T
Twisted
Haven't you gotten the bloody hint yet? Shut the hell up!
Haven't you gotten the bloody hint yet? Shut the hell up!
T
Twisted
The highly-selective message-blocking. The "coincidental" timing of
the first such incident in quite a long time, affecting an important
rebuttal posting rather than something more trivial. The fact that
nothing in the message should have set off any spam filters, and if
any were overzealous enough to nail it there's still the odd timing
and choice of which message set it off. I'd expect overzealous spam
filtering somewhere to nail a random percentage of my posts, rather
than only one single but especially important post. I'd expect a human
attacker to go for the throat however.
Are you trying to attack me or reassure yourself? Because you are
rapidly climbing up my suspect list, for the simple reason that you're
making an awful lot of effort to "prove" that it was "just a glitch"
and ridicule my suspicion that it was engineered intentionally. That
is something that the guilty party has a lot of reason to try to do,
and it is not something that Oliver Wrong is doing, but it is
something that you are doing.
Say it ain't so.
T
Twisted
But you control your own behavior. What I want is for people to stop
berating and castigating GG users for the behavior of GG's
technicians, over whom GG's users have very little evidence, nor for
their choice (or rather, in the vast majority of cases lack of choice)
of news provider.
I refuse to sign up for a Web forum when there's a perfectly good
Usenet that had already existed for decades before the Web was a
twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. If people here want GG issues
discussed someplace else then someone with admin access can go create
a GG-issues Usenet newsgroup.
No, you're DEMANDING, which speaks volumes about YOUR maturity. You
sound like either a tin despot or a two-year-old. So do all those
copyright fanatics: MINE! No I don't WANT to share! Playing fair is
for SISSIES! Mom, little Annie next door has the SAME EXACT DRESS AS
ME! THAT'S NOT FAIR! ...
T
Twisted
Delayed by 72 hours? (And counting...)
T
Twisted
Are they high enough to recoup costs and turn a profit? Then they're
high enough and public policy shouldn't make them higher at the
expense of important freedoms.
No, anything that benefits them at everyone else's expense is bad.
Especially anything that smacks of rich-person or corporate welfare.
Cut out the middleman and they may make more even while the total book
sales revenue goes down -- the author gets some of what the publisher
got, and the public saves on spending the rest. The publisher,
obsolete, gets zilch.
This is what public policy should support. If publishers are obsolete
let them go out of business like buggy whip manufacturers did. If they
are not then ipso facto they'll still be able to do business and make
money.
Steal? I never advocated theft. Only free copying.
Person A cannot steal from person B by doing something with person C
in private, far from person B, and involving only their own labor and
time and only materials that belong to A and C.
That is insulting, rude, and uncalled-for. The business model
described works for Red Hat, so your calling it "naive"[sic] is
refuted by evidence and simply braindead. And by the way, it's
"naïve".
No, I am attempting to justify repealing some bad laws. In fact, I
shouldn't have to be; the laws should be repealed unless someone can
justify keeping them. In fact it would be nice if laws were subject to
renewal requirements that depended on a vote of the legislature and
argumentation including submitted briefs by interested parties, and
substantial public opposition after informed debate would work as a
veto. But they'll never create such an enlightened system because it
would stop a whole lot of fat cats' gravy trains.
You believe in it blindly, which does.
You also believe that nonviolent civil disobedience is wrong.
How can you people continue to twist it around to where I'm somehow
"forcing" something? The law is "forcing" something that I think it
shouldn't. Getting my way would mean an increase, not a drop, in
freedom. It is you, who advocate retaining the present laws in the
area, that promote "forcing" something.
Get this -- without law enforcement, ownership of your car remains
enforceable. You can use a gun, for example, to defend it from would-
be thieves yourself. Ownership of cars is therefore natural. Also,
enforcement of your ownership of your car does not infringe on anyone
else's ownership of their cars, steel or other raw materials, or
anything else.
Without law enforcement, "ownership" of your software does not, save
that you can defend copies you personally possess as you could defend
your car. "Ownership" of software (and other information) is therefore
unnatural. Also, enforcement of your "ownership" of your software does
infringe on my ownership of my computer, plastic discs, and other
stuff.
Tell me what I can and cannot do with my machinery and my stuff inside
the walls of my house, will you? Communist! *spits*
I prefer to give the USER a choice. Users outnumber creators. And it's
a false choice anyway. It's an artificial constraint made purely to
benefit a wealthy elite. As such it's ipso facto illegitimate under
this country's constitution, even if somehow not technically illegal.
And you accuse ME of loose morals!
Imagine there was no copyright and they were just now proposing to
create it. An unnatural "property right" for the few that would
substantially trample the pre-existing property rights of everyone,
require ubiquitous snooping to enforce, and benefit a few large
businesses at the expense of pretty much everybody else. It would be
no contest -- my arguments would win out.
