> probability states that it would be worthwhile putting one of a thousand guns to your head, > where only one was loaded, and pulling the trigger if the reward was a million dollers upon survival.
Uh, no. Probability and expectation theory only deals in uniform ideal units. Your example contains two different units: "death" and "dollar". You're confusing probability theory with utility theory here. Or with a combination of probability and utility theory.
E.g., if the person pulling the trigger knows he is sick and most likely will die in great pain within several weeks, I wouldn't think it at all extraordinary for him to take this wager. In his case the utility of death vs. money is different than for others (you, for example, it seems).
And in the downloader's case, in many cases the downloaded product has a higher utility (e.g., no DRM) than the product he can attain legally. And what the relative utility of being sued by RIAA is for him is dependent on what he thinks, not what you think.
I'm pretty sure that the enormous fine was because of the uploading, under the theory that making the files available over P2P is the same as distribution. RIAA has never gone after anyone for purely downloading, AFAIK, and the maximum fines would be much, much, smaller.
> both aren't especially wise.
Both are illegal. Since the probability of being caught and prosecuted are very small, one could make a case based on mathematical expectation that it is financially worthwhile to break the law in this case. Kind of like being paid to buy a lottery ticket which makes you pay a larger sum back if you "win".
> They fact that they haven't caught him doesn't give you a license to break the law.
Correct, but unfortunately not connected with the point trying to be made (you missed it in your knee-jerk reaction against breaking copyright law), which is that the situation raised as an analogy in laughingcoyote's post would indicate that there is something wrong with the justice system (within his analogy). The justice system being analogous to "the content industry" in this case.
And before you lash out at me in similar fashion, note that I also have made no pro-piracy statements. The matter in question is whether the behavior of "the content industry" seems reasonable, not whether piracy is OK or justified or not.
In my eyes, the major problem with the argument in question is that the poster lumps a lot of relatively unrelated organizations (RIAA, MPAA, and all their respective "shadows" in non-US countries) into one cohesive "content industry", in order to criticize its behavior as being disjointed and arbitrary.
I'm assuming you were interested in a reference to this alternative usage. My apologies if you were actually only interested in old books and nostalgia.
> I'm quite sure any voting laws against coersion and vote buying are not perfectly observed today.
Uh, the situation today is that it is impossible to coerce or buy votes effectively, since everyone can convincingly lie about how they voted (what you want to do away with). The only people you can coerce are those who you can convince that their votes are somehow not secret, or who are just too stupid to understand the ramifications of that secrecy. That's why your observation about the imperfection of those laws only strengthens my argument, and undercuts your own.
> Individual is plantiff vs. huge corporation is plantiff
Yes, but take into consideration that the majority of the RIAA cases where the defendent is innocent (and he doesn't represent himself) are abandoned eventually by RIAA, since their case is usually very weak, and they don't want to set a losing precedent.
An effective prosecution of voting coercion would almost certainly necessitate the testimony of the person coerced, and he has already shown that he is coercible by the defendent who now has an interest to coerce him to not testify. Doesn't sound like an easy case for the state.
In 1876, he became obsessed with Anna Ivanovna Popova and began courting her; in 1881 he proposed to her and threatened suicide if she refused. His divorce from Leshcheva was finalized one month after he had married Popova in early 1882. Even after the divorce, Mendeleev was technically a bigamist; the Russian Orthodox Church required at least 7 years before lawful re-marriage.
I agree he's far from a monk, but I think calling him an unqualified bigamist is a bit much...
Look at it this way: If you're only coding for a couple of hours a week, your project had better not depend on you. And if it doesn't, then either you don't have standing to decide which license you release under, or you've made the choice already by deciding to commit to a particular project.
I got the impression that the person you're replying to isn't worried about these piecemeal coders wasting their time worrying about what license the project gets released under. He is more worried about one of these coders deciding that it would be cool to link in some kind of functionality from a different OSS project, and now this guy has to start worrying about exactly what flavors of GPL he's dealing with on both sides. Before, he just had to know that both were GPL and everything was cool.
This extra overhead only affects those developers contributing to GPL licensed projects. The headaches of dealing with other license compatibility issues remain the same.
