For the most part I agree with that. But I think you are missing the point of why the defeat of this bill was such a Good Thing (tm). This doesn't require there to be a "wireless tax" state-wide. It only allows each municipality to decide for themselves if they want to establish one. What is good for one place is not necessarily good for another. Allowing the local people to vote on local issues is a win for everyone. Now THAT's keeping the government out of your life...
LOL that's just so amazingly not even in the same category as to be comical. I'm going to spell it out, using really short words so that you might understand. This nation decided upon its creation that intellectual property is a good thing. The founding fathers spelled it out in the Constitution. Intellectual Property helps spur innovation by creating a financial incentive to create new things...thereby (oops...thereby is a complicated word, sorry) improving the lives of the general population by helping to introduce more art and inventinons to the society over time than would otherwise be available. This society has made a decision that this is a Good Thing (tm) for more than 2 centuries. Just because you want everything that people work for to be handed to you for free, doesn't mean that you are right.
Comparing the rights of people to own property and make a living off it to the Holocaust shows just how fucking ignorant you are. Why don't you read a book first before trying to chime in on such topics. Better yet, why don't you get a job and make a living...and see what the real world is really like, before you make moral judgements on what is acceptable. Simply put (in deference to you) copyrights and patents are a moral and just way of providing incentive to artists and inventors to create more art and inventions according to the vast majority of people who live in this country. Does this mean that every law regulating intellectual property is a good one? Hell no..but that doesn't invalidate the concept of intellectual property being a net gain for our society. Don't like it? Start a movement to change it, or get the fuck out. There are plenty of countries who have no respect for Intellectual Property in the world...and I think you'll notice that they don't create too many new things but rather just pirate content and inventions created in other places. I'm afraid that no argument you can make will ever justify theft of intellectual property just because you believe in your little heart that it all should be free because you don't feel like paying for it. Tell you what, I think that all property that YOU own should be in the public domain. Why don't you mail me a few of your video games...to re-distribute your wealth. Put your money where your mouth is, buddy.
You're right. And the fact that it's still around after all these years says something about what the 51% think about it. Sorry to say, but you're in the minority on this one. Perhaps it is YOU who needs to re-evaluate your morals. You are trying to impose your viewpoint that property ownership is immoral on the majority of folks who live in this society who think quite differently.
By your definition, no one should be able to own anything. Intellectual Property laws are incredibly lax by comparison to other related laws. For instance, trespassing laws. Just like "copying"...a person who trespasses "takes nothing"...but instead is using property without the owner's permission. In many states, deadly force can be used to prevent such illegal use of one's property. Just something to think about.
If you had your way, we'd live in a society of "to each according to his need"...also known as Communism. Maybe China really *is* the place for you. I really hope that you are able to invent some really cool gadget or software, and have it taken away by some mega-corporation who goes on to market it for billions while you get nothing. Since everything is in the public domain, surely you wouldn't mind.
Well, like I said in my original reply (although it didn't originally apply to you), perhaps it is time that you moved to another country. Since you obviously have no interest in actually being proactive in the political system to change it for the good of "the people" (when was the last time you wrote your congressman about these issues?), and you have no respect for the laws that happen to be on the books here (whether or not they are wise, just, or otherwise good for the citizenry is immaterial in a court of law as long as they are constitutionally sound)....you obviously would be happier in another type of society. I hear that China is a hotbed of IP piracy, and political commentary is "discouraged". I think you would fit right in. Send me a postcard from Beijing when you get there.
As for your commentary that they don't own the intellectual property in question..well, again I'd have to say that the law says different. If you choose to stay in our fine country (despite your complete apathy on trying to work towards a real solution), I wish you the best of luck in convincing a judge on your viewpoint when one of the "**AA" lawyers comes a-knocking for your behavior:) It's folks like you that the media *love* to point to when the question of IP theft and such come into the spotlight. "Thanks" for providing the **AA more ammunition to use against all p2p users. Like I mentioned before, if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And you are clearly part of the problem, and making the legitimate uses of p2p technology more and more difficult to demonstrate to the non-technically-savvy media and political leaders.
