Read up on (your) history. It matters to people whether the law is wrong or right. If you don't care about your laws being right, than you have my sympathy.
By the same logic, lying is stealing as well since you are depriving someone of truth. And truth belongs to all, it is one of the most basic rights one has and needs to have in a moral society. Not sure how many of the worlds population/governments/businesses/organizations are than thieves, but my guess is 80%+. Taking little white lies into account, make that 99%.
Doesn't surprise me. Russia is not to happy about the US Missile Shield, but their opinion seems to be ignored. So they flex their military again to get some more weight behind it.
collateral damage IS the political agenda furthering mechanism
Sorry, but I disagree. At least in the 9-11 case. 9-11 was about the symbols. If it was about people, they would have flown all 4 planes into Skyscrapers and they would have done it at a slightly later time so all 4 buildings would have been packed with people.
If they only wanted to blow the towers up, they could have done it at night.
They could, but seeing they were mediocre pilots at best, it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult at night. In fact, having flown myself (gliding), I'm pretty darn sure they wouldn't have been able to hit the pentagon at night. VFR without a horizon, without clear ground sight, lots of blinking lights is and no proper training/experience, is rather a silly gamble.
He was happier than hell that it took out much more than he ever expected.
He was happy that the towers fell. No-one figured that would happen. The things were designed to survive a plane crashing into them. Skyscrapers normally don't collapse because of fire. I doubt the terrorist had the knowledge by which they knew the towers would fall.
Sbarro? Yup, again, the terrorists could have blown it up when it was empty.
I wasn't talking about Sbarro in my post, just 9-11. In all honestly, I don't even know that attack. But I believe that it refers to a attack in Israel. That's a different kind of Terrorism, which is much more about hatred between two civilian populations. The Terroists attack on 9-11 were about US hegemony, hence they attacked those symbols. If they wanted to attack civilians, they would have crashed a jet in the stadium during the Superball. Or they would have crashed all four jets in places with lots of people. If there would have been only 100 people working in the WTC, they still would have done the same.
Collateral damage in the case of the US led invasion is completely different.
Tell that to the families. Do you actually think they care whether family members die by a terrorist attack or a military attack?
Terrorism is designed to MAXIMIZE collateral damage, or the idiots with the bomb vests wouldn't fill them full of (insert small projectiles like nails, screws, etc here).
Some terrorism is, some terrorism isn't. Not all terrorism is the same. Read a good book about it. Look at some documentaries about the topic. (There is actually a good one about a terrorist group in Iraq. While being terrorists, they denounce the attacks on civilians f.i.).
This is a vast oversimplification. Try telling that to the families of those killed in a certain Israeli pizza shop or in the WTC.
That is a vast oversimplification as well. The fact that people died in the 9/11-attacks is very very tragic, but they were not the target of the attacks, they were collateral damage. I'm pretty sure the attackers didn't care about the deaths of "infidels", but they were attacking the symbols of Americanism (note that I'm not writing America/USA or Americans here). Collateral damage was acceptable for them. Just as it was when "the Coalition" invaded Iraq. Just as it has been in every major conflict.
A full-scale device should produce 1 megawatt - enough to power around 200 houses.
Which article is right? Is it 200 houses or 2000? Both sound wrong to me. 2000 is way to much, that would be.5kW per house (minus energy loss during transportation/transformations), but 200 sounds a little low unless everyone is plugging in a Prius at night.
Privacy is not a chore. Privacy is property. Protecting said property is a chore, you need to actively protect it. In a perfect world, people would respect your property (privacy) and leave it alone. In the real world, that doesn't happen of course. People aren't as moral as they always claim to be.
You are forgetting one thing though. On many sites, you aren't allowed to block those ads. They don't check up on you whether or not you are watching those ads, but at some point, they will. I watch the internet without ads too and getting an adblocker (Admucher in this case) was the best thing I ever did.
Maybe the future is to focus on creating better wireless devices. If everyone in my city had a wireless devices that were capable of merging into one large network, then I could send information from my computer to someone on the other side of the city (or country) aslong as there was a path and nodes for it to leapfrog across. This probably wouldn't be anything like as efficent as a landline, but done right it could provide a secondary internet of sorts; which would be a lot harder to regulate.
I think those networks are called roofnets (based on WiFi and Mesh-networking). They are already regulated to some sorts, e.g. the maximum power of a wireless device is currently 100mW in Europe for WiFi (1W in USA). Wouldn't surprise me if the EU lowered that to 10mW or would start to require licenses for anything above 10mW.
OTOH, you are not going to find a 100mW WiFi accesspoint in your local store. All consumer-grade WiFi-accesspoints are roughly 30mW (Senao was the exception, not sure if they still are). And now with 802.11n, antenna's have started moving to inside the box, meaning you can't boost you signal anymore with directional antenna's either.
