" "harbor house" of sorts for child pornographers, terrorists, and other criminals."
Possibily, although the same could be said when it was communists, the KKK, or neo-nazi's that were the hate groups de jour. There will always be a group in which you dislike their message (right now i guess its people wanting gay marriage) get used to it.
If you really dislike these groups (all of the above) then the onus is on you to argue why you do not like what they way, and how they are wrong, and how information harms people.
In the end it isn't information that harms people, it is people acting upon that information: information is neutral.
There has always been a bugaboo, right now it is child porn and terrorism but not long ago it was communism, or the KKK or neo-nazi's or what ever.
If you do not like child pornography then you are free to set up a freenet webpage and give your views as to why it, and anything else you dont like, is wrong.
As to the parent, I also agree that people seem to be hypocritical in that they think one type of 'illegal' speech is ok (MP3 copying etc.) but other types (child porno) is bad. Reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Marge is forced to stop trying to censor the violent cartoon industry because she realized she was a hypocrite in wanting Michangelo's David (nudity) to be shown.:)
"I also do not want to support the most disgusting people by giving storage to them for free."
Do some homework, you can choose not to share your data store with Freenet (i.e. be a transient node). The only problem with that is anything in your datastore then was requested by you, although it is still encrypted, so it's slightly more insecure.
50 years ago people would have been crying about the communists using Freenet, now its terrorists and childpornographers. The groups keeps changing but hopefully freedom of speech is here to stay.
Yes, but you forgot an important factor. If the person is truly rational, they will use the following formula:
Expected Gain = (Gain from burglary) - [(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] - (Opportunity Cost)
Opportunity cost is important - my opportunity cost is high, for example, since the next best option for me is my current job, which pays well, has health beenfits, etc. For someone with only a GED, though, it is significantly lower.
the estimated monetary cost being caught is a value assigned to the penalty (i.e., how much is it worth to me to stay out of jail).
Given that formula, a truly rational person will burgle whenever the Expected Gain is greter than 0.
--
Mod parent up plz, I have mod points but I already posted in this discussion:). It is nice when someone says something so clearly, esp. with regards to economics as it seems that it's the social science that, although many people discuss it, people know little about.
"Robbery and murder may be economically rational too, but I'm not looking in to a career change."
Only if the person thinks the benefits of murder outweigh the (possible) costs. I'd think that there maybe something more to economics then throwing around the words 'economically rational';).
The only population that surpasses armchair psychologists are armchair economists.
If someone thinks the benefits of a behaviour outweighs its costs then they will do that behaviour.
It is up to government or other entities to increase the costs (e.g. jail, fines etc.) of behaviours that are 'undesirable', like say murder or, worse yet, spam;p.
The only population that surpasses armchair psychologists are armchair economists.
My
anti college site is
offline too - for the same reasons. The forums and content got too hot for the
administration and they wanted to go to court. I did once - and won hands down -
but I was still out the money. So, in the end they still win. Cause they have
the tuition of thousands of students and I don't. There is no free speech in
America anymore unless you are rich. Any one that tells you other wise is a
liar, wrong or both.
Well if you feel you cannot speak out effectively then you should try other
means of expression, like anonymous p2p sites like Freenet.
Freenet , and some other anonymous
p2p applications, exist exactly for this kind of court threatened censorship.
The only drawback to this medium is since everything is anonymous you must be
more discerning of what you read, so stupid / gullible people need not bother
installing it.
The only way to counteract Government and corporation's attempts to censor
the internet is to use p2p technology that prevents this, usually anonymous p2p
technologies. Freenet and
Mute (both
on sourceforge) are good places to start.
Also show people this article on internet censorship:
I2P is another anonymous p2p project you should look at. The developers are on
the IIP ( http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip/index.php ) network in #I2P. Here are some links to their content, and I believe
their network can scale up to 5 million people (or so their documentation says).
