If you want to nitpick the distinctions between "stealing" and "theft", why don't you read the comment I was responding to and ask yourself which term was used there (particularly in the third paragraph, which is the one I quoted)?
If you have a problem with folks on Slashdot using common dictionary definitions of these words, rather than precise legal definitions, then either suck it up or go somewhere else. This isn't a courtroom or a law school; we're discussing broad ethics and morals, not intricate legalities. The rest of us have no problem understanding what "stealing" and "theft" mean in this particular context.
If you read the post I was replying to, you'll see that obtaining a copy of the game wasn't one of his requirements: he said the act was "stealing" because the copyright holder was deprived of revenue. HTH.
it shows how little this community actually understands the mechanics of language [...]
Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys.
Well, by that logic, if I have $50 in my pocket and I decide to buy a few books with it instead of a game -- maybe because of the bookstore's actions, like if I saw they were having a sale -- doesn't that mean the bookstore has "stolen" that revenue from the game store? After all, the game store wanted my money, but the bookstore got it instead, just like how in your example, the copyright holder wanted those customers' money but the infringer got it instead.
It doesn't hold up. In fact, it's the same logic people use to argue that noncommercial copying is stealing (because the copyright holder wanted your money but didn't get it), and it doesn't hold up there either.
It's only stealing when someone takes away something that you already had. Theft makes the victim poorer, which is why it's considered a bad thing. But if you have exactly as much money and property after the alleged theft as you did before, it wasn't theft at all. Money that belongs to someone else doesn't count, no matter how much you might wish for it to become yours.
It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property), an intellectual property owner has the right to control who gets access to the intellectual property.
Nope. See, the reason you have exclusive rights to the use of your real property is because it's a limited resource. If I bring 100 of my friends into your living room, that's going to make it hard for you to set up that new entertainment center. My use can interfere with yours, and so to resolve those conflicts, someone has to decide who may or may not use it at any given time. That person is called the "owner". The same goes for cars, radio spectrum, and so on: we grant ownership in order to prevent conflicts when different people have different ideas about how something should be used.
Information, however, is not subject to the same limitations. I can play a copy of a game at home while you play another copy at your house, or hang the CD on your wall, or compress it and email it to your pal in Russia, or whatever. My use of the information on that disc cannot possibly interfere with your use of it, and vice versa, so there's no need for either of us to have exclusive rights to it. And so, even if the law does attempt to grant one of us exclusive rights over that information, those rights are illegitimate, and the other one of us shouldn't be too worried about infringing them.
As for changing Java - Sun, but really Java, was VERY VERY open. From the start there was a huge Java community effort way outside Sun called JCP, the Java community process.
Has this process actually led to any VM changes, or is it limited to superficial language changes (which wouldn't be enough to implement major C# features)?
No no no. Punishment is all about preventing crime. If the punishment for murder was bad enough, maybe Nina would still be alive. Throwing him in jail now doesn't mean much. There is no punishment for punishment's sake- it's meant to be an example for others to avoid.
Yes, that's what's called a "deterrent".
However, like I said, a prison term is already enough deterrent for any rational person. If someone isn't deterred by the thought of being locked up for decades, then either he's convinced he isn't going to get caught, and so no sentence will be harsh enough because he doesn't believe it'll apply to him; or he's not acting rationally, and so no sentence will be harsh enough because he isn't making a cost-benefit calculation anyway.
It's nothing but wishful thinking to say that if the sentence for murder were harsher, Nina would still be alive. Hans clearly either wasn't thinking rationally when he killed her (a crime of passion) or was convinced that he wouldn't get caught. He was facing a sentence of what, 25 years already? Surely you don't think another few years would've made a difference.
And as an afterthought, I doubt murder victims' families feel good about their tax dollars sheltering and feeding murderers.
I agree, but that's why these decisions are made by judges and juries, not by the victims' families: because victims' families are often irrational and bloodthirsty. Appeasing those people is not a legitimate goal of the justice system.
It's not bloody okay if somebody commits a violent crime against me, my family or my friends.
Why not? You can already hear you ask. Quite simple. My thirst for revenge would be fueled. I might get uncivilized.
Well then, if you act on that "thirst for revenge", you should be locked up as a deterrent to others who might follow in your footsteps, and to keep you from committing any more vigilante acts.
To have a civilized society we need the state to meter out punishment fitting to the crime, so that the victims thirst for revenge is satisfied at the same time as trying to rehabilitate people.
No, no, no. What you're suggesting is that the state should preemptively commit barbaric acts in order to preempt its own barbarically-inclined citizens.
But why bother getting the state involved at that point? If we're going to accept such barbarism, we may as well just let those people dish it out themselves, right? It's no less despicable when the state does it, and surely it'd be cheaper to let you exact retribution with your own hands than to pay a state employee to do it for you.