I shouldn't waste my time but I reply with an analysis (in [[ ]]) of your reply:
> Get over your paranoia already. [[ personal attack, non sequitor ]]
> You're arguing against something because it disallows you to LIE CONVINCINGLY? [[ restatement of obvious ]] > Oh wait, you run for office. Gotcha. [[ non sequitor, possible personal attack ]]
As for the law i suggested: You can still apply all the same parallels to discrimination as it stands. "I really like married (no gays) people who jog daily (no handicapped people)." Now, if you use that as a basis for making employment decisions, you're guilty of breaking the law. If I'm married and like to jog and tell you so...so be it. I'm not saying discrimination laws work perfectly either.
[[ Discrimination laws are slightly broken, so we should slightly break our safeguards against voting coercion, for some unstated reason (making it easier to implement electronic voting?). You've also missed a big point here, which is that an employer who hasn't hired you yet probably has LESS influence on you than a current employer. This is why I moved your analogy to the STRONGER one of sexual harassment.]]
Second, sexual harassment is NOT discrimination. [[ Correct. But then, I wasn't confused about it. ]]
Third, comparing the MAFIAA tactics to a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuits is so far off base i'm not even going into it. [[ Dismissal of analogy out-of-hand. Why is it any easier to prosecute a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit than to defend against the MAFIAA? I can only think of one thing which might justify your dismissal of the analogy, which is that the possible rewards from a successful discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit would probably be much larger than the "rewards" from successfully defending oneself from the MAFIAA. This point would seem to me to be largely offset by the relative difficulties of the two legal actions. Don't forget that the burden of proof is on the prosecution in a discrimination or sexual harassment case. ]]
> You think couples don't argue NOW about who they're going to vote for? You think some employers dont' try to swing votes?
Your system makes it impossible to convincingly lie about how you vote, an ability which undercuts what you want instead to outlaw. Your proposal would probably also infringe on the right of free political speech for all employers. Where would you draw the line? Would it be allowed for an employer to officially state a political opinion and say "I really like people who see this the same way I do"? It's a kind of vague coercion, there. People might suddenly start to "volunteer" to show their receipts to this guy (he didn't ask them to, now, right?).
The analogous behavior in the case of sexual harassment might be to stare a lot at your secretary's breasts. Not a lot of secretaries go to court over that....
> When they're not there's a lawsuit and fines.
Right. And people sued by **AA never choose to just pay up rather than go to court. What universe do you live in, anyway?
You seem to be making two assumptions whose validity is not obvious to me:
(1) All physical processes are deterministic. (2) All deterministic problems are computable.
It is well known that there are lots of deterministic problems which are not computable.
If you somehow are making a deep philosophical statement that no problems derived from simulating physical reality are in this category of problems (a statement which as far as I can see needs justification), you still have the problem that they might well be computable only theoretically, in that a computer powerful enough to compute the answer would require more matter or space than exists in the physical universe.
> It claims they "detected an individual" who is "distributing". > But they don't actually detect any distribution.
Nor do they detect an "individual". An IP address isn't an individual. If you're lucky, you might be able to connect it to a particular computer at a particular time.
> I prefer conversation to moderation. Only moderate if there are already replies.
interesting. I moderate comments to make them more (or less) visible, not in order to discuss them. Until Slashdot implements some kind of weighted rating system where each replier can affect the rating of the parent comment (presumably with an ability corresponding to his karma or something), I will continue to moderate you (perhaps against your wishes) rather than reply "Your comment is insightful". Anyway, such a reply is real conversation to about the same extent that Monty Python's "argument" was real argumentation (ouch, I can already imagine what kind of replies that reference is going to bring...).
I skimmed the ruling, and he really goes through logical contortions to vacate the injunction, while having to accept that everything that e360 claimed was factual, because of the egregious legal errors that Spamhaus made.
He really had to work hard to "do the right thing".
> Before this ruling was handed down, the vast majority of webcasters were barely making ends meet as Internet radio > advertising revenue is just beginning to develop.
so moving all or part of their business off-shore doesn't sound realistic. (caveat: savenetradio.org is a partisan group looking out for the webcasters, so they wouldn't of course tell us if the webcasters were making money hand over fist, so you'll have to apply your own reality filter to this.)
Americans will probably just end up listening to RIAA-run internet radio, or foreign stations, at least until the latter are legislated away....
Sorry, didn't quite understand that reply, especially considering your other posts....
You're just happy that the use of ActiveX isn't dogma of major Indian religions? You're glad you won't have to compete in the job market against outsourcing to Indian Linux/BSD gurus?
