I am pretty sure that the 31k gun deaths per year in the United States have more to do with the war on drugs and other "tough on crime" efforts than with guns themselves, as well as the generally bad welfare among the poor in this country. People with guns do not automatically start shooting other people (I happen to own three hunting rifles, and I would never point any of those weapons at another person even when I know they are not loaded); on the other hand, people who are smuggling contraband at the risk of life imprisonment are pretty likely to kill other people, whether with a gun, a machete, dangerous chemicals, or any other means. Guns are a convenient way to kill people because they separate killers from the mess, but you have to already want to kill people before that becomes a factor.
As a point of comparison, how many Canadian gun owners are murdering people?
Both FTP and HTTP have ton's legal uses and only a tiny fraction of illegal uses, with most P2P stuff it's exactly the reverse, they are optimized for illegal sharing and quite useless for legal sharing.
Hm...interesting...most P2P stuff is optimized for illegal sharing...thus explaining why Skype is optimized for legal VoIP calls. Somehow I get the feeling there are more Skype users out there than there are people using P2P filesharing systems to violate copyrights.
So in essence, if the goal of P2P was to make it easier for users to share legal stuff, it does an incredible shitty job at it.
The Internet itself was originally designed as a P2P system. If you are wondering what a network that is not P2P looks like, take a look at digital cable TV or some other thin client network. The whole point of the Internet is that any computer connected to the Internet can establish communication with any other computer, without having to route that communication through some single central system (note that in the case of cable TV, nodes cannot communicate with each other at all, except for communication between the head ends and the set-top box). P2P distributed computing embodies the very philosophy of the Internet, which is to share computing resources among Internet users -- whether that is storage (in the case of filesharing systems) or CPU time (in the case of Skype and grid computing efforts).
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Should you have the ability to change the software on all of them
Yes.
Lots of people will reprogram the ECM but what about the CPU that controls the anitlock brakes?
As long as they do not make their vehicle unsafe for the road, why would that be a problem? We require cars to pass inspection for this reason. Why should someone be forbidden from hacking their brakes?
you're on your own if [the ability to root your computer] goes away.
It did not "go away," it was deliberately disabled by these companies. It is a computer, nothing less, and we have every reason to expect the ability to run any software we want on our computers.
I asked a question: how do you decide what research is "too dangerous" to allow people to see? Let me add this: How do you allow science to progress while restricting public access to research? Do only "certified" or "legitimate" scientists get to read scientific papers? How are scientists trying to develop defenses against avian flu supposed to work if they are not allowed to read the paper mentioned in TFA?
That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do
It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software? If people were complaining that their Nook could not solve the Post correspondence problem, you would have a point.
If this was on an (open) desktop platform, such a flaw wouldn't really be tolerated for long.
Which is why the user should simply be given root access to begin with. Instead of having to use privilege escalation attacks, users should just be able to hit a button or flip a switch to enable root access for themselves. Quick, easy, and perhaps voiding the warranty (but I think anyone who wants root access is willing to have no warranty).
I did not say that nobody use multiple search engines, I said that not many people do so. People who use a search engine other than Google tend to not use Google at all; on the other hand, many people who use a non-Windows OS will dual boot with Windows.
Not only that, but Google has been pretty friendly about interoperability. Gmail has SMPT and POP/IMAP available for people who prefer to use an email client rather than Google's web interface. Gchat will exchange messages with other Jabber servers (there are a few bugs that still need to be worked out here, although this is better than what, say, Facebook has pulled). Google Docs exports files in open formats.
Google wins because people like them -- they like their search algorithm, they like their web apps, and they do not like what other competitors have been pushing. This investigation will be hard pressed to find any abuses.
Right, it was "leeches" who were seeking to control and destroy Microsoft back when they were sued for antitrust violations. Microsoft had the superior product, right? Solaris was years behind Windows NT 4, right?
Please, this is just an investigation, and even if Google is found to be abusing its position the worst that will happen is they will get a slap on the wrists, like Microsoft did.
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain
Indeed, imagine the damage that might be caused if research on how different types of plastics behave under heavy stress were to fall into the wrong hands. Terrorists might figure out how to turn plastic bottles into knives and then use those knives to hijack an airplane!
How do you decide what sort of research should be censored or hidden from the public? Terrorists are creative and can find ways to weaponize just about anything. Perhaps we should require people to get licenses before allowing them to read scientific papers?
Nor is it supposed to be won. The purpose of the "war on terror" is to keep our defense industry booming and to keep people afraid of the faceless enemy hiding in the shadows.
Not only that, but if this research was performed at a university, the original manuscripts and experiment designs will probably not be hard to obtain. My department just got a new building, with fancy locks on the doors, but it is common to just let people in if they are standing outside -- no questions asked. I have seen server rooms locked with a cheap padlock at another university, or even left unlocked.
If a terrorist wanted information from a university, they could just walk in and grab it, at least in my experience (admittedly, that is in engineering; perhaps biomedical research is different?).