On the other hand, if we're not going to accept such barbarism, then we certainly shouldn't have the state committing it in our names.
J# is a.NET compiler for Java, with some extensions to handle.NET features like delegates. It used to be included with Visual Studio, but as of VS 2008 I think it's gone. I never found J# very useful anyway, since it was based on an old version of Java and never updated.
As for whether Microsoft should've pressured Sun to improve Java instead of developing C#... Sun never seemed very open to that, did they? Even now, they're reluctant to change the VM: look at how they implemented generics, for example. Some of the ways that C# improves over Java (e.g. delegates and value types) depend on having a more featureful VM.
The punishment is the prison time, not rape, let along the long, drawn-out suffering that is an AIDS death. Yes he's a terrible person for having killed his wife, yes he should be punished and no the 15 years he's getting probably isn't enough for someone who can kill their wife and then calculatingly lie to the police and a jury about it for so long. That doesn't mean he deserves to be raped.
No one "deserves" to suffer at all as payback for committing a crime. Punishment for punishment's sake is barbaric and has no place in a civilized legal system.
That doesn't mean no one should be sentenced, of course. But the purpose of any sentence should be to prevent the criminal from reoffending (either by rehabilitating him or just by keeping him off the street), to make him compensate the victim (when possible, which it isn't in this case), and to provide a deterrent to other would-be criminals, not to take revenge on him for being a bad boy.
Now, it's true that the sentence has to be undesirable for it to work as an effective deterrent, but really, prison is undesirable enough on its own. You don't need to throw in the threat of prison rape or violence; the thought of being locked up for a few decades is enough to deter any rational person, and an irrational one won't be deterred by anything.
As a 49 yo grandmother, c programmer and feminist, I find this offensive.
Oh, do you really? Just a few months ago, you told someone else to chill out when they were offended by a similar statement:
I am a grandmother too, and sorry but you are wrong. The truth is, that most grandmothers are not technically literate. I just happen to have a career as a programmer, but I think your being too pc if you think there isn't a grain of truth in the original statement.
I'm not sure that's an improvement. Let me see if I understand what you're saying correctly...
Suppose I'm considering calling $100 to win a total of $400 (25% pot odds), and suppose I correctly predict that I have a 50% chance of winning the hand.
If I always call here, then half the time, I'll win $300, and the other half I'll lose $100. My expectation is 300 *.50 - 100 *.50, or +$100.
On the other hand, if I randomize my play and only call 75% of the time according to my pot odds, then 1/4 of the time I break even (fold), 3/8 of the time I win $300, and 3/8 of the time I lose $100. My expectation is (0 *.25) + (300 *.50 - 100 *.50) *.75, or +$75. (If I only call 50% of the time according to my odds of winning, then my expectation is only +$50.)
It looks like calling every time is the better strategy. Am I missing something here? What is the information I'm paying $25 to avoid giving my opponent, and how do I know it's worth that much?
Without copyright, we'd hardly need the GPL in the first place.
Yes, it's true that without the GPL, you can't force people to release their modified source code. But many would argue that you wouldn't need to do that anyway; you could just use their modified binaries (which could be legally and freely shared), or disassemble/decompile them (since reverse engineering would be legal), or reimplement their changes in your own code (since you wouldn't have to worry about making your work a derivative of theirs).
The same way as the market for any other product or service. Some people have artistic ability and want money; other people have money and want new art produced. Information and money flows between consumer and producer, possibly through some network of middlemen (like the distributors and retailers who move physical albums), the work is done, and everyone moves on to the next project.
For one possibility, take a look at Sellaband, where fans contribute $10 at a time to fund album production (a $50,000 goal). With only a few changes -- let the bands name their own price and keep whatever they don't spend on production, for example -- that model could easily fund production in a copyright-free world.
I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure how many artists will be happy to move to that sort of system.
Perhaps they wouldn't be. No one is ever very happy to have to change the way they do things.
Their happiness, however, must be weighed against the rights and freedoms of everyone else: copyright conflicts with free speech and private property rights, and in practice it has led to restrictions and added expense for electronics manufacturers, software developers, ISPs and site operators, etc. The people who are negatively affected by copyright would probably be happy to be free from that, don't you think?
However, this does not solve the problem of paying for the creation. Until we establish who will pay the creators for their work, and how much they will be paid and so forth, the issue of falling distribution costs is fairly moot.
We don't have to establish that; the market will do it.
Without copyright, artists will still be able to sell their time and talent to anyone who's willing to pay. Maybe that means one big sponsor paying a million dollars, or a million fans each paying one dollar -- the cost of those transactions is coming down too -- but the best way to find out is to set up the right conditions and let a solution arise. The demand for the creation of new art isn't going anywhere, and neither is the supply of talent.
I suspect that if that were tried on a wider scale, by bands with fans in different demographics to Radiohead fans, then many more people would just take the music than pay for it.
