The world's richest man decided that he wanted to make more money. In order to do so he decided not to invest in stocks or venture capital. Instead he gave away a large proportion of his money to a foundation that is required by law to give away over $1.5bn each year to public charities. The foundation can then use this as a cover to invest in lucrative enterprises like eradicating polio and curing guinea worm disease.
You are alleging that a seemingly philanthropic endeavour is actually some sort of cynical scheme to make money from the problems of the developing world. That's a pretty serious allegation. If you don't have any evidence an honourable person would take it back.
I think that when you are accusing someone of self-interested bias it behoves you to set out exactly what that self interest is and why you believe it has biased them.
The Gates Foundation is a philanthropic organisation that invests mostly in global development and health programs. Malcolm Gladwell is a niche tech journalist. I struggle to see how he could possibly expect to profit from the Foundation. Equally I can't see why the Foundation would ever want to court his praise: they have no need of publicity, and even if they did PC Magazine is hardly the reference journal for philanthropists.
You have made a serious accusation about Malcolm Gladwell's character. I think the fairest thing to do would be to put your cards on the table and show what evidence you founded it on.
I don't know when the parent started work, but it's probably worth pointing out that the employment market is much more competitive than it used to be, and degrees are rather more common. I know a lot of people in my field who started 10+ years ago with fairly meagre qualifications and now hold quite senior positions; today they wouldn't get an interview, because the increase in the number of applicants has meant filtering out everyone without a good degree.
Can you explain this a little more please? It sounds like you're saying that patents completely stifle innovation while they are in force - but that would mean claiming that there are popular and in-demand technologies that have stood still for 20 years. I'm sure that's not what you mean but it would be helpful if you could be a little more explicit.
You also address the dissuasive impact of potential legal costs on new entrants into a market. What you don't mention though is the inducement provided by patents allowing an inventor to make a profit from his invention without having to compete with 'copycats' that don't have to recoup their R&D expenditure. To take an example from the technology sector, Intel have spent $32.2 billion on R&D in the last 5 years. One wonders how much they would have been willing to spend if they had known that AMD or IBM could copy their innovations.
I think you're being a little bit unfair with possibilities like "software companies are not bothering to even have correctly defined specifications to test against", and that they're "unable to tell a working program from a dangerously unsafe failing one". For you to consider either of those things to be serious failings you have to believe that it is reasonably possible to create a complete specification that sets out exactly what behaviour is expected from an OS in every situation. Not only that, but the specification itself has to be perfect: a mistake or a false assumption going into the specification will lead to an OS that validates against it but isn't secure.
Believing that that is possible is already pretty optimistic. The specification would be the most complicated document ever created; even if it's less likely to contain errors than the equivalent amount of code, the chances of every specified response and every underlying assumption being correct are tiny.
Believing that it is practicable is not just optimistic, it's insane. Bear in mind that formal verification of the OK microkernel, with about 9000 lines of code, took a team of 12 researchers 4 years. Google suggests that the Windows kernel contains over 40 million lines of code (for comparison the Linux kernel apparently contains 15 million, so it doesn't look like the Windows kernel is excessively large). Assuming that Microsoft can refine the verification process to be 10 times faster, and that it's possible to further speed up verification by simply throwing more researchers at it, it would still take a team of 500 researchers working full-time to allow one release every 10 years. And that's not including time spent drawing up the specification or altering it when technological progress leaves it out-of-date.
I think maybe that blaming either company - either the OS designer or the AV company - is a little unreasonable. The AV companies were out of their depth, as the article says; the OS team are also out of their depth here. But is that really a surprise? Is this really something that it's reasonable to expect them to be able to cope with?
Even if you hire the best locksmiths and builders around a government agency will still be able to get into your house. If you hire the best bodyguards in the world a nation state could still have you assassinated, or kidnapped. In all three cases they can probably even make it undetectable, or at least untraceable - and our security companies are much more familiar with the physical world than the digital one.
The truth is that a nation state operates on a different level to these companies. Expecting a modern operating system and AV suite to protect you against a determined, specific attack by a well-resourced team of experts is hopelessly optimistic.
The only reasonable response to this news, I think, is to shrug. Of course nation-states were able to compromise computer security. Anyone who thought about it knew that they inevitably could well before Flame was discovered.
