HN user
On your Google, with your results, with your search history and thus in your specific filter bubble.
Fuck, people, don't you get this already? There is no n-th result on Google. Don't act like there is.
I seriously do not understand his problem. I don't like LotR either, but its cultural impact is huge and it does in no way devalue the gigantic literary work that Tolkien has created. Idiotic copyright lawsuits won't change reality, either.
Exactly.
Do yourself a favor and use a native client. Every single web client for IRC sucks. No exceptions.
I'm sorry to say this, but all issues you describe are instances of PEBKAC.
Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily host and extend yourself?
I don't get you people. I really don't get you.
>1. People afraid of being tracked down and prosecuted because someone used their exit node for criminal behavior
Again, Flash Proxy is not an exit node, it's a bridge. It merely helps people to access the Tor network, and does not relay traffic back out (which, as far as I know, is not even technically possible). There's zero risks involved. Also, why are you not running at least a relay, anyways?
>2. People concerned about limiting criminal behavior
Limiting criminal behavior is fine, but never at the cost of essential liberties and rights. This is inarguable. People rallying against Tor for "criminal behavior" are the very same people we need Tor to protect ourselves against.
>3. People who want to stop free speech
I you[1] are such a person, I hate you and you more than deserve to have your browser turned into a powerful weapon of the very thing you want to stop.
[1] This is the general you, I'm not talking to the parent poster specifically.
It's equally debatable whether it's okay to put stupid advertisements or tracking technology on your website - which have infinitely less positive benefits for humanity than Tor.
Anyways, my answer wasn't about Flash-Proxy at all (which is, polemics aside, indeed debatable). I was pissed about the attitude that Tor == CP, which is a dishonest fallacy thrown around by supporters of surveillance and spying.
It makes me extremely sad - and somewhat angry - that a lot of people just associate Tor with CP and criminals. Tor enabled and helped carry out fucking revolutions. Hundreds, if not thousands of (not only) chinese dissidents use it to communicate safely. It protects lives. Tor is a blessing upon humanity, and a big, fat, thorn in the side of every oppressive government on this planet.
The fact that some individuals use Tor for accessing child pornography is sad, but that constitutes a miniscule amount of its entire traffic. Stop looking at the few bad apples and look at the big picture.
Oh, and if you're at it, watch Jacob and Roger's talk at the 29c3 as soon as it is available. They explained this awesome piece of software a bit more in detail there, amongst all the other amazing projects related to the Tor Project.
>a serious crime
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Piracy is not a crime, much less a serious one. Murder, for example, is a serious crime. Please don't spout nonsense. Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not even a felony.
That is not to say that what Canonical did - if the accusations are justified - is ethically sound. But please don't spread the bullshit propaganda of certain industry representatives.
The bad thing about the "nothing to hide" camp usually isn't their opinion that they themselves have nothing to hide, but the fact that the majority of these people seem to want to force this opinion on the rest of society. Fine, live your rose-colored post-privacy life. But leave me the fuck out of it. I have things to hide. Everyone has. You included.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- Cardinal Richelieu
>For some people, jobs are hard to come by, I would wager the majority of TSA screeners do not have any better paying options, so to criticize them for being a part of a faulty system, or to paint them as being "from a sixth grade mentality", or "trying to get employed with border patrol asap" when they are just trying to provide for themselves and their families, who may not have better options, is pretty unfair.
I don't think so. It's very valid to criticize someone who works for a morally corrupt, unneeded and socially harmful agency, no matter the reason. Your argument is basically a sophisticated "but think of the children!!11oneone" appeal to emotion, ie not a valid argument.
If there aren't any better job options (which I highly doubt), then it's another gigantic fucking failure of the government that needs to be fixed ASAP.
Your examples only make a legal name important if you consider these things important. I don't, and they aren't. Part of why we need to get rid of the concept of a legal name is exactly for this reason. A government has no business and no authority to decide who I am.
I always wonder during those discussions - what exactly is a "real" name supposed to be? I don't have "real" name. Rather, I have many chosen names, and a name my parents gave me. I consider all of these names real, as they refer to a facet of my personality, a part of me.
I do have a legal name - my birth name. It's but one of many. Why is my legal name important? It isn't. I don't even consider it my primary name. The concept of one single "real" name is severely retarded and flies in the face of reality. We need to get rid of this concept, along with the illusion of a single identity. I simply am not the same person when I am with my parents, when I'm with my meatspace friends, or if I'm hanging out on IRC with people I know pretty well, but have never seen or met. I'm someone different here on HN than I am on 4chan, or any other message board. That's perfectly human, and no company or law will ever change that.
I don't think you understand how science works.
>People search on Google -- they opt-in to Google Search -- because the results satisfy them (more than the competition).
Um, no. A lot of people don't even know there is competition to Google. They don't "opt-in" to Google just as much as they don't "opt-in" to using Windows, they've just always used it because it comes with their browser/PC. There's a reason Google pays Mozilla a few million every year to be the default search engine.
If you saw it on twitter, why don't you ask this on twitter?
>I see that a programmer or artist is slightly different because the work the programmer or artist did can be duplicated.
That's not only "slightly different", that's the crucial difference. So no, they aren't "effectively the same", they are two completely unrelated cases. Would people please stop trying to use this dishonest and flat out false argument to support entirely wrong chains of argumentation?
