No, no, no. He's right. It is not a right, it's a privlege. As I've said before, there are only 2 strictly moral stances on copyright. Either you get to "own" everything you "create", or you don't because that infringes on other people's right to generally do whatever they want. In other words, either you argue for eternal copyrights or you argue for its abolition. Any solution in-between is not trying to solve an ethical problem but a practical one.
For the last centuries the stance of the government is in fact, that copyrights are indeed wrong. Then on top of that it reintroduces the concept to solve the problem of financing arts and engineering.
To me it is more of a process thing. If you believe that, let's say, aliens built the pyramids, i could be due to some misinformation. Adequate explanation s should suffice to convince you otherwise. If they fail, they show a verifiable inability to reason properly and could/should be basis for expelling you from a scientifically rigorous job. It is not your fault having false beliefs, it is your fault to have faulty reasoning.
He means interactively, he is talking about immediate feedback and interactive design. Leaving aside that these things are know and already worked on, why could he title his conference after what he is actually talking? Why did he had to make it appear as if he's breaking some philosophical ground and why did he had to inkoe great creators from the past? Oh yes he's an Apple guy, the company that used 1984 imagery to insult IBM, the company that used the ghost of communism to sell themselves, the company that abused images of Ghandi to sell you questionably priced equipment.
The conclusion from this story is that the government could be forcing captured members of anonymous into their own evil (yes I said evil, I can't believe it either) plans.
Here we have an activist group exposing the extramarital relation of government and big banks and surveillance business and the police's only reaction is to go after those who exposed the problem, and now we have forced labor under treat against public interests, how is that not evil?
Ineed, I started playing Tribes: Ascend this Tuesday and something that is really bothering me is the XP system where you can buy upgrades and weapons for either dollars or "XP" at my current level I make about 150 XP per game, or 1000 XP if the teams are stacked and I manage to capture the flag. Most upgrades are in the tens of thousands with entire classes locked by hundreads of thousands XP. At this rate I'm never going to be on a level play with people of my skill level because I'm not only playing against skill but time/money.
This means that someone who pays already has better equipment than I've gotten in these past two days and that someone who has been playing a lot is twice as far ahead of me than say, someone who plays more TF2 than me, against whom I still have a teoretical and often quite practical chance to win.
We have talked about enough "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" so let me comment on "You're one in a million, nobody cares about your insignificant neck-beard life"
Firstly, it contains the tacit admission from the speaker that nobody cares about his/her own life either. What is really bothersome is that this isn't just a recognition of one's insignificance, but a commitment to it. The speakers not only admits that he isn't standing up for anything or doing anything important with his/her life, but that he/she never will at any point against the authorities, against powerful or influential people in any way. And they want you to make the same commitment.
Yep he's destroying the hard work of Stratford milking our government for money for allegedly lousy evidence, if you believe the spin that Stratford is harmless, or acting like a CIA front for domestic surveillance, if you don't.
My 2cents, my political stance, while leaning on increased regulation, is about regulation of financial institutions and protection of environment. For citizens, government should be as local as possible, with local courts being able to overrule federal decisions and such.
Unfortunately, a situation like this one has little to do with the "size" of government. Something like this could happen in a small county with a small police department and a hopelessly small Social Services staff. The solution of this problem can only take the form of an incentive for the police to be less proactive.
Two non mutually exclusive solutions are, make it so that policemen arresting innocent people get punished meaning that policemen will have an incentive to be relaxed. Or, make it less rewarding to just arrest anybody for any reason. If anything. I'd go with the first one, I want my police to be very incentiviced to catch criminals but not trigger happy about it.
Either way, the solution would be MORE regulation (to ensure policemen aren't trigger happy) not less. At least in the general case. Of course it would help if possession of CP wasn't a crime, which may be what you are suggesting. Should possession of CP be a crime or and indication that you are a dangerous person? Well I've always said that if possession and free distribution of CP is purported to be helpful to CP producers then distribution of Big5 music and movies should not be a crime. On the other hand, let's say it was decriminalized and you found out that your neighbor has a huge stash of --completely legal to own-- CP, would you trust your children with him? Would you trust him with *his* children?
