a 17y old kid can singlehandledly [sic] cause a billion dollar damage then YOUR SECURITY IS BAD ANYWAY, which should be YOUR responsibility.
Thank you for spelling this one out. When I was in highschool (a rather special computer science oriented highschool in Moscow) I had 2 (two) people in my class, who wrote simple viruses for the fun of it -- they didn't have any malicious payload. Both viruses were promptly listed in the AV products of the day, but it did not prevent one of them from sweeping across Ukrain.
Internet is very, very, very insecure, and so demanding harsh penalties for writing viruses is rather hypocritical. Proponents are the same people who would argue that they should be able to shoot people who trespass across their front loan. Newsflash: fences were invented!
Another point I want to make is rather unpopular, as far as I can tell after perusing the comments. Virus writers do not infect computers, nor do they cause damages -- viruses do that. The latter should be punished severely (DELETED!), and the former -- to the extent of their intent. A college kid who wrote a fun and harmless virus should be slapped on the hands; a spam king who wrote a virus which installs a backdoor should pull some time. And if it can be proven before the jury that the intent of writing was to kill some people in a gruesome manner -- sure, go ahead and ask for a capital punishment.
Bottom line is: if the Internet's constitution is so weak that it catches every minor cold and is allergic to a hundred things on any given day -- this our own fault. An organism so weak cannot be protected by laws -- only by introduction of good diet, good habits, and regular exercise.
I wish I had mod points for you. The following sentence struck me as the one having a larger, symbolic meaning:
Most computer users live in houses with no locks
Case in point: lack of security throughout the Internet is the cause for viral infections, not the consequence. If it is so easy to infect and to take control over someone else's machine, then it must be easy to frame someone for writing/spreading the virus. Suppose that we vote for death penalty for hackers. That may deter a few college kids at Cornell, but sure as hell it won't stop a professional hacker in St. Petersburg. A black hat will write a virus, take control over Joe Blow's computer, release it in the wild, then retreat by removing the backdoor. Next thing you know, Joe Blow, 17, Wallmart employee, is in court, facing the electric chair. Beautiful.
Along the lines of what the parent said: if you want to apply a serious punishment, you better be damn sure that the crime is hard to commit. Otherwise you will end up doing the worst thing: electrifying the wrong people.
How's the electronic textbook, copyrighted, and possibly DRMed, going to fix the problem? No no, the only way to stop what you call the "racket" is to adapt free (in Stallman's sense) textbooks.
This is a very viable option, opposed mainly by publishers of the copyrighted works and by a handful of textbook writers with connections. It will work because textbooks are a commodity -- a comparison with a commodity OS should suffice as a compelling reason of its success. There are just too many people who can and will participate, given a chance. Public school textbooks are not quantum physics, they are easy to write. All that is needed is a decent writer with a good grasp of the subject matter. US universities are stuffed full with such people. Also, unlike the college textbooks for cutting edge technologies, school textbooks do not require extensive revisions. All of this makes it quite probable that school textbooks will be just as effective if they go over to some equivalent of GPL.
I did not have a pleasure of going to a US public school, but I've spent a few years in college here. A few exceptions aside, the newer the text is -- the worse it is. Some of the best texts I've used were (1) those written by my professors back when they were slaving for their advisors and (2) those out of print -- we were given photocopies of the relevant chapters, copyright be damned. Even if I put the pricing issue aside, I am convinced that commercial textbook publishing is a big rip-off, as far as the quality goes. I therefore conjecture that switching to a GPL-like license may also increase the overall quality.
And here's why none of this happen in your lifetime. As well as I do, you know that teaching sciences is a secondary goal of the US public school. The primary goal is ever the same, and it is to condition a citizen. (I do not put US last, the situation is much the same or worse in other countries.) To allow children to learn from what essentially is a Wiki-textbook is to loose all control over formation of values and views. Moreover, once the learning material is better than people who teach it, the flaws of the latter come to light. Every parent will be able to see that many of the school teachers and officials are nothing more than officers of the disciplinary force, who do not regard liberal education as their primary objective.
