The main problem with the Clinton approach is that there is no good way to define "valid" anonymity. Will I have to prove in court that I anonymized myself because I wanted to talk about abuse (and not because I get off talking to abused children)? It will simply not work, either techically or leagaly.
That is why your idea might be the best thing. If I *know* that the person I'm talking to is hiding his/her real identity, I *know* that there is a risk that I'm being taken for a ride.
It must, however, not be too easy to log non-anonymous surfers. I give my identity to my ISP, where an official might find it with a court order, *not* to doubleclick.
Sorry, it was a bit low to resort to word-picking when I knew well what you said in your previous post.
So then: 'the only absolute standard for 'rating' a political stance, attitude, or decision, is the amount of freedom it negates, restricts, adds, or enhances'
So, you would (in theory or in practice) approve of an action that enhances overall freedom, but decreases for example happiness, life expectancy, general well being or some other candidate for the "absolute good"?
I remain sceptical of any philosophy that don't take into account real life issues, like limited resources and every beings natural, primary instinct to survive and propagate.
Abstract qualities, such as freedom, don't mean much before you fulfil basic needs like food, water, sleep, and social contact.
Also it is not too hard to construct an example where a reduction in everyones personal freedom increases the *collective* freedom and thus the overall amount of freedom. The (ideal) justice system is the typical example of this. Here you might even have a larger reduction in the theoretical freedom, than what is de facto gained, since most people would never use most of the freedom that is taken away.
You didn't expect me to leave this thread yet did you?
Its a question of trade-offs. Personally, I'm in favour of...
But if we resort to trade-offs, the it is no longer an absolute freedom, but a relative one. It is no longer a matter of having *freedom* but having *more* freedom.
That's what happens when you let thirteen year-old kids read Robert Anton Wilson:)
Or your basic slashdot story;) Lets moderate Wilson [subversive -1E100] immediately!
OK just for the sake of the argument (so, I'm bored to death debugging someone else's C++ source)
What do you do when a law reduces your freedom to increase someone else's. In real life, I happily give up the freedom to knock people down, so that I may enjoy the freedom of not *being* knocked down.
How can I make that decision if I want an *absolute* freedom?
The problem is that the word "freedom" is so soaked in various agendas, that it has almost lost all real meaning.
Not that maximizing your personal definition of it is a bad philosophy though.
Do I have the right to demand 24/7 free instant access to a medical team?
If you're American, then the answer is no. As a UK subject, the answer is Yes
No I'm not american, I'm Swedish. The point was *instant* access. ie my own personal team watching over me constantly, just in case. We can always save/prolong more lives by pouring more money into the health service. However we must draw a line somewhere, or we will be too preoccupied by surviving, to actually live. (and the doctors deserve a life too..)
And I disagree that 'curbing freedoms' is necessarily a good ideal; freedom is the only political absolute.
Sorry to strike down on this sentence since your post was so good otherwise There *are* no political absolutes. There are far too many cases where one freedom or other "absolute" right collides with another.
Right to life? Yes! an absolute right, you say. But at what cost. Do I have the right to demand 24/7 free instant access to a medical team? If not, there goes a piece of that "absolute right"
Freedom of speech? Including that standard example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.
Freedom of thought? yes perhaps that. But only as long as I keep my thoughts to myself. If I start expressing my thoughts (other than "nice" thoughts) I might be stepping on someone else's "absolute" freedom.
Politics is the art of weighing one freedom or right against another. If there was such a thing as an absolute right, there would be no need for politics.
I suggest we end this thread, since we seem to agree (and I seriously doubt anybody else is still reading this)
It was a nice discussion. I guess that if/. crew can bring Katz on board for some added weight, they might be able to find someone with a little legal weight too. The simplest way to deal with more noise *is* to add more signal.
For the record: I agree 100% that the law must represent the will of the people.
The problem is that "the will of the people" is very hard to define. If most people care more for security than freedom, would that make surveillance cameras OK? Or more drastically: What if the majority doesn't care about the rights about a minority?