As long as the bands were paid a fair price for writing and recording the albums in the first place, it wouldn't matter how many people downloaded or bought copies later.
The problem as I see it is not an inability to meet the demand for bits, but the inability to meet the demand for the content contained in those bits. [...] Content producers have to be paid something at some point along the way - the artists, the engineers, even the execs. [...] At some point someone has to pay them and we can't have the utopia that people want where all content can be obtained for free forever.
The reason you're seeing that as a problem is that you're conflating two different things:
1. Producing something that has not existed before 2. Distributing copies of something that already exists
Copyright artificially ties these two things together, by promoting a business model where #1 is paid for by #2, so it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that they always have to be linked: that the only way for the producer in #1 to make money is for the recipient in #2 to pay for the copy he gets, and therefore that if people are allowed to share copies for free, producers will never get paid.
But that's a fallacy. They're two very different acts, involving different skills and tools, occurring at different times, and involving different parties.
If people want to get paid for producing new content, all they have to do is refuse to produce any new content until they've been paid: they can sell their artistic labor, instead of their ability to press a button on a copy machine. The demand for new content isn't going away; people are willing to pay for it, and if copyright goes away, a new business model will replace it quickly enough.
The problem is that the strategy you call "optimal" isn't really optimal at all in a game of limited information. If your strategy is to always call when the odds say you should call, and never call when they don't, then an opponent who catches on can easily bluff you out of every hand.
If you see someone pushing all-in before the flop ten hands in a row, it's possible that he's just gotten a streak of premium hands, but it's more likely that he's bluffing with a lot of crappy hands. You'll tend to win more by assuming that he's bluffing and lowering your own requirements for calling him, i.e. using an "exploitative" strategy.
You throw around the word reverse-engineer like it were a trivial thing. Sure, unobfuscated java class files decompile quite nicely, but as soon as you get away from that, you're massively ramping up the overhead required to modify their code.
*shrug* Then don't modify their code; just reimplement their changes in your own code. With no copyright, you don't have to worry whether your program is too similar to theirs.
I don't really see how this poses a problem for free software. You can use it and distribute it however you want; that's as free as free can get. If you can't change it, then so what - either use their version or make a better one.
Exactly. And that system is called copyright! It's a novel idea that lets a movie maker recoup the cost of creating a movie from many, many interested parties, meaning that no single one of them has to fund the entire venture.
The system I had in mind is called "the free market", where people willingly pay each other to perform services. If customers want the service performed, and they have money, that money will eventually find its way to the people who can perform the service, the same way it does in every other industry. You don't need any kind of special treatment for that to happen - all you need is one group of people who have a demand and another group who can supply it.
Copyright isn't what lets creators get paid by many, many interested parties; the market does that by giving them a place to advertise and sell their services to as many people as they want. What copyright lets them do is pretend that they're manufacturing a product.
So if somebody has possession of the pictures my own father took of my abuse at his hands, that won't harm me?
To put it bluntly: no, it won't.
The abuse happened in the past. The pictures are evidence of that abuse, but they aren't inherently abusive by themselves. Part of recovery is coming to terms with that, and separating the real harm you suffered in the past from the imaginary harm you're worried about.
I got the feeling after being interviewed for the umpteenth time by the feds that this guy was producing porn.
If that's true, then it's good he's not doing it anymore.
This attitude of something as heinous as child porn not harming anyone is bogus ethically. Demand creates a market where sick fucks like that guy create porn for sale by exploiting their own children.
Sick fucks like that guy would be exploiting children anyway. And I suspect that most child porn is downloaded for free, with no money changing hands -- recall that the GP said he used hash checks to look for files that are decades old. Demand for old files isn't going to cause anyone to go back in time and create those files.
Anyone that sends their computer to be fixed by someone else shouldn't expect any more privacy than a homeowner who hires someone to fix something around the house and than complains that they should not of noticed the DVDs or magazines laying around the house with naked children on them.
Well, you know, people who come into your home to do repairs should mind their business too. We have people whose job it is to enforce the law: they're called police. If you want to spend your days turning in people for possession of porn or drugs or whatever, apply for a job as a policeman, not an electrician or a plumber.
Now, obviously, if you find someone in the midst of harming someone else -- actively abusing children, for example -- that's different. But possession isn't inherently harmful to anyone.
I am a contractor that operates outside the box, almost a vigilante. I cannot name what software I use or I would be easily identified. I do not engage in corp espionage but this law would stop me in my tracks if I were to ever have stepped foot in Texas.
Good! You have no right to snoop around other people's computers, even if you think you're doing it for a noble cause. (Which you aren't, by the way -- if you really wanted to help people, you'd go after the ones creating these images in the first place.)
I hope to turn in many more.
And I hope that when your vigilante game finally lands you in prison, you'll meet up with some of your victims.
