In what way has Eric actually said something that is obviously false [...], or done something that has actually defrauded people?
I don't believe that he's actively misleading anyone other than himself, and that's mostly about being some kind of Open Source Messiah. Let's not go there right now.
However, the more statements I see come out of him, the more I feel that he's blinded by his biases. There're times when a person crosses the line from righteous indignation to outright stupidity, and I see him lingering near that line quite a bit lately.
Not that I think he's wrong or lying about this "leak"... there's not enough evidence to say either way right now.
However, if I was working for an anti-Linux corporation and I wanted to propagate a hugely misleading document about what I'm doing for, say, the purposes of boosting my stock and distracting the investment community from what I'm really doing, I'd send it to someone who I know is out to get me. esr fits the bill.
Maybe I'm just casting doubt on him because I'm an underhanded bastard who expects this sort of thing from other underhanded bastards, but the whole situation just seems awfully convenient.
That would only be safe if they were absolutely sure a whistleblower can't or won't produce proof of authenticity.
True. But do you really expect that from someone who's leaking high level documents anonymously? Proof of authenticity is quite likely to involve revealing identity and suffering the consequences. Not really the sort of things whistleblowers do unless they're backed into a corner.
Wave bye-bye to the nice whistleblower. I bet the 'typos and syntax bobbles' are part of a document tracking system. SCO will know who released this.
Yeah, that'd be real smart. Then they have a hostile witness that's willing to testify that he/she got fired for distributing a document that SCO failed to provide to IBM or Red Hat or Novell for discovery.
Or, I suppose, they can fire the person, provide a copy to the various lawyers, possibly get an nice friendly SEC visit, and generally piss off everyone that might have been involved in pushing money at them.
The only thing they can safely do is deny the whole thing... Eric's lost enough credibility lately that it might actually fly. Heck, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just someone trolling him... It's really about time.
Seems like it might end up doing to the MP3 format what record company DRM is doing to the CD... Creating a format where you don't know if you'll be able to play it until you hit "play".
And if they can enforce DRM in authoring tools through nasty patent licensing, well, you can maybe kiss MP3 goodbye as a useful format.
If Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" thing ever panned out, they'd be goners anyways... You can't sell security add-ons if the operating system is "secure enough". This doesn't really change anything, it just accelerates it.
Mark was giving a presentation at a conference. He was showing off one of his small insect robots. He then (to the audience's horror) crumpled it up like a wad of paper and put it down on top of the overhead projector
Sounds like Mark. When he was a lab tech at University of Waterloo, I got to see him do similar things on many occasions, although maybe not as extreme. Then again, his budget was whatever he could scrounge at surplus electronics stores. He'd bend and twist the wire legs of robots, flip them on their backs, swap around resistors to change the style of walk of the robot, and generally introduce randomness into their environment.
He also had the most kick-ass water gun ever, which he appears to have turned into a marketable product. Although it looks like he dropped the flash bulb. Pity.
I'm thinking that if someone from Microsoft stated "It's just a crash" the editors here would be just a touch more sarcastic...
Yes, but Microsoft lacks credibility when it comes to security.
If William G Gates personally presented me with a signed and notarized certificate saying "It's just a crash" I'd get still get a second opinion. After making sure I still had my wallet.
Of course. But there's a world of difference between a subpoenaed witness and someone who's actively cooperating. And then there's the PR and jury influencing aspects of having the ex-CEO of Caldera testifying against Caldera's interpretation of events that happened while he was in charge.
Boies might be good (although he sure hasn't been showing it lately), but I can't see him filling a jury full of people dumb enough to buy the ABI argument.
Hmmm... I guess he could feed them some of Darl's crack.
...since logic doesn't seem to have much to do with it they might say they were an unauthorized release and try to make some specific employee the goat, claim that the ABIs are an insignificant part of their total IP in Linux, or other things I'm not warped enough to think of. They aren't going to shut up for anything.