I have no respect for the RIAA or MPAA in the methods that they employ to track down violators (this new DRM virus bullshit is a new low in my opinion), but I have even less respect for those who demonstrate such wanton disregard for the laws, and then cry when they get their little hands slapped by "The Man". And as for your argument that "nobody has the right to control how intellect is distributed"...well, your ignorance shines though yet again. This power is granted to Congress (in order to pass laws in this area) by the Constitution of the United States (perhaps you've heard of it....) in Article I, Section 8 " To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" So again, if you aren't prepared to 1) live with this or 2) work towards a Constitutional amendment to change this then I suggest you seek accomodations in another place where such ideas are not a consideration. You may fancy yourself as a revolutionary engaged in civil disobedience...but I simply see you as an ignorant petty thief. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors...you'll need it with that attitude you carry.
That's a great attitude...lay down and die. You might consider the alternative of contacting your congress-people directly, supporting the EFF, etc...instead of such defeatist "drivel" (your word). Also, I don't recall ever using the word "donating"...dunno where you got that. And since when is downloading ripped music from strangers "copying"? Last I heard that was known as illegal distribution of licenced and copyrighted material. I have a large MP3 collection, all of which consists of music that I have personally ripped from CD's that I purchased. I will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve my (and anyone's) right to do that. However, if some bozo wants to download music, also known as intelletutal property under our current system of law, for free without any compensation to the copyright holder....well I'm sorry to have to burst the bubble in your rose-colored world but that my friend is called theft. It's not an analogy...it's a legal definition and a very direct comparison to theft of physical merchandise. Please educate yourself before spouting off such gibberish.
If you don't agree with the business practices of the record industry and/or the movie industry...great...make your statement by not buying CD's, DVD's or going to the cinema. But the answer is not to steal...because the law is never going to be on your side whether or not you believe you have the "moral high ground". If you think that's bullshit...great....like I said before work within the system and help be a force in changing it. But in the mean time...the rules are such that YOU are going to jail and/or paying a fine for stealing content, and not the "evil empires" of the record and movie studios...so YOU tell ME who's spouting off the "drivel".
While I hardly approve of the measures that the **AA's are using to enforce their business model, I think that you are not quite grasping the concept of what is illegal and what is not. The television show you mention clearly was demonstrating an illegal activity. Just because you don't agree with a company's business practice, you don't have the right to steal from them. So, if you think Walmart is the evil anti-christ of retail...are you going to teach your son to shoplift from there? That's what your comment implies. Yes, the RIAA and MPAA are acting in the interests of the record labels and movie studios at the expense of just about everyone else (including the artists). However, anyone who is blatantly stealing intellectual property, through any mechanism, deserves to be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. Don't like it? Work to get the law changed, or move to another country. The only reason that p2p is synonymous with illegal activity is that unfortunately the vast majority of its use is in fact illegal. That's not propaganda..that's realism. And it's people like you who help to perpetuate this, and screw over the rest of us who use BitTorrent for distributing Linux kernels and the like.
As long as you advocate turning a blind eye to blatant theft, please park your high horse at some other address that doesn't respect IP. You are not part of the solution...you are part of the problem.
Well, since the system seems to be a glorified packet sniffer..the solution is quite simple actually. SSL/TLS was designed for this very scenario: on-the-fly encryption between two unrelated endpoints. You could do any number of other things if you didn't want all of the complexity of implementing full-blown SSL/TLS. If you were just interested in encrypting the application-level data, and didn't really care about the lower-level stuff...you could roll your own encryption scheme using DH or RSA in order to create a secure channel to derive/exchange a symmetric key (for DES/3DES/AES/*insert favorite symmetric algorithm here*). Of course, none of this prevents the RIAA or whoever from actually logging on to your system via the P2P program as a normal user and "browsing your wares", so to speak. I think for that, you would need a mechanism similar to the PGP "web of trust"...where you only allow clients that have been "vouched for" by entities that you trust. Yes, I know that digital certificates do the same thing..but they generally require more centralization than does the PGP model. You could limit the "degrees of separation" allowed to access your box...minimizing the risk that the "bad guys" could covertly sneak into the trust-web at a level that you authorize. Of course, as long as you are allowing basically anonymous connections to your shares, you'll never be 100% secure from the *AA, but this would certainly mitigate those risks to a large degree. The actual implementation of such a system is left as an excercise to the reader:)
While it seems to me that a *nix-based solution would probably serve you the best (free, powerful, highly-customizable, etc etc), it also seems that most folks have also neglected to mention some strategies that could be used in setting up the traffic shaping. Probably the easiest way to look at things is that you are uploading data using a predictable source or destination port. Simply make that a *low* priority, and everything else will automagically have a higher priority. This is useful when one considers that not all traffic shaping packages have options of specifying traffic such as ACKs as shaping types (many of the simpler packages can only filter on port). Also, in order to maximize the throughput, you should set the overall upstream bandwidth on the shaping box to match the DSL capped value, so that buffers and such on the modem don't fool TCP into not issuing quench requests and such. This way, the shaping box is actually in full control, without interference from "artificial" factors upstream that might screw things up for you. This can be thought of as "matching the impedence" for maximum power throughput in an electrical circuit--same concept and I'm sure someone with more caffeine in their system than I could show the benefits mathematically.
