Are you asking me to provide data or reliable cites that prove a negative?
Showing that your data and other data, both collected with identical methodology, do not coincide calls into question the data of others but does not prove a negative. Using a different methodology that doesn't show climate warming and better explains all the data doesn't prove a negative. Where exactly is anyone asking you to prove a negative?
I'm claiming that climate change is natural and normal and nothing to be too concerned about.
Could you expand on this? Is all climate change natural? Are human actions "natural"? When you say climate change is nothing to be too concerned about, are you speaking of yourself not being concerned or that no climate change is something to be too concerned about? Unless you narrowly define your words, I can't see how your claim can be supported.
I mostly agree, but I'd have to say that it wasn't so much the right to compensation as the right to the potential for compensation. The free market then actually is a good way of filtering out the "good" ideas because those that manage to be compensated are those that sell well. And so they are the ones that are more likely to produce sequals. The major problem is that many people have taken copyright to be an actual *right*. They feel not only that they're entitled to ownership and control over their work, but that they have the right to be paid effectively indefinitely. Further, they feel that they have a right to be compensated completely and that anyone who manages to use their work without paying should be punished some way, even if it's because someone discarded a newspaper.
Now, clearly something like P2P is quite different from this, but all the proclamations of the RIAA and MPAA seem to be words of entitlement. Copyright is far from this. Talk about "theft" really only furthers this idea. I really do fear that until people drill in into peoples head that compensation is a *side-effect*, copyright will only further spiral out of control. People will really have to start saying that artists don't deserve compensation. It's something that is granted to them. I wonder if renaming copyright to copygrant would change this. And while I don't subscribe to the idea that it's the unjustness of copyright that is causing so many people to pirate, I can imagine that a more sane copyright period (ie, 14-28 years) would see a lot more people doing legitimiate public domain trading. Certainly, P2P is good evidence that the mass trading of free music isn't sufficient to stop the production of new music (and almost lampoons the idea that copyright is even necessary for its stated purpose; of course, the fact that the real world still sees harsh enforcement of copyright makes it hard to really test). In any case, public domain trading shouldn't be a valid excuse against having a short copyright period.
Much as I dislike Fox, the guy does have a point - the definition of 'planet' has absolutely no use whatsoever in science.
Right. Exactly the reason why he should have never learned that Pluto was a planet in the first place. Then he'd not have to worry about unlearning it. Seriously, there's very little "science" involved in naming *anything*. It just happens that they took a lot of astronomers and gave them the chance to express an opinion. If people still want to call Pluto a planet, more power to them. But it's silly to not acknowledge the legitimitacy of many of the complaints of calling Pluto a planet. So, in the end, you'll have a reason to update the text books, to note the many people who voted for a new scheme that no one is forced to adhere to.
Theft is the act of stealing. Stealing is taking something without permission.
Congratulations. Now let's try to relate this to copying a CD. Note, IANAL.
Situation 1: I take a CD from someone without the permission. Conclusion 1: I stole a CD. Ie, I commited theft.
Situation 2: I borrow a CD from someone with their permission, I could copy the data to a new CD. Finally, I return the borrowed CD. Conclusion 2: In most of the US (all?), this would be copyright infringement. The owner of the CD still has their CD, so it wouldn't be theft.
Situation 3: I go to court and claim I own the copyright to music on a CD, even though I never made the work (directly or indirectly) and the work was never legally transfered to me. The court ends up siding with me, as the opposing side doesn't show up. Conclusion 3: I stole the copyright. I am guilty of fraud legally.
Situation 4: There is only one copy of a copyrighted work made by John. I take that copy without his permission with intent to destroy it. Conclusion 4: I stole John's copy. John still owns the copyright on the work, even though the work may no longer exist.
Hopefully this will help clear up some things. Copyright is a right that exists even when copies of a work don't necessarily exist. To claim that copyright infringement is theft is to ignore how copyright behaves rather differently than physical property.
The entire purpose of copyright, as allowed by the U.S. Constitution, is to facilitate creators of works to earn money off their creations for a time.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
However, I think you have to be fairly daft to believe the point of such exclusive rights, geared as it is towards "the promotion of progress of science and useful arts", wasn't about making money off the deal.
The *purpose* of copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Copyright does this *by* giving exclusive rights to the author or inventor of a work for a limited time. So, while money is a likely byproduct of copyright, to say that was the purpose of copyright under the Constitution is to ignore what it clearly states. But, of course, it's easier for artists (and their publishers) to show that they're not being paid than it is to show that they're promoting the arts and sciences.
No. BSD is about giving freedom to the end user. GPL about paying a price to the "creator" who calls that "freedom". BSD is end-user oriented, GPL developer oriented.
BSD is about giving freedom to the end user to do what exactly, develop? GPL gives freedom to developers who are what, end users? There isn't a clear separation between the developers and end-users as you'd like to believe.
If I hand you a gift and then limit what you can do with it because I want stuff back, it's not giving total freedom.
Exactly. And the BSD allows that.:) After all, BSD code can be relicensed under the GPL. It's only so long as it retains the BSD license that one has "total" freedom. But the second one exercises that freedom, everyone else down the line loses that "total" freedom. The GPL is a compromise that tries to make it so people down the line can't further restrict what can be done to the code. The real answer, of course, is to banish copyright. But neither the BSD nor GPL really attempt to achieve that effect (and for the GPL it'd be as simple as removing the source redistribution requirement and possibly making reverse engineering legal again, even in the case of copy protection schemes), since that'd really be the ultimate freedom; you do realize that copyright is an unnecessary governmental interference, right?
Real freedom of software is were you even defend that freedom even if some people do something with it that you don't like or agree with, like closing enhancements and selling it.
Real freedom is when they sell to you that closed enhancements, you're able to sell the same thing to others because there's no law stopping you. The GPL is much closer to that theory. But really, trying to claim the BSD or GPL are "ultimate freedom" is a ludicrous argument. Instead, each are an attempt at their own vision of some subset type of freedom.
Well hallelujah, that seems to come straight out of the GPL Bullsh!t Marketeze Generator. I mean, like "to give users the freedoms that Stallman set-out to insure existed in GPLed code" and "to run ever increasing sections of one's system on an open and modifiable platform", that's nice but not very specific, so dare I ask -you-, how does for example FreeBSD not do this? Does it restrict freedoms? Is it not open and modifiable? I name this OS because it uses the simplest of licences at the opposite end of the spectrum and does exactly what you just vaguely mentioned. The only thing I can come up with is that you cannot close it and redistribute under the GPL, so if you have any numbers on the equation of how many more contributions that deliveres minus the potential contributors one loses, I'd be grateful.
If you'll notice, the original statement was about it being foolish to use a license/software to push a moral war and social reform. And clearly it's not. Why? Because before the GPL, was there any license *like* the GPL? The BSD license can hardly be said to be an original invention. And there's certainly tons of projects under BSD and BSD-like licenses. But at the same time, the GPL has spawned various derivative versions as well. And while many have their minor quirks that make them incompatable with each other, they all share one thing: giving freedom to the end user. Not just the first end user. Not just the second. Every end user. The GPL started a social reform known as the free software movement (ironically called the open software movement). And it harkened back to the days of share and share-alike, to the same sort of morality that says no person has a right to stop others from receiving something, altering it, and giving it to others; the GPL merely extended the idea to copyrighted works.
