Public outcry was enough about the McKinnon case, but this guy hadn't actually done anything illegal under UK law so the noise would've only got strong regarding this.
McKinnon had only broken the law in a minor way in the UK. It was the talk of the US imprisoning him for 40 or 60 years that outraged the UK public, when his crime here would have got him a fine and a suspended sentence.
Activism is generally not considered illegal in civilized countries.
He's not an activist, he's a student who managed to make a fair whack of money (GBP 15,000 a month which he allegedly just spent on normal student things like pizza and beer) from his twist on copyright infringement.
He's just lucky that a lot of people in the UK hate the US (mainly since Iraq) and so he got a lot of public sympathy and so his supporters could bring up the whole Guantanamo Bay/disproportionately long potential prison sentence thing.
Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.
No, in the UK at least it was created to provide artists like Dickens with a way of earning money from their creations. Obviously, places like the US ignored our copyright laws, which makes the current RIAA/MAFIAA hysteria somewhat ironic, as the US economy was basically built on infringement of intellectual property laws.
It wasn't that many generations ago that our forefathers even believed that if you died home safe in bed and not in the heat of battle that you would never see the afterlife and your soul might simply vanish.
Were your forefathers Vikings? It's been a long while since anyone else believed this.
You're right, they're not people. They stopped being people when they accepted the unholy religion of Islam. Any rational human knows that those meatbags are an abomination to anything humane and logical.
I seem to remember reading about a moustached Corporal in Germany in the 1930s saying something similar about another religious group.
I have a suspicion that you have never a) actually served in a military, b) never been shot at or c) never had to clean up your friend's blood after he has been while next to you.
It amazes me how many people who have not had these experiences are willing to put in their comments (paid for in the blood of those who have). Great idea - join up for 2 years with an Army and see what the world is like instead of sitting in your comfy chair posting to slashdot.
Guess what? I've never been the Commandant of a fucking Concentration Camp but I still know they were evil.
At least you're out on a field where the other guy can shoot back, not in a cozy armchair,
Close contact with the enemy does not make one dispassionate, and less likely to commit war crimes. It is exactly the opposite. A grunt on a patrol probably hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. He is hungry, and tired. His whole body aches with fatigue and itches with bug bites. His canteens are empty and his eyes sting with sweat turned to brine. Just yesterday he saw his best friend get his foot blown off by by a "toe popper". You think he is going to make more ethical life and death decisions than a well-rested, well-fed operator in an air conditioned van in Nevada who is having his every decision recorded? The depersonalization of war is a GOOD THING. Mistakes are still made, but we do not see any intentional atrocities like we did at My Lai, or No Gun Ri.
If your soldiers are committing atrocities against civilians, you need to train and monitor your soldiers better.
I've got a P3 700MHz laptop with 256mb RAM that works fine. I have kept Win98 on it specifically to play the games that never worked properly in XP. It's much easier than messing around with emulators or whatever.
Well - at the very least - there's no excuse to complain about piracy if you're not making a legal option available.
The question is whether you believe there is such a thing as ownership of digital artifacts. Most people here don't, therefore copying without payment or permission is fine, as you are simply availing yourself of common culture. (Although for some reason it's OK to purchase songs from iTunes if they're cheap enough). But if you do believe there is, then piracy is not an acceptable option, whether something's legally available or not, i.e. if Disney want to keep their charmingly racist classic in their vaults, it's up to them.
But in the brave new copyright-free world of tomorrow, why would anyone pay ID $20 for these asset files when they could just download them for nothing off TPB?
And if ID had not received any money from games sales of Doom, how would they have financed Doom2, Quake, etc?
Everything should be free as in freedom because you should be free to repair, modify, and copy your own property as you see fit. It's about what sort of rights we will retain in the new information age.
Hold on, I thought streams of bits weren't property, which is why you caouldn't steal them?
Or is there a special sort of digital property which gives you all the rights of real property, but none of the obligations?
For this reason, many people believe that making perfect copies of other's property for private use is OK, hence the popularity of downloading hollywood movies off of bittorrent. We now have computers to make perfect copies of digital data, and also to share those copies with others. I personally think we seriously change copyright and to make it compatible with a world where copying is trivial. The genie is out of the bottle, generally purpose computers are not going away.
But by your argument, we couldn't do anything about copyright apart from abolish it entirely. If people are going to freely copy stuff anyway, any copyright will be ignored just the same. If copyright was limited to one week from the date of release, you'd still get someone who wanted it on day one and downloaded it for free.
