The plantation masters. Yep - they were the economic future of America
Yep, they were entitled to slaves because they put money and effort into them
And without slavery, they had no *incentive* to grow cotton or tobacco
even better, if you freed a slave, you were stealing
and I pitty those poor fools who thought that the slave states could nicely get along with the free states.
to the plantation masters, technology ment using the cotton gyn and slaves to run bigger plantations than ever in history - yep thats what they thought the industrial revolution was about.
however, when it all hit the fan, nobody ever expected so much loss in life and property, the civil war was brutal
I would like to point out that teachers in private ( especially Catholic ) schools often earn much less then their equiv. public schools. They also tend to have class sizes that are much greater.
When I was a kid in an elementry (Catholic) school, classes averaged 40 students per teacher. Later on, I went to a boarding school (high-school) that cost about $2500/student, at the same time the state of California was spending about $3000 per student for you to send your kids to gettho high.
Both of these schools were WAY above the state average when it came to student rankings. And way below it when it came to cost/student
Public schools are not accountable to education, but politics - we should shut them down, people would better spend their own money.
Leading and working in government is not a right, it is not even a right if you do your job and play by all the rules, it is not a right even if you are backed by majority vote. The preamble of the consitiution makes it very clear that government is justified only to the extent of its ability to uphold certain basic inaliable rights.
With this programmer, the right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happyness has clearly been denied - and there seems to be little intent of restoring it. By doing this, it will obligate civil people to deny those in government any authority over them - even at the cost of personal safety and life.
America has been thru nearly 2 centuries of people dying to uphold these basic rights, esp the freedom of speech, people will simply not let be done what is trying to be done. As me a free citizen, and you (government) a public servent - I demand that you release him because you are bound to.
Society has lost millions of lives, and struggled over many centruies to get to a government whose preamlbe says "we take it to be self evident that people are endowed by their maker with certain inaliable rights". His article totally ignores the foundation of rights based history.
The question we should be addressing is not wether a rights based model is good or bad, but if rights being exercised are just rights - like slave owners who thought that they had a right to own people. This was clearly not a just right, even if they did have no incentive to grow cotton without them.
I wish people would understand that incentive is not a justification for property - maybe I have no incentive to grow oranges unless I can plant a tree in your yard and force you to water it, but that would not be a just right either. I wish people would understand that just because a government or institution calls something a property right - does not just mean that it is - either. I wish people would understnad that free markets are not about markets, but about freedom - where markets are just one of many pleasant side effects. what can I say or do to get people to get it????
if you want to know what the GPL is really about, that is it.
After all, if the govt went regulating the natural supply and demand of oranges, every free market advocate would see it for waht it is - a farce. But if they start regulating the free flow of information, and give it a fancy name like intellectual-property - then wala, it's a God given right.
(ya know, 2 million Americans died in a war partly to proove that just because a government calls something a property right, does not mean that it is, I digress)
I think we have here a which came first, the chicken or the egg question? The fact is that open-source projects can not be controlled by anyone, but everyone has a need that requires other peoples cooperation, so there is a strong pressure to unify to get maximum benefit from a limited number of developers. In a propriatory software world, the pressures are to differentiate yourself from competitors - however old style competition does not make sense in software development. In a free market society, having seperate factories for say shoes creates pressures to keep costs down for each unit and innovate - however in software that model breaks down - having seperate software development shopes developing the same code is silly because the natural cost of copying is minimal compaired to providing to people who need service or improvements on existing code bases. Let us not forget that intellectual property is not a basic property right, just because the government calls something a property does not make it so. It was never even designed to be a property right, and it's ignorance of fundameltal economics like natural limits in supply and demand (which is artifically put on information instead of services) dooms it to failure, as well as closed centralized software projects.
diamond is in the same group on the perodic table as silicon, so there is no reason why it shouldn't also be a semiconductor. this would be good because diamond is 12x times more small than silicon atoms - thus giving us at least a 12x factor in speed increase.
but diamond is also transparent, so I wander if it couldn't in some way for optical semiconducting. very exciting thought imho.
I would want to ask, why didn't you GPL PGP. In all fairness, this latest incident may have never happened to begin with if the code was GPL'd from the start. (or even if it was, it would have likely been an option that could easially be left out). Given a choice in the matter, I know I never would have used a product that implements key-escrow unless I specifically wanted and needed it.