Perhaps I am wrong - and feel free to correct me if you think I am - but I think that your response actually supports my point.
You originally said that all that was necessary was to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable cost. I said that I think those are already present for a lot of people, giving examples like Netflix, but that the problem was that they could never compete with piracy unless something occurs to make that less 'perfect'.
Your response is that none of the services are good enough. Netflix is too expensive because it's a subscription - despite the fact that it's only $8/month. It also has to be available worldwide and work on every platform. Amazon is no good because its library is too small - despite the fact that, looking at Torrentfreak's list of the most pirated shows and films, Amazon has most of them.
I think this tends to illustrate my point. If what you want is something as good as Bittorrent then nothing is good enough, and nothing ever can be.
Incidentally Star Trek is already available through Amazon Instant Video, and one suspects that watching it means Paramount get a cut of Amazon's fee. I wonder, though: if we tested your theory by comparing the number of Star Trek fans who pirate the shows with the number who watch them through Amazon, would you really find that regular viewers opt to pay?
That's a nice collection of buzz-words, but what does it mean? What is an 'economic game-breaker'? Why is consistent enforcement extremely harmful to the economy? Why is only the marginal cost relevant, and not the cost of creation?
When no legal methods exist for consumers to obtain content in a way they demand, of course the only option left for them then is to illegally obtain that which they desire.
In pretty much any other area of business the option would be to compromise on what they want or the way they demand it. I know that sounds anti-consumer but it's not - it's the only way the industry can operate.
Legal methods to obtain content do exist, at least in many places - DVDs, broadcast/cable/sky TV, Netflix, Amazon videos, Lovefilm and so on. The days of piracy being the only online distribution method are, broadly speaking, over. Piracy remains popular not because there isn't a legal alternative, but because piracy lets you get whatever you want for free. That's the "way they demand" when you're talking about people used to pirating media: unlimited media, for no cost, with no consequences.
Legislation and legal action aren't antithetical to a move to digital distribution, they're a necessary part of it: the more people move to legal distribution methods the better the negotiating position of the distribution companies and the more shows become viable to offer. For legal online distributors to be able to compete with Bittorrent, though, there needs to be some disadvantage to BT - that disadvantage can be provided by legislation and legal action.
David Allen Green, Paul Chambers' solicitor, blogs for the New Statesman and under his own name at Jack of Kent and has written about the case a number of times. He has also discussed it on the Without Prejudice podcasts on a number of occasions, e.g. two days ago.
The problem here is: I want x; I don't want to pay for x.
That's not really a "problem". "Problem" suggests that it is something outside of you, imposed on you and that you have to find a way past. All we have here is your selfish desire to have what you want for free.
If you don't want to pay for Photoshop because you don't think it's worth it, then don't buy it. Use GIMP, or Paint.net, or just draw with a pencil. When you pirate Photoshop instead what you're saying is that you think it's a good piece of software and the money and developer time that have gone into it were worthwhile, but you aren't going to pay for it because your desires are more important.
It's stupid, really. IMO, all that's necessary to end this ridiculous cat and mouse game is for the entertainment industry to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable prices (per movie/show/series/episode/album/song) and all this bad behavior will be unnecessary on both sides.
What's a reasonable cost? Netflix, Lovefilm and Amazon Video are all pretty cheap.
The problem I think is that they have to compete with what is essentially the ultimate competitor: someone offering high-quality downloads, with no restrictions, for free. There's simply no way they can compete with that - if you're used to downloading whatever you want for free then anything a media company can offer will be worse.
That's why I think these measures are necessary, and a good thing. Yes, the entertainment industry needs to offer good, cheap services to let people access their media. But after a slow start those services are appearing, and getting better. What they need though is something to counterbalance the price advantage of illegal downloading - inconvenience and the threat of disconnection or legal action can be that counterbalance. Then the market for services like Netflix can grow, giving the providers more power to negotiate good deals and encouraging competition.
The regulatory measures are necessary though. As long as it's easy and consequence-free you can't compete with Bittorrent.
But what would it then do? Around here - the UK - it would show a message stating that there's an "unexpected item in the bagging area" and require a member of staff to authorise it.
Which they would do without checking since the message appears so regularly for no obvious reason.
You don't have to pay any income tax at all - there are plenty of places that don't charge it. Go live on the Cayman islands and make your fortune there - I don't think they have any income tax or capital gains tax, so you can keep 100% of your money!