> OpenBSD developers have time and time again claimed "moral superiority" over GNU and Linux due to their adoption > of a license that allows code to be used in closed projects. It always was a specious argument, but it's looking > all the more absurd today.
Doesn't this always tend to happen with organized religion? The "our ideology is better/truer/stronger than yours so we are superior and can condescend/oppress/forcibly convert" syndrome?
(Flashes on the surrealistic scene of the Romans watching RMS fight Theo de Raadt in the Colosseum...)
Most people have the impression that a major goal of DRM is also to prevent distribution. After all, the **AA's aren't prosecuting people right and left for skipping ads, or even for downloading. They're suing over distribution.
Also, if "the manner" in which the "DRM" is executed were important to the original poster, it seems to me that he wouldn't have made the original analogy. So it's irrelevant to this thread.
> tweaked Windows for profit instead of to improve efficiency or user experience
Did you read the article? It was obviously tweaked to improve the "user experience"; the painful difference between OSS and this being that Microsoft arbitrarily decided for all of Vista's users what "user experience" they would like to experience (i.e., skipless media playback as opposed to maximum network performance). There were bugs in Microsoft's solution, but there are also bugs in OSS.
OSS projects, however, are (usually) much less dictatorial in deciding what the user wants; they can't be, actually, because if he doesn't like what they give him, he can just fork-and-run.
> Fair use allows you to transfer from the original media to another device or backup but not from that device or backup > to anything else, they had simply gone one step to many, it is only fair use from the original media.
Even assuming this is true, you're missing the major point which is that damages were awarded for distribution. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that the violation of copyright you're describing is something different.
I don't believe OOXML should be a standard, but it seems to me to be pretty nit-picking to complain that numeric values are stored with "rounding errors" since that is inherent in converting between ASCII values and any binary format, including IEEE-standard floats. How does ODF handle this? It explicitly defines how the conversions are to be done? Or it caches the string the user typed?
Other than that, most of the other stuff he talks about is rather damning.
Slashdot Mirror
See De Bruijn sequence.
> probability states that it would be worthwhile putting one of a thousand guns to your head,
> where only one was loaded, and pulling the trigger if the reward was a million dollers upon survival.
Uh, no. Probability and expectation theory only deals in uniform ideal units. Your example contains two different units: "death" and "dollar". You're confusing probability theory with utility theory here. Or with a combination of probability and utility theory.
E.g., if the person pulling the trigger knows he is sick and most likely will die in great pain within several weeks, I wouldn't think it at all extraordinary for him to take this wager. In his case the utility of death vs. money is different than for others (you, for example, it seems).
And in the downloader's case, in many cases the downloaded product has a higher utility (e.g., no DRM) than the product he can attain legally. And what the relative utility of being sued by RIAA is for him is dependent on what he thinks, not what you think.
> They said uploading, but she downloaded too,
I'm pretty sure that the enormous fine was because of the uploading, under the theory that making the files available over P2P is the same as distribution. RIAA has never gone after anyone for purely downloading, AFAIK, and the maximum fines would be much, much, smaller.
> both aren't especially wise.
Both are illegal. Since the probability of being caught and prosecuted are very small, one could make a case based on mathematical expectation that it is financially worthwhile to break the law in this case. Kind of like being paid to buy a lottery ticket which makes you pay a larger sum back if you "win".
> They fact that they haven't caught him doesn't give you a license to break the law.
Correct, but unfortunately not connected with the point trying to be made (you missed it in your knee-jerk reaction against breaking copyright law), which is that the situation raised as an analogy in laughingcoyote's post would indicate that there is something wrong with the justice system (within his analogy). The justice system being analogous to "the content industry" in this case.
And before you lash out at me in similar fashion, note that I also have made no pro-piracy statements. The matter in question is whether the behavior of "the content industry" seems reasonable, not whether piracy is OK or justified or not.
In my eyes, the major problem with the argument in question is that the poster lumps a lot of relatively unrelated organizations (RIAA, MPAA, and all their respective "shadows" in non-US countries) into one cohesive "content industry", in order to criticize its behavior as being disjointed and arbitrary.
See the applicable section of Wikipedia.
I'm assuming you were interested in a reference to this alternative usage. My apologies if you were actually only interested in old books and nostalgia.
> I'm quite sure any voting laws against coersion and vote buying are not perfectly observed today.
Uh, the situation today is that it is impossible to coerce or buy votes effectively, since everyone can convincingly lie about how they voted (what you want to do away with). The only people you can coerce are those who you can convince that their votes are somehow not secret, or who are just too stupid to understand the ramifications of that secrecy. That's why your observation about the imperfection of those laws only strengthens my argument, and undercuts your own.
> Individual is plantiff vs. huge corporation is plantiff
Yes, but take into consideration that the majority of the RIAA cases where the defendent is innocent (and he doesn't represent himself) are abandoned eventually by RIAA, since their case is usually very weak, and they don't want to set a losing precedent.
An effective prosecution of voting coercion would almost certainly necessitate the testimony of the person coerced, and he has already shown that he is coercible by the defendent who now has an interest to coerce him to not testify. Doesn't sound like an easy case for the state.
I agree he's far from a monk, but I think calling him an unqualified bigamist is a bit much...
I got the impression that the person you're replying to isn't worried about these piecemeal coders wasting their time worrying about what license the project gets released under. He is more worried about one of these coders deciding that it would be cool to link in some kind of functionality from a different OSS project, and now this guy has to start worrying about exactly what flavors of GPL he's dealing with on both sides. Before, he just had to know that both were GPL and everything was cool.
This extra overhead only affects those developers contributing to GPL licensed projects. The headaches of dealing with other license compatibility issues remain the same.
I shouldn't waste my time but I reply with an analysis (in [[ ]]) of your reply:
> Get over your paranoia already. [[ personal attack, non sequitor ]]
> You're arguing against something because it disallows you to LIE CONVINCINGLY? [[ restatement of obvious ]]
> Oh wait, you run for office. Gotcha. [[ non sequitor, possible personal attack ]]
As for the law i suggested: You can still apply all the same parallels to discrimination as it stands. "I really like married (no gays) people who jog daily (no handicapped people)." Now, if you use that as a basis for making employment decisions, you're guilty of breaking the law. If I'm married and like to jog and tell you so...so be it. I'm not saying discrimination laws work perfectly either.
[[ Discrimination laws are slightly broken, so we should slightly break our safeguards against voting coercion, for some unstated reason (making it easier to implement electronic voting?). You've also missed a big point here, which is that an employer who hasn't hired you yet probably has LESS influence on you than a current employer. This is why I moved your analogy to the STRONGER one of sexual harassment.]]
Second, sexual harassment is NOT discrimination. [[ Correct. But then, I wasn't confused about it. ]]
Third, comparing the MAFIAA tactics to a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuits is so far off base i'm not even going into it. [[ Dismissal of analogy out-of-hand. Why is it any easier to prosecute a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit than to defend against the MAFIAA? I can only think of one thing which might justify your dismissal of the analogy, which is that the possible rewards from a successful discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit would probably be much larger than the "rewards" from successfully defending oneself from the MAFIAA. This point would seem to me to be largely offset by the relative difficulties of the two legal actions. Don't forget that the burden of proof is on the prosecution in a discrimination or sexual harassment case. ]]
> You think couples don't argue NOW about who they're going to vote for? You think some employers dont' try to swing votes?
Your system makes it impossible to convincingly lie about how you vote, an ability which undercuts what you want instead to outlaw. Your proposal would probably also infringe on the right of free political speech for all employers. Where would you draw the line? Would it be allowed for an employer to officially state a political opinion and say "I really like people who see this the same way I do"? It's a kind of vague coercion, there. People might suddenly start to "volunteer" to show their receipts to this guy (he didn't ask them to, now, right?).
The analogous behavior in the case of sexual harassment might be to stare a lot at your secretary's breasts. Not a lot of secretaries go to court over that....
> When they're not there's a lawsuit and fines.
Right. And people sued by **AA never choose to just pay up rather than go to court. What universe do you live in, anyway?
You seem to be making two assumptions whose validity is not obvious to me:
(1) All physical processes are deterministic.
(2) All deterministic problems are computable.
It is well known that there are lots of deterministic problems which are not computable.
If you somehow are making a deep philosophical statement that no problems derived from simulating physical reality are in this category of problems (a statement which as far as I can see needs justification), you still have the problem that they might well be computable only theoretically, in that a computer powerful enough to compute the answer would require more matter or space than exists in the physical universe.
Nah, just have Bruce Lee teach you how to do it.
Wow, I feel my age... which is strange, since Daredevil came first by a good number of years...
> It claims they "detected an individual" who is "distributing".
> But they don't actually detect any distribution.
Nor do they detect an "individual". An IP address isn't an individual. If you're lucky, you might be able to connect it to a particular computer at a particular time.
I find your sig
> I prefer conversation to moderation. Only moderate if there are already replies.
interesting. I moderate comments to make them more (or less) visible, not in order to discuss them. Until Slashdot implements some kind of weighted rating system where each replier can affect the rating of the parent comment (presumably with an ability corresponding to his karma or something), I will continue to moderate you (perhaps against your wishes) rather than reply "Your comment is insightful". Anyway, such a reply is real conversation to about the same extent that Monty Python's "argument" was real argumentation (ouch, I can already imagine what kind of replies that reference is going to bring...).
The Curie point of modern magnetic media is higher than the melting point of aluminum.
I skimmed the ruling, and he really goes through logical contortions to vacate the injunction, while having to accept that everything that e360 claimed was factual, because of the egregious legal errors that Spamhaus made.
He really had to work hard to "do the right thing".
> copyright holders are paid
You meant **IA and its ilk will be paid; thousands of independent artists won't, and their own artists will almost not.
Bad idea, if only that the wrong people get the money.
savenetradio.org claims:
> Before this ruling was handed down, the vast majority of webcasters were barely making ends meet as Internet radio
> advertising revenue is just beginning to develop.
so moving all or part of their business off-shore doesn't sound realistic. (caveat: savenetradio.org is a partisan group looking out for the webcasters, so they wouldn't of course tell us if the webcasters were making money hand over fist, so you'll have to apply your own reality filter to this.)
Americans will probably just end up listening to RIAA-run internet radio, or foreign stations, at least until the latter are legislated away....
Sorry, didn't quite understand that reply, especially considering your other posts....
You're just happy that the use of ActiveX isn't dogma of major Indian religions?
You're glad you won't have to compete in the job market against outsourcing to Indian Linux/BSD gurus?
> OpenBSD developers have time and time again claimed "moral superiority" over GNU and Linux due to their adoption
> of a license that allows code to be used in closed projects. It always was a specious argument, but it's looking
> all the more absurd today.
Doesn't this always tend to happen with organized religion? The "our ideology is better/truer/stronger than yours so we are superior and can condescend/oppress/forcibly convert" syndrome?
(Flashes on the surrealistic scene of the Romans watching RMS fight Theo de Raadt in the Colosseum...)
Most people have the impression that a major goal of DRM is also to prevent distribution. After all, the **AA's aren't prosecuting people right and left for skipping ads, or even for downloading. They're suing over distribution.
Also, if "the manner" in which the "DRM" is executed were important to the original poster, it seems to me that he wouldn't have made the original analogy. So it's irrelevant to this thread.
> tweaked Windows for profit instead of to improve efficiency or user experience
Did you read the article? It was obviously tweaked to improve the "user experience"; the painful difference between OSS and this being that Microsoft arbitrarily decided for all of Vista's users what "user experience" they would like to experience (i.e., skipless media playback as opposed to maximum network performance). There were bugs in Microsoft's solution, but there are also bugs in OSS.
OSS projects, however, are (usually) much less dictatorial in deciding what the user wants; they can't be, actually, because if he doesn't like what they give him, he can just fork-and-run.
> Fair use allows you to transfer from the original media to another device or backup but not from that device or backup
> to anything else, they had simply gone one step to many, it is only fair use from the original media.
Even assuming this is true, you're missing the major point which is that damages were awarded for distribution. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that the violation of copyright you're describing is something different.
I don't believe OOXML should be a standard, but it seems to me to be pretty nit-picking to complain that numeric values are stored with "rounding errors" since that is inherent in converting between ASCII values and any binary format, including IEEE-standard floats. How does ODF handle this? It explicitly defines how the conversions are to be done? Or it caches the string the user typed?
Other than that, most of the other stuff he talks about is rather damning.
> I didn't care if the US government thought I was a criminal
Reality check! Reality check! ITAR regulates exportation only. Importing strong encryption has never been a federal crime.
Not so in all other countries, YMMV, check local regulations....