Bill Gates is a sick, demented, power-hungry person, IMHO.
Excuse me? He's a businessman. And regardless of the morality or legality of some of the things he has done, he is running a business. He is being prosecuted under antitrust, a body of law that is so vague that he has no way of knowing what is and is not a crime. Given that, it is not at all suprising that he often makes statements that border on lying. When he is asked to prove that he has not engaged in "anticompetitive practices," what is he supposed to say? That's his JOB--to outcompete the other companies in his field. So obviously he is engaging in "anticompetitive" practices. That's how you succeed, by doing better than your competition.
Now he may have done some specifically illegal or unethical things, and I am all for prosecuting him on those. But such laws need to specific--it needs to be clear ahead of time what is and is not illegal. With antitrust, the rules change every few years, and then companies are forced to prove that they did not engage in practices that were perfectly legal at the time.
So DESPITE your writing EVERY sixth word in capital LETTERS, I am not scared of Bill Gates. I use a Mac at home, Linux for work, and I pretty much never touch a M$ product. Microsoft is not holding anyone hostage. The fact that people are unwilling or unable to switch to another OS is not Bill Gates' doing. People have choices, they simply have not taken advantage of them.
I would emphasize the bad ending plot. I didn't think the ending was all that bad, and a lot of movies I like have hokey premises. (Star Wars, for example) And The Matrix was very well-directed: it was a very moody, tense movie.
But the ending was a letdown. Basically, Neo just suddenly acquires magical powers and kicks the bad guys' ass. He doesn't have to do anything for this, it just happens. So after 2 hours of buildup, the movie went out with a whimper.
Still I'd rank it above Menace. Up until the ending it did have a good plot, and there were no annoying children or Jar Jars to mess things up.
But the point is that no one is going to take the time to decode your messages unless they have a _reason_ to suspect you of something in the first place. If for exmple, I use 40-bit encryption on a rot13'ed file, a computer program will decrypt it, find it is jibberish, and give up. If a human being spent enough time on it, sure they could probably figure it out, but there aren't enough people to decode all of the questionable messages by hand.
So even if you make a modification that makes your crypto less secure, it is still going to fool the _computers_, and that's all you really need unless you're a big-time terrorist or something.
Sure, you could dream up ways to defeat any given trick, but the point is that each of these new methods must be interpreted by a human being. As anyone who is familiar with AI knows, interpreting human language is an incredibly difficult problem. Ultimately, you have to resort to tricks with keyword matching and such. So although there are lots of tricks you can play, with complex pattern-matching, no algorithm is going to catch someone who wants to keep his secrets secret.
To use the rot13 example, no computer is going to "think" of checking for that on its own. Someone has to add that to the system. And I can also use "rot12","rot11", etc. I can use pig latin. I can use number-based codes. I can type words backwords. The point is that there are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of such tricks. Combined with the sheer volume of messages that get sent every day, checking every message for all possible hidden codes becomes an impossible task.
There are other problems as well. One is that it is often impossible to track down the "true" owner of a given email address. And even cracking weak crypto messages takes time. And since you can't read a message until after it is cracked, there is no way of knowing which messages will be worth cracking. Furthermore we can easily flood it with nonsense, bogging it down even more.
The point is that computers are DUMB, and no algorithm will effectively sort out the messages that are relevant. The only way to do this would be to have a human check each one, but that is simply not possible considering the volume involved. In short, wide-scale surveilance of an entire nation is not possible with any consistency.
The best protection is strong encryption (which government's should allow).
And probably the most comforting thing is that the cat is now out of the bag. There is literally nothing governments can do now to keep people from encrypting their messages. There are simply too many crypto algorithms floating around on the 'net, and nothing short of an absolute police state can stop them now. This means that anyone who doesn't want the government spying on them can prevent it with minimal hassle.
What does being a farmer have to do with anything? Working on a farm is a choice, just like everyone else. It is no more ok to subsidize farmers than it is to subsidize rural non-farmers. If farming is too expensive, then some farms will close, food prices will go up, and we will pay for it in higher grocery bills. All subsidies do is give farmers incentive to produce more food than people want. A farm is a business like any other, and it should pay its own way like any other.
Well, the first two sertainly must be a part of the definition. I think the third is the one that is insufficiently precise:
The people you are emailing don't have a common thread which relates to the topic of your message. For instance, if you send an email to each of your Congressmen about a political issue, that's not spam.
How about if I send out emails to all Americans telling them to vote for Al Gore? They have a common thread (they are American voters) but I think everyone will agree that that is spam. Or what about sending out messages to people because "they are in my address book"? Obviously this is a stretch, but on the other hand, I occasionally send out email to a group of 10 to 50 people whose only connection is that I happen to be acquainted with them. (Jokes, party information, etc) Another example would be the president of the U of Minnesota sending out emails to the entire U of M community. This is probably appropriate for him, but would not be appreciated if I did it. So depending on the wording of this third criteria, I think it either allows most spammers to get through or unreasonably restricts the use of mass mailings for legitimate. I think that third criteria needs to be refined before it could be put into anything resembling good law. And until I see one, I don't think its a good idea to start regulating the flow of information via email.