Of course it's a bit more difficult to make your money without an educated workforce, or lots of infrastructure, or developed labour and financial laws, or trade connections, or any of the other things that government provides for business. But who needs any of that? People who make money make it entirely through their own effort and talent and don't owe one iota of a debt to the government.
On the other hand if you want to make use of the advantages that government spending provides in order to make your fortune it behoves you to pay the tax that finances that spending.
My post only makes sense in its context - I was replying to the GGP, which claimed that as long as there is any legitimate use it is always wrong to ban something. Once you start talking of "illegitimate uses [that] far outweighed the legitimate" you have accepted my point - that it is a question of balance. At that point it is perfectly consistent to say both that bittorrent has legitimate uses and that it should be banned or restricted.
I wasn't trying to say that bittorrent should be banned. But the article's premise seems to effectively be that the potential for legitimate use, be it ever so minor, is a persuasive argument against ISPs blocking or degrading BT traffic. That, I think, is plainly not the case.
[Following an example based around amphetamines] So now we've established that a total ban on something with any amount of legitimate use is, at the very least, not an accepted practice. We don't need to rely on abstract philosophical arguments - we can point to concrete examples. So we've essentially "proven" that you should not ban Bittorrent, inasmuch as you can "prove" anything in as loose a field as ethics and law.
I'm not sure that you have established that. The question, as you suggested, is one of balance, but taking the example of a drug used medicinally puts a heavy finger on that balance, because the ethical case against denying people legitimate medical treatment is exceptionally strong. It is therefore difficult to extrapolate from a medical example to any other industry.
And indeed there are plenty of examples of things that have been banned completely even though they have legitimate uses, because the harmful use outweighed (at least allegedly) those strongly. In the UK, for example, flick knives and spring-loaded knives are completely banned even though they have a legitimate use. The US bans flavoured cigarettes - those clearly have legitimate uses, but those were judged outweighed by the risk of encouraging smoking.
I think the GP was right to say that it was a bad analogy. It's a bad analogy for two reasons. First, you can't just close down the entire road network - it's not possible and even if it were, society would collapse and a great many people would die. Road travel is vital in a way that Bittorrent isn't, so the only possible response would be checkpoints, not complete closure. Second, the complaint about Bittorrent isn't that pirates could use it - it's that it's almost exclusively (someone above posted I think 99.7%) used for piracy. A closer analogy would be that 99% of the traffic on the roads was people doing nothing but moving pirated DVDs. If that were the case they still wouldn't close all the roads - as above, they are literally vital for peoples' survival. But you would see checkpoints and huge numbers of random stops to try to prevent those users, which is as close as you can get.
If you look at the proportion of GDP spent on the military, the UK is nothing exceptional; of the 99 countries in Wikipedia's list, the UK is 40th. In absolute terms it appears between Japan and France - two other currently peaceful first-world countries that presumably feature in your "rest of the world".
History is littered with stories of the militarily strong taking from the militarily weak, of erstwhile allies going to war because they see the possibility to gain. There is nothing unreasonable or crazy about a country seeking to protect itself and to maintain that protection even when there is no obvious short-term threat. We may be safe at the moment, but arguing that current peacefulness means we can safely let our military stagnate is like arguing that the first world is in good health, so we don't need to invest in doctors.
Getting pulled over is apparently out-of-the-ordinary enough to be carried by dozens of newspapers and news sites. How many people get detectable radiation treatment each day?
And what's the problem with radiation detectors? Even ignoring possible 'dirty bomb' scenarios, radioactive material - even if completely innocently or unknowingly carried - can cause serious health problems to the person concerned and those around them, without anyone knowing it's happening. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing it is worth looking out for.
And if he refused to answer any questions as he had every right to do? How do you think this story would have ended then?
That would be a suspicious situation, and he may well have been arrested (and exonerated fairly quickly as the real story emerged, I suspect). Just like someone running down the road and mistaken for a robber might be arrested if they refuse - as is their right - to answer any questions about what they're doing. Staying silent is your right, but that doesn't mean it is always the most sensible choice or that it's automatically free of consequences.
