When I see someone reduced to arguing on semantics ("what is stealing?") then I know they have no legitimate justification.
Semantics is the meaning of words. How can correctly defining words invalidate an argument?
When I see someone complaining about "arguing on semantics" it's usually because they've used an incorrect word, either through ignorance or as propaganda, and can't bring themselves to admit they are wrong. After all, if their point was correct as stated, they could simply explain it.
As for your sociopathy comment, someone disagreeing with you about what is wrong is not necessarily a sociopath.
What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
Well, I don't pirate stuff, but I'd buy a heap more movies if no-DRM files were available for download from imdb.com
When my wife and I watch movies at home we are in the habit of looking up the actors on imdb.com to see what else they've been in etc. A buy-it-now button on imdb would make heaps of money.
prohibition makes supply harder and more expensive to get. this doesn't prevent addicts, who will do absolutely anything to get their fix, but it prevents the creation of more addicts.
Yet you can get heroin everywhere and the amounts a new user would need to develop a habit only costs a couple of hundred dollars. By your post, it seems you would even like alcohol prohibition back. Just as everybody could get alcohol during prohibition, so now everyone who wants heroin could get it. Heroin has been prohibited for a long time, if it was going to prevent creation of more addicts, there would be no heroin addicts by now. The reality is that for many addicts, their method of funding their habit is to sell it to more people, creating more addicts. Someone obtaining it legally and cheaply has no pressure to introduce more people to the drug.
Nevertheless I would not have heroin as an unrestricted substance but have it available through pharmacists, who could monitor use rates and target people for medical help.
As the parent of a recovering heroin addict, I can say that you are wrong, sir.
A friend's brother was a heroin addict. He died of an overdose. It seems his dealer had decided he was a liability and increased the concentration of what they sold him without telling him. If he had a reliable supply with labeled, predictable concentration he would be alive.
I wonder, if you could think about it clearly, how much of your son's problem was strictly the affects of heroin, and how much was driven by the need for excessive amounts of money to maintain the habit and therefore constant criminal behavior.
You're saying so long as the users can legally acquire high quality heroin there's no serious harm? But what about being addicted in the first place? I count that as harm.
Dependence is included in my quote of what harm it causes. It doesn't do stuff like destroy your liver, like alcohol can, for example. A heroin addict given a steady supply will not have their physical health destroyed by it.
What I would say is the primary damage of heroin is the destruction of the conscience. Heroin will make you feel good when you should be feeling guilty. It is this, combined with the drive to get more, that is so destructive to the individual. However the destruction of the conscience is a process that is accelerated and exacerbated by prohibition because of black market prices and habitual association with criminals. A heroin addict with a steady supply has a conscience that is compromised by that addiction but not destroyed by habitual violation.
As for meth not making you violent, obviously taking a hit doesn't instantly turn everyone into violent psychopaths or it wouldn't be a popular party drug. I don't care if some guy wrote a book, some people very definitely become violent on meth. The fact that it might be merely amplifies preexisting violent tendencies doesn't say much for it.
I wouldn't wish addiction on anyone, but addiction is not solved by prohibition. Prohibition also creates problems of it's own and makes real solutions harder to implement and less effective. In the case of heroin, if the cost was a small amount over production a fairly bad habit could be maintained without resort to crime.
and finally, what happens to people who are addicts and can't afford their fix, regardless of legality.
The same thing that happens to tobacco addicts and alcoholics when they can't afford their drugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin does not cause many long-term complications other than dependence and constipation. Adulterated "street" heroin however is considered to be one of the most harmful drugs especially if consumed intravenously.
Sorry, but most of the damage done by heroin can be attributed to policy decisions rather than pharmacology. Unlike meth, for example, heroin users will generally not become violent while they have enough of it. A high, consistent quality and cheap supply would eliminate heroin related violent crime. Compare to something like meth where people will become violent because of the direct effects of the drug itself and I definitely put heroin in a different class than other "hard" drugs. Still not a habit I'd recommend, to put it mildly.
1) I agree
2) Is a subset of 1
3) and 4) would be largely offset by a reliable supply of predictable quality, ie: those negative affects are largely due to prohibition rather than the drug itself.