Most of those arguments would be shot to shit if IBM could just arrange for Ransom Love as a witness for the defense.
"Yes, while I was running Caldera I ordered employees to contribute the ABI's and a whole bunch of other stuff under the GPL to the Open Source community. Yes, IBM was contributing stuff with our approval."
By the sounds of it, Love's pissed off enough that he might go along with it.
Comprehensive, that's for sure, but the examples look like it's also reinventing FILE* in the io_* API.
glibc's fmemopen() moots most of the IBM article, I think, but since I don't code exclusively in a glibc environment... Grrr... If only POSIX specced out FILE* a bit tighter...
Anyone who's done C coding for more than, oh, a day would have already figured that out. It's not a coincidence that every programming language that doesn't have "smart" arrays built into the language ends up with some sort of buffer class (Java's ByteStream class, C++'s stream IO buffers, etc).
The fundamental problem is that this sort of thing needs to be done at the C library level. And if it's not done in a flexible fashion, you end up with a library call that rarely gets used. Anyone used hsearch() lately?
If only clib streams (FILE* and friends) were extensible, this article would never have had to be written.
"... but wholesale copying of music... is just plain immorally wrong"
Nope, that doesn't follow. Maybe if you'd said "wholesale _infringement_". I also think you meant "morally wrong", but we get the idea.
Copying music is moral and right in many circumstances. Even in many situations where certain interests say it isn't.
- it's moral and right if the music is public domain. If someone wanted to go after the music industry for abuse of copyright _priveleges_, that might mean most music out there. - it's often moral and right if it's a live recording. - it's moral and right if the copyright owner allows it - it's moral and right if the copyright owner is compensated appropriately (under Canadian copyright law, as far as we can tell) - it's moral and right if the copier(s) live in a country that doesn't recognize the specific instance of copying as infringement (countries with "immature" copyright laws or some sort of private copying regime).
Then there's the wonderful grey areas called fair use (US law) and moral rights (many other coutries) which might be relevant to any given piece of work.
The basic reality is that the rightness or wrongness of copying a particular piece of music _must_ be decided on the piece by piece, uploader to downloader, day by day basis. You can't make sweeping wholesale decisions about the entire issue or any specific chunk of technology. _International_ copyright just doesn't work like that.
That's one of the implications of Turing completeness. If you can simulate a Turing machine, you must have an endless loop (or theoretically endless recursion).
"HyperText Markup Language is indeed a programming language. Just because it's child's play compared to C doesn't make it not a programming language."
What makes it "not a programming language" is that it's not Turing complete. It's a markup language, not a programming language. A complicated markup language full of browser-specific pitfalls and more standards documents than you can shake a stick at, but without flow control there's a real limit to how much trouble someone could get themselves into.
It may seem like a small distinction, but if I saw a resume with HTML listed as a programming language, I'd assume that the applicant has a weak grasp of language theory. It would certainly make me suspect how well they understood the concepts behind the other 8 or 9 languages they feel obligated to list.
Why aren't companies liable for failing to prevent obscene phone calls? How about flyers for adult video stores left on cars in the company parking lot? Are they liable if some moron plants a hidden camera in the women's bathroom?
Yes, spam happens more frequently than any of those, but this is slashdot. Reductuo ad absurdum, baby.
My question is, how the heck can we expect people feeling mental and emotional distress from things found in e-mail to cope with the other stresses of the modern workplace?!? Are these same people going to be checking into an institution the first time they're asked to meet an tough deadline, too?
"In short, Open Source computing is a concept whose day has come and now has gone, and it's time to either get back to chasing 'warez' or give up on computers entirely.
Unless there's something I'm missing here."
Anti-trust, maybe. Microsoft _needs_ Open Source in order to push Trusted Computing on the masses, just like it needed Linux to help prove that it still has to compete in the operating system space.