I agree, wikimedia (makers of wikipedia) have online free, as in freedom,
text books. Why not use free text books that have been created by a collaboritve
effort by the best minds?
What the patent office should do is allow anyone to file prior art for a patent, so everyone can help regulate our patent system.
Also there should be some sort of loser pays system in which someone trying to enforce a patent and loses has to pay the other side's fees.
Anyone have any other ideas, perhaps an in house appeals process that is cheaper then going to court? Increased fees for filing patents, and more staff for the patent office?
I went to the GNU main site
to try and figure out what the LGPL was about, and no luck at all getting a
coherent explanation.
Wikipeda has
a good
explanation (below), although I am confused as to why the way back machine
choose this particular licence since it seems to really be specifically for
software libraries. Perhaps they meant the
GFDL
(GNU Free Documentation License).
P.S. Your allowed to copy all the stuff you want from Wikipeda its
copylefted with
the GFDL itself!:)
--- Wikipedia Article on LGPL ---
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_P ublic_License
GNU Lesser General Public License
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The GNU Lesser General Public License is a software license designed as a
compromise between the GNU General Public License and simple permissive licenses
such as the BSD license and the MIT License.
It places a copyleft restriction on individual source code files but does not
copyleft the program as a whole. The license is useful for software libraries;
it was once called the GNU Library General Public License.
It is Good Bill Nye is Still Doing Science
on
Bill Nye's Marsdial
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I am glad Bill Nye is still participating in science. Its unfortunate that
his reputation seemed to have suffered in the scientific community after his
Disney show Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is now relegated to working on the
show 'Battle Bots' for comedy central.
An
interesting article / interview from Scientific American also mentions a
wide contempt in the scientific community for scientists engaging the public,
for example it is likely Carl Sagan was denied membership to the national
academy of sciences because he was on television. As well a scientist
deserving of the Nobel Prize, who wrote children's books, was also ridiculed.
Is it no wonder why the public is so science ignorant when scientists are
punished for speaking to and educating them. Hopefully, with Bill Nye as
the example, scientists will be more willing to engage the public.
I was interested in the folding protein project, but are the results open to the public (like the human geneome project) free of charge, or will someone making a buck off *my* computing power?
With all the distributed computing projects out there be sure to read the fine print, if your going to use your computer for a project make sure its helping everyone instead of a few corporations make $.
So in vitro babies are not entitled to resources as other children because they are 'artificial'? If you are scrounging for an argument to exclude gays from marriage it is not to be found in the marriage resources angle.
The natural/unnatural(artificial) angle is also disingenuous as homosexuality is found in nature, and little, if anything, that people do (from modern medicine to living in houses [not caves]) is 'natural'.
In other words, marriage by all rights ought to be between a man and a
woman
No. Your argument falls apart here, there is no reason to exclude gays since
they too can be parents. *All* parents should be entitled to the extra resources
for raising children you've alluded to.
But I do not think that the driving force behind gay marriage is about resources
/ benefits. What it is about is rights. Homosexuals do not want to be treated as
2nd class citizens, they want the same, not more, rights as everyone else,
including the right to marry.
There is a problem with freenet, a large one actually: people can run non contributing 'transient nodes'. i.e. serial leecher nodes.
Leeching, esp. on an anonymous network, where there is little if any drawback to doing so, is a big problem. If few people contribute then the network becomes slow (although the speed is faster now on Freenet I find).
One solution to serial leeching was created by another p2p project, which is GPLed, called GNUnet. They use an economic model in which people who contribute get credits they can use to request files, so leechers are out in the dark.
Even if you don't know programing, but know network topology, or even economics in GNUnet's case, then why not contribute your ideas to these projects? Freedom of speech seems like a worthy cause to donate some time to.
First of all, Freenet is making rapid progress despite the fact they have very *very* limited funding. I'm currently able to insert and receive gigabytes of stuff off freenet. Perhaps if you did as suggested and left your node on for a few days so it could intergrate into the network you'd see some speed.