Even something as interesting as the GPL would not exist without it. You might say that the GPL would be unnecessary, but if you think about it, that isn't quite true...
I disagree: copyleft licenses, of which the GPL is one, fundamentally serve to give back the freedoms that copyright takes away. With no copyright, there'd be no need for copyleft, so the GPL would indeed be unnecessary.
It might be less convenient to develop open source software without the GPL, since others would be able to modify your software and distribute the modified binaries, without releasing their source changes (which they can already do if you use the BSD license). But then you'd be free to reverse-engineer their code and port the changes back into your open source version - or you could just freely use and share their binary version.
I look at the content we agree we would lose, and I don't want it to go away. Of the content we would gain... I'm not really seeing the added value.
Well, first, I don't necessarily agree that we would lose that content; that was a hypothetical. As long as there's demand for movies like Toy Story to be produced, I have a hard time seeing how they could just "go away": if the market has taught us anything, it's that money will eventually find its way from the people who want something to the people who can provide it.
Second, even if you can't see the added value yourself, surely you agree that's a matter of personal taste. Pixar movies aren't "better" in any objective sense than, say, the music of Girl Talk or Negativland.
Perhaps you could have people building up movies organically like open source software. But I can't really picture that working out.
It's already happening, slowly but surely. See Big Buck Bunny, for example.
By that consideration, OOXML would be the perfect standard for document interchange, but no-one agrees.
That's because people have objections to the OOXML format itself. For example, some OOXML features are basically specified as "behave like Word 95", and that's hard to duplicate. But as far as I've seen (as the author of more than one compiler targeting.NET), there's nothing like that in the CLR standard.
Are you raising objections to the substance of the CLR standard, rather than the fact that it comes from Microsoft? If not, there's no analogy to OOXML.
I'm unsure why that standard would be bad, but the CLR standard is ok.
The only thing they have in common is they're both from Microsoft.
I don't think they'll shut down the Mono project, but I know it'll never be as good as the equivalent on Windows.
As I have been pointing out for years now, ECMA publishes documents that contain unlicensed patented technology of member companies.
That's because the member companies agree to allow those patents to be used to implement the standards. Microsoft statement:
The ECMA process requires that all patents held by member companies that are essential for implementing its standards are available under "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms" for the purpose of implementing those Standards. This is the normal condition used in all International Standards organizations, including both ECMA and ISO.
But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C# and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis for this purpose.
So yes, they're patented, but everyone is free to use those technologies.
So despite your unknowledgeable remark about not needing MS or the sanctity of MONO, The ECMA standards belong to Microsoft and they can kill MONO any time they want.
No, they can't. It's a shame that you've been misleading people "for years now" by spreading this FUD.
.NET is the tool by which they destroy third party development.
Why isn't that a good idea? Because encouraging more monopolistic companies and cartels is not a good idea?
Large != monopolistic.
You seem to be arguing against economies of scale in general here. Sorry, but I don't think you're going to convince anyone that small, inefficient firms are preferable to large, efficient ones.
And like I said, as soon as the large, efficient firm fails to meet consumer needs (by not writing a particular program that people want to see written), they leave room for an independent developer to move in. So either we have large developers writing all the software that anyone could ever want cheaply, or we have large developers writing some of it cheaply and independent developers writing the rest of it for a higher price. Either way, it all gets written.
I also haven't even addressed the issue that your idea would entirely stifle innovation (why would a programmer come up with an idea for an awesome new product if he can't get paid for it?)
That question rests on a false premise. People can get paid for writing code whether they implement a boring old idea or an awesome new one. Coming up with the idea isn't really the hard part anyway; plenty of people have awesome new ideas, but few of them ever get implemented.
How do you propose to address the sudden death of all so-called "sleeper hits" coming out of left field?
I suspect they'll be more than balanced out by the sudden appearance of new works which had been prohibited by copyright: mash-ups, fan tributes, sequels and other universe continuations, etc.
Or do you sacrifice innovation and creativity on the altar of stripping developers' freedoms?
You misspelled "the altar of restoring everyone else's freedoms". HTH!
You've obviously given it a lot of thought, and in an ideal world maybe it'd work, but you've given no incentive for content creators to want such a thing.
If they aren't convinced by the prospect of a guaranteed income (rather than gambling on whether they'll sell enough copies to recoup their investment), then they won't be convinced.
But that's OK. I don't need to convince them.
And sorry if it sounds selfish, but there's absolutely no benefit to this idea to me or anyone who doesn't want to draw a paycheck from some multinational.
Actually, there's plenty of benefit to consumers, service providers, and basically everyone who isn't a copyright holder. Maybe copyright holders don't think they'd benefit, but that's OK: the playing field has been tipped in their favor for long enough already.
Slashdot Mirror
Theft and stealing are not interchangeable.