The problem of heroin, taken apart from the "war on drugs" is that it is highly addictive. That's it.
You would only have to read one post above mine (including the quote from the previous post) to realize what a dumb-ass reply you made. In case clicking on "Parent" a couple of times is too much for you: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2682681&cid=39105905 "Except that part of the freedom that comes with free software is the freedom to sell that software."
...and if you're selling it, what's wrong with paying some royalties? There's free, as in libre, which is what you're talking about, and having associated costs doesn't affect that. Then there's free, as in beer, and having a royalty of x% of revenue doesn't affect that.
Let's say you have a 1% of revenue royalty to license a patent. Then Megacorp's army of lawyers say you are violating 200 of their patents.
Fair enough, but I was replying to a comment that started with "Causing a full security review after a known penetration costs REAL WORLD MONEY" so I think my comment is not unwarranted. In addition, criminals are generally not held personally liable for the costs of government enforcement actions against them. I'm just not sure of the appropriateness of a prison term for this. Just having a criminal record would be a significant deterrent for a lot of people, so a conviction and maybe some community service or a fine should have been sufficient.
The judge's comments "You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," indicates that sentencing was based on the wealth and influence of the victim rather than the nature of his crime. He wouldn't have gone to prison for hacking my server.
There is no inherent right to crack other people's property. I find nothing wrong in the law saying 'thou shalt not penetrate others network without explicit permission or authority.' This person had neither.
I don't condone his actions at all, but I question placing full legal responsibility on him for the cost of security reviews. Surely whatever security reviews the professionals at Facebook had been shown to be inadequate. Was the security of Facebook from other attacks decreased because of changes he made to the system? Did he cause damage or reveal it?
Sentence the man for what he did: breaking into the computers. Not based on crap like "Potentially what you did could have been utterly disastrous to Facebook"
Creating a hazard can be illegal, eg: you can be booked for reckless driving even if no other cars are around at the time. Leaving aside the question of whether it was he or Facebook that created the hazard, or what proportion of culpability should be shared, the sentence is based not on what he did, but who he did it to (from the first link in the summary) :
"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance,"
So to answer rgbrenner's "lock on your bedroom window is crap", argument, the judge's response is "You broke the bedroom lock on a rich man's house, it's not like you broke into the house of normal people".
You don't have to be sympathetic to this guy to find this court judgement reprehensible.
Yeh, I'd prefer it if these microdots didn't exist, but I've yet to see a convincing argument of their actual danger.
Then why would you prefer they don't exist? It would seem that you have an intuitive understanding of the problem that you are unable to articulate.
Many stores ask for personal details "for the warranty" so in fact to be able to track a printer to the purchaser is possible. The first thing off the top of my head is that this could affect whistle-blowers. If you are leaking information to the press, for example, you had better not have printed any of those files from your own printer.
The demonstrated danger, however, is the government itself. We have constitutional limits on the government because governments have over a period of thousands of years been shown to be dangerous. So, the proper question isn't "What reason have we shown to justify stopping the government doing this?" but rather "What justification of this action has the government provided to convince us to allow it?"
Where is the constitutional authority to track the writings of the population? Seems like it could be a first amendment issue to me.
On the face of it, to a non-lawyer such as myself, it doesn't seem that the federal government requiring these "features" could possibly be legal as it effectively prohibits anonymous campaign literature.
In India, which is worse off than both China and Korea, if you are literate (secondary school pass), you can get a call center job, or a secretarial lob atleast.
No need to slog like slaves
A lot of factory work is not too hard. In Australia, if you can get a call center job with no qualification other than literacy I could pretty much guarantee I could get a factory job with ok work conditions and higher pay from doing shift work. Probably more pleasant than dealing with angry customers over the phone too.
By your logic the woman's financial state should be guaranteed simply by getting married.
Marriage is, among other things, a financial partnership for most people. Yes, my wife should be guaranteed not to be dumped on the street with no assets or income so long as I am capable of preventing it, particularly if her needs include providing for my children.
I make pretty good money, much more than I was making 10 years ago when I married her. I have been able to pursue my career, working long and inconvenient hours partly because I have left much of the rest of life for her to look after. Despite the paycheck being in my name, it really is a join effort to make it come in and she deserves her cut.
