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It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-purpose computation. Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your d
by maeon3 15y ago
It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-purpose computation.
Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your door and take your device. Drop the device citizen, don't make me taze you. We need to invest hevily on infrastructure and devices that make the war against general purpose computation very difficult to block everything from a central location.
- eternalban 15y agoWaiting for the day that publishing software would require government approval ...
- Kadin 15y agoProbably won't ever happen -- that's a little too obvious. But approval from some giant corporate entity that is thoroughly in the pocket of the government, and approves or denies applications at the government's whims? That's not very hard to imagine.
- mdaniel 15y agoIsn't that the definition of a patent?
- eternalban 15y agoNever considered it from that angle. (You may have just convinced me software patents are indeed a bad idea; I was on the fence.)
- philwelch 15y agoA patent isn't a restriction on publication, actually the patent itself is publication. It's a restriction on commercial use. The original intention of patents was that, rather than keeping your trade secrets secret, you can file them with the government. The government will grant you an exclusive monopoly to it for a limited period of time, which is a stronger but more temporary protection than is given to trade secrets, but more importantly it will publish your patent so that once it expires it becomes part of common knowledge. It was essentially intended as a means of open-sourcing technology.
- wnoise 15y agoSOPA is a war on communication, not directly on computation.
- astrodust 15y agoThis is the correct interpretation. Computation has nothing to do with SOPA. You could have the world's most locked down phone and still run afoul of SOPA because you're republishing copyrighted material with it.