So, yes, FreeBSD exists. Its install base is quite healthy. And its users are apparently quite happy with the social network and morality that it encourages. But can you honestly say that the Linux, GNU, GNOME, et al communities don't exist now or that if there was no GPL they would still exist anywhere near their large healthy forms? The moral war and the social reform is ongoing. Not everyone will necessarily switch (undoubtedly many won't, as is demonstrated by people like Linus who seem only interested in open source so long as it's directly good to them). But that doesn't mean that the fight couldn't or shouldn't happen. It obviously is. And the only real arguments why it shouldn't are based in opinions, many on the moral evil of the GPL (some more economic); it's the sort of thing that makes it ironic when people say licenses shouldn't be about moral warfare, yet they seem willing to engage in it.
When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom.
ARRRGHGHGHGHGHH!! If I read this once more I'll puke. Why doesn't the FSF rename itself to the Freedom Software Foundation and stop explaining it over and over and over and over and over and over...
RMS is on a crusade to frame the argument in the words of his choosing. By doing so, he is making it so that when you hear him or others like him speak, you will remember the context in which he speaks. By this, he can be assured that others cannot distort what he is trying to communicate. And if that communication also ends up making people evaluate just how much freedom is in their free-as-in-beer software, then perhaps people will be more open to considering what the FSF and GPL have to offer.
You really can't/shouldn't make software/licenes a moral warfare or a means for social reform.
Dare I ask why you can't or shouldn't? The simple fact is, the GPL is doing mostly today what it was designed to do, to give users the freedoms that Stallman set-out to insure existed in GPLed code. To me, the work of GNU has created a moral and social reform in some sense, by making people realize it is possible to run ever increasing sections of one's system on an open and modifiable platform.
People want the freedom to decide how their long and hard hours of work should be distributed.
And those people have it. At the same time, users want the freedom to take the work of others and fit it to their needs while at the same time allowing others to benefit from their work.
GPL 3 is basicly a way to make the midless Stallman followers to be more zealot about the things Stallman disaproves of.
So, a new license offering more choice is intended to feed mindless zealots? Why with language like that, you must be against the creation of all sorts of new licenses!
There is users freedomes and developers freedom, as a developer I want the freedome to do what I want with my code and decide who should do what with it.
If you want to control your users, then the GPL isn't for you. Nor was it ever designed to be. But don't be surprised when this means you can't use the GPL code of others.
If I choose that GNU is good then I will use it, if not then I want an other choice. Stallman is moving CopyLeft to CopyFarLeft.
Yea, that bastard Stallman. How dare he write up a new license to further refine his intentions. By God, it's almost as if he's the copyright holder of GNU and as a "developer" wants to decide what others do with his code. Hell, he sounds just like you. The funny thing is, he's interested in furthering user freedom. Clearly anyone who cares about the freedom of the common man is Far Left.
I admit, my estimates were insanly overestimations on a lot of the elements. My point was to demonstrate that even in the extreme case, it would be possible for a government like the US to finance such a program. But it's nice to have a more reasonable estimation on what it'd probably cost on an average case.
Well, let's do some math. First, let's assume every last person in the US has a standard phone line or a cell phone, each of which ends up being routed through a switching center, where phone calls are recorder. Now, a standard phone line can, by order of the FCC, transmit at no faster than 53kbps (I'd assume cells can transmit faster in some sort of "data" mode, but for the sake of argument, let's say that their "voice" communications are still limited to the 53kbps). That works out to 53000 bits per second, or ~6.5KB/s. Recording both way bumps that up to ~13KB/s. Now, there's 86400 seconds in a day, so that works out to be ~1.066GB/day. Now, there's 365 days in a year and approximately 250 million people in the US. So, that works out to be approximatley 97,288,750,112GB/year for the whole US. Now, HDs (not exactly the absolute best storage capacity, but let's assume they're used because they're relatively portable) can be bought at approximately $100 per 300GB (certainly, that's a doable rate for buying in such bulk). So, to record all standard phone lines in the US would require ~324,295,834 HDs of size 300GB or a budget of ~$32.4 billion.
Of course, none of this includes the costs of storage, the setup to allow for all this (assuming that the phone companies haven't build it in already for such large-scale wiretap support (assumedly they built-in support to wiretap anything that they transmit/receive)), or the fact that it'd be a probably noticable program to record every last recording. But consider that most people aren't on 24/7 and that 90% of the population would probably not be recorded at all, and you can shift down the numbers by a few orders of magnitude. I don't think it'd be out of the realm of possibility for the federal government to be able to manage that sort of budget or operation, if motivated. However, I'd still be a bit surprised if they'd go through all that hassle and not work harder to trap more things that could carry conversations or other data. Ie, I doubt that they're wiretapping even to *that* scale.
For example, suppose a kidnapper was captured, and, in confessing, admitted that he had locked his victim, unconscious but still alive, in a random car in the long term parking lot at LAX. Would (in your opinion) some sort of warrant or warrants be needed to legally search the cars and, if so, would it be legal for a judge to issue it?
Probably not. LAX would probably give the go-ahead to open trunks and the courts would probably rule that by being on LAX property, they come under LAX care (similar to the landlord-tenent relationship). Ie, it'd probably be possible to get a warrant even *if* LAX said no (which would be a PR nightmare, I'd imagine).
I'm still having trouble with the certain-but-unconvincing duality of the information you are assuming. It seems to me crucial to your case that they have information which is absolutely convincing to them but would not be to anyone else (say, a judge).
It's not a matter of the information being convincing. It's the fact that there isn't any precedent that would make the Queens situation like the LAX situation or the many-rented-apartments example. As such, the judge would be very cautious to allow such broad leeway in trying to track down one terrorist cell. Basically, they'd be like you, suggesting that there were other, less legally questionable ways to resolve the issue. So, it's not that the judge questions the evidence or even the veriacity of their call filterer. It's the fact that the error rate is so high that, again, there isn't the precedent to support such a position. Hell, P2P seems to remain legal even though one could guess only 1% of the content is unquestionably legal (consider how many linux distros aren't necessarily legal, given the mp3 patents).
A key point that you seem to be skipping over here is that none of what you have offered explains why they wouldn't ask for warrants in the first place, as they are legally required to do.
As the story showed, they went to the FISA court. They argued their case. And the FISA court turned them down for requesting a much too broad warrant. It's not that they didn't try. It's that it didn't fly. One could even imagine that they wiretapped the area for 3 days and it was on the third day that it was turned down and they had to stop. The point is, the judge didn't okay their warrant request.
The untrusted guards assumption, if allowed, makes the whole thing way more complicated than it needs to be. If we're going to assume that we can't adequately vet members of "our team" we might as well cut out all the deadwood and just assume that the FISA judges themselves are in cahoots with the terrorists. As I said very early on, this sort of thing would neatly justify not seeking warrants without any other assumptions.
Except that an untrustworthy judge can be side stepped by going to another judge. You'd need the FISA court, (all?) federal courts, and local courts all to be in cohoots. It only takes one person on guard duty to blow up the bridge.
Still, in case you really doubt the existence of a wealth of ideas as yet unexplored in this discussion, I'll throw out a few more:
* Narrow the list by data mining; there is plenty of publicly available information that should be useful in significantly reducing the scope of the search, possible to a small enough list to get warrants for
Possible. And possibly not. But an illegal wiretap would necessarily stop the attack (assuming enough agents are available to monitor calls).
* Destroy the Statue of Liberty yourself, or at least publicly schedule its destruction, to force them into the bridge-plan, and otherwise take the initiative in controlling events. There are all sorts of variations here, from shoot the hostage gambits to squeeze plays and
The whole point of a warrant is to look for something; it does not automatically become "illegal" if what they are looking for isn't found.