But the problem is not simply spammers that send out 6e9 messages at once. There are times when it is perfectly appropriate to send out, say, 50 messages to a group of friends, coworkers, etc. But in other contexts, this would be considered spam. I think it is going overboard to make it a crime to send more than one person at a time email without first asking their permission, and short of that, I don't see how you can define it with precision necessary for a law.
My problem with laws banning spam is that it is not clear to me that you can draw a clear line between spam and non-spam email. You could define it as any email sent to more than one person that was unsolicited, but that strikes me as too draconian. I could come up with cases where there are legitimate reasons to send out mass-mailings, and it seems excessive, to have the governmnet step in every time you have to hit the delete key. Yes spam is a problem, but I wonder whether banning it would really accomplish anything, and whether it could be done without stifling free speech. Anybody have a definition that would prevent abuses without turning every mass email message into a lawsuit?
I don't think this is why. The reason it is guaranteed to do so well is because of the enourmous popularity of the first trilogy. I will go and see it no matter how bad the reviews are. This is not because I am mindless, but simply because the first trilogy was so good that it is all but certain that this one will be ok.
A better computer analogy: If there was a computer company that made an OS with the class and consistency of Mac OS, the stability of *nix, and the installed base of Windoze, and who has produced three rock-solid releases in a row, lots of people will buy the next version whether it gets good reviews or not, because they trust the people who make it.
This is not what is at issue in the case at all. The question is whether the man has a right to use Intel's computers to send the email. It is basically about property rights. Intel's servers belong to Intel, and so they have a right to prohibit specific people from using them. If the employees have non-work email accounts, then intel would have no right to ban email to those accounts.
In fact, I think all free speech issues boil down to property rights. My right to freedom of the press derives from the fact that the owner of the press has given me permission to print on it. My right to speak derives from the fact that I own my lungs and vocal chords. My right to give a speech derives from the fact that the owner of the building where I am speaking has given me permission to do so.
By the same token, my right to send email derives from the fact that I own my computer, and the computers between me and the destination have all consented to be used in this manner. If someone on the 'net asks me not to send email to his computer, then I have no right to do so, as this is an invasion of his rights to control what goes on his computer. I am free to send my packets by another route, or to go with another ISP, but I have no necessary right to use his computer for my communication.
The problem with this is that I think it is a very bad idea for the government to step in simply because a piece of email is unsolicited. The key point is that Intel had already asked him to stop.
There are times when an unsolicited email can be worthwhile. It would be a mistake to ban them, as there is no clear way to determine what is meant by unsolicited. Certainly most of the mail we get was not specifically requested. A clearer legal standard is one that requires the person to stop if he is so requested. This is a clear and unambiguous standard, and it does not have a negative effect on free communication.
Is the one in Disclosure, which featured the interesting shell command
do it/kill all
and a great scene in which the hero is watching a video as it is being deleted by Demi Moore, and the movie player displays a nice graphic of the video being deleted on the hero's screen as it is playing. More dramatic, I suppose, but awfully funny.
I agree. What's the difference between some guy going to a concert and buying up all of the tickets only to sell them at ten times the price at the door and these domain gimps going up and buying all of the domains they think are interesting and re-selling them?
Nothing. Both should be legal. When you choose to buy a domain name or a ticket, you are making a gamble that it will be valuable. At this point, all the really valuable domain names are already taken, so banning their resale is not gonna stop many squatters.
If this practice is ignored or even legitimized, what's to stop our friendly new registrars from doing the same thing?
Well in this case they have been granted a government-imposed monopoly, and so if they misbehave, the government certainly should bring them into line. But *anyone* has the opportunity to buy domain names, and so there is no reason for the government to restict their use once they are sold to private individuals.
As for the speculators who do pay the fee and still sit on the names, there needs to be a total ban on the private resale of domain names. This is a real problem and we need a measure like this to stop it.
I see no justification for this. Why should we restrict private transactions simply because some people are making a profit off of them. Although this might deter some speculators, it would also make it impossible for companies who logically out to have a given domain name from getting it. If I own an Apple orchard, and I register apple.com, it is perfectly reasonable that Apple computer should pay me a premium for the domain. To ban that would mean that anyone who wants Apple's home page gets my apple orchard instead.
Private property is needed on the 'net every bit as much as in real life. Whether domain names are sold or liscenced, the people who obtain them should be free to use them however they please, including selling them.
anyway i expect that now they're going to have to write a *NIX quicktime client, or else they're going to look pretty silly releasing a *NIX server.
2 points. First, they are not necessarily going to release a *nix client, except for the fact that MOSXS is based on *nix. This will, however allow others to write servers on other platforms.
Second, having a *nix server in no way necessitates a *nix client. *nix makes for great servers in general, and being able to stream Quicktime on them would be very useful, but the individuals who would want to view these movies are still overwhelmingly in the Mac OS and PC camps. *nix servers can stream to Macs and PC's. Not that a Linux client is a bad thing, but there is nothing "silly" about not writing one.
anyway i expect that now they're going to have to write a *NIX quicktime client, or else they're going to look pretty silly releasing a *NIX server.