I personally use a FreeBSD machine (PPro 180MHz) as my NAT/router/firewall (and outgoing SMTP, internal IMAP, mp3 server, photo album, etc) with a number of windoze and *nix machines behind it. As such, it is *way* overpowered for what it does--so suggestions of pentium 90's are very feasible. For the low bandwidth requirements that you have, you could probably even use an old 486 with no problem if you were doing only net traffic functions with it. I've not had to actually do any kind of QoS or shaping with mine, but after thinking about the topic I might just give it a go for the fun of it:) Good luck with yours!
IBM has announced that the next rev of the S-80's will include hot-swappable memory and CPU's...so that won't be an issue for much longer. As a sysadmin who helps run a pair of S-80's, I can definitely say that they are some *sweet* machines:)
The simple fact is that if you aren't encrypting your email, ANY sysadmin on the mail path from you to the destination can read what you've sent. That should send shivers down ANYONE's spine if they are in the least concerned about privacy. AOL isn't to blame here (tho I am far from fond of them for other reasons); it is ultimately the responsibility of end users to protect their own privacy if they are concerned about it.
I just finished posting a similar, if abbreviated, view on the IMDB. The movie sucked. I really wanted to like it...but just couldn't. But like Rob said, seeing the trailer on the big screen was almost worth the money by itself, so I didn't feel *too* cheated.
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For the most part I agree with that. But I think you are missing the point of why the defeat of this bill was such a Good Thing (tm). This doesn't require there to be a "wireless tax" state-wide. It only allows each municipality to decide for themselves if they want to establish one. What is good for one place is not necessarily good for another. Allowing the local people to vote on local issues is a win for everyone. Now THAT's keeping the government out of your life...
LOL that's just so amazingly not even in the same category as to be comical. I'm going to spell it out, using really short words so that you might understand. This nation decided upon its creation that intellectual property is a good thing. The founding fathers spelled it out in the Constitution. Intellectual Property helps spur innovation by creating a financial incentive to create new things...thereby (oops...thereby is a complicated word, sorry) improving the lives of the general population by helping to introduce more art and inventinons to the society over time than would otherwise be available. This society has made a decision that this is a Good Thing (tm) for more than 2 centuries. Just because you want everything that people work for to be handed to you for free, doesn't mean that you are right.
Comparing the rights of people to own property and make a living off it to the Holocaust shows just how fucking ignorant you are. Why don't you read a book first before trying to chime in on such topics. Better yet, why don't you get a job and make a living...and see what the real world is really like, before you make moral judgements on what is acceptable. Simply put (in deference to you) copyrights and patents are a moral and just way of providing incentive to artists and inventors to create more art and inventions according to the vast majority of people who live in this country. Does this mean that every law regulating intellectual property is a good one? Hell no..but that doesn't invalidate the concept of intellectual property being a net gain for our society. Don't like it? Start a movement to change it, or get the fuck out. There are plenty of countries who have no respect for Intellectual Property in the world...and I think you'll notice that they don't create too many new things but rather just pirate content and inventions created in other places. I'm afraid that no argument you can make will ever justify theft of intellectual property just because you believe in your little heart that it all should be free because you don't feel like paying for it. Tell you what, I think that all property that YOU own should be in the public domain. Why don't you mail me a few of your video games...to re-distribute your wealth. Put your money where your mouth is, buddy.
You're right. And the fact that it's still around after all these years says something about what the 51% think about it. Sorry to say, but you're in the minority on this one. Perhaps it is YOU who needs to re-evaluate your morals. You are trying to impose your viewpoint that property ownership is immoral on the majority of folks who live in this society who think quite differently.