One of the ultimate mecas of retail is to charge every customer a different price, and that price is - whatever the maximum they are willing to pay. You can see stores doing this with "customer loyality" cards too. They'll charge outrageous prices, that is, unless you use their card which will bring you down to normal levels. At that point, they carefully record all the purchases and buying habbits you make and will price and discount stuff that they figure you wouldn't have bought otherwise. They also target you heavially to fufill their dream of the ultimate marketing mecca - to be able to target every individual customer with a custom made pitch designed to lure the max in purchases out of them that they are willing to pay. It's sorta cute, but you're rather stupid if you play their game, information technology put's the power in your court - not theirs. If you're always jumping through their hoops you're never going to realize that it is they who should be jumping through your hoops. You should realize that the same technology that allows them to pigeon hole you so well, also allows you to bypass them totally and leave them out of the loop. Orginisations like "Mercata" are one example "Priceline" another, ebay another, and there are a lot of barter and exchange sites on the web where if you do it right you could get a $1000 worth of furniture, someone else could get $1000 worth of computer programming from you - so both of you got $1000 of worth that each of you didn't have before and the IRS is none the wiser. This is what the internet's all about.
Using the word piracy is just a plain lie. It should be called what it is - copying, perhaps illegal - but it's still copying. Piracy is where you board a ship, beat the hell out of people, terrorize them, and take their ship. I would hardly call this the same as ripping my favorite David Bowie song.
They've misused the term so much, it's even in the doctionary now. I don't care. I wander if they call black people niggers.
they still don't get it, int-property is dead
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if anything, Linux is a symptom that int-property can't survive the information age. people just can't seem to get it out of their head that int-property just isn't a right - it was a short term "incentive", and all the published trash and all the hollywood hype shows that it wasn't even a good one at that.
in the 1850s, 2 million Americans died to learn that just because a government calls something a property right, doesn't mean that it is a property right. Looking back we can see that it wasn't about property at all - it was about controll! I wander what it's gonna take for people to learn their lesson this time?
I don't really like patents anyhow, but if someone wants to do the research and get a patent on it - they should atleast do it with private money. My tax money paid for that research and those patents, I should at least have right to use them as freely as anyone else (not that I would, but that's half the point - they are special enough in their field to make money even without a monopoly that locks out competition)
lets say i go to the store, rack up a bill of $250 and now need to pay. I just go to my cell phone, use the encrypted uplink to $250 in an anonymous url location, give the cashier the url on the display - and wala. a totally anonymous digital transaction has taken place. it works even better for people who work under the table. they can earn money without anyone (even their employer) being able to proove how much they earn. And employers can buy their services, without anyone being able to proove that the employer broke the law. But my favorite will be when all my stocks are held by an offshore company outside the juristiction of us tax law. Each stock will be represented by a digital certificate - wich the owner can verify and trade anonymously without record or trace. Sales taxes, bye bye. Income taxes, bye bye. property taxes - yeah they're still arround, but only the properties that they can show that I own.
Any libertarian knows that property rights are defined by natural realities, not by government decree. Copyrights are a particularly bad one because they are not about property at all, but about controll. Copyrights totally ignore the fact that the limiting factor in the supply and demand equasion is individual effort - not the information they produce in itself. Copyrights totally ignore fundamentals of free market economics (eg there is no natural limit on supply and demmand). This is one reason why open-source is much more accountable to free-market economics and will eventually be much more successfull than closed source software. It's not about the source, it's about force (used to controll copyrights - that is)
oh and one more thing, polymory would make all things equal if it didn't conviently ignore one simple fact. Women can bear children, men cant. In that sense, polygamy is much more libertarian than polymory. (don't worry - it sure doesn't seem like it's gonna catch on in the bay area anytime soon.)
even with all the problems we see, people still don't get it that copyrights are inherently evil. And copyrights in any form that restricts an individual from openly copying and relling and redistributing what they please is coercive and unethical. it is us, who still grasp onto little fractions of the copyright idea that are the true sorrce of the problem.
they said that without this property right, we would have no incentive to produce the great output that we have produced they said that we put great wealth and effort into obtaining this property right, and so therefore we are entitled to it they said that the great economic wealth of america rests on this property right, but one thing must be said. slavery was still wrong - because it wasn't about property but about controll.
they said that slavery would last forever, but 2 million people died proving otherwise. yes, nobody could have possibly immagined that the consequences could be so violent, but nobody had ever experienced the war with the new technologies of the industrial revolution either. did they understand the consequences of their actions?? did people really believe enough in "those" property rights to kill for them??
if people send out informational emails to high level government officials and people loyal to the communist/facist governments and do it in a way that implies them, or others that they know as traitors to the government then chances are that they will start killing off, imprisoning, and spying on each other and leaving the regular people more alone.