So we should simply allow police to ignore civil liberties and be able to pull over anyone who has had detectable radiation therapy? Everyone is up in arms because its radiation, when the true danger of being blown up is infinitesimally small. It if FAR FAR FAR more likely they are going to detect patients rather then terrorists and the gains do not outweigh the loss of liberty. Id rather lose an entire American city then subject our citizenry to tyranny.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone who's "up in arms because it's radiation". I'm certainly not. What I see is a police officer noticing that something is out of the ordinary - very out of the ordinary, to the extent that something could be seriously wrong. He acted on that by pulling the person over and asking them. That's exactly what I would want a policeman to do if they thought I might be in serious danger and not know it.
You say "so we should simply allow police to ignore civil liberties and be able to pull over anyone who has had detectable radiation therapy" as though this were being used as a pretence to pull people over, not a reasonable response to an unusual situation. What would you view as a sensible response by a policeman who discovers that a car is extremely unusually radioactive?
It sounds at the moment like you're worried about this being a "slippery slope" to something else. But a slippery slope to what? This seems to be exactly how we would want the police to behave: -The policeman had solid information that suggested that something was wrong (either a crime or a person in danger from radioactivity). -He investigated that in the least invasive way possible - he asked the person involved, who explained it.
That sounds like good policework - investigating things that suggest that something's wrong and reacting in a measured and reasonable manner. I would definitely want a policeman to stop me if I was driving along in a radioactive vehicle - I don't want radiation poisoning - just like I would want an officer on foot to come over and speak to me if they saw blood on my shirt and thought I had either been injured or attacked someone. The only unreasonable overreaction I see is dozens of slashdot posters trying to turn it into an excuse to rant about another assault on their civil liberties.
Is this really "by far the most controversial bill" discussed in the Queen's Speech?
This is a controversial matter; it's also an important one. But the Queen's speech also discussed the reform of the House of Lords - a fundamental constitutional change which has led to a schism in the government. And it didn't suggest any change to the austerity program or welfare system, despite there being a lot of popular pressure to move away from austerity-only to focus on economic growth. Both of those questions are more controversial than the outlined surveillance bill.
I know that this is an important matter, and particularly important to people on Slashdot, but let's not lose perspective: this was not (unless I missed it) even discussed by Ed Miliband (the leader of the opposition party) when he criticised the legislative agenda. It's not the most controversial, or indeed important, measure announced.
Are you alleging now that as a result of this investigation people have been convicted based on "half-baked legal justifications"? That would seem to rely on the assumption that not only SOCA but also the CPS and the judiciary are controlled by the record companies.
When you say that SOCA and the record companies act as they do because they "know there is no realistic chance of either being prosecuted" what crimes are you saying that they have committed?
Where is the evidence - even the most circumstantial and tenuous evidence - that SOCA has overstepped the mark in this case? I haven't seen a single person alleging that their computer has been hacked illegally by SOCA. The most damning thing I have seen is a comment from a security expert that SOCA could have obtained their information using illegal methods - or could have used legal ones. Not evidence so much as a truism.
Again I'm afraid I get the impression that you are not looking at what happened and drawing conclusions, but starting from the position that SOCA must be guilty and then looking for a justification for that. Thus far you have simply given no evidence at all to support your allegations.
I wonder whether you are perhaps looking for SOCA to be in the wrong.
You started by saying that SOCA should not have been investigating because there was no crime. You then accepted that that was not correct but said that individual file-sharing was not a crime. I think - and apologies if I have misunderstood - that you have now accepted that individual file-sharing could be a crime but are saying that the message posted on rnbxclusive.com was a "confession" to illegal acts.
First, I am struggling to see how the message could be a confession of anything since it does not seem to refer to any past actions at all, other than the arrest of the site owners.
Second, is the most plausible reason that you can think of for posting that message really that SOCA were engaged in unlawful (and apparently ineffectual, since there is no sign of them having occurred at all) abuses of power at the behest of the record companies and that they were so clueless as to what they were doing that they sought to confess online? This is a theory that requires you to think that a large, well-funded and specialist police force has so little expertise in what it's doing that it can fail to realise that it has committed a crime. That SOCA is at once so cohesive and disciplined that it is not plausible to suggest that the message was a mistake, but at the same time so shambolic that it can commit crimes and confess without realising. I don't see that it is a tenable explanation unless you are looking for a way to inculpate SOCA.