Besides which, the work an artist/programmer has done is unrelated to the distribution of the result. If one expects to be paid for the actual work done, they have to seek other models. One that often comes up here is Kickstarter, where a form of contract is made - money for work done. Perfectly fine. Musicians have and always had concerts and merchandise as their source of income. Comissioned works are also possible, and are a very valid source of income. Additionally, there's patronage - which is, for example, basically the way Linus Torvalds makes his money.
I'm positive this list is by far not exhaustive.
So no, pirating something is not taking someone's work time, since their time and money spend for distribution is effectively zero.
There is a very important difference between "owning" information - which is impossible and any attempt to do so is morally reprehensible - and the "creator's right" of being named as said creator - which is perfectly fine. All your examples are more or less instances of the latter - it's not okay, for example, to plagiarize because you are violating everyone's right to truth.
"We have always felt entitled to do what we please with the fruit of our labors, and we feel no differently when that fruit is information."
Except that fruit of your labor is not "information", it's a "copy of information". And of course you are entitled to do whatever you want with it. As am I, if I have gained access to it by any means that did not violate your privacy (eg., breaking into your house or hacking into your computer) or other fundamental rights (copy"right" is not a right, it's a privilege - very, very important difference, as rights cannot be granted by law). In other words, I cannot force you to share something with me. But neither can you forbid me from sharing things I have - including pieces of information - unless they violate one of your fundamental rights (for example, your dignity).
Except here in Germany, where the local fuckwads at the GEMA [1] made Youtube block the video because "they hadn't granted the necessary rights". For a fucking copyright-waived video. Argh.
And people actually wonder why more and more (German) people have absolutely no qualms about piracy. I'm actually not sure whether or not I should thank the GEMA for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikali...
Our first, yes, but not our only. Otherwise, dolphins and whales might be extinct soon. There's nothing preventing you from supporting both, say, Amnesty International and Sea Sheperd, or Médecins Sans Frontières and Greenpeace - or all of them. This is not a binary decision.
Education shouldn't be about not doing drugs, but about not getting addicted to them. It's perfectly fine to occasionally take drugs (you know, like CH₃CH₂OH or C₈H₁₀N₄O₂, the former of which is a lot worse than a good number of illegal and "dangerous" drugs like THC), it's not fine to be constantly stoned/high/drunk/intoxicated. I don't want even more "drugs are bad, mkay kids" in schools. Drugs are perfectly fine and have been part of human civilization for thousands of years now. It's only been very recently that people got the idiotic idea to crack down on them.
I do believe most new projects today would be better off with a combination of a high level language for the logic, like Python or Perl, and a low level language like C or maybe Go for the plumbing, with clean interfaces between them. There really is no need for a behemoth like C++, with two dozen ways to do any single thing, half of them conflicting with each other and the other half subject to vigorous religious debates.
The thing about identifying as removable storage is that it allows you to use whatever music syncing tool or library program you want, and aren't locked into the universally horrible vendor-supplied excuses for an application. Files in a directory structure are a universal API that almost any program can understand and make use of.
As for the IM protocols, maybe this will prompt people to migrate to better protocols like XMPP. ICQ, MSN, AIM and all those other proprietary protocols with their ad-laden, bloated clients (which I classify as nothing short of malware) should have died years ago.
If you are building your own computers anyways, it's not that huge of an issue to watch out for Linux compatible graphic cards. Really.
>But asking them to give up their mp3 players, chat programs and background tasks while they're gaming?
Wat.
Linux programs like Pidgin have support for almost all IM protocols known to man, it can handle any Portable Media Player with sane behavior (read: identifies as removable storage, which pretty much all players except the shitty Apple ones do) and last time I checked, Linux is capable of multitasking, too.
With all due respect, you have absolutely no fucking idea what you are talking about.
First of all, every damn time someone brings up the "you just have to double click the installer on Windows" argument, they leave out the steps before that (most prominently, locate and download a safe copy of said installer).
Second, I don't know what FUD you have been told about Linux on the desktop, but contrary to what you assert about it, no, installing applications on almost all widespread Linux distributions I can spontaneously think of - except Gentoo - requires neither compiling nor messing around with dependencies.
Third, no, not everything on Ubuntu comes from the "Ubuntu store" or "Apitude store" - in fact, neither of those exists. If you are talking about the Ubuntu Software Center, that's basically just a fancy front-end for APT - as is Aptitude. If I remember correctly, the UCS also allows purchasing of some commercial software as of recently (I don't use Ubuntu).
In addition, Ubuntu (and derived distributions) have a thing called Personal Package Archives, whose very concept is to make it possible to easily add your own package sources to complement the official repositories. The UCS can handle those, too.
Also, there's a very important distinction between a package repository as used in many Linux distributions and a closed app store: the former is, at least to an extent, managed by the community and the users. You cannot say that of the latter.
It's a bit stretched to assert that European countries don't have Free Speech. Germany, for instance, grants Freedom of Expression in its "Grundgesetz" (its fundamental law), and states that "there is no censorship", though there may be exceptions as defined by the law. For example, it's illegal in Germany to slander or insult someone, or to deny the Holocaust.
I don't agree especially with the latter. It's ridiculous to assert the Holocaust didn't happen - I've visited the remains of the Dachau Concentration Camp, and I won't ever forget that place in my life - but it's equally ridiculous to disallow questioning it. I just pity the people who do it.
But again, it's not exactly right to say that Free Speech doesn't exist here in Europe. I'd say it's mostly the same situation as in the US - it's under attack and we, as the united inhabitants of this planet, need to stand up and fight back where-ever possible. Stop thinking in countries. Start thinking as a part of humanity as a whole.