Implicate government oficials as being involved in "treasonous" matters even if they're not. Not that I would take any joy in seeing people being hurt and destroyed who did no wrong. But that's the whole point, isn't it - it's better for people who oppress freedom to oppress each others freedom rather than people who wan't none of it IMHO.
look whoever you are, don't give me some sob story that you cant figure out how to take care of own room and board after having 60 years to do so. the only bull going on arround here is the thought that old people will be starving in the streets unless the government rams a bullshit retirement plan down peoples throat. if you're whiz enough to believe it, then fine go for it, but sheesh don't force me into it too. (ps I've spent thousands helping the older people in my family, even kept their house from getting repossesed once. - it would sure be easier if I didn't have this outrageous SS tax ramed down my throat - that is actually doubble than what they say it is because your employer has to match - I don't believe for a second that that doesn't come off my nickel). anyone who's been arround 60 or more years otta know better than to trust the government with your money.
one more thing, if i had an investment scheme and forced people to participate in it - that would be called running a racket and I would be thrown in jail faster than you could count to three. If I had an investment portfolio where I had new entrants pay off the interest of original investors that would be called running a ponzi scheme, and would also get me thrown in jail. But now, if I vote someone in to do it for me, and I force everyone into the plan, then oh my god it becomes a noble right that saves us all from the natural consequences of our actions. sheesh, what the hell.
1st) get rid of that damn SS number. I hate that thing, and the idea of the fed paying for my retirement makes me sick to my stomach. Even if you must insist that we need it for tax reporting (which is just as bad, but that's another story) I certainly don't need it for my movie card. for christ sake, I know they can't require it - technically speaking - by law (yeah right). but it should be illegal for them to even ask for it.
2) drivers licenses should be for driving. if it isn't about the saftey of my driving - then it should be illegal to ask for that too. and why do they need my fingerprint to proove I'm a good driver. sheesh, thankfully our fore-fathers didn't think that id-ing criminals was so more important then individual liberty. I guess that's why we have those "inconviences" like innocent untill proven guilty, and trial by jury.
3) copyrights anyone? alot of people think that copyrights are about property rights, but their not - they're about controll over markets, and any type of controll requires tracking. Nobody would ever be inconsiderate enough to put code in apache that sends your ID to a centralized microsoft server, but it's amazing how these kind of things happen with closed software.
4)fed up with the Fed. it amazes me how many americans can see that monopolies are bad, and socialisim is worse, but when it comes to our very own money system - all of a sudden the free market gets thrown out the window. I can't help thinking that one of the best ways to get financial privacy is to get the government out of the finance busisness.
5)end the war on drugs. lets just face it, as bad as drugs are - they are not as bad as alchol probition which was a direct cause of the mob, and drug prohibition today which is a direct cause of druglord violence today. These laws have been used to screw citizens out of more privacy than anything that I can think of.
6)why in the hell do i need a prescription. Have you ever noticed that countries that don't require prescriptions and all that formal paperwork about your medicine habits, that people in these contries somehow seem to survive with out the glorious intervention of the FDA. Sheesh, why do mexicans pay 1/3 for perscription drugs that americans do, without the paper work - when they come from the same factory and everything else.
1) do something about those crappy ads, a filter, perhaps like the orbs list would especially be nice. Another nice feature would be a "wipe out" option, where if I find a banner too annoying I could just click on it and get rid of it.
2) do something about those cookies, especially for the sites that don't even need one cookie, but flash you 5000000 before you can see the content. (ps I like the feature on lynx that requests once and allows the option of never accepting from that site again during the session). I really want better and easier control of my cookies other than having to manually edit the file or relink it to/dev/null. I might use ones for yahoo mail and slashdot to keep the logins, but really I don't need 500 set by MSNBC, sheesh.
