[snip]
Who let you off your leash? Why attack this post no, weeks after I
wrote it? Why not just leave me alone, for that matter, jerkwad?
[snip]
NO FEEDBACK LOOPS!
What I write in response to Peter is no skin off your nose.
No, it is not. Morals has to do with avoiding actions that may
actually harm people, and with honesty. You, of course, wouldn't know
anything about either, mind you, so I suppose I should have expected
you to get this wrong.
The supposed "offense" here does not even rise to the level of
ignoring a "keep off the grass" sign, since (done right) you won't
have left any footprints on the grass or otherwise damaged the lawn,
and nobody will have been watching and seen you. What Google doesn't
know (and that doesn't use excessive bandwidth or get used to compete
unfairly against them) doesn't hurt Google. That includes private,
responsible use of automation to access Google. (If it didn't, it
would exclude using IE or Firefox to access google! You'd have to
telnet to their port 80, manually type get requests, and manually
interpret the results. How silly.)
If you do not comply with their term of service, then you have not
right to use their service.
Not quite true. If I do not comply with their terms of service, then
they have the right to refuse service. They may or may not actually
choose to do so in any given instance, and that's assuming they can
even detect the "violation".
And considering that you apparently like to use a free service from
Google yourself, then I think you should show some respect for them.
I have plenty of respect for the founders. I have none for a bunch of
lawyers that write broad and overreaching terms and generally try to
claim absurd levels of control, one of the artifacts of having what
they call an "adversarial" system. I also couldn't care less if my
actions are theoretically disliked by some large corporation but are
also undetectable by same and have no actual harmful consequences for
them.
Not that I have taken any such actions. We were discussing someone
*else*'s Java project, if you'd bother to actually read the whole
thread, when someone made an irrelevant comment and I made a note of
the fact of its irrelevancy. And then you bided your time for a week
before attacking, randomly and without provocation, simply because of
the identity of that comment's author, rather than for any other
reason.
There are two types of people:
- those that follow the rules because they think that is the right way
- those that follow the rules only if they think they otherwise will get
caught
You are oversimplifying, and as usual you are doing it deliberately
and dishonestly in a rather transparent, poorly-thought-out, and
futile attempt to make me look bad.
There are, in fact, three types of people:
- Those that follow the rules at all times, no matter how silly the
rules or how questionable they are in purpose, enforceability, whose
best interests they serve (if anyone's!), etc. -- these people are
known as "goody two shoes". A bunch of them killed lots of Jews in
Nazi Germany and excused it later on as "just following orders".
- Those that follow the rules only if they think they would otherwise
get caught, no matter how important the rules are. One of them is
posting nasty, inflammatory, rude, and off-topic posts to cljp as part
of a smear campaign and this post is a reply to that asshole.
- And then there's most people, who follow rules that are enforced and
rules that make sense. For example, they don't steal or kill, because
rules against those are enforced and doing those things is really not
very nice. They don't lie much, because they may get caught in a lie
and most lying is for hostile purposes, and not very nice. They may
tell white lies, technically "against the rules", where there is some
overriding reason. They may ignore a pointless, unenforceable, or
otherwise silly rule that serves no useful purpose, their breaking of
which would not actually harm anybody. Particularly if the rule in
question makes some hairsplitting or nitpicky distinction (e.g. this
http client is ok, that one isn't, etc. when they all generate
comparable levels of traffic when in use and are being used for
private browsing purposes), or the rule has dubious authority behind
it (e.g. it's neither a law, nor part of any binding contract signed
by the would-be rule-breaker, nor a socially-enforced social norm like
"thou shalt not wear bright mauve polyester to the shopping mall after
Jan. 1, 1980", nor is its breaking even detectable (which indicates
its breaking does no harm, in particular).
As I said, what the OP contemplates doing isn't even at the level of
ignoring a "Keep Off the Grass" sign.
I guess we know where you stand. But other have higher moral standards.