Open Source operating systems might not be able to take full advantage of the available hardware, but Microsoft and friends can't safely use the hardware to completely lock out Open Source.
Oh, wait, Bush is in the White House. Never mind. Forget I said anything.
Banners have gone the same way as spam to such a extent that there's been a backlash against anything that looks like advertising.
I actually don't mind banner ads, in general. What I do mind is banner ads that interfere with the content. That basically means anything animated, anything that requires plug-ins, anything that pops up windows, etc. I've come to read articles, not have some asshole in marketing induce a seizure.
Unfortunately, just like there's essentially no spam that's truthful, bandwidth friendly, opt-in, and otherwise acceptable, there's virtually no banner ad that isn't overly intrusive.
So I've reached a decent middle ground (for me... advertisers might not like it). I use Konqueror with Javascript,.gif animations and plugins all disabled. Banner ads that work in the first.gif frame are seen (in fact, at the top of this comment post page is a perfectly good Windows Server 2003 advert) while all the fancy crap goes missing. I still won't click on an ad anymore than I'll call the toll-free number on a television ad, but at least it counts as a page view for/.
It sounds like NAV04 has gone a little overboard, but it was bound to happen. I'll make a point of ROTFL if I ever see a NAV04 banner.
It's a good article and definitely worth a read just to understand how incredibly unsophisticated the people implementing this DRM stuff actually. Anyone with a passing interest in how computers actually work could have defeated this piece of shit.
What scares me is that the media companies probably did field testing and found that 98% of Joe Public was unable to defeat the DRM measures.
"At the moment, the Apple Store lets you "authorize" music files. So for this person, after the file had been "sold", he would have to deauthorize the up to 3 other computers that had been allowed to play the song, give a copy of the file to the buyer, then provide them with his Apple iTunes Store username/password so they could authorize it on their machine."
What happens when you sell a physical CD containing music? You have to destroy/overwrite any tapes that you might have made (including mixed tapes), you need to delete the MP3's you ripped to your desktop and ensure that any other digital devices (players, PDA, other networked PCs, etc) no longer have any tracks from the disk, and you need to destroy any CD's that you burned containing tracks from the disk. Oh, and don't forget sending out messages to anyone who got it from you via Kazaa and such.
Or something like that. Specific details are probably more convoluted and you'll need your own lawyer to figure out which copies you need to destroy. iTunes probably makes it easier to manage by limiting how much the music can be copied in the first place.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see the number in the billions, although any specific number is just silly.
For the organization I work for, the final cost will probably be 7, maybe 8, figures. Heck, we'll probably end up spending that on consultants to come and tell us what happened how to do better.
1. during the actual attacks, our network admins go into full reactive CYA mode. That is, they take down routers to "protect" sections of the network, they monitor things up the hoop, and they test as deploy defenses. In the cases involving worms, they scan the network for vulnerable systems.
2. obviously, this is going to affect peoples ability to get work done. In our organization, we keep huge amounts of metrics on productivity and quality of the end product and we can probably point to actual effects.
3. after the fact, there's a report going up to the head of the entire organization (of a government ministry). This report will likely involve hundreds people's time to prepare. Not counting the time doing forensics that a good network admin would normally do.
4. after the report, there will undoubtedly be a period of security activity to prevent any further attacks.
And we never even really got hit. The preventative measures did more damage than any actual virus or worm.
The obvious question, mind you, is whether all this time and money is even justified? It isn't. My specific department never saw a hint of an actual attack because we don't do stupid shit like leaving netbios ports open to the Internet and mostly use Unix tools (including a fascist filter) for e-mail.
So yeah, the total figure is probably in the billions. However, if people were actually doing their jobs, it _should_, maybe, be millions... after all, worms suck bandwidth.
c.
"It's like SCO is holding a handgrenade and people are slowly moving away from the madman..."