The laws of any country are patchworks, each law designed to adress a problem without disturbing the system too much. Think about how hard it is to fix a computer system ten years old. Well the lawyers have to deal with "code" that is hundreds of years old. Each new fix may cause a security hole or a resource conflict somewhere. And they have their share of script kiddies, who just love to throw some dirt into the law machinery.
Of course we are entitled to have our opinions about how the law should work. I'm just so tired of all people who seem to think that you can apply a quick fix to a law and solve the problem.
That is why I sometimes wish for a/. lawyer. Somebody qualified (and honest) enough to say "Yes, this law leads to some unwanted results. However, the proposed change would be worse" or "No, that act will not grant Gates the right to monitor your disk, because of this law" and so on.
Or simply/. editorials on legal aspects of geek stuff, from someone who actually knows what he/she is talking about.
My private e-mail should be private. (Or as private as I choose to make it. If I dont care to encrypt it it is *my* choice)
Business e-mail is a completely different thing. A court order to view *corpotate* mail is definitely OK. Wether or not they can "prove" anything.
People will just have to learn to separate their personal and professonal e-mails. Perhaps companies should insist on digital signatures on business mail, informing employees that business mail is company property.
STOP Hold the flame thrower! Of course, they ought to provide a semi-private mail account too, for company (or personal) mattter "off the record".
Hey, it works for snail mail. If I write to:
TheCompany Ltd att: Anonymous Coward Someville
It is understood that my letter is meant primalily for the company, and simply adressed to AC. If AC is not there, I expect someone else to take care of it. OTOH If I write:
Anonymous Coward TheCompany Ltd Someville
It is understood that the content meant for AC and not to be opened by someone else.
Why should not the same thing work for e-mail? (if laws are applied wisely, that is)
... "blocking" patents and are what result in the large number of cross licensing agreements between companies that hold patents in closely related areas.
Yes, the "old" industries are very used to play this game. They always make sure to have lots of patents to trade for their competitors patents. Therefor they can coexist happily, keeping *new* competitors out.
As far as legal fees go, if you have an especially good case against an infringer (i.e. you show that they knew of your patent and infringed anyway) you can generally get legal fees at the end of the suit.
... Then again, if the infringer has deeper pockets than you, you might be out of business years before the case is settled. Even megacorps have a hard time defending their patent pool. If you are a little guy, forget it.
What is intresting is not only "What can/cannot be patented" I'd like to see a discussion (not just on slashdot) about what rights a patent can grant you.
Should I be able to hold a patent, simply for defensive use? If I don't use the patented technique, should I lose it? Should a patent follow the inventor or the investor? Is it fair how I'll have to pay legal costs to defend my patent against pirates?
Well if writing code was as hard as writing law I might be able to beef up my lousy IT-consultant salary;-)
Anyway, sometimes I wish for a/. house lawyer. There are far too many "IANAL but..." threads here.
Consider someone on/. arguing along the lines of: "Well IANACE (I'm not a computer expert), but I read the specifications and since I think that since they limit our freedom to write however we like, I suggest we disobey them."
You are right, of course. Otherwise there would not be many internet shops.
What I was trying to say was that you cannot rely on "lower price through tax breaks" If that is your strategy, you are completely in the hands of the govenment. It is like some big ferry lines here in europe who relied on tax free liquor and tobacco sales to finance their ships.
They sort of got in trouble when a inter-EU line no longer could sell tax free goods...
Is not the point of these "pseudo-crimes" to have a way to catch exceptionally slippery criminals (or suspects with very good lawyers)?
Say a cop or a security guard finds AC wandering around in a closed store. They charge him for theft or breaking in. Now AC claims "Oh but I thought the store was open. You see the door was open so I just figured I'd do some late night shopping"
This is where it is nice to be able to build a case upon those lockpicks in AC's back pocket. If the real charge wont stick, bring out the lesser charge which you can *prove*.
BTW is it not a strange experience to read a conversation btw an AC and a high-karma/.'er on threshold 1+?