I have the utmost moral standards. But they recognize a distinction
between an action being *immoral* and an action being against some
particular rule from some particular rule-book. An immoral action has
to cause, or recklessly risk causing, harm to someone, where "harm"
means "something hurts them" with some added nuances to allow for
consensual "hurt", forms of "hurt" that are generally allowed
(business competition, free speech that may offend, &c.). Many rules
are immoral to break, and breaking promises is typically immoral (and
thus, breaching contracts), but not always. Contracts may have
unconscionable clauses; in many cases, whistleblowers violate an NDA
but are doing the right thing by doing so. The rules against some
recreational drug use are pointless and stupid (but well-enforced,
making it unwise though not immoral to break them; not immoral, since
your private use of such substances harms no child or unconsenting
adult). An awful lot of rules and even laws, perhaps most of them, are
not always immoral to break, and a fair number are rarely if ever
immoral to break.
Speeding may be moral and keeping to the speed limit immoral in some
circumstances, if the general flow of traffic is faster than the speed
limit. It's safer, for oneself and others, to stay close to the speed
of surrounding traffic rather than deviating substantially from that
speed, whatever some sign says. You're not even especially likely to
get a ticket -- with everyone going the same speed, any tickets would
be issued more or less at random with each particular driver in that
bunch having low odds of being singled out for one, if they do nothing
else to stand out from the crowd. Heck, going slower makes you stand
out and radar guns have been known to produce false positives...
Only an authoritarian would argue that morality is identical to
following the rules, or even that it is especially close. And
authoritarianism is the moral philosophy that we have to thank for
things like the Holocaust, not its opposite ("hooliganism"?) or the
common sense behavior of the majority of people, which avoids either
extreme.
If Google say it is a violation (and Googles rules does not violate
law) then it is a violation
Technically, but a violation of what? Not morals, and not of a legal
contract. It's not breaking a promise (you never promised anything to
Google). It's not lying, except to the extent that you spoof the UA
string, and browser compatibility wars and discriminatory sites have
resulted in a lot of UA spoofing to the extent that it surely cannot
be considered immoral. The UA string is generally seen only by
machines anyway, so UA spoofing isn't really lying anyway you slice
it, unless you would argue that nonsentient machines have a natural
right to truth or something equally ridiculous. Extending natural
rights to nonsentient *animals* often gets taken too far, though those
can feel and anticipate pain and so we have some degree of moral duty
to spare them avoidable suffering. Machines don't have even those
limited rights. Our society doesn't tend to consider *human children*
for that matter to have a right to the truth, though they can think
and speak as well as feel; lies (mostly euphemisms and white lies,
mind you) are told to children all the time -- sometimes for reasons
that I suspect are misguided, or just plain don't work as intended,
mind you.
Indeed, the effect the OP has on Google may be 100% indistinguishable
from the effect they'd have using Firefox and then doing some
additional work manually, or by feeding the results of "save as..." in
Firefox to a program that doesn't make any network connections of its
own.
Republishing Google pages would be copyright infringement, which is an
entirely separate matter and the OP indicated no intention to do so.
Flooding Google with bandwidth would be a denial of service attack,
which is an entirely separate matter and the OP indicated no intention
to do so; one hopes they will ensure that their software's requests
will be rate-limited to be comparable to, or less frequent than, the
rate typically generated by a human surfing a site.
With those two potential harms to Google not occurring, not only is
Google unharmed but they have no way of detecting the "harm" anyway,
short of actually spying on people with that new GeoEye satellite of
theirs or something. (And if they did that, I'd consider Google to be
acting immorally, if they somehow were using it to look into private
spaces.)
It's like a "keep off the grass" sign being "violated" by Casper the
Friendly Ghost moving off the sidewalk and onto the lawn, while
remaining invisible and insubstantial.
If the OP had indicated here an intention to cut a corner across a
lawn with a "keep off the grass" sign would you or Peter have wigged
out this badly? Even though that proposed action would have been
worse, by any reasonable reckoning, having a discernible effect and
involving actual trespass as it would have?
no matter how many [misspelled insult deleted]
None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.