Honestly something has to be done about it, although I can see the argument that being a pedophile and being harmful are not the same way. I think Social Services should have talked with his daughter to find out if he was making her uncomfortable in anyway. In any case, I don't think anarchy is the solution here.
Oh wait, researchers have freedom of speech. Come to think of it, so do marketing firms.
Should != Must. It's their opinion. And I'm sure you are against anything good the Government could do to help but I propose for the government to make their own model magazine. Should be free of course and feature only average woman. Call it "Girl Next Door".
So I know that if go on a round trip to Alpha Centauri near the speed of light while my twin brother stays on Earth and nails my wife, when we meet again I'll be at least 10 years younger than him and would probably have ditched her anyway. But what happens if I go on a FTL ship? Will I'll be MUCH MORE younger than him? Be the same age? Be younger than him and probably greet my self on the way out?
How about if I spend a year at the 'Tauri on a (artificial?) planet (that's no moon/whatever) of the same gravitational force than Earth at an orbit equivalent with the gravitational pull of our Sun?
I would like to think that engineers support a balanced approach to things (e.g. Stewart's I Disagree With You But I'm Pretty Sure You're Not a Nazi philosophy)
At the risk of repeating myself. Engineers support a technical or analytical aproach to things, "Balance" means nothing "Effective" means everything.
("Real" is another core principle. It could be argued that engineers only care about Reality because it's the best tool we have. Engineering could be described as a process of "reality finding" in other words, eliminating all solutions that aren't possible or good enough.
Of course engineers are humans and therefore fundamentally irrational and it's possible that some of us care about reality more than effectiveness, I think I do. But I disgress...)
My point is, when engineers think of someone as "Nazi" is not over simple disagreement but because they actually see arguments to classify them so. And if having a weaker government does actually benefit society and benefiting society is one of your goals, there's nothing about it that makes it bad engineering there.
Basically you are dissmissing most of slashdot as "leftist" which implies that their opinion is not theirs but one consummed from ahother entity, namely "The Left". My only point is that the tendency of slashdoters to lean left is not just your opinion, it is a fact, but it has nothign to do with indoctrination and everything to do with engineering mindset, that of thinking in terms of systems and problem solving.
In conclusion the reason so many Slashdotters (but not as many as you think) are pro-wikileaks is because we think they are a net gain to society. Has nothing to do with balance.
If you'd paid more attention you'll see that slashdot celebrates everytime the a corporation does something cool and whenever the government makes a positive move.
I don't know if this is trolling, sarcasm but there is a grain of truth in this.
Slashdot is populated predominantly by engineer types. Engineers believe in processes and systems, engineers believe in the objective world and the scientific method.
So engineers have a tendency to support a political stance based around solving problems by engineered solutions, in other words, government programs. Tell an engineer that the government is broken and he'll try to fix it. Tell him that it is corrupt and he'll device decision making processes around human flaws.
What are the alternative political postures? Conservatism and Libertarianism. For an engineer Conservatism is a joke, it is based around tradition and authority. Authority is not objective and definitively not scientific. Science is based on independent verification but authority means that the authority is right, not because of evidence or proofs but because it says so. Tradition is simply putting authority on past decisions.
Fortunately only the most retarded conservatives would entrust this massive amount of faith to any single person. Unfortunately they have "God" an infallible (and unaccountable) authority figure who is then adopted by conservative leaders. Surprisingly they turn out to be quite balanced in their position about government power! If asked whether conservatives like the government or not, the answer is "both". They are against and in favor of government depending on who's in power, so they loved government when Bush was in in the White House and hate it now that Obama is. Sounds flip-floppy but is actually quite consistent.