Second, this child pornography thing is false. The main sites have little if any of it, see for yourself. As well, this porgraphy content could easily be displaced by projects like this Memo thing if people would just insert other content.
Third, content doesn't drop off fast. It usually takes months of non requests before it slides off. As well GNUnet, another p2p anonymous GPL project, has the ability to host specific files on your hard drive, perhaps this feature will be added to Freenet.
The coding is simple, and if you dont like Java, there is a close cousin of freenet in C,C++ type language called Entropy, as well as there is GNUnet. Why not look at the code and experiment, its all GPL.
The freenet project is an excellent tool to publish anonymously. With normal P2P you have to be connected in order to share the content, but with freenet you can publish, turn off your computer, and your content will still be there available to everyone.
Freenet is a work in progress, but there is no doubt that freenet will become a p2p force to be reckoned with, it's just a question of when.
Freenetters out there should just take it upon themselves to publish the GIA material on freenet, it will become the defacto database for this project, and the GIA project is one of the projects that Freenet was created in mind for.
Kazaa is feeling the burn from the RIAA. As P2P networks wake up to the realities, and problems, of non-anonymous
transfers better anonymous P2P clients will take their place.
One such client is Freenet and is
starting to get to the point where I think it is useful, especially the new 'unstable'
build that has many new routing features that make it faster. (After
installing, stop freenet, and save the unstable jar file over freenet.jar and
restart to use the unstable (often better) build.)
Another benefit is that this project is
GPL open source, so anyone
can take a look at the code, to help avoid another JAP or EarthStation 5
like situation.
The New Network is Good and there is NO Revolt
on
Fracturing P2P Networks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This thing about a 'revolt' is false. First, Ian Clarke endorsed the
idea (From the developer newsgroup October 5 2003):
Reskill wrote:
> Stricter upgrading sounds good to me if it helps bring the network out
> of this hole... but I do think that, while the technically minded among
> us play with the latest code, some of us reside on a separate network
> so we can enjoy freenet for what it really is.
>
> For those wanting to give this a try, see http://mids.student.utwente.nl/~mids/freenet/
Lets do this properly and keep it under the project umbrella. The last
thing we need are different competing and deliberately incompatable
Freenet versions.
Basically stable should be reverted to whatever the current consensus is
on a stable version, and we need two separate seedlists.
I already have a seednode harvester set up, I can easily set up two each
specific to a different network provided there are volunteers who will
make their nodes available for seeding.
Ian.
Second, this is split (making a second network from a older (ver. 692) more
functioning version) is win-win for everyone. The new secondary Freenet network
I was on was much faster then the current one (Getting 100,000 kilobytes per
second thoughput, and that was just because there is a default cap of 100,000).
And the developers get a network to study that has 1 build, instead of a
willy-nilly collection of many different builds.
Linus Torvalds' work is his, years before this SCO mess. You don't have to apply for a copyright, its automatically given in any country that has signed the Berne convention. It is only necessary to register for copyright if you plan to sue anyone for damages.
Its lose lose for SCO; either GPL is valid and the code contributed (from all parties including Caldara/SCO) stays as is, or the GPL is invalid and the copyrights stay with their respective owners (Linus, and other developers / companies).
Hewlett Packard was a *member* and *speaker* of SCO Forum 2003:
http://www.caldera.com/2003forum/agenda.html
SCO and HP are friends. I would not be surprised if SCO made a deal with HP to let them off the hook in order for HP to do this little indemnification campaign to sell more of their computers.
What can you do about this? Do not buy HP products, or products from people who deal with SCO.
Human immortality sounds good, but the human population is already exploding and thats *with* people dying off. If a large number of people are going to become immortal then we need population controls in place, or at least teaching how birth control is used in school;).
Slashdot Mirror
" "harbor house" of sorts for child pornographers, terrorists, and other criminals."
