Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: You COULD NOT...

>>"If you really wanted to harmonise the sentencing guidelines then you could lower the penalty for the physical crime."

Yes, you could resolve it either way. But in the case of someone who was pulling down £400,000 from advertising on the back of other people's work and funnelling that money secretly via international banks to hidden accounts in South America (not a hypothetical example but one of the rare cases of someone in the UK getting a mult-year prison sentence for this kind of stuff), should it be lowered? Frequently cases like this are not prosecuted simply because the complexities in the law have made it difficult to proceed. This clarifies and rationalizes the law and that's a good thing. If you want to argue that industrial-scale fraud should have its penalties lowered to inline with what some home torrenter might get (a fine), then that's going to need some support.

>>"It is perfectly reasonable to use stronger laws (fraud etc) to prosecute the more serious cases."

Discretionary sentencing is a valuable tool in the British legal system. Without it you get an inability of judges to be lenient. and cases being thrown out because the prosecution picked the wrong gradient of the crime. E.g. dangerous driving can be anything from a fine to two years in prison. And if you kill someone it can go up to fourteen years. What happens if the prosecution pick the variant of the crime and don't meet the necessary burden of proof for the ten year dangerous driving law, but would have met it for the eight? And it leads to US-style plea bargaining.

Discretionary sentencing is, if not vital, certainly very important.

>>Sorry. I fundamentally disagree that you could be locked up for 10 years for sharing an ISO.

You wont be. The article has misled you. If you're talking about sharing some popular movie, you'll get a fine, same as you always would. This is about commercial-scale piracy which your example certainly doesn't meet the criteria of.

>>And I disagree just as strongly with the way that policy was created.

Public consultation followed by vote by elected MPs? What would be your preferred method of enacting and removing laws?

>>"So, this is legislation for a problem that has already been solved?"

No, because previously the same crime was handled differently depending on whether it took place online or offline. This rationalizes the law on the subject so that there is no double-standard.

Re: Disproportionate

If someone slapped or punched me, that would be assault and a "crime against the person" as you call it. Would that inherently demand a harsher sentence than if I'd had spent two years working on a computer game and then that same person took it from me and shared it online costing me tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds and wasting two years of my life? Because that's what you've just argued. And then you've declared that only "a cretin" would think otherwise.

You should review what you've written here. You've allowed this (admittedly very biased and one-sided article) to lead you into thinking this is about ten years for occasionally downloading movies. It isn't.

Re: So if you wrote a book...

Bullshit. If you spent two years of your life working on something, e.g. a computer game, and then someone took it for free and shared it to the world free, you'd be livid. You'd want them fined to get recompense for the lost sales and I'd lay pretty good odds that you'd be angry enough to want them to go to prison as punishment.

>>"Piracy hurts only big fish in distribution, don't even try to give me the shit that it hurts artists. Artists get peanuts from MAFIAA for their work"

It hurts everyone involved in the music and movie industries. If you work in the movie industry - whether you're a caterer, a carpenter or a movie star, you're hired on the basis of expected profits and paid by investors who look at returns on previous films. Anything that reduces profits on a film impacts investment in future films. Which knocks on all the way through the system.

Re: Actually, no

Thanks banks weren't lying (generally, that we know of). The ratings agencies, e.g. Standards and Poor, were lying. They rated packages as AAA when they knew they were no such thing. And the reason for that is almost undoubtedly that the banks wanted them to. So in fact, there was wilful deception involved. The film The Big Short which came out recently is worth watching on the subject.

Re: Actually, no

>>"It's not a persecution complex or paranoia if they actually are out to get you."

That's the point, they're not. You're not going to get ten years for torrenting a few current movies. This whole article is click-bait and I'll happily debate the author on it and tear their argument apart piece by piece if they'd like to engage me on it.

>>"On a related note; what's the penalty for defrauding billions with sub-prime mortgages and causing a global depression? Yeah, I fucking thought so."

If you're now using Goldman-Sachs et al as a way of making yourself look moral, you need to raise your standards. A lot.

