What matters is where the language came from, historically speaking. English is a Germanic language because it evolved from other Germanic languages, not because its grammar is similar to other Germanic languages (although the latter is often evidence suggesting the former).
Pretty much, it's just that most of those things aren't considered unethical. The difference between ethical killing (for example, squishing an insect, or [arguably] killing an animal for food) and unethical killing (murder) is always going to be arbitrary. The abortion debate exists because there's no consensus on when ending a life becomes unethical.
That is, after all, the only real way to reconcile the two statements
At least in the jurisdiction I live in, the law ignores the first statement rather than attempting to reconcile the two. If I state that I'm giving you permission to do something that would otherwise be a violation of my rights, that's making a license, even if I say "this is not a license".
By saying "you are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc." you are granting anybody a license to do those things to your post. Like the GP said, this means that your claim that "this post is not covered under any license" is false. A license is just permission to do something which would otherwise be illegal (in this case, violating your post's automatic copyright).
Stating that something is not under a license doesn't make it so if your words make it clear that creating a license was your intention. A license is a legal concept, not a document.
It may be worth using Vista for a while rather than blindly accepting the Slashdot hyperbole. UAC is not as annoying as you're implying, especially now that Vista's been out long enough for most of the troublesome apps to work out their issues. I don't see UAC prompts on my Vista machine much more frequently than administrator password prompts on my MacBook.
Regardless, the point is that even though the user might still have administrative privileges, they don't run with them. I think you'll find most people who use OS X at home are administrators, and most people who use Linux at home are sudoers - but they don't run as root, which is what most Windows users were effectively doing prior to Vista.
The result? Many programs that wouldn't run without (unnecessary) administrative privileges now work fine as a limited user, thanks to UAC making it obvious when the privileges are needed. The number of programs that trigger "unnecessary" UAC prompts is reducing all the time.
Security is improved, because programs are no longer able to silently perform administrative tasks just because you have administrative privileges.
You said that you expect OSes to make major changes occasionally. Why can't those changes be 'below the hood'?
The sort of changes that are immediately visible to end users - new applications, UI changes and cosmetic changes - are typically not the sort of changes that cause backwards-compatibility problems.
I expect OSs to occasionally have to make a major change. DOS to windows 3, 3 to 95, somewhat 95 to xp, but I don't see a distinct major change since then, so why do things have to break in vista and then again in 7
UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default. That's a pretty major change which was largely responsible for a lot of the problems people had with Vista when it was first released.
As far as I can tell, the change from Vista to 7 is much smaller, so there should be far fewer issues.
Are you serious? Every other Slashdot post has a capitalized title, so why should this one differ? And why is "wall wart" any more correct than "wall-wart"?
What's the mechanism of action of your 'electric jetpack'? I think you'd need an awfully powerful turbine to generate enough thrust to lift you off the ground.
I didn't mean to suggest that it was wrong to say things like "he stole my innocence" or "she stole my idea". Generally, in those circumstances, the precise legal definition of the term is not intended.
However, in the context of a legal discussion such as this one, it is not appropriate to use the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement. In law, 'theft' has a specific meaning. It describes the crime of stealing someone's property, which is not analogous to copyright infringement, a civil wrong.
Regardless of whether or not you believe copyright infringement should be illegal, it is not as bad as theft - nobody is deprived of any physical property. Associations like the IFPI and RIAA use the term 'theft' to make copyright infringement sound like a more serious wrong than it really is.
it makes me wonder if carbon based life coming around on earth was just a fluke? It could've possibly gone another way, if we hadn't gotten there first?
Isn't suggesting that abiogenesis was anything but a fluke creationism?
In common law jurisdictions, you can't 'change' a contract, you can only create a new contract that voids the old contract - and the new contract is subject to the same requirements with respect to offer and acceptance as any other contract. Silence does not constitute acceptance of an offer - Felthouse v. Bindley (1862) 142 ER 1037.
Of course, I don't know how this applies to American law.:-)
I had no problems using BitTorrent several years ago on a 512/128 connection - before ADSL2 was available at all. It was certainly a lot faster than the dialup connection I was using before that:-)
Also, I think you are wrong in your assumption of why people pirate movies, it's not because it's free, it's because it's convenient.
Do you have any evidence to support this argument? Seems to me that people do it because it's both free and convenient. Considering how expensive movies and music are these days, I think the 'free' part is probably a larger motivator, but I can't be certain.
In the United States, it's unconstitutional to pass an "ex post-facto" law - how is it that the terms of copyright are being retroactively renegotiated?
According to Wikipedia:
An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "after the fact") or retroactive law, is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of acts committed or the legal status of facts and relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law.