2 points. First, they are not necessarily going to release a *nix client, except for the fact that MOSXS is based on *nix. This will, however allow others to write servers on other platforms.
Second, having a *nix server in no way necessitates a *nix client. *nix makes for great servers in general, and being able to stream Quicktime on them would be very useful, but the individuals who would want to view these movies are still overwhelmingly in the Mac OS and PC camps. *nix servers can stream to Macs and PC's. Not that a Linux client is a bad thing, but there is nothing "silly" about not writing one.
Pollution is good, it shows man?s conquest of nature, I want to see more of it!
Would you mind telling me where she said that? Rand was no environmentalist, but I find it hard to believe she would have said that. And I certainly would not support it.
Asking for Microsoft to have all the rights possesed by its shareholders without making the shareholders take responsibility for Microsoft is morally inconsistent.
OK, I agree here. There may be some specific, legally defined difference between the rights of an individual and those of a corporation. But they still have rights, and those right still need to be specific and legally defined. The claim I was objecting to was that corporations have no rights. Microsoft does not have all the rights of a corporation, but it certainly has some.
I'm a Libertarian. I assume you are familiar with their ideas, but in case not, the have a web page. anyway, in particular:
I want to know if you're one of those people who basically ascribes to the doctrine that the world doesn't owe anyone a living, so you shouldn't take care of anyone else.
The former does not imply the latter. I think it is in one's self interest to do good things for those one cares about, and to be polite and helpful to a point to those around you. I am also a proponent of individual rights in the Jeffersonian sense. I don't think I have an obligation to help others, but that does not mean that I don't.
But the views that you expressed sound like the views of the dog-eat-dog proponent, that is, one who believes that because a dog can eat another dog, and sometimes will, that's a perfectly fine situation.
Well the human equivalent would be murder, which I am opposed to, if that is what you mean. I am not particularly concerned with the welfare of dogs, so if the owner of both dogs consented, I guess I would not have a problem with it. As far as i know dogs never eat each other.
You see, the problem with microsoft is not that they don't have the "right" to do what they've done. In the Hobbsian sense they have the right to do anything that they can get away with. On the other hand, they don't have the right to do what they've done in the sense of deserving it, or it being morally permissible.
Microsoft has done some sleazy things, and some of them are probably immoral. But i don't think the simple fact of making a closed, buggy, undocumented, unfair, unsupported OS is. If they are guilty of fraud, slander, breach of contract, intellectual property theft, or other crimes that have victims, I wholeheartedly support going after them for it. But the antitrust laws are not about that. Netscape does not have a right to its market share, so Microsoft did not steal it from them.
do you think that narcotics should be regulated?
No.
Do you think that crack dealers are simply "good businesmen" (they are selling a product for which there is a large demand)?
They are selling a destructive product, and I disapprove of their actions. But I do not feel that I (or by extension my government) has the right to ban it. The War on Drugs would require its own thread to discuss properly.
Just like it should be illegal for microsoft to compete by filing hundreds of lawsuits against its competitors,
Well this is an unjustified use of force, and the aggrieved party would be justified in countersuing for lost damages.
sending them hundreds of pounds of mail every day
If they ask Mirosoft to stop and they refuse, then this is a violation of their property rights (they own their mailbox) and they would be justified in suing.
flooding their email box with messages, or ping flooding their competitors websites into oblivion,
Same arguments as above. This is a violation of property rights.
It should be illegal for them to build addiction devices into their products.
You chose to use that product, and you have every right not to. It is true that doing so is inconvenient, but it is not the job of Microsoft to make sure that its competition does not fall behind.
But the problem with us coming to an understanding seems to be that your view of morality is "anything not directly violent is ok".
You are operating on the premise "anything immoral shouild be illegal." I reject that premise. The question is not whether something is immoral, it is whether the government is morally justified in using force to impose its will.
Why should the government dictate that blacks have to be able to use the same bathrooms in private establishments as whites.
No, the question is "why should the government force blacks to use different bathrooms?" The primary problem in the South was not private discrimination. It was laws that *required* discrimination. repealing those laws would have eliminated most of the discrimination.
Or why should blacks be able to sit in the front of the bus like whites in privately owned buses.
Well I am not sure whether the buses were private or not back then, but I believe that it was illegal to mingle whites with blacks on busses. If the bus was in fact privately owned, and the owner chose to put blacks in the back, I would not have any business objecting. This does not make it ok, it simply is not right for the government to make it illegal.
Or why shouldn't a company be able to hire only white males solely because they're white males? It's their business if they want to do that.
If a business chose to do that, I would allow it. I would not approve. And such a business would pay a price for this, because qulified women and minorities would go to the competition.
I'm assuming that you're against equal employment laws, correct? And you believe that child labor should be acceptable because either the kid or his parents should be responsible for the kid.
Yes for the first. Yes on the second assuming that the welfare of the child is not clearly endangered.
And I assume that loansharking should be perfectly legal.
I am not sure what "loansharking" is, but if you mean lending money, then yes.
And that electricity and water companies should be able to charge whatever they want.
I would be inclined to say yes, assuming that they do are not owned/operated/subsidized/regulated by the government.
If the water company decided one day that they were going to charge everyone 100% of their assets for a drop of water, that's fine.