I think that in the majority of cases divorce isn't something that just happens to you. It's like a car going rusty, if you notice when small patches of rust appear and fix them properly, your car will not fall apart from rust. It just doesn't happen that your perfectly maintained car collapses in a heap from rust on your way to work one day.
As someone who has come pretty close to getting divorced, I'll make a few observations.
(1) If you are interested to know, it is generally pretty easy to know if you are making your partner happy.
(2) If you aren't, there's a good chance they won't stay with you long term.
(3) They probably tell you on a regular basis the things they would like from you. Listen. No, really, shut up for a while. Don't explain your point, don't correct them or tell them why it can't be that way, forget about how unfair their demands are and JUST listen.
(4) You may need to get better at picking when to do the opposite of what they say. (I don't want you to buy flowers for valentines, it's just so commercialized.)
Could I get divorced, despite working hard not to? Sure, legally my wife can divorce me at any time for any or no reason, so it's possible. Are there really any statistics that are useful for determining the outcome of my relationship? No, "the odds" are not relevant, individual behavior is what counts.
I feel no obligation to obey laws written for the benefit of special interest groups rather than the general public, whether those laws are written in secret or not.
The question I have is, if the process of lawmaking is corrupted, at what point does it become a form of corruption to merely follow those laws, even if you had no part in making them.
Only if they flash. If it emits a steady light rather than flashing, torch is a more appropriate word. As you noted when you were in that cab you "saw what a 'torch' really is." I've no idea, now you know what a torch really is, why you want us to use the incorrect word.
I didn't say he was a socialist, I said he may as well have been a socialist for all the liberties we gave up (since I was replying to a right winger). As far as I'm concerned you may as well have been paraphrasing me when you said "The conservative right want to take your freedoms just as much as the progressive left - often more so. The only difference is ideology."
The progressives want to make decisions for your own good
I don't believe that, and I'd rather they didn't anyway. I'd like to decide what is for my own good. You know, the whole "freedom" thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That update was optional, and I believe Sony disclosed the removal of OtherOS functionality beforehand.
An advertised feature was removed whether or not you installed the update.
When I see someone reduced to arguing on semantics ("what is stealing?") then I know they have no legitimate justification.
Semantics is the meaning of words. How can correctly defining words invalidate an argument?
When I see someone complaining about "arguing on semantics" it's usually because they've used an incorrect word, either through ignorance or as propaganda, and can't bring themselves to admit they are wrong. After all, if their point was correct as stated, they could simply explain it.
As for your sociopathy comment, someone disagreeing with you about what is wrong is not necessarily a sociopath.
What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
Well, I don't pirate stuff, but I'd buy a heap more movies if no-DRM files were available for download from imdb.com
When my wife and I watch movies at home we are in the habit of looking up the actors on imdb.com to see what else they've been in etc. A buy-it-now button on imdb would make heaps of money.
Short words and long words.
prohibition makes supply harder and more expensive to get. this doesn't prevent addicts, who will do absolutely anything to get their fix, but it prevents the creation of more addicts.
Yet you can get heroin everywhere and the amounts a new user would need to develop a habit only costs a couple of hundred dollars. By your post, it seems you would even like alcohol prohibition back. Just as everybody could get alcohol during prohibition, so now everyone who wants heroin could get it. Heroin has been prohibited for a long time, if it was going to prevent creation of more addicts, there would be no heroin addicts by now. The reality is that for many addicts, their method of funding their habit is to sell it to more people, creating more addicts. Someone obtaining it legally and cheaply has no pressure to introduce more people to the drug.
Nevertheless I would not have heroin as an unrestricted substance but have it available through pharmacists, who could monitor use rates and target people for medical help.
As the parent of a recovering heroin addict, I can say that you are wrong, sir.
A friend's brother was a heroin addict. He died of an overdose. It seems his dealer had decided he was a liability and increased the concentration of what they sold him without telling him. If he had a reliable supply with labeled, predictable concentration he would be alive.
I wonder, if you could think about it clearly, how much of your son's problem was strictly the affects of heroin, and how much was driven by the need for excessive amounts of money to maintain the habit and therefore constant criminal behavior.