So if you want to get rid of copyright entirely, just say so. I know a lot of people here do. I would just be interested to know how they earn their living.
Are you saying that distributing a copy of your item would somehow deprive you of the original item? Copying doesn't "take it away" - it just lets more people enjoy it.
It takes away the creator's right to charge you for the privelege of enjoying his work that he spent time and money on.
If we lived in an ideal world where lawyers, network managers, plumbers and advertising executives all gave their time for free to society and received back only a standard living allowance and the grateful praise of those they helped, fine. Unfortunately, we don't, so it is abusrd to expect artists/content creators to give you their work for nothing.
Piracy is the way the games market is introducing competition.
But you can't compete against "free" in a capitalist society. Piracy is equivalent to nicking half a factory full of widgets and giving them away. It's great for the customers but it will put the widget maker out of business, as no one's going to buy any of the other half factory full of widgets when they can get their widgets for nothing, and the widget maker has had to pay money to make them.
And yes, I know copyright infringement!=theft.
Oh, and I also know that everyone here likes to say that piracy is really just a protest against evil DRM, but the answer to that is not to buy fucking DRM products if you're that bothered. If manufacturer A releases a movie with DRM, don't buy it. Not having it isn't going to kill you.
If you want to "own" your creation then keep it a secret. The moment you reveal it to the world it is no longer yours.
If you want people to pay you for bits then you need to come up with a compelling reason. Whining doesn't solve anything, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, "your" bits will be transmitted across a global network whether you want them to be or not.
The reason is that something like an album, and especially a movie, require a lot of money to create, and unless you want the world to go back to some patron/grateful artist model, that money should come from all the people that get the benefit of it.
Personally, I'd be quite happy for the people/government to pay for all artistic as well as economic activity and share the fruits equally, but I doubt the free market right wingers here would be too pleased with that sort of communism.
Also, completely shutting down the vehicle is a very bad idea that could leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere, and could actually put someone's life at greater risk than driving under certain circumstances. It should instead put the vehicle into a low-speed "limp mode" so that the user won't be willing to drive it much farther than the nearest repair place, but where the user at least has the ability to get it to the repair place without calling a tow truck.:-)
There is a big difference between something putting someone's life at risk, and slightly inconveniencing them by making them wait for roadside assistance.
My feeling would be that if you're ever in a situation where your vehicle breaking down could put your life in genuine danger, then you should make some sort of disaster preparation plan for that eventuality anyway. Because there could always be an accident that would leave your vehicle undriveable, irrespective of any automatic computer shut down (e.g. suddenly hitting an unseen pothole and breaking an axle).
lots of cars will give you an error light if a light is out...
Unless, of course, it's the error light that's out.
Yes, but if the chances of all your brake fluid suddenly falling out through a leak are (say) 1/10,000 and the chances of your brake fluid warning light failing are (say)1/1,000, then the chances of them both failing at the same time are 1/10,000,000. Made up numbers, but I think the point is valid.
And I'm sad to say there are probably corporate tricks that can be played as well, where limited liability entities are used to compartmentalize. e.g. "FF201802, Inc" ends up taking the risks for all the Ford Focuses made in the second quarter of 2018 or something like that, and has few assets to lose.
Yes, that's why BP set up "Deepwater Horizon, Inc" and ended up paying no fines. Oh, wait...
criminal liability issues as well. What about a death due to a car thinking that a kid in the road is just road kill or something like a paper bag that is on safe to drive over list.
Unless you're driving a tank, you wouldn't have something kid-sized on your "safe to drive over list".
If your driverless car is incapable of distinguishing between a paper bag and a small human being, that is a fault in the system that could easily be fixed by sensible testing, not an unlucky accident waiting to happen.
With all these sorts of objections, though, the fundamental point is that there are probably many times more human drivers who kill kids because they're too slow to react, are distracted by the radio, can't see perfectly because they're old and it's late at night, or whatever, than there ever would be with properly set up driverless cars.
The fact that computer-controlled cars can't prevent all accidents/deaths is not a good reason to use them and prevent the vast majority of them. There will always be kids who run out into the road from behind parked cars, and I would bet that that the driverless car would react more quickly and effectively than any human driver.
Slashdot Mirror
Public outcry was enough about the McKinnon case, but this guy hadn't actually done anything illegal under UK law so the noise would've only got strong regarding this.