No one would pay it, so if they want to waste their time, go ahead.
And there's nothing wrong with what OPEC did, is there? And I assume that price-fixing should be perfectly legal.
OPEC was not too successful. They made a small amount of extra money for a few years, before prices collapsed, and it would have been even less successful, had our government not exascerbated the problem with price controls. Price-fixing in general does not work too well.
Out of curiosity, since you're dependent on your parents for food etc. in the first X years of your life, do they in effect own you? Should they be able to starve you, etc. if they want? Send you out naked into the snow if they don't want you in their house or wearing their clothes?
I sense that you are more interested in making me look bad than actually finding out my opinions, but I don't really care.
I think there is an argument to be made that you are obligated to take care of your children, because you made a unilateral decision to bring them into the world. I was never consulted about whether my parents had me or not, so in a sense they have a duty to get me to the point where I can take care of myself. I am not too sure about that argument. Children are a special case because they cannot care for themselves.
What do you propose to restrict? What laws do you say should be on the books?
If you are actually interested, look into Libertarianism. If your point is that I am a member of the lunatic fringe, then you are free to think that.
There is an argument to be made that the telephone and power companies are "natural monopolies:" the economies of scale are so great that a one-producer situation is inevitable. I am skeptical of this argument, but in any event, this is clearly different from the Microsoft case. There are a number of competing OS's, so you do have a choice. The concept of "undue influence" is too vague to make laws over.
I also do not believe it is the government's place to require ingredient lists on food, but that is another thread entirely.
If I write a story in Microsoft Word, I should be able to retrieve it, even if I no longer have Microsoft word. They have no rights to my intellectual property, and no right to keep it from me.
When you purchased Word, you purchased the right to put a copy of it on your hard drive and use it. That's it. If you did not want to be dependent on Word, you were free to use Claris or WordPerfect or notepad or whatever. Unless Microsoft committed to help you convert your information between formats without using Word, I see no reason they should be required to. You chose to use Word, and you knew you would need Word to read your documents.
Can you come up with a convincing argument for why selling something doesn't inherently imply selling the information on how to use it and interact with it?
I would want an argument the other way around. There are lots of examples. When I buy a pound of sugar, I don't get a cookbook with it. When I buy a car, I don't get a shop manual. I don't see how such an obligation could ever exist unless the producer has committed to do so.
Can you give a convincing reason why a company should be allowed to make a product which hides my information, or the information that someone else gives to me, in a format that only they can read so that I am forced to pay them for it?
Well, if you want to be literal about it, you hid the information. You just used their software to do it. If you are worried about it DON't USE WORD. I don't.
Think of it this way: do you think that it would be OK if Honda sells you a car, that can only use Honda ExpensoTires, and they're the sole manufacturer of them?
Unless they had promised that there would be other sources, absolutely. If you are worried about it, you should do research beforehand.
And if you only found out about it afterwards (how many software boxes say "This product uses a proprietary format that binds you to our products and doesn't allow interoperability with other people, excepting that they also use this product")
Most boxes also do not say "Warning! this software will not triple your hard drive space, will not improve your sex life, and will not cause your computer to levitate off of your desk" either, but that doesn't mean I expect them. Software companies can write whatever features they want in their software, and the consumer is free to buy or not buy it. It is not secret that Word is a proprietary format, and anyone who cares can find out with minimal effort.
As for the slavery, it is completely irrelevant, and there are so many things about that paragraph that are irrelevant that I am not going to bother to respond.
What do you mean by 'only an extension'? People do not forfeit their individual rights as members of a corporation.
How about shareholders? They surrender their property rights in the property that they use to buy the shares. This is the source of the company's property rights. The things that the company owns are in fact jointly owned by the shareholders, and the shareholder delegate the right to control that property to the officers of the company. To take away the property of the company is to steal from the shareholders.
Yes. Marriages don't have free speech rights, people do. Of course, in practice the difference is so slight as to be unneccessary.
I would argue that there is no difference. When we say that the marriage has the right to speak, we are simply saying that either partner has the right to speak for both of them. The same is true of corporations. When an officer puts out a press release, he is excersizing his personal free speech rights on behalf of the corporation. Sop to ban MS from certifying computers that are not open violates the free speech rights of the individual officers, and by extension those of the company. When I say that a company has a right to something, I mean that the individuals in the company have that right, just as when I say that a company does something, I mean that individuals in the company did it.
but there is no limited liability to give significance to the fictitious entity.
This is an important point, and one that needs to be addressed, but it is not clear how this negates the rights of the corporation.
Me:The same arguments can be made about churches, schools, governments, social clubs, universities, unions, etc.
Yes again. These entities are subject to laws which do not apply to individuals.
In the case of churches, private schools, social clubs, private universities, and non-compulsory unions, I would argue that they should not have any special laws apply to them. The government-run case is different, because they have additional restrictions due to the fact that they use taxpayer money. But other than that, I see no reason for a person's rights to change simply by virtue of forming an organization.
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Bill Gates is a sick, demented, power-hungry person, IMHO.