I don't think the copyright extensions constitute 'ex post facto' laws, because they don't change the legal consequences of acts committed before the laws were enacted. As I understand it, if the original copyright term was 50 years, the extensions were passed before those 50 years were up.
If copyrighted material had time to enter the public domain before the laws were enacted, then the laws would have turned distribution of the public domain material into copyright infringement again. Seems like this would make it 'ex post facto', but I don't think this is the case.
It sounds like you don't really understand the law very well. Generally, breach of contract is not a crime. The state is not going to prosecute you for breaching a contract - the aggrieved party could sue you though. "Nuisance" also has a specific legal meaning, and it's a tort, not a crime. Also, generally murder, rape and other crimes like that are considered crimes against the person, not crimes against property.
The difference is that adding sender verification to SMTP would be rather trivial. Verifying that the return address on a physical letter is accurate is far more difficult.
I'm still not sure if I believe the market share argument - but keep in mind that servers are typically administered by computer-savvy sysadmins, whereas the botnetted Windows machines are largely run by people who don't know what they're doing.
You said that Wikipedia includes information that's verifiable, but really it includes information that's repeated, which is not necessarily the same as verifiable.
It is in the sense that Wikipedia uses it. A statement is "verifiable" when its accuracy is easy to determine. Whenever Wikipedia says "X is true" and provides a citation, it's really saying "X is true according to Y". When a citation is provided, it's easy to go and verify that Y did in fact claim that X is true.
It's still hard to verify whether or not X is objectively true, but Wikipedia doesn't try to do this. In this sense, you're correct: what's 'verifiable' is what you can easily show that other people have repeated.
I mean, staying within Wikipedia's guidelines, I would be providing "verifiable" information if I modified the entry on Chuck Norris to state that he sleeps with a pillow under his gun. I could provide countless links to prove this.
I think Wikipedia's flaw, if you can call it that, is that it can't make sure all its policies and guidelines are followed. Pretty much every problem on Wikipedia is a result of policy being ignored.
The problem here is, as others have pointed out, that people can't be trusted to honestly report details about themselves.
There is an existing set of guidelines on how to deal with this problem, but I accept that there is room for improvement. However, I don't like the way your suggestion seems to allow the person to say whatever they want and prevent others from editing that information. Seems that would make Wikipedia less of a wiki - anybody should be able to edit it. If you want to present autobiographical information that can't be revised and updated by other people, you should make a personal website. Wikipedia should summarize the information that's out there, including citations from the personal website if necessary - remember, Wikipedia includes information based on its verifiability, not truth.
Slashdot Mirror
What matters is where the language came from, historically speaking. English is a Germanic language because it evolved from other Germanic languages, not because its grammar is similar to other Germanic languages (although the latter is often evidence suggesting the former).
Pretty much, it's just that most of those things aren't considered unethical. The difference between ethical killing (for example, squishing an insect, or [arguably] killing an animal for food) and unethical killing (murder) is always going to be arbitrary. The abortion debate exists because there's no consensus on when ending a life becomes unethical.
At least in the jurisdiction I live in, the law ignores the first statement rather than attempting to reconcile the two. If I state that I'm giving you permission to do something that would otherwise be a violation of my rights, that's making a license, even if I say "this is not a license".
By saying "you are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc." you are granting anybody a license to do those things to your post. Like the GP said, this means that your claim that "this post is not covered under any license" is false. A license is just permission to do something which would otherwise be illegal (in this case, violating your post's automatic copyright).
Stating that something is not under a license doesn't make it so if your words make it clear that creating a license was your intention. A license is a legal concept, not a document.
It may be worth using Vista for a while rather than blindly accepting the Slashdot hyperbole. UAC is not as annoying as you're implying, especially now that Vista's been out long enough for most of the troublesome apps to work out their issues. I don't see UAC prompts on my Vista machine much more frequently than administrator password prompts on my MacBook.
Regardless, the point is that even though the user might still have administrative privileges, they don't run with them. I think you'll find most people who use OS X at home are administrators, and most people who use Linux at home are sudoers - but they don't run as root, which is what most Windows users were effectively doing prior to Vista.
The result? Many programs that wouldn't run without (unnecessary) administrative privileges now work fine as a limited user, thanks to UAC making it obvious when the privileges are needed. The number of programs that trigger "unnecessary" UAC prompts is reducing all the time.
Security is improved, because programs are no longer able to silently perform administrative tasks just because you have administrative privileges.
You said that you expect OSes to make major changes occasionally. Why can't those changes be 'below the hood'?
The sort of changes that are immediately visible to end users - new applications, UI changes and cosmetic changes - are typically not the sort of changes that cause backwards-compatibility problems.
