However, I'm not so sure about your take on the 1st Amendment. It is for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. It is just that there cannot be a national religion that is forced upon the populace. At least that's what the framers we going for I believe.
Saying "freedom of religion" does not allow one not to have a religion is the same as saying "freedom of speech" does not allow one to remain shut up.
One of the replies to your post has basically said the same thing I'm going to say, but here's how I see it.
Consider an algorithm, say, the Sieve of Erathostenes for calculating prime numbers. I posit this --- and any other --- algorithm should not be patentable. However, you can go and implement this algorithm in some language, compile it, and get a bit sequence that, together with the appropriate hardware, is arguably a patentable machine.
(Also, consider that perhaps a dedicated machine for calculating prime numbers is not very useful --- you'd instead use the Sieve of Erathostenes as a component of a larger system, say a cryptographic device.)
However, software patents don't cover the actual implementation --- they cover the abstract idea, i.e. the algorithm, regardless of how or for what purpose you're going to implement it. That, I think, is where the problem lies.
It means that an algorithm is a mathematical construct with certain properties. Not that different from a natural number, a graph (as in graph theory), a real-valued function, or a finite state automaton.
You can't (and shouldn't be able to) patent any of these, so why should you be able to patent an algorithm?
My meaning was distributing files that do not have the copyright holder's permission to distribute.
So put the blame where it belongs: prosecute the person who originally made the torrent available, since he/she is the only person who knowingly posted the content and can attest for his/her (un)authorization to do so.
I think it's pretty obvious that "Confessions of a Shopaholic" is not being distributed with the copyright holder's permission. I'll quite happily give you odds of 50:1 on it if you want to put money on it.
Oh wait. I have this file on my hard disk named "core". It must surely be a copy of this copyrighted work that I have no right to distribute.
What if I write an essay about my personal drama as a shopaholic and publish it online?
50:1 odds are no acceptable grounds to convict anyone (nor can you really derive such a number realistically). There is reasonable doubt and the particular situation should be investigated instead of assuming guilt.
Once again, we have to assume extreme stupidity to believe that 90% of the content on TPB is distributed with the owners permission.
And you throw the other 10% out with the baby water, because you think the lazy attitude of outlawing Bittorrent completely is socially more acceptable than verifying copyright infringement claims on an individual basis.
But once again, we have to assume impressive stupidity on the part of everyone for not realising the extremely high probability that it's illegal.
Then do as someone else said: do not ever open a web page again, because it might contain some copyrighted content --- and you'll never know about it until the bits are already in your RAM!
Geez, is it hard to understand that the problem with the "let's ban Bittorrent" argument is the extremely dangerous consequences it has for the rest of the Internet?
In law, there's the concept of "knew or should have known". Maybe the copyright holder on an obscure low budget animation is hard to determine but a yopu can't make the same claim for a major motion picture, whose owners have contacted you explicitly to let you know that they have not given permission for the distribution of the file.
Maybe I don't see Hollywood movies; maybe I don't watch TV. Honestly, I haven't been at the movies for so long that I probably wouldn't recognize 90% of the movies that came out in the last three months by their titles. I don't think it's too far-fetched to assume I won't be able to recognize some copyrighted work through a file name.
By the way: law indeed has a concept of "knowing". That's why you distinguish between murder and manslaughter, to give the most obvious example. If the prosecution can prove that you fully understood the implications of your actions that led to someone's death (as opposed to an unpremeditated accident), you'll get a harsher sentence.
So ultimately TPB's defence relies on a genuine belief that people are making high budget movies and giving them away for free.
I think TPB's defence relies on the assumption that a machine (torrent tracker) cannot decide whether some content is okay to redistribute or not. The people who made the content available can, so if you want to prosecute anyone, you should prosecute them.
I have a good idea to get the drivers while still eliminating the bloat.
Have an option to compile the kernel during installation, based on detected devices.
And then whenever you buy a new webcam, replace your graphics card, or whatever, the kernel must be recompiled. People will love that.