You're saying so long as the users can legally acquire high quality heroin there's no serious harm? But what about being addicted in the first place? I count that as harm.
Dependence is included in my quote of what harm it causes. It doesn't do stuff like destroy your liver, like alcohol can, for example. A heroin addict given a steady supply will not have their physical health destroyed by it.
What I would say is the primary damage of heroin is the destruction of the conscience. Heroin will make you feel good when you should be feeling guilty. It is this, combined with the drive to get more, that is so destructive to the individual. However the destruction of the conscience is a process that is accelerated and exacerbated by prohibition because of black market prices and habitual association with criminals. A heroin addict with a steady supply has a conscience that is compromised by that addiction but not destroyed by habitual violation.
As for meth not making you violent, obviously taking a hit doesn't instantly turn everyone into violent psychopaths or it wouldn't be a popular party drug. I don't care if some guy wrote a book, some people very definitely become violent on meth. The fact that it might be merely amplifies preexisting violent tendencies doesn't say much for it.
and finally, what happens to people who are addicts and can't afford their fix, regardless of legality.
The same thing that happens to tobacco addicts and alcoholics when they can't afford their drugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin
Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin does not cause many long-term complications other than dependence and constipation. Adulterated "street" heroin however is considered to be one of the most harmful drugs especially if consumed intravenously.
Sorry, but most of the damage done by heroin can be attributed to policy decisions rather than pharmacology. Unlike meth, for example, heroin users will generally not become violent while they have enough of it. A high, consistent quality and cheap supply would eliminate heroin related violent crime. Compare to something like meth where people will become violent because of the direct effects of the drug itself and I definitely put heroin in a different class than other "hard" drugs. Still not a habit I'd recommend, to put it mildly.
1) I agree
2) Is a subset of 1
3) and 4) would be largely offset by a reliable supply of predictable quality, ie: those negative affects are largely due to prohibition rather than the drug itself.
The problem of heroin, taken apart from the "war on drugs" is that it is highly addictive. That's it.
You would only have to read one post above mine (including the quote from the previous post) to realize what a dumb-ass reply you made. In case clicking on "Parent" a couple of times is too much for you: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2682681&cid=39105905
"Except that part of the freedom that comes with free software is the freedom to sell that software."
...and if you're selling it, what's wrong with paying some royalties? There's free, as in libre, which is what you're talking about, and having associated costs doesn't affect that. Then there's free, as in beer, and having a royalty of x% of revenue doesn't affect that.
Let's say you have a 1% of revenue royalty to license a patent. Then Megacorp's army of lawyers say you are violating 200 of their patents.
See the problem?
Fair enough, but I was replying to a comment that started with "Causing a full security review after a known penetration costs REAL WORLD MONEY" so I think my comment is not unwarranted. In addition, criminals are generally not held personally liable for the costs of government enforcement actions against them. I'm just not sure of the appropriateness of a prison term for this. Just having a criminal record would be a significant deterrent for a lot of people, so a conviction and maybe some community service or a fine should have been sufficient.
The judge's comments "You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," indicates that sentencing was based on the wealth and influence of the victim rather than the nature of his crime. He wouldn't have gone to prison for hacking my server.
There is no inherent right to crack other people's property. I find nothing wrong in the law saying 'thou shalt not penetrate others network without explicit permission or authority.' This person had neither.
I don't condone his actions at all, but I question placing full legal responsibility on him for the cost of security reviews. Surely whatever security reviews the professionals at Facebook had been shown to be inadequate. Was the security of Facebook from other attacks decreased because of changes he made to the system? Did he cause damage or reveal it?
Sentence the man for what he did: breaking into the computers. Not based on crap like "Potentially what you did could have been utterly disastrous to Facebook"
Creating a hazard can be illegal, eg: you can be booked for reckless driving even if no other cars are around at the time. Leaving aside the question of whether it was he or Facebook that created the hazard, or what proportion of culpability should be shared, the sentence is based not on what he did, but who he did it to (from the first link in the summary) :
"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance,"
So to answer rgbrenner's "lock on your bedroom window is crap", argument, the judge's response is "You broke the bedroom lock on a rich man's house, it's not like you broke into the house of normal people".
You don't have to be sympathetic to this guy to find this court judgement reprehensible.
