Would he be eligible for trial elsewhere since his crime went beyond German borders?
Probably not - double jeopardy holds among civilized nations. If he would not be tried in Germany, then possibly. But even if he were eligible, Germany does not extradite German citizens - if they commit crimes abroad, they are tried at home. AFAIK, this is nearly universal.
Mandatory prison time sounds like a knee-jerk reaction of people who don't understand the hacker mentality.
There is no mandatory prison time. The maximum sentence for adult offenders for these crime is 5 years.
Moreover, he is tried as a juvenile. In Germany, you are invariably tried as a juvenile up to 18 years of age, and more typically up to 21 years if the court determines that "your character is not completely formed". Sentences in a German juvenile court are not primarily for punishment, but to provide guidance and education. Very few juvenile offenders go to prison (and if yes, none goes to an adult prison). Typical sentences include mandatory social work or weekend arrests.
Finally, first time offenders always get much lower sentences, and prison sentences up to a year are nearly always suspended (for first-time offenders with reasonably behaviour and prognosis, so are some longer sentences).
So his risks of actually spending time in prison are rather low.
I think this might actually do some good. In contrast to Microsoft, Intel and AMD chips are actually compatible enough that customers do have a real choice without jumping through major loops. This weakens the claim of monoplistic practices, of course, but it also means that if Intel is forced to give up some of these practices, more people might pick up AMD chips.
To jump from Windows, on the other hand, you have to give up much of your software investment, and may even have trouble transfering your existing documents and business processes.
Oh and someone mentioned "unwritten law", fark yes if i was in China I wouldn't go risking my neck on something that the local goverment might not approve of on the off chance i pissed someone off.
I'm glad that people like Sokrates, Voltaire, Danton, Jefferson, Franklin, Gandhi and Mandela all agreed. Would be a very complicated world, otherwise. Maybe someone would even dare to have an opinion...
You are aware that the posted speed limit is an upper bound to the legal speed? You are not allowed to drive faster than safely possible under the actual circumstances. In particular, you always have to be able to stop within the distance you can overlook (half that if there is a single lane for both directions). Simple physics...I fail to see how a slow vehicle can cause a correctly driven vehicle to swerve into ONCOMING traffic. The only possible reason is an built-in inferiority complex of car drivers that cause them to overtake cyclists at all cost (happens all the time, even if I go at the posted speed limit).
You seem to misunderstand the situation. I'm not Lance Armstrong and I don't cycle for fun. I cycle to go places (I'm quite happy to get a free workout out of that, but that's incidental). Not all places are reachable (or reasonably reachable) by nice bike lanes or separate bike pathes. So I am forced to use roads.
I'm not creating an unsafe environment, I'm forced to operate in one created by bad city planning and reckless idiots in overpowered and undercontrolled tin cans. To shout back: IF YOU CANNOT DRIVE WITHIN EXISTING TRAFFIC LAWS, DON'T DRIVE!
As far as the speed issue is concerned: At least in Munich, my average speed is about the same as that of most cars. Taking the search for a free parking space into account, I'm faster for most intra-city distances. The burst speed of a car is obviously higher (for most cars).
BTW, cycling in Miami caused a mild sensation - people would see me in my cycling dress, and still not belive that I intended to carry my groceries in a backpack and on the bike. People here in Europe are more used to utility cycling...
Except that speed limits are typically.66 to.75 the actual maximum safe speed for any stretch of road. Being in control of your vehicle means not hitting things or people, and not leaving the road.
So I guess you are one of the 90% of drivers that consider themselves "above average".
Being a cyclist most of the time, I can tell you that "not being hit" by a fucking idiot passing me within 10 cm (about 4 inches for you;-) and with a speed difference of 30km/h is emphatically NOT safe. Accidents happen - in fact, in most countries it is legally acknowledged that driving a motorized vehicle is inherently unsafe and hence you are required to carry insurance that pays even in cases where you are not necessarily at fault (e.g. a blown tire causing you to swerve).
If you are ignoring a posted speed limit, not only do you increase the energy (and hence the damage potential) in an accident, you also assume you are smarter than the people who, supposedly after some deliberation, put up the limit. Chances are you are not...or at least not always. Local conditions may not be obvious (gusts of wind, school nearby, whatever).
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
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You are making a fundamental (and frequent) mistake here. The job of Ford Motor Company is not to make money. It is to make cars.
I'd love to see this argument backed up with something. It seems to me that it is the job of a public corporation to make money in legal (and, ideally, ethical) ways.
Somebody upstream put it quite nicely in terms of job and purpose. If the job of a company in our society would be to make money, we could just introduce a flat tax for everyone and distribute the revenue to companies (ok, we are close in some sectors;-).