Also: the Linux kernel is modular. This means you don't actually hold in memory, at every time, the drivers to all the hardware devices known to man. Only those your machine actually needs to run. The remaining are just files sitting on your hard disk, ready to be loaded should the need arise. This is an adequate way to keep down the bloat while not inconveniencing the user every time a new piece of hardware pops up.
Oftentimes I have wished I knew more assembly so I could rewrite often used or expensive procedures to fit the target machine and try to optimize it. I don't know assembly well, however, and therefore don't mess with this. Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C? I thought often run pieces of the Linux kernel were being rewritten into common architecture assembly languages because of this?
I'd say speed is hardly a concern for BIOS code, which is run only during the booting process. AFAIK, modern operating systems have their own hardware access routines that bypass the BIOS.
Thus one can take advantage of C's readability and maintainability (as compared to assembly) without worrying with the performance penalty. And even then, as others suggested in this thread, it is not entirely clear that the compiled code would be less efficient than the hand-assembled one...
Technically, "A contains B" means the same as "B is a subset of A". The parent may have been confusing containment with membership, which I tried to clear up in my reply.
I understand the philosophical side of the question, but mathematically speaking it's simply a matter of definition.
You say "set A is contained in set B" if, for every element x of A, x also belongs to B. Applying this to your statement, both A and B are the empty set. Since A has no elements, then surely every element it contains has whatever property you can conceive (in particular, every element belongs to B), therefore the empty set is contained in the empty set. Mathematicians call this a vacuous truth because the statement is true by actually not applying to any elements of the set (since there aren't any).
If this doesn't make sense to you, consider that the negation of the proposition is "there is at least one x in A such that x doesn't belong to B". Since A has no elements this proposition is obviously false --- therefore the first one must be true.
Some people have trouble with this statement because they confuse the "is contained in" relation with the "belongs to" relation. While it is true that the empty set is contained in the empty set, it is not true that the empty set belongs to the empty set (otherwise it would not be empty). This is the difference between placing an empty bag inside another (previously empty) bag, and checking whether the contents of an empty bag are also inside another empty bag.
Yet another reason why.com/.net/.org (and the stupid newer ones) should be abolished and all domains should end in their country codes. There is no such thing as not being under the control of SOME countries laws.
I agree that, for the sake of clarity, the.com/.org/etc TLDs should be reserved to "international" organizations (whatever that can possibly mean in legal terms), and all American domains should have been placed into.us. But that's not going to happen simply because no one would go through the hassle of converting all the existing American domains over to.us and forcing everyone to update their bookmarks and finger memory.
(And now witness a horde of American slashdotters coming along proclaiming the supremacy of the US over the Internet ("because we invented it!"), and in particular their inalienable right to shorter domain names;)
I just want to stress that the EU is not nearly the model of freedom of speech that America is. After all, America is the only western country with an explicit constitution stating such.
Either you're trolling about the whole EU constitution affair (which, by the way, is now in the process of being ratified by the member states), or you are totally unaware that the constitutions of several EU member states protect freedom of speech --- despite the fact that you live in Europe, and perhaps in a country belonging to the EU.
A big selling point for commercial software is that you have someone else to blame when things go wrong. You claim "due diligence" in having selected the best money can buy (what might not have been the best you could have gotten for free, but juries are not filled with CS Ph.D.s).
You should read the Microsoft EULA -- they say in big capital letters that they won't be liable for any damages arising from using their software. I guess most software houses, if not all, do exactly the same to cover their ass in cases like that one. No one should think they have someone else to blame just because they buy commercial software.
Then again, you're probably right because most people (quite unfortunately) assume a correlation between price and quality, and most likely don't know much about open source software.
How many people die yearly in coal mining accidents? How about accidents on oil drilling rigs?
Those do not incur the risk of radioactive contamination, which has long-term consequences that are more worrying than those resulting directly from the incident (I'm not saying every nuclear incident goes the way of Chernobyl -- just pointing out there is a risk). So it's not just a matter of comparing casualties resulting from the particular explosion/meltdown/whatever.
There has always been that mistaken notion that source code is the keys to the kingdom; for example, companies take great pains from letting their source code leak out, especially to their competitors. There are rarely secrets contained in source code (except for Microsoft's NSA backdoors), and if a competitor got it, more power to them wasting their time trying to reverse engineer it.