So we are left with Libertarianism. Libertarianism is internally inconsistent. It is based on the doctrine that nothing good could ever come out of Government, except enforcing of private property. The core assumption is unquestionable. They'll won't concede any example of positive government intervention. Any attempt to patching it or fixing it will be derided as "yet another government agency" and declared part of the problem.
At this point it should be obvious why an engineer would have trouble with Libertarians, but they also adamantly support government enforcing of private property. Why is this acceptable? Why is this part of the government capable of helping? And why is the evils of corruption tolerable here?
Well, they just are.
It gets worse when you realize that their definition of private property and self determination are quite weird. They for instance have no concept of common land. They see absolutely nothing wrong with rich people monopolizing obscene amounts of resources. At the same time they see nothing wrong with creating areas of property where there was none. I'm talking about copyrights and patents. Things that nobody would conceive of "owning" are, for the Libertarians, not only appropriable, but MOST be so, the mere idea of anything being free is highly offensive to them, therefore their motto, "there's no such thing like a free lunch".
Let's be honest. Libertarians are kind of a modern oddity. A civilization cannot grow in Libertarianism. Who owns the land? Who owns the mountains? Who owns the grass? Who owns wildlife? Who owns the earth bellow your house? Who owns the water underground? the rivers across it? The rain above it? Who owns the roads? Who owns the electromagnetic spectrum? Any growing civilization would have bumped into these questions and discover that we, for the most part, have only one world that we must share. Libertarians are simple people born into a world too big for them to understand and think that simple rules would work just fine.
That's why few engineers adopt libertarianism. Except of course those who are so fed up with political corruption and idiotic electorate that have adopted Libertarianism out of despair. But honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if they just wanted to see the world burn.
It is not romanticism fucking dumbass. These kids did what had to be done. It's a bloddy tragedy that after unerthing evidence of massive fraud and corruption the reaction of the police is to persecute the whistleblowers. As much as you call then thugs and criminals what they did was heroic.
You committed a crime, not a civil infraction, A CRIME, you should not be able to get away with an apology, other criminals can't. But thanks to our corrupt laws you will. Motherfucker.
Hasn't worked well so far. For starters, the analog loop hasn't been closed completely, and it will ONLY work once it has. Secondly, as long as stuff has to run on Windows, (and I'd say, any well known OS) it will be possible to intercept the video feed by software, even if it involves some sort of jail breaking --which, you can assume it's already done-- because people who upload movies also download cracked versions of Windows. And I don't belive the key would be so impossible to break, in the extreme case they could use a distributed computing network using 4chan users, but that's already more effort than it took to break the DVD key and the Playstation 3 key, and once it is broken it will be in slashdot signatures agan.
Your entire argument rests on the assumption that the government would have 1984 level of control on the Internet --which I don't dispute-- but at that point you don't need DRM.
I've said this before but it baffles me that the studios are so obsessed with forcing DRM on paying customers.
The kind of people that upload Hollywood movies is already capable and willing of breaking any DRM you can dream of since it is mathematically impossible to create unbreakable DRM. The kind of people who want to pay for content are exactly the kind that avoids downloading illegal copies, much less uploading. It creates enormous amounts of discomfort for paying customers in exchange of minimal discomfort for infringers.
Let me get this straight. A search engine that claims to not track you. (actually it was awarded the first European Privacy Seal by the EU so it's their claim) is actually LESS private that a search engine that stores your queries long term and crossreferences them with your email and social networks to built a comprehensive permanent profile?
Stop making this about you. What about less technically inclide people? And how do you know you are not using Google? Google knows you home SSID, and correlates it to your iPhone's MAC address. And unless you use pretty agressive blockers they have a pretty good list of all websites yhou have visited, even if you never visit youtube/gmail/google.com
There's nothing preventing the Google AND the goverment from fucking you over, except the fact that you have never done anything important ever.
The argument of their actual danger has ben explained to you already but I'll try again. The problems are availability, plausible deniability and finally, "red flaging" (I don't know the proper term, my apologies).