The job of a company is to produce goods and services (typically those an individual would be hard-pressed to produce, or to produce efficiently). Money is just the motivator - a measure of the value produced. It is not the value produced itself.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
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· Score: 1
The point of a business is to::make money::.
Well, if the job of a business is to make money, they should better buy printing presses. Making money is per se useless (well, the concrete product can be used foe ass-wiping, but is much inferior to normal toilet paper).
We use money to regulate the making and distribution of goods and services. The "making" (actually, earning) of money is an incentive to operate efficiently and to fulfill the desires of the consumers. Each individual participant in the market may well strive to "make" as much money as possible (i.e. to maximize his share in the produced goods and services). But we as a society that sets up the market are not interested in the making of money, but in the creation of (suitable) goods and services.
We do hope that, all in all, letting each individual participant trying to increase his share will lead to a bigger total for all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails (i.e. if a monopoly arrises, if not all costs are internalized, or if a participant behaves irrational). In that cases, we use regulation and taxation to fix this behavour.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
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McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 3, Insightful
comparison of open source vs. closed source will show a humongous disparity in the earnings potential in each market.
You are making a fundamental (and frequent) mistake here. The job of Ford Motor Company is not to make money. It is to make cars. The job of BMG is not to make money, it is to distribute music. The job of the software industry is not to make money, it is to make software.
We use money as an instrument to guide what is made and where we should spend our effort. Money in itself is useless. If Free Software can make the same (or equivalent) software than Microsoft, but cheaper, that is good. It means that our economy as a whole just got more efficient.
Yes, thay may mean less money for programmers and computer scientists (I am one), but on the other hand, we all benefit from the additional efficiency (Ford can make cheaper cars, as it spends less money on Word. Wal-Mart can drop prices as their database backend is cheaper. Microsoft....ok, dies;-).
I wrote "Either you are for government interference or you are for anarchy", which is true. I did not write "Either you are for total control of your life by the UN, or you are for anarchy", which would be wrong (and indeed a false dilema).
Your implication "being for govenment interference implies being for the entire subset of government interference" (whatever that is) is what is faulty and leads to the conflict.
Also see the context: The original poster was rethorically decrying "government interference" to change a status quo that is build on government interference. That is the hypocrisy I was pointing out with my statement.
Well, since one of the common defintions of anarchy is absence of any form of political authority or government, it is not a false dilema...if you are against all government intervention, you are indeed for anarchy.
Either you are for "government interference" or you are for anarchism.
That's several different types of fallacies...
Tell me one....
I think government should minimalize its involvment in these situations.... There should only be law saying "giving out copies is wrong" IMHO.
Well, so you are for (limited) government interference. And you actually selected the most questionable part of the whole system for govenment support. The idea that information can be owned is quite hard to support from basic principles. Forbidding all copies is even harder, and extremely rare in modern legal systems. Copy protection hence always tries to forbid legal copies.
Why is there a law saying people *must* be told DRM exists on a CD in France?
Well, for one because a "CD" with DRM is not a CD, as it does no follow the CD specification and hence is not allowed to be called a CD by trademark law. It will not work in all devices, and will not do all things a CD must do. More generally, the consumer expects that something that is marketed as a CD and looks like a CD is a CD. Selling something quite different as a CD is, at least, borderline fraud. That's why we have labelling laws. Try selling 10% HCl in water bottles in the water isle of a supermarket...
I'm not sure I agree with the French courts on this case. Though i strongly disagree with the US courts WRT the DMCA. I think government should just "not be involved" to this extent and let existing laws stand.
That is exactly what most courts do - let the existing law stand. Typically, only constitutional courts can change (well, invalidate) laws. What the court decided was that copy protection on DVDs violates current French law.
I don't see why everybody is clamoring for government interference.
Either you are for "government interference" or you are for anarchism. Are you arguing for anarchy or for the status quo?
Add to the fact that the Roman Catholic church is highly intolerant of other religions - the murder and war against the Saracens in the 11th century, the purge of 'witches' (six million deaths at least) in the 14th century.
Not to defend the Catholic church (they have enough real dirty big secrets), but by far most of the witch hunts were conducted after the reformation and under protestant churches...
Differing opinions out to be REWARDED--they show students who have formed their own opinions (generally).
Well-reasoned, informed opinions should be rewarded. You will not get any credits for arguing 2+2=5 out of me (at least not in a Math/Science class). A different opinion is not inherent more valuable than a concurring one.
Agreed. To make it even better, publish a basic driver in source form and under a non-restructive license (BSD-like probably works best). That gives people a starting point.
Documentation available under NDA is useless for open source (publishing the source itself will likely break the NDA).
The problem is most people do not see it this way as you say. Most people unfortunately take it very literally, that's where the whole religion part comes in.