Excuse me? He's a businessman. And regardless of the morality or legality of some of the things he has done, he is running a business. He is being prosecuted under antitrust, a body of law that is so vague that he has no way of knowing what is and is not a crime. Given that, it is not at all suprising that he often makes statements that border on lying. When he is asked to prove that he has not engaged in "anticompetitive practices," what is he supposed to say? That's his JOB--to outcompete the other companies in his field. So obviously he is engaging in "anticompetitive" practices. That's how you succeed, by doing better than your competition.
Now he may have done some specifically illegal or unethical things, and I am all for prosecuting him on those. But such laws need to specific--it needs to be clear ahead of time what is and is not illegal. With antitrust, the rules change every few years, and then companies are forced to prove that they did not engage in practices that were perfectly legal at the time.
So DESPITE your writing EVERY sixth word in capital LETTERS, I am not scared of Bill Gates. I use a Mac at home, Linux for work, and I pretty much never touch a M$ product. Microsoft is not holding anyone hostage. The fact that people are unwilling or unable to switch to another OS is not Bill Gates' doing. People have choices, they simply have not taken advantage of them.
I would emphasize the bad ending plot. I didn't think the ending was all that bad, and a lot of movies I like have hokey premises. (Star Wars, for example) And The Matrix was very well-directed: it was a very moody, tense movie.
But the ending was a letdown. Basically, Neo just suddenly acquires magical powers and kicks the bad guys' ass. He doesn't have to do anything for this, it just happens. So after 2 hours of buildup, the movie went out with a whimper.
Still I'd rank it above Menace. Up until the ending it did have a good plot, and there were no annoying children or Jar Jars to mess things up.
But the point is that no one is going to take the time to decode your messages unless they have a _reason_ to suspect you of something in the first place. If for exmple, I use 40-bit encryption on a rot13'ed file, a computer program will decrypt it, find it is jibberish, and give up. If a human being spent enough time on it, sure they could probably figure it out, but there aren't enough people to decode all of the questionable messages by hand.
So even if you make a modification that makes your crypto less secure, it is still going to fool the _computers_, and that's all you really need unless you're a big-time terrorist or something.
Sure, you could dream up ways to defeat any given trick, but the point is that each of these new methods must be interpreted by a human being. As anyone who is familiar with AI knows, interpreting human language is an incredibly difficult problem. Ultimately, you have to resort to tricks with keyword matching and such. So although there are lots of tricks you can play, with complex pattern-matching, no algorithm is going to catch someone who wants to keep his secrets secret.
To use the rot13 example, no computer is going to "think" of checking for that on its own. Someone has to add that to the system. And I can also use "rot12","rot11", etc. I can use pig latin. I can use number-based codes. I can type words backwords. The point is that there are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of such tricks. Combined with the sheer volume of messages that get sent every day, checking every message for all possible hidden codes becomes an impossible task.
There are other problems as well. One is that it is often impossible to track down the "true" owner of a given email address. And even cracking weak crypto messages takes time. And since you can't read a message until after it is cracked, there is no way of knowing which messages will be worth cracking. Furthermore we can easily flood it with nonsense, bogging it down even more.
The point is that computers are DUMB, and no algorithm will effectively sort out the messages that are relevant. The only way to do this would be to have a human check each one, but that is simply not possible considering the volume involved. In short, wide-scale surveilance of an entire nation is not possible with any consistency.
The best protection is strong encryption (which government's should allow).
And probably the most comforting thing is that the cat is now out of the bag. There is literally nothing governments can do now to keep people from encrypting their messages. There are simply too many crypto algorithms floating around on the 'net, and nothing short of an absolute police state can stop them now. This means that anyone who doesn't want the government spying on them can prevent it with minimal hassle.
What does being a farmer have to do with anything? Working on a farm is a choice, just like everyone else. It is no more ok to subsidize farmers than it is to subsidize rural non-farmers. If farming is too expensive, then some farms will close, food prices will go up, and we will pay for it in higher grocery bills. All subsidies do is give farmers incentive to produce more food than people want. A farm is a business like any other, and it should pay its own way like any other.
Well, the first two sertainly must be a part of the definition. I think the third is the one that is insufficiently precise:
The people you are emailing don't have a common thread which relates to the topic of your message. For instance, if you send an email to each of your Congressmen about a political issue, that's not spam.
How about if I send out emails to all Americans telling them to vote for Al Gore? They have a common thread (they are American voters) but I think everyone will agree that that is spam. Or what about sending out messages to people because "they are in my address book"? Obviously this is a stretch, but on the other hand, I occasionally send out email to a group of 10 to 50 people whose only connection is that I happen to be acquainted with them. (Jokes, party information, etc) Another example would be the president of the U of Minnesota sending out emails to the entire U of M community. This is probably appropriate for him, but would not be appreciated if I did it. So depending on the wording of this third criteria, I think it either allows most spammers to get through or unreasonably restricts the use of mass mailings for legitimate. I think that third criteria needs to be refined before it could be put into anything resembling good law. And until I see one, I don't think its a good idea to start regulating the flow of information via email.
But the problem is not simply spammers that send out 6e9 messages at once. There are times when it is perfectly appropriate to send out, say, 50 messages to a group of friends, coworkers, etc. But in other contexts, this would be considered spam. I think it is going overboard to make it a crime to send more than one person at a time email without first asking their permission, and short of that, I don't see how you can define it with precision necessary for a law.
