the ones that apparently got more or less wiped out.
Yeah, some may have survived by following their instincts. But a) that's easier on a sharply-sloping, underpopulated island than in a flat, crowded Indian town and b) that doesn't mean we can't try to do better.
And tribes in general only exist cos either we don't want their land or we're too namby-pamby to go in and wipe them out. That's industrialisation for you.
As far as I can tell from the press release, Tegam is stating that they have been the target of an astroturfing campaign making spurious claims about their products. This sounds plausible, but so does the alleged astroturfer's complaints about their software.
The only way to tell which side is playing silly buggers is by having some kind of example code. If there's code that any owner of the software can run, that demonstrates the weaknesses and thus conclusively proves they exist, then the company can't easily make statements rubbishing claims.
If there is no such code, and the culture is such that code would be expected, then astroturfing campaigns become obvious. An exploit code culture prevents someone making ludicrous claims without putting their code where their mouth is, *and* it stops companies denying the insecurity of their products. And it achieves both without one having to find a trustworthy expert. What more could you want?
a) As I understand Marx, he was mostly concerned about protecting the proletariat from the bourgeoisie - the Golgafrinchan approach of getting rid of all the productivity drains. I'd class this (no pun intended) as being more of a group-oriented struggle than a fight for individual freedom.
I'm not saying that Communism is intrinsically against personal freedom, just that it's nowhere near being the point of the movement.
b) I'd say that cultural impression is by far the more important factor in the free culture movement. Lessig himself points out that focusing on practical matters rather than theory could have won him the Eldred 1 court case. Equally, even if I didn't think the Nazis were that bad (this is ONLY for the sake of argument), I would not encourage the comparison.
a) Calling free culture advocates commies shows a... slight misunderstanding of the two ideologies. At its best, Communism was never particularly concerned with the individual (possibly why it is so successful in the Confucian environment of China).
b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.
is when they sue college students and claim that they're just trying to "educate" them. Education is expensive enough these days without getting sued too, thank you very much.
Of course, the pirates will love it - just work for a store that sells DVDs and you get instant access to a high-quality stream of videos.
However, yours is probably the best way round the problem I've seen. At least it makes it easier to track down the guilty party (unless, of course, they paid with cash).
Small wikis do tend to work better than large ones. For example, I recently set up a MathWiki for the maths students at my university. It's still suffering growth pains (and no-one ever posts during the holidays...), but shows every sign of being a very useful resource.
A couple of hundred years back, copying could only be done using expensive equipment, much labour and not-exactly-cheap materials. I doubt anyone would have *needed* to create a law prohibiting distribution without payment - it would have been its own punishment. Are there any online references to the relevant laws?
For the record, I'm currently halfway through question 4 of CATAM 1.1 and was taking a break (the omegas are frying my brain somewhat). The stupidly late nights correspond almost in entirety to the nights when I have work to hand in the next day. There is no excuse for the sycophantic comments tho, or for causing problems for supervisors - I'll get back to work.
A kiddie porn picture (to continue the much-overused example) does not itself constitute an idea. Neither does a copyrighted movie, on the whole. Most ideas can be transmitted in the form of plaintext. (Any counterexamples?)
If text were distributable, Falun Gong and anti-government speech would be protected, and anyone who wanted to advocate snuff films could do so with impunity.
Making it possible to distribute images and movies adds little to this system from the point of view of a civil libertarian. The only case where it would be useful would be things like the videos of civilians being gunned down in Iraq. The downside would be the addition of a massive load increase to the system.
No system could be proof against transmission of kiddie porn and copyrighted videos, but I don't see any harm in trying. Certainly the attempt doesn't instantly make one not a civil libertarian. Possibly we have different views of what that means?
I'd be interested to hear your refutations - I'm aware that I'm a little biased on this topic, which is a Bad Thing.
Regards the purpose of police, I think we have a lexical incompatibility. I'm very much talking about the reason for having a police force in the first place (enforcing the interests of the community). You're talking more about what they do on a day-to-day basis.
