On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 01:18:50AM +0100, Ian Clarke wrote: > > > I *am* a left-wing anarchist! > > Surely capitalism is much closer to anarchy than socialism since it > requires much less government intervention (in fact, I believe that > government intervention damages capitalism)?
Socialism does not require government intervention (it is just thought by most people to require government intervention)? Do you know who (forgot first name) Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Noam Chomsky were/are? > > I object to the idea of using micropayments in Freenet both on > > ideological and practical grounds, while you object to it just on > > practical grounds. > > Actually where questions of freedom of information are concerned, I > don't see much of a difference between the practical, and the > idealogical. If it were practical to use purely* technological means > to prevent information from being duplicated without the author's > permission, then I wouldn't have a problem with it (the only > alternative would be to make that technology illegal - and making > technologies illegal is not my thing). > > * By this I mean without relying on any form of legal sanction or > government threat > > The point is that it is *not* possible to prevent "piracy" through > purely technological means - and it is unlikely that methods will be > developed, up to now people have required the threat of government > sanction in the form of copyright law. Now the issue is that as > communication technology improves even government sanctions are > becomming less and less effective, Freenet makes them rather impotent. <somewhat offtopic> Yeah. For example, back in the ancient Apple //e days, software developers used all sorts of techniques such as checking for particular data at specific locations on the disk, sector skewing (to make disks which are easy to read with specialized operating system code but are *very* difficult to write (of course the programs checked to make sure the disk that they were on was skewed)), reset trapping (to keep the bitty box from going into the monitor), customized variants of DOS 3.3 (no, this isn't MSDOS 3.3) (whose purpose was to make it difficult for a user to break into the Applesoft BASIC prompt through the monitor and look at the disk), etc. But then, they found out that there was no technological way to stop the "pirates" when the pirates turned to boot tracing (yes, they literally trace the operating system and the main program from the moment that the system boots the disk) after the introduction of sector skewing. I'll stop rambling about ancient computer history (I still like Apple //es in a rather nostalgic way - the first boxen that I ever used (and the first box that I ever owned) were all Apple //es). </somewhat offtopic> -- Travis Bemann Sendmail is still screwed up on my box. My email address is really bemann at execpc.com. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 2422 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20000817/1ce06864/attachment.pgp>