3) give me easier and better font controll, i am sick and tired of sites fonting me to death with every immaginable size and shape, and color, of fonts accept for the type that are easy to read. It would sure be nice if I could highlight sections, and change the font on the fly.
4) give me some more "crap" controll. Have you ever been to a home page and waited for 50000000TB of useless "pretties" to download before you can even so much as click on a link. It would sure be nice if there was a skip-crap button that would just fill in the pretties with asthetically pleasing "blanks" and grab all the juicy content first.
5) take off the bullshit buttons. I don't know who else has netscape, but I don't need a special button on my browser telling me where to shop, or any of the other netscape propaganda - thankyou
6) give me a password and login reminder list. After having 500billion logins and passwords for every immaginable website, it would really be nice to have some simple (encrypted??) id storage file that could show me (or prompt me) for my password and login when I click a button, and even better not half to rely on those damn cookies. (if authentication methods were more standardized, you could even have it login automatically per my pre-settings - but nowdays that would probably be asking too much.
7) allow me a selective delete or select. Have you ever been to a site where you have 50 pages of refferal links and other crap before you get to the one paragraph or so of content that you were really after. It would sure be nice if I could highlight that and click on something that wipes the other crap off the page (if I find i need it later i'll bush the back button).
8) make it so I can get arround easier using the keyboard. I mean, cmon guys. I got TunnelCarpal, if I get 500 field form I don't want to half to click in each field, or continually half to move the focus from the scroll bar to the main page and back.
9) I want better screen/context controll. Have you ever had 20 or so windows open on the same page, and sorta wished they were all consolidated into one screen. or have you ever wanted to click on a link and not wipe out the page you were on (well you can do that, but it would be nice if it was more intuitive. On the same note, i just absolutely hate it when I visit a site and it shoves half a dozen useless piece of shit popups down my throat, please do something about that too. Thankyou, since I know noone's gonna listen anyhow, please feel free to moderate this down to negative infinity. David
This means WAR (literally)
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For the longest time those who believe in copyright monopolies and those who believe in hardware patent monopolies managed to get along because both are phony peoperty rights, and they didn't want to bring attention to themselves by attacking the other. But the simple fact is that patent monopoly wealth and copyright monopoly wealth are often incompatible as the stint between MS and IBM, and the problems with Apple clearly showed. But now a drastic new turn of events has happened, big patent people like IBM and ATT are turning their backs on copyrights because it is simply more profitable (eg the adoption of Linux suverely reduces software costs, and the unhibited flow of information greatly increases demand for AT&T's networks). This means that all hell will break out soon because the copyright lords have bet trillions of $$ on the assumption that copyrights are a basic property right, and the patent lords stand to loose trillions if copyright monopolies continue. Throw the huge market for embeded devices into the mix, the market pressures to have anonymous and easy to use digital cash, and we have a formula for all hell breaking loose.
Something similar happened with rail-road and factory technology just before the economic presures of plantations trying to expand and factories trying to get labor boiled over into an outright disaster. There were a lot of smart, rich, and educated people who never saw it comming then - and I doubt they will see it now, but with so much at stake it is bound to happen and there really isn't any turning back. And unfortunately in this case there is no defined north and south - if all hell breaks loose it will be much more localized and much more confusing.
The best thing to do is just to understand how bad copyrights and patents really are and aviod them whenever you can.
After millions and millions of people died, I guess the european culture decided that maybe it isn't such a good idea for peoples lives to always be transparent to the government. Funy thing is that the germans considered themselves to be the most civalized, educated, and mature society in the world. These were smart people who elected Hitler as a democratic leader. The USA is very arrogant to assume that their immune from government (or corporate america it seems now days) from raging out of controll. I hope we never pay such a bitter price.
I totally agree, our worst enemy has gone from being the soviet union to being ourselves. Copyrights are a more effective tool for censorship and controll of information than anything the soviet union ever came up with. It not only "fines" people who try to dissapate usefull information, but also disproportionately rewards people who produce a lot of noise and hype. (hollywood)
I think if people here in the states work to maximize their own personal liberties, that that in itself will create economic and political pressures for china to get with it or get out. Don't get me wrong. I despize what they're doing, and I think that the consequences are deadly, but we certinly can't help the people of china if we can't help ourselves.