What a rant, and all off-topic. But what can I do? Introducing laptops is almost inconsequential to the learning per se, aside from getting kids to use computers.
When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
In all probability, not on our life. Because what keeps it sane in other industries are the laws allowing us, consumers, to return a broken products for a full refund. I don't see that happening to sofrware any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think OSS would flourish as much if there was true competition and openness in the software field, with "may the best win" instead of "may the one with the nastiest schemes screw everybody else over."
You may think that GPL is "ideological bullshit", but it is precisely the thing that allows for the goodness like "may the best win". Without GPL, we are left with proprietary, closed source software, protected to the max by copyrights and patents. The party with the most IP capital wins, innovation be damned.
It is also unclear to me how you concluded that free software would be unable to flourish on the level playing field, even though it is good enough to compete in the near-monopolized marketplace. It is like suggesting that the driving force behind free software initiative is the hatred of Microsoft. I beg you to differ. Linux became what it is today because millions of programmers needed an OS that would serve their needs, whereas Windows served the needs of Microsoft. No matter how well regulated the market is, the proprietary commodity software is always written to maximize someone's revenue, and so if the public wants something useful, the public must write its own OS.
This can be generalized for all commodity ideas. Wikipedia is a great example from another field. I reckon that it is the best encyclopedia that ever existed. Why haven't anyone publish a thing like this to make a lot of money? Because there were no money to be made. If there was a price associated with its use, the general public would not use it at all!
Free software is a product of a collective will to share. It will never make it into the niches, but it will eventually capture every market which deals with a commodity.
He isn't really dead, he's just been beamed up.
After reading other comments, I actually agree with you. It looks like they are not with RIAA because they don't want to. I have nothing to say against an independent publishing effort.
I was just surprised at the implication that UC made this deal to combat piracy.
IMHO, it doesn't makes perfect sense. Apple's DRM is a joke. There must be thousands of technically inept people out there who stripped it by mistake through the CD hole. Additionally, all of the popular music is already available on P2P. So what does the DRM matter? An Apple customer can share her music with her friends. If a Mindawn customer uses P2P, he runs a risk of getting busted. I don't see any difference.
I thought that parent is a troll, so I went and tossed a few querries. Couldn't get any results. So I browsed. It looks like they carry a few hundred of albums. Wow. I've seen personal collections bigger than that. They've got nothing on a university lan.
For expressing a mild interest in my website, you will be punished by listening to Megalomania and giving some feedback.
The funny thing is, most of what I was saying was a kneejerk response. I just got very pissed when P2P crowd was characterized as "greedy". Quite aside from the moral issue at hand, that is just plain incorrect. P2P users do not hoard, nor do they make profit. RI hoards and profits -- they are greedy, if anyone is.
My point is that the reward that we use to convince people to work in society is the carrot of purchases. If that carrot is no longer present, then it seems like society might cease producing goods.
What are these goods that will not be produced in the absence of strict copyright protection? Before we consider things like music recordings, we can look at software, as it helps to illustrate my opinion better. I think it was Stallman who wrote somewhere that 90% of all software development is funded before it begins, simply because it has to be customized to the customer's needs. The remaining piece is the commodity software, like OSes, text processors, and other popular applications. But it is evident that these kinds of software are developed right now, under copyleft, and that they are on par with their commercial counterparts. All in all, prohibition of non-commercial distribution apparently does nothing to encourage people to write new software. Small clients with special needs let programmers eat the carrot in advance, and commodity software magically gets written by volunteers in the face of competition. This magic is possible because the returns of producing commodity ideas are far greater than the investments. When nearly everyone demands an OS, there will be a few Linuses with ability and desire to write it. When everyone loves to hear electronic music, there will be some unemployed dude who will spend 8 self-gratifying hours in his parents' garage and come up with a single which will be enjoyed by the rest of the world.