It is orders of magnitude easier to reverse-engineer source code in a high-level language than it is to reverse-engineer machine code or even assembly code (especially when you have software at your disposal that can obfuscate the compiled machine code). That's why leaaking out source code is much more dangerous from the point of view of the proprietary software company.
Indeed you can, but I fail to see how this is relevant. Password-protecting a website both a) takes effort on the part of the person doing so and b) clearly indicates the user does not want the content to be publically available.
Securing an access point both a) takes effort on the part of the person doing so and b) clearly indicates the user does not want the AP to be publicly available. Can you not see how my example is relevant?
Highly doubtful. You can make a quite reasonable argument that people who make the effort to put up a website to share information with others have implicitly made the decision that information should be public.
Not necessarily. You can have a password-protected website via HTTP authentication -- just like you can have a password-protected access point.
Your distinction makes sense in the context of informally agreed-upon netiquette, but the law doesn't go far enough to make that distiction. That's what I was pointing out -- that the law really is too vague in this matter.
"Access" means to gain entry to, instruct, or communicate with the logical, arithmetical, or memory function resources of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
(7) Knowingly and without permission accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network.
So every time you want to visit a web site, you write a letter or call up the webmaster to ask for permission?
If by setting up a Web server I'm tacitly permitting inbound traffic, then surely setting up an unprotected wifi access point is the same, as far as the law is concerned?
(I'm not saying Wifi piggybacking is or should be legal, just pointing out that the law you mention as it is is quite vague and open to interpretation.)
In companies, people are reallocated to where they are needed, why doesn't that work with linux?
Because Linux is not a company, and there's no centralized management to take such decisions.
Even if there were one, if you were developing for Linux on your free time, would you like someone to tell you "now you're going to do this?" (even if "this" is not something you're interested in doing, or something you don't want to be committed to?)
What's not fine are the backends, still reeling on a million textfiles in/etc/ instead than a unified register
I've never understood why some people believe a registry is conceptually different from a filesystem hierarchy, as in/etc. They're the same thing. On the technical side, however, the registry is actually worse, since you need a specialised tool to edit it (and thus you can't edit it in a practical way when the system is in a bad state and only basic tools are available).
And before you read my reply the wrong way, notice that I'm not saying that carrying bomb-like stuff around is acceptable. I'm just saying specifically that box cutters are a good example of something people should be allowed to carry. So are a lot of items that nowadays airport security refuses you to carry aboard (and if they did let you, 99.9999% of the times no bad use would be put to them).
The other sad part is that if I could go back to 9-11 and warn security to arrest those 19 men with friggin box-cutters, you'd be screaming the loudest. "My GOD! All these men did was have box cutters! WTF could these guys do with just friggin BOX CUTTERS!!??! They were seriously overreacting!"
That's exactly the point. Yes, you would be overreacting. The price you pay for your freedom to carry box cutters around with you is that they may be used in wrong ways. That is precisely what freedom is -- a two-way road. You reap the benefits and take the risks.
I would rather take the risks of living in a free society than living in a police state where carrying anything even remotely suspicious with me is going to paint me as a terrorist. Would you?
Slashdot Mirror
Saying "freedom of religion" does not allow one not to have a religion is the same as saying "freedom of speech" does not allow one to remain shut up.
I suspect it would fail when attempting to delete the deltree binary itself, or the directory it belongs to. Haven't tried, though.
(No such problem on Linux, of course; rm -rf / will happily wipe your entire fs, including the rm binary and the /bin directory.)
One of the replies to your post has basically said the same thing I'm going to say, but here's how I see it.
Consider an algorithm, say, the Sieve of Erathostenes for calculating prime numbers. I posit this --- and any other --- algorithm should not be patentable. However, you can go and implement this algorithm in some language, compile it, and get a bit sequence that, together with the appropriate hardware, is arguably a patentable machine.
(Also, consider that perhaps a dedicated machine for calculating prime numbers is not very useful --- you'd instead use the Sieve of Erathostenes as a component of a larger system, say a cryptographic device.)
