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Be careful what you wish for. This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures. Censorship sucks no matter how yo
by stephth 15y ago
Be careful what you wish for. This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures. Censorship sucks no matter how you look at it.
And I don't get your drug analogy. Buying drugs legally means you know what you're buying, you can easily track the quality and strength like you would for your favorite brand of coffee. You can know where it comes from, who worked on it, if it is sustainable. You can use drugs legitimately, you don't need to hide. You can be open about it with people, and share how it has a place in your life. Illegal drugs on the other hand have none of this. The only thing you can do is build a relationship with a good dealer and cross fingers that the quality will stay the same most of the time. And there's obviously no way it hell you will trace the product back to its production. You can even go to jail for using it. And the unreliability of the product makes the experience unsafe, unpredictable, unhealthy, and dangerous. How is that "freedom"?
Edit: Seeing how popular the parent comment is, I urge readers to think twice about it. The parent comment's "looking at the bright side" stance is a coward and lazy attitude. Sorry for being harsh but it's true. It's much easier to invent yourself a wicked reason why it would work for your own individual best, put your mind at ease and just sit back instead of going through the mental effort of worrying about this and putting the energy to stand up for everybody's rights.
- sebphfx 15y agoThat made me laugh:"This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures". So true!
- mhb 15y agoHow are you able to see how popular the parent comment is?
- pmorici 15y agoYou can't but you can infer it's popularity based on the time elapsed since it was posted and it's current placement on the page. In this case it is the number 2 comment at the moment and it was posted more than several hours ago.
- stephth 15y agoIt was #1 (and ~ one hour old) when I commented, and stayed #1 for a couple hours, in a highly popular thread (3 hours old and almost 400 votes at the time I believe). My comment stuck as the top child with just a couple votes, hence all children had a low voting count. So I assumed the parent was #1 amongst dozens of other comments thanks to its individual number of votes. I kept an eye on this because its popularity is unsettling to me. I don't usually miss the vote counters but in situations like this one I really do.
- wladimir 15y agoYou're reading it different than me. I don't think he's literally wishing for it to pass, or is it really "the bright side" that he is describing. He's just trying to rationalize that the worst-case scenario is not the end of all freedom yet, and there will still be ways to fight/circumvent it. More like a small bright dot on a very dark background.
- vidarh 15y agoThe more interesting point in his comment to me is that sometimes it is worse in the long term if your adversary restricts themselves. Yes, if this passes it will wreck lives and businesses, but it might also just be bad enough to get ordinary people to start waking up to how damaging the copyright lobby is. Now copyright and patent issues are mainly relevant to business and a small subset of people being pursued for torrenting etc. The pain point for average people have not been reached in any way - they don't notice. But push far enough, and the backlash the copyright lobby will face may lay waste all of them. Whether or not SOPA constitutes pushing far enough remains to be seen.