Possibily, although the same could be said when it was communists, the KKK, or neo-nazi's that were the hate groups de jour. There will always be a group in which you dislike their message (right now i guess its people wanting gay marriage) get used to it.
If you really dislike these groups (all of the above) then the onus is on you to argue why you do not like what they way, and how they are wrong, and how information harms people.
In the end it isn't information that harms people, it is people acting upon that information: information is neutral.
Very good post, please mod parent up further.
:)
There has always been a bugaboo, right now it is child porn and terrorism but not long ago it was communism, or the KKK or neo-nazi's or what ever.
If you do not like child pornography then you are free to set up a freenet webpage and give your views as to why it, and anything else you dont like, is wrong.
As to the parent, I also agree that people seem to be hypocritical in that they think one type of 'illegal' speech is ok (MP3 copying etc.) but other types (child porno) is bad. Reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Marge is forced to stop trying to censor the violent cartoon industry because she realized she was a hypocrite in wanting Michangelo's David (nudity) to be shown.
"I also do not want to support the most disgusting people by giving storage to them for free."
Do some homework, you can choose not to share your data store with Freenet (i.e. be a transient node). The only problem with that is anything in your datastore then was requested by you, although it is still encrypted, so it's slightly more insecure.
50 years ago people would have been crying about the communists using Freenet, now its terrorists and childpornographers. The groups keeps changing but hopefully freedom of speech is here to stay.
Yes, but you forgot an important factor. If the person is truly rational, they will use the following formula:
:). It is nice when someone says something so clearly, esp. with regards to economics as it seems that it's the social science that, although many people discuss it, people know little about.
Expected Gain = (Gain from burglary) - [(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] - (Opportunity Cost)
Opportunity cost is important - my opportunity cost is high, for example, since the next best option for me is my current job, which pays well, has health beenfits, etc. For someone with only a GED, though, it is significantly lower.
the estimated monetary cost being caught is a value assigned to the penalty (i.e., how much is it worth to me to stay out of jail).
Given that formula, a truly rational person will burgle whenever the Expected Gain is greter than 0.
--
Mod parent up plz, I have mod points but I already posted in this discussion
"Robbery and murder may be economically rational too, but I'm not looking in to a career change."
;).
Only if the person thinks the benefits of murder outweigh the (possible) costs. I'd think that there maybe something more to economics then throwing around the words 'economically rational'
The only population that surpasses armchair psychologists are armchair economists.
If someone thinks the benefits of a behaviour outweighs its costs then they will do that behaviour.
;p.
It is up to government or other entities to increase the costs (e.g. jail, fines etc.) of behaviours that are 'undesirable', like say murder or, worse yet, spam
The only population that surpasses armchair psychologists are armchair economists.
My anti college site is offline too - for the same reasons. The forums and content got too hot for the administration and they wanted to go to court. I did once - and won hands down - but I was still out the money. So, in the end they still win. Cause they have the tuition of thousands of students and I don't. There is no free speech in America anymore unless you are rich. Any one that tells you other wise is a liar, wrong or both.
Well if you feel you cannot speak out effectively then you should try other means of expression, like anonymous p2p sites like Freenet.
Freenet , and some other anonymous p2p applications, exist exactly for this kind of court threatened censorship. The only drawback to this medium is since everything is anonymous you must be more discerning of what you read, so stupid / gullible people need not bother installing it.
The only way to counteract Government and corporation's attempts to censor the internet is to use p2p technology that prevents this, usually anonymous p2p technologies. Freenet and Mute (both on sourceforge) are good places to start.
Also show people this article on internet censorship:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimat ur/
I2P is another anonymous p2p project you should look at. The developers are on the IIP ( http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip/index.php ) network in #I2P. Here are some links to their content, and I believe their network can scale up to 5 million people (or so their documentation says).