If you want to nitpick the distinctions between "stealing" and "theft", why don't you read the comment I was responding to and ask yourself which term was used there (particularly in the third paragraph, which is the one I quoted)?
If you have a problem with folks on Slashdot using common dictionary definitions of these words, rather than precise legal definitions, then either suck it up or go somewhere else. This isn't a courtroom or a law school; we're discussing broad ethics and morals, not intricate legalities. The rest of us have no problem understanding what "stealing" and "theft" mean in this particular context.
No, because you don't have the game.
If you read the post I was replying to, you'll see that obtaining a copy of the game wasn't one of his requirements: he said the act was "stealing" because the copyright holder was deprived of revenue. HTH.
it shows how little this community actually understands the mechanics of language [...]
Wait for it ...
Stealing != theft.
...bam! Now that's comedy.
Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys.
Well, by that logic, if I have $50 in my pocket and I decide to buy a few books with it instead of a game -- maybe because of the bookstore's actions, like if I saw they were having a sale -- doesn't that mean the bookstore has "stolen" that revenue from the game store? After all, the game store wanted my money, but the bookstore got it instead, just like how in your example, the copyright holder wanted those customers' money but the infringer got it instead.
It doesn't hold up. In fact, it's the same logic people use to argue that noncommercial copying is stealing (because the copyright holder wanted your money but didn't get it), and it doesn't hold up there either.
It's only stealing when someone takes away something that you already had. Theft makes the victim poorer, which is why it's considered a bad thing. But if you have exactly as much money and property after the alleged theft as you did before, it wasn't theft at all. Money that belongs to someone else doesn't count, no matter how much you might wish for it to become yours.
It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property), an intellectual property owner has the right to control who gets access to the intellectual property.
Nope. See, the reason you have exclusive rights to the use of your real property is because it's a limited resource. If I bring 100 of my friends into your living room, that's going to make it hard for you to set up that new entertainment center. My use can interfere with yours, and so to resolve those conflicts, someone has to decide who may or may not use it at any given time. That person is called the "owner". The same goes for cars, radio spectrum, and so on: we grant ownership in order to prevent conflicts when different people have different ideas about how something should be used.
Information, however, is not subject to the same limitations. I can play a copy of a game at home while you play another copy at your house, or hang the CD on your wall, or compress it and email it to your pal in Russia, or whatever. My use of the information on that disc cannot possibly interfere with your use of it, and vice versa, so there's no need for either of us to have exclusive rights to it. And so, even if the law does attempt to grant one of us exclusive rights over that information, those rights are illegitimate, and the other one of us shouldn't be too worried about infringing them.
As for changing Java - Sun, but really Java, was VERY VERY open. From the start there was a huge Java community effort way outside Sun called JCP, the Java community process.
Has this process actually led to any VM changes, or is it limited to superficial language changes (which wouldn't be enough to implement major C# features)?
No no no. Punishment is all about preventing crime. If the punishment for murder was bad enough, maybe Nina would still be alive. Throwing him in jail now doesn't mean much. There is no punishment for punishment's sake- it's meant to be an example for others to avoid.
Yes, that's what's called a "deterrent".
However, like I said, a prison term is already enough deterrent for any rational person. If someone isn't deterred by the thought of being locked up for decades, then either he's convinced he isn't going to get caught, and so no sentence will be harsh enough because he doesn't believe it'll apply to him; or he's not acting rationally, and so no sentence will be harsh enough because he isn't making a cost-benefit calculation anyway.
It's nothing but wishful thinking to say that if the sentence for murder were harsher, Nina would still be alive. Hans clearly either wasn't thinking rationally when he killed her (a crime of passion) or was convinced that he wouldn't get caught. He was facing a sentence of what, 25 years already? Surely you don't think another few years would've made a difference.
And as an afterthought, I doubt murder victims' families feel good about their tax dollars sheltering and feeding murderers.
I agree, but that's why these decisions are made by judges and juries, not by the victims' families: because victims' families are often irrational and bloodthirsty. Appeasing those people is not a legitimate goal of the justice system.
It's not bloody okay if somebody commits a violent crime against me, my family or my friends.
Why not? You can already hear you ask. Quite simple. My thirst for revenge would be fueled. I might get uncivilized.
Well then, if you act on that "thirst for revenge", you should be locked up as a deterrent to others who might follow in your footsteps, and to keep you from committing any more vigilante acts.
To have a civilized society we need the state to meter out punishment fitting to the crime, so that the victims thirst for revenge is satisfied at the same time as trying to rehabilitate people.
No, no, no. What you're suggesting is that the state should preemptively commit barbaric acts in order to preempt its own barbarically-inclined citizens.
But why bother getting the state involved at that point? If we're going to accept such barbarism, we may as well just let those people dish it out themselves, right? It's no less despicable when the state does it, and surely it'd be cheaper to let you exact retribution with your own hands than to pay a state employee to do it for you.
