They are constantly "updating" laws so that "criminals" get whatever the prosecutor wants. They've even charge people for acts committed before they became crimes.
You just don't challenge authority, unless you're prepared to DEAL WITH authority.
Not unless you're mentally ill, which his suicide suggests.
But also he obviously misjudged the likely reactions to his actions. If they'd just considered his activities to be a minor nuisance, and so not pursued it, or if once they'd caught him had simply considered him to be 'precocious' or a "boy being a boy", and not taken him seriously, he'd have been fine. But obviously SOMEONE took him as a serious threat to something, and believed that throwing the book at him (then writing another book and throwing that at him) to be an appropriate response.
Unfortunately, history shows us that computer and phone crimes are usually massively over-reacted to. Probably because prosecutors and management does not understand the technology, considers it basically to be "magic", and are so very afraid when youngsters can make it stand up and dance to any tune they whistle. Especially when they make it do unexpected things. People have been banned from using PHONES at all because of this fear.
Stupidity kills. It doesn't bargain, it doesn't warn, it doesn't care - it just kills.
"This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth."
Actually campus police are usually sworn police officers under state statutes, just like municipal or county police.
I think they only legally have the powers of a police officer when they are acting AS a police officer. Not that they have to actually be working their paid hours, but I believe that when they are off duty, that they are just another citizen up to and until they see a crime. And then they have an obligation to pursue it.
Otherwise the term "illegal search and seizure" would have no meaning, and lying to a police officer spouse, parent, sibling, or child about even personal, non criminal things would be a crime.
I don't believe that security guards have a special right to not lied to, and that an off duty police officer can't put himself on-duty until he sees a crime. Even then, I think that lying to an officer is only illegal when lying obstructs an investigation into a crime. If the institution thinks that a crime has been committed, they need to get "the police" involved, not handle it themselves with a rent-a-cop who may have a conflict of interest because he's also an employee.
I mean 6 months in a minimum security federal prison is not exactly hard time.
Maybe not, but try to get a coding job, an internship, or even a management position after a stint in ANY type of prison. I know I'd be hesitant to hire you.
Besides, mental illness has no regard for the law, or real consequences. I'm sure he saw his life as irreparably ruined.
why is plagiarism so much worse than straight copying?
I think he is saying that making a profit off of stolen IP is more wrong than simply stealing IP, or stealing IP and sharing it, or receiving stolen IP.
That was the line I wouldn't cross when I was in high-school, buying or selling pirated IP. That absolutely IS taking food out of the programmers mouth. While sharing programs for free, at least in my situation, wasn't, because I wouldn't have bought it anyway since I was poor. And if I found it useful and worth the price of admission, I eventually paid.
It is illogical to oppose copyright, then moan when people copy things in ways that do not benefit the original artist.
Not really. You can feel that current copyright law is broken, and no longer serves to incentivize original artists, but rather serves to simply enrichen big corporations and their stockholders.
How does lifetime protection encourage more production? How does lifetime + 75 years of protection years encourage more production? How does lifetime + 75 years + an additional 150 years of protection encourage more production?
It does not. They do not.
Neither the copyright nor the patent was invented to guarantee unending income. Especially for corporations and estates.
They were created to protect creations for a short period of time, so that the originator could reap the rewards of his work, incentivizing both him and others to create, THEN to open the creation for use / modification by the world. Creating incentive for others to create more and possibly even greater uses of the technology / art, and legitimate derivative works. Benefiting society as a whole.
One major reason for this is because the originator is usually blinded to the potential of his/her own creation by his/her original vision of it, and cannot possibly foresee all possible uses for it. The inventor of the Xeroxing process never made, or even designed any copiers because he couldn't see ANY demand for it outside the Publishing Industry, which already had a superior technology for re-creating text, called the printing-press. He just couldn't see any demand coming from non-publishing businesses, small offices, or even individual users. But now most people can't imagine working, learning, or living without the capacity to copy, scan or print high quality images and documents.