Most people actually do not take the Bible literally - not even most Christians. The whole Catholic Church has e.g. no problem with an old earth and evolution, and none of the big protestant churches in Europe has. Only a small but vociferous minority has - less small and more vociferous in the US, but probably still a minority.
What I really find intellectually dishonest is that even those people do not take all of the bible literally, just some of the popular extracts. Most eat pork, travel on the Sabbath (regardless of wether it is Saturday or Sunday), don't free their slaves after 7 years, and (non-nation-level) smiting of others for minor infractions is also somewhat out of favour.
Question; can they save money by shutting down the analysis portion and just collecting raw data until more generous hands are on the budgetary purse strings?
Good idea. But once you disolve the analysis group with all the small thing competence (how are tapes numbered? When did we switch to the new data format? Which Perl script was used to get out data series 0X78 from the binary dump?), it will be very hard and thus quite unlikely that the operation will start again.
The review process is by no means free. The peer reviewers have to be specialists in the field the article discusses. Sometimes, there are only two or three such peers world wide and they are just as hard working as the author. If you want them to sit down and think about an article they didn't write for a day, you have to pay them.
I don't know about esoteric fields, but in computer science, I have never heard about reviewers being paid by anybody. I am very certain that I have not received a cent for the 50 or so reviews I have written in my life. It's just part of the job. You want to get reviewed, so you review yourself.
I also have rarely encountered copy editors, wether for journals or for conferences. That has changed over the last 15 years or so - my very first journal paper in 1997 was still copy-edited and re-typeset. But that was exotic and rare even back then.
Editing a journal for content is real work, but again often done for the fame instead of for money.
I agree with much of the rest, especially with your comments on "author pays" (which sucks).
Actually, the _really_ best thing we did in Australia was work out how to keep the beer cold, but that other stuff is still pretty high on the list.
No offense, but if the standard Australian beers (XXXX, VB,...) did not suck so much, there would be no need to keep it at just about freezing point. It's just to numb your palate.
Try a Camra compatible ale at one time - it's fine at room temperature.
Half a kilo of butter, or a pound of butter is a reasonable purchase. Grams just don't cut it. What am I getting if I ask for 80 grams of salami? Well I guess I can visualize it and some Europeans buy it that way, but the average everyday user of a measuring system is nearly innumerate. They want to buy one or two or maybe a half of something.
Actually, most people in Germany and Italy (where I have experience) buy Salami by the gramm - 100g is the most common amount for any kind of sliced sausage or meat. Some people still buy "a quarter pound" (125g) if they want a little bit more than 100g. And butter is sold in 250g pieces (only rarely referred to as "a quarter kilo").
Works fine. For cooking, I found it much harder to work with the various kinds of "spoons" in the US.
Sorry, I was not precise. The allies liberated a lot of copyrights (and quite some patents) for use in their own countries (including commonwealth countries), either during or after the war. Also, if rights for particular countries or translations have been transferred before Hitler's death, those contracts would, of course, remain in force. Bavaria does hold the rights for most of the world - they recently stopped a Polish publisher from reprinting the book.
Is the version sold in Australia a German or an English edition?
The german government also censors religion (Scientology is actually forbidden by federal law)
Where do you get this "information"? Scientology is quite legal in Germany. Scientologists are bared from civil servant status under a general law that requires that civil servants uphold the constitution as the final authority. The same law blocks member of the DKP (the radical German Communist Part), but not members of any party or organization accepting the constitutional order (including e.g. the PDS, successor of the GDR SED). The German constitution and any number of European and international treaties gurantee freedom of religion in Germany.
Well, for one it is accusing all those that lived through it of lying. Just imagine walking up to a rape victim in public and claiming "You asked for it".
If that should outweight free speech is debatable. But that it hurts many people is a fact.
Like Mein Kampf -- you will have problems googling the full text of this.
That is a quite different issue. Mein Kampf is still under copyright. The copyright was seized by the Allies after the war, and transferred (with other seized assets) to the state of Bavaria when the Federal Republic of Germany was founded (Hitler was legally registered in Munich, the capital of Bavaria). Bavaria, as the copyright holder, does not allow the production of new copies. It is a matter of civil, not criminal law. As soon as the copyright expires (should be 2015, unless we get a new extension), it will be possible to reprint the book - or publish it online.
I don't know if annotated copies for scholary use were an exception or if they were produced under fair use.
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Moreover, he is tried as a juvenile. In Germany, you are invariably tried as a juvenile up to 18 years of age, and more typically up to 21 years if the court determines that "your character is not completely formed". Sentences in a German juvenile court are not primarily for punishment, but to provide guidance and education. Very few juvenile offenders go to prison (and if yes, none goes to an adult prison). Typical sentences include mandatory social work or weekend arrests.