Slashdot Mirror
The world's richest man decided that he wanted to make more money. In order to do so he decided not to invest in stocks or venture capital. Instead he gave away a large proportion of his money to a foundation that is required by law to give away over $1.5bn each year to public charities. The foundation can then use this as a cover to invest in lucrative enterprises like eradicating polio and curing guinea worm disease.
You are alleging that a seemingly philanthropic endeavour is actually some sort of cynical scheme to make money from the problems of the developing world. That's a pretty serious allegation. If you don't have any evidence an honourable person would take it back.
In that case can I say exactly they same thing, please?
I think that when you are accusing someone of self-interested bias it behoves you to set out exactly what that self interest is and why you believe it has biased them.
The Gates Foundation is a philanthropic organisation that invests mostly in global development and health programs. Malcolm Gladwell is a niche tech journalist. I struggle to see how he could possibly expect to profit from the Foundation. Equally I can't see why the Foundation would ever want to court his praise: they have no need of publicity, and even if they did PC Magazine is hardly the reference journal for philanthropists.
You have made a serious accusation about Malcolm Gladwell's character. I think the fairest thing to do would be to put your cards on the table and show what evidence you founded it on.
I don't know when the parent started work, but it's probably worth pointing out that the employment market is much more competitive than it used to be, and degrees are rather more common. I know a lot of people in my field who started 10+ years ago with fairly meagre qualifications and now hold quite senior positions; today they wouldn't get an interview, because the increase in the number of applicants has meant filtering out everyone without a good degree.
Can you explain this a little more please? It sounds like you're saying that patents completely stifle innovation while they are in force - but that would mean claiming that there are popular and in-demand technologies that have stood still for 20 years. I'm sure that's not what you mean but it would be helpful if you could be a little more explicit.
You also address the dissuasive impact of potential legal costs on new entrants into a market. What you don't mention though is the inducement provided by patents allowing an inventor to make a profit from his invention without having to compete with 'copycats' that don't have to recoup their R&D expenditure. To take an example from the technology sector, Intel have spent $32.2 billion on R&D in the last 5 years. One wonders how much they would have been willing to spend if they had known that AMD or IBM could copy their innovations.
I think you're being a little bit unfair with possibilities like "software companies are not bothering to even have correctly defined specifications to test against", and that they're "unable to tell a working program from a dangerously unsafe failing one". For you to consider either of those things to be serious failings you have to believe that it is reasonably possible to create a complete specification that sets out exactly what behaviour is expected from an OS in every situation. Not only that, but the specification itself has to be perfect: a mistake or a false assumption going into the specification will lead to an OS that validates against it but isn't secure.
Believing that that is possible is already pretty optimistic. The specification would be the most complicated document ever created; even if it's less likely to contain errors than the equivalent amount of code, the chances of every specified response and every underlying assumption being correct are tiny.
Believing that it is practicable is not just optimistic, it's insane. Bear in mind that formal verification of the OK microkernel, with about 9000 lines of code, took a team of 12 researchers 4 years. Google suggests that the Windows kernel contains over 40 million lines of code (for comparison the Linux kernel apparently contains 15 million, so it doesn't look like the Windows kernel is excessively large). Assuming that Microsoft can refine the verification process to be 10 times faster, and that it's possible to further speed up verification by simply throwing more researchers at it, it would still take a team of 500 researchers working full-time to allow one release every 10 years. And that's not including time spent drawing up the specification or altering it when technological progress leaves it out-of-date.
I think maybe that blaming either company - either the OS designer or the AV company - is a little unreasonable. The AV companies were out of their depth, as the article says; the OS team are also out of their depth here. But is that really a surprise? Is this really something that it's reasonable to expect them to be able to cope with?
Even if you hire the best locksmiths and builders around a government agency will still be able to get into your house. If you hire the best bodyguards in the world a nation state could still have you assassinated, or kidnapped. In all three cases they can probably even make it undetectable, or at least untraceable - and our security companies are much more familiar with the physical world than the digital one.
The truth is that a nation state operates on a different level to these companies. Expecting a modern operating system and AV suite to protect you against a determined, specific attack by a well-resourced team of experts is hopelessly optimistic.
The only reasonable response to this news, I think, is to shrug. Of course nation-states were able to compromise computer security. Anyone who thought about it knew that they inevitably could well before Flame was discovered.
Perhaps I am wrong - and feel free to correct me if you think I am - but I think that your response actually supports my point.
You originally said that all that was necessary was to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable cost. I said that I think those are already present for a lot of people, giving examples like Netflix, but that the problem was that they could never compete with piracy unless something occurs to make that less 'perfect'.
Your response is that none of the services are good enough. Netflix is too expensive because it's a subscription - despite the fact that it's only $8/month. It also has to be available worldwide and work on every platform. Amazon is no good because its library is too small - despite the fact that, looking at Torrentfreak's list of the most pirated shows and films, Amazon has most of them.
I think this tends to illustrate my point. If what you want is something as good as Bittorrent then nothing is good enough, and nothing ever can be.
Incidentally Star Trek is already available through Amazon Instant Video, and one suspects that watching it means Paramount get a cut of Amazon's fee. I wonder, though: if we tested your theory by comparing the number of Star Trek fans who pirate the shows with the number who watch them through Amazon, would you really find that regular viewers opt to pay?
That's a nice collection of buzz-words, but what does it mean? What is an 'economic game-breaker'? Why is consistent enforcement extremely harmful to the economy? Why is only the marginal cost relevant, and not the cost of creation?
When no legal methods exist for consumers to obtain content in a way they demand, of course the only option left for them then is to illegally obtain that which they desire.
In pretty much any other area of business the option would be to compromise on what they want or the way they demand it. I know that sounds anti-consumer but it's not - it's the only way the industry can operate.
Legal methods to obtain content do exist, at least in many places - DVDs, broadcast/cable/sky TV, Netflix, Amazon videos, Lovefilm and so on. The days of piracy being the only online distribution method are, broadly speaking, over. Piracy remains popular not because there isn't a legal alternative, but because piracy lets you get whatever you want for free. That's the "way they demand" when you're talking about people used to pirating media: unlimited media, for no cost, with no consequences.
Legislation and legal action aren't antithetical to a move to digital distribution, they're a necessary part of it: the more people move to legal distribution methods the better the negotiating position of the distribution companies and the more shows become viable to offer. For legal online distributors to be able to compete with Bittorrent, though, there needs to be some disadvantage to BT - that disadvantage can be provided by legislation and legal action.
David Allen Green, Paul Chambers' solicitor, blogs for the New Statesman and under his own name at Jack of Kent and has written about the case a number of times. He has also discussed it on the Without Prejudice podcasts on a number of occasions, e.g. two days ago.
Ergo, pirating as solution
"Solution". But solution to what problem?
The problem here is:
I want x;
I don't want to pay for x.
That's not really a "problem". "Problem" suggests that it is something outside of you, imposed on you and that you have to find a way past. All we have here is your selfish desire to have what you want for free.
If you don't want to pay for Photoshop because you don't think it's worth it, then don't buy it. Use GIMP, or Paint.net, or just draw with a pencil. When you pirate Photoshop instead what you're saying is that you think it's a good piece of software and the money and developer time that have gone into it were worthwhile, but you aren't going to pay for it because your desires are more important.
It's stupid, really. IMO, all that's necessary to end this ridiculous cat and mouse game is for the entertainment industry to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable prices (per movie/show/series/episode/album/song) and all this bad behavior will be unnecessary on both sides.
What's a reasonable cost? Netflix, Lovefilm and Amazon Video are all pretty cheap.
The problem I think is that they have to compete with what is essentially the ultimate competitor: someone offering high-quality downloads, with no restrictions, for free. There's simply no way they can compete with that - if you're used to downloading whatever you want for free then anything a media company can offer will be worse.
That's why I think these measures are necessary, and a good thing. Yes, the entertainment industry needs to offer good, cheap services to let people access their media. But after a slow start those services are appearing, and getting better. What they need though is something to counterbalance the price advantage of illegal downloading - inconvenience and the threat of disconnection or legal action can be that counterbalance. Then the market for services like Netflix can grow, giving the providers more power to negotiate good deals and encouraging competition.
The regulatory measures are necessary though. As long as it's easy and consequence-free you can't compete with Bittorrent.
But what would it then do? Around here - the UK - it would show a message stating that there's an "unexpected item in the bagging area" and require a member of staff to authorise it.
Which they would do without checking since the message appears so regularly for no obvious reason.
You don't have to pay any income tax at all - there are plenty of places that don't charge it. Go live on the Cayman islands and make your fortune there - I don't think they have any income tax or capital gains tax, so you can keep 100% of your money!
Of course it's a bit more difficult to make your money without an educated workforce, or lots of infrastructure, or developed labour and financial laws, or trade connections, or any of the other things that government provides for business. But who needs any of that? People who make money make it entirely through their own effort and talent and don't owe one iota of a debt to the government.
On the other hand if you want to make use of the advantages that government spending provides in order to make your fortune it behoves you to pay the tax that finances that spending.
My post only makes sense in its context - I was replying to the GGP, which claimed that as long as there is any legitimate use it is always wrong to ban something. Once you start talking of "illegitimate uses [that] far outweighed the legitimate" you have accepted my point - that it is a question of balance. At that point it is perfectly consistent to say both that bittorrent has legitimate uses and that it should be banned or restricted.
I wasn't trying to say that bittorrent should be banned. But the article's premise seems to effectively be that the potential for legitimate use, be it ever so minor, is a persuasive argument against ISPs blocking or degrading BT traffic. That, I think, is plainly not the case.
[Following an example based around amphetamines] So now we've established that a total ban on something with any amount of legitimate use is, at the very least, not an accepted practice. We don't need to rely on abstract philosophical arguments - we can point to concrete examples. So we've essentially "proven" that you should not ban Bittorrent, inasmuch as you can "prove" anything in as loose a field as ethics and law.
I'm not sure that you have established that. The question, as you suggested, is one of balance, but taking the example of a drug used medicinally puts a heavy finger on that balance, because the ethical case against denying people legitimate medical treatment is exceptionally strong. It is therefore difficult to extrapolate from a medical example to any other industry.
And indeed there are plenty of examples of things that have been banned completely even though they have legitimate uses, because the harmful use outweighed (at least allegedly) those strongly. In the UK, for example, flick knives and spring-loaded knives are completely banned even though they have a legitimate use. The US bans flavoured cigarettes - those clearly have legitimate uses, but those were judged outweighed by the risk of encouraging smoking.
I think the GP was right to say that it was a bad analogy. It's a bad analogy for two reasons. First, you can't just close down the entire road network - it's not possible and even if it were, society would collapse and a great many people would die. Road travel is vital in a way that Bittorrent isn't, so the only possible response would be checkpoints, not complete closure. Second, the complaint about Bittorrent isn't that pirates could use it - it's that it's almost exclusively (someone above posted I think 99.7%) used for piracy. A closer analogy would be that 99% of the traffic on the roads was people doing nothing but moving pirated DVDs. If that were the case they still wouldn't close all the roads - as above, they are literally vital for peoples' survival. But you would see checkpoints and huge numbers of random stops to try to prevent those users, which is as close as you can get.
If you look at the proportion of GDP spent on the military, the UK is nothing exceptional; of the 99 countries in Wikipedia's list, the UK is 40th. In absolute terms it appears between Japan and France - two other currently peaceful first-world countries that presumably feature in your "rest of the world".
History is littered with stories of the militarily strong taking from the militarily weak, of erstwhile allies going to war because they see the possibility to gain. There is nothing unreasonable or crazy about a country seeking to protect itself and to maintain that protection even when there is no obvious short-term threat. We may be safe at the moment, but arguing that current peacefulness means we can safely let our military stagnate is like arguing that the first world is in good health, so we don't need to invest in doctors.
Getting pulled over is apparently out-of-the-ordinary enough to be carried by dozens of newspapers and news sites. How many people get detectable radiation treatment each day?
And what's the problem with radiation detectors? Even ignoring possible 'dirty bomb' scenarios, radioactive material - even if completely innocently or unknowingly carried - can cause serious health problems to the person concerned and those around them, without anyone knowing it's happening. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing it is worth looking out for.
And if he refused to answer any questions as he had every right to do? How do you think this story would have ended then?
That would be a suspicious situation, and he may well have been arrested (and exonerated fairly quickly as the real story emerged, I suspect). Just like someone running down the road and mistaken for a robber might be arrested if they refuse - as is their right - to answer any questions about what they're doing. Staying silent is your right, but that doesn't mean it is always the most sensible choice or that it's automatically free of consequences.
