phantomfive is being a douchebag.

I've never considered intelligence a liability, so I'm curious why you do. Could you elaborate on specifically why you think this, give some examples, etc.?

> If someone created that commercial movie, of course, they're are going to want to sell it. Who else, besides the owner, should have a right to sell movie tickets or DVDs for that movie? Pirates? Consumers? Who's being silly now?

Still you :)

The donut analogy fails because other people can sell donuts that look and taste exactly like the donut shop owner's donuts. This is normal competition and is a good thing. If the donut owner has some patented formula where only he can sell specific types of donuts, that's a statutory monopoloy again, but it's a patent monopoly, so let's focus on copyright.

As far as "who else should have the rights?", let's start with noting that, in the absence of copyright, everyone would have the rights to create and sell copies of the work. For works that are sufficiently old, this is what happens, with the result that you can pick up the complete works of Shakespeare for $3.99 off Amazon (fake example don't ask me for a link). All of society benefits from these lower prices, much more than societies benefit from cheap donuts because donuts are bad for you and lead to obesity and other health problems.

Of course, the problem with zero copyright is that the creators don't get paid and, therefore, many people who would create copyrighted works if they could monopolize the sales of them will instead choose not to create copyrighted works. There are a number of ways to resolve this. One way would be just having the government directly pay people to write books, paint artwork, and make movies. There are problems with that. Another way is copyright. There are also problems with that.

All in all, I think giving copyright owners some type of time-limited monopoly over their works is a good idea. So, to answer, "Who should have the rights?", I'd answer, "the creator only for about 20 years, and then everyone". It's not that copyright is bad -- it's a creative solution to a real problem. The issue is that right now, copyright lasts for 70 years past the death of the author. That's too damn long: most copyrighted works make a lot of money at first, and then revenue goes way down, so, pretty soon after the work is released, we could expire copyright on it and the creators wouldn't lose much, but society would gain quite a bit. 20 years is plenty of time for Marvel to recoup its costs for all their big-budget movies about buff men with giant, magical hammers.

But, like I said before, my opinions on copyright aren't really relevant to whether copyright is a monopoly. It is, and it is so described. This is true no matter what you think of it.

---linuxrocks123

It's often possible to get a judge to pierce through shams like that. Not saying it was in that case. But sometimes.

The monopoly is that only you get to sell that particular movie. So, you have a monopoly on the market for that individual movie.

People with all sorts of different views on copyright refer to the construct as a statutory monopoly. Stop being silly.

> In the UK you would end up in jail for the stuff they say.

Then shame on the UK.

Yes, deletionists are asshats.

One thing you can do is use the Wayback Machine to get the text of deleted articles. I learned about that trick on Wikipedia itself. Why can't they just include the page history of deleted pages well that's a really good question.

Deletionpedia is the protest response against deletionist asshats, but it's just getting started. It would be nice if an administrator leaked the text of all previously deleted articles to Deletionpedia. They actually KEEP THE DELETED ARTICLES ON WIKIPEDIA'S SERVERS and just DON'T LET ANYBODY LOOK AT THEM except the Anointed Ones. It's not even a disk space issue why they delete stuff. There's no justification at all; it's pure Vogonism.

So, come on, inclusionist administrators: which one of you would like to be the Internet's Prometheus? It wouldn't even be copyright infringement because the creators of the content licensed it CC to put it in Wikipedia to begin with. WE ALL own those deleted articles, not the tyrant bureaucrats at the Wikimedia Foundation. You'd be like Edward Snowden except you'd just be perma-banned from Wikipedia instead of your home country. Have some balls. Get 15 minutes of fame. BRING LIGHT TO THE WORLD.

If someone wants to kickstart a campaign to bribe an administrator into leaking all deleted articles to Deletionpedia, I'll put up $100. Maybe more. I'm not kidding. THIS IS THE GOOD FIGHT.

---linuxrocks123

I think stomache acid probably destroys SD cards. Also, I think it would probably be poisonous; heavy metals and all...

Better is to just let them delete the video. They're probably stupid enough not to do it right, so you can undelete it later. I said something like this very recently in another thread, actually, about the guy where the NY cops actually did delete his video.

I'm going to go WAAAAY out on a limb here and speculate that these bullying asshole police officers weren't tech-savvy enough to know how to permanently delete stuff from a cell phone. Most likely, a simple FAT file system undeletion utility could have brought back all those pictures, or at least most of them. Does anyone know if the victim here did anything to try to get those photos undeleted?

