Actually, the laws of all countries I'm aware of agree, listing copyright violation as a separate offence than stealing and intellectual property laws apart from real property laws.
While I agree that the implementation of a lot of copyright law sucks, if we're going to abandon the concept that someone who has a unique idea should be able to exclusively decide what is done with that idea, then bang goes a lot of the last 30 years of scientific progress. That's perhaps built more upon sharing just enough data to show off, without sharing enough to allow competitors to overtake you, than you realise.
Oh noes, there goes Cold Fusion!
Seriously, science is about sharing all data so it can be independently verified. This is sometimes done under patent law, if said data has immediate commercial value - how the heck could you copyright data on, say, how particles behave anyway?
If I write a game, it is my choice how I want it copied, and what fee, if any, I want to be paid for my labor. It is not YOUR choice to say that I should give up my work for FREE.
No one's asking you to give up anything. You, on the other hand, are asking to be able to control people's actions with something you've made after it has left your hands. That is quite unreasonable.
Yep. And then they can die in a muddy gutter like Edgar Allan Poe did. Is this really the kind of society we want to bring back, where our artists live impoverished lives because they can't earn any money off their creations?
According to Wikipedia, Poe died in a hospital. He lived his last few years in a pretty nice cottage in New York rather than "gutter". Finally, his works were copyrighted. So please explain WTF you are talking about?
Anyway, people have been creating content for millenia, but never on anywhere near scale of today. Not by a factor of 100. The reason for that is that due to copyright protection, artists, writers, musicians etc can for the first time in history make a good living out of their talent and not depend on pity of some "patron" like some of the greatest musicians in history had to.
This is untrue. Not only is the majority of content nowadays created without profit motive - amateur artists, writers and whatever outnumber the professional ones by a huge amount - but things like Kafka's writings were created without any. The only thing that has changed is that amateurs can nowadays publish their work easily and cheaply on the Internet.
Let's put it in the coldest terms possible: until it's breathing air, human spawn is worthless tissue. Actually, not. Because you can recover stem cells from them.
We're emotional creatures. That's why the above paragraph is sickening to me. But that doesn't make it incorrect. As adults, we learn to cope with uncomfortable truths.
Actually, the cold truth is that you never stop being worthless tissue. No matter how productive you are, in the end that productivity simply helps other people, who are equally worthless tissue. The whole concept of trying to assign something a value unemotionally is flawed; it always comes down to valuing something due to emotions, be they lust, love, hunger, bad self-esteem or a desire to leave something behind.
If you had to make the terrible choice between mom and a child, I'd say the lose the child.
If the embryo was located in an artificial womb outside of mother's body, why would you ever need to do such a choice?
To get back to topic, I guess someone just read the Island of Dr. Moreau. Just show him All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku to get him to calm down;).
How about ability to track down child porn dealers?
Am I the only one who's getting a bit disturbed by the utter... obsession our great leaders seem to have with thinking children? And frankly, I'm starting to get sick of it. Who cares if some pervert gets his jollies from looking at pictures of naked children? Especially since anyone under 18 is apparently a child nowadays, at least in the context of porn - but not in the context of being imprisoned and marked a sex offender for sending someone pictures of themselves.
Or other crime (eg. money laundering, theft, etc)?
How do you steal something over the Net? In any case, I'm not required to be monitored 24 hours a day IRL on the off chance that I do something illegal, so why should I be under surveillance in the Net where my ability to cause mischief is far more limited?
Or how about just tracking down spammers and the minions?
The top spammers are known. What is left is sending them to jail where they belong.
Deleting DHCP logs on a whim like that is similar to running around naked because you don't like that all clothes have one of these itchy tags in them.
No, deleting DHCP logs on a whim is like not memorizing the registry plate of every car you see on the way to work just in case the police happen to be interested. It's the obsessive need for logging everything that's insane, not refusing to do so.
I'd agree with your post, but the movies and art that most people are stealing (that's right, I said stealing)
Oooo. You have balls of steel, truly.
are not works that should theoretically have already been released into the public domain. Even under really old statutes, before all of the extensions.
Unjust laws serve to bring all law into contempt. That's human nature and something the copyright industry should have considered before starting their shenigans.
I'm sorry. Where do we have a right to copy others' work?
By default, you have a right to do anything that's not expressly forbidden. This means that it's not you who need to justify your right to copy anything you want, it's the copyright holders who have to justify why you shouldn't be allowed to do so.
Although I download a lot of stuff, I don't try to delude myself into thinking what I'm doing is acceptable.