Well as far as you collecting other states taxes I agree. However:
If you can not think of any reason why your customers should buy from you other than differences in tax you should seriously rethink your business plan.
If your plan is to sell something that is available locally everywhere, with worse service and slower delivery, hoping that tax laws will be in your favour forever, well, then your internet business will not last long.
Sooner or later there must be some kind of international agreement on this. Not on the tax rates or systems, but on who gets to collect the tax
As I see it there are four options:
Tax is collected where the selling company is located/registred
Tax is collected where the buyer is located/registred
Internet as a tax free zone
Anarchy
The first is the most company friendly solution. One set of rules to implement on your website. (of cource the buyer must learn to check what "Tax not included" means...)
The second is a small web company's nightmare. Every freaking site owner is suddenly responsible for every freaking tax system in the world... Governments will like it though, since people don't move away from taxes to the same degree as companies.
Tax free internet? Don't think so. Why should a net ordered item be tax free when the same item (maybe from the same company) bought "irl" is not?
Anarchy is where we are heading now. Every government wants a cut. Fortunately they are not clueful enough to do something really clueless, like bit tax. or whatever...
In the EU, every (web) company must implement the tax rules for member countries to which they sell for more than a certain amount. If they sell less, it is the customers responsibility to pay sales tax according to local rules.
This version of alternative 2 or altenative 1 is probably where we will end up eventually.
However that was not the problem. Converting is an easy task every time. The problem is that you have to thing about it *E*V*E*R*Y* *T*I*M*E*
Say that this adds one hour of development for a project and five minutes per week for the user. Now add up: ((one hour/project) * (X projects per year) + (five minutes/week/user) * (Y users) * (52 weeks/year)) * (Z $$/hour) * (fifteen years)
Enter some resonable numbers instead of XYZ...
Anyway I'm just whining. Hey I get paid to fix stuff like this...
There are sooo many exerts talking about who will win or lose when something is (illegaly) copied.
If anyone is intrested, here are my thoughts: Media piracy plays right in the hands of the big networks! That is right. The winners are CBS/FOX/Disney et al. Why? Because they have the content that "everybody" wants. Therefore enough people will pay for it even in a situation where every show and record is on a thousand pirate web servers.
Smaller networks and independent producers wont stand a chance. If they come up with a product that might generate some income, it will be a) copied for free everywhere. b) Hijacked by the big guys.
So what is left? Amateurs, who might be very talented, but lacks the (expensive) technical means of the megacorps.
Media will become just like the software business where microsoft and the other big guys control the market.
Some of us don't have english as our mother tongue. That is something that is too often forgotten at places like redmont.
(OK this in slightly OT, but I'll rant anyway.) Between DOS and windows that company we all love to hate decided to change character sets. Suddenly three letters in the swedish alphabet have a new character code. One and a half decades later (count that in internet time...) we are still struggling with documents with mixed encoding.
That means every damn application has to provide a way to recode OEM to Ansi. AND deal with users who tries to do this conversion on files already converted.
This is *before* dealing with unix and mac files.
So if we cant read freaking text files after ten years, how are we supposed to read binaries?
...vendors complain that they must do that, due to provisions of their contract with Microsoft!
So find another vendor! They have not *all* signed the same contract. The reason why they signed that contract is that they have something to gain even from a bad termed MS contract.
A PC with preinstalled OS is *much* cheaper to make than a blank PC, postinstalled with Windows. Just imagine the volume of support calls from users installing windows themselves... Therefore the vendors prefer to sell windows preinstalled. Therefore they accept "evil" terms.
I don't like Microsoft very much. I just want to point out that their domination is not neccecarily the result of big illegal pressure. A thousand small factors, each perfectly legal and ethical, is pushing their products. Every single user has found it in their interest to play along rather than to resist.
Here is a similar case:
Where I live there are two stores selling university textbooks. One "normal" store and one owned by the student body. The student store keeps the prices down, so that we get our textbooks cheaper than at most other places. However, the "normal" store has even lower prizes on textbooks.
Where shall I buy my books? I save much needed cash by going to the "normal" store, But if nobody shops at the student store, they will close and prizes will go up for everybody.