My problem with laws banning spam is that it is not clear to me that you can draw a clear line between spam and non-spam email. You could define it as any email sent to more than one person that was unsolicited, but that strikes me as too draconian. I could come up with cases where there are legitimate reasons to send out mass-mailings, and it seems excessive, to have the governmnet step in every time you have to hit the delete key. Yes spam is a problem, but I wonder whether banning it would really accomplish anything, and whether it could be done without stifling free speech. Anybody have a definition that would prevent abuses without turning every mass email message into a lawsuit?
I don't think this is why. The reason it is guaranteed to do so well is because of the enourmous popularity of the first trilogy. I will go and see it no matter how bad the reviews are. This is not because I am mindless, but simply because the first trilogy was so good that it is all but certain that this one will be ok.
A better computer analogy: If there was a computer company that made an OS with the class and consistency of Mac OS, the stability of *nix, and the installed base of Windoze, and who has produced three rock-solid releases in a row, lots of people will buy the next version whether it gets good reviews or not, because they trust the people who make it.
This is not what is at issue in the case at all. The question is whether the man has a right to use Intel's computers to send the email. It is basically about property rights. Intel's servers belong to Intel, and so they have a right to prohibit specific people from using them. If the employees have non-work email accounts, then intel would have no right to ban email to those accounts.
In fact, I think all free speech issues boil down to property rights. My right to freedom of the press derives from the fact that the owner of the press has given me permission to print on it. My right to speak derives from the fact that I own my lungs and vocal chords. My right to give a speech derives from the fact that the owner of the building where I am speaking has given me permission to do so.
By the same token, my right to send email derives from the fact that I own my computer, and the computers between me and the destination have all consented to be used in this manner. If someone on the 'net asks me not to send email to his computer, then I have no right to do so, as this is an invasion of his rights to control what goes on his computer. I am free to send my packets by another route, or to go with another ISP, but I have no necessary right to use his computer for my communication.
The problem with this is that I think it is a very bad idea for the government to step in simply because a piece of email is unsolicited. The key point is that Intel had already asked him to stop.
There are times when an unsolicited email can be worthwhile. It would be a mistake to ban them, as there is no clear way to determine what is meant by unsolicited. Certainly most of the mail we get was not specifically requested. A clearer legal standard is one that requires the person to stop if he is so requested. This is a clear and unambiguous standard, and it does not have a negative effect on free communication.
And another idea. Let's ban marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. That'll really cut down on crime and keep people from getting hurt.
Wait a minute... we already did that... and it's not working too well
Is the one in Disclosure, which featured the interesting shell command
do it/kill all
and a great scene in which the hero is watching a video as it is being deleted by Demi Moore, and the movie player displays a nice graphic of the video being deleted on the hero's screen as it is playing. More dramatic, I suppose, but awfully funny.
I agree. What's the difference between some guy going to a concert and buying up all of the tickets only to sell them at ten times the price at the door and these domain gimps going up and buying all of the domains they think are interesting and re-selling them?
Nothing. Both should be legal. When you choose to buy a domain name or a ticket, you are making a gamble that it will be valuable. At this point, all the really valuable domain names are already taken, so banning their resale is not gonna stop many squatters.
If this practice is ignored or even legitimized, what's to stop our friendly new registrars from doing the same thing?
Well in this case they have been granted a government-imposed monopoly, and so if they misbehave, the government certainly should bring them into line. But *anyone* has the opportunity to buy domain names, and so there is no reason for the government to restict their use once they are sold to private individuals.
As for the speculators who do pay the fee and still sit on the names, there needs to be a total ban on the private resale of domain names. This is a real problem and we need a measure like this to stop it.
I see no justification for this. Why should we restrict private transactions simply because some people are making a profit off of them. Although this might deter some speculators, it would also make it impossible for companies who logically out to have a given domain name from getting it. If I own an Apple orchard, and I register apple.com, it is perfectly reasonable that Apple computer should pay me a premium for the domain. To ban that would mean that anyone who wants Apple's home page gets my apple orchard instead.
Private property is needed on the 'net every bit as much as in real life. Whether domain names are sold or liscenced, the people who obtain them should be free to use them however they please, including selling them.
It would be far too easy to register names for your wife, kids, parents, friends, pets, etc.
anyway i expect that now they're going to have to write a *NIX quicktime client, or else they're going to look pretty silly releasing a *NIX server.
2 points. First, they are not necessarily going to release a *nix client, except for the fact that MOSXS is based on *nix. This will, however allow others to write servers on other platforms.
Second, having a *nix server in no way necessitates a *nix client. *nix makes for great servers in general, and being able to stream Quicktime on them would be very useful, but the individuals who would want to view these movies are still overwhelmingly in the Mac OS and PC camps. *nix servers can stream to Macs and PC's. Not that a Linux client is a bad thing, but there is nothing "silly" about not writing one.
anyway i expect that now they're going to have to write a *NIX quicktime client, or else they're going to look pretty silly releasing a *NIX server.
