Paddy Duke 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: UK Court Upholds Its First Web Censorship Order: BT Has 14 Days To Block Access To Newzbin2 & Gets To Pay For The Privelege

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 26 Oct, 2011 @ 07:10am

    Re:

    I like abc gum?s term: The Content Cartel

    (see a few posts up)

  • On the post: European Court Says Leagues Don't Hold Copyright On Sporting Events

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2011 @ 02:04am

    Crowdcast Sport

    I?ve been fascinated for some time by the possibility of crowdsourced sports broadcasts. This ruling certainly seems to open it up as a possibility.

    How long before we have a crowdcasting app that you use to collect streams of live footage from tagged events and locations? A sort of video Gowalla.

  • On the post: Father: Why Isn't Facebook Keeping My Kid Off Its Site?

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2011 @ 12:46pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Above was me.

  • On the post: Father: Why Isn't Facebook Keeping My Kid Off Its Site?

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2011 @ 09:34am

    Re:

    I want to click ?insightful? on this comment, but I?m not sure how accurate it is. Citation?

  • On the post: Dutch Journalist In Legal Trouble For Showing How New Transit Card Is Easy To Defraud

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2011 @ 01:00am

    Re:

    Don?t forget giving away lemonade.

  • On the post: Physicists Claim Time Travel Is Impossible (This Time, They Mean It)

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2011 @ 08:28am

    Lord Kelvin declared "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," just eight short years before he was proven wrong.

    It?s all a ploy to goad scientists into proving time travel is possible.

    Before:
    1 - Time travel is possible.
    2 - Yeah, I guess.

    Now:
    1 - Time travel is impossible.
    2 - Fuck that!

  • On the post: The Absurdity Of Comparing Copying To Stealing

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2011 @ 02:57am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Wouldn't gov't subsidizing academia be better than waging wars for empire?

    Actually, if the work is in the public domain I would be perfectly in the right if I made a copy of it while I had legal access to it.

    I haven?t done a thing to your copy. Once again, you don?t own a copy of a digital file, you have just (temporarily) licensed the right to use that particular arrangement of 1s and 0s.

    If it?s in the public domain, everyone has the right to use it. If you don?t want me to copy it, you need to prevent me from having any access to it.

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2011 @ 01:59am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Fascinatingly though, I believe that a prohibition-era scenario with regards to guns could only happen in the US. Even then I doubt it would be very likely.

    Elsewhere in the world we have strict gun control. As a result, we have a significantly smaller number (1/2000 in Norway, compared to the US) of gun related crimes.

    Gun control is demonstrably effective at reducing gun crime. You are either dishonest or ignorant to claim otherwise. You don?t run with scissors, do you?

    To touch on your other points, alcohol and drugs are impossible to eliminate for many of the same reasons as copyright infringement is impossible to police; primarily that there is little sense of societal wrongdoing involved in their use. If I smoke a joint or drink a beer in my own home, in a responsible fashion, the only person who could conceivably be harmed by my actions is me.

    That changes if I go out driving afterwards or start making a nuisance of myself, but we have other laws for that, and there is a societal stigma attached to being an asshole.

    In Europe, we attach a pretty strong stigma to anyone not in law enforcement carrying a concealed weapon. That?s missing in the US, and you have hundreds of times more gun related deaths as a result.

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2011 @ 08:45am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I don?t buy that argument at all. Nothing about the current state of gun crime in the US suggests that wide availability of firearms reduces gun crime.

    If anything it just makes it much more likely that a confrontation will end in serious injury or death.

    People who carry guns (usually mistakenly) feel safer than people who don?t and this misplaced confidence often leads to bad decisions. This is why gun-owners are more likely to get shot than non-gun-owners.

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2011 @ 07:36am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Both, in reality. There's no doubt cars and roads could be a lot safer too. The important difference is that the primary and correct use of a vehicle is not maiming and killing.

    On top of that, if you include accidental and other deaths due to firearms the difference is not really that pronounced. The most complete figures I could find, while somewhat out of date (2002), suggest that total gun deaths comprise around 1.2% of the US' annual total deaths, while vehicle deaths make up about 1.8%.

    We could easily decrease that 1.2% by making it much more difficult to get hold of a gun. The side effects would be fairly negligible outside the gun industry/lobby.

    Taking over 250 million passenger vehicles off the road might have slightly more of an impact.

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2011 @ 06:38am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    You're not suggesting that the population of the US is 2000 times that of Norway, are you?

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2011 @ 06:25am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Unless he's the best marksman, right?

  • On the post: Looking At Security Theater Through The Lens Of The Utøya Massacre

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2011 @ 06:22am

    Re: Re:

    Oh yeah, I mean look how well that?s worked out for the US so far. No-one ever shoots anyone in the States, because you just never know who might start shooting back. It?s practically a crime-free country, and all because everyone is potentially armed to the teeth.

    Take the gun homicide figures from 2005, for example. They speak for themselves:

    USA - 10,158
    Norway - 5

    The evidence is clear. The more guns we have, the safer we are.

    --
    Figures from http://www.gunpolicy.org

  • On the post: Video Gamers Realizing Streaming Criminalization Bill Might Make A Lot Of Them Into Criminals

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2011 @ 01:52am

    Re: Re: Re:

    I would just like to highlight this line from Nicedoggy?s comment:

    "You see people should start voting for laws not for politicians."

  • On the post: Is Pretending Your Domain Name Has Been Seized By ICE The New Rickroll?

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2011 @ 09:09am

    But all of this makes me wonder if "my site's been seized by ICE" is becoming a meme, a la the rickroll, in which sites looking for attention suddenly pretend that they were seized by ICE.

    This suggests that the seizures might not be having the effect ICE thinks they are having, if people are faking the seizures to garner extra attention.

  • On the post: UK Injunction Process Revised To Better Fit The Realities Of Internet Communication

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2011 @ 06:35am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm bored of the crappy comedy posts now

    I think you need to check your definitions. The post is satire, not parody.

  • On the post: Entitlement? Spoiled Brats? Or Just Progress?

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 08 Jun, 2011 @ 10:57am

    Worth remembering too that Charlie Brooker?s articles are typically very tongue in cheek.

    I agree with Mike that the sense of entitlement definitely seems to come from the other side -- the ones who seem to feel they are entitled to freeze the world in a state that?s most comfortable for them.

  • On the post: UK Injunction Process Revised To Better Fit The Realities Of Internet Communication

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 May, 2011 @ 07:43am

    Re: Re: I'm bored of the crappy comedy posts now

    You're right. There's nothing like a good satire.

    And this was nothing like a good satire.

  • On the post: UK Injunction Process Revised To Better Fit The Realities Of Internet Communication

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 May, 2011 @ 06:52am

    I'm bored of the crappy comedy posts now

    I find most of Tim Cushing's articles inappropriate in tone for Techdirt, where I used to come to read insightful articles on issues surrounding the media, government policy, international legal systems, and technology.

    Recently though, it seems that I'd have been better off reading The Onion. At least their satire is funny.

  • On the post: Google Ditches Newspaper Archival Effort… To Help Publishers Charge For Online Content

    Paddy Duke ( profile ), 25 May, 2011 @ 06:27am

    Re: Good Move by Google

    Rope for sale! Just enough rope!

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