On the other hand, if we're not going to accept such barbarism, then we certainly shouldn't have the state committing it in our names.
Er, maybe you're thinking of J++.
J# is a .NET compiler for Java, with some extensions to handle .NET features like delegates. It used to be included with Visual Studio, but as of VS 2008 I think it's gone. I never found J# very useful anyway, since it was based on an old version of Java and never updated.
As for whether Microsoft should've pressured Sun to improve Java instead of developing C#... Sun never seemed very open to that, did they? Even now, they're reluctant to change the VM: look at how they implemented generics, for example. Some of the ways that C# improves over Java (e.g. delegates and value types) depend on having a more featureful VM.
The punishment is the prison time, not rape, let along the long, drawn-out suffering that is an AIDS death. Yes he's a terrible person for having killed his wife, yes he should be punished and no the 15 years he's getting probably isn't enough for someone who can kill their wife and then calculatingly lie to the police and a jury about it for so long. That doesn't mean he deserves to be raped.
No one "deserves" to suffer at all as payback for committing a crime. Punishment for punishment's sake is barbaric and has no place in a civilized legal system.
That doesn't mean no one should be sentenced, of course. But the purpose of any sentence should be to prevent the criminal from reoffending (either by rehabilitating him or just by keeping him off the street), to make him compensate the victim (when possible, which it isn't in this case), and to provide a deterrent to other would-be criminals, not to take revenge on him for being a bad boy.
Now, it's true that the sentence has to be undesirable for it to work as an effective deterrent, but really, prison is undesirable enough on its own. You don't need to throw in the threat of prison rape or violence; the thought of being locked up for a few decades is enough to deter any rational person, and an irrational one won't be deterred by anything.
As a 49 yo grandmother, c programmer and feminist, I find this offensive.
Oh, do you really? Just a few months ago, you told someone else to chill out when they were offended by a similar statement:
I'm not sure that's an improvement. Let me see if I understand what you're saying correctly...
Suppose I'm considering calling $100 to win a total of $400 (25% pot odds), and suppose I correctly predict that I have a 50% chance of winning the hand.
If I always call here, then half the time, I'll win $300, and the other half I'll lose $100. My expectation is 300 * .50 - 100 * .50, or +$100.
On the other hand, if I randomize my play and only call 75% of the time according to my pot odds, then 1/4 of the time I break even (fold), 3/8 of the time I win $300, and 3/8 of the time I lose $100. My expectation is (0 * .25) + (300 * .50 - 100 * .50) * .75, or +$75. (If I only call 50% of the time according to my odds of winning, then my expectation is only +$50.)
It looks like calling every time is the better strategy. Am I missing something here? What is the information I'm paying $25 to avoid giving my opponent, and how do I know it's worth that much?
Without copyright, we'd hardly need the GPL in the first place.
Yes, it's true that without the GPL, you can't force people to release their modified source code. But many would argue that you wouldn't need to do that anyway; you could just use their modified binaries (which could be legally and freely shared), or disassemble/decompile them (since reverse engineering would be legal), or reimplement their changes in your own code (since you wouldn't have to worry about making your work a derivative of theirs).
How?
The same way as the market for any other product or service. Some people have artistic ability and want money; other people have money and want new art produced. Information and money flows between consumer and producer, possibly through some network of middlemen (like the distributors and retailers who move physical albums), the work is done, and everyone moves on to the next project.
For one possibility, take a look at Sellaband, where fans contribute $10 at a time to fund album production (a $50,000 goal). With only a few changes -- let the bands name their own price and keep whatever they don't spend on production, for example -- that model could easily fund production in a copyright-free world.
I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure how many artists will be happy to move to that sort of system.
Perhaps they wouldn't be. No one is ever very happy to have to change the way they do things.
Their happiness, however, must be weighed against the rights and freedoms of everyone else: copyright conflicts with free speech and private property rights, and in practice it has led to restrictions and added expense for electronics manufacturers, software developers, ISPs and site operators, etc. The people who are negatively affected by copyright would probably be happy to be free from that, don't you think?
However, this does not solve the problem of paying for the creation. Until we establish who will pay the creators for their work, and how much they will be paid and so forth, the issue of falling distribution costs is fairly moot.
We don't have to establish that; the market will do it.
Without copyright, artists will still be able to sell their time and talent to anyone who's willing to pay. Maybe that means one big sponsor paying a million dollars, or a million fans each paying one dollar -- the cost of those transactions is coming down too -- but the best way to find out is to set up the right conditions and let a solution arise. The demand for the creation of new art isn't going anywhere, and neither is the supply of talent.
I suspect that if that were tried on a wider scale, by bands with fans in different demographics to Radiohead fans, then many more people would just take the music than pay for it.