It's the same argument for total encryption, if you encrypt only sensitive information you are making it very easy for an attacker to know what to look for. If the only encrypted files in your laptop are your credit card numbers and password stores, Again if the only email you encrypt is the most highly sensitive ones, and industrial spy who gains access to your email knows exactly where to look for trade secrets.
This means that if you ever have a good reason to print something you don't want traced back to you, you'll have to get access to an special printer. Cracking down on religious or political dissidents, whistleblowers and "unconfortable" citizens becomes a matter of tracking down who has access to these special printers. That's the red flag.
Sooner than later just having such a printer becomes proof of any crime, such as encrypting your harddrive and refusing to hand over the key is considered evidence of the crime by some authorities. If you want to have access to these printers when you need them you need to use them when you don't need them. That's your plausible deniability.
And if they simply become ilegal, there is no availability.
Let's drop the topic of revolutions and use a theme closer to home, whisthleblowing. So you are a lowly clerk in an oil company and happend uppon records proving corruption involving high profile politicians. So you take the files in a USB, print them at home and send them anonymously to an activist group.
If your mail get's intercepted, you are fucked. If your employer's lawyers get them, you are fucked. If the police happens to "lose" them. You are fucked. Because thanks to cooperation between corporations and the state it's easy to trace you. The yellow dots link your copy to your printer, to the store and to your credit card number. And for all we know there is already a database out there that just links yellow dots to names and it only takes a few calls to know who leaked the incriminating data.
And once they know you may as well move yourself to perpetual-unemployment-ville.
Market innovation, Megaupload wasn't busted because of piracy, they were busted because they wanted to go legit by offering artists a distribution platform with 90% profit *for the artists*. Some sources:
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no. He's right. It is not a right, it's a privlege. As I've said before, there are only 2 strictly moral stances on copyright. Either you get to "own" everything you "create", or you don't because that infringes on other people's right to generally do whatever they want. In other words, either you argue for eternal copyrights or you argue for its abolition. Any solution in-between is not trying to solve an ethical problem but a practical one.
For the last centuries the stance of the government is in fact, that copyrights are indeed wrong. Then on top of that it reintroduces the concept to solve the problem of financing arts and engineering.
To me it is more of a process thing. If you believe that, let's say, aliens built the pyramids, i could be due to some misinformation. Adequate explanation s should suffice to convince you otherwise. If they fail, they show a verifiable inability to reason properly and could/should be basis for expelling you from a scientifically rigorous job. It is not your fault having false beliefs, it is your fault to have faulty reasoning.
He means interactively, he is talking about immediate feedback and interactive design. Leaving aside that these things are know and already worked on, why could he title his conference after what he is actually talking? Why did he had to make it appear as if he's breaking some philosophical ground and why did he had to inkoe great creators from the past? Oh yes he's an Apple guy, the company that used 1984 imagery to insult IBM, the company that used the ghost of communism to sell themselves, the company that abused images of Ghandi to sell you questionably priced equipment.
The conclusion from this story is that the government could be forcing captured members of anonymous into their own evil (yes I said evil, I can't believe it either) plans.
Here we have an activist group exposing the extramarital relation of government and big banks and surveillance business and the police's only reaction is to go after those who exposed the problem, and now we have forced labor under treat against public interests, how is that not evil?
Ineed, I started playing Tribes: Ascend this Tuesday and something that is really bothering me is the XP system where you can buy upgrades and weapons for either dollars or "XP" at my current level I make about 150 XP per game, or 1000 XP if the teams are stacked and I manage to capture the flag. Most upgrades are in the tens of thousands with entire classes locked by hundreads of thousands XP. At this rate I'm never going to be on a level play with people of my skill level because I'm not only playing against skill but time/money.
This means that someone who pays already has better equipment than I've gotten in these past two days and that someone who has been playing a lot is twice as far ahead of me than say, someone who plays more TF2 than me, against whom I still have a teoretical and often quite practical chance to win.