Clearly it's acceptable to you since you're doing it.
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay...
I know plenty of people who don't want people to have sex outside of marriage. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to do just that.
You have to give a better reason to limit my right to do whatever I want than not wanting me to. It is, after all, my actions we are talking about, so my will reigns supreme over them by default.
it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
It became fair game the second anyone besides you saw it. If you disagree, give some reason why they shouldn't be allowed to copy it; "I don't want them to" is insufficient reason to force them to obey.
Train security isn't nearly as tight, since it's hard to crash one into a building.
All you have to do to prevent an airliner from crashing into a building is lock the cockpit door. If you want even more security, arm the pilots, or even put an armed guard or two on the flight.
Train security is not tight because trains are not at the spotlight of the security theater.
(service roads are a bitch and transporting energy requires infrastructure),
That would be relevant only if coal plants did not require roads as well.
Actually it's very relevant since coal plants require truckloads of coal every day, while windmills or solar arrays require a service van once or twice per year. Of course that's probably not what the grandparent hoped to imply...
Yet people who are pro-free-market always get their panties in a wad whenever people start suggesting that this or that company ought to be boycott for what they're doing.
What the fuck is up with that?
Most pro-free-market types are actually pro-corporation types who hide behind bullshit about freedom.
Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else?
The preceding is a strawman: you show some examples of culture influencing what is considered attractive and try to imply that a culture accepting homosexuality would produce exclusive homosexuals. That is, of course, rubbish: even ancient Greece, infamous for its institution of pederasty, had no trouble producing new generations to die in their wars.
You can propagandize impressionable minds into thinking that "sexual attractiveness" is a schoolgirl in a fuku.
There is no need for such propaganda. People are hardwired to consider teens attractive, and a fuku is simply a school uniform that signifies that the wearer belongs to said age group, at least in some cultures.
Why, if homosexuality is "fixed", are pro-gay groups working so hard to get books promoting their lifestyle into kindergartens if not that they're trying to propagandize kids the same way and pick up some numbers?
I'd imagine that it has something to do with self-preservation. You know, get kids used to thinking homosexuals as normal, so they won't discriminate against them later in life.
Controlling what you yourself say is not censorship.
It might be self-censorship, depending on what is being omitted and why. And while Amazon isn't there yet, at some point a large enough corporation has de facto power to decide what people can or can't see and is quite capable of censorship - if it isn't on Google, it isn't on the Web.
A small cornerstore is free to decide on its own what it will or will not carry. A large corporation, however, wields power close to that of a government, and thus must be held accountable for use and abuse of that power. You can't give an elephant the same freedom to run around wild in a porcelain shop you can give to a mouse.
If religion is real - that is, if it's backed by actual supernatural power - then you can't destroy it. And if it's not real, then one must assume that people have some kind of inherent drive to invent religions - as evidenced by the fact that all known cultures from Neanderthals up have had some kind of religion - and you again aren't going to be successful. Sure, in the latter case you might be able to destroy a particular religion, but people will simply invent a new one. And a nasty one at that, since "destroying" a religion in practice won't go bloodlessly.
All you'll end up doing is exchanging an established lukewarm religion into one with fanatical fire-eyed followers, and that's assuming the best possible outcome. Not a good trade, IMHO.
Then my ISP's email certifier will get spam reports, They will contact my ISP. They will cut off my email and demand an explanation. I will clean my computer of malware before they turn on my email again.
I'm in your computer, reporting random e-mails as spam in your name, in an effort to drown real spam in the noise of false positives.
See? Easy!
Indeed. You're thinking like a decent person, not like a spammer. That's why your suggestion fails.
Don't take it too hard, thought: there is no way to defeat spam short of a human-level strong AI, and even that won't be 100% effective - after all, humans fall into e-mail fraud all the time.
If the average consumer sees charges of $5 on their bill from based on sending spam, then they have an incentive to get their computer cleaned up and locked down.
Average consumer doesn't have the ability to lock their computer down. In fact no one has this ability. It's simply not possible to ensure that a general-purpose device, such as a computer, can only be used in a certain way.
I'm not saying I support this scheme; that's just the idea behind it.
The idea is either honest stupidity or a cynical grab for more money not dissimilar to the War on Terror and the associated "security" practices.
The main deflector. It is simultaneously nonessential (in First Contact, when assessing the Borg threat to the ship) and the answer to nearly every limitation of the ship's capability.
So it's pretty bloody essential after all;). That, or better writers...