Nor did I say that was true. The point is that while there is probable cause to believe that one phone is connected to the terrorist cell, there isn't reason to believe that *all* phones are connected to the terrorist cell.
And you haven't backed up your earlier claim that there is some sort of magic upper limit on the number of warrants that could be issued.
There is no need for a "magical limit" so much as the fact that you don't have probable cause for the many specific places the warrant would be for.
If your logic worked, a crook could rent a dozen apartments (or maybe it would take twenty, or a hundred), rob a bank, and hide the money in one of them. The police would be powerless to search any of them because they couldn't establish probable cause for them individually even though they had certainty about them collectively.
That's a false analogy. In this instance, they'd have probable cause because they'd know all properties are in fact owned by one person. In effect, they're all be one specific place (though separate warrants would be likely issued). The same cannot be said when you're talking about the property of thousands of people. Nor could you, upon knowing the bank robber had a dozen apartments raid every apartment in a city just because you don't know which apartments are his. The latter would be a much more apt analogy to the terrorist cell situation.
Close the statue of liberty and the bridges? Yes, it would be disruptive, but less disruptive than letting the attack go ahead with the bridges occupied, or tossing our laws and constitution out the window based on what is, by definition if we find ourselves in this predicament, unconvincing evidence?
And how long shall we keep them closed? A day? Weeks? Months? Forever? What is to say that those people who will be guarding the bridge aren't infact part of the cell, hence the reason why their back-up plan was to attack the bridges?
Or close off the statue of liberty and implement thorough inspections for the bridges.
That's an idea, but it fails for the same reasong closing it would fail.
Or just shut off all phone service to Queens, save calls to 911?
For how long? Weeks? Months? Do you think shutting off phone service will stop them from attacking?
Or set up a phone bank to call all the numbers in Queens, using the code book, to tell the cell to do something that would be obvious, and then nabbing them?
You assume it's a two-way code book. In fact, it's an outward code book for the cell. Because there was never any plan to stop the attack, the cell was given a random abort code. So, you calling up everyone and trying to redirect them would fail short of being incredibly lucky.
Or any of a hundred other things which would be perfectly legal, rather than insisting that the only way to deal with such a situation is to break the law?
Feel free to come up with hundreds of other ways that are perfectly legal to stop this threat.
My point was that the time metric offered might not be sufficient.
Yes, I understand that. But my question is why wouldn't it be?
The same reason you have continuously running backups. There are times when it's only after the fact that you realize you need to go back to fix things. To that end, recording all the time illegal will provide information that you'd otherwise not find out because you only started recording the second you had suspicion. Criminals don't start talking when you start recording and don't continuously repeat themselves just to make sure that a wiretap catches them admitting their to-be crime.
So, one can legally wiretap an entire city by obtaining a warrant by the third day? I was under the impression that these post-72-hour wiretap warrants were designed to allow wiretapping one's target instantly instead of having to wait for a warrant, not to allow wiretapping large regions just to file a few wiretaps after the fact.
I'm not at all sure what you are saying here.
I'm not sure how I can be that much clearer. Perhaps I should just spell out what a warrant is. Or clarify that you can't wiretap a whole city legally, neither through one warrant or through enough warrants to cover every phone.
Do you really believe that they have the resources to listen to that much traffic all at once, on short notice, but they don't have a spare lawyer they could send 'round to the judge to explain why they think they need to?
They might not have the resources to listen to that much traffic. Perhaps they'd wiretap everything and focus only on the calls they think are probably targets, to only go back and sort through everything else if their target isn't found otherwise. But sending a lawyer to some judge to try to explain things doesn't magically make it legal.
Or that they would be justified in doing such a thing but couldn't convince any of the judges from a court that has never turned down a request that they needed a warrant?
But yea, never turned down a request... And I'm sure the FISA court wouldn't mind receiving 50,000 warrant requests to cover a small city. Sure, it's unlikely the FBI would file that many warrants. It'd be much easier to wiretap a fraction of that (say, a city block) and only file a warrant for their target. Of course, that's illegal too. But then it's not like them filing warrants for everyone on the city block and getting all but one of them rejected would make their wiretapping any more legal.
So, to put it another way, there was up to 4 recorded instances of illegal wiretapping in 2004. I doubt those 4 happened to be instances where they came to the FISA court pre-wiretapping.
The easiest way to get me to take back the "dancing around the issue" claim would be to point out where this limit is (e.g. in the law, or a responsible analysis of it).
"no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Ie, no warrant could be legally granted to search an entire city. And a warrant couldn't be granted to search when you don't even know who the target is. Even if they *tried* to get those 50,000 or so warrants for a small city and succeeded, 49,999 of them would be illegal; there isn't a probable cause that 49,999 of those phones are linked to terrorists, only one is.
And I know this is out of order, but here's for a creative story.
What would your "1% case" look like? Remember, they can already wiretap for 72 hours before getting the warrant
The time they need to wiretap 73 hours before getting the warrant.
Restating the question isn't the same thing as answering it. If I asked you to "name one thing that you thing would cure baldness" and you replied "a baldness cure," you'd hardly expect me to accept that as a responsive answer, would you?
No, nor was my answer like that. It was a bit flippant, though. My point was that the time metric offered might not be sufficient.
The time that they know that someone is going to attack a specifically national monument and generally where they'll be when they get their "go ahead" call, but they don't know the exact phone to be used or who the hidden contact is.
Huh? Either way, they start the wiretap at exactly the same time. Only in one case (the legal one) the notify their superiors and have somebody get a warrant going within the first three days of the wiretap.
So, one can legally wiretap an entire city by obtaining a warrant by the third day? I was under the impression that these post-72-hour wiretap warrants were designed to allow wiretapping one's target instantly instead of having to wait for a warrant, not to allow wiretapping large regions just to file a few wiretaps after the fact.
I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of other examples where the only way to stop a terrorist plot involves bending or breaking the law as the threat is imminent and the information is insufficient in the time provided to legally find the person to commit the attack.
No, I can't think of any; that was the point of my question. And, so far as I can tell, you can't either, otherwise you wouldn't be dancing around like this. I'm certainly not unimaginative
If you consider it dancing around to point out that the major components of the most liberal wiretapping program avaiable under the FISA courts have both a space and a time limit from which it's hardly inconceivably that a terrorist attack might not be covered (and I tried to give two examples, though you seemed to dismiss them), then I really do consider you unimaginative. If you're wanting me to make up specific examples to demonstrate the point, then you'll have to give me some guidelines on just how "real" you want it before you consider it no longer "dancing".
Oh, and there's little evidence that a nuclear bomb would actually disrupt a hurricane significantly, though it'd almost certainly create some nasty rain when it did reach land.
What would your "1% case" look like? Remember, they can already wiretap for 72 hours before getting the warrant
The time they need to wiretap 73 hours before getting the warrant. The time that they know that someone is going to attack a specifically national monument and generally where they'll be when they get their "go ahead" call, but they don't know the exact phone to be used or who the hidden contact is. I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of other examples where the only way to stop a terrorist plot involves bending or breaking the law as the threat is imminent and the information is insufficient in the time provided to legally find the person to commit the attack. But as I said in my comment, the 1% is just a made up number. The point is that the number is non-zero, and so stating your argument based on "it's unnecessary" is a fallacy; the fact that it is incredibly small will not placate some people. If you consider just how infrequent death and destruction by terrorist attacks is, doing *nothing* would amount to less than a 1% total failure rate at stopping preventable death and destruction.