As I was reading this and seeing how these people came to the same intellectual conclusions using totally different creativity, knowledge bases, and independent thinking. It becomes obvious that something like the concept of IP is completely unworkable because people will undoubtedly approach similar technologies from different paths.
There is really no way IP could be an incentive to creators, but it can do plenty to inhibit them from applying the labor of their work without fear of penalty.
The main reason why standard processes go so badly is the whole array of companies who have copyrights and patents and are trying to position themselves to be at a competitive advantage. Without these, there is plenty of motive to comply to common standards and to create rational new ones as the need arrises. You only see the standards problems between closed software and hardware vendors. Communities like the Linux community have a much better agreement about standards.
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The plantation masters. Yep - they were the economic future of America
Yep, they were entitled to slaves because they put money and effort into them
And without slavery, they had no *incentive* to grow cotton or tobacco
even better, if you freed a slave, you were stealing
and I pitty those poor fools who thought that the slave states could nicely get along with the free states.
to the plantation masters, technology ment using the cotton gyn and slaves to run bigger plantations than ever in history - yep thats what they thought the industrial revolution was about.
however, when it all hit the fan, nobody ever expected so much loss in life and property, the civil war was brutal
I would like to point out that teachers in private ( especially Catholic ) schools often earn much less then their equiv. public schools. They also tend to have class sizes that are much greater.
When I was a kid in an elementry (Catholic) school, classes averaged 40 students per teacher. Later on, I went to a boarding school (high-school) that cost about $2500/student, at the same time the state of California was spending about $3000 per student for you to send your kids to gettho high.
Both of these schools were WAY above the state average when it came to student rankings. And way below it when it came to cost/student
Public schools are not accountable to education, but politics - we should shut them down, people would better spend their own money.
Leading and working in government is not a right, it is not even a right if you do your job and play by all the rules, it is not a right even if you are backed by majority vote. The preamble of the consitiution makes it very clear that government is justified only to the extent of its ability to uphold certain basic inaliable rights.
With this programmer, the right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happyness has clearly been denied - and there seems to be little intent of restoring it. By doing this, it will obligate civil people to deny those in government any authority over them - even at the cost of personal safety and life.
America has been thru nearly 2 centuries of people dying to uphold these basic rights, esp the freedom of speech, people will simply not let be done what is trying to be done. As me a free citizen, and you (government) a public servent - I demand that you release him because you are bound to.
Society has lost millions of lives, and struggled over many centruies to get to a government whose preamlbe says "we take it to be self evident that people are endowed by their maker with certain inaliable rights". His article totally ignores the foundation of rights based history.
The question we should be addressing is not wether a rights based model is good or bad, but if rights being exercised are just rights - like slave owners who thought that they had a right to own people. This was clearly not a just right, even if they did have no incentive to grow cotton without them.
I wish people would understand that incentive is not a justification for property - maybe I have no incentive to grow oranges unless I can plant a tree in your yard and force you to water it, but that would not be a just right either. I wish people would understand that just because a government or institution calls something a property right - does not just mean that it is - either. I wish people would understnad that free markets are not about markets, but about freedom - where markets are just one of many pleasant side effects. what can I say or do to get people to get it????
After all, if the govt went regulating the natural supply and demand of oranges, every free market advocate would see it for waht it is - a farce. But if they start regulating the free flow of information, and give it a fancy name like intellectual-property - then wala, it's a God given right.
(ya know, 2 million Americans died in a war partly to proove that just because a government calls something a property right, does not mean that it is, I digress)
I think we have here a which came first, the chicken or the egg question?
The fact is that open-source projects can not be controlled by anyone, but everyone has a need that requires other peoples cooperation, so there is a strong pressure to unify to get maximum benefit from a limited number of developers. In a propriatory software world, the pressures are to differentiate yourself from competitors - however old style competition does not make sense in software development.
In a free market society, having seperate factories for say shoes creates pressures to keep costs down for each unit and innovate - however in software that model breaks down - having seperate software development shopes developing the same code is silly because the natural cost of copying is minimal compaired to providing to people who need service or improvements on existing code bases.