In some parts of the world, ISP's are also getting enthousiastic with providing customers with free routers and WiFi accesspoint. Locked down, with limited access to the settings of course.
If you consider copyright infringement stealing, than fixed prices or tacit collusion to set a certain price-level for copyrighted material is stealing as well. If true free markets existed for content (music, movies, whatever), p2p would have been a massive force for good. The reason it isn't has nothing to do with people "stealing" the latest 50-cent song, it has to do with certain industries trying to steal from consumers. p2p in its current shape is a reaction to the lack of free-markets for copyrighted content and the abuse of certain monopolists/duopolists/oligopolists of that situation. What comes around goes around.
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
See http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/en_technology.html . The 128kB blocks are not "unique". Nor is data fancily compressed. You can use a block for a holiday picture, it could also be used for an mp3. It all depends on the URL. If I store a copyrighted file on OFF (say a legally purchased mp3) and I keep the URL to myself, noone will actually know (nor can they see) that I actually stored that mp3 on OFF. Even though I stored it on a Distributed File System, by keeping the URL to myself, I did not distribute the mp3 (noone can download the mp3 without the URL).
In other words, it's distributing liability for infringement to all the people holding the bits you use to assemble the file. Wow. That's great.
No. The bits have no meaning. They are isolated random blocks of data, which have no meaning by themselves. Theoretically speaking, a random block of data could infringe in the same way a bunch of monkeys with type-writers might accidentally produce a text that infringes on copyright.
(via this randomized block encryption)
It isn't a randomized block encryption. It is a storage space for random blocks of data. The random blocks of data carry no meaning and have no special significance. They are just random neutral blocks of data. What gives them meaning is the URL, which combines various blocks of random to become something with meaning.
that the only practical means of enforcing the laws would be to make the people running data stores liable, that's exactly what the courts will do
I would find that highly peculiar. Even though those people do not do anything that is even remotely infringing, just because they are the only ones you can litigate, courts would actually allow that? By that same way of reasoning, you could hold the publisher of a dictionary liable for inciting hate/racism/whatever, because a person could use the words in the dictionary in that fashion.
As for the rest, I'm not a US citizen, so I don't have all the ins and outs of your legal system. A few thins confuse me. Technology is neutral, but when I read "since it doesn't have (per Grokster) substantial non infringing uses", technology is not neutral in Law? This confuses me. P2P has substantial non infringing uses, that people don't use it that way, well you can't blame the technology or a service provider for that.
With that analogy, you are outlawing random data. Random data is like a binary nerve agent? Come on. Just because data is random and doesn't have any color, it should be illegal? Everything without color is illegal? That doesn't sound like freedom to me. If I want to produce bits without color, than that is my free right. I'm not going to artificially color my bits, just because some likes bits with colors. A society where colors are mandatory and where everything is checked to see if it is the "proper" color, even though color is just an artificial/virtual addition which has no real meaning, is about as far from a free society as you can be. Especially if the meaning of color is sold to the highest bidder or the one with the most power.
I don't discriminate. I don't care what color bits are, nor do I care if a bit happens to be born without color. I don't even care if a bit is unhappy with its color and want to change it over time. I do care however if a bit is (re)colored against its will.
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
Yes, they key, or in OFF's example, the URL is indeed in itself a derivative work of the copyrighted file. But the random or arbitrary data (which is what OFF stores) isn't. Hence, you can't infringe on copyrights with a Brightnet. It is nothing more than a large collection of random/arbitrary data.
An example: I could store a backup of a copyrighted work (say a DVD) on OFF. It would be stored a random blocks of data, which wouldn't infringe on any copyright. It is just random data, the being what turns it into a copyrighted work. As long as I keep the key to myself (e.g do not distribute the DVD), no laws are broken. I'm allowed to make backup of a legal DVD for personal use under Dutch Law.
If the copyrighted data can be recovered it's considered distribution - in some cases even if the key itself is not distributed with the encrypted data.
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
It is not about compression. And how does it provide a poor level of privacy? Blocks can be used by any number of files, so how can you tie a block of data to a specific file?
There is another weakness in BT which allows ISP's to throttle traffic. Client to tracker communications. Unless your tracker uses SSL, all peers inside a swarm are send over in the clear. So your ISP knows which IPs are likely to send and receive BT-traffic. They don't have to look at the traffic, they just use the same information the tracker provided to you. IP in BT-swarm? Throttle.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can't see if Google has silently deleted any other of your email? Doesn't make sense to me.
Read up on (your) history. It matters to people whether the law is wrong or right. If you don't care about your laws being right, than you have my sympathy.