Clearly you did not bother to look up what the term means. "Hollywood Accounting" refers to the practice of setting up dummy corporations that are paid large amounts of money during the production of a movie, so that a movie studio can claim to have turned no profit. This allows the studio to not pay people whose contracts stipulate that they receive some percentage of the profit turned by a movie -- for example, the author of Forrest Gump, which was enormously successful financially but which the studio claimed turned a loss.
This is not a question of "making money like any other business." There are businesses that are run honestly and that do not actively try to cheat people out of their money. If you want to make a comparison with another business, ask yourself this: what other business can turn a loss on almost everything it produces without going bankrupt?
Correction: this guy did not even leak it from the studios, he just uploaded a copy he bought on the streets. Yeah, that really justifies imprisonment.
I think the point is that there needs to be some line where a studio can expect to make money fair and square through distribution.
Big budget movies are risky investments.
The movie studios did make money from the movie despite the fact that this pre-release copy was downloaded by some people.
Am I really supposed to feel sympathy for the movie industry? They pull all sorts of underhanded tactics to cheat people out of their wages (see: Hollywood Accounting).
Since they hadn't even sold a copy to anyone yet, obtaining the movie is both theft and it also decreases the potential value of the movie before they even have a chance to collect on it.
No, it was not theft, it was copyright infringement and perhaps breach of contract. Uploading a copy of a movie to megaupload is not theft before, during, or after the theatrical run of a movie.
In this case, it was never the property of anyone but the studio, because no one ever paid anyone for it, so there is no real ethical argument for this.
The argument is not about whether or not it is ethical -- the man presumably agreed not to do what he did as a condition of his job -- but rather whether or not a yearlong prison sentence is justified. I would say that it falls squarely in the "not justifiable" category, since our prisons exist to protect us from dangerous people and copying movies is in no way dangerous.
What is with these car and plane references? This guy did not "fuel up" anything -- he made a copy of a pre-release movie, and uploaded it to a filesharing server. Is that such a big deal? Really?
"Oh no, he caused us to lose some money on our already risky investment! Imprison him, and then let us sue him after he gets out!!"
You really think that we should add another prisoner to an already over-crowded, over-burdened prison system just for that? Please, this punishment is way out of proportion with the "crime."
Slashdot Mirror
I am pretty sure that the 31k gun deaths per year in the United States have more to do with the war on drugs and other "tough on crime" efforts than with guns themselves, as well as the generally bad welfare among the poor in this country. People with guns do not automatically start shooting other people (I happen to own three hunting rifles, and I would never point any of those weapons at another person even when I know they are not loaded); on the other hand, people who are smuggling contraband at the risk of life imprisonment are pretty likely to kill other people, whether with a gun, a machete, dangerous chemicals, or any other means. Guns are a convenient way to kill people because they separate killers from the mess, but you have to already want to kill people before that becomes a factor.
As a point of comparison, how many Canadian gun owners are murdering people?
A gun is a weapon
Hm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_(tool)
Both FTP and HTTP have ton's legal uses and only a tiny fraction of illegal uses, with most P2P stuff it's exactly the reverse, they are optimized for illegal sharing and quite useless for legal sharing.
Hm...interesting...most P2P stuff is optimized for illegal sharing...thus explaining why Skype is optimized for legal VoIP calls. Somehow I get the feeling there are more Skype users out there than there are people using P2P filesharing systems to violate copyrights.
So in essence, if the goal of P2P was to make it easier for users to share legal stuff, it does an incredible shitty job at it.
The Internet itself was originally designed as a P2P system. If you are wondering what a network that is not P2P looks like, take a look at digital cable TV or some other thin client network. The whole point of the Internet is that any computer connected to the Internet can establish communication with any other computer, without having to route that communication through some single central system (note that in the case of cable TV, nodes cannot communicate with each other at all, except for communication between the head ends and the set-top box). P2P distributed computing embodies the very philosophy of the Internet, which is to share computing resources among Internet users -- whether that is storage (in the case of filesharing systems) or CPU time (in the case of Skype and grid computing efforts).
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
I think perhaps you should take a moment to read the definition of "computer" and then tell me how a Kindle Fire does not meet that definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
Should you have the ability to change the software on all of them
Yes.
Lots of people will reprogram the ECM but what about the CPU that controls the anitlock brakes?
As long as they do not make their vehicle unsafe for the road, why would that be a problem? We require cars to pass inspection for this reason. Why should someone be forbidden from hacking their brakes?
you're on your own if [the ability to root your computer] goes away.
It did not "go away," it was deliberately disabled by these companies. It is a computer, nothing less, and we have every reason to expect the ability to run any software we want on our computers.
I asked a question: how do you decide what research is "too dangerous" to allow people to see? Let me add this: How do you allow science to progress while restricting public access to research? Do only "certified" or "legitimate" scientists get to read scientific papers? How are scientists trying to develop defenses against avian flu supposed to work if they are not allowed to read the paper mentioned in TFA?