Let us not forget that intellectual property is not a basic property right, just because the government calls something a property does not make it so. It was never even designed to be a property right, and it's ignorance of fundameltal economics like natural limits in supply and demand (which is artifically put on information instead of services) dooms it to failure, as well as closed centralized software projects.
but diamond is also transparent, so I wander if it couldn't in some way for optical semiconducting. very exciting thought imho.
I would want to ask, why didn't you GPL PGP. In all fairness, this latest incident may have never happened to begin with if the code was GPL'd from the start. (or even if it was, it would have likely been an option that could easially be left out). Given a choice in the matter, I know I never would have used a product that implements key-escrow unless I specifically wanted and needed it.
One of the ultimate mecas of retail is to charge every customer a different price, and that price is - whatever the maximum they are willing to pay. You can see stores doing this with "customer loyality" cards too. They'll charge outrageous prices, that is, unless you use their card which will bring you down to normal levels. At that point, they carefully record all the purchases and buying habbits you make and will price and discount stuff that they figure you wouldn't have bought otherwise. They also target you heavially to fufill their dream of the ultimate marketing mecca - to be able to target every individual customer with a custom made pitch designed to lure the max in purchases out of them that they are willing to pay. It's sorta cute, but you're rather stupid if you play their game, information technology put's the power in your court - not theirs. If you're always jumping through their hoops you're never going to realize that it is they who should be jumping through your hoops. You should realize that the same technology that allows them to pigeon hole you so well, also allows you to bypass them totally and leave them out of the loop. Orginisations like "Mercata" are one example "Priceline" another, ebay another, and there are a lot of barter and exchange sites on the web where if you do it right you could get a $1000 worth of furniture, someone else could get $1000 worth of computer programming from you - so both of you got $1000 of worth that each of you didn't have before and the IRS is none the wiser. This is what the internet's all about.
They've misused the term so much, it's even in the doctionary now. I don't care. I wander if they call black people niggers.
in the 1850s, 2 million Americans died to learn that just because a government calls something a property right, doesn't mean that it is a property right. Looking back we can see that it wasn't about property at all - it was about controll! I wander what it's gonna take for people to learn their lesson this time?
I don't really like patents anyhow, but if someone wants to do the research and get a patent on it - they should atleast do it with private money. My tax money paid for that research and those patents, I should at least have right to use them as freely as anyone else (not that I would, but that's half the point - they are special enough in their field to make money even without a monopoly that locks out competition)
lets say i go to the store, rack up a bill of $250 and now need to pay. I just go to my cell phone, use the encrypted uplink to $250 in an anonymous url location, give the cashier the url on the display - and wala. a totally anonymous digital transaction has taken place. it works even better for people who work under the table. they can earn money without anyone (even their employer) being able to proove how much they earn. And employers can buy their services, without anyone being able to proove that the employer broke the law. But my favorite will be when all my stocks are held by an offshore company outside the juristiction of us tax law. Each stock will be represented by a digital certificate - wich the owner can verify and trade anonymously without record or trace. Sales taxes, bye bye. Income taxes, bye bye. property taxes - yeah they're still arround, but only the properties that they can show that I own.
oh and one more thing, polymory would make all things equal if it didn't conviently ignore one simple fact. Women can bear children, men cant. In that sense, polygamy is much more libertarian than polymory. (don't worry - it sure doesn't seem like it's gonna catch on in the bay area anytime soon.)
even with all the problems we see, people still don't get it that copyrights are inherently evil. And copyrights in any form that restricts an individual from openly copying and relling and redistributing what they please is coercive and unethical. it is us, who still grasp onto little fractions of the copyright idea that are the true sorrce of the problem.
they said that without this property right, we would have no incentive to produce the great output that we have produced
they said that we put great wealth and effort into obtaining this property right, and so therefore we are entitled to it
they said that the great economic wealth of america rests on this property right,
but one thing must be said. slavery was still wrong - because it wasn't about property but about controll.
they said that slavery would last forever, but 2 million people died proving otherwise.
yes, nobody could have possibly immagined that the consequences could be so violent, but nobody had ever experienced the war with the new technologies of the industrial revolution either.
did they understand the consequences of their actions??
did people really believe enough in "those" property rights to kill for them??