By the same logic, lying is stealing as well since you are depriving someone of truth. And truth belongs to all, it is one of the most basic rights one has and needs to have in a moral society. Not sure how many of the worlds population/governments/businesses/organizations are than thieves, but my guess is 80%+. Taking little white lies into account, make that 99%.
Doesn't surprise me. Russia is not to happy about the US Missile Shield, but their opinion seems to be ignored. So they flex their military again to get some more weight behind it.
Only if you are part of those who are policing it.
collateral damage IS the political agenda furthering mechanism
Sorry, but I disagree. At least in the 9-11 case. 9-11 was about the symbols. If it was about people, they would have flown all 4 planes into Skyscrapers and they would have done it at a slightly later time so all 4 buildings would have been packed with people.
If they only wanted to blow the towers up, they could have done it at night.
They could, but seeing they were mediocre pilots at best, it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult at night. In fact, having flown myself (gliding), I'm pretty darn sure they wouldn't have been able to hit the pentagon at night. VFR without a horizon, without clear ground sight, lots of blinking lights is and no proper training/experience, is rather a silly gamble.
He was happier than hell that it took out much more than he ever expected.
He was happy that the towers fell. No-one figured that would happen. The things were designed to survive a plane crashing into them. Skyscrapers normally don't collapse because of fire. I doubt the terrorist had the knowledge by which they knew the towers would fall.
Sbarro? Yup, again, the terrorists could have blown it up when it was empty.
I wasn't talking about Sbarro in my post, just 9-11. In all honestly, I don't even know that attack. But I believe that it refers to a attack in Israel. That's a different kind of Terrorism, which is much more about hatred between two civilian populations. The Terroists attack on 9-11 were about US hegemony, hence they attacked those symbols. If they wanted to attack civilians, they would have crashed a jet in the stadium during the Superball. Or they would have crashed all four jets in places with lots of people. If there would have been only 100 people working in the WTC, they still would have done the same.
Collateral damage in the case of the US led invasion is completely different.
Tell that to the families. Do you actually think they care whether family members die by a terrorist attack or a military attack?
Terrorism is designed to MAXIMIZE collateral damage, or the idiots with the bomb vests wouldn't fill them full of (insert small projectiles like nails, screws, etc here).
Some terrorism is, some terrorism isn't. Not all terrorism is the same. Read a good book about it. Look at some documentaries about the topic. (There is actually a good one about a terrorist group in Iraq. While being terrorists, they denounce the attacks on civilians f.i.).
This is a vast oversimplification. Try telling that to the families of those killed in a certain Israeli pizza shop or in the WTC.
That is a vast oversimplification as well. The fact that people died in the 9/11-attacks is very very tragic, but they were not the target of the attacks, they were collateral damage. I'm pretty sure the attackers didn't care about the deaths of "infidels", but they were attacking the symbols of Americanism (note that I'm not writing America/USA or Americans here). Collateral damage was acceptable for them. Just as it was when "the Coalition" invaded Iraq. Just as it has been in every major conflict.
What the hell does Child Pornography has to do with this?
From the Anaconda website:
Typically in the north Atlantic, a tube 7m in diameter and 150m long would collect an average power over the year of about one megawatt.
The articles talk about 200m in length, the website talks about 150m in length.
A full-scale device should produce 1 megawatt - enough to power around 200 houses.
Which article is right? Is it 200 houses or 2000? Both sound wrong to me. 2000 is way to much, that would be .5kW per house (minus energy loss during transportation/transformations), but 200 sounds a little low unless everyone is plugging in a Prius at night.
What about the last time Iran had a democracy? What happened to that?
Privacy is not a chore. Privacy is property. Protecting said property is a chore, you need to actively protect it. In a perfect world, people would respect your property (privacy) and leave it alone. In the real world, that doesn't happen of course. People aren't as moral as they always claim to be.
If they would build in a SPAM-filter, to filter them out, it would even be more useful. Personally, those spam reviews irritate the hell out of me.
You are forgetting one thing though. On many sites, you aren't allowed to block those ads. They don't check up on you whether or not you are watching those ads, but at some point, they will. I watch the internet without ads too and getting an adblocker (Admucher in this case) was the best thing I ever did.
Maybe the future is to focus on creating better wireless devices. If everyone in my city had a wireless devices that were capable of merging into one large network, then I could send information from my computer to someone on the other side of the city (or country) aslong as there was a path and nodes for it to leapfrog across. This probably wouldn't be anything like as efficent as a landline, but done right it could provide a secondary internet of sorts; which would be a lot harder to regulate.
I think those networks are called roofnets (based on WiFi and Mesh-networking). They are already regulated to some sorts, e.g. the maximum power of a wireless device is currently 100mW in Europe for WiFi (1W in USA). Wouldn't surprise me if the EU lowered that to 10mW or would start to require licenses for anything above 10mW.