Summary indicates that the device has 512MB of onboard flash memory.
UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default. That's a pretty major change which was largely responsible for a lot of the problems people had with Vista when it was first released.
As far as I can tell, the change from Vista to 7 is much smaller, so there should be far fewer issues.
Are you serious? Every other Slashdot post has a capitalized title, so why should this one differ? And why is "wall wart" any more correct than "wall-wart"?
What's the mechanism of action of your 'electric jetpack'? I think you'd need an awfully powerful turbine to generate enough thrust to lift you off the ground.
Definitely a concern - although it's not such a big issue if you use an ISP that doesn't meter uploads.
I didn't mean to suggest that it was wrong to say things like "he stole my innocence" or "she stole my idea". Generally, in those circumstances, the precise legal definition of the term is not intended.
However, in the context of a legal discussion such as this one, it is not appropriate to use the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement. In law, 'theft' has a specific meaning. It describes the crime of stealing someone's property, which is not analogous to copyright infringement, a civil wrong.
Regardless of whether or not you believe copyright infringement should be illegal, it is not as bad as theft - nobody is deprived of any physical property. Associations like the IFPI and RIAA use the term 'theft' to make copyright infringement sound like a more serious wrong than it really is.
Isn't suggesting that abiogenesis was anything but a fluke creationism?
In common law jurisdictions, you can't 'change' a contract, you can only create a new contract that voids the old contract - and the new contract is subject to the same requirements with respect to offer and acceptance as any other contract. Silence does not constitute acceptance of an offer - Felthouse v. Bindley (1862) 142 ER 1037.
Of course, I don't know how this applies to American law. :-)
In Australia, you can't "change a contract" you can only form a new contract, which may render the previous contract void.
The new contract is subject to the requirements of consideration just like the old contract, too.
I had no problems using BitTorrent several years ago on a 512/128 connection - before ADSL2 was available at all. It was certainly a lot faster than the dialup connection I was using before that :-)
Do you have any evidence to support this argument? Seems to me that people do it because it's both free and convenient. Considering how expensive movies and music are these days, I think the 'free' part is probably a larger motivator, but I can't be certain.
According to Wikipedia:
I don't think the copyright extensions constitute 'ex post facto' laws, because they don't change the legal consequences of acts committed before the laws were enacted. As I understand it, if the original copyright term was 50 years, the extensions were passed before those 50 years were up.
If copyrighted material had time to enter the public domain before the laws were enacted, then the laws would have turned distribution of the public domain material into copyright infringement again. Seems like this would make it 'ex post facto', but I don't think this is the case.
It sounds like you don't really understand the law very well. Generally, breach of contract is not a crime. The state is not going to prosecute you for breaching a contract - the aggrieved party could sue you though. "Nuisance" also has a specific legal meaning, and it's a tort, not a crime. Also, generally murder, rape and other crimes like that are considered crimes against the person, not crimes against property.
Theft is unlawfully depriving somebody of their physical property.
You can't steal rights, or ideas. You can only steal physical property. Your definition of 'theft' is also unreasonable.
The difference is that adding sender verification to SMTP would be rather trivial. Verifying that the return address on a physical letter is accurate is far more difficult.
I'm still not sure if I believe the market share argument - but keep in mind that servers are typically administered by computer-savvy sysadmins, whereas the botnetted Windows machines are largely run by people who don't know what they're doing.
It is in the sense that Wikipedia uses it. A statement is "verifiable" when its accuracy is easy to determine. Whenever Wikipedia says "X is true" and provides a citation, it's really saying "X is true according to Y". When a citation is provided, it's easy to go and verify that Y did in fact claim that X is true.
It's still hard to verify whether or not X is objectively true, but Wikipedia doesn't try to do this. In this sense, you're correct: what's 'verifiable' is what you can easily show that other people have repeated.
I don't think any of those links would constitute "reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy".
I think Wikipedia's flaw, if you can call it that, is that it can't make sure all its policies and guidelines are followed. Pretty much every problem on Wikipedia is a result of policy being ignored.
The problem here is, as others have pointed out, that people can't be trusted to honestly report details about themselves.
There is an existing set of guidelines on how to deal with this problem, but I accept that there is room for improvement. However, I don't like the way your suggestion seems to allow the person to say whatever they want and prevent others from editing that information. Seems that would make Wikipedia less of a wiki - anybody should be able to edit it. If you want to present autobiographical information that can't be revised and updated by other people, you should make a personal website. Wikipedia should summarize the information that's out there, including citations from the personal website if necessary - remember, Wikipedia includes information based on its verifiability, not truth.