The only reason your kind have any traction whatsoever is because of
the inertia of the status quo. Changing the laws now would seem to
"take something away from you" but only because it (a monopoly
privilege!) was granted by government largesse in the first place,
which means you should only be able to keep it at the peoples'
continued sufferance. But we, the people, have spoken. Loudly. 60
million people is more than 1/10 the population, indeed closer to 1/5.
Your traction won't last long; your grip is already beginning to
slip...
Red Hat's shareholders would disagree and I think they outnumber you.
Funnily enough, there was a Finnish gent once who thought much the
same thing about a pet programming project he was doing in his garage.
He released the results under GPL. He's now a flaming millionaire. You
might have heard of this fella, name of Linus Torvalds...
And thus impoverishing the world, making it so much harder for them to
efficiently use and benefit from your software, even though that
additional use would not increase your costs one iota (save support,
but you could refuse that, or charge money for it to cover its costs
and turn a profit).
Sound public policy should not by artifice give you this choice where
you would not have it otherwise, and probably should actively restrict
such a choice if you would have it otherwise. (Cf. antitrust law
restricting the choices of corporations to merge at times. Would that
it had more teeth these days, like it used to. Monopolies, monopolies
everywhere and not a DoJ attorney in sight!)
P
Patricia Shanahan
Twisted said:
I was talking about "most people" who repost newsgroup messages.
I just checked, and for what it is worth, both
<[email protected]>, posted by
nebulous99, and <[email protected]>,
posted by Twisted, arrived at both the NNTP servers I use, Earthlink and
UCSD.
The most likely place to look for the problem is the server you are
using to monitor propagation, not the sending server.
Patricia
T
Twisted
Your claims are incorrect.
You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything
you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have
the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will
be appointed to you at no cost.
You will confine yourself to your current workstation area until
police arrive. Law enforcement has been notified of your illegal act
and should appear shortly to take you into custody.
T
Twisted
No, it means that the behavior in question wasn't even (provably)
wrong.
No, but I certainly have the right to request that they shut the hell
up if they have no alternative to offer.
T
Twisted
Privilege of copy-control, and I don't see them being able to enforce
a rental business model in the presence of free non-rental
competition, since someone could freely reverse engineer their
"service" and create standalone software to do the same job that was
100% compatible with the original (or 110% compatible -- now with
support for empty wallets and systems without network access!).
The only exception I can foresee here is where the application is an
MMORPG or similarly, and use of the vendor's servers is necessary for
it to work. Even then, competing servers that can be used with
compatible software could be created.
Evil business models would die. Software that can be implemented as
purely local computation would have free local-computation-only
implementations and there'd be no getting trapped unable to migrate
from something like Windoze while someone like Bill Gates sticks a
hand in your pocket. Server-based stuff that could be implemented
purely locally included. Server-based stuff that is necessarily
online, because it involves multiple users interacting online, might
have decentralized p2p equivalents and certainly would have
competition, so prices would be driven down to operating expenses plus
reasonable margins.
Everyone wins, except the fatcat types. They end up going from rich to
merely being able to make ends meet, at worst, and may remain
moderately wealthy given they have actual talents in a useful area.
Mostly, it's management and lawyer types that would really lose out
and may even have to switch careers and get an honest job. And even
then they won't likely starve.
T
Twisted
But if there is nowhere more on-topic to put it, then here is no worse
than anyplace else, so it can't be *wrong*.
You seem to forget that one and only one of those "rights" is
enshrined in the constitution. Specifically, the First Amendment.
T
Twisted
Which is a problem. There should be a law requiring that companies
read and take appropriate action based on user feedback instead of
ignoring it, but all too many companies spend serious amounts of money
simply on plugging their ears and saying "Lalalalalalala" everytime a
user complains, from installing fancy phone systems and painstakingly
creating huge mazes full of dead ends with no "finally! a real live
human being!" cheese at the center -- or trick cheese ("AARGH! The
idiot didn't even listen to what I had to say, just waited for me to
say about three words and then transferred me back into the maze
someplace!")...
With such a law I'd have simply complained to Google and they'd have
been forced to not ignore me.
So, where's the difference? The difference is, that
*there* your whining at least wouldn't be off-topic
First of all, it might not annoy anyone there. Since someone annoyed
me I have to annoy someone back, so failing to annoy anyone would be,
well, failing. Also, of course, annoying someone here gives them
incentives to do something or suggest a way to make Google take notice
of my wishes and complaints in this matter, or disclose a useable free
NNTP server that permits posting, or something else of the sort to
make my complaints that they find so annoying go away. Failing to
annoy anyone in alt.whine produces no such incentives. Lastly, there's
the simple fact that I don't subscribe to alt.whine and don't have the
time to add another high-traffic newsgroup either. So I'd miss all the
responses, and then there'd be no point in my posting. Yet it had to
be posted. So it had to be posted to a newsgroup I already have
subscribed ... and besides, this newsgroup and my use of it was what
was affected by Google's egregious behavior to provoke the complaint
to begin with!