This makes a difference cos it sounds like you think I'm annoyed at the police themselves. That's not the case - as you say, they're only doing their job. I'm angry at the legislators and lobbyists who put the police in a position where doing their job is not in the best interests of society.
Very good points. The only argument I'd make is that the flu vaccine situation still isn't applicable - people may have been willing to pay higher prices, but only because scarcity was driving demand. Unless the producers were actually making a loss on the drugs sold, relaxing the monopoly status of the vaccine would have enabled others to make it.
I could be mis-arguing this as I don't know the specifics of the case - any recommended references?
We could argue as to whether they willfully infringe copyrights because they include disclaimers and ask for copyright holders to notify them, but neither the grandparent, nor you, really debated that. - thanks for drawing that to my attention.
You make some good points. However, I'd argue that, if one is not in posession of material, it is impossible to distribute that material. Your example of the guy in the alley is interesting, but consider the situation in more detail: either he owns the CDs, in which case he's guilty as sin, or he doesn't. If he doesn't then either he is acting on behalf of the owner of the CDs (in which case he is complicit in the owner's infringement) or he is acting independently. If he is acting independently then he is complicit in your theft of the CDs. No need for "second-order" copyright infringement legislation anywhere there.
IANAL - if this contradicts the previous actions of the courts then of course my argument is a little pointless. However, I'd say that the Betamax verdict is possibly applicable - as I understand it, links are posted to the torrent sites by people other than the owners. You could possibly argue that the specific posters of links were aiding and abetting infringement but that doesn't change the fact that the technology (in this case the website) has substantial non-infringing usage - material that is out of copyright for example.
Thanks for a great discussion - any counters or further points?
that there *is* someone else to make it. And they can do it cheaper. And save more lives. It's the free market (sans artificial limitations) fixing the price, not the government.
You raise a good point about the recouping of research costs (or at least I think that was what you were getting at), but I strongly feel that the balance is tilted way too much in favour of big pharma at the moment, at the expense of real people's lives.
I can only comment on their activities cos I myself don't posess a government-backed monopoly on any major lifesaving products. However, I hope that, if put in that situation, I would behave a little more ethically than these companies.
The relevant section would appear to be section 506 (pages 139 and 140) covering what acts are considered criminal under the legislation. I can't see anything there about links to links to trackers to seeds to peers with copyrighted material. Hence I would conclude that the grandparent was justified in his assertion. Any counterarguments?
The job of cops is ultimately to act in the best interests of our society - that's what we have laws for in the first place. If we see our government acting as hired guns for whichever lobby group has the most cash, I would say we have a good reason to get pissed off.
I consider this to be a decent example of said phenomenon. As far as independent (non-RIAA-funded) studies can find, filesharing hasn't harmed the music industry at all. On a personal level, I can vouch for filesharing promoting quality - the "free demo" theory. This is a good thing for society as a whole, but not for the RIAA.
Hence, when the police and judiciary start to stamp heavily on people whose actions are not (IMO) particularly immoral, I consider it to be acceptable to protest loudly and often.
that this all seems to hinge on some rather dodgy legal decisions (120 year copyright anyone?) and to be very similar to the much-loathed approach of barratry.
Personally, I have trouble believing that the behaviour of these governments is in the interests of the majority, or, for that matter, anyone other than the RIAA fatcats. And that would imply that somewhere down the line there's been an abuse of the democratic process (no shit...).
I always use Direct Connect to download linux isos and similar. The problem is that my uni is quite strict on downloads outside of the internal network - more than 400mb/day and you're stuffed. They do have an internal mirror but it only has a couple of distros on (lame). So my mates and I wget an iso each then share them.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't get screwed over.
the ones that apparently got more or less wiped out. Yeah, some may have survived by following their instincts. But a) that's easier on a sharply-sloping, underpopulated island than in a flat, crowded Indian town and b) that doesn't mean we can't try to do better. And tribes in general only exist cos either we don't want their land or we're too namby-pamby to go in and wipe them out. That's industrialisation for you.