Business interests have been lobbying to increase both copy and patent time periods, the penalties for breaking them, and to deny ownership of those patents and copyrights to those persons who actually created the IP, for hundreds of years. And every day they get closer to fulfilling their dream of absolute ownership of the rights, processes and results of all creativity, without having to reimburse the actual creators with even a fraction of the profits they make off of them.
Poor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing MemoriesPoor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing Memories
"Calling Doctor Obvious. Doctor Obvious, please come to the front desk! You have an unnecessary message! Doctor Obvious! You have a message from an "N. S. Sherlock!"
The RIAA / MPAA (and the Right) will argue there IS no right to privacy, since it is not mentioned in the constitution.
The DMCA already made it legal for companies searching for copyright violations to break and enter your computer, while holding them harmless for any damage or data loss on your end, foreseeable or not.
Their's lots of ways to "not pay for something". Including not using it.
There is no assumption of trust, in the law, owed by a company to a human being, excepting medical information. Only the other way around.
1) Anonymizing torrent clients are not inevitable, and they will be treated just as share requirements were by users and programmers. They will write programs that LIE about what they are/have shared/sharing and who they've shared it with. And the MPAA/RIAA will continue to provide bad seeds and false packets, all of which will be harder to filter out because the sharers are anonymous.
2) If you think that creating a system that anonymously shares downloads creates plausible deniability for the downloaders, you haven't been paying attention. Creating anonymizing torrent networks will, in fact, create a whole new huge (and lucrative) group of co-conspirators for the RIAA and MPAA to sue for not just enabling the pirates to hide out in the crowd, but also actively participating in piracy regardless of what they've personally downloaded, simply because they've passed on packets of copyrighted materials. This isn't just raising your hand as a group when asked, "Who is Guy Fawkes?" This is helping to carry the dynamite to Parliament.
And the RIAA and MPAA will see this as simply another (though potentially much larger) revenue stream and tap it. Suing THOUSANDS of people for each file shared, since they were ALL involved in a 'razzel-dazzel', now you see it, now you don't, conspiracy to hide piracy.
Of course, the way the lawmakers have kowtowed to the RIAA/MPAA in the past, I don't see why they wouldn't be happy to assume that receipt of a single packet of copyrighted material as proof of membership in a "conspiracy to pirate / enable piracy". I also foresee the claim that simply having an anonymizing download client installed, or even simply in your possession, as proof of membership in a conspiracy to pirate. Remember, in the DMCA they made it illegal to CREATE tools that were simply capable of being used to circumvent DRM and / or copy-protection. Which brings up another, smaller, group of people to prosecute, developers.
Far from the piracy panacea the author sees, anonymizing clients will create more convicted criminals, and increase MPAA / RIAA revenues.
Yeah, Microsoft's shady (at best) adoption of the 1st half of WordPerfect's name, plus Window 95 basically killed WordPerfect.
The only drawback that WordPerfect had was that it wasn't WYSIWYG, and it had such a strong render engine that it was slow to adopt it under Windows. (Although you could switch back and forth between View Mode and Edit Mode.)
It had an intelligent spell checker, would offer you words not just similarly spelled, but also words PHONETICALLY similar. It would learn your spelling foibles. So if you consistently misspelled a word, it went to the top of the list. Also, it seemed to learn the TYPES of spelling weaknesses you had, and was able to suggest accurate spellings of words based on HOW YOU are likely to misspell them. It didn't just offer the same 4 nearly identical words, it even could compensate for different types of errors existing in the same word. Like mispronunciation in one section, and phonetic spelling in another. And lastly, you (eventually) had access to it's ENTIRE dictionary file, not just a handful of words it thinks are right, and then it learns HOW you misspell the words you misspell, so the next time it runs across the same misspelling, it will offer you that you had to find for it the first time. Oh, and it NEVER just gave up and offered no help. Oh, and editing the dictionary was no big deal, so if you misspelled a dictionary entry that was easy to correct.