N
nebulous99
Stop insulting me. And they do (try to) impose it. They and you claim
(incorrectly; see 17 USC 117(a)(1)) that you cannot legitimately use
their software without agreeing to the non-negotiable terms and
conditions. You don't have the choice to achieve your goals without
agreeing to their BS "agreement"s, because there is (the vast majority
of the time) no competing, fully-substitutable product you could use
instead!
But what if they need this software and have no alternatives? What
then? It's hardly fair. And as noted, there's nothing you get in
return -- not even the use of the software which 17 USC 177(a)(1)
entitles you to anyway as soon as you legitimately purchase a copy.
Unless you do something dumb like negotiate away half your rights
under 17 USC in return for zilch, in which case courts are likely to
consider the contract void anyway as obviously not providing any quid
pro quo.
N
nebulous99
I'd like to see MS lose the support of the government and law
enforcement and have to try to make it with such an evil business
model on their own, change, or die, personally. Anyway, you can't do
everything on some other OS that you can do on Windows. Windows has
such a large market share that lots of stuff is Windoze-exclusive. If
evil laws hadn't enabled MS to be so nasty that probably would not be
true and we wouldn't be having this discussion, but short of
interdimensional travel we have to somehow fix the mess the world's
gotten into instead of pine for some alternate reality. Fixing the
mess starts with tossing out the shrub and jailing him and some of his
top henchmen, adding a carbon cap-and-trade system, and repealing
copyright and patent laws.
N
nebulous99
s/software patents/patents and copyrights
Same reasoning still applies -- corporations have deep pockets and top-
notch legal teams; individuals have diddly-squat.
Ditto, but I draw the line at them trying to enforce artificial
scarcity (through legal or technical means) and strongly oppose public
policy being to actually aid and abet such enforcement. Let them
choose any business model they please that does not involve artificial
scarcity; I will not object, unless it involves something else nasty
like kiddie porn or nuclear weapons or armed robbery or something.
N
nebulous99
Please curl up and die now. It is obvious that you have nothing
constructive to contribute, nor indeed anything but personal attacks,
if no longer directed exclusively at me.
N
nebulous99
I thought it went without saying that Joe Attacki can't argue his way
out of a paper bag.
L
Lasse Reichstein Nielsen
Twisted said:
You make a point. He rebuts it. You call it an insult. Yes, I think
we have a hint now.
/L
N
nebulous99
No, I make a point, he calls me names, I call it an insult.
And my point still stands. Have you not noticed that 99+% of his
postings are off-topic attack posts?
N
nebulous99
Either way, the high selectivity remains, as does the fact that the
perpetrator violated the CFAA in hacking a server (whichever server).
Add to that a second violation of the CFAA if you're right, as they'd
have had to hack or spy in some illicit manner to find out which
server I use to check propagation! Under your theory, that server
becomes another narrowly-targeted aspect of this so-called "glitch"
that further reduce the odds of its being a random happenstance --
adding to the fact that two different versions of the same message
with the same semantic content were affected but no other messages
were affected by the so-called "glitch", the fact that the message in
question was an important one and one that took a relatively large
amount of effort to create, and that the message in question was a
defense in a war situation, plus that none of these "glitches"
occurred during peacetime or affected less-important messages,
messages that didn't require much effort to compose, or messages
unrelated to any ongoing controversies.
Why so selective? Your theory and the assumption that it's a random
"glitch" predict a random percentage of messages would be affected.
The odds that only two would be, AND they'd happen to be the only two
attempts to post a particular response, AND the sole affected unit of
semantic content would be a defense in response to a bogus post in a
controversy rather than something unrelated to controversy, AND the
post would be one involving significant effort to compose rather than
little given the majority require little, AND the post would be mine
and not someone else's, AND the affected server would be precisely the
one that I use to check propagation, AND the post would be one I
considered it important to see distributed as widely as possible, and
at minimum everywhere the one it followed up to went, rather than one
I was less concerned about ... are astronomically against that
incredible chain of bizarre coincidences.
So much for "random glitch". It was censorship. The only thing to
quibble over is which server was hacked, by whom, and how, and perhaps
their exact motives -- Oliver wanting to force having the last word?
Joe Attacki out of pure bloody-mindedness and hate? Someone else?
J
Joe Attardi
I asked what proof you have.
Instead you just listed your own conjectures and the suspicious nature
of such posts that were allegedly hacked. Not to mention, hacking
Google Groups would be a daunting task. If you think the security of
Google is that lax that your average Usenet poster could break it to
selectively block posts, you are off your rocker.
I'm simply trying to point out the absurdity of your allegations.