For that matter, can you even come up with a plausible reason why they'd want to?
Perhaps all those things you mention. Perhaps they truly believe they're doing something for the betterment of society and that the laws are simply too strict. It's not really relevent to know why they want to do the things they do because even if their actions are specifically to crush freedom, they won't be able to gain support unless they sugar coat it in some way (religion seems to be a favorite). And to merely challenge what they sugar coat today makes it possible for them to shift the aim, collapsing your efforts against them and making it seem they've won against the opposition; beyond that, it's hard to argue against the points a platform makes that only speak of protecting puppies from being kicked, for example. So, instead of focusing on "they've evil aims, but we can't prove it right now" which seems more conspiracy theory than anything, it'd be better to focus on the simple fact that they're destroying our freedom. Perhaps if people cared more about freedom and less about the evil boogyman of the week, we wouldn't see so many draconian laws passed.
This story actually quite well demonstrates why. And I'd liken it to the same situation with the Open Source movement**. The general problem with recognizing whether or not warrantless wiretaps will aid a terror investigation is that while it's true that 99% of terrorism investigation will likely never have a need for a warrantless wiretap before they will be found out, there will be that 1%* that would require it to be found out before the attack occurs. And so unsurprisingly, if you wait long enough people will find these planned attacks and announce how the new freedom-stripping laws have proven their worth.
As a result, people will turn to the group that said "it won't help" and think that this is the major group that opposes such laws. But this just proves them wrong. So, the masses then become content with having the "opposition" being proven wrong and really starts to accept such laws. The truth is, people have to have at the front a strong desire for freedom. Trying to take this abstract idea and condense it down into something less abstract to get people behind it will ultimately fail because something like freedom is abstract precisely *because* it's not something that can be boiled down into a few trite examples. And trying to do so only worsens the perception of what freedom really is.
*Obviously, just a made up percent. The point is it's not 0.
**There will always be some open source project that is worse than some closed project, by virtue of circumstances outside of the ideals of what open source is. For this reason, one has to accept that the fundamental idea of the open source movement could be virtually eliminated with enough motivation by closed source groups. If that is truly fine with you, great. But I have a hope that many people came to the open source world more because it was open, not just because it was better than the competition. That is, it being open was what made it better, not necessarily how well it functioned at its job. And that's more the sentiment of Free software, not Open software.
Before the F/OSS nay sayers toss out the obligatory (and to be expected) "Meh. So much for the 'many eyes' theory"
Please don't group the Free Software group with the Open Software group in this instance. If anything, some of the Free software group is part of the nay sayers. I, for one, don't believe open source is a panacea. But by it being Free, it means that at least *I* can try to fix software that I use.
Can I make a guess on how this is possible? Most IDE, SATA, etc HDs are common. So, it would be as simple as stuffing the whole system into a VM, having a very simple pass-through for the HD, and causing a swap out of important system files. Now, the swap out puts important files on the HD. The new pass-through allows one to alter otherwise locked files (as well as hiding malicious files), and since the IDE/SATA/etc hardware is so common, it'd be the least effort to writing a single pass-through exploit. And the reason I can see Vista (and possible Mac OS X) is vulnerable is because, as mentioned previously, these operating systems are hybrids, so important system files (ie, read parts of the effective kernel) are swapped out to the HD. Something like Linux and BSD would be mostly immune, as their kernels are never swapped (AFAIK).
Of course, all of this basically requires root-like authority, so it's not really a security vulnerability per-say. At best, it's a means to attack something more silently. But a lower-level pass-through would almost certainly be just as effective. It seems interesting from a perspective of a "and so this is why you can't let regular users run a VM", but that point is hardly a security surprise (it's why *nix doesn't allow regular users to mount filesystems, except under a strict set of conditions; and why Windows NT (though, AFAIK not later versions, as Direct X can trap any key combination) had a CTRL-ALT-DEL login option). It'd be tons easier to just replace the shell, probably. It'd just probably not being possible to do without a logout. And this could potentially change that.
Maybe. But do you want to tip off the people you're about to arrest that they should really, really think about getting on that small boat they've got hidden on the coast right about now? If you're watching them and they vanish - then you whack up the alert level. As long as you know where they are, there's no need to warn them that you're in a van near to their house with all your cameras and listening gear.
Ah, of course. So, the alert level only goes up when (a) the government knows of a terror plot and (b) manage to fuck up capturing people. So, it's a barometer of government fuck up. No wonder it's so high in the US and UK.
I'm sorry, but is the discussion that the delivery of products is more complex or that the use of products is more complex under Linux?
If it's the former, I'd whole heartedly agree. That's a design descision made by distros to limit the malicious and/or non-malicious damage caused by allowing every piece of software into the main distro line. People can still choose to walk outside of it, and distros surely are constantly undermanned to do the job of adding legitimate programs at an optimal rate. But, distros are focused more on providing for the users, not the distributors. After all, distros *are* distributors, and they damn well recognize they're doing the hard work of distributing.
If you're more interested in having an easy and complex life than helping your users, don't be surprised if the Linux approach seems "unfair". It's pretty unfair when developers only release for Windows or the PS2 or whatever platform. Users have learned to cope. Targetting Linux (and the *BSDs) might just mean requiring the developer to cope.
Oh, and as for your example:
>A real-world example of this is SeaMonkey. How long will it be until Debian users can install the software easily? Windows users can have the latest version as soon as we ship it. Linux users generally have to wait for their distro to provide an updated package.
That last sentence nails the answer. Debian isn't focused on being up-to-the-minute. It's focused on stability. Bitching that Debian doesn't update often enough is effectively bitching at the users for not wanting to update often enough. That's not exactly a great focus on user wants.
The problem is that Apple seems to be schizophrenic in their relationship with Windows. On one hand, they smugly deride Windows at every opportunity ("Hasta la vista" and the like). On the other hand, they release stuff like bootcamp (a tacit admission that their platform is sorely lacking in ports of games and other software).
How much money is Microsoft losing in the selling of gaming and media machines, again? What's exactly schizophrenic about only encouraging the use of Windows in those areas that Microsoft will lose money (or at least gain the least, considering their dominant market position means it unlikley they will ever gain nothing) while encouraging the use of Apple machines in those areas that Apple profits most?
The problem isn't so much that I misunderstood you. It was that you were asking a question in a context that already defined an act as illegal. It is this reason that I pedantically discussed what exactly a conspiracy was. And I further answered what probable intention was, to know whether I thought verbal agreements could be in themselves illegal.
The point of disagreement seems to be on *whether* certain speech should or should not be illegal, and arguing that is as productive as tossing am Israeli and Palestenian in a room and telling them not to come out until they agree on what to do with the West Bank - lots of yelling, maybe a death or two, but never anyone changing their opinion.
Agreed, as such is based on an opinion. I'm just sad that the Supreme Courts opinions have reduced those protections laid out in the first amendment by making certain speech illegal in itself.
Having said that, a little rant:
It sets the dangerous precedent of, for example, making those who make sufficiently intelligent AI (but a non-sentient/sapient variety, so no worries of the AI itself being inditable) to be charged with co-conspiracy for not putting sufficient restraint into their systems to prevent the abuse of such a system for crimes (somewhat like how video game makers are being targetted for violent/sexual video games, even before evidence that such video games even cause crime has been found; and yes, it's only minors at the moment, but if the logic holds for minors, I don't see how it wouldn't apply to adults as well as a means to low crime rates). After all, the reporter who has no intention of aiding suspects but invariably does is not far from the programmer who makes a device with similar effect--a reporter who used an audio recorder/player to provide information wouldn't be able to claim that the audio device somehow abdicates themselves from responsibility, as in the end it's the speech in the device that would be ruled illegal, not the use of the speech by the criminals; it just happens that the use helps demonstrate why it is illegal. And my silly example is a prime reason intent is such a driving force in trials today.