The only problem with my analogy is that I didn't take anything from your house. This guy took source code worth millions of dollars from the server.
He copied the source code. For your analogy to be perfect, you would have to copy something from the house.
Yeh, I'd prefer it if these microdots didn't exist, but I've yet to see a convincing argument of their actual danger.
Then why would you prefer they don't exist? It would seem that you have an intuitive understanding of the problem that you are unable to articulate.
Many stores ask for personal details "for the warranty" so in fact to be able to track a printer to the purchaser is possible. The first thing off the top of my head is that this could affect whistle-blowers. If you are leaking information to the press, for example, you had better not have printed any of those files from your own printer.
The demonstrated danger, however, is the government itself. We have constitutional limits on the government because governments have over a period of thousands of years been shown to be dangerous. So, the proper question isn't "What reason have we shown to justify stopping the government doing this?" but rather "What justification of this action has the government provided to convince us to allow it?"
Where is the constitutional authority to track the writings of the population? Seems like it could be a first amendment issue to me.
A quick look at wikipedia later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Commission
the Supreme Court of the United States held that an Ohio statute that prohibits anonymous political or campaign literature is unconstitutional.
On the face of it, to a non-lawyer such as myself, it doesn't seem that the federal government requiring these "features" could possibly be legal as it effectively prohibits anonymous campaign literature.
In India, which is worse off than both China and Korea, if you are literate (secondary school pass), you can get a call center job, or a secretarial lob atleast.
No need to slog like slaves
A lot of factory work is not too hard. In Australia, if you can get a call center job with no qualification other than literacy I could pretty much guarantee I could get a factory job with ok work conditions and higher pay from doing shift work. Probably more pleasant than dealing with angry customers over the phone too.
By your logic the woman's financial state should be guaranteed simply by getting married.
Marriage is, among other things, a financial partnership for most people. Yes, my wife should be guaranteed not to be dumped on the street with no assets or income so long as I am capable of preventing it, particularly if her needs include providing for my children.
I make pretty good money, much more than I was making 10 years ago when I married her. I have been able to pursue my career, working long and inconvenient hours partly because I have left much of the rest of life for her to look after. Despite the paycheck being in my name, it really is a join effort to make it come in and she deserves her cut.
I think that in the majority of cases divorce isn't something that just happens to you. It's like a car going rusty, if you notice when small patches of rust appear and fix them properly, your car will not fall apart from rust. It just doesn't happen that your perfectly maintained car collapses in a heap from rust on your way to work one day.
As someone who has come pretty close to getting divorced, I'll make a few observations.
(1) If you are interested to know, it is generally pretty easy to know if you are making your partner happy.
(2) If you aren't, there's a good chance they won't stay with you long term.
(3) They probably tell you on a regular basis the things they would like from you. Listen. No, really, shut up for a while. Don't explain your point, don't correct them or tell them why it can't be that way, forget about how unfair their demands are and JUST listen.
(4) You may need to get better at picking when to do the opposite of what they say. (I don't want you to buy flowers for valentines, it's just so commercialized.)
Could I get divorced, despite working hard not to? Sure, legally my wife can divorce me at any time for any or no reason, so it's possible. Are there really any statistics that are useful for determining the outcome of my relationship? No, "the odds" are not relevant, individual behavior is what counts.
I guess I am the sociopath here. I save it for the elevator where there is no escape.
You sacrifice yourself for the sake of trapping your victims. I use the same idea, but I have no sense of smell!
I feel no obligation to obey laws written for the benefit of special interest groups rather than the general public, whether those laws are written in secret or not.
The question I have is, if the process of lawmaking is corrupted, at what point does it become a form of corruption to merely follow those laws, even if you had no part in making them.
and btw, please stop calling flashlights torches.
Only if they flash. If it emits a steady light rather than flashing, torch is a more appropriate word. As you noted when you were in that cab you "saw what a 'torch' really is." I've no idea, now you know what a torch really is, why you want us to use the incorrect word.
The progressives want to make decisions for your own good
I don't believe that, and I'd rather they didn't anyway. I'd like to decide what is for my own good. You know, the whole "freedom" thing.
The way you explain that is still reason (2).