Picture McBride behind the wheel of a minivan, flying down a drag strip as fast as 6 cylinders can take it on a collision course with a main battle tank. The SCO van has lights flashing, sirens blaring, mimes doing handstands on the roof, and maybe a little T&A out the sunroof. Oh, and it's full of lawyers.
The tank isn't doing much of anything, really.
Now, what we're all wondering... Is Darl McBride just some crazy lunatic powering his shitbox down the road and maybe planning on turning at the last minute, or does he really have something in that minivan that can take out a tank. And if he does, when is he gonna whip it out? Will the tank bring around the main gun and blast him, or will it just use the machine gun? How many lawyers are killed? Mimes? Will the minivan turn into a DeLorean at the very last second and blast a trail through time?!?
I don't know about you, but the suspense is killing me.
I'd be interested in knowing what the numbers would be for adults that don't trade files.
I'd be willing to bet that the percentages are probably similar. In fact, it's far more likely that the _average_ adult has far less respect for copyright than the average file trader simply because of the demographic distribution of people who have computers and networks good enough to actually play music and movies. Things like education and knowledge work would tend to imply a higher exposure to copyright issues, wouldn't it?
I also highly doubt that this has changed much in the last century or so. The only thing that has changed is the ease of copyright infringement.
Ian's stance seems pretty darn clear and unambiguous. Freenet and its ilk are tools allowing free and anonymous speech even against large and organized adversaries. These goals and the goals of corporations and misguided governments are mutually exclusive.
He didn't really argue strongly about good or bad, other than to say that Freenet is better than guns and such. I suppose it's implied that he believes the freedom is good and any controls over freedom are bad.
Slashdot Mirror
In what way has Eric actually said something that is obviously false [...], or done something that has actually defrauded people?
I don't believe that he's actively misleading anyone other than himself, and that's mostly about being some kind of Open Source Messiah. Let's not go there right now.
However, the more statements I see come out of him, the more I feel that he's blinded by his biases. There're times when a person crosses the line from righteous indignation to outright stupidity, and I see him lingering near that line quite a bit lately.
Not that I think he's wrong or lying about this "leak"... there's not enough evidence to say either way right now.
However, if I was working for an anti-Linux corporation and I wanted to propagate a hugely misleading document about what I'm doing for, say, the purposes of boosting my stock and distracting the investment community from what I'm really doing, I'd send it to someone who I know is out to get me. esr fits the bill.
Maybe I'm just casting doubt on him because I'm an underhanded bastard who expects this sort of thing from other underhanded bastards, but the whole situation just seems awfully convenient.
c.
That would only be safe if they were absolutely sure a whistleblower can't or won't produce proof of authenticity.
True. But do you really expect that from someone who's leaking high level documents anonymously? Proof of authenticity is quite likely to involve revealing identity and suffering the consequences. Not really the sort of things whistleblowers do unless they're backed into a corner.
c.
Wave bye-bye to the nice whistleblower. I bet the 'typos and syntax bobbles' are part of a document tracking system. SCO will know who released this.
Yeah, that'd be real smart. Then they have a hostile witness that's willing to testify that he/she got fired for distributing a document that SCO failed to provide to IBM or Red Hat or Novell for discovery.
Or, I suppose, they can fire the person, provide a copy to the various lawyers, possibly get an nice friendly SEC visit, and generally piss off everyone that might have been involved in pushing money at them.
The only thing they can safely do is deny the whole thing... Eric's lost enough credibility lately that it might actually fly. Heck, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just someone trolling him... It's really about time.
c.
Seems like it might end up doing to the MP3 format what record company DRM is doing to the CD... Creating a format where you don't know if you'll be able to play it until you hit "play".
And if they can enforce DRM in authoring tools through nasty patent licensing, well, you can maybe kiss MP3 goodbye as a useful format.
That sucks. The CD in my truck doesn't do OGG...
c.
If Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" thing ever panned out, they'd be goners anyways... You can't sell security add-ons if the operating system is "secure enough". This doesn't really change anything, it just accelerates it.
c.