The reporter is allowed to report. However, the reporter can't be writing a story on whether movie theaters are unsafe and run into a movie theater and yell "fire" in order to see how well the theater exits work.
See, a much better analogy. At least you're involving speech this time.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not protected speech. If you want arguments to support that statement, I'll dig up my old lay books with the cites for the speech cases in front of the Supreme Court.
Right you are. For better or for worse, the Supreme Court has ruled that imminent danger speech and obscenity are both not forms of protected speech. Now, can you reasonable show that telling suspected terrorists they're being watched is an "imminent danger" speech? Note, imminent danger doesn't include things that may lead to a crime in the course of days or weeks in the future. "Fire" in a theater is likely to lead to harm, if not death, to people in the course of a matter of minutes. The same can be said of speech that could spark a riot. The fact that one informs a suspect they are being watched may induce them to flee from authorities, but to claim it creates an imminent danger would be quite ludicrous. So, you're closer to the mark, but you're still not drawing a straight analogy showing how the speech should be a crime, as it otherwise isn't.
The issue isn't the reporting of the event, but in causing a change in the event by interference, and whether that interference makes one a participant rather than a reporter.
Uh, why does that matter? As has been stated by others, being a reporter doesn't make you a magical being different than others. Simply *covering* the news is an act of participation (I guess if you've got a sniper camera and sniper mike, you can stalk people without that being the case, but good luck getting the information you're interested in that way). Further, reporters aren't journalists. And what you're subscribing to is a journalist creedo, not some sort of law that differentiates the "people" from the "journalists". Journalists try to cover the story as much as possible without interfering with the story because they're not interested in being the story. But, clearly reporters have repeatedly shown that they're more interested in making themselves look good than having a realistic account of what they're covering (look no further than "To Catch A Preditor" to demonstrate not only a reporter participating but also informing the suspect before the police arrest the suspect).
Someone doing nothing more than "speaking" could become an accessory to the crime after the fact by sharing information with the criminals and shielding information from the authorities, or other tampering in an ongoing investigation.
Very true, and such laws are almost always based upon intent. And to me, this is a very serious problem with the way the law works in the US today. On the one hand, shouting "fire" in a burning theater is generally okay, but if one shouts "fire" in a burning theater with the belief that the tramplings will kill more than quietly ushering people out, shouting "fire" can revert back to non-protected speech. In a similar way, a reporter who is interested in covering a subject and "reporting the breaking news" can in many cases lure people in who might already be being investigated and tip them off to their behavior being trackable (and any suggest that getting an okay from the police to do it, with them standing in the wings, would make the reporters action a police action, effectively voiding any charges on the grounds of entrapment, seriously damaging any investigation against the person, an obvious obstruction of justice). Overall, one is left to deal with the "thought crimes" one commits and the ability of the prosecutor to convince the jurors that specific thoughts occurred rather than specific actions occurred.
Criminal conspiracies are nothing more than "speech" related to crimes, yet are treated differentl
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Showing that your data and other data, both collected with identical methodology, do not coincide calls into question the data of others but does not prove a negative. Using a different methodology that doesn't show climate warming and better explains all the data doesn't prove a negative. Where exactly is anyone asking you to prove a negative?
Could you expand on this? Is all climate change natural? Are human actions "natural"? When you say climate change is nothing to be too concerned about, are you speaking of yourself not being concerned or that no climate change is something to be too concerned about? Unless you narrowly define your words, I can't see how your claim can be supported.
I mostly agree, but I'd have to say that it wasn't so much the right to compensation as the right to the potential for compensation. The free market then actually is a good way of filtering out the "good" ideas because those that manage to be compensated are those that sell well. And so they are the ones that are more likely to produce sequals. The major problem is that many people have taken copyright to be an actual *right*. They feel not only that they're entitled to ownership and control over their work, but that they have the right to be paid effectively indefinitely. Further, they feel that they have a right to be compensated completely and that anyone who manages to use their work without paying should be punished some way, even if it's because someone discarded a newspaper.
Now, clearly something like P2P is quite different from this, but all the proclamations of the RIAA and MPAA seem to be words of entitlement. Copyright is far from this. Talk about "theft" really only furthers this idea. I really do fear that until people drill in into peoples head that compensation is a *side-effect*, copyright will only further spiral out of control. People will really have to start saying that artists don't deserve compensation. It's something that is granted to them. I wonder if renaming copyright to copygrant would change this. And while I don't subscribe to the idea that it's the unjustness of copyright that is causing so many people to pirate, I can imagine that a more sane copyright period (ie, 14-28 years) would see a lot more people doing legitimiate public domain trading. Certainly, P2P is good evidence that the mass trading of free music isn't sufficient to stop the production of new music (and almost lampoons the idea that copyright is even necessary for its stated purpose; of course, the fact that the real world still sees harsh enforcement of copyright makes it hard to really test). In any case, public domain trading shouldn't be a valid excuse against having a short copyright period.
Right. Exactly the reason why he should have never learned that Pluto was a planet in the first place. Then he'd not have to worry about unlearning it. Seriously, there's very little "science" involved in naming *anything*. It just happens that they took a lot of astronomers and gave them the chance to express an opinion. If people still want to call Pluto a planet, more power to them. But it's silly to not acknowledge the legitimitacy of many of the complaints of calling Pluto a planet. So, in the end, you'll have a reason to update the text books, to note the many people who voted for a new scheme that no one is forced to adhere to.
Congratulations. Now let's try to relate this to copying a CD. Note, IANAL.
Situation 1: I take a CD from someone without the permission.
Conclusion 1: I stole a CD. Ie, I commited theft.
Situation 2: I borrow a CD from someone with their permission, I could copy the data to a new CD. Finally, I return the borrowed CD.
Conclusion 2: In most of the US (all?), this would be copyright infringement. The owner of the CD still has their CD, so it wouldn't be theft.
Situation 3: I go to court and claim I own the copyright to music on a CD, even though I never made the work (directly or indirectly) and the work was never legally transfered to me. The court ends up siding with me, as the opposing side doesn't show up.
Conclusion 3: I stole the copyright. I am guilty of fraud legally.
Situation 4: There is only one copy of a copyrighted work made by John. I take that copy without his permission with intent to destroy it.
Conclusion 4: I stole John's copy. John still owns the copyright on the work, even though the work may no longer exist.
Hopefully this will help clear up some things. Copyright is a right that exists even when copies of a work don't necessarily exist. To claim that copyright infringement is theft is to ignore how copyright behaves rather differently than physical property.
The *purpose* of copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Copyright does this *by* giving exclusive rights to the author or inventor of a work for a limited time. So, while money is a likely byproduct of copyright, to say that was the purpose of copyright under the Constitution is to ignore what it clearly states. But, of course, it's easier for artists (and their publishers) to show that they're not being paid than it is to show that they're promoting the arts and sciences.
BSD is about giving freedom to the end user to do what exactly, develop? GPL gives freedom to developers who are what, end users? There isn't a clear separation between the developers and end-users as you'd like to believe.
Exactly. And the BSD allows that.