It would even check your GRAMMER! And was right 98% of the time.
Word only gained market-share because when managers told flunkies to go buy WordPerfect, they SAID, "Go buy that Word program."
I still have a box, disks and manual for Word 1. (Never should have opened it.) It's absolutely HORRID. Even for back then.
I ran Corel Draw! under Windows 3.11 on a 386 I built myself and never had a single crash.
My biggest regret is that I trusted my only copy to tape backup (when I wanted it, I copied it back into the OS, swapped the autoexec.bat and config.sys, and then used it), and then one day my tape broke and jammed in the drive, so I lost it.:_(
One of the nicest things about DOS (Windows 3.1 was a program, not an OS) is how easy it was to create multiple boot configurations, as long as you looked at the problem correctly. Most people wanted a menu to choose from at boot-up, and even hacked the boot.sys (I think it was) to boot an autoexec and config.sys depending on what key you pressed. Ugly, non-standard, and only gave users a 3 second window. I simply created different autoexec's and config.sys's, stored them in a subdirectory, and used a batch file to copy them in and out of the current files. So I'd type BOOT DRAW, it would copy the BOOT.BAT and BOOT.SYS on top of the autoexec and config.sys files. Very nice setup, made it easy to create environments tailored to specific programs, utilities and games, avoiding unnecessary bloat, conflicting settings and conflicting memory management systems. Then 95 came out and forced us back into a 1-size-fit's-all system again.
I loved that program, even if it was non-intuitive. Before I'd used it I had only disdain for line based graphics, preferring bit-graphics for drawing, but for me the biggest benifit to Corel Draw was twisting, turning and otherwise distorting what you'd drawn.
It's just called matter because it ACTS like matter, except for neither blocking or reflecting light, which is why it's called dark.
It's important to name something, even before you know what it is, because it's very difficult to discuss something that has no designation. They could call it "Effect 32" for all it really matters, it's just that "dark matter" gives the listener a little memory advantage over some arbetrary non-discriptive designation.
In reality dark matter could be nearly anything, and could be nothing like matter. Or it could be actual invisible matter that you could build things out of.
Don't get stuck on the semmantics of the phrase. Yes, it's an "I don't know", but it's a specific "I don't know". To just call it something mysterious, without an attempt to figure it out, would be the equivilant of writing "Here be Dragons" on our maps, and walking away.
Actually it's more simmilar to the days when software producers made public announcements declairing their copy-protection to be un-hackable. That was a real call-to-arms to the leagons of socially-challenged, pimpelly faced, snot-nosed, don't-have-anything-better-to-do-all-weekend kids around the world to put grampa back in his place. It took the Software Insustry years to realize that for every single person they put on making copy-protection 40 hours a week, that there were hundreds of kids out there willing to invest every waking hour into breaking it, and do it just for the bragging rights. And that bragging about it just made them focus on your products.
You don't hear much good comming out about businesses anymore. Usually it's stuff like Nike claiming free speech rights after fraudulently taking out a full-page ad claiming they didn't use slave labor.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a lawyer, but I watch them on TV!
That injustice exists is no excuse to condone it.
A composer is more akin to an architect. And a musician more akin to a tradesman / builder.
And if you believe that extracting data from a database is compairable to playing music, you live in a musicless world, and I pity you.
That's what happens when an upstart, supposedly powerless individual scares the powerful. There is no bigger sin in this world.
Rape, mass murder, theft of life savings, all are forgivable, as long as the powerful are not made to feel insecure.
It always has been, and probably always will be.
They are constantly "updating" laws so that "criminals" get whatever the prosecutor wants. They've even charge people for acts committed before they became crimes.
What's to stop them from doing it in this case?
You just don't challenge authority, unless you're prepared to DEAL WITH authority.
