If we let Blu-Ray die... we let mediocre, sub par quality win.
Sounds good to me. I've never quite worked out what all those extra pixels are for, I can make everything out perfectly well without them. They just mean larger, more unwieldy files and Recorded Media that's far more Defective.
Of all the drugs to describe the consumption of as punished harshly, you've chosen one of the few legal ones?
I can't imagine what you'd think about the punishment of people who take safer, but harshly discriminated against drugs like psychedelics, cannabis or MDMA.
The potential evil is one of deceit, it's in colluding with someone who claims to be 'selling' an application, which in reality is programmed to disobey the person deceived into thinking they own it if it can't find this DRM server.
Using DRM, by itself, is not an issue. It's this refusal to be clear that, by doing so, you've changed 'selling' into a strange form of rental (with incompletely specified conditions) which is the evil bit. If you participate in an activity which looks like selling, but doesn't actually give the 'buyer' the freedoms they get when they buy a useful object normally, that looks like complicity in fraud to me.
Lots of others may be doing it, but in morality this is no excuse.
What about the people producing child pornography? I absolutely agree that simple possession of an image should carry no legal penalty, but I also think there should be a punishment for causing a person to engage in something potentially psychologically damaging before that person has reached the age to make an informed decision about whether to do so.
Well, most frequently nowadays, the person producing it is the 'victim' themselves...
Just have a generalised law against sexual activity with children who are very significantly younger than the offender, which covers both 'sex' and 'making porn'. That'll cover any age-related abuse without even involving collections of pixels.
Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.
1) Upgrading free software tends to cost less.
2) If we don't like some aspect of the latest version of free software, such as having DRM built into its foundations, we can fork it.
Use/dev/urandom. There is virtually no reason to use/dev/random as a source of randomness instead of/dev/urandom. The only difference is that/dev/random blocks if it doesn't like the amount of entropy it's got. While this is highly annoying, there are almost no scenarios in which it is a genuinely useful security precaution. Only use/dev/random if you have a thorough security analysis telling you exactly why/dev/urandom is dangerous but/dev/random is safe for what you're doing. Don't use/dev/random out of some vague idea that it's 'more secure', this is very rarely the case.
I'm fully with you as far as the likes of the ??AA go, but I find it worthwhile to make a distinction between the (generally large) companies which deceive, bully and engage in corruption at every turn, and smaller outfits which are still concerned only with creating (perhaps) good media.
One should really distinguish between the right to freedom, and the 'right' to control others. You only impinge on someone's rights if you stop them from doing something, in some way. Disobeying an order in a way which doesn't affect what they can do is impinging on their power. The term 'copyright' is doublespeak, unlike genuine property rights, in which eating an apple stops others from eating it, copyright is purely a restriction on people.
If you say "Fuck you", they'll leave you alone and go and find someone more easily intimidated into giving them money. None of these cases has ever gone to court, and they're clearly worried about killing the cash cow if it does happen.
(A couple of related cases did go to court a while back, but I think they cherry-picked people who chose ill-advised defenses which effectively admitted the bits which are impossible to prove. And someone who had moved and wasn't getting any letters, so would never turn up to defend themselves in the first place.)
There's no problem with the existence of the Caps Lock key, wanting to type a long string of capitals is a perfectly reasonable use case. The problem is its undeservedly prominent position. If Caps Lock was up next to Scroll Lock or thereabouts, nobody would complain.
A speeder risks killing people. How can money compensate for that? Should very rich murderers (same sort of damage, just higher probability of that damage occurring) be able to buy their immediate freedom?
Our governments claim that it is essential to stop people downloading and possessing regular media from P2P services (outside of official channels) because it decreases the ability and motivation of media producers to produce new media.
Our governments claim that it is essential to stop people downloading child porn off P2P services because it increases the ability and motivation of child abusers (or more commonly now, children) to produce new child porn.
Coding in your spare time whilst not working with computers or unemployed shows an interest in computers. Coding in your spare time when you're already coding for 40 hours a week for your job suggests more of an obsession.
If the possibility if Microsoft "going offline" existed, people wouldn't become so dependent on the continual co-operation of one individual entity in the first place.
Quite frankly, unless he's actually paying for it, or otherwise actually contributing to child abuse, I really don't care. Simple possession, if not a completely victimless crime, is certainly very close to being one.
Perhaps this US ambassador should consider the comparitive figures for actual rape of real people who really exist in America and Japan.