With C++, you just pass a VideoCube to renderer.spin(Cube&cube) and it will call approporiate virtual functions to get bitmaps of each of the sides.
Personally, I just flip the relevant switches on the front of my machine a few times. I guess it takes all sorts...
...this is exactly why it's necessary.
As far as I can tell from the press release, Tegam is stating that they have been the target of an astroturfing campaign making spurious claims about their products. This sounds plausible, but so does the alleged astroturfer's complaints about their software.
The only way to tell which side is playing silly buggers is by having some kind of example code. If there's code that any owner of the software can run, that demonstrates the weaknesses and thus conclusively proves they exist, then the company can't easily make statements rubbishing claims.
If there is no such code, and the culture is such that code would be expected, then astroturfing campaigns become obvious. An exploit code culture prevents someone making ludicrous claims without putting their code where their mouth is, *and* it stops companies denying the insecurity of their products. And it achieves both without one having to find a trustworthy expert. What more could you want?
a) As I understand Marx, he was mostly concerned about protecting the proletariat from the bourgeoisie - the Golgafrinchan approach of getting rid of all the productivity drains. I'd class this (no pun intended) as being more of a group-oriented struggle than a fight for individual freedom.
I'm not saying that Communism is intrinsically against personal freedom, just that it's nowhere near being the point of the movement.
b) I'd say that cultural impression is by far the more important factor in the free culture movement. Lessig himself points out that focusing on practical matters rather than theory could have won him the Eldred 1 court case. Equally, even if I didn't think the Nazis were that bad (this is ONLY for the sake of argument), I would not encourage the comparison.
I can't think of a single anarchist government that's killed millions of people.
a) Calling free culture advocates commies shows a... slight misunderstanding of the two ideologies. At its best, Communism was never particularly concerned with the individual (possibly why it is so successful in the Confucian environment of China).
b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.
is when they sue college students and claim that they're just trying to "educate" them. Education is expensive enough these days without getting sued too, thank you very much.
Of course, the pirates will love it - just work for a store that sells DVDs and you get instant access to a high-quality stream of videos.
However, yours is probably the best way round the problem I've seen. At least it makes it easier to track down the guilty party (unless, of course, they paid with cash).
Small wikis do tend to work better than large ones. For example, I recently set up a MathWiki for the maths students at my university. It's still suffering growth pains (and no-one ever posts during the holidays...), but shows every sign of being a very useful resource.
Microsoft did get caught. Doesn't seem to have stopped them getting rich.
A couple of hundred years back, copying could only be done using expensive equipment, much labour and not-exactly-cheap materials. I doubt anyone would have *needed* to create a law prohibiting distribution without payment - it would have been its own punishment. Are there any online references to the relevant laws?
For the record, I'm currently halfway through question 4 of CATAM 1.1 and was taking a break (the omegas are frying my brain somewhat). The stupidly late nights correspond almost in entirety to the nights when I have work to hand in the next day. There is no excuse for the sycophantic comments tho, or for causing problems for supervisors - I'll get back to work.
A kiddie porn picture (to continue the much-overused example) does not itself constitute an idea. Neither does a copyrighted movie, on the whole. Most ideas can be transmitted in the form of plaintext. (Any counterexamples?)
If text were distributable, Falun Gong and anti-government speech would be protected, and anyone who wanted to advocate snuff films could do so with impunity.
Making it possible to distribute images and movies adds little to this system from the point of view of a civil libertarian. The only case where it would be useful would be things like the videos of civilians being gunned down in Iraq. The downside would be the addition of a massive load increase to the system.
No system could be proof against transmission of kiddie porn and copyrighted videos, but I don't see any harm in trying. Certainly the attempt doesn't instantly make one not a civil libertarian. Possibly we have different views of what that means?
With this and the stay of execution on software patents, anyone buying me pressies will have a tough act to follow :)
I'd be interested to hear your refutations - I'm aware that I'm a little biased on this topic, which is a Bad Thing.