By your definition, no one should be able to own anything. Intellectual Property laws are incredibly lax by comparison to other related laws. For instance, trespassing laws. Just like "copying"...a person who trespasses "takes nothing"...but instead is using property without the owner's permission. In many states, deadly force can be used to prevent such illegal use of one's property. Just something to think about.
If you had your way, we'd live in a society of "to each according to his need"...also known as Communism. Maybe China really *is* the place for you. I really hope that you are able to invent some really cool gadget or software, and have it taken away by some mega-corporation who goes on to market it for billions while you get nothing. Since everything is in the public domain, surely you wouldn't mind.
Well, like I said in my original reply (although it didn't originally apply to you), perhaps it is time that you moved to another country. Since you obviously have no interest in actually being proactive in the political system to change it for the good of "the people" (when was the last time you wrote your congressman about these issues?), and you have no respect for the laws that happen to be on the books here (whether or not they are wise, just, or otherwise good for the citizenry is immaterial in a court of law as long as they are constitutionally sound)....you obviously would be happier in another type of society. I hear that China is a hotbed of IP piracy, and political commentary is "discouraged". I think you would fit right in. Send me a postcard from Beijing when you get there.
:) It's folks like you that the media *love* to point to when the question of IP theft and such come into the spotlight. "Thanks" for providing the **AA more ammunition to use against all p2p users. Like I mentioned before, if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. And you are clearly part of the problem, and making the legitimate uses of p2p technology more and more difficult to demonstrate to the non-technically-savvy media and political leaders.
As for your commentary that they don't own the intellectual property in question..well, again I'd have to say that the law says different. If you choose to stay in our fine country (despite your complete apathy on trying to work towards a real solution), I wish you the best of luck in convincing a judge on your viewpoint when one of the "**AA" lawyers comes a-knocking for your behavior
I have no respect for the RIAA or MPAA in the methods that they employ to track down violators (this new DRM virus bullshit is a new low in my opinion), but I have even less respect for those who demonstrate such wanton disregard for the laws, and then cry when they get their little hands slapped by "The Man". And as for your argument that "nobody has the right to control how intellect is distributed"...well, your ignorance shines though yet again. This power is granted to Congress (in order to pass laws in this area) by the Constitution of the United States (perhaps you've heard of it....) in Article I, Section 8 " To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" So again, if you aren't prepared to 1) live with this or 2) work towards a Constitutional amendment to change this then I suggest you seek accomodations in another place where such ideas are not a consideration. You may fancy yourself as a revolutionary engaged in civil disobedience...but I simply see you as an ignorant petty thief. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors...you'll need it with that attitude you carry.
That's a great attitude...lay down and die. You might consider the alternative of contacting your congress-people directly, supporting the EFF, etc...instead of such defeatist "drivel" (your word). Also, I don't recall ever using the word "donating"...dunno where you got that. And since when is downloading ripped music from strangers "copying"? Last I heard that was known as illegal distribution of licenced and copyrighted material. I have a large MP3 collection, all of which consists of music that I have personally ripped from CD's that I purchased. I will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve my (and anyone's) right to do that. However, if some bozo wants to download music, also known as intelletutal property under our current system of law, for free without any compensation to the copyright holder....well I'm sorry to have to burst the bubble in your rose-colored world but that my friend is called theft. It's not an analogy...it's a legal definition and a very direct comparison to theft of physical merchandise. Please educate yourself before spouting off such gibberish.
If you don't agree with the business practices of the record industry and/or the movie industry...great...make your statement by not buying CD's, DVD's or going to the cinema. But the answer is not to steal...because the law is never going to be on your side whether or not you believe you have the "moral high ground". If you think that's bullshit...great....like I said before work within the system and help be a force in changing it. But in the mean time...the rules are such that YOU are going to jail and/or paying a fine for stealing content, and not the "evil empires" of the record and movie studios...so YOU tell ME who's spouting off the "drivel".