Let us take another bunny trail before confronting arts. Let us talk about sciences, because copyrights in US are meant to encourage them. Even a cursory glance at the scientific research convinces us that it is blooming, while defying the copyright. It is commonly understood that the research cannot even proceed properly unless the exchange of ideas is unrestricted.
While the situation in arts was greatly convoluted by the publishers' propaganda, I believe that it is not very different. The key notion ignored by copyright pimps can be summarized as follows: the demand for art exists with or without the copyright; the demand for commodity art is tremendous, and will be met with or without the copyright. Not a day goes by without someone saying "artists deserve to get paid for their labour". If that is what it is all about, I have to throw my arms in the air. I fail to comprehend how artists can be so clueless that they cannot find a way to get paid for something that is in such a great demand. It is apparent to me that popular artists enjoy fame, love, and trust under any circumstances. Copyright or not, people are throwing money at them. Industries market with them. Young girls pack themselves in boxes and try to reach them by mail [true story] -- that is the kind of demand they are facing. Only a loon can be serious while saying that popular artists will not be able to get paid for their labour without draconian laws controlling the distribution of content.
As for the not-so-popular artists -- they were always poor, they are poor now, and so they will remain.
These and many other arguments convince me that copyright protection does nothing "to encourage the progress of arts". At the same time, the evidence for its harmful effects on the progress of arts is abundant and embarrassing (cf. Lessig). Moreover, I consider the non-profit distribution of ideas a human right. There are some, I am sure, who would like to argue, but they are all full of shit because they themselves exercise that right when they are arguing with us. I want to see the law reformed to get off our backs in that respect. I do not want it gone --
Moral absolutist? Hold on... [Thumbing through Wikipedia] No, I am most certainly not. In my view, answers are useful, but only questions really matter. If I was to neuter my worldview by attempting to describe it in one paragraph, I would say: I consider ideas, and therefore morals too, alive in a certain sense. Just like the known lifeforms they experience a sort of evolution. "Absolute truth", therefore, is nonsense (in that area I have been heavily influenced by the kind of Lao Tzu and Nagarjuna). An ordinary "truth" (as opposed to well defined truths in logic, law, etc.) is nothing more than a top dog -- an idea which happens to be strong enough to defeat opposing ideas, called "fallacies", and to occupy a significant place in the ecology, which largely consists of human minds. To be concrete, I will draw an example from morals. It is, arguably, true that "all persons are created equal". While we could go on for years discussing what the hell does that mean, it is undeniable that this idea is a t-rex among lemmings. At the time of Plato there were a few people hiding it in their closets. At the time of Jesus and shortly thereafter there were a few hundred thousands of people kicking it around. After the Civil War, a few millions of people were waving flags with "equality" on them. You may disagree, you may even have a great argument against "equality", but t-rex tends to win because he can eat you for lunch. At the same time it is not improbable that you have something new, something that will be able to eat t-rex or to make it obsolete. To that end we should be willing to understand our opponents and to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, in hope that we can replace our truths with better ones.
I do not understand the implied connection between CS/philosophy and moral absolutism. At any rate, I have a degree in CS, and at the time I am working on a degree in math. Throughout my life I was very interested in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. In these areas, I do not have much formal training under my belt, but enough, I think, to be dangerous.
In other news: Lucasfilm files a John Doe lawsuit against an unidentified Creator, alleging that he or she is using the copyrighted solar system design and setting without an explicit permission.
I own my computer, my sound system, my network equipment; I pay for my Internet connection. In the same sense of the word, I do not "own" any music simply because the concept of ownership does not apply to ideas.
We can admit that "own" acquires a new meaning when applied to the "intellectual property": to own an idea would amount to exercising control over its distribution. Even in that sense I hardly "own" anything, because I only participated in distribution once, which resulted in production of 2 copies -- both of them made without commercial gain to anyone. That is a far cry from "exercising control" over anything.