As long as the bands were paid a fair price for writing and recording the albums in the first place, it wouldn't matter how many people downloaded or bought copies later.
The problem as I see it is not an inability to meet the demand for bits, but the inability to meet the demand for the content contained in those bits. [...] Content producers have to be paid something at some point along the way - the artists, the engineers, even the execs. [...] At some point someone has to pay them and we can't have the utopia that people want where all content can be obtained for free forever.
The reason you're seeing that as a problem is that you're conflating two different things:
1. Producing something that has not existed before
2. Distributing copies of something that already exists
Copyright artificially ties these two things together, by promoting a business model where #1 is paid for by #2, so it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that they always have to be linked: that the only way for the producer in #1 to make money is for the recipient in #2 to pay for the copy he gets, and therefore that if people are allowed to share copies for free, producers will never get paid.
But that's a fallacy. They're two very different acts, involving different skills and tools, occurring at different times, and involving different parties.
If people want to get paid for producing new content, all they have to do is refuse to produce any new content until they've been paid: they can sell their artistic labor, instead of their ability to press a button on a copy machine. The demand for new content isn't going away; people are willing to pay for it, and if copyright goes away, a new business model will replace it quickly enough.
The problem is that the strategy you call "optimal" isn't really optimal at all in a game of limited information. If your strategy is to always call when the odds say you should call, and never call when they don't, then an opponent who catches on can easily bluff you out of every hand.
If you see someone pushing all-in before the flop ten hands in a row, it's possible that he's just gotten a streak of premium hands, but it's more likely that he's bluffing with a lot of crappy hands. You'll tend to win more by assuming that he's bluffing and lowering your own requirements for calling him, i.e. using an "exploitative" strategy.
You throw around the word reverse-engineer like it were a trivial thing. Sure, unobfuscated java class files decompile quite nicely, but as soon as you get away from that, you're massively ramping up the overhead required to modify their code.
*shrug* Then don't modify their code; just reimplement their changes in your own code. With no copyright, you don't have to worry whether your program is too similar to theirs.
I don't really see how this poses a problem for free software. You can use it and distribute it however you want; that's as free as free can get. If you can't change it, then so what - either use their version or make a better one.
Exactly. And that system is called copyright! It's a novel idea that lets a movie maker recoup the cost of creating a movie from many, many interested parties, meaning that no single one of them has to fund the entire venture.
The system I had in mind is called "the free market", where people willingly pay each other to perform services. If customers want the service performed, and they have money, that money will eventually find its way to the people who can perform the service, the same way it does in every other industry. You don't need any kind of special treatment for that to happen - all you need is one group of people who have a demand and another group who can supply it.
Copyright isn't what lets creators get paid by many, many interested parties; the market does that by giving them a place to advertise and sell their services to as many people as they want. What copyright lets them do is pretend that they're manufacturing a product.
So if somebody has possession of the pictures my own father took of my abuse at his hands, that won't harm me?
To put it bluntly: no, it won't.
The abuse happened in the past. The pictures are evidence of that abuse, but they aren't inherently abusive by themselves. Part of recovery is coming to terms with that, and separating the real harm you suffered in the past from the imaginary harm you're worried about.
I got the feeling after being interviewed for the umpteenth time by the feds that this guy was producing porn.
If that's true, then it's good he's not doing it anymore.
This attitude of something as heinous as child porn not harming anyone is bogus ethically. Demand creates a market where sick fucks like that guy create porn for sale by exploiting their own children.
Sick fucks like that guy would be exploiting children anyway. And I suspect that most child porn is downloaded for free, with no money changing hands -- recall that the GP said he used hash checks to look for files that are decades old. Demand for old files isn't going to cause anyone to go back in time and create those files.
Anyone that sends their computer to be fixed by someone else shouldn't expect any more privacy than a homeowner who hires someone to fix something around the house and than complains that they should not of noticed the DVDs or magazines laying around the house with naked children on them.
Well, you know, people who come into your home to do repairs should mind their business too. We have people whose job it is to enforce the law: they're called police. If you want to spend your days turning in people for possession of porn or drugs or whatever, apply for a job as a policeman, not an electrician or a plumber.
Now, obviously, if you find someone in the midst of harming someone else -- actively abusing children, for example -- that's different. But possession isn't inherently harmful to anyone.
I am a contractor that operates outside the box, almost a vigilante. I cannot name what software I use or I would be easily identified. I do not engage in corp espionage but this law would stop me in my tracks if I were to ever have stepped foot in Texas.
Good! You have no right to snoop around other people's computers, even if you think you're doing it for a noble cause. (Which you aren't, by the way -- if you really wanted to help people, you'd go after the ones creating these images in the first place.)
I hope to turn in many more.
And I hope that when your vigilante game finally lands you in prison, you'll meet up with some of your victims.