We have talked about enough "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" so let me comment on "You're one in a million, nobody cares about your insignificant neck-beard life"
Firstly, it contains the tacit admission from the speaker that nobody cares about his/her own life either. What is really bothersome is that this isn't just a recognition of one's insignificance, but a commitment to it. The speakers not only admits that he isn't standing up for anything or doing anything important with his/her life, but that he/she never will at any point against the authorities, against powerful or influential people in any way. And they want you to make the same commitment.
- "Please, log in to your facebook profile here."
- "Please, log in to your facebook profile with your distress password here."
Yep he's destroying the hard work of Stratford milking our government for money for allegedly lousy evidence, if you believe the spin that Stratford is harmless, or acting like a CIA front for domestic surveillance, if you don't.
My 2cents, my political stance, while leaning on increased regulation, is about regulation of financial institutions and protection of environment. For citizens, government should be as local as possible, with local courts being able to overrule federal decisions and such.
Unfortunately, a situation like this one has little to do with the "size" of government. Something like this could happen in a small county with a small police department and a hopelessly small Social Services staff. The solution of this problem can only take the form of an incentive for the police to be less proactive.
Two non mutually exclusive solutions are, make it so that policemen arresting innocent people get punished meaning that policemen will have an incentive to be relaxed. Or, make it less rewarding to just arrest anybody for any reason. If anything. I'd go with the first one, I want my police to be very incentiviced to catch criminals but not trigger happy about it.
Either way, the solution would be MORE regulation (to ensure policemen aren't trigger happy) not less. At least in the general case. Of course it would help if possession of CP wasn't a crime, which may be what you are suggesting. Should possession of CP be a crime or and indication that you are a dangerous person? Well I've always said that if possession and free distribution of CP is purported to be helpful to CP producers then distribution of Big5 music and movies should not be a crime. On the other hand, let's say it was decriminalized and you found out that your neighbor has a huge stash of --completely legal to own-- CP, would you trust your children with him? Would you trust him with *his* children?
Honestly something has to be done about it, although I can see the argument that being a pedophile and being harmful are not the same way. I think Social Services should have talked with his daughter to find out if he was making her uncomfortable in anyway. In any case, I don't think anarchy is the solution here.
Your country is evil.
Why are you assuming that illegal downloads is all use there is for it? If this simply makes whistle blowers and protesters safer I'm all for it.
Oh wait, researchers have freedom of speech. Come to think of it, so do marketing firms.
Should != Must. It's their opinion. And I'm sure you are against anything good the Government could do to help but I propose for the government to make their own model magazine. Should be free of course and feature only average woman. Call it "Girl Next Door".
So I know that if go on a round trip to Alpha Centauri near the speed of light while my twin brother stays on Earth and nails my wife, when we meet again I'll be at least 10 years younger than him and would probably have ditched her anyway. But what happens if I go on a FTL ship? Will I'll be MUCH MORE younger than him? Be the same age? Be younger than him and probably greet my self on the way out?
How about if I spend a year at the 'Tauri on a (artificial?) planet (that's no moon/whatever) of the same gravitational force than Earth at an orbit equivalent with the gravitational pull of our Sun?
At the risk of repeating myself. Engineers support a technical or analytical aproach to things, "Balance" means nothing "Effective" means everything.
("Real" is another core principle. It could be argued that engineers only care about Reality because it's the best tool we have. Engineering could be described as a process of "reality finding" in other words, eliminating all solutions that aren't possible or good enough.
Of course engineers are humans and therefore fundamentally irrational and it's possible that some of us care about reality more than effectiveness, I think I do. But I disgress...)
My point is, when engineers think of someone as "Nazi" is not over simple disagreement but because they actually see arguments to classify them so. And if having a weaker government does actually benefit society and benefiting society is one of your goals, there's nothing about it that makes it bad engineering there.