Mark was giving a presentation at a conference. He was showing off one of his small insect robots. He then (to the audience's horror) crumpled it up like a wad of paper and put it down on top of the overhead projector
Sounds like Mark. When he was a lab tech at University of Waterloo, I got to see him do similar things on many occasions, although maybe not as extreme. Then again, his budget was whatever he could scrounge at surplus electronics stores. He'd bend and twist the wire legs of robots, flip them on their backs, swap around resistors to change the style of walk of the robot, and generally introduce randomness into their environment.
He also had the most kick-ass water gun ever, which he appears to have turned into a marketable product. Although it looks like he dropped the flash bulb. Pity.
c.
I'm thinking that if someone from Microsoft stated "It's just a crash" the editors here would be just a touch more sarcastic...
Yes, but Microsoft lacks credibility when it comes to security.
If William G Gates personally presented me with a signed and notarized certificate saying "It's just a crash" I'd get still get a second opinion. After making sure I still had my wallet.
c.
Of course. But there's a world of difference between a subpoenaed witness and someone who's actively cooperating. And then there's the PR and jury influencing aspects of having the ex-CEO of Caldera testifying against Caldera's interpretation of events that happened while he was in charge.
Boies might be good (although he sure hasn't been showing it lately), but I can't see him filling a jury full of people dumb enough to buy the ABI argument.
Hmmm... I guess he could feed them some of Darl's crack.
c.
...since logic doesn't seem to have much to do with it they might say they were an unauthorized release and try to make some specific employee the goat, claim that the ABIs are an insignificant part of their total IP in Linux, or other things I'm not warped enough to think of. They aren't going to shut up for anything.
Most of those arguments would be shot to shit if IBM could just arrange for Ransom Love as a witness for the defense.
"Yes, while I was running Caldera I ordered employees to contribute the ABI's and a whole bunch of other stuff under the GPL to the Open Source community. Yes, IBM was contributing stuff with our approval."
By the sounds of it, Love's pissed off enough that he might go along with it.
c.
I bet it would be a whole lot easier to find a glossy advertising unlimited bandwidth without any fine print. Preferably from a current campaign.
Then threaten then with a false advertising complaint.
c.
Comprehensive, that's for sure, but the examples look like it's also reinventing FILE* in the io_* API.
glibc's fmemopen() moots most of the IBM article, I think, but since I don't code exclusively in a glibc environment... Grrr... If only POSIX specced out FILE* a bit tighter...
c.
Anyone who's done C coding for more than, oh, a day would have already figured that out. It's not a coincidence that every programming language that doesn't have "smart" arrays built into the language ends up with some sort of buffer class (Java's ByteStream class, C++'s stream IO buffers, etc).
The fundamental problem is that this sort of thing needs to be done at the C library level. And if it's not done in a flexible fashion, you end up with a library call that rarely gets used. Anyone used hsearch() lately?
If only clib streams (FILE* and friends) were extensible, this article would never have had to be written.
c.
"Copyright infringement is wrong"
... is just plain immorally wrong"
Yup.
"... but wholesale copying of music
Nope, that doesn't follow. Maybe if you'd said "wholesale _infringement_". I also think you meant "morally wrong", but we get the idea.
Copying music is moral and right in many circumstances. Even in many situations where certain interests say it isn't.
- it's moral and right if the music is public domain. If someone wanted to go after the music industry for abuse of copyright _priveleges_, that might mean most music out there.
- it's often moral and right if it's a live recording.
- it's moral and right if the copyright owner allows it
- it's moral and right if the copyright owner is compensated appropriately (under Canadian copyright law, as far as we can tell)
- it's moral and right if the copier(s) live in a country that doesn't recognize the specific instance of copying as infringement (countries with "immature" copyright laws or some sort of private copying regime).