Also, I do not mean to come off as rude or angry, but phrases like "the computer is not supposed to be used for this software" are problematic.
That people don't try to return the product when they screw it up doing something that the product wasn't intended to do
It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software? If people were complaining that their Nook could not solve the Post correspondence problem, you would have a point.
If this was on an (open) desktop platform, such a flaw wouldn't really be tolerated for long.
Which is why the user should simply be given root access to begin with. Instead of having to use privilege escalation attacks, users should just be able to hit a button or flip a switch to enable root access for themselves. Quick, easy, and perhaps voiding the warranty (but I think anyone who wants root access is willing to have no warranty).
Why is this so hard?
I did not say that nobody use multiple search engines, I said that not many people do so. People who use a search engine other than Google tend to not use Google at all; on the other hand, many people who use a non-Windows OS will dual boot with Windows.
s/SMPT/SMTP/
Not only that, but Google has been pretty friendly about interoperability. Gmail has SMPT and POP/IMAP available for people who prefer to use an email client rather than Google's web interface. Gchat will exchange messages with other Jabber servers (there are a few bugs that still need to be worked out here, although this is better than what, say, Facebook has pulled). Google Docs exports files in open formats.
Google wins because people like them -- they like their search algorithm, they like their web apps, and they do not like what other competitors have been pushing. This investigation will be hard pressed to find any abuses.
the same leech who
FTFY
Right, it was "leeches" who were seeking to control and destroy Microsoft back when they were sued for antitrust violations. Microsoft had the superior product, right? Solaris was years behind Windows NT 4, right?
Please, this is just an investigation, and even if Google is found to be abusing its position the worst that will happen is they will get a slap on the wrists, like Microsoft did.
Let us also not forgot that many GNU/Linux users are dual booting. I do not think many people use multiple search engines.
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain
Indeed, imagine the damage that might be caused if research on how different types of plastics behave under heavy stress were to fall into the wrong hands. Terrorists might figure out how to turn plastic bottles into knives and then use those knives to hijack an airplane!
How do you decide what sort of research should be censored or hidden from the public? Terrorists are creative and can find ways to weaponize just about anything. Perhaps we should require people to get licenses before allowing them to read scientific papers?
Why bother, when the work was already presented at conferences that anyone could have attended?
Nor is it supposed to be won. The purpose of the "war on terror" is to keep our defense industry booming and to keep people afraid of the faceless enemy hiding in the shadows.
Not only that, but if this research was performed at a university, the original manuscripts and experiment designs will probably not be hard to obtain. My department just got a new building, with fancy locks on the doors, but it is common to just let people in if they are standing outside -- no questions asked. I have seen server rooms locked with a cheap padlock at another university, or even left unlocked.
If a terrorist wanted information from a university, they could just walk in and grab it, at least in my experience (admittedly, that is in engineering; perhaps biomedical research is different?).
Clearly you did not bother to look up what the term means. "Hollywood Accounting" refers to the practice of setting up dummy corporations that are paid large amounts of money during the production of a movie, so that a movie studio can claim to have turned no profit. This allows the studio to not pay people whose contracts stipulate that they receive some percentage of the profit turned by a movie -- for example, the author of Forrest Gump, which was enormously successful financially but which the studio claimed turned a loss.
This is not a question of "making money like any other business." There are businesses that are run honestly and that do not actively try to cheat people out of their money. If you want to make a comparison with another business, ask yourself this: what other business can turn a loss on almost everything it produces without going bankrupt?
Correction: this guy did not even leak it from the studios, he just uploaded a copy he bought on the streets. Yeah, that really justifies imprisonment.
I think the point is that there needs to be some line where a studio can expect to make money fair and square through distribution.
Since they hadn't even sold a copy to anyone yet, obtaining the movie is both theft and it also decreases the potential value of the movie before they even have a chance to collect on it.
No, it was not theft, it was copyright infringement and perhaps breach of contract. Uploading a copy of a movie to megaupload is not theft before, during, or after the theatrical run of a movie.
In this case, it was never the property of anyone but the studio, because no one ever paid anyone for it, so there is no real ethical argument for this.
The argument is not about whether or not it is ethical -- the man presumably agreed not to do what he did as a condition of his job -- but rather whether or not a yearlong prison sentence is justified. I would say that it falls squarely in the "not justifiable" category, since our prisons exist to protect us from dangerous people and copying movies is in no way dangerous.
What is with these car and plane references? This guy did not "fuel up" anything -- he made a copy of a pre-release movie, and uploaded it to a filesharing server. Is that such a big deal? Really?
"Oh no, he caused us to lose some money on our already risky investment! Imprison him, and then let us sue him after he gets out!!"
You really think that we should add another prisoner to an already over-crowded, over-burdened prison system just for that? Please, this punishment is way out of proportion with the "crime."