Please do. Your ranting is quite amusing, in a way. It doesn't actually answer my question ("what barrier did Obama bankrupt?"), but it's amusing nonetheless.
But I suppose I can't really blame you. Times like these must be very difficult for libertarianists. You merely react the same way most people do when their favourite ideology or religion is being contradicted by reality: you shout louder.
I wish you luck in battling whatever demons of altruism you were really answering to. We've all had these moments of weakness when it seems just cruel to suggest that people should starve on the streets so we don't have to pay taxes, rather than the will of the Invisible Hand it is. You just have to have faith that everything will magically fix itself if you follow your greed and the word of Ayn Rand.
But there are people who have jobs and extra income that aren't spending as freely because of all the bad economic news.
And they shouldn't spend their income, but rather save it so they can afford housing, medicine, etc if and when it's their time to face unemployment. That's the problem with treating people as "human resources", as capitalism does: they have no security of income, so they have to react with panic to every economic hiccup.
Does anyone know if WotC has done a big buyback? It almost seems like someone has been scouring the bookstores methodically, snatching up everything that would suggest an older edition ever existed.
It seems somewhat illogical to buy back a book just to sell another book, rather than just discontinuing the old book. Besides, isn't the whole reason to publish a new edition that old edition wasn't selling anymore? So why expend money towards removing books books no one wants anyway?
"world--thanks, Obama, for bankrupting the last barrier to a crushingly Socialist one-world government where the only group willing to rise up and take back power are the Islamofascists"
Just out of curiosity: what barrier was that? I thought it was capitalism that went bankrupt, and rather spectacularly at that...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the laws of all countries I'm aware of agree, listing copyright violation as a separate offence than stealing and intellectual property laws apart from real property laws.
Oh noes, there goes Cold Fusion!
Seriously, science is about sharing all data so it can be independently verified. This is sometimes done under patent law, if said data has immediate commercial value - how the heck could you copyright data on, say, how particles behave anyway?
No one's asking you to give up anything. You, on the other hand, are asking to be able to control people's actions with something you've made after it has left your hands. That is quite unreasonable.
According to Wikipedia, Poe died in a hospital. He lived his last few years in a pretty nice cottage in New York rather than "gutter". Finally, his works were copyrighted. So please explain WTF you are talking about?
This is untrue. Not only is the majority of content nowadays created without profit motive - amateur artists, writers and whatever outnumber the professional ones by a huge amount - but things like Kafka's writings were created without any. The only thing that has changed is that amateurs can nowadays publish their work easily and cheaply on the Internet.
Actually, the cold truth is that you never stop being worthless tissue. No matter how productive you are, in the end that productivity simply helps other people, who are equally worthless tissue. The whole concept of trying to assign something a value unemotionally is flawed; it always comes down to valuing something due to emotions, be they lust, love, hunger, bad self-esteem or a desire to leave something behind.
If the embryo was located in an artificial womb outside of mother's body, why would you ever need to do such a choice?
To get back to topic, I guess someone just read the Island of Dr. Moreau. Just show him All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku to get him to calm down ;).
Am I the only one who's getting a bit disturbed by the utter... obsession our great leaders seem to have with thinking children? And frankly, I'm starting to get sick of it. Who cares if some pervert gets his jollies from looking at pictures of naked children? Especially since anyone under 18 is apparently a child nowadays, at least in the context of porn - but not in the context of being imprisoned and marked a sex offender for sending someone pictures of themselves.
How do you steal something over the Net? In any case, I'm not required to be monitored 24 hours a day IRL on the off chance that I do something illegal, so why should I be under surveillance in the Net where my ability to cause mischief is far more limited?
The top spammers are known. What is left is sending them to jail where they belong.
No, deleting DHCP logs on a whim is like not memorizing the registry plate of every car you see on the way to work just in case the police happen to be interested. It's the obsessive need for logging everything that's insane, not refusing to do so.
Oooo. You have balls of steel, truly.
Unjust laws serve to bring all law into contempt. That's human nature and something the copyright industry should have considered before starting their shenigans.
By default, you have a right to do anything that's not expressly forbidden. This means that it's not you who need to justify your right to copy anything you want, it's the copyright holders who have to justify why you shouldn't be allowed to do so.
Clearly it's acceptable to you since you're doing it.
I know plenty of people who don't want people to have sex outside of marriage. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to do just that.
You have to give a better reason to limit my right to do whatever I want than not wanting me to. It is, after all, my actions we are talking about, so my will reigns supreme over them by default.