When I download stuff off the web or rip it off the library CDs, I am not driven by a desire to profit or to control distribution. I am driven solely by my love of music. Slap some labels on me, if you wish, but go slow with "covetous".
Finally, I am yet to hear a valid argument in opposition of my moral right to listen to whatever music I see fit. Nor have I heard a valid argument for doing what the current legislation does: prohibiting non-commercial distribution of artistic creations.
I can't afford to buy CD's because I'm a loser who can't stop smoking or playing on-line games even though I have no money...
So much is true :)
With some reservations, true again. It is really amazing how you turned everything upside down by inserting a single word "so" between these 2 sentences. I never connected them -- they are in the different posts even. I used the first one to show only that I am not greedy, and the second one stands on its own.
Please read more carefully. I do not use my financial situation as an excuse for breaking the law. I gave these figures to prove that I am not "greedy".
[Yawn>]
Seeing that /. left no stone unturned in the whole copyright issue, one would think that /. readers, out of all people, would not waste their time offering this analogy. You have just compared me to a robber -- not to a thief even, like the records companies do, but to someone who robs you of your food in a broad daylight. This analogy is flawed because when I choose to disrespect the copyright holder's exlusive distribution rights, I do not take anything from anyone. The opposite is the case: I create more goods. That, of course, deprives the holder of a potential profit, which is secured by nothing else than the copyright law.
Aside from your argument being weak, it is also misplaced. I clearly implied in my post that I do not consider copyright law ethical and that I wish it to be reformed. I choose to pass on options (1) and (2) you have given me and go for (3) non-violent resistance to the unjust law -- a resistance which gives me no profit and hurts only the richest and only very slightly; that coupled with raising awareness about the law's harmful effects and doing what I can to change it, or to get rid of it altogether.
I am sorry to sound kind, but that's the way life should be.
Your point about wasted time is well taken. But to be truthful with you, my finances are not exactly in ruins. Money comes and goes. Still, the figures I have given are accurate, and in this country they firmly place me into the category of people who cannot possibly afford to buy CDs and DVDs, while making it ethically acceptable for me to get (and so also invariably give with BT) illegitimate copies over the net, strictly for private use.
Illegitimate copying on P2P is not "greedy", nor should it be called "piracy". I am $400 in debt, and at the moment this number is greater than what I have in my bank account. Do I look greedy to you, when I opt out of buying a $15 CD and go for BT instead? I am not trying to to make money here. I just cannot possibly spare any cash on anything else besides activities that are essential to the functioning of my body: food, cigarettes, and WoW subscription.
If you listen to these "grumpy" people carefully, you will find out that many of them object to the copyright law (in its current state) on ethical grounds. The fact that some, like me, would rather reform that law and see less art in exchange for more freedoms should convince you again that we are anything but greedy.
No, because, as the study indicates, there's a good 2/3 probability that the study itself offers accurate conclusions.
Mod parent up!
This is not a paradox, if you accept that the opposite of lying is being sincere. If, for one, you know that "to lie" means "to tell something you know without an intention to deceive", i.e. "to be sincere", then there is no contradiction in the fact that you are sincerely stating "I am lying".
If a 17y old kid can singlehandledly [sic] cause a billion dollar damage then YOUR SECURITY IS BAD ANYWAY, which should be YOUR responsibility.
Thank you for spelling this one out. When I was in highschool (a rather special computer science oriented highschool in Moscow) I had 2 (two) people in my class, who wrote simple viruses for the fun of it -- they didn't have any malicious payload. Both viruses were promptly listed in the AV products of the day, but it did not prevent one of them from sweeping across Ukrain.
Internet is very, very, very insecure, and so demanding harsh penalties for writing viruses is rather hypocritical. Proponents are the same people who would argue that they should be able to shoot people who trespass across their front loan. Newsflash: fences were invented!