Real freedom is when they sell to you that closed enhancements, you're able to sell the same thing to others because there's no law stopping you. The GPL is much closer to that theory. But really, trying to claim the BSD or GPL are "ultimate freedom" is a ludicrous argument. Instead, each are an attempt at their own vision of some subset type of freedom.
If you'll notice, the original statement was about it being foolish to use a license/software to push a moral war and social reform. And clearly it's not. Why? Because before the GPL, was there any license *like* the GPL? The BSD license can hardly be said to be an original invention. And there's certainly tons of projects under BSD and BSD-like licenses. But at the same time, the GPL has spawned various derivative versions as well. And while many have their minor quirks that make them incompatable with each other, they all share one thing: giving freedom to the end user. Not just the first end user. Not just the second. Every end user. The GPL started a social reform known as the free software movement (ironically called the open software movement). And it harkened back to the days of share and share-alike, to the same sort of morality that says no person has a right to stop others from receiving something, altering it, and giving it to others; the GPL merely extended the idea to copyrighted works.
So, yes, FreeBSD exists. Its install base is quite healthy. And its users are apparently quite happy with the social network and morality that it encourages. But can you honestly say that the Linux, GNU, GNOME, et al communities don't exist now or that if there was no GPL they would still exist anywhere near their large healthy forms? The moral war and the social reform is ongoing. Not everyone will necessarily switch (undoubtedly many won't, as is demonstrated by people like Linus who seem only interested in open source so long as it's directly good to them). But that doesn't mean that the fight couldn't or shouldn't happen. It obviously is. And the only real arguments why it shouldn't are based in opinions, many on the moral evil of the GPL (some more economic); it's the sort of thing that makes it ironic when people say licenses shouldn't be about moral warfare, yet they seem willing to engage in it.
RMS is on a crusade to frame the argument in the words of his choosing. By doing so, he is making it so that when you hear him or others like him speak, you will remember the context in which he speaks. By this, he can be assured that others cannot distort what he is trying to communicate. And if that communication also ends up making people evaluate just how much freedom is in their free-as-in-beer software, then perhaps people will be more open to considering what the FSF and GPL have to offer.
Dare I ask why you can't or shouldn't? The simple fact is, the GPL is doing mostly today what it was designed to do, to give users the freedoms that Stallman set-out to insure existed in GPLed code. To me, the work of GNU has created a moral and social reform in some sense, by making people realize it is possible to run ever increasing sections of one's system on an open and modifiable platform.
And those people have it. At the same time, users want the freedom to take the work of others and fit it to their needs while at the same time allowing others to benefit from their work.
So, a new license offering more choice is intended to feed mindless zealots? Why with language like that, you must be against the creation of all sorts of new licenses!
If you want to control your users, then the GPL isn't for you. Nor was it ever designed to be. But don't be surprised when this means you can't use the GPL code of others.
Yea, that bastard Stallman. How dare he write up a new license to further refine his intentions. By God, it's almost as if he's the copyright holder of GNU and as a "developer" wants to decide what others do with his code. Hell, he sounds just like you. The funny thing is, he's interested in furthering user freedom. Clearly anyone who cares about the freedom of the common man is Far Left.
I admit, my estimates were insanly overestimations on a lot of the elements. My point was to demonstrate that even in the extreme case, it would be possible for a government like the US to finance such a program. But it's nice to have a more reasonable estimation on what it'd probably cost on an average case.
:)
Oh, and it didn't come off as a flame.
Well, let's do some math. First, let's assume every last person in the US has a standard phone line or a cell phone, each of which ends up being routed through a switching center, where phone calls are recorder. Now, a standard phone line can, by order of the FCC, transmit at no faster than 53kbps (I'd assume cells can transmit faster in some sort of "data" mode, but for the sake of argument, let's say that their "voice" communications are still limited to the 53kbps). That works out to 53000 bits per second, or ~6.5KB/s. Recording both way bumps that up to ~13KB/s. Now, there's 86400 seconds in a day, so that works out to be ~1.066GB/day. Now, there's 365 days in a year and approximately 250 million people in the US. So, that works out to be approximatley 97,288,750,112GB/year for the whole US. Now, HDs (not exactly the absolute best storage capacity, but let's assume they're used because they're relatively portable) can be bought at approximately $100 per 300GB (certainly, that's a doable rate for buying in such bulk). So, to record all standard phone lines in the US would require ~324,295,834 HDs of size 300GB or a budget of ~$32.4 billion.
Of course, none of this includes the costs of storage, the setup to allow for all this (assuming that the phone companies haven't build it in already for such large-scale wiretap support (assumedly they built-in support to wiretap anything that they transmit/receive)), or the fact that it'd be a probably noticable program to record every last recording. But consider that most people aren't on 24/7 and that 90% of the population would probably not be recorded at all, and you can shift down the numbers by a few orders of magnitude. I don't think it'd be out of the realm of possibility for the federal government to be able to manage that sort of budget or operation, if motivated. However, I'd still be a bit surprised if they'd go through all that hassle and not work harder to trap more things that could carry conversations or other data. Ie, I doubt that they're wiretapping even to *that* scale.
Probably not. LAX would probably give the go-ahead to open trunks and the courts would probably rule that by being on LAX property, they come under LAX care (similar to the landlord-tenent relationship). Ie, it'd probably be possible to get a warrant even *if* LAX said no (which would be a PR nightmare, I'd imagine).
It's not a matter of the information being convincing. It's the fact that there isn't any precedent that would make the Queens situation like the LAX situation or the many-rented-apartments example. As such, the judge would be very cautious to allow such broad leeway in trying to track down one terrorist cell. Basically, they'd be like you, suggesting that there were other, less legally questionable ways to resolve the issue. So, it's not that the judge questions the evidence or even the veriacity of their call filterer. It's the fact that the error rate is so high that, again, there isn't the precedent to support such a position. Hell, P2P seems to remain legal even though one could guess only 1% of the content is unquestionably legal (consider how many linux distros aren't necessarily legal, given the mp3 patents).
As the story showed, they went to the FISA court. They argued their case. And the FISA court turned them down for requesting a much too broad warrant. It's not that they didn't try. It's that it didn't fly. One could even imagine that they wiretapped the area for 3 days and it was on the third day that it was turned down and they had to stop. The point is, the judge didn't okay their warrant request.
Except that an untrustworthy judge can be side stepped by going to another judge. You'd need the FISA court, (all?) federal courts, and local courts all to be in cohoots. It only takes one person on guard duty to blow up the bridge.
Possible. And possibly not. But an illegal wiretap would necessarily stop the attack (assuming enough agents are available to monitor calls).
Quite true. If you destroy
Nor did I say that was true. The point is that while there is probable cause to believe that one phone is connected to the terrorist cell, there isn't reason to believe that *all* phones are connected to the terrorist cell.
There is no need for a "magical limit" so much as the fact that you don't have probable cause for the many specific places the warrant would be for.
That's a false analogy. In this instance, they'd have probable cause because they'd know all properties are in fact owned by one person. In effect, they're all be one specific place (though separate warrants would be likely issued). The same cannot be said when you're talking about the property of thousands of people. Nor could you, upon knowing the bank robber had a dozen apartments raid every apartment in a city just because you don't know which apartments are his. The latter would be a much more apt analogy to the terrorist cell situation.
And how long shall we keep them closed? A day? Weeks? Months? Forever? What is to say that those people who will be guarding the bridge aren't infact part of the cell, hence the reason why their back-up plan was to attack the bridges?