However, software patents don't cover the actual implementation --- they cover the abstract idea, i.e. the algorithm, regardless of how or for what purpose you're going to implement it. That, I think, is where the problem lies.
It means that an algorithm is a mathematical construct with certain properties. Not that different from a natural number, a graph (as in graph theory), a real-valued function, or a finite state automaton.
You can't (and shouldn't be able to) patent any of these, so why should you be able to patent an algorithm?
So put the blame where it belongs: prosecute the person who originally made the torrent available, since he/she is the only person who knowingly posted the content and can attest for his/her (un)authorization to do so.
Oh wait. I have this file on my hard disk named "core". It must surely be a copy of this copyrighted work that I have no right to distribute.
What if I write an essay about my personal drama as a shopaholic and publish it online?
50:1 odds are no acceptable grounds to convict anyone (nor can you really derive such a number realistically). There is reasonable doubt and the particular situation should be investigated instead of assuming guilt.
And you throw the other 10% out with the baby water, because you think the lazy attitude of outlawing Bittorrent completely is socially more acceptable than verifying copyright infringement claims on an individual basis.
Then do as someone else said: do not ever open a web page again, because it might contain some copyrighted content --- and you'll never know about it until the bits are already in your RAM!
Geez, is it hard to understand that the problem with the "let's ban Bittorrent" argument is the extremely dangerous consequences it has for the rest of the Internet?
Maybe I don't see Hollywood movies; maybe I don't watch TV. Honestly, I haven't been at the movies for so long that I probably wouldn't recognize 90% of the movies that came out in the last three months by their titles. I don't think it's too far-fetched to assume I won't be able to recognize some copyrighted work through a file name.
By the way: law indeed has a concept of "knowing". That's why you distinguish between murder and manslaughter, to give the most obvious example. If the prosecution can prove that you fully understood the implications of your actions that led to someone's death (as opposed to an unpremeditated accident), you'll get a harsher sentence.
I think TPB's defence relies on the assumption that a machine (torrent tracker) cannot decide whether some content is okay to redistribute or not. The people who made the content available can, so if you want to prosecute anyone, you should prosecute them.
And then whenever you buy a new webcam, replace your graphics card, or whatever, the kernel must be recompiled. People will love that.
Also: the Linux kernel is modular. This means you don't actually hold in memory, at every time, the drivers to all the hardware devices known to man. Only those your machine actually needs to run. The remaining are just files sitting on your hard disk, ready to be loaded should the need arise. This is an adequate way to keep down the bloat while not inconveniencing the user every time a new piece of hardware pops up.
I'd say speed is hardly a concern for BIOS code, which is run only during the booting process. AFAIK, modern operating systems have their own hardware access routines that bypass the BIOS.
Thus one can take advantage of C's readability and maintainability (as compared to assembly) without worrying with the performance penalty. And even then, as others suggested in this thread, it is not entirely clear that the compiled code would be less efficient than the hand-assembled one...
Technically, "A contains B" means the same as "B is a subset of A". The parent may have been confusing containment with membership, which I tried to clear up in my reply.
I understand the philosophical side of the question, but mathematically speaking it's simply a matter of definition.
You say "set A is contained in set B" if, for every element x of A, x also belongs to B. Applying this to your statement, both A and B are the empty set. Since A has no elements, then surely every element it contains has whatever property you can conceive (in particular, every element belongs to B), therefore the empty set is contained in the empty set. Mathematicians call this a vacuous truth because the statement is true by actually not applying to any elements of the set (since there aren't any).
If this doesn't make sense to you, consider that the negation of the proposition is "there is at least one x in A such that x doesn't belong to B". Since A has no elements this proposition is obviously false --- therefore the first one must be true.
Some people have trouble with this statement because they confuse the "is contained in" relation with the "belongs to" relation. While it is true that the empty set is contained in the empty set, it is not true that the empty set belongs to the empty set (otherwise it would not be empty). This is the difference between placing an empty bag inside another (previously empty) bag, and checking whether the contents of an empty bag are also inside another empty bag.