Basically you are dissmissing most of slashdot as "leftist" which implies that their opinion is not theirs but one consummed from ahother entity, namely "The Left". My only point is that the tendency of slashdoters to lean left is not just your opinion, it is a fact, but it has nothign to do with indoctrination and everything to do with engineering mindset, that of thinking in terms of systems and problem solving.
In conclusion the reason so many Slashdotters (but not as many as you think) are pro-wikileaks is because we think they are a net gain to society. Has nothing to do with balance.
If you'd paid more attention you'll see that slashdot celebrates everytime the a corporation does something cool and whenever the government makes a positive move.
I don't know if this is trolling, sarcasm but there is a grain of truth in this.
Slashdot is populated predominantly by engineer types. Engineers believe in processes and systems, engineers believe in the objective world and the scientific method.
So engineers have a tendency to support a political stance based around solving problems by engineered solutions, in other words, government programs. Tell an engineer that the government is broken and he'll try to fix it. Tell him that it is corrupt and he'll device decision making processes around human flaws.
What are the alternative political postures? Conservatism and Libertarianism. For an engineer Conservatism is a joke, it is based around tradition and authority. Authority is not objective and definitively not scientific. Science is based on independent verification but authority means that the authority is right, not because of evidence or proofs but because it says so. Tradition is simply putting authority on past decisions.
Fortunately only the most retarded conservatives would entrust this massive amount of faith to any single person. Unfortunately they have "God" an infallible (and unaccountable) authority figure who is then adopted by conservative leaders. Surprisingly they turn out to be quite balanced in their position about government power! If asked whether conservatives like the government or not, the answer is "both". They are against and in favor of government depending on who's in power, so they loved government when Bush was in in the White House and hate it now that Obama is. Sounds flip-floppy but is actually quite consistent.
So we are left with Libertarianism. Libertarianism is internally inconsistent. It is based on the doctrine that nothing good could ever come out of Government, except enforcing of private property. The core assumption is unquestionable. They'll won't concede any example of positive government intervention. Any attempt to patching it or fixing it will be derided as "yet another government agency" and declared part of the problem.
At this point it should be obvious why an engineer would have trouble with Libertarians, but they also adamantly support government enforcing of private property. Why is this acceptable? Why is this part of the government capable of helping? And why is the evils of corruption tolerable here?
Well, they just are.
It gets worse when you realize that their definition of private property and self determination are quite weird. They for instance have no concept of common land. They see absolutely nothing wrong with rich people monopolizing obscene amounts of resources. At the same time they see nothing wrong with creating areas of property where there was none. I'm talking about copyrights and patents. Things that nobody would conceive of "owning" are, for the Libertarians, not only appropriable, but MOST be so, the mere idea of anything being free is highly offensive to them, therefore their motto, "there's no such thing like a free lunch".
Let's be honest. Libertarians are kind of a modern oddity. A civilization cannot grow in Libertarianism. Who owns the land? Who owns the mountains? Who owns the grass? Who owns wildlife? Who owns the earth bellow your house? Who owns the water underground? the rivers across it? The rain above it? Who owns the roads? Who owns the electromagnetic spectrum? Any growing civilization would have bumped into these questions and discover that we, for the most part, have only one world that we must share. Libertarians are simple people born into a world too big for them to understand and think that simple rules would work just fine.
That's why few engineers adopt libertarianism. Except of course those who are so fed up with political corruption and idiotic electorate that have adopted Libertarianism out of despair. But honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if they just wanted to see the world burn.
It is not romanticism fucking dumbass. These kids did what had to be done. It's a bloddy tragedy that after unerthing evidence of massive fraud and corruption the reaction of the police is to persecute the whistleblowers. As much as you call then thugs and criminals what they did was heroic.
I'd vote for you if that helps you...
You committed a crime, not a civil infraction, A CRIME, you should not be able to get away with an apology, other criminals can't. But thanks to our corrupt laws you will. Motherfucker.