That's an idea, but it fails for the same reasong closing it would fail.
For how long? Weeks? Months? Do you think shutting off phone service will stop them from attacking?
You assume it's a two-way code book. In fact, it's an outward code book for the cell. Because there was never any plan to stop the attack, the cell was given a random abort code. So, you calling up everyone and trying to redirect them would fail short of being incredibly lucky.
Feel free to come up with hundreds of other ways that are perfectly legal to stop this threat.
The same reason you have continuously running backups. There are times when it's only after the fact that you realize you need to go back to fix things. To that end, recording all the time illegal will provide information that you'd otherwise not find out because you only started recording the second you had suspicion. Criminals don't start talking when you start recording and don't continuously repeat themselves just to make sure that a wiretap catches them admitting their to-be crime.
I'm not sure how I can be that much clearer. Perhaps I should just spell out what a warrant is. Or clarify that you can't wiretap a whole city legally, neither through one warrant or through enough warrants to cover every phone.
They might not have the resources to listen to that much traffic. Perhaps they'd wiretap everything and focus only on the calls they think are probably targets, to only go back and sort through everything else if their target isn't found otherwise. But sending a lawyer to some judge to try to explain things doesn't magically make it legal.
"Through the end of 2004, 18,761 warrants were granted, while just five were rejected (many sources say four)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Court
But yea, never turned down a request... And I'm sure the FISA court wouldn't mind receiving 50,000 warrant requests to cover a small city. Sure, it's unlikely the FBI would file that many warrants. It'd be much easier to wiretap a fraction of that (say, a city block) and only file a warrant for their target. Of course, that's illegal too. But then it's not like them filing warrants for everyone on the city block and getting all but one of them rejected would make their wiretapping any more legal.
So, to put it another way, there was up to 4 recorded instances of illegal wiretapping in 2004. I doubt those 4 happened to be instances where they came to the FISA court pre-wiretapping.
"no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Ie, no warrant could be legally granted to search an entire city. And a warrant couldn't be granted to search when you don't even know who the target is. Even if they *tried* to get those 50,000 or so warrants for a small city and succeeded, 49,999 of them would be illegal; there isn't a probable cause that 49,999 of those phones are linked to terrorists, only one is.
And I know this is out of order, but here's for a creative story.
No, nor was my answer like that. It was a bit flippant, though. My point was that the time metric offered might not be sufficient.
So, one can legally wiretap an entire city by obtaining a warrant by the third day? I was under the impression that these post-72-hour wiretap warrants were designed to allow wiretapping one's target instantly instead of having to wait for a warrant, not to allow wiretapping large regions just to file a few wiretaps after the fact.
If you consider it dancing around to point out that the major components of the most liberal wiretapping program avaiable under the FISA courts have both a space and a time limit from which it's hardly inconceivably that a terrorist attack might not be covered (and I tried to give two examples, though you seemed to dismiss them), then I really do consider you unimaginative. If you're wanting me to make up specific examples to demonstrate the point, then you'll have to give me some guidelines on just how "real" you want it before you consider it no longer "dancing".
Oh, and there's little evidence that a nuclear bomb would actually disrupt a hurricane significantly, though it'd almost certainly create some nasty rain when it did reach land.
What would your "1% case" look like? Remember, they can already wiretap for 72 hours before getting the warrant
The time they need to wiretap 73 hours before getting the warrant. The time that they know that someone is going to attack a specifically national monument and generally where they'll be when they get their "go ahead" call, but they don't know the exact phone to be used or who the hidden contact is. I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of other examples where the only way to stop a terrorist plot involves bending or breaking the law as the threat is imminent and the information is insufficient in the time provided to legally find the person to commit the attack. But as I said in my comment, the 1% is just a made up number. The point is that the number is non-zero, and so stating your argument based on "it's unnecessary" is a fallacy; the fact that it is incredibly small will not placate some people. If you consider just how infrequent death and destruction by terrorist attacks is, doing *nothing* would amount to less than a 1% total failure rate at stopping preventable death and destruction.
For that matter, can you even come up with a plausible reason why they'd want to?
Perhaps all those things you mention. Perhaps they truly believe they're doing something for the betterment of society and that the laws are simply too strict. It's not really relevent to know why they want to do the things they do because even if their actions are specifically to crush freedom, they won't be able to gain support unless they sugar coat it in some way (religion seems to be a favorite). And to merely challenge what they sugar coat today makes it possible for them to shift the aim, collapsing your efforts against them and making it seem they've won against the opposition; beyond that, it's hard to argue against the points a platform makes that only speak of protecting puppies from being kicked, for example. So, instead of focusing on "they've evil aims, but we can't prove it right now" which seems more conspiracy theory than anything, it'd be better to focus on the simple fact that they're destroying our freedom. Perhaps if people cared more about freedom and less about the evil boogyman of the week, we wouldn't see so many draconian laws passed.
With all due respect, it's irrelevant.
This story actually quite well demonstrates why. And I'd liken it to the same situation with the Open Source movement**. The general problem with recognizing whether or not warrantless wiretaps will aid a terror investigation is that while it's true that 99% of terrorism investigation will likely never have a need for a warrantless wiretap before they will be found out, there will be that 1%* that would require it to be found out before the attack occurs. And so unsurprisingly, if you wait long enough people will find these planned attacks and announce how the new freedom-stripping laws have proven their worth.
As a result, people will turn to the group that said "it won't help" and think that this is the major group that opposes such laws. But this just proves them wrong. So, the masses then become content with having the "opposition" being proven wrong and really starts to accept such laws. The truth is, people have to have at the front a strong desire for freedom. Trying to take this abstract idea and condense it down into something less abstract to get people behind it will ultimately fail because something like freedom is abstract precisely *because* it's not something that can be boiled down into a few trite examples. And trying to do so only worsens the perception of what freedom really is.
*Obviously, just a made up percent. The point is it's not 0.
**There will always be some open source project that is worse than some closed project, by virtue of circumstances outside of the ideals of what open source is. For this reason, one has to accept that the fundamental idea of the open source movement could be virtually eliminated with enough motivation by closed source groups. If that is truly fine with you, great. But I have a hope that many people came to the open source world more because it was open, not just because it was better than the competition. That is, it being open was what made it better, not necessarily how well it functioned at its job. And that's more the sentiment of Free software, not Open software.
Before the F/OSS nay sayers toss out the obligatory (and to be expected) "Meh. So much for the 'many eyes' theory"
Please don't group the Free Software group with the Open Software group in this instance. If anything, some of the Free software group is part of the nay sayers. I, for one, don't believe open source is a panacea. But by it being Free, it means that at least *I* can try to fix software that I use.
Can I make a guess on how this is possible? Most IDE, SATA, etc HDs are common. So, it would be as simple as stuffing the whole system into a VM, having a very simple pass-through for the HD, and causing a swap out of important system files. Now, the swap out puts important files on the HD. The new pass-through allows one to alter otherwise locked files (as well as hiding malicious files), and since the IDE/SATA/etc hardware is so common, it'd be the least effort to writing a single pass-through exploit. And the reason I can see Vista (and possible Mac OS X) is vulnerable is because, as mentioned previously, these operating systems are hybrids, so important system files (ie, read parts of the effective kernel) are swapped out to the HD. Something like Linux and BSD would be mostly immune, as their kernels are never swapped (AFAIK).