Re: His (her) Master's Voice

>>"If i steal a warehouse of cd's and dvd's they're gone, i nicked em and made a profit selling em. I have deprived someone of real things. If I copy a mates mp3 via bluetooth on my device, no one has lost out."

Both are methods of depriving the content producer of payment for their product. Unless for some incalculable reason you think the primary cost of producing a movie or album is the plastic that goes into the DVD, then it really makes no difference how you take it without paying for it. This is a fact.

>>"I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so no loss of sale."

This is you deciding unilaterally the worth of someone's work and depriving them of a say in it. You declare it's not worth £10 but is worth £0, so it's therefore okay for you to take it for £0. Trade depends on both parties being able to negotiate on a price. If the seller prices it too highly, you choose not to buy. If you find it worth the price they demand, you do choose to. Taking it at a price that the seller does not agree to is theft, even if (especially if) that price is £0. The customer always wants everything cheaper, that's why they don't get to set the prices of it unilaterally.

Also, utterly absurd to argue from a position that piracy doesn't cost sales. Whilst the comments sections of IT news sites seem to be filled with people who pirate nothing that they would ever buy, the real world contains people I know who absolutely use piracy as an alternative to buying, renting or cinema.

And before I get the utterly predictable retort that this doesn't mean that every pirated good is a lost sale, let me point out I haven't made such an argument.

All of the above is fairly straightforward logical progression from supportable premises. You're trying to justify piracy and doing a piss-poor job of it.

>>"And now they wanna lock me up for 10 years."

No, the article is misleading you. They want to slap a fine on you and say "don't do it again." Unless you happen to be engaging in large-scale software piracy for profit which is more what this is about despite the frothing rant that has just attempted to pass itself off as journalism without so much as pretending to consider the opposing view.

Re: How not to get pwned on Windows...

>>"Security bugs are a fact of life in all software - the bigger the code base, the more you can expect. Saying "my OS is less likely to get pwned than your OS" is just stupid."

It's not stupid. There are actual variations in security flaws between different OSs. Back in pre-Vista era, Windows was inherently less secure than GNU/Linux. That's no longer true. Windows is probably slightly more secure than GNU/Linux these days. And maybe that will change again over time - who knows. But it's not right to reject comparisons between OSs. It's useful. If nothing else, it keeps different vendors trying hard to compete in the area of closing down vulnerabilities.

>>"We all know that the "many eyes" theory spouted by the OSS hardliners is complete bullshit."

It's not "complete bullshit". It's a valid argument that Open Source benefits from people being able to inspect the source and find flaws. The problem is that the more complex the project, the more specialized you have to be to notice flaws. I can find a flaw in the MySQL source code. I can't find one in Firefox source - I simply wouldn't know where to start with their code base. But that doesn't mean that other people can't or that it's "bullshit".

The biggest security advantage of Open Source, though, is not guarding against accidental flaws, but against deliberate ones. It lets you examine the source for deliberate backdoors by the vendor. That has a lot of value, imo.

Re: Excellent

All I know about Jehovah's Witnesses is that the one I worked with never mentioned his religion in the entire time I worked with him (I found out from someone else) and he was one of the nicest and most helpful people I worked with, going out of his way to help and patiently dealing with some extremely trying situations.

I don't know how much of that was because of his faith, but I can conclude that one shouldn't judge people's character by their religion.

Re: Excellent

>>"So which religion isn't based on a work of fiction?"

In Discordianism, you actually have to be fictional to attain the higher levels of sainthood. The reasoning is that fictional people are more able to approximate the perfection needed to be a greater saint. If you're a real human being (and not a cabbage or something) the best you can get is level one saint, even if you're Emperor Norton or similar.

We make no distinction fnord between reality and fiction because effect is what matters and one can be equally inspired by Captain Yossarian as by a real person.

Personally, I'm more concerned in this case as to why the prisoner is being denied books of any kind. Is knowledge and learning withheld in US prisons unless you can justify it as part of your religion? Fiction or otherwise, let them have their books. Hail Eris!

Re: The government [of USA] can lead by example...

>>"Or perhaps it's simpler: Feinstein, Burr, et al are insane."

Simpler than that. They're interests just don't align with the publics. Nor has a farmer's interests ever truly aligned with the chickens. They might both want to keep the fox out, but the farmer still wants to keep the chickens in.