Even something as interesting as the GPL would not exist without it. You might say that the GPL would be unnecessary, but if you think about it, that isn't quite true...
I disagree: copyleft licenses, of which the GPL is one, fundamentally serve to give back the freedoms that copyright takes away. With no copyright, there'd be no need for copyleft, so the GPL would indeed be unnecessary.
It might be less convenient to develop open source software without the GPL, since others would be able to modify your software and distribute the modified binaries, without releasing their source changes (which they can already do if you use the BSD license). But then you'd be free to reverse-engineer their code and port the changes back into your open source version - or you could just freely use and share their binary version.
I look at the content we agree we would lose, and I don't want it to go away. Of the content we would gain... I'm not really seeing the added value.
Well, first, I don't necessarily agree that we would lose that content; that was a hypothetical. As long as there's demand for movies like Toy Story to be produced, I have a hard time seeing how they could just "go away": if the market has taught us anything, it's that money will eventually find its way from the people who want something to the people who can provide it.
Second, even if you can't see the added value yourself, surely you agree that's a matter of personal taste. Pixar movies aren't "better" in any objective sense than, say, the music of Girl Talk or Negativland.
Perhaps you could have people building up movies organically like open source software. But I can't really picture that working out.
It's already happening, slowly but surely. See Big Buck Bunny, for example.
Well, it was dated 2003, which isn't all that recent: .NET has only been around since 2001 or so.
In any case, I'm glad we got this cleared up, and if you honestly weren't aware of their patent grant, I apologize for the hostile tone of my comment.
This information wasn't hard to find, by the way. It's in the Mono FAQ section about patents.
By that consideration, OOXML would be the perfect standard for document interchange, but no-one agrees.
That's because people have objections to the OOXML format itself. For example, some OOXML features are basically specified as "behave like Word 95", and that's hard to duplicate. But as far as I've seen (as the author of more than one compiler targeting .NET), there's nothing like that in the CLR standard.
Are you raising objections to the substance of the CLR standard, rather than the fact that it comes from Microsoft? If not, there's no analogy to OOXML.
I'm unsure why that standard would be bad, but the CLR standard is ok.
The only thing they have in common is they're both from Microsoft.
I don't think they'll shut down the Mono project, but I know it'll never be as good as the equivalent on Windows.
So... you're saying the Mono team is incompetent?
As I have been pointing out for years now, ECMA publishes documents that contain unlicensed patented technology of member companies.
That's because the member companies agree to allow those patents to be used to implement the standards. Microsoft statement:
So yes, they're patented, but everyone is free to use those technologies.
So despite your unknowledgeable remark about not needing MS or the sanctity of MONO, The ECMA standards belong to Microsoft and they can kill MONO any time they want.
No, they can't. It's a shame that you've been misleading people "for years now" by spreading this FUD.
.NET is the tool by which they destroy third party development.
Only in your imagination, sir.
Why isn't that a good idea? Because encouraging more monopolistic companies and cartels is not a good idea?
Large != monopolistic.
You seem to be arguing against economies of scale in general here. Sorry, but I don't think you're going to convince anyone that small, inefficient firms are preferable to large, efficient ones.
And like I said, as soon as the large, efficient firm fails to meet consumer needs (by not writing a particular program that people want to see written), they leave room for an independent developer to move in. So either we have large developers writing all the software that anyone could ever want cheaply, or we have large developers writing some of it cheaply and independent developers writing the rest of it for a higher price. Either way, it all gets written.
I also haven't even addressed the issue that your idea would entirely stifle innovation (why would a programmer come up with an idea for an awesome new product if he can't get paid for it?)
That question rests on a false premise. People can get paid for writing code whether they implement a boring old idea or an awesome new one. Coming up with the idea isn't really the hard part anyway; plenty of people have awesome new ideas, but few of them ever get implemented.
How do you propose to address the sudden death of all so-called "sleeper hits" coming out of left field?
I suspect they'll be more than balanced out by the sudden appearance of new works which had been prohibited by copyright: mash-ups, fan tributes, sequels and other universe continuations, etc.
Or do you sacrifice innovation and creativity on the altar of stripping developers' freedoms?
You misspelled "the altar of restoring everyone else's freedoms". HTH!
You've obviously given it a lot of thought, and in an ideal world maybe it'd work, but you've given no incentive for content creators to want such a thing.
If they aren't convinced by the prospect of a guaranteed income (rather than gambling on whether they'll sell enough copies to recoup their investment), then they won't be convinced.
But that's OK. I don't need to convince them.
And sorry if it sounds selfish, but there's absolutely no benefit to this idea to me or anyone who doesn't want to draw a paycheck from some multinational.
Actually, there's plenty of benefit to consumers, service providers, and basically everyone who isn't a copyright holder. Maybe copyright holders don't think they'd benefit, but that's OK: the playing field has been tipped in their favor for long enough already.