2008 is a leap year, you insensitive clod!
And healthcare has exactly what to do with memory sticks and Internet access?
Who modded this insightful?
I agree that, for the sake of clarity, the .com/.org/etc TLDs should be reserved to "international" organizations (whatever that can possibly mean in legal terms), and all American domains should have been placed into .us. But that's not going to happen simply because no one would go through the hassle of converting all the existing American domains over to .us and forcing everyone to update their bookmarks and finger memory.
(And now witness a horde of American slashdotters coming along proclaiming the supremacy of the US over the Internet ("because we invented it!"), and in particular their inalienable right to shorter domain names ;)
Either you're trolling about the whole EU constitution affair (which, by the way, is now in the process of being ratified by the member states), or you are totally unaware that the constitutions of several EU member states protect freedom of speech --- despite the fact that you live in Europe, and perhaps in a country belonging to the EU.
I vote for the first option.
You should read the Microsoft EULA -- they say in big capital letters that they won't be liable for any damages arising from using their software. I guess most software houses, if not all, do exactly the same to cover their ass in cases like that one. No one should think they have someone else to blame just because they buy commercial software.
Then again, you're probably right because most people (quite unfortunately) assume a correlation between price and quality, and most likely don't know much about open source software.
Those do not incur the risk of radioactive contamination, which has long-term consequences that are more worrying than those resulting directly from the incident (I'm not saying every nuclear incident goes the way of Chernobyl -- just pointing out there is a risk). So it's not just a matter of comparing casualties resulting from the particular explosion/meltdown/whatever.
It is orders of magnitude easier to reverse-engineer source code in a high-level language than it is to reverse-engineer machine code or even assembly code (especially when you have software at your disposal that can obfuscate the compiled machine code). That's why leaaking out source code is much more dangerous from the point of view of the proprietary software company.
How about sending an e-mail to the customer's mailbox, then? Just like my ISP does. And it's a lot less intrusive than modifying web pages.
Securing an access point both a) takes effort on the part of the person doing so and b) clearly indicates the user does not want the AP to be publicly available. Can you not see how my example is relevant?
Not necessarily. You can have a password-protected website via HTTP authentication -- just like you can have a password-protected access point.
Your distinction makes sense in the context of informally agreed-upon netiquette, but the law doesn't go far enough to make that distiction. That's what I was pointing out -- that the law really is too vague in this matter.
So every time you want to visit a web site, you write a letter or call up the webmaster to ask for permission?
If by setting up a Web server I'm tacitly permitting inbound traffic, then surely setting up an unprotected wifi access point is the same, as far as the law is concerned?
(I'm not saying Wifi piggybacking is or should be legal, just pointing out that the law you mention as it is is quite vague and open to interpretation.)
Because Linux is not a company, and there's no centralized management to take such decisions.
Even if there were one, if you were developing for Linux on your free time, would you like someone to tell you "now you're going to do this?" (even if "this" is not something you're interested in doing, or something you don't want to be committed to?)
And yet again someone misses the difference between free as in beer and free as in freedom...
(P.S. I'm not saying I agree with the GP; but he was talking about freedom, not beer.)
I've never understood why some people believe a registry is conceptually different from a filesystem hierarchy, as in /etc. They're the same thing. On the technical side, however, the registry is actually worse, since you need a specialised tool to edit it (and thus you can't edit it in a practical way when the system is in a bad state and only basic tools are available).
And before you read my reply the wrong way, notice that I'm not saying that carrying bomb-like stuff around is acceptable. I'm just saying specifically that box cutters are a good example of something people should be allowed to carry. So are a lot of items that nowadays airport security refuses you to carry aboard (and if they did let you, 99.9999% of the times no bad use would be put to them).
That's exactly the point. Yes, you would be overreacting. The price you pay for your freedom to carry box cutters around with you is that they may be used in wrong ways. That is precisely what freedom is -- a two-way road. You reap the benefits and take the risks.
I would rather take the risks of living in a free society than living in a police state where carrying anything even remotely suspicious with me is going to paint me as a terrorist. Would you?