Regards the purpose of police, I think we have a lexical incompatibility. I'm very much talking about the reason for having a police force in the first place (enforcing the interests of the community). You're talking more about what they do on a day-to-day basis.
This makes a difference cos it sounds like you think I'm annoyed at the police themselves. That's not the case - as you say, they're only doing their job. I'm angry at the legislators and lobbyists who put the police in a position where doing their job is not in the best interests of society.
Very good points. The only argument I'd make is that the flu vaccine situation still isn't applicable - people may have been willing to pay higher prices, but only because scarcity was driving demand. Unless the producers were actually making a loss on the drugs sold, relaxing the monopoly status of the vaccine would have enabled others to make it.
I could be mis-arguing this as I don't know the specifics of the case - any recommended references?
We could argue as to whether they willfully infringe copyrights because they include disclaimers and ask for copyright holders to notify them, but neither the grandparent, nor you, really debated that. - thanks for drawing that to my attention.
You make some good points. However, I'd argue that, if one is not in posession of material, it is impossible to distribute that material. Your example of the guy in the alley is interesting, but consider the situation in more detail: either he owns the CDs, in which case he's guilty as sin, or he doesn't. If he doesn't then either he is acting on behalf of the owner of the CDs (in which case he is complicit in the owner's infringement) or he is acting independently. If he is acting independently then he is complicit in your theft of the CDs. No need for "second-order" copyright infringement legislation anywhere there.
IANAL - if this contradicts the previous actions of the courts then of course my argument is a little pointless. However, I'd say that the Betamax verdict is possibly applicable - as I understand it, links are posted to the torrent sites by people other than the owners. You could possibly argue that the specific posters of links were aiding and abetting infringement but that doesn't change the fact that the technology (in this case the website) has substantial non-infringing usage - material that is out of copyright for example.
Thanks for a great discussion - any counters or further points?
that there *is* someone else to make it. And they can do it cheaper. And save more lives. It's the free market (sans artificial limitations) fixing the price, not the government.
You raise a good point about the recouping of research costs (or at least I think that was what you were getting at), but I strongly feel that the balance is tilted way too much in favour of big pharma at the moment, at the expense of real people's lives.
I can only comment on their activities cos I myself don't posess a government-backed monopoly on any major lifesaving products. However, I hope that, if put in that situation, I would behave a little more ethically than these companies.
The relevant section would appear to be section 506 (pages 139 and 140) covering what acts are considered criminal under the legislation. I can't see anything there about links to links to trackers to seeds to peers with copyrighted material. Hence I would conclude that the grandparent was justified in his assertion. Any counterarguments?
Congratulations, you now have neither. Have a nice day.
Personally, I support the rights of many many poor Africans to live over the rights of Big Pharma to rake in extra dough. Any counterarguments?
The job of cops is ultimately to act in the best interests of our society - that's what we have laws for in the first place. If we see our government acting as hired guns for whichever lobby group has the most cash, I would say we have a good reason to get pissed off.
I consider this to be a decent example of said phenomenon. As far as independent (non-RIAA-funded) studies can find, filesharing hasn't harmed the music industry at all. On a personal level, I can vouch for filesharing promoting quality - the "free demo" theory. This is a good thing for society as a whole, but not for the RIAA.
Hence, when the police and judiciary start to stamp heavily on people whose actions are not (IMO) particularly immoral, I consider it to be acceptable to protest loudly and often.
that this all seems to hinge on some rather dodgy legal decisions (120 year copyright anyone?) and to be very similar to the much-loathed approach of barratry.
Personally, I have trouble believing that the behaviour of these governments is in the interests of the majority, or, for that matter, anyone other than the RIAA fatcats. And that would imply that somewhere down the line there's been an abuse of the democratic process (no shit...).
I always use Direct Connect to download linux isos and similar. The problem is that my uni is quite strict on downloads outside of the internal network - more than 400mb/day and you're stuffed. They do have an internal mirror but it only has a couple of distros on (lame). So my mates and I wget an iso each then share them.