Then there's the wonderful grey areas called fair use (US law) and moral rights (many other coutries) which might be relevant to any given piece of work.
The basic reality is that the rightness or wrongness of copying a particular piece of music _must_ be decided on the piece by piece, uploader to downloader, day by day basis. You can't make sweeping wholesale decisions about the entire issue or any specific chunk of technology. _International_ copyright just doesn't work like that.
c.
That's one of the implications of Turing completeness. If you can simulate a Turing machine, you must have an endless loop (or theoretically endless recursion).
c.
"HyperText Markup Language is indeed a programming language. Just because it's child's play compared to C doesn't make it not a programming language."
What makes it "not a programming language" is that it's not Turing complete. It's a markup language, not a programming language. A complicated markup language full of browser-specific pitfalls and more standards documents than you can shake a stick at, but without flow control there's a real limit to how much trouble someone could get themselves into.
It may seem like a small distinction, but if I saw a resume with HTML listed as a programming language, I'd assume that the applicant has a weak grasp of language theory. It would certainly make me suspect how well they understood the concepts behind the other 8 or 9 languages they feel obligated to list.
c.
Why aren't companies liable for failing to prevent obscene phone calls? How about flyers for adult video stores left on cars in the company parking lot? Are they liable if some moron plants a hidden camera in the women's bathroom?
Yes, spam happens more frequently than any of those, but this is slashdot. Reductuo ad absurdum, baby.
My question is, how the heck can we expect people feeling mental and emotional distress from things found in e-mail to cope with the other stresses of the modern workplace?!? Are these same people going to be checking into an institution the first time they're asked to meet an tough deadline, too?
Stupidity is obscene.
c.
"In short, Open Source computing is a concept whose day has come and now has gone, and it's time to either get back to chasing 'warez' or give up on computers entirely.
Unless there's something I'm missing here."
Anti-trust, maybe. Microsoft _needs_ Open Source in order to push Trusted Computing on the masses, just like it needed Linux to help prove that it still has to compete in the operating system space.
Open Source operating systems might not be able to take full advantage of the available hardware, but Microsoft and friends can't safely use the hardware to completely lock out Open Source.
Oh, wait, Bush is in the White House. Never mind. Forget I said anything.
c.
Banners have gone the same way as spam to such a extent that there's been a backlash against anything that looks like advertising.
.gif animations and plugins all disabled. Banner ads that work in the first .gif frame are seen (in fact, at the top of this comment post page is a perfectly good Windows Server 2003 advert) while all the fancy crap goes missing. I still won't click on an ad anymore than I'll call the toll-free number on a television ad, but at least it counts as a page view for /.
I actually don't mind banner ads, in general. What I do mind is banner ads that interfere with the content. That basically means anything animated, anything that requires plug-ins, anything that pops up windows, etc. I've come to read articles, not have some asshole in marketing induce a seizure.
Unfortunately, just like there's essentially no spam that's truthful, bandwidth friendly, opt-in, and otherwise acceptable, there's virtually no banner ad that isn't overly intrusive.
So I've reached a decent middle ground (for me... advertisers might not like it). I use Konqueror with Javascript,
It sounds like NAV04 has gone a little overboard, but it was bound to happen. I'll make a point of ROTFL if I ever see a NAV04 banner.
c.
"Newest tautology proven correct."
"DRM still useless."
"Music companies still don't get it."
"Consumers still buy stuff."
It's a good article and definitely worth a read just to understand how incredibly unsophisticated the people implementing this DRM stuff actually. Anyone with a passing interest in how computers actually work could have defeated this piece of shit.
What scares me is that the media companies probably did field testing and found that 98% of Joe Public was unable to defeat the DRM measures.
c.
"At the moment, the Apple Store lets you "authorize" music files. So for this person, after the file had been "sold", he would have to deauthorize the up to 3 other computers that had been allowed to play the song, give a copy of the file to the buyer, then provide them with his Apple iTunes Store username/password so they could authorize it on their machine."
