Posts by Bluepants

Wake up, Linux hippies: No one 'morally obligated' to give back

Rational calculation of interests is not always enough to get the best results

"The moment it's perceived self-interest is furthered by contributing rather than free-riding, Amazon will contribute." That's all very well and rational, except that free-riding can cause problems - in particular the under-production of public goods. Game theory nicely shows how rational agents can back themselves into corners by choosing strategies that appear to maximize their self-interest. Sometimes you need more than a perception of your own interests. Maybe talking about moral obligation can get a little tedious, but some kind of communal strategy can be necessary to overcome problems caused by narrow calculation of self-interest, as anyone who has ever investigated prisoners' dilemmas will tell you.

Don’t leak WikiLeaks: The NDA from hell

Crude would do the trick

Assange doesn't actually help his case much - he comes out with the crazy often enough to make almost any slur plausible. But the fact that the readership of El Reg seem happy enough to swallow this revelation without any reflection on its provenance, or who might benefit, suggests that a crude attempt to smear Wikileaks would be quite sufficient. No real need to bring in the big boys here.

4chan launches DDoS against entertainment industry

Law = simple?

I think a lot of the negative comments on this board (and others) indicate that for many people the issue is simply one of legality - the law is there to protect our interests and the courts are there to decide on who is in the right, so leave it all to them.

This is, to say the least, a rather naive view of how laws emerge and get enforced.

In the case of individual multimedia freetards, stealing a tv show or an album is simply that, stealing. So kicking up a fuss when the company tries to stop you from doing something illegal by using illegal means is a little rich. But there is a much, much bigger picture behind all of this that anyone analysing the role of corporate and special interest power in the functioning of democracy should be awake to.

The media is, by definition, the vector through which communities tell the stories and provide the information that determine what is considered valuable and what is considered not valuable in the political sphere. That is to say, the media is inherently political. (Yes, even crap Hollywood movies - curious about why the foreigners are always the bad guys?) And every generation since Adam has seen some group or other try to monopolise the channels of information - the Church, the State, and now profit seeking mega corporations as well. It's not a conspiracy, its a natural, normal and bloody dangerous process.

So yeah, the freetards might not have a moral leg to stand on. But they're challenging an oligopoly that should be challenged, one that most citizens are too ignorant or apathetic or powerless to challenge, one that most politicians are too ignorant, apathetic or compromised to challenge. I'm not sure we'll ever get a good alternative, but go the freetards in at least trying to pull this ologopoly down. Their selfish sense of entitlement is, in this case, in all of our best interests.