Of course, all of this basically requires root-like authority, so it's not really a security vulnerability per-say. At best, it's a means to attack something more silently. But a lower-level pass-through would almost certainly be just as effective. It seems interesting from a perspective of a "and so this is why you can't let regular users run a VM", but that point is hardly a security surprise (it's why *nix doesn't allow regular users to mount filesystems, except under a strict set of conditions; and why Windows NT (though, AFAIK not later versions, as Direct X can trap any key combination) had a CTRL-ALT-DEL login option). It'd be tons easier to just replace the shell, probably. It'd just probably not being possible to do without a logout. And this could potentially change that.
Maybe. But do you want to tip off the people you're about to arrest that they should really, really think about getting on that small boat they've got hidden on the coast right about now? If you're watching them and they vanish - then you whack up the alert level. As long as you know where they are, there's no need to warn them that you're in a van near to their house with all your cameras and listening gear.
Ah, of course. So, the alert level only goes up when (a) the government knows of a terror plot and (b) manage to fuck up capturing people. So, it's a barometer of government fuck up. No wonder it's so high in the US and UK.
People are so damn squeamish. They're YOUR fluids. ... Nobody's asking you to drink a big foamy glass of piss here.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you'd have no problem tasting your own urine to board a plane. They are, after all, YOUR fluids.
I'm sorry, but is the discussion that the delivery of products is more complex or that the use of products is more complex under Linux?
If it's the former, I'd whole heartedly agree. That's a design descision made by distros to limit the malicious and/or non-malicious damage caused by allowing every piece of software into the main distro line. People can still choose to walk outside of it, and distros surely are constantly undermanned to do the job of adding legitimate programs at an optimal rate. But, distros are focused more on providing for the users, not the distributors. After all, distros *are* distributors, and they damn well recognize they're doing the hard work of distributing.
If you're more interested in having an easy and complex life than helping your users, don't be surprised if the Linux approach seems "unfair". It's pretty unfair when developers only release for Windows or the PS2 or whatever platform. Users have learned to cope. Targetting Linux (and the *BSDs) might just mean requiring the developer to cope.
Oh, and as for your example:
>A real-world example of this is SeaMonkey. How long will it be until Debian users can install the software easily? Windows users can have the latest version as soon as we ship it. Linux users generally have to wait for their distro to provide an updated package.
That last sentence nails the answer. Debian isn't focused on being up-to-the-minute. It's focused on stability. Bitching that Debian doesn't update often enough is effectively bitching at the users for not wanting to update often enough. That's not exactly a great focus on user wants.
The problem is that Apple seems to be schizophrenic in their relationship with Windows. On one hand, they smugly deride Windows at every opportunity ("Hasta la vista" and the like). On the other hand, they release stuff like bootcamp (a tacit admission that their platform is sorely lacking in ports of games and other software).
How much money is Microsoft losing in the selling of gaming and media machines, again? What's exactly schizophrenic about only encouraging the use of Windows in those areas that Microsoft will lose money (or at least gain the least, considering their dominant market position means it unlikley they will ever gain nothing) while encouraging the use of Apple machines in those areas that Apple profits most?
I don't understand your misunderstanding.
The problem isn't so much that I misunderstood you. It was that you were asking a question in a context that already defined an act as illegal. It is this reason that I pedantically discussed what exactly a conspiracy was. And I further answered what probable intention was, to know whether I thought verbal agreements could be in themselves illegal.
The point of disagreement seems to be on *whether* certain speech should or should not be illegal, and arguing that is as productive as tossing am Israeli and Palestenian in a room and telling them not to come out until they agree on what to do with the West Bank - lots of yelling, maybe a death or two, but never anyone changing their opinion.
Agreed, as such is based on an opinion. I'm just sad that the Supreme Courts opinions have reduced those protections laid out in the first amendment by making certain speech illegal in itself.
Having said that, a little rant:
It sets the dangerous precedent of, for example, making those who make sufficiently intelligent AI (but a non-sentient/sapient variety, so no worries of the AI itself being inditable) to be charged with co-conspiracy for not putting sufficient restraint into their systems to prevent the abuse of such a system for crimes (somewhat like how video game makers are being targetted for violent/sexual video games, even before evidence that such video games even cause crime has been found; and yes, it's only minors at the moment, but if the logic holds for minors, I don't see how it wouldn't apply to adults as well as a means to low crime rates). After all, the reporter who has no intention of aiding suspects but invariably does is not far from the programmer who makes a device with similar effect--a reporter who used an audio recorder/player to provide information wouldn't be able to claim that the audio device somehow abdicates themselves from responsibility, as in the end it's the speech in the device that would be ruled illegal, not the use of the speech by the criminals; it just happens that the use helps demonstrate why it is illegal. And my silly example is a prime reason intent is such a driving force in trials today.
The reporter is allowed to report. However, the reporter can't be writing a story on whether movie theaters are unsafe and run into a movie theater and yell "fire" in order to see how well the theater exits work.
See, a much better analogy. At least you're involving speech this time.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not protected speech. If you want arguments to support that statement, I'll dig up my old lay books with the cites for the speech cases in front of the Supreme Court.
Right you are. For better or for worse, the Supreme Court has ruled that imminent danger speech and obscenity are both not forms of protected speech. Now, can you reasonable show that telling suspected terrorists they're being watched is an "imminent danger" speech? Note, imminent danger doesn't include things that may lead to a crime in the course of days or weeks in the future. "Fire" in a theater is likely to lead to harm, if not death, to people in the course of a matter of minutes. The same can be said of speech that could spark a riot. The fact that one informs a suspect they are being watched may induce them to flee from authorities, but to claim it creates an imminent danger would be quite ludicrous. So, you're closer to the mark, but you're still not drawing a straight analogy showing how the speech should be a crime, as it otherwise isn't.
The issue isn't the reporting of the event, but in causing a change in the event by interference, and whether that interference makes one a participant rather than a reporter.
Uh, why does that matter? As has been stated by others, being a reporter doesn't make you a magical being different than others. Simply *covering* the news is an act of participation (I guess if you've got a sniper camera and sniper mike, you can stalk people without that being the case, but good luck getting the information you're interested in that way). Further, reporters aren't journalists. And what you're subscribing to is a journalist creedo, not some sort of law that differentiates the "people" from the "journalists". Journalists try to cover the story as much as possible without interfering with the story because they're not interested in being the story. But, clearly reporters have repeatedly shown that they're more interested in making themselves look good than having a realistic account of what they're covering (look no further than "To Catch A Preditor" to demonstrate not only a reporter participating but also informing the suspect before the police arrest the suspect).
Someone doing nothing more than "speaking" could become an accessory to the crime after the fact by sharing information with the criminals and shielding information from the authorities, or other tampering in an ongoing investigation.
Very true, and such laws are almost always based upon intent. And to me, this is a very serious problem with the way the law works in the US today. On the one hand, shouting "fire" in a burning theater is generally okay, but if one shouts "fire" in a burning theater with the belief that the tramplings will kill more than quietly ushering people out, shouting "fire" can revert back to non-protected speech. In a similar way, a reporter who is interested in covering a subject and "reporting the breaking news" can in many cases lure people in who might already be being investigated and tip them off to their behavior being trackable (and any suggest that getting an okay from the police to do it, with them standing in the wings, would make the reporters action a police action, effectively voiding any charges on the grounds of entrapment, seriously damaging any investigation against the person, an obvious obstruction of justice). Overall, one is left to deal with the "thought crimes" one commits and the ability of the prosecutor to convince the jurors that specific thoughts occurred rather than specific actions occurred.
Criminal conspiracies are nothing more than "speech" related to crimes, yet are treated differentl