I2P Links:
http://www.i2p.net
http://wiki.invisiblenet.net/iip-wiki?I2P
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/i2p/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/i2p/
I agree, wikimedia (makers of wikipedia) have online free, as in freedom, text books. Why not use free text books that have been created by a collaboritve effort by the best minds?
The link like the parent said is here:
http://wikibooks.org/
What the patent office should do is allow anyone to file prior art for a patent, so everyone can help regulate our patent system.
Also there should be some sort of loser pays system in which someone trying to enforce a patent and loses has to pay the other side's fees.
Anyone have any other ideas, perhaps an in house appeals process that is cheaper then going to court? Increased fees for filing patents, and more staff for the patent office?
I went to the GNU main site to try and figure out what the LGPL was about, and no luck at all getting a coherent explanation.
:)
P ublic_License
Wikipeda has a good explanation (below), although I am confused as to why the way back machine choose this particular licence since it seems to really be specifically for software libraries. Perhaps they meant the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License).
P.S. Your allowed to copy all the stuff you want from Wikipeda its copylefted with the GFDL itself!
--- Wikipedia Article on LGPL ---
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_
GNU Lesser General Public License
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The GNU Lesser General Public License is a software license designed as a compromise between the GNU General Public License and simple permissive licenses such as the BSD license and the MIT License.
It places a copyleft restriction on individual source code files but does not copyleft the program as a whole. The license is useful for software libraries; it was once called the GNU Library General Public License.
I am glad Bill Nye is still participating in science. Its unfortunate that his reputation seemed to have suffered in the scientific community after his Disney show Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is now relegated to working on the show 'Battle Bots' for comedy central.
An interesting article / interview from Scientific American also mentions a wide contempt in the scientific community for scientists engaging the public, for example it is likely Carl Sagan was denied membership to the national academy of sciences because he was on television. As well a scientist deserving of the Nobel Prize, who wrote children's books, was also ridiculed.
Is it no wonder why the public is so science ignorant when scientists are punished for speaking to and educating them. Hopefully, with Bill Nye as the example, scientists will be more willing to engage the public.
I was interested in the folding protein project, but are the results open to the public (like the human geneome project) free of charge, or will someone making a buck off *my* computing power?
With all the distributed computing projects out there be sure to read the fine print, if your going to use your computer for a project make sure its helping everyone instead of a few corporations make $.
"artificial means of reproduction"
So in vitro babies are not entitled to resources as other children because they are 'artificial'? If you are scrounging for an argument to exclude gays from marriage it is not to be found in the marriage resources angle.
The natural/unnatural(artificial) angle is also disingenuous as homosexuality is found in nature, and little, if anything, that people do (from modern medicine to living in houses [not caves]) is 'natural'.
In other words, marriage by all rights ought to be between a man and a woman
No. Your argument falls apart here, there is no reason to exclude gays since they too can be parents. *All* parents should be entitled to the extra resources for raising children you've alluded to.
But I do not think that the driving force behind gay marriage is about resources / benefits. What it is about is rights. Homosexuals do not want to be treated as 2nd class citizens, they want the same, not more, rights as everyone else, including the right to marry.
There is a problem with freenet, a large one actually: people can run non contributing 'transient nodes'. i.e. serial leecher nodes.
Leeching, esp. on an anonymous network, where there is little if any drawback to doing so, is a big problem. If few people contribute then the network becomes slow (although the speed is faster now on Freenet I find).
One solution to serial leeching was created by another p2p project, which is GPLed, called GNUnet. They use an economic model in which people who contribute get credits they can use to request files, so leechers are out in the dark.
Even if you don't know programing, but know network topology, or even economics in GNUnet's case, then why not contribute your ideas to these projects? Freedom of speech seems like a worthy cause to donate some time to.
What is with these misconceptions about freenet.
First of all, Freenet is making rapid progress despite the fact they have very *very* limited funding. I'm currently able to insert and receive gigabytes of stuff off freenet. Perhaps if you did as suggested and left your node on for a few days so it could intergrate into the network you'd see some speed.