Hasn't worked well so far. For starters, the analog loop hasn't been closed completely, and it will ONLY work once it has. Secondly, as long as stuff has to run on Windows, (and I'd say, any well known OS) it will be possible to intercept the video feed by software, even if it involves some sort of jail breaking --which, you can assume it's already done-- because people who upload movies also download cracked versions of Windows. And I don't belive the key would be so impossible to break, in the extreme case they could use a distributed computing network using 4chan users, but that's already more effort than it took to break the DVD key and the Playstation 3 key, and once it is broken it will be in slashdot signatures agan.
Your entire argument rests on the assumption that the government would have 1984 level of control on the Internet --which I don't dispute-- but at that point you don't need DRM.
I've said this before but it baffles me that the studios are so obsessed with forcing DRM on paying customers.
The kind of people that upload Hollywood movies is already capable and willing of breaking any DRM you can dream of since it is mathematically impossible to create unbreakable DRM. The kind of people who want to pay for content are exactly the kind that avoids downloading illegal copies, much less uploading. It creates enormous amounts of discomfort for paying customers in exchange of minimal discomfort for infringers.
Let me get this straight. A search engine that claims to not track you. (actually it was awarded the first European Privacy Seal by the EU so it's their claim) is actually LESS private that a search engine that stores your queries long term and crossreferences them with your email and social networks to built a comprehensive permanent profile?
Stop making this about you. What about less technically inclide people? And how do you know you are not using Google? Google knows you home SSID, and correlates it to your iPhone's MAC address. And unless you use pretty agressive blockers they have a pretty good list of all websites yhou have visited, even if you never visit youtube/gmail/google.com
There's nothing preventing the Google AND the goverment from fucking you over, except the fact that you have never done anything important ever.
The argument of their actual danger has ben explained to you already but I'll try again. The problems are availability, plausible deniability and finally, "red flaging" (I don't know the proper term, my apologies).
It's the same argument for total encryption, if you encrypt only sensitive information you are making it very easy for an attacker to know what to look for. If the only encrypted files in your laptop are your credit card numbers and password stores, Again if the only email you encrypt is the most highly sensitive ones, and industrial spy who gains access to your email knows exactly where to look for trade secrets.
This means that if you ever have a good reason to print something you don't want traced back to you, you'll have to get access to an special printer. Cracking down on religious or political dissidents, whistleblowers and "unconfortable" citizens becomes a matter of tracking down who has access to these special printers. That's the red flag.
Sooner than later just having such a printer becomes proof of any crime, such as encrypting your harddrive and refusing to hand over the key is considered evidence of the crime by some authorities. If you want to have access to these printers when you need them you need to use them when you don't need them. That's your plausible deniability.
And if they simply become ilegal, there is no availability.
Let's drop the topic of revolutions and use a theme closer to home, whisthleblowing. So you are a lowly clerk in an oil company and happend uppon records proving corruption involving high profile politicians. So you take the files in a USB, print them at home and send them anonymously to an activist group.
If your mail get's intercepted, you are fucked. If your employer's lawyers get them, you are fucked. If the police happens to "lose" them. You are fucked. Because thanks to cooperation between corporations and the state it's easy to trace you. The yellow dots link your copy to your printer, to the store and to your credit card number. And for all we know there is already a database out there that just links yellow dots to names and it only takes a few calls to know who leaked the incriminating data.
And once they know you may as well move yourself to perpetual-unemployment-ville.
Market innovation, Megaupload wasn't busted because of piracy, they were busted because they wanted to go legit by offering artists a distribution platform with 90% profit *for the artists*. Some sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/was-megaupload-targeted-because-of-its-upcoming-megabox-digital-jukebox-service/
http://cgarmstrong.me/post/16405025252/megaupload
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120123busta
http://www.deltaworld.org/technology/Megaupload-had-planned-to-pay-artists-to-create-a-new-online-music-service/
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=megaupload+artists+90%25&t=lm
uhm... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg ?