I think there are good arguments for giving them the power,
Such as? Despite what the media may try to represent, in real life there are few cases of "evil" people walking free because of legal protections when compared to the many people who have their constitutional rights abused because of this power. The right to expression is also followed by a right to secrecy just as the right to vote is followed by a right to secret ballot. Imagine how less free elections would be if everyone would know who and what you voted for (as ordinary citizens in elections, not as members of congress voting on bills). Just as the right to vote comes the right to be anonymous about what you vote for, so should the right to have secure and secret communication. Of course, just like you can tell everyone who you voted for, so can others hear, listen or read what you communicate, but the right to be anonymous (if one chooses) is needed to ensure a free society.
Your statements can only be true if and only if the employement is a sellers'market (there is more demand for employees than supply). Else, the situation is "You don't want to give me your FB login? Fine, the next applicant will and you won't get another interview"
While it is true that some people are willing to compromise everything for the sake of getting a job, others aren't. Barring the government fucking up the free market, there will be other employers (or people starting up their own business) looking to employ people without invading their applicant's privacy. Because of this, these employers will be favored to work for and one of two things will happen either to close the competitive advantage that the other companies have the previous company abolish their invasive practices or the workers who are unhappy at the previous company will leave and flock to the better employer, leaving the previous employer with a problem which eventually would lead to the company's demise.
Add to it that corporations are really out of hand for everything that they can control, and you'll see that soon everywhere you go will demand not only you FB login to check it but also to post praises to your employer and ask your friends to buy their products (and beware of befriending "known radicals" or visiting "non-adequate" sites). The more power they can get over you, the more power they can get. The only constraint would be the money they need to spend to control you.
Your argument only holds true in an economy where no new companies are started and no workers ever leave because of unhappiness.
If enough workers find the demands of their employers to be unreasonable, they will form their own company or leave. For example, because Atari treated their employees like crap, many of them left and formed Activision.
While there are always some who are willing to trade their souls for a job opportunity, there are others who will resist.
Your employer already has a lots of power over you. Give him more, and you'll end being your slave. What is fine for me if that only applied to idiots willing to comply with it, but soon they will think everyone is an idiot thanks to people like you.
No he doesn't. I have power over him. I have every right to leave. Sure, he will eventually find a replacement for me, but there are some skills that I have that other employees don't have that makes finding a replacement harder. While it is true that he has some power over me, if he violates what I believe is reasonable, I have the right to leave.
They shouldn't. However, they have every (and should have every) -right- to ask. That doesn't mean that it is a good idea and that employers should do it, but they should still have the right to ask, just like you have every right to work for them or not to work for them. They shouldn't have the right to sniff your password, or anything, but they should be perfectly in the clear to ask for it. Of course, you are perfectly able to refuse the request and refuse to work for that employer. With enough like minded people, it is possible to drive that business to the ground (barring government intervention). When the government fucks with the free market by increasing regulations, the people with less money always lose because they are powerless to navigate the court systems as well as a company, even when they have won a case, they still usually come out behind financially, emotionally and time wise. Also, regulation changes the natural balance of a fully free economy to one side or the other. This results in one side having more and the other side having less power which results in more legislation constantly shifting the balance while harming everyone in the process.
Just because something is a right, doesn't mean that it is always wise to exercise it.
There should be employer's rights and they should be able to ask for logins from job applicants. However, such a thing would result in less and less people wanting to work there and eventually such a company would do bankrupt if not for government intervention. However, this is a case of the government once again fucking up the free market because of overusing jails for victimless "crimes". Jails and correction officers should be reserved for crimes that harm someone and that if they were let out they would harm others. Jail is not and should not be a "time out" place. Rather, those who commit lesser crimes and harm others should be forced to pay financial restitution to the victim.
The problem with income inequality is it doesn't show the full picture. Lets say there are two countries each with equal population of 100 people, country A and country B. Lets say that all of the wealth in country A is equal to 100 gold pieces, that is spread around evenly to all 100 people where everyone has 100 gold pieces. And lets say that country B has a wealth of 300 gold pieces and 1 person has 102 gold pieces and the other 99 have 2 gold pieces each. Country A has an equal income equality but yet the people in country B are better off even though 1 person controls about 1/3rd of the country's wealth.
I disagree. People always think that it could never happen here because we are the exception to the rule. But time and time it was proven false. The real reason why the internet won't be shut down because of protests is because of a lack of real protesters. When it comes down to it, the vast, vast majority of Americans have no real principles that the odds of a successful protest starting and continuing are slim until things really start getting out of hand (hyperinflation, etc.).
After all, if you came up to a random person on the street and asked if you could do an invasive body search on you, they would decline, the more educated of them would say it was a violation of the constitutional provision to prevent unreasonable searches. But yet put that in an airport situation and the majority of them will say that its "for the greater good" and a "necessary evil" and that "if it saves one life, it is worth it".
All the government needs to do is point to some excuse and the masses as a whole will obey. Like another poster said, if you really look at anti-war protesters they are either anti-Republican and will vote for a democrat because they seem to have an ill-conceived notion that they are anti-war or they are people who really don't care about the war but want to look hip. Very few of them take a principled stand.
No. For being part of the "pro civil rights and anti-war party" Obama sure isn't pro either. If he didn't object to the extremely unconstitutional PATRIOT act, he isn't going to object to an internet kill switch.
But such is what you get when you vote for the RepubloCrats.
You aren't a martyr for any worthwhile cause then. If you want to look at a martyr, look a Bradley Manning.
Explain how releasing Google's source code benefits the world as a whole. It doesn't. Sure, it might be -neat- and sure, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the rest of them want the information but it doesn't benefit the world as a whole. This isn't some lifesaving cancer drug, this isn't stopping a war, this isn't deposing of a dictator. This is a search algorithm. The most it would do if released would benefit Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, etc.
He wouldn't be a martyr because this isn't a cause to make someone a martyr because releasing this isn't benefiting the world.
Um... so in other words, you are saying that if you were a (high ranking) employee at a profitable company like Google you would risk being sued, losing your job and all other job offers, simply because you think that releasing code increases "freedom of information"? Look, I can admire the people who leaked information about abuses to Wikileaks because people deserve to know where their tax dollars are going and that is the only way they can make informed choices. On the other hand though, releasing something like Google's code does really no good while putting you/your family in financial ruin.
No, copyright shouldn't be enforceable simply because it is silly to claim that something is property without having the entire reason we created property laws which is that two people can't do what they wish with the property simultaneously.
Google should certainly be able to not release the code and keep it a secret, but Google shouldn't be able to take legal action if someone reverse-engineers code, decompiles the code, if Google releases it themselves, or if someone else releases the code (Google should however, if it was an employee to sue them for breach of contract).
Get rid of copyright and patents, after all, the company who created them is most likely going to be better at understanding how to practically apply that code and would have the inbuilt competitive advantage.
Yes, a few dominant players but there are still others out there and will always continue to have others out there serving niches that aren't met by the large players. If there is a need, there will be a company to fulfill that need, no matter how small. Whenever there is a niche that needs to be filled, one of two things will happen, either a new business will start up to fulfill that niche or an existing business will, its not going to go unfulfilled for long. Name me a product that no company has stepped in to fulfill a need.
Which is why properly maintained repositories are so useful. However they are often incomplete (as in the case with Ubuntu), super-restricted (as in the case of Apple), or a mess (as in the case with Android).
Um, no, (pure) capitalism isn't the will of the majority. If capitalism was the will of the majority, there would be only one provider for everything. One car, one restaurant, etc. Rather, capitalism shows that it is possible to get a profit while not being in the majority. For example, in any medium sized town there are multiple places to eat and most of the time none of them have a majority but yet all of them are successful. If capitalism was the will of the majority, if less than 50% plus one was eating at that restaurant, it would close but yet that doesn't happen. While it is true that you need -some- people to go to your business or else it will go bankrupt, the idea that it is the "will of the majority" is laughable.
This is an interesting idea, but there are far too many flaws with it. First off is the obvious privacy issue, your phone number can easily be used to track you, plus your Gmail account, plus Google's information logging makes this a privacy nightmare. And even if you trust Google, there is still the fact that the government/*AA could get ahold of the data and frame you for crimes you didn't commit based on circumstantial evidence. Secondly is the obvious implementation problems, not everyone has a cell phone or has service 24/7.
Your post makes no sense. How is it good if our standard of living declines? Sure, perhaps you have a lot of extra cash that you really want to spend on more expensive food, clothes, electronics and other goods, but for everyone else, this isn't a good thing.
A decline in the standard of living for a country is never, ever a good thing.
Except for the fact that it is more practical in most places. If you are in a windy part of the country, of course wind farms make some sense. If you are in death valley, of course solar thermal makes sense. If you are on the east coast where there is a lot of coal, coal makes sense. But in areas that these conditions aren't true, or where there is limited area to build a wind farm or solar farm, nuclear makes a lot more sense and a lot of the opposition to nuclear power being used is based on media hype and misinformation.
The alternatives will start coming when A) we stop federal subsidies for "alternative energy" and B) when the price actually hits where it makes sense for people to transition.
All federal subsides do is delay real, marketable solutions for stuff that doesn't work in the real world. Just look at ethanol, it is completely impractical for use in the US, especially from corn, but because of all of the subsides going to it, we continued on even though it is a dead end. Perhaps if we stopped interfering with the automotive industries we might actually see a practical electric car on the market, rather than attempts to gain tax credits and subsides.
...And the democrats want to pump money into unworkable schemes to fund their "green energy" friends. Neither side is about sustainability and real progress, both sides just want to funnel as much of your tax money as possible into whatever pet projects they have that make them/their friends money.
Exactly. The safest, most efficient form of energy we have right now is nuclear energy but of course we can't have that because its nuclear! We need to focus on the here and now and the here and now is nuclear.
Because of price, features and companies who don't seem to hate their customers. Every iDevice costs quite a bit of money and isn't unlocked to work wherever. Not everyone is on AT&T or Verizon, nor can everyone afford to shell out $200 for the base model of the current generation of iPhone. The iPhone will never have a full hardware keyboard, despite the improvements made with software keyboard they will never match the accuracy and feel of a physical keyboard, anyone who wants a keyboard on their phone is going to have to get a non-iPhone. The iPad is ridiculously overpriced. I can get a decent laptop for $350 that will do more than a $500 iPad will do when it comes to actually getting stuff done, and I won't have to jump through silly hoops.
The point is, there are a ton of people who iDevices don't fit and Apple is never going to make them fit. So they are going to get their devices running Android/WebOS/etc.
But does it really matter? I mean, aside from possible phishing and spoofing attacks, it really doesn't matter that/. is.org, it could very well be.com,.net, or.tech and it would still be the same site.
But it doesn't matter. There wasn't even a DMCA takedown notice or anything with copyright infringement. This was a guy who tried to say that something was illegal simply because he couldn't compete with it.
Exactly. This is by far the silliest lawsuit I think I've heard of. You don't (and shouldn't) have the right to make money. You should have every opportunity to make money so long as you aren't harming others, but if you can't compete with what others are offering, you have no right to complain. Just because you have been making carriages all your life doesn't give you an excuse to ban the cars for losing your job.
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I think there are good arguments for giving them the power,
Such as? Despite what the media may try to represent, in real life there are few cases of "evil" people walking free because of legal protections when compared to the many people who have their constitutional rights abused because of this power. The right to expression is also followed by a right to secrecy just as the right to vote is followed by a right to secret ballot. Imagine how less free elections would be if everyone would know who and what you voted for (as ordinary citizens in elections, not as members of congress voting on bills). Just as the right to vote comes the right to be anonymous about what you vote for, so should the right to have secure and secret communication. Of course, just like you can tell everyone who you voted for, so can others hear, listen or read what you communicate, but the right to be anonymous (if one chooses) is needed to ensure a free society.
Your statements can only be true if and only if the employement is a sellers'market (there is more demand for employees than supply). Else, the situation is "You don't want to give me your FB login? Fine, the next applicant will and you won't get another interview"
While it is true that some people are willing to compromise everything for the sake of getting a job, others aren't. Barring the government fucking up the free market, there will be other employers (or people starting up their own business) looking to employ people without invading their applicant's privacy. Because of this, these employers will be favored to work for and one of two things will happen either to close the competitive advantage that the other companies have the previous company abolish their invasive practices or the workers who are unhappy at the previous company will leave and flock to the better employer, leaving the previous employer with a problem which eventually would lead to the company's demise.
Add to it that corporations are really out of hand for everything that they can control, and you'll see that soon everywhere you go will demand not only you FB login to check it but also to post praises to your employer and ask your friends to buy their products (and beware of befriending "known radicals" or visiting "non-adequate" sites). The more power they can get over you, the more power they can get. The only constraint would be the money they need to spend to control you.
Your argument only holds true in an economy where no new companies are started and no workers ever leave because of unhappiness.
If enough workers find the demands of their employers to be unreasonable, they will form their own company or leave. For example, because Atari treated their employees like crap, many of them left and formed Activision.
While there are always some who are willing to trade their souls for a job opportunity, there are others who will resist.
Your employer already has a lots of power over you. Give him more, and you'll end being your slave. What is fine for me if that only applied to idiots willing to comply with it, but soon they will think everyone is an idiot thanks to people like you.
No he doesn't. I have power over him. I have every right to leave. Sure, he will eventually find a replacement for me, but there are some skills that I have that other employees don't have that makes finding a replacement harder. While it is true that he has some power over me, if he violates what I believe is reasonable, I have the right to leave.
They shouldn't. However, they have every (and should have every) -right- to ask. That doesn't mean that it is a good idea and that employers should do it, but they should still have the right to ask, just like you have every right to work for them or not to work for them. They shouldn't have the right to sniff your password, or anything, but they should be perfectly in the clear to ask for it. Of course, you are perfectly able to refuse the request and refuse to work for that employer. With enough like minded people, it is possible to drive that business to the ground (barring government intervention). When the government fucks with the free market by increasing regulations, the people with less money always lose because they are powerless to navigate the court systems as well as a company, even when they have won a case, they still usually come out behind financially, emotionally and time wise. Also, regulation changes the natural balance of a fully free economy to one side or the other. This results in one side having more and the other side having less power which results in more legislation constantly shifting the balance while harming everyone in the process.
Just because something is a right, doesn't mean that it is always wise to exercise it.
There should be employer's rights and they should be able to ask for logins from job applicants. However, such a thing would result in less and less people wanting to work there and eventually such a company would do bankrupt if not for government intervention. However, this is a case of the government once again fucking up the free market because of overusing jails for victimless "crimes". Jails and correction officers should be reserved for crimes that harm someone and that if they were let out they would harm others. Jail is not and should not be a "time out" place. Rather, those who commit lesser crimes and harm others should be forced to pay financial restitution to the victim.
The problem with income inequality is it doesn't show the full picture. Lets say there are two countries each with equal population of 100 people, country A and country B. Lets say that all of the wealth in country A is equal to 100 gold pieces, that is spread around evenly to all 100 people where everyone has 100 gold pieces. And lets say that country B has a wealth of 300 gold pieces and 1 person has 102 gold pieces and the other 99 have 2 gold pieces each. Country A has an equal income equality but yet the people in country B are better off even though 1 person controls about 1/3rd of the country's wealth.
Exactly. I for one admire the Wisconsin governor for standing up for balanced budgets and reducing entitlements.
I disagree. People always think that it could never happen here because we are the exception to the rule. But time and time it was proven false. The real reason why the internet won't be shut down because of protests is because of a lack of real protesters. When it comes down to it, the vast, vast majority of Americans have no real principles that the odds of a successful protest starting and continuing are slim until things really start getting out of hand (hyperinflation, etc.).
After all, if you came up to a random person on the street and asked if you could do an invasive body search on you, they would decline, the more educated of them would say it was a violation of the constitutional provision to prevent unreasonable searches. But yet put that in an airport situation and the majority of them will say that its "for the greater good" and a "necessary evil" and that "if it saves one life, it is worth it".
All the government needs to do is point to some excuse and the masses as a whole will obey. Like another poster said, if you really look at anti-war protesters they are either anti-Republican and will vote for a democrat because they seem to have an ill-conceived notion that they are anti-war or they are people who really don't care about the war but want to look hip. Very few of them take a principled stand.
No. For being part of the "pro civil rights and anti-war party" Obama sure isn't pro either. If he didn't object to the extremely unconstitutional PATRIOT act, he isn't going to object to an internet kill switch.
But such is what you get when you vote for the RepubloCrats.
Exactly, especially step 1. "Cyber War" isn't a war if we simply have all truly critical things offline.
You aren't a martyr for any worthwhile cause then. If you want to look at a martyr, look a Bradley Manning.
Explain how releasing Google's source code benefits the world as a whole. It doesn't. Sure, it might be -neat- and sure, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the rest of them want the information but it doesn't benefit the world as a whole. This isn't some lifesaving cancer drug, this isn't stopping a war, this isn't deposing of a dictator. This is a search algorithm. The most it would do if released would benefit Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, etc.
He wouldn't be a martyr because this isn't a cause to make someone a martyr because releasing this isn't benefiting the world.
Um... so in other words, you are saying that if you were a (high ranking) employee at a profitable company like Google you would risk being sued, losing your job and all other job offers, simply because you think that releasing code increases "freedom of information"? Look, I can admire the people who leaked information about abuses to Wikileaks because people deserve to know where their tax dollars are going and that is the only way they can make informed choices. On the other hand though, releasing something like Google's code does really no good while putting you/your family in financial ruin.
No, copyright shouldn't be enforceable simply because it is silly to claim that something is property without having the entire reason we created property laws which is that two people can't do what they wish with the property simultaneously.
Google should certainly be able to not release the code and keep it a secret, but Google shouldn't be able to take legal action if someone reverse-engineers code, decompiles the code, if Google releases it themselves, or if someone else releases the code (Google should however, if it was an employee to sue them for breach of contract).
Get rid of copyright and patents, after all, the company who created them is most likely going to be better at understanding how to practically apply that code and would have the inbuilt competitive advantage.
Yes, a few dominant players but there are still others out there and will always continue to have others out there serving niches that aren't met by the large players. If there is a need, there will be a company to fulfill that need, no matter how small. Whenever there is a niche that needs to be filled, one of two things will happen, either a new business will start up to fulfill that niche or an existing business will, its not going to go unfulfilled for long. Name me a product that no company has stepped in to fulfill a need.
Which is why properly maintained repositories are so useful. However they are often incomplete (as in the case with Ubuntu), super-restricted (as in the case of Apple), or a mess (as in the case with Android).
Um, no, (pure) capitalism isn't the will of the majority. If capitalism was the will of the majority, there would be only one provider for everything. One car, one restaurant, etc. Rather, capitalism shows that it is possible to get a profit while not being in the majority. For example, in any medium sized town there are multiple places to eat and most of the time none of them have a majority but yet all of them are successful. If capitalism was the will of the majority, if less than 50% plus one was eating at that restaurant, it would close but yet that doesn't happen. While it is true that you need -some- people to go to your business or else it will go bankrupt, the idea that it is the "will of the majority" is laughable.
This is an interesting idea, but there are far too many flaws with it. First off is the obvious privacy issue, your phone number can easily be used to track you, plus your Gmail account, plus Google's information logging makes this a privacy nightmare. And even if you trust Google, there is still the fact that the government/*AA could get ahold of the data and frame you for crimes you didn't commit based on circumstantial evidence. Secondly is the obvious implementation problems, not everyone has a cell phone or has service 24/7.
Your post makes no sense. How is it good if our standard of living declines? Sure, perhaps you have a lot of extra cash that you really want to spend on more expensive food, clothes, electronics and other goods, but for everyone else, this isn't a good thing.
A decline in the standard of living for a country is never, ever a good thing.
Except for the fact that it is more practical in most places. If you are in a windy part of the country, of course wind farms make some sense. If you are in death valley, of course solar thermal makes sense. If you are on the east coast where there is a lot of coal, coal makes sense. But in areas that these conditions aren't true, or where there is limited area to build a wind farm or solar farm, nuclear makes a lot more sense and a lot of the opposition to nuclear power being used is based on media hype and misinformation.
The alternatives will start coming when A) we stop federal subsidies for "alternative energy" and B) when the price actually hits where it makes sense for people to transition.
All federal subsides do is delay real, marketable solutions for stuff that doesn't work in the real world. Just look at ethanol, it is completely impractical for use in the US, especially from corn, but because of all of the subsides going to it, we continued on even though it is a dead end. Perhaps if we stopped interfering with the automotive industries we might actually see a practical electric car on the market, rather than attempts to gain tax credits and subsides.
...And the democrats want to pump money into unworkable schemes to fund their "green energy" friends. Neither side is about sustainability and real progress, both sides just want to funnel as much of your tax money as possible into whatever pet projects they have that make them/their friends money.
Exactly. The safest, most efficient form of energy we have right now is nuclear energy but of course we can't have that because its nuclear! We need to focus on the here and now and the here and now is nuclear.
Because of price, features and companies who don't seem to hate their customers. Every iDevice costs quite a bit of money and isn't unlocked to work wherever. Not everyone is on AT&T or Verizon, nor can everyone afford to shell out $200 for the base model of the current generation of iPhone. The iPhone will never have a full hardware keyboard, despite the improvements made with software keyboard they will never match the accuracy and feel of a physical keyboard, anyone who wants a keyboard on their phone is going to have to get a non-iPhone. The iPad is ridiculously overpriced. I can get a decent laptop for $350 that will do more than a $500 iPad will do when it comes to actually getting stuff done, and I won't have to jump through silly hoops.
The point is, there are a ton of people who iDevices don't fit and Apple is never going to make them fit. So they are going to get their devices running Android/WebOS/etc.
But does it really matter? I mean, aside from possible phishing and spoofing attacks, it really doesn't matter that /. is .org, it could very well be .com, .net, or .tech and it would still be the same site.
But it doesn't matter. There wasn't even a DMCA takedown notice or anything with copyright infringement. This was a guy who tried to say that something was illegal simply because he couldn't compete with it.
Exactly. This is by far the silliest lawsuit I think I've heard of. You don't (and shouldn't) have the right to make money. You should have every opportunity to make money so long as you aren't harming others, but if you can't compete with what others are offering, you have no right to complain. Just because you have been making carriages all your life doesn't give you an excuse to ban the cars for losing your job.