Re: tracking ownership of digital products

>>"The way our society works, the "ownership" of the digital product is with the artist or their agent. As an end-user, at best what you have is ownership of a limited right-to-use."

You can own a product. You can own copyright on something. These are different things. If I own a car, I own it. Even though I don't own the patents that would allow me to manufacture copies. If I own a book, I own it. Even though I don't own the copyrights that would allow me to print copies. And I own a number of digital products. Even though I don't own the copyrights that would allow me to distribute copies. Again, there is nothing inherent to a product being digital that requires the model to be different. So hopefully my question can be answered rather than just have people pontificating on their views on copyright. Especially when even in your own post you concede that what I say is correct.

>>"Airlines could make airline tickets transferrable. They choose not to for the same reason."

Yes. And they did that when you had paper tickets as well. I own several products that I am free to sell on if I wish. So what I am interested in is whether this technology can be used to track ownership. It's a pretty simple question asked genuinely by someone interested in this technology for this purpose.

>>"Yes, such rights could be transferrable. This doesn't require a blockchain: it just requires that the real owners are happy to have transferrable rights, and any way to record that."

This is incorrect and why I am asking my question. With a digital product, reproduction is trivial. If we want to sell a digital product under the same model as a physical product, we need two further things to do that well. The first is to be able to prove legitimate ownership in a scenario where there could be two instances of the same thing (unlike physical goods where if B gains, A loses by an equal amount); and second is for a third party to be able to follow it in order to enforce copyright law. It seems to me that this technology could meet both of those needs very effectively, but I'm hoping that someone who knows about this will reply to me rather than a couple of soap-boxing freetards who conflate ownership of copyright (creation and distribution rights) with ownership of a product.

Re: tracking ownership of digital products

Nothing inherent to digital products requires that the right to use be non-transferrable. So yes, you can own digital products. Nor that they be "domestic personal use only". Just like you can own a paper book, you can own an ebook. In neither case does copyright allow you to distribute copies of it.

So, to get back to my question...

Re: For shame!

I think you mean Stallman. He's the one that - for better or worse - has always been self-consistent in his principles and doesn't waver.

Re: They have hired top Linux people before

>>"Windows server hell"

See, I could accept an argument that MS's GNU/Linux involvement is a rear-guard action and wont see competitive support. I don't think that's true, but I could see it as a supportable argument. But then you go off on one about "Windows server Hell". There might be people who feel that way if they're a GNU/Linux shop and they have one odd Windows server needed for some piece of critical software and they don't really know how to maintain it or have processes to manage it. An odd inconsistency in your processes is always a PITA. But Windows as an OS is pretty solid. And it has a lot of very good enterprise tools to manage it. So I conclude that you don't know what you're talking about.

Hague was the one that led the case for British bombing of Libya to try and sponsor their foreign-backed "popular uprising" (that popular uprising that involved importing troops from Qatar and foreign Special Forces). Libya is now exporting terrorism around the world. Whilst terrorist bombings like we've recently seen aren't a right response to our involvement, they are in significant part a response nonetheless. First Hague wants us to get involved for the sake of British oil interests, then Hague wants us to give up all privacy to the government to deal with the fallout.

No matter that the bombings are terrible, I remain more afraid of the government than I do the terrorists.

Out of interest, where do you find Postgres starts to creak on large data sets? I find Postgres excellent but have never used it on very large-scale datasets so curious about your experience.

Re: coercion in the US is easy

>>- Do not incriminate yourself and face life without parole

>>Faced with that choice... which one would you go for?

The only logical one: Revolution.

Re: Comey, the Master of Overreach

I for one am sick to death of people thinking that "Godwin's Law" posts are either especially insightful or deeply witty. Please! Can we just get through a single thread without a bunch of people waiting to leap in and go "GODWIN'S LAW!"

You know what Nazi Germany was, by the way? State-managed corporatism. I.e. if the ruling party said 'do something', a company better do it regardless of whether they received adequate payment or if it was just a legal requirement. Not unlike the US government telling Apple they must develop new firmware just because the FBI wants it.