McKinnon had only broken the law in a minor way in the UK. It was the talk of the US imprisoning him for 40 or 60 years that outraged the UK public, when his crime here would have got him a fine and a suspended sentence.
Activism is generally not considered illegal in civilized countries.
He's not an activist, he's a student who managed to make a fair whack of money (GBP 15,000 a month which he allegedly just spent on normal student things like pizza and beer) from his twist on copyright infringement.
He's just lucky that a lot of people in the UK hate the US (mainly since Iraq) and so he got a lot of public sympathy and so his supporters could bring up the whole Guantanamo Bay/disproportionately long potential prison sentence thing.
Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.
No, in the UK at least it was created to provide artists like Dickens with a way of earning money from their creations. Obviously, places like the US ignored our copyright laws, which makes the current RIAA/MAFIAA hysteria somewhat ironic, as the US economy was basically built on infringement of intellectual property laws.
You forgot to read the slashdot memo. He's a fucking freedom fighter like Kim Dotcunt.
I think there should be a short-term "-1 for mentioning the fucking fiscal cliff" moderation option.
It wasn't that many generations ago that our forefathers even believed that if you died home safe in bed and not in the heat of battle that you would never see the afterlife and your soul might simply vanish.
Were your forefathers Vikings? It's been a long while since anyone else believed this.
You're right, they're not people. They stopped being people when they accepted the unholy religion of Islam. Any rational human knows that those meatbags are an abomination to anything humane and logical.
I seem to remember reading about a moustached Corporal in Germany in the 1930s saying something similar about another religious group.
I have a suspicion that you have never a) actually served in a military, b) never been shot at or c) never had to clean up your friend's blood after he has been while next to you.
It amazes me how many people who have not had these experiences are willing to put in their comments (paid for in the blood of those who have). Great idea - join up for 2 years with an Army and see what the world is like instead of sitting in your comfy chair posting to slashdot.
Guess what? I've never been the Commandant of a fucking Concentration Camp but I still know they were evil.
At least you're out on a field where the other guy can shoot back, not in a cozy armchair,
Close contact with the enemy does not make one dispassionate, and less likely to commit war crimes. It is exactly the opposite. A grunt on a patrol probably hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. He is hungry, and tired. His whole body aches with fatigue and itches with bug bites. His canteens are empty and his eyes sting with sweat turned to brine. Just yesterday he saw his best friend get his foot blown off by by a "toe popper". You think he is going to make more ethical life and death decisions than a well-rested, well-fed operator in an air conditioned van in Nevada who is having his every decision recorded? The depersonalization of war is a GOOD THING. Mistakes are still made, but we do not see any intentional atrocities like we did at My Lai, or No Gun Ri.
If your soldiers are committing atrocities against civilians, you need to train and monitor your soldiers better.
Me too!
Canal Barge beats Train 5 to1 on energy.
They have a slight speed disadvantage though.
I've got a P3 700MHz laptop with 256mb RAM that works fine. I have kept Win98 on it specifically to play the games that never worked properly in XP. It's much easier than messing around with emulators or whatever.
Well - at the very least - there's no excuse to complain about piracy if you're not making a legal option available.
The question is whether you believe there is such a thing as ownership of digital artifacts. Most people here don't, therefore copying without payment or permission is fine, as you are simply availing yourself of common culture. (Although for some reason it's OK to purchase songs from iTunes if they're cheap enough). But if you do believe there is, then piracy is not an acceptable option, whether something's legally available or not, i.e. if Disney want to keep their charmingly racist classic in their vaults, it's up to them.
And if ID had not received any money from games sales of Doom, how would they have financed Doom2, Quake, etc?
Everything should be free as in freedom because you should be free to repair, modify, and copy your own property as you see fit. It's about what sort of rights we will retain in the new information age.
Hold on, I thought streams of bits weren't property, which is why you caouldn't steal them?
Or is there a special sort of digital property which gives you all the rights of real property, but none of the obligations?
For this reason, many people believe that making perfect copies of other's property for private use is OK, hence the popularity of downloading hollywood movies off of bittorrent. We now have computers to make perfect copies of digital data, and also to share those copies with others. I personally think we seriously change copyright and to make it compatible with a world where copying is trivial. The genie is out of the bottle, generally purpose computers are not going away.
But by your argument, we couldn't do anything about copyright apart from abolish it entirely. If people are going to freely copy stuff anyway, any copyright will be ignored just the same. If copyright was limited to one week from the date of release, you'd still get someone who wanted it on day one and downloaded it for free.