2 points. First, they are not necessarily going to release a *nix client, except for the fact that MOSXS is based on *nix. This will, however allow others to write servers on other platforms.
Second, having a *nix server in no way necessitates a *nix client. *nix makes for great servers in general, and being able to stream Quicktime on them would be very useful, but the individuals who would want to view these movies are still overwhelmingly in the Mac OS and PC camps. *nix servers can stream to Macs and PC's. Not that a Linux client is a bad thing, but there is nothing "silly" about not writing one.
Ummm... didn't some scientists in Japan already prove that neutrinos have mass several months ago?
Pollution is good, it shows man?s conquest of nature, I want to see more of it!
Would you mind telling me where she said that? Rand was no environmentalist, but I find it hard to believe she would have said that. And I certainly would not support it.
Asking for Microsoft to have all the rights possesed by its shareholders without making the shareholders take responsibility for Microsoft is morally inconsistent.
OK, I agree here. There may be some specific, legally defined difference between the rights of an individual and those of a corporation. But they still have rights, and those right still need to be specific and legally defined. The claim I was objecting to was that corporations have no rights. Microsoft does not have all the rights of a corporation, but it certainly has some.
I'm a Libertarian. I assume you are familiar with their ideas, but in case not, the have a web page. anyway, in particular:
I want to know if you're one of those people who basically ascribes to the doctrine that the world doesn't owe anyone a living, so you shouldn't take care of anyone else.
The former does not imply the latter. I think it is in one's self interest to do good things for those one cares about, and to be polite and helpful to a point to those around you. I am also a proponent of individual rights in the Jeffersonian sense. I don't think I have an obligation to help others, but that does not mean that I don't.
But the views that you expressed sound like the views of the dog-eat-dog proponent, that is, one who believes that because a dog can eat another dog, and sometimes will, that's a perfectly fine situation.
Well the human equivalent would be murder, which I am opposed to, if that is what you mean. I am not particularly concerned with the welfare of dogs, so if the owner of both dogs consented, I guess I would not have a problem with it. As far as i know dogs never eat each other.
You see, the problem with microsoft is not that they don't have the "right" to do what they've done. In the Hobbsian sense they have the right to do anything that they can get away with. On the other hand, they don't have the right to do what they've done in the sense of deserving it, or it being morally permissible.
Microsoft has done some sleazy things, and some of them are probably immoral. But i don't think the simple fact of making a closed, buggy, undocumented, unfair, unsupported OS is. If they are guilty of fraud, slander, breach of contract, intellectual property theft, or other crimes that have victims, I wholeheartedly support going after them for it. But the antitrust laws are not about that. Netscape does not have a right to its market share, so Microsoft did not steal it from them.
do you think that narcotics should be regulated?
No.
Do you think that crack dealers are simply "good businesmen" (they are selling a product for which there is a large demand)?
They are selling a destructive product, and I disapprove of their actions. But I do not feel that I (or by extension my government) has the right to ban it. The War on Drugs would require its own thread to discuss properly.
Just like it should be illegal for microsoft to compete by filing hundreds of lawsuits against its competitors,
Well this is an unjustified use of force, and the aggrieved party would be justified in countersuing for lost damages.
sending them hundreds of pounds of mail every day
If they ask Mirosoft to stop and they refuse, then this is a violation of their property rights (they own their mailbox) and they would be justified in suing.
flooding their email box with messages, or ping flooding their competitors websites into oblivion,
Same arguments as above. This is a violation of property rights.
It should be illegal for them to build addiction devices into their products.
You chose to use that product, and you have every right not to. It is true that doing so is inconvenient, but it is not the job of Microsoft to make sure that its competition does not fall behind.
But the problem with us coming to an understanding seems to be that your view of morality is "anything not directly violent is ok".
You are operating on the premise "anything immoral shouild be illegal." I reject that premise. The question is not whether something is immoral, it is whether the government is morally justified in using force to impose its will.
Why should the government dictate that blacks have to be able to use the same bathrooms in private establishments as whites.
No, the question is "why should the government force blacks to use different bathrooms?" The primary problem in the South was not private discrimination. It was laws that *required* discrimination. repealing those laws would have eliminated most of the discrimination.
Or why should blacks be able to sit in the front of the bus like whites in privately owned buses.
Well I am not sure whether the buses were private or not back then, but I believe that it was illegal to mingle whites with blacks on busses. If the bus was in fact privately owned, and the owner chose to put blacks in the back, I would not have any business objecting. This does not make it ok, it simply is not right for the government to make it illegal.
Or why shouldn't a company be able to hire only white males solely because they're white males? It's their business if they want to do that.
If a business chose to do that, I would allow it. I would not approve. And such a business would pay a price for this, because qulified women and minorities would go to the competition.
I'm assuming that you're against equal employment laws, correct? And you believe that child labor should be acceptable because either the kid or his parents should be responsible for the kid.
Yes for the first. Yes on the second assuming that the welfare of the child is not clearly endangered.
And I assume that loansharking should be perfectly legal.
I am not sure what "loansharking" is, but if you mean lending money, then yes.
And that electricity and water companies should be able to charge whatever they want.