Of course the Federal Reserve is a government agency. Congress created it. Congress can shut it down if it wants. It's not "accountable" because being accountable means, "politicians can fuck with it". And whoever the current President is would have a strong temptation to force the Federal Reserve to enact an inflationary monetary policy just before an election, because such a policy would cause a temporary increase in economic growth, and the negative effects of the inflation would not be felt until some time later. So, it's done exactly like the Supreme Court*: the President appoints the Board of the Federal Reserve System, the Senate confirms the appointments, and, afterwards, the President can't fire or control the appointed official. Are you going to claim the Supreme Court isn't part of our government?

*Except that Congress can't fire a Supreme Court justice but could completely rewrite the Federal Reserve Act and fire whoever they wanted at any time.

Weimar Republic was a special case. Punitive measures put on Germany (reparations) gave the Weimar Republic fewer options than the US would have. The US has the options of the following:

1. Telling foreign creditors to get stuffed.
2. Declaring all bond debt null and void.
3. Declaring SOME bond debt (say, those bonds held by rich people -- not saying I support this, just that it's an option) null and void.
4. Many other "creative" options I haven't even thought of.

The Weimar Republic could do none of this. It was a weak, unpopular, unstable government that was also under the boot of foreign oppressors. A US federal government bankruptcy would look much different.

And you don't have to go to precious metals anyway. Corporate stocks, real estate, and inflation-adjusted bonds also track inflation.

The way around this is Whonix. You can't be totally sure there are no zero-days in your web browser, so you browse in a VM that's only connected to the Internet through ANOTHER VM and THAT VM is running Tor. So, the VM the web browser is running in doesn't know your MAC address and doesn't know your IP and has no way to get it.

Then, when you're done, you reset the entire VM to a known state ("snapshot") so that any virus they managed to installed can't stick around and probe for ways out of the VM jail.

This isn't perfect. Nothing is. They could find a 0-day in the Tor project software, or they could find a way to break out of the VM after they compromised Firefox, but this is still REALLY good protection.

And I have no problem with the FBI using malware to catch bad guys. Like others have said, the problem is (was?) with the Tor Browser, not with the FBI. They're just doing their job, and I applaud them for using all tools they have available.

Now, they "blew their cover" with this tool by using it, so this particular vulnerability won't ever work again. I hope it was worth it.

The endgame, of course, is going to be that the FBI doesn't have tools like this. Whonix, software like Whonix, and just plain better security practices in coding will make exploits like this rarer and rarer. Is that a good thing? I guess we'll see. If organized crime starts flourishing because of Internet anonymity, then I guess it's not a good thing. If not, it probably is. But, as long as law enforcement has a tool, it's their job to use it.

You're surprised about this?

This is Google being Not Evil by not censoring people. Hate speech isn't illegal in the US. It's protected political speech, the kind most protected by the First Amendment. Google could remove it anyway, but Google is one of the few corporations out there with brass balls and a willingness to stand up for its users.

You must not be from the US. If you were, you'd know there was not and could never be such a law here.

Are you an American? Please say no.

I think it's a testament to how great we are that the American Nazi Party can field a candidate for President if they want.

I also think it's a very, very good thing they would lose horribly.

No one should not be able to run for office just because of what they think. No one should not be allowed to express their thoughts just because of what they think. Everyone has equal rights. Even the asshats.

It's not like extremist groups don't run for office in Europe. They just use dog whistles instead. Are you going to erode your democracy further by trying to ban political groups that look-nativist-but-aren't-explicitly-nativist-but-we-don't-like-them-so-let's-ban-them? How would you make sure giving the current government the power to ban rival parties from elections wouldn't be abused?

I have an idea, how about you not let the current government ban political parties, but have a direct vote on the matter instead?

Wait...

I'm almost a free speech absolutist. Like, really really close. Look at my posting history here and on SoylentNews especially if you don't believe me.

And I disagree with you here.

Yes, the people panicking are partly to blame. But, so is the guy who falsely shouted fire in a crowded theater. In a civil suit, both would be liable for damages to the people trampled. And that's the right result.

People are responsible for being dumbasses. But people are also responsible for manipulating other people to do harm, even if the people they manipulate are dumbasses.

Oh geez.

Shouting "Kill the Jews!": protected speech unless they're seriously inciting imminent murder. Stupid and horrible, yes. Protected speech, yes.

Attacking a nearby synagogue: that would fall under assault and arresting people who are using violence is totally okay.

Speech doesn't hurt people. Violence does. Ban violence, not speech.