Surely this difference is far too big to be explained purely as a reporting bias. 34.20 compared to 1.48 per 100,000 people, first figures I found. It's pretty clear that giving potential rapists the ability to do so in a fictional environment where they do not hurt any real people is a good way of making them less likely to do it for real. "Don't hurt anyone, that would be bad" is a better way of getting people not to hurt anyone than "revealing your fantasies makes you damned whether you hurt anyone or not."
Copyright was supposed to regulate the publishing industry. Its regulation of private citizens, who didn't really copy stuff back then, came about essentially by accident. When the charge is out of keeping with the spirit of the law, one shouldn't be ashamed of a defense which is out of keeping with the spirit of the law.
There's nothing wrong with crippling "power word reload". You just need to remember that you're doing it when you're designing the game, so that the player won't permanently lose without doing something clearly stupid.
It is the courteous thing to do though. So if people are interested in whether or not a company behaves in a courteous manner, it's still worth mentioning.
Every day over 100 people (I think) die in the US alone in road traffic accidents. About 30,000 children die in the world every day due to poverty. This incident is pretty insignificant, really. It just gets noticed because it's an unusual sort of death.
The problem is that you're taking a fundamental freedom and making it into a tradeable commodity.
Or in more detail, the principle of free speech has two purposes; to make sure that good ideas or important bits of information don't end up getting supressed, and more to the point, simply to allow people to speak their minds, because society exists for the benefit of individuals, and people feel bad if they can't say what they think.
Allowing "free speech" to corporations achieves neither of these. This isn't mathematics, the rules and principles we devise to allow our society to work are not proven theorems which are effective in any conceivable set of circumstances, (which is what you'd need to perform your kind of reasoning on it). They are general rules which work as long as the situation is similar enough to the ones it was designed for. That is why, for example, we have the principle of "do not murder", but we allow abortion in many cases and are increasingly recognising that it shouldn't be applied in certain cases of euthanasia. If a corporation can't say certain things, none of the individuals working for it will feel bad because they can't say what the corporation "thinks" (or rather, what it's most profitable for the corporation to say).
Free speech is based on the assumption that the speaker has feelings. Corporations do not have feelings. That is why allowing the principle of free speech to apply to corporations is silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds good to me. I've never quite worked out what all those extra pixels are for, I can make everything out perfectly well without them. They just mean larger, more unwieldy files and Recorded Media that's far more Defective.
Of course, the real issue there is the criminal world's monopoly on the supply of non-mainstream drugs.
Of all the drugs to describe the consumption of as punished harshly, you've chosen one of the few legal ones?
I can't imagine what you'd think about the punishment of people who take safer, but harshly discriminated against drugs like psychedelics, cannabis or MDMA.
The potential evil is one of deceit, it's in colluding with someone who claims to be 'selling' an application, which in reality is programmed to disobey the person deceived into thinking they own it if it can't find this DRM server.
Using DRM, by itself, is not an issue. It's this refusal to be clear that, by doing so, you've changed 'selling' into a strange form of rental (with incompletely specified conditions) which is the evil bit. If you participate in an activity which looks like selling, but doesn't actually give the 'buyer' the freedoms they get when they buy a useful object normally, that looks like complicity in fraud to me.
Lots of others may be doing it, but in morality this is no excuse.
Well, most frequently nowadays, the person producing it is the 'victim' themselves...
Just have a generalised law against sexual activity with children who are very significantly younger than the offender, which covers both 'sex' and 'making porn'. That'll cover any age-related abuse without even involving collections of pixels.
1) Upgrading free software tends to cost less.
2) If we don't like some aspect of the latest version of free software, such as having DRM built into its foundations, we can fork it.
Use /dev/urandom. There is virtually no reason to use /dev/random as a source of randomness instead of /dev/urandom. The only difference is that /dev/random blocks if it doesn't like the amount of entropy it's got. While this is highly annoying, there are almost no scenarios in which it is a genuinely useful security precaution. Only use /dev/random if you have a thorough security analysis telling you exactly why /dev/urandom is dangerous but /dev/random is safe for what you're doing. Don't use /dev/random out of some vague idea that it's 'more secure', this is very rarely the case.
I'm fully with you as far as the likes of the ??AA go, but I find it worthwhile to make a distinction between the (generally large) companies which deceive, bully and engage in corruption at every turn, and smaller outfits which are still concerned only with creating (perhaps) good media.