Yes of cource I would lose. (at least *if* I was under US jurisdiction...) Just like I would lose if I got prosecuted without those "licence terms"
*But* with some luck I might bring the law down with me. If the UCTIA gives the little guy a chance to screw with the big boys, the big boys will make sure that it goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is that too obvious.
A bit. There are no general trademarks.
.tm.us, .tm.uk, .tm.se etc
You would need something like:
Actually, that would not work either, you would need:
.food.tm.us, .software.tm.us etc.
The shortage is not in domain names, but in *names*
The main problem with the Clinton approach is that there is no good way to define "valid" anonymity. Will I have to prove in court that I anonymized myself because I wanted to talk about abuse (and not because I get off talking to abused children)? It will simply not work, either techically or leagaly.
That is why your idea might be the best thing. If I *know* that the person I'm talking to is hiding his/her real identity, I *know* that there is a risk that I'm being taken for a ride.
It must, however, not be too easy to log non-anonymous surfers. I give my identity to my ISP, where an official might find it with a court order, *not* to doubleclick.
So then:
'the only absolute standard for 'rating' a political stance, attitude, or decision, is the amount of freedom it negates, restricts, adds, or enhances'
So, you would (in theory or in practice) approve of an action that enhances overall freedom, but decreases for example happiness, life expectancy, general well being or some other candidate for the "absolute good"?
I remain sceptical of any philosophy that don't take into account real life issues, like limited resources and every beings natural, primary instinct to survive and propagate.
Abstract qualities, such as freedom, don't mean much before you fulfil basic needs like food, water, sleep, and social contact.
Also it is not too hard to construct an example where a reduction in everyones personal freedom increases the *collective* freedom and thus the overall amount of freedom. The (ideal) justice system is the typical example of this. Here you might even have a larger reduction in the theoretical freedom, than what is de facto gained, since most people would never use most of the freedom that is taken away.
Its a question of trade-offs. Personally, I'm in favour of...
But if we resort to trade-offs, the it is no longer an absolute freedom, but a relative one. It is no longer a matter of having *freedom* but having *more* freedom.
That's what happens when you let thirteen year-old kids read Robert Anton Wilson :)
Or your basic slashdot story ;)
Lets moderate Wilson [subversive -1E100] immediately!
What do you do when a law reduces your freedom to increase someone else's. In real life, I happily give up the freedom to knock people down, so that I may enjoy the freedom of not *being* knocked down.
How can I make that decision if I want an *absolute* freedom?
The problem is that the word "freedom" is so soaked in various agendas, that it has almost lost all real meaning.
Not that maximizing your personal definition of it is a bad philosophy though.
If you're American, then the answer is no. As a UK subject, the answer is Yes
No I'm not american, I'm Swedish.
The point was *instant* access. ie my own personal team watching over me constantly, just in case.
We can always save/prolong more lives by pouring more money into the health service. However we must draw a line somewhere, or we will be too preoccupied by surviving, to actually live. (and the doctors deserve a life too..)
That is more a case of the classical pre-DMCA tactic of filing semi-valid (at best) lawsuits hoping to scare someone into submission.
Sorry to strike down on this sentence since your post was so good otherwise
There *are* no political absolutes. There are far too many cases where one freedom or other "absolute" right collides with another.
Right to life? Yes! an absolute right, you say.
But at what cost. Do I have the right to demand 24/7 free instant access to a medical team? If not, there goes a piece of that "absolute right"
Freedom of speech? Including that standard example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.
Freedom of thought? yes perhaps that. But only as long as I keep my thoughts to myself. If I start expressing my thoughts (other than "nice" thoughts) I might be stepping on someone else's "absolute" freedom.
Politics is the art of weighing one freedom or right against another. If there was such a thing as an absolute right, there would be no need for politics.
Well the title said "How about a BA in Quake?" or something similar, so I guess we cant blame /. for the headline.
Well so are computer people...