Not unless you're mentally ill, which his suicide suggests.
But also he obviously misjudged the likely reactions to his actions. If they'd just considered his activities to be a minor nuisance, and so not pursued it, or if once they'd caught him had simply considered him to be 'precocious' or a "boy being a boy", and not taken him seriously, he'd have been fine. But obviously SOMEONE took him as a serious threat to something, and believed that throwing the book at him (then writing another book and throwing that at him) to be an appropriate response.
Unfortunately, history shows us that computer and phone crimes are usually massively over-reacted to. Probably because prosecutors and management does not understand the technology, considers it basically to be "magic", and are so very afraid when youngsters can make it stand up and dance to any tune they whistle. Especially when they make it do unexpected things. People have been banned from using PHONES at all because of this fear.
Stupidity kills. It doesn't bargain, it doesn't warn, it doesn't care - it just kills.
As does ignorance.
"This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth."
Actually campus police are usually sworn police officers under state statutes, just like municipal or county police.
I think they only legally have the powers of a police officer when they are acting AS a police officer.
Not that they have to actually be working their paid hours, but I believe that when they are off duty, that they are just another citizen up to and until they see a crime. And then they have an obligation to pursue it.
Otherwise the term "illegal search and seizure" would have no meaning, and lying to a police officer spouse, parent, sibling, or child about even personal, non criminal things would be a crime.
I don't believe that security guards have a special right to not lied to, and that an off duty police officer can't put himself on-duty until he sees a crime. Even then, I think that lying to an officer is only illegal when lying obstructs an investigation into a crime. If the institution thinks that a crime has been committed, they need to get "the police" involved, not handle it themselves with a rent-a-cop who may have a conflict of interest because he's also an employee.
I mean 6 months in a minimum security federal prison is not exactly hard time.
Maybe not, but try to get a coding job, an internship, or even a management position after a stint in ANY type of prison. I know I'd be hesitant to hire you.
Besides, mental illness has no regard for the law, or real consequences. I'm sure he saw his life as irreparably ruined.
why is plagiarism so much worse than straight copying?
I think he is saying that making a profit off of stolen IP is more wrong than simply stealing IP, or stealing IP and sharing it, or receiving stolen IP.
That was the line I wouldn't cross when I was in high-school, buying or selling pirated IP. That absolutely IS taking food out of the programmers mouth. While sharing programs for free, at least in my situation, wasn't, because I wouldn't have bought it anyway since I was poor. And if I found it useful and worth the price of admission, I eventually paid.
It is illogical to oppose copyright, then moan when people copy things in ways that do not benefit the original artist.
Not really. You can feel that current copyright law is broken, and no longer serves to incentivize original artists, but rather serves to simply enrichen big corporations and their stockholders.
How does lifetime protection encourage more production?
How does lifetime + 75 years of protection years encourage more production?
How does lifetime + 75 years + an additional 150 years of protection encourage more production?
It does not. They do not.
Neither the copyright nor the patent was invented to guarantee unending income. Especially for corporations and estates.
They were created to protect creations for a short period of time, so that the originator could reap the rewards of his work, incentivizing both him and others to create, THEN to open the creation for use / modification by the world. Creating incentive for others to create more and possibly even greater uses of the technology / art, and legitimate derivative works. Benefiting society as a whole.
One major reason for this is because the originator is usually blinded to the potential of his/her own creation by his/her original vision of it, and cannot possibly foresee all possible uses for it. The inventor of the Xeroxing process never made, or even designed any copiers because he couldn't see ANY demand for it outside the Publishing Industry, which already had a superior technology for re-creating text, called the printing-press. He just couldn't see any demand coming from non-publishing businesses, small offices, or even individual users. But now most people can't imagine working, learning, or living without the capacity to copy, scan or print high quality images and documents.