OTOH, you are not going to find a 100mW WiFi accesspoint in your local store. All consumer-grade WiFi-accesspoints are roughly 30mW (Senao was the exception, not sure if they still are). And now with 802.11n, antenna's have started moving to inside the box, meaning you can't boost you signal anymore with directional antenna's either.
In some parts of the world, ISP's are also getting enthousiastic with providing customers with free routers and WiFi accesspoint. Locked down, with limited access to the settings of course.
If you consider copyright infringement stealing, than fixed prices or tacit collusion to set a certain price-level for copyrighted material is stealing as well. If true free markets existed for content (music, movies, whatever), p2p would have been a massive force for good. The reason it isn't has nothing to do with people "stealing" the latest 50-cent song, it has to do with certain industries trying to steal from consumers. p2p in its current shape is a reaction to the lack of free-markets for copyrighted content and the abuse of certain monopolists/duopolists/oligopolists of that situation. What comes around goes around.
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
See http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/en_technology.html . The 128kB blocks are not "unique". Nor is data fancily compressed. You can use a block for a holiday picture, it could also be used for an mp3. It all depends on the URL. If I store a copyrighted file on OFF (say a legally purchased mp3) and I keep the URL to myself, noone will actually know (nor can they see) that I actually stored that mp3 on OFF. Even though I stored it on a Distributed File System, by keeping the URL to myself, I did not distribute the mp3 (noone can download the mp3 without the URL).
In other words, it's distributing liability for infringement to all the people holding the bits you use to assemble the file. Wow. That's great.
No. The bits have no meaning. They are isolated random blocks of data, which have no meaning by themselves. Theoretically speaking, a random block of data could infringe in the same way a bunch of monkeys with type-writers might accidentally produce a text that infringes on copyright.
(via this randomized block encryption)
It isn't a randomized block encryption. It is a storage space for random blocks of data. The random blocks of data carry no meaning and have no special significance. They are just random neutral blocks of data. What gives them meaning is the URL, which combines various blocks of random to become something with meaning.
that the only practical means of enforcing the laws would be to make the people running data stores liable, that's exactly what the courts will do
I would find that highly peculiar. Even though those people do not do anything that is even remotely infringing, just because they are the only ones you can litigate, courts would actually allow that? By that same way of reasoning, you could hold the publisher of a dictionary liable for inciting hate/racism/whatever, because a person could use the words in the dictionary in that fashion.
As for the rest, I'm not a US citizen, so I don't have all the ins and outs of your legal system. A few thins confuse me. Technology is neutral, but when I read "since it doesn't have (per Grokster) substantial non infringing uses", technology is not neutral in Law? This confuses me. P2P has substantial non infringing uses, that people don't use it that way, well you can't blame the technology or a service provider for that.
With that analogy, you are outlawing random data. Random data is like a binary nerve agent? Come on. Just because data is random and doesn't have any color, it should be illegal? Everything without color is illegal? That doesn't sound like freedom to me. If I want to produce bits without color, than that is my free right. I'm not going to artificially color my bits, just because some likes bits with colors. A society where colors are mandatory and where everything is checked to see if it is the "proper" color, even though color is just an artificial/virtual addition which has no real meaning, is about as far from a free society as you can be. Especially if the meaning of color is sold to the highest bidder or the one with the most power.
I don't discriminate. I don't care what color bits are, nor do I care if a bit happens to be born without color. I don't even care if a bit is unhappy with its color and want to change it over time. I do care however if a bit is (re)colored against its will.
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
Yes, they key, or in OFF's example, the URL is indeed in itself a derivative work of the copyrighted file. But the random or arbitrary data (which is what OFF stores) isn't. Hence, you can't infringe on copyrights with a Brightnet. It is nothing more than a large collection of random/arbitrary data.
An example: I could store a backup of a copyrighted work (say a DVD) on OFF. It would be stored a random blocks of data, which wouldn't infringe on any copyright. It is just random data, the being what turns it into a copyrighted work. As long as I keep the key to myself (e.g do not distribute the DVD), no laws are broken. I'm allowed to make backup of a legal DVD for personal use under Dutch Law.
If the copyrighted data can be recovered it's considered distribution - in some cases even if the key itself is not distributed with the encrypted data.
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
It is not about compression. And how does it provide a poor level of privacy? Blocks can be used by any number of files, so how can you tie a block of data to a specific file?
There is another weakness in BT which allows ISP's to throttle traffic. Client to tracker communications. Unless your tracker uses SSL, all peers inside a swarm are send over in the clear. So your ISP knows which IPs are likely to send and receive BT-traffic. They don't have to look at the traffic, they just use the same information the tracker provided to you. IP in BT-swarm? Throttle.