Finally, first time offenders always get much lower sentences, and prison sentences up to a year are nearly always suspended (for first-time offenders with reasonably behaviour and prognosis, so are some longer sentences).
So his risks of actually spending time in prison are rather low.
To jump from Windows, on the other hand, you have to give up much of your software investment, and may even have trouble transfering your existing documents and business processes.
You seem to misunderstand the situation. I'm not Lance Armstrong and I don't cycle for fun. I cycle to go places (I'm quite happy to get a free workout out of that, but that's incidental). Not all places are reachable (or reasonably reachable) by nice bike lanes or separate bike pathes. So I am forced to use roads.
I'm not creating an unsafe environment, I'm forced to operate in one created by bad city planning and reckless idiots in overpowered and undercontrolled tin cans. To shout back: IF YOU CANNOT DRIVE WITHIN EXISTING TRAFFIC LAWS, DON'T DRIVE!
As far as the speed issue is concerned: At least in Munich, my average speed is about the same as that of most cars. Taking the search for a free parking space into account, I'm faster for most intra-city distances. The burst speed of a car is obviously higher (for most cars).
BTW, cycling in Miami caused a mild sensation - people would see me in my cycling dress, and still not belive that I intended to carry my groceries in a backpack and on the bike. People here in Europe are more used to utility cycling...
So I guess you are one of the 90% of drivers that consider themselves "above average".
Being a cyclist most of the time, I can tell you that "not being hit" by a fucking idiot passing me within 10 cm (about 4 inches for you ;-) and with a speed difference of 30km/h is emphatically NOT safe. Accidents happen - in fact, in most countries it is legally acknowledged that driving a motorized vehicle is inherently unsafe and hence you are required to carry insurance that pays even in cases where you are not necessarily at fault (e.g. a blown tire causing you to swerve).
If you are ignoring a posted speed limit, not only do you increase the energy (and hence the damage potential) in an accident, you also assume you are smarter than the people who, supposedly after some deliberation, put up the limit. Chances are you are not...or at least not always. Local conditions may not be obvious (gusts of wind, school nearby, whatever).
The job of a company is to produce goods and services (typically those an individual would be hard-pressed to produce, or to produce efficiently). Money is just the motivator - a measure of the value produced. It is not the value produced itself.
We use money to regulate the making and distribution of goods and services. The "making" (actually, earning) of money is an incentive to operate efficiently and to fulfill the desires of the consumers. Each individual participant in the market may well strive to "make" as much money as possible (i.e. to maximize his share in the produced goods and services). But we as a society that sets up the market are not interested in the making of money, but in the creation of (suitable) goods and services.
We do hope that, all in all, letting each individual participant trying to increase his share will lead to a bigger total for all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails (i.e. if a monopoly arrises, if not all costs are internalized, or if a participant behaves irrational). In that cases, we use regulation and taxation to fix this behavour.
We use money as an instrument to guide what is made and where we should spend our effort. Money in itself is useless. If Free Software can make the same (or equivalent) software than Microsoft, but cheaper, that is good. It means that our economy as a whole just got more efficient.
Yes, thay may mean less money for programmers and computer scientists (I am one), but on the other hand, we all benefit from the additional efficiency (Ford can make cheaper cars, as it spends less money on Word. Wal-Mart can drop prices as their database backend is cheaper. Microsoft....ok, dies ;-).
Your implication "being for govenment interference implies being for the entire subset of government interference" (whatever that is) is what is faulty and leads to the conflict.
Also see the context: The original poster was rethorically decrying "government interference" to change a status quo that is build on government interference. That is the hypocrisy I was pointing out with my statement.
Next, please.
Documentation available under NDA is useless for open source (publishing the source itself will likely break the NDA).
What I really find intellectually dishonest is that even those people do not take all of the bible literally, just some of the popular extracts. Most eat pork, travel on the Sabbath (regardless of wether it is Saturday or Sunday), don't free their slaves after 7 years, and (non-nation-level) smiting of others for minor infractions is also somewhat out of favour.
I also have rarely encountered copy editors, wether for journals or for conferences. That has changed over the last 15 years or so - my very first journal paper in 1997 was still copy-edited and re-typeset. But that was exotic and rare even back then.
Editing a journal for content is real work, but again often done for the fame instead of for money.
I agree with much of the rest, especially with your comments on "author pays" (which sucks).
Try a Camra compatible ale at one time - it's fine at room temperature.
Works fine. For cooking, I found it much harder to work with the various kinds of "spoons" in the US.
Is the version sold in Australia a German or an English edition?
If that should outweight free speech is debatable. But that it hurts many people is a fact.
I don't know if annotated copies for scholary use were an exception or if they were produced under fair use.