Business interests have been lobbying to increase both copy and patent time periods, the penalties for breaking them, and to deny ownership of those patents and copyrights to those persons who actually created the IP, for hundreds of years. And every day they get closer to fulfilling their dream of absolute ownership of the rights, processes and results of all creativity, without having to reimburse the actual creators with even a fraction of the profits they make off of them.
Poor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing MemoriesPoor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing Memories
"Calling Doctor Obvious. Doctor Obvious, please come to the front desk! You have an unnecessary message! Doctor Obvious! You have a message from an "N. S. Sherlock!"
Just requires the Space Elevator, which NASA and others are working on.
The RIAA / MPAA (and the Right) will argue there IS no right to privacy, since it is not mentioned in the constitution.
The DMCA already made it legal for companies searching for copyright violations to break and enter your computer, while holding them harmless for any damage or data loss on your end, foreseeable or not.
Their's lots of ways to "not pay for something". Including not using it.
There is no assumption of trust, in the law, owed by a company to a human being, excepting medical information. Only the other way around.
1) Anonymizing torrent clients are not inevitable, and they will be treated just as share requirements were by users and programmers. They will write programs that LIE about what they are/have shared/sharing and who they've shared it with. And the MPAA/RIAA will continue to provide bad seeds and false packets, all of which will be harder to filter out because the sharers are anonymous.
2) If you think that creating a system that anonymously shares downloads creates plausible deniability for the downloaders, you haven't been paying attention. Creating anonymizing torrent networks will, in fact, create a whole new huge (and lucrative) group of co-conspirators for the RIAA and MPAA to sue for not just enabling the pirates to hide out in the crowd, but also actively participating in piracy regardless of what they've personally downloaded, simply because they've passed on packets of copyrighted materials. This isn't just raising your hand as a group when asked, "Who is Guy Fawkes?" This is helping to carry the dynamite to Parliament.
And the RIAA and MPAA will see this as simply another (though potentially much larger) revenue stream and tap it. Suing THOUSANDS of people for each file shared, since they were ALL involved in a 'razzel-dazzel', now you see it, now you don't, conspiracy to hide piracy.
Of course, the way the lawmakers have kowtowed to the RIAA/MPAA in the past, I don't see why they wouldn't be happy to assume that receipt of a single packet of copyrighted material as proof of membership in a "conspiracy to pirate / enable piracy". I also foresee the claim that simply having an anonymizing download client installed, or even simply in your possession, as proof of membership in a conspiracy to pirate. Remember, in the DMCA they made it illegal to CREATE tools that were simply capable of being used to circumvent DRM and / or copy-protection. Which brings up another, smaller, group of people to prosecute, developers.
Far from the piracy panacea the author sees, anonymizing clients will create more convicted criminals, and increase MPAA / RIAA revenues.
Yeah, Microsoft's shady (at best) adoption of the 1st half of WordPerfect's name, plus Window 95 basically killed WordPerfect.
The only drawback that WordPerfect had was that it wasn't WYSIWYG, and it had such a strong render engine that it was slow to adopt it under Windows. (Although you could switch back and forth between View Mode and Edit Mode.)
It had an intelligent spell checker, would offer you words not just similarly spelled, but also words PHONETICALLY similar. It would learn your spelling foibles. So if you consistently misspelled a word, it went to the top of the list. Also, it seemed to learn the TYPES of spelling weaknesses you had, and was able to suggest accurate spellings of words based on HOW YOU are likely to misspell them. It didn't just offer the same 4 nearly identical words, it even could compensate for different types of errors existing in the same word. Like mispronunciation in one section, and phonetic spelling in another. And lastly, you (eventually) had access to it's ENTIRE dictionary file, not just a handful of words it thinks are right, and then it learns HOW you misspell the words you misspell, so the next time it runs across the same misspelling, it will offer you that you had to find for it the first time. Oh, and it NEVER just gave up and offered no help. Oh, and editing the dictionary was no big deal, so if you misspelled a dictionary entry that was easy to correct.