I suggest we end this thread, since we seem to agree (and I seriously doubt anybody else is still reading this)
It was a nice discussion. I guess that if /. crew can bring Katz on board for some added weight, they might be able to find someone with a little legal weight too. The simplest way to deal with more noise *is* to add more signal.
The problem is that "the will of the people" is very hard to define. If most people care more for security than freedom, would that make surveillance cameras OK?
Or more drastically: What if the majority doesn't care about the rights about a minority?
The laws of any country are patchworks, each law designed to adress a problem without disturbing the system too much. Think about how hard it is to fix a computer system ten years old. Well the lawyers have to deal with "code" that is hundreds of years old. Each new fix may cause a security hole or a resource conflict somewhere. And they have their share of script kiddies, who just love to throw some dirt into the law machinery.
Of course we are entitled to have our opinions about how the law should work. I'm just so tired of all people who seem to think that you can apply a quick fix to a law and solve the problem.
That is why I sometimes wish for a /. lawyer. Somebody qualified (and honest) enough to say "Yes, this law leads to some unwanted results. However, the proposed change would be worse" or "No, that act will not grant Gates the right to monitor your disk, because of this law" and so on.
Or simply /. editorials on legal aspects of geek stuff, from someone who actually knows what he/she is talking about.
Or The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
(The latter is signed by all countries in the world,... except USA and Somalia)
A country that executes children should be very careful when it comes to condemning others.
(That said I'd still prefer to live in the US, rather than China or Iraq...)
Business e-mail is a completely different thing. A court order to view *corpotate* mail is definitely OK. Wether or not they can "prove" anything.
People will just have to learn to separate their personal and professonal e-mails. Perhaps companies should insist on digital signatures on business mail, informing employees that business mail is company property.
STOP Hold the flame thrower! Of course, they ought to provide a semi-private mail account too, for company (or personal) mattter "off the record".
Hey, it works for snail mail. If I write to:
TheCompany Ltd
att: Anonymous Coward
Someville
It is understood that my letter is meant primalily for the company, and simply adressed to AC. If AC is not there, I expect someone else to take care of it.
OTOH If I write:
Anonymous Coward
TheCompany Ltd
Someville
It is understood that the content meant for AC and not to be opened by someone else.
Why should not the same thing work for e-mail? (if laws are applied wisely, that is)
Yes, the "old" industries are very used to play this game. They always make sure to have lots of patents to trade for their competitors patents. Therefor they can coexist happily, keeping *new* competitors out.
As far as legal fees go, if you have an especially good case against an infringer (i.e. you show that they knew of your patent and infringed anyway) you can generally get legal fees at the end of the suit.
I'd like to see a discussion (not just on slashdot) about what rights a patent can grant you.
Should I be able to hold a patent, simply for defensive use? If I don't use the patented technique, should I lose it? Should a patent follow the inventor or the investor? Is it fair how I'll have to pay legal costs to defend my patent against pirates?
Anyway, sometimes I wish for a /. house lawyer. There are far too many "IANAL but..." threads here.
Consider someone on /. arguing along the lines of:
"Well IANACE (I'm not a computer expert), but I read the specifications and since I think that since they limit our freedom to write however we like, I suggest we disobey them."
What I was trying to say was that you cannot rely on "lower price through tax breaks"
If that is your strategy, you are completely in the hands of the govenment. It is like some big ferry lines here in europe who relied on tax free liquor and tobacco sales to finance their ships.
They sort of got in trouble when a inter-EU line no longer could sell tax free goods...
The best of luck though!
Is not the point of these "pseudo-crimes" to have a way to catch exceptionally slippery criminals (or suspects with very good lawyers)?
Say a cop or a security guard finds AC wandering around in a closed store. They charge him for theft or breaking in. Now AC claims "Oh but I thought the store was open. You see the door was open so I just figured I'd do some late night shopping"
This is where it is nice to be able to build a case upon those lockpicks in AC's back pocket. If the real charge wont stick, bring out the lesser charge which you can *prove*.
BTW is it not a strange experience to read a conversation btw an AC and a high-karma /.'er on threshold 1+?