Another point I want to make is rather unpopular, as far as I can tell after perusing the comments. Virus writers do not infect computers, nor do they cause damages -- viruses do that. The latter should be punished severely (DELETED!), and the former -- to the extent of their intent. A college kid who wrote a fun and harmless virus should be slapped on the hands; a spam king who wrote a virus which installs a backdoor should pull some time. And if it can be proven before the jury that the intent of writing was to kill some people in a gruesome manner -- sure, go ahead and ask for a capital punishment.
Bottom line is: if the Internet's constitution is so weak that it catches every minor cold and is allergic to a hundred things on any given day -- this our own fault. An organism so weak cannot be protected by laws -- only by introduction of good diet, good habits, and regular exercise.
I wish I had mod points for you. The following sentence struck me as the one having a larger, symbolic meaning:
Most computer users live in houses with no locks
Case in point: lack of security throughout the Internet is the cause for viral infections, not the consequence. If it is so easy to infect and to take control over someone else's machine, then it must be easy to frame someone for writing/spreading the virus. Suppose that we vote for death penalty for hackers. That may deter a few college kids at Cornell, but sure as hell it won't stop a professional hacker in St. Petersburg. A black hat will write a virus, take control over Joe Blow's computer, release it in the wild, then retreat by removing the backdoor. Next thing you know, Joe Blow, 17, Wallmart employee, is in court, facing the electric chair. Beautiful.
Along the lines of what the parent said: if you want to apply a serious punishment, you better be damn sure that the crime is hard to commit. Otherwise you will end up doing the worst thing: electrifying the wrong people.
If I had one of those copies I'd take it camping with me and come back on the 16th and claim ignorance.
Bah, I would skip camping and go straight for ignorance.
[Judge] Where is the book?
[Mel] That book I legally purchased in a bookstore? Uh, I must've put it somewhere... Last time I remember reading it, I was on a can.
Case adjourned.
How's the electronic textbook, copyrighted, and possibly DRMed, going to fix the problem? No no, the only way to stop what you call the "racket" is to adapt free (in Stallman's sense) textbooks.
This is a very viable option, opposed mainly by publishers of the copyrighted works and by a handful of textbook writers with connections. It will work because textbooks are a commodity -- a comparison with a commodity OS should suffice as a compelling reason of its success. There are just too many people who can and will participate, given a chance. Public school textbooks are not quantum physics, they are easy to write. All that is needed is a decent writer with a good grasp of the subject matter. US universities are stuffed full with such people. Also, unlike the college textbooks for cutting edge technologies, school textbooks do not require extensive revisions. All of this makes it quite probable that school textbooks will be just as effective if they go over to some equivalent of GPL.
I did not have a pleasure of going to a US public school, but I've spent a few years in college here. A few exceptions aside, the newer the text is -- the worse it is. Some of the best texts I've used were (1) those written by my professors back when they were slaving for their advisors and (2) those out of print -- we were given photocopies of the relevant chapters, copyright be damned. Even if I put the pricing issue aside, I am convinced that commercial textbook publishing is a big rip-off, as far as the quality goes. I therefore conjecture that switching to a GPL-like license may also increase the overall quality.
And here's why none of this happen in your lifetime. As well as I do, you know that teaching sciences is a secondary goal of the US public school. The primary goal is ever the same, and it is to condition a citizen. (I do not put US last, the situation is much the same or worse in other countries.) To allow children to learn from what essentially is a Wiki-textbook is to loose all control over formation of values and views. Moreover, once the learning material is better than people who teach it, the flaws of the latter come to light. Every parent will be able to see that many of the school teachers and officials are nothing more than officers of the disciplinary force, who do not regard liberal education as their primary objective.
What a rant, and all off-topic. But what can I do? Introducing laptops is almost inconsequential to the learning per se, aside from getting kids to use computers.
Does it mean we can now watch Internet porn while riding public buses and trains? Woohoo!
When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
In all probability, not on our life. Because what keeps it sane in other industries are the laws allowing us, consumers, to return a broken products for a full refund. I don't see that happening to sofrware any time soon.
OK nevermind, I am retarded. I don't think I can do that from behind the firewall.