So we should simply allow police to ignore civil liberties and be able to pull over anyone who has had detectable radiation therapy? Everyone is up in arms because its radiation, when the true danger of being blown up is infinitesimally small. It if FAR FAR FAR more likely they are going to detect patients rather then terrorists and the gains do not outweigh the loss of liberty. Id rather lose an entire American city then subject our citizenry to tyranny.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone who's "up in arms because it's radiation". I'm certainly not. What I see is a police officer noticing that something is out of the ordinary - very out of the ordinary, to the extent that something could be seriously wrong. He acted on that by pulling the person over and asking them. That's exactly what I would want a policeman to do if they thought I might be in serious danger and not know it.
You say "so we should simply allow police to ignore civil liberties and be able to pull over anyone who has had detectable radiation therapy" as though this were being used as a pretence to pull people over, not a reasonable response to an unusual situation. What would you view as a sensible response by a policeman who discovers that a car is extremely unusually radioactive?
Can you spell out the point that you're making?
It sounds at the moment like you're worried about this being a "slippery slope" to something else. But a slippery slope to what? This seems to be exactly how we would want the police to behave:
-The policeman had solid information that suggested that something was wrong (either a crime or a person in danger from radioactivity).
-He investigated that in the least invasive way possible - he asked the person involved, who explained it.
That sounds like good policework - investigating things that suggest that something's wrong and reacting in a measured and reasonable manner. I would definitely want a policeman to stop me if I was driving along in a radioactive vehicle - I don't want radiation poisoning - just like I would want an officer on foot to come over and speak to me if they saw blood on my shirt and thought I had either been injured or attacked someone. The only unreasonable overreaction I see is dozens of slashdot posters trying to turn it into an excuse to rant about another assault on their civil liberties.
Is this really "by far the most controversial bill" discussed in the Queen's Speech?
This is a controversial matter; it's also an important one. But the Queen's speech also discussed the reform of the House of Lords - a fundamental constitutional change which has led to a schism in the government. And it didn't suggest any change to the austerity program or welfare system, despite there being a lot of popular pressure to move away from austerity-only to focus on economic growth. Both of those questions are more controversial than the outlined surveillance bill.
I know that this is an important matter, and particularly important to people on Slashdot, but let's not lose perspective: this was not (unless I missed it) even discussed by Ed Miliband (the leader of the opposition party) when he criticised the legislative agenda. It's not the most controversial, or indeed important, measure announced.
Are you alleging now that as a result of this investigation people have been convicted based on "half-baked legal justifications"? That would seem to rely on the assumption that not only SOCA but also the CPS and the judiciary are controlled by the record companies.
When you say that SOCA and the record companies act as they do because they "know there is no realistic chance of either being prosecuted" what crimes are you saying that they have committed?
Where is the evidence - even the most circumstantial and tenuous evidence - that SOCA has overstepped the mark in this case? I haven't seen a single person alleging that their computer has been hacked illegally by SOCA. The most damning thing I have seen is a comment from a security expert that SOCA could have obtained their information using illegal methods - or could have used legal ones. Not evidence so much as a truism.
Again I'm afraid I get the impression that you are not looking at what happened and drawing conclusions, but starting from the position that SOCA must be guilty and then looking for a justification for that. Thus far you have simply given no evidence at all to support your allegations.
I wonder whether you are perhaps looking for SOCA to be in the wrong.
You started by saying that SOCA should not have been investigating because there was no crime.
You then accepted that that was not correct but said that individual file-sharing was not a crime.
I think - and apologies if I have misunderstood - that you have now accepted that individual file-sharing could be a crime but are saying that the message posted on rnbxclusive.com was a "confession" to illegal acts.
First, I am struggling to see how the message could be a confession of anything since it does not seem to refer to any past actions at all, other than the arrest of the site owners.
Second, is the most plausible reason that you can think of for posting that message really that SOCA were engaged in unlawful (and apparently ineffectual, since there is no sign of them having occurred at all) abuses of power at the behest of the record companies and that they were so clueless as to what they were doing that they sought to confess online? This is a theory that requires you to think that a large, well-funded and specialist police force has so little expertise in what it's doing that it can fail to realise that it has committed a crime. That SOCA is at once so cohesive and disciplined that it is not plausible to suggest that the message was a mistake, but at the same time so shambolic that it can commit crimes and confess without realising. I don't see that it is a tenable explanation unless you are looking for a way to inculpate SOCA.