So if you want to get rid of copyright entirely, just say so. I know a lot of people here do. I would just be interested to know how they earn their living.
Are you saying that distributing a copy of your item would somehow deprive you of the original item? Copying doesn't "take it away" - it just lets more people enjoy it.
It takes away the creator's right to charge you for the privelege of enjoying his work that he spent time and money on.
If we lived in an ideal world where lawyers, network managers, plumbers and advertising executives all gave their time for free to society and received back only a standard living allowance and the grateful praise of those they helped, fine. Unfortunately, we don't, so it is abusrd to expect artists/content creators to give you their work for nothing.
Sorry, but thieves steal things.
Copying is not, nor can it ever be, stealing.
Gosh, that's something no one here ever thought of before. End of thread right now.
Piracy is the way the games market is introducing competition.
But you can't compete against "free" in a capitalist society. Piracy is equivalent to nicking half a factory full of widgets and giving them away. It's great for the customers but it will put the widget maker out of business, as no one's going to buy any of the other half factory full of widgets when they can get their widgets for nothing, and the widget maker has had to pay money to make them.
And yes, I know copyright infringement!=theft.
Oh, and I also know that everyone here likes to say that piracy is really just a protest against evil DRM, but the answer to that is not to buy fucking DRM products if you're that bothered. If manufacturer A releases a movie with DRM, don't buy it. Not having it isn't going to kill you.
If you want to "own" your creation then keep it a secret. The moment you reveal it to the world it is no longer yours.
If you want people to pay you for bits then you need to come up with a compelling reason. Whining doesn't solve anything, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, "your" bits will be transmitted across a global network whether you want them to be or not.
The reason is that something like an album, and especially a movie, require a lot of money to create, and unless you want the world to go back to some patron/grateful artist model, that money should come from all the people that get the benefit of it.
Personally, I'd be quite happy for the people/government to pay for all artistic as well as economic activity and share the fruits equally, but I doubt the free market right wingers here would be too pleased with that sort of communism.
Also, completely shutting down the vehicle is a very bad idea that could leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere, and could actually put someone's life at greater risk than driving under certain circumstances. It should instead put the vehicle into a low-speed "limp mode" so that the user won't be willing to drive it much farther than the nearest repair place, but where the user at least has the ability to get it to the repair place without calling a tow truck. :-)
There is a big difference between something putting someone's life at risk, and slightly inconveniencing them by making them wait for roadside assistance.
My feeling would be that if you're ever in a situation where your vehicle breaking down could put your life in genuine danger, then you should make some sort of disaster preparation plan for that eventuality anyway. Because there could always be an accident that would leave your vehicle undriveable, irrespective of any automatic computer shut down (e.g. suddenly hitting an unseen pothole and breaking an axle).
lots of cars will give you an error light if a light is out...
Unless, of course, it's the error light that's out.
Yes, but if the chances of all your brake fluid suddenly falling out through a leak are (say) 1/10,000 and the chances of your brake fluid warning light failing are (say)1/1,000, then the chances of them both failing at the same time are 1/10,000,000. Made up numbers, but I think the point is valid.
And I'm sad to say there are probably corporate tricks that can be played as well, where limited liability entities are used to compartmentalize. e.g. "FF201802, Inc" ends up taking the risks for all the Ford Focuses made in the second quarter of 2018 or something like that, and has few assets to lose.
Yes, that's why BP set up "Deepwater Horizon, Inc" and ended up paying no fines. Oh, wait...
criminal liability issues as well. What about a death due to a car thinking that a kid in the road is just road kill or something like a paper bag that is on safe to drive over list.
Unless you're driving a tank, you wouldn't have something kid-sized on your "safe to drive over list".
If your driverless car is incapable of distinguishing between a paper bag and a small human being, that is a fault in the system that could easily be fixed by sensible testing, not an unlucky accident waiting to happen.
With all these sorts of objections, though, the fundamental point is that there are probably many times more human drivers who kill kids because they're too slow to react, are distracted by the radio, can't see perfectly because they're old and it's late at night, or whatever, than there ever would be with properly set up driverless cars.
The fact that computer-controlled cars can't prevent all accidents/deaths is not a good reason to use them and prevent the vast majority of them. There will always be kids who run out into the road from behind parked cars, and I would bet that that the driverless car would react more quickly and effectively than any human driver.
Re you sig, it's "fruit flies". It's sort of the point of the witticism that the same word means two different things for both "flies" and "like".