I would be inclined to say yes, assuming that they do are not owned/operated/subsidized/regulated by the government.
If the water company decided one day that they were going to charge everyone 100% of their assets for a drop of water, that's fine.
No one would pay it, so if they want to waste their time, go ahead.
And there's nothing wrong with what OPEC did, is there? And I assume that price-fixing should be perfectly legal.
OPEC was not too successful. They made a small amount of extra money for a few years, before prices collapsed, and it would have been even less successful, had our government not exascerbated the problem with price controls. Price-fixing in general does not work too well.
Out of curiosity, since you're dependent on your parents for food etc. in the first X years of your life, do they in effect own you? Should they be able to starve you, etc. if they want? Send you out naked into the snow if they don't want you in their house or wearing their clothes?
I sense that you are more interested in making me look bad than actually finding out my opinions, but I don't really care.
I think there is an argument to be made that you are obligated to take care of your children, because you made a unilateral decision to bring them into the world. I was never consulted about whether my parents had me or not, so in a sense they have a duty to get me to the point where I can take care of myself. I am not too sure about that argument. Children are a special case because they cannot care for themselves.
What do you propose to restrict? What laws do you say should be on the books?
If you are actually interested, look into Libertarianism. If your point is that I am a member of the lunatic fringe, then you are free to think that.
Oh boy... Lot's interesting points here...
There is an argument to be made that the telephone and power companies are "natural monopolies:" the economies of scale are so great that a one-producer situation is inevitable. I am skeptical of this argument, but in any event, this is clearly different from the Microsoft case. There are a number of competing OS's, so you do have a choice. The concept of "undue influence" is too vague to make laws over.
I also do not believe it is the government's place to require ingredient lists on food, but that is another thread entirely.
If I write a story in Microsoft Word, I should be able to retrieve it, even if I no longer have Microsoft word. They have no rights to my intellectual property, and no right to keep it from me.
When you purchased Word, you purchased the right to put a copy of it on your hard drive and use it. That's it. If you did not want to be dependent on Word, you were free to use Claris or WordPerfect or notepad or whatever. Unless Microsoft committed to help you convert your information between formats without using Word, I see no reason they should be required to. You chose to use Word, and you knew you would need Word to read your documents.
Can you come up with a convincing argument for why selling something doesn't inherently imply selling the information on how to use it and interact with it?
I would want an argument the other way around. There are lots of examples. When I buy a pound of sugar, I don't get a cookbook with it. When I buy a car, I don't get a shop manual. I don't see how such an obligation could ever exist unless the producer has committed to do so.
Can you give a convincing reason why a company should be allowed to make a product which hides my information, or the information that someone else gives to me, in a format that only they can read so that I am forced to pay them for it?
Well, if you want to be literal about it, you hid the information. You just used their software to do it. If you are worried about it DON't USE WORD. I don't.
Think of it this way: do you think that it would be OK if Honda sells you a car, that can only use Honda ExpensoTires, and they're the sole manufacturer of them?
Unless they had promised that there would be other sources, absolutely. If you are worried about it, you should do research beforehand.
And if you only found out about it afterwards (how many software boxes say "This product uses a proprietary format that binds you to our products and doesn't allow interoperability with other people, excepting that they also use this product")
Most boxes also do not say "Warning! this software will not triple your hard drive space, will not improve your sex life, and will not cause your computer to levitate off of your desk" either, but that doesn't mean I expect them. Software companies can write whatever features they want in their software, and the consumer is free to buy or not buy it. It is not secret that Word is a proprietary format, and anyone who cares can find out with minimal effort.
As for the slavery, it is completely irrelevant, and there are so many things about that paragraph that are irrelevant that I am not going to bother to respond.
What do you mean by 'only an extension'? People do not forfeit their individual rights as members of a corporation.
How about shareholders? They surrender their property rights in the property that they use to buy the shares. This is the source of the company's property rights. The things that the company owns are in fact jointly owned by the shareholders, and the shareholder delegate the right to control that property to the officers of the company. To take away the property of the company is to steal from the shareholders.
Yes. Marriages don't have free speech rights, people do. Of course, in practice the difference is so slight as to be unneccessary.
I would argue that there is no difference. When we say that the marriage has the right to speak, we are simply saying that either partner has the right to speak for both of them. The same is true of corporations. When an officer puts out a press release, he is excersizing his personal free speech rights on behalf of the corporation. Sop to ban MS from certifying computers that are not open violates the free speech rights of the individual officers, and by extension those of the company. When I say that a company has a right to something, I mean that the individuals in the company have that right, just as when I say that a company does something, I mean that individuals in the company did it.
but there is no limited liability to give significance to the fictitious entity.
This is an important point, and one that needs to be addressed, but it is not clear how this negates the rights of the corporation.
Me:The same arguments can be made about churches, schools, governments, social clubs, universities, unions, etc.
Yes again. These entities are subject to laws which do not apply to individuals.
In the case of churches, private schools, social clubs, private universities, and non-compulsory unions, I would argue that they should not have any special laws apply to them. The government-run case is different, because they have additional restrictions due to the fact that they use taxpayer money. But other than that, I see no reason for a person's rights to change simply by virtue of forming an organization.