It would even check your GRAMMER! And was right 98% of the time.
Word only gained market-share because when managers told flunkies to go buy WordPerfect, they SAID, "Go buy that Word program."
I still have a box, disks and manual for Word 1. (Never should have opened it.) It's absolutely HORRID. Even for back then.
I ran Corel Draw! under Windows 3.11 on a 386 I built myself and never had a single crash.
My biggest regret is that I trusted my only copy to tape backup (when I wanted it, I copied it back into the OS, swapped the autoexec.bat and config.sys, and then used it), and then one day my tape broke and jammed in the drive, so I lost it. :_(
One of the nicest things about DOS (Windows 3.1 was a program, not an OS) is how easy it was to create multiple boot configurations, as long as you looked at the problem correctly. Most people wanted a menu to choose from at boot-up, and even hacked the boot.sys (I think it was) to boot an autoexec and config.sys depending on what key you pressed. Ugly, non-standard, and only gave users a 3 second window. I simply created different autoexec's and config.sys's, stored them in a subdirectory, and used a batch file to copy them in and out of the current files. So I'd type BOOT DRAW, it would copy the BOOT.BAT and BOOT.SYS on top of the autoexec and config.sys files. Very nice setup, made it easy to create environments tailored to specific programs, utilities and games, avoiding unnecessary bloat, conflicting settings and conflicting memory management systems. Then 95 came out and forced us back into a 1-size-fit's-all system again.
I loved that program, even if it was non-intuitive. Before I'd used it I had only disdain for line based graphics, preferring bit-graphics for drawing, but for me the biggest benifit to Corel Draw was twisting, turning and otherwise distorting what you'd drawn.
Never did buy it again, too expensive.
Wah wah, pardon my touch screen
Aliens!?
No, no. It's Gnomes following their 3 step plan!
Step 1: Speed up the rotation of the galixies. .... umn.
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!
Neither of those concepts are part of modern science.
You fuss because he was not specific enough. He meant that "Dark Matter is an effect we observe."
I will not engague you in a debate on whether or not an effect is a "thing" in that context, but I suspect you knew what he meant.
It's just called matter because it ACTS like matter, except for neither blocking or reflecting light, which is why it's called dark.
It's important to name something, even before you know what it is, because it's very difficult to discuss something that has no designation. They could call it "Effect 32" for all it really matters, it's just that "dark matter" gives the listener a little memory advantage over some arbetrary non-discriptive designation.
In reality dark matter could be nearly anything, and could be nothing like matter. Or it could be actual invisible matter that you could build things out of.
Don't get stuck on the semmantics of the phrase. Yes, it's an "I don't know", but it's a specific "I don't know". To just call it something mysterious, without an attempt to figure it out, would be the equivilant of writing "Here be Dragons" on our maps, and walking away.
Actually it's more simmilar to the days when software producers made public announcements declairing their copy-protection to be un-hackable. That was a real call-to-arms to the leagons of socially-challenged, pimpelly faced, snot-nosed, don't-have-anything-better-to-do-all-weekend kids around the world to put grampa back in his place. It took the Software Insustry years to realize that for every single person they put on making copy-protection 40 hours a week, that there were hundreds of kids out there willing to invest every waking hour into breaking it, and do it just for the bragging rights. And that bragging about it just made them focus on your products.
Too late!
... so how are we supposed to know what we can and cannot export?
Especially since "ignorance is not a defence"?
Infected / contaminated or INFESTED bedding, you mean.
You don't hear much good comming out about businesses anymore. Usually it's stuff like Nike claiming free speech rights after fraudulently taking out a full-page ad claiming they didn't use slave labor.
A long time ago I saw a USB powered rice cooker. Real product!
... a coffie-cup-holder with a built-in peltier device?
That way you could charge up your iPhone with your hot coffie!
Or heat up your coffie with your phone!
+1 for complying with the GPL.