It became fair game the second anyone besides you saw it. If you disagree, give some reason why they shouldn't be allowed to copy it; "I don't want them to" is insufficient reason to force them to obey.
All you have to do to prevent an airliner from crashing into a building is lock the cockpit door. If you want even more security, arm the pilots, or even put an armed guard or two on the flight.
Train security is not tight because trains are not at the spotlight of the security theater.
They're just humans. The issue coming out might hurt a corporation. Have some sense of priority.
Of course not. It means: "Someone is paying me to silence this opinion."
No, just a coal shill.
Actually it's very relevant since coal plants require truckloads of coal every day, while windmills or solar arrays require a service van once or twice per year. Of course that's probably not what the grandparent hoped to imply...
Most pro-free-market types are actually pro-corporation types who hide behind bullshit about freedom.
The preceding is a strawman: you show some examples of culture influencing what is considered attractive and try to imply that a culture accepting homosexuality would produce exclusive homosexuals. That is, of course, rubbish: even ancient Greece, infamous for its institution of pederasty, had no trouble producing new generations to die in their wars.
There is no need for such propaganda. People are hardwired to consider teens attractive, and a fuku is simply a school uniform that signifies that the wearer belongs to said age group, at least in some cultures.
I'd imagine that it has something to do with self-preservation. You know, get kids used to thinking homosexuals as normal, so they won't discriminate against them later in life.
It might be self-censorship, depending on what is being omitted and why. And while Amazon isn't there yet, at some point a large enough corporation has de facto power to decide what people can or can't see and is quite capable of censorship - if it isn't on Google, it isn't on the Web.
A small cornerstore is free to decide on its own what it will or will not carry. A large corporation, however, wields power close to that of a government, and thus must be held accountable for use and abuse of that power. You can't give an elephant the same freedom to run around wild in a porcelain shop you can give to a mouse.
Why? Is Slashdot not a corporate website that can do anything within the law? Or does that only apply to whoever pays your bills, astroturfer?
If religion is real - that is, if it's backed by actual supernatural power - then you can't destroy it. And if it's not real, then one must assume that people have some kind of inherent drive to invent religions - as evidenced by the fact that all known cultures from Neanderthals up have had some kind of religion - and you again aren't going to be successful. Sure, in the latter case you might be able to destroy a particular religion, but people will simply invent a new one. And a nasty one at that, since "destroying" a religion in practice won't go bloodlessly.
All you'll end up doing is exchanging an established lukewarm religion into one with fanatical fire-eyed followers, and that's assuming the best possible outcome. Not a good trade, IMHO.
I'm in your computer, reporting random e-mails as spam in your name, in an effort to drown real spam in the noise of false positives.
Indeed. You're thinking like a decent person, not like a spammer. That's why your suggestion fails.
Don't take it too hard, thought: there is no way to defeat spam short of a human-level strong AI, and even that won't be 100% effective - after all, humans fall into e-mail fraud all the time.
Average consumer doesn't have the ability to lock their computer down. In fact no one has this ability. It's simply not possible to ensure that a general-purpose device, such as a computer, can only be used in a certain way.
The idea is either honest stupidity or a cynical grab for more money not dissimilar to the War on Terror and the associated "security" practices.
I'm in your machine, sending spam using your e-mail account.
So it's pretty bloody essential after all ;). That, or better writers...
Please do. Your ranting is quite amusing, in a way. It doesn't actually answer my question ("what barrier did Obama bankrupt?"), but it's amusing nonetheless.
But I suppose I can't really blame you. Times like these must be very difficult for libertarianists. You merely react the same way most people do when their favourite ideology or religion is being contradicted by reality: you shout louder.
I wish you luck in battling whatever demons of altruism you were really answering to. We've all had these moments of weakness when it seems just cruel to suggest that people should starve on the streets so we don't have to pay taxes, rather than the will of the Invisible Hand it is. You just have to have faith that everything will magically fix itself if you follow your greed and the word of Ayn Rand.
In other words: Fuck you, I'm a socialist.
And they shouldn't spend their income, but rather save it so they can afford housing, medicine, etc if and when it's their time to face unemployment. That's the problem with treating people as "human resources", as capitalism does: they have no security of income, so they have to react with panic to every economic hiccup.
It seems somewhat illogical to buy back a book just to sell another book, rather than just discontinuing the old book. Besides, isn't the whole reason to publish a new edition that old edition wasn't selling anymore? So why expend money towards removing books books no one wants anyway?
Just out of curiosity: what barrier was that? I thought it was capitalism that went bankrupt, and rather spectacularly at that...