Second, this child pornography thing is false. The main sites have little if any of it, see for yourself. As well, this porgraphy content could easily be displaced by projects like this Memo thing if people would just insert other content.
Third, content doesn't drop off fast. It usually takes months of non requests before it slides off. As well GNUnet, another p2p anonymous GPL project, has the ability to host specific files on your hard drive, perhaps this feature will be added to Freenet.
The coding is simple, and if you dont like Java, there is a close cousin of freenet in C,C++ type language called Entropy, as well as there is GNUnet. Why not look at the code and experiment, its all GPL.
The freenet project is an excellent tool to publish anonymously. With normal P2P you have to be connected in order to share the content, but with freenet you can publish, turn off your computer, and your content will still be there available to everyone.
Freenet is a work in progress, but there is no doubt that freenet will become a p2p force to be reckoned with, it's just a question of when.
Freenetters out there should just take it upon themselves to publish the GIA material on freenet, it will become the defacto database for this project, and the GIA project is one of the projects that Freenet was created in mind for.
Kazaa is feeling the burn from the RIAA. As P2P networks wake up to the realities, and problems, of non-anonymous transfers better anonymous P2P clients will take their place.
One such client is Freenet and is starting to get to the point where I think it is useful, especially the new 'unstable' build that has many new routing features that make it faster. (After installing, stop freenet, and save the unstable jar file over freenet.jar and restart to use the unstable (often better) build.)
Another benefit is that this project is GPL open source, so anyone can take a look at the code, to help avoid another JAP or EarthStation 5 like situation.
This thing about a 'revolt' is false. First, Ian Clarke endorsed the idea (From the developer newsgroup October 5 2003):
Reskill wrote:
> Stricter upgrading sounds good to me if it helps bring the network out
> of this hole... but I do think that, while the technically minded among
> us play with the latest code, some of us reside on a separate network
> so we can enjoy freenet for what it really is.
>
> For those wanting to give this a try, see http://mids.student.utwente.nl/~mids/freenet/
Lets do this properly and keep it under the project umbrella. The last
thing we need are different competing and deliberately incompatable
Freenet versions.
Basically stable should be reverted to whatever the current consensus is
on a stable version, and we need two separate seedlists.
I already have a seednode harvester set up, I can easily set up two each
specific to a different network provided there are volunteers who will
make their nodes available for seeding.
Ian.
Second, this is split (making a second network from a older (ver. 692) more functioning version) is win-win for everyone. The new secondary Freenet network I was on was much faster then the current one (Getting 100,000 kilobytes per second thoughput, and that was just because there is a default cap of 100,000). And the developers get a network to study that has 1 build, instead of a willy-nilly collection of many different builds.
"donating their work to a pirated project"
Wrong.
Linus Torvalds' work is his, years before this SCO mess. You don't have to apply for a copyright, its automatically given in any country that has signed the Berne convention. It is only necessary to register for copyright if you plan to sue anyone for damages.
Its lose lose for SCO; either GPL is valid and the code contributed (from all parties including Caldara/SCO) stays as is, or the GPL is invalid and the copyrights stay with their respective owners (Linus, and other developers / companies).
I have to agree with the parent, the focus should be on the GPL. A lot of programs are released under the GPL aside from Linux.
GPL is what makes it all happen, without it Linux is just another unremarkable operating system.
Hewlett Packard was a *member* and *speaker* of SCO Forum 2003:
http://www.caldera.com/2003forum/agenda.html
SCO and HP are friends. I would not be surprised if SCO made a deal with HP to let them off the hook in order for HP to do this little indemnification campaign to sell more of their computers.
What can you do about this? Do not buy HP products, or products from people who deal with SCO.
Human immortality sounds good, but the human population is already exploding and thats *with* people dying off. If a large number of people are going to become immortal then we need population controls in place, or at least teaching how birth control is used in school ;).