If you can not think of any reason why your customers should buy from you other than differences in tax you should seriously rethink your business plan.
If your plan is to sell something that is available locally everywhere, with worse service and slower delivery, hoping that tax laws will be in your favour forever, well, then your internet business will not last long.
As I see it there are four options:
- Tax is collected where the selling company is located/registred
- Tax is collected where the buyer is located/registred
- Internet as a tax free zone
- Anarchy
The first is the most company friendly solution. One set of rules to implement on your website. (of cource the buyer must learn to check what "Tax not included" means...)The second is a small web company's nightmare. Every freaking site owner is suddenly responsible for every freaking tax system in the world... Governments will like it though, since people don't move away from taxes to the same degree as companies.
Tax free internet? Don't think so. Why should a net ordered item be tax free when the same item (maybe from the same company) bought "irl" is not?
Anarchy is where we are heading now. Every government wants a cut. Fortunately they are not clueful enough to do something really clueless, like bit tax. or whatever...
In the EU, every (web) company must implement the tax rules for member countries to which they sell for more than a certain amount. If they sell less, it is the customers responsibility to pay sales tax according to local rules.
This version of alternative 2 or altenative 1 is probably where we will end up eventually.
However that was not the problem. Converting is an easy task every time. The problem is that you have to thing about it *E*V*E*R*Y* *T*I*M*E*
Say that this adds one hour of development for a project and five minutes per week for the user. Now add up: /year)) * (Z $$/hour) * (fifteen years)
((one hour/project) * (X projects per year) + (five minutes/week/user) * (Y users) * (52 weeks
Enter some resonable numbers instead of XYZ...
Anyway I'm just whining. Hey I get paid to fix stuff like this...
If anyone is intrested, here are my thoughts:
Media piracy plays right in the hands of the big networks!
That is right. The winners are CBS/FOX/Disney et al.
Why? Because they have the content that "everybody" wants. Therefore enough people will pay for it even in a situation where every show and record is on a thousand pirate web servers.
Smaller networks and independent producers wont stand a chance. If they come up with a product that might generate some income, it will be
a) copied for free everywhere.
b) Hijacked by the big guys.
So what is left? Amateurs, who might be very talented, but lacks the (expensive) technical means of the megacorps.
Media will become just like the software business where microsoft and the other big guys control the market.
Some of us don't have english as our mother tongue. That is something that is too often forgotten at places like redmont.
(OK this in slightly OT, but I'll rant anyway.)
Between DOS and windows that company we all love to hate decided to change character sets. Suddenly three letters in the swedish alphabet have a new character code. One and a half decades later (count that in internet time...) we are still struggling with documents with mixed encoding.
That means every damn application has to provide a way to recode OEM to Ansi. AND deal with users who tries to do this conversion on files already converted.
This is *before* dealing with unix and mac files.
So if we cant read freaking text files after ten years, how are we supposed to read binaries?
Sometimes I just get too tired...
So find another vendor! They have not *all* signed the same contract. The reason why they signed that contract is that they have something to gain even from a bad termed MS contract.
A PC with preinstalled OS is *much* cheaper to make than a blank PC, postinstalled with Windows. Just imagine the volume of support calls from users installing windows themselves... Therefore the vendors prefer to sell windows preinstalled. Therefore they accept "evil" terms.
I don't like Microsoft very much. I just want to point out that their domination is not neccecarily the result of big illegal pressure. A thousand small factors, each perfectly legal and ethical, is pushing their products. Every single user has found it in their interest to play along rather than to resist.
Here is a similar case:
Where I live there are two stores selling university textbooks. One "normal" store and one owned by the student body. The student store keeps the prices down, so that we get our textbooks cheaper than at most other places.
However, the "normal" store has even lower prizes on textbooks.
Where shall I buy my books? I save much needed cash by going to the "normal" store, But if nobody shops at the student store, they will close and prizes will go up for everybody.
*But* with some luck I might bring the law down with me. If the UCTIA gives the little guy a chance to screw with the big boys, the big boys will make sure that it goes away.