One should really distinguish between the right to freedom, and the 'right' to control others. You only impinge on someone's rights if you stop them from doing something, in some way. Disobeying an order in a way which doesn't affect what they can do is impinging on their power. The term 'copyright' is doublespeak, unlike genuine property rights, in which eating an apple stops others from eating it, copyright is purely a restriction on people.
If you say "Fuck you", they'll leave you alone and go and find someone more easily intimidated into giving them money. None of these cases has ever gone to court, and they're clearly worried about killing the cash cow if it does happen.
(A couple of related cases did go to court a while back, but I think they cherry-picked people who chose ill-advised defenses which effectively admitted the bits which are impossible to prove. And someone who had moved and wasn't getting any letters, so would never turn up to defend themselves in the first place.)
There's no problem with the existence of the Caps Lock key, wanting to type a long string of capitals is a perfectly reasonable use case. The problem is its undeservedly prominent position. If Caps Lock was up next to Scroll Lock or thereabouts, nobody would complain.
A speeder risks killing people. How can money compensate for that? Should very rich murderers (same sort of damage, just higher probability of that damage occurring) be able to buy their immediate freedom?
Our governments claim that it is essential to stop people downloading and possessing regular media from P2P services (outside of official channels) because it decreases the ability and motivation of media producers to produce new media.
Our governments claim that it is essential to stop people downloading child porn off P2P services because it increases the ability and motivation of child abusers (or more commonly now, children) to produce new child porn.
I think there's something fishy here.
Coding in your spare time whilst not working with computers or unemployed shows an interest in computers. Coding in your spare time when you're already coding for 40 hours a week for your job suggests more of an obsession.
If the possibility if Microsoft "going offline" existed, people wouldn't become so dependent on the continual co-operation of one individual entity in the first place.
Quite frankly, unless he's actually paying for it, or otherwise actually contributing to child abuse, I really don't care. Simple possession, if not a completely victimless crime, is certainly very close to being one.
Perhaps this US ambassador should consider the comparitive figures for actual rape of real people who really exist in America and Japan.
Surely this difference is far too big to be explained purely as a reporting bias. 34.20 compared to 1.48 per 100,000 people, first figures I found. It's pretty clear that giving potential rapists the ability to do so in a fictional environment where they do not hurt any real people is a good way of making them less likely to do it for real. "Don't hurt anyone, that would be bad" is a better way of getting people not to hurt anyone than "revealing your fantasies makes you damned whether you hurt anyone or not."
mplayer dvd://1 -ss 1090 -endpos 20
Seems to work well enough.
So there's no room in your philosophy for being able to love more than one thing.
Copyright was supposed to regulate the publishing industry. Its regulation of private citizens, who didn't really copy stuff back then, came about essentially by accident. When the charge is out of keeping with the spirit of the law, one shouldn't be ashamed of a defense which is out of keeping with the spirit of the law.
There's nothing wrong with crippling "power word reload". You just need to remember that you're doing it when you're designing the game, so that the player won't permanently lose without doing something clearly stupid.
It is the courteous thing to do though. So if people are interested in whether or not a company behaves in a courteous manner, it's still worth mentioning.
China is an authoritarian capitalist state nowadays. That's more or less the opposite of communism.
Every day over 100 people (I think) die in the US alone in road traffic accidents. About 30,000 children die in the world every day due to poverty. This incident is pretty insignificant, really. It just gets noticed because it's an unusual sort of death.
The problem is that you're taking a fundamental freedom and making it into a tradeable commodity.
Or in more detail, the principle of free speech has two purposes; to make sure that good ideas or important bits of information don't end up getting supressed, and more to the point, simply to allow people to speak their minds, because society exists for the benefit of individuals, and people feel bad if they can't say what they think.
Allowing "free speech" to corporations achieves neither of these. This isn't mathematics, the rules and principles we devise to allow our society to work are not proven theorems which are effective in any conceivable set of circumstances, (which is what you'd need to perform your kind of reasoning on it). They are general rules which work as long as the situation is similar enough to the ones it was designed for. That is why, for example, we have the principle of "do not murder", but we allow abortion in many cases and are increasingly recognising that it shouldn't be applied in certain cases of euthanasia. If a corporation can't say certain things, none of the individuals working for it will feel bad because they can't say what the corporation "thinks" (or rather, what it's most profitable for the corporation to say).
Free speech is based on the assumption that the speaker has feelings. Corporations do not have feelings. That is why allowing the principle of free speech to apply to corporations is silly.