While I hardly approve of the measures that the **AA's are using to enforce their business model, I think that you are not quite grasping the concept of what is illegal and what is not. The television show you mention clearly was demonstrating an illegal activity. Just because you don't agree with a company's business practice, you don't have the right to steal from them. So, if you think Walmart is the evil anti-christ of retail...are you going to teach your son to shoplift from there? That's what your comment implies. Yes, the RIAA and MPAA are acting in the interests of the record labels and movie studios at the expense of just about everyone else (including the artists). However, anyone who is blatantly stealing intellectual property, through any mechanism, deserves to be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law. Don't like it? Work to get the law changed, or move to another country. The only reason that p2p is synonymous with illegal activity is that unfortunately the vast majority of its use is in fact illegal. That's not propaganda..that's realism. And it's people like you who help to perpetuate this, and screw over the rest of us who use BitTorrent for distributing Linux kernels and the like.
As long as you advocate turning a blind eye to blatant theft, please park your high horse at some other address that doesn't respect IP. You are not part of the solution...you are part of the problem.
Well, since the system seems to be a glorified packet sniffer..the solution is quite simple actually. SSL/TLS was designed for this very scenario: on-the-fly encryption between two unrelated endpoints. You could do any number of other things if you didn't want all of the complexity of implementing full-blown SSL/TLS. If you were just interested in encrypting the application-level data, and didn't really care about the lower-level stuff...you could roll your own encryption scheme using DH or RSA in order to create a secure channel to derive/exchange a symmetric key (for DES/3DES/AES/*insert favorite symmetric algorithm here*). Of course, none of this prevents the RIAA or whoever from actually logging on to your system via the P2P program as a normal user and "browsing your wares", so to speak. I think for that, you would need a mechanism similar to the PGP "web of trust"...where you only allow clients that have been "vouched for" by entities that you trust. Yes, I know that digital certificates do the same thing..but they generally require more centralization than does the PGP model. You could limit the "degrees of separation" allowed to access your box...minimizing the risk that the "bad guys" could covertly sneak into the trust-web at a level that you authorize. Of course, as long as you are allowing basically anonymous connections to your shares, you'll never be 100% secure from the *AA, but this would certainly mitigate those risks to a large degree. The actual implementation of such a system is left as an excercise to the reader :)
While it seems to me that a *nix-based solution would probably serve you the best (free, powerful, highly-customizable, etc etc), it also seems that most folks have also neglected to mention some strategies that could be used in setting up the traffic shaping. Probably the easiest way to look at things is that you are uploading data using a predictable source or destination port. Simply make that a *low* priority, and everything else will automagically have a higher priority. This is useful when one considers that not all traffic shaping packages have options of specifying traffic such as ACKs as shaping types (many of the simpler packages can only filter on port). Also, in order to maximize the throughput, you should set the overall upstream bandwidth on the shaping box to match the DSL capped value, so that buffers and such on the modem don't fool TCP into not issuing quench requests and such. This way, the shaping box is actually in full control, without interference from "artificial" factors upstream that might screw things up for you. This can be thought of as "matching the impedence" for maximum power throughput in an electrical circuit--same concept and I'm sure someone with more caffeine in their system than I could show the benefits mathematically.
:) Good luck with yours!
I personally use a FreeBSD machine (PPro 180MHz) as my NAT/router/firewall (and outgoing SMTP, internal IMAP, mp3 server, photo album, etc) with a number of windoze and *nix machines behind it. As such, it is *way* overpowered for what it does--so suggestions of pentium 90's are very feasible. For the low bandwidth requirements that you have, you could probably even use an old 486 with no problem if you were doing only net traffic functions with it. I've not had to actually do any kind of QoS or shaping with mine, but after thinking about the topic I might just give it a go for the fun of it
IBM has announced that the next rev of the S-80's will include hot-swappable memory and CPU's...so that won't be an issue for much longer. As a sysadmin who helps run a pair of S-80's, I can definitely say that they are some *sweet* machines :)
The simple fact is that if you aren't encrypting your email, ANY sysadmin on the mail path from you to the destination can read what you've sent. That should send shivers down ANYONE's spine if they are in the least concerned about privacy. AOL isn't to blame here (tho I am far from fond of them for other reasons); it is ultimately the responsibility of end users to protect their own privacy if they are concerned about it.
Hate to point out the obvious...but I believe that the message you replied to was a sarcastic farse. You need to lighten up a bit there bud.
I just finished posting a similar, if abbreviated, view on the IMDB. The movie sucked. I really wanted to like it...but just couldn't. But like Rob said, seeing the trailer on the big screen was almost worth the money by itself, so I didn't feel *too* cheated.