What happens when you sell a physical CD containing music? You have to destroy/overwrite any tapes that you might have made (including mixed tapes), you need to delete the MP3's you ripped to your desktop and ensure that any other digital devices (players, PDA, other networked PCs, etc) no longer have any tracks from the disk, and you need to destroy any CD's that you burned containing tracks from the disk. Oh, and don't forget sending out messages to anyone who got it from you via Kazaa and such.
Or something like that. Specific details are probably more convoluted and you'll need your own lawyer to figure out which copies you need to destroy. iTunes probably makes it easier to manage by limiting how much the music can be copied in the first place.
c.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see the number in the billions, although any specific number is just silly. For the organization I work for, the final cost will probably be 7, maybe 8, figures. Heck, we'll probably end up spending that on consultants to come and tell us what happened how to do better. 1. during the actual attacks, our network admins go into full reactive CYA mode. That is, they take down routers to "protect" sections of the network, they monitor things up the hoop, and they test as deploy defenses. In the cases involving worms, they scan the network for vulnerable systems. 2. obviously, this is going to affect peoples ability to get work done. In our organization, we keep huge amounts of metrics on productivity and quality of the end product and we can probably point to actual effects. 3. after the fact, there's a report going up to the head of the entire organization (of a government ministry). This report will likely involve hundreds people's time to prepare. Not counting the time doing forensics that a good network admin would normally do. 4. after the report, there will undoubtedly be a period of security activity to prevent any further attacks. And we never even really got hit. The preventative measures did more damage than any actual virus or worm. The obvious question, mind you, is whether all this time and money is even justified? It isn't. My specific department never saw a hint of an actual attack because we don't do stupid shit like leaving netbios ports open to the Internet and mostly use Unix tools (including a fascist filter) for e-mail. So yeah, the total figure is probably in the billions. However, if people were actually doing their jobs, it _should_, maybe, be millions... after all, worms suck bandwidth. c.
"could it be this minivan?"
SCO isn't exactly known for the speed of their products. I also think I used the term "shitbox" in my post.
c.
"It's like SCO is holding a handgrenade and people are slowly moving away from the madman..."
Picture McBride behind the wheel of a minivan, flying down a drag strip as fast as 6 cylinders can take it on a collision course with a main battle tank. The SCO van has lights flashing, sirens blaring, mimes doing handstands on the roof, and maybe a little T&A out the sunroof. Oh, and it's full of lawyers.
The tank isn't doing much of anything, really.
Now, what we're all wondering... Is Darl McBride just some crazy lunatic powering his shitbox down the road and maybe planning on turning at the last minute, or does he really have something in that minivan that can take out a tank. And if he does, when is he gonna whip it out? Will the tank bring around the main gun and blast him, or will it just use the machine gun? How many lawyers are killed? Mimes? Will the minivan turn into a DeLorean at the very last second and blast a trail through time?!?
I don't know about you, but the suspense is killing me.
c.
I'd be interested in knowing what the numbers would be for adults that don't trade files.
I'd be willing to bet that the percentages are probably similar. In fact, it's far more likely that the _average_ adult has far less respect for copyright than the average file trader simply because of the demographic distribution of people who have computers and networks good enough to actually play music and movies. Things like education and knowledge work would tend to imply a higher exposure to copyright issues, wouldn't it?
I also highly doubt that this has changed much in the last century or so. The only thing that has changed is the ease of copyright infringement.
c.
Actually, Ian was paraphrasing Judge Posner.
Ian's stance seems pretty darn clear and unambiguous. Freenet and its ilk are tools allowing free and anonymous speech even against large and organized adversaries. These goals and the goals of corporations and misguided governments are mutually exclusive.
He didn't really argue strongly about good or bad, other than to say that Freenet is better than guns and such. I suppose it's implied that he believes the freedom is good and any controls over freedom are bad.
c.