Implicate government oficials as being involved in "treasonous" matters even if they're not. Not that I would take any joy in seeing people being hurt and destroyed who did no wrong. But that's the whole point, isn't it - it's better for people who oppress freedom to oppress each others freedom rather than people who wan't none of it IMHO.
one more thing, if i had an investment scheme and forced people to participate in it - that would be called running a racket and I would be thrown in jail faster than you could count to three. If I had an investment portfolio where I had new entrants pay off the interest of original investors that would be called running a ponzi scheme, and would also get me thrown in jail. But now, if I vote someone in to do it for me, and I force everyone into the plan, then oh my god it becomes a noble right that saves us all from the natural consequences of our actions. sheesh, what the hell.
1st) get rid of that damn SS number. I hate that thing, and the idea of the fed paying for my retirement makes me sick to my stomach. Even if you must insist that we need it for tax reporting (which is just as bad, but that's another story) I certainly don't need it for my movie card. for christ sake, I know they can't require it - technically speaking - by law (yeah right). but it should be illegal for them to even ask for it.
2) drivers licenses should be for driving. if it isn't about the saftey of my driving - then it should be illegal to ask for that too. and why do they need my fingerprint to proove I'm a good driver. sheesh, thankfully our fore-fathers didn't think that id-ing criminals was so more important then individual liberty. I guess that's why we have those "inconviences" like innocent untill proven guilty, and trial by jury.
3) copyrights anyone? alot of people think that copyrights are about property rights, but their not - they're about controll over markets, and any type of controll requires tracking. Nobody would ever be inconsiderate enough to put code in apache that sends your ID to a centralized microsoft server, but it's amazing how these kind of things happen with closed software.
4)fed up with the Fed. it amazes me how many americans can see that monopolies are bad, and socialisim is worse, but when it comes to our very own money system - all of a sudden the free market gets thrown out the window. I can't help thinking that one of the best ways to get financial privacy is to get the government out of the finance busisness.
5)end the war on drugs. lets just face it, as bad as drugs are - they are not as bad as alchol probition which was a direct cause of the mob, and drug prohibition today which is a direct cause of druglord violence today. These laws have been used to screw citizens out of more privacy than anything that I can think of.
6)why in the hell do i need a prescription. Have you ever noticed that countries that don't require prescriptions and all that formal paperwork about your medicine habits, that people in these contries somehow seem to survive with out the glorious intervention of the FDA. Sheesh, why do mexicans pay 1/3 for perscription drugs that americans do, without the paper work - when they come from the same factory and everything else.
While you're at it, add some features.
/dev/null. I might use ones for yahoo mail and slashdot to keep the logins, but really I don't need 500 set by MSNBC, sheesh.
1) do something about those crappy ads, a filter, perhaps like the orbs list would especially be nice. Another nice feature would be a "wipe out" option, where if I find a banner too annoying I could just click on it and get rid of it.
2) do something about those cookies, especially for the sites that don't even need one cookie, but flash you 5000000 before you can see the content. (ps I like the feature on lynx that requests once and allows the option of never accepting from that site again during the session). I really want better and easier control of my cookies other than having to manually edit the file or relink it to
3) give me easier and better font controll, i am sick and tired of sites fonting me to death with every immaginable size and shape, and color, of fonts accept for the type that are easy to read. It would sure be nice if I could highlight sections, and change the font on the fly.
4) give me some more "crap" controll. Have you ever been to a home page and waited for 50000000TB of useless "pretties" to download before you can even so much as click on a link. It would sure be nice if there was a skip-crap button that would just fill in the pretties with asthetically pleasing "blanks" and grab all the juicy content first.
5) take off the bullshit buttons. I don't know who else has netscape, but I don't need a special button on my browser telling me where to shop, or any of the other netscape propaganda - thankyou
6) give me a password and login reminder list. After having 500billion logins and passwords for every immaginable website, it would really be nice to have some simple (encrypted??) id storage file that could show me (or prompt me) for my password and login when I click a button, and even better not half to rely on those damn cookies. (if authentication methods were more standardized, you could even have it login automatically per my pre-settings - but nowdays that would probably be asking too much.
7) allow me a selective delete or select. Have you ever been to a site where you have 50 pages of refferal links and other crap before you get to the one paragraph or so of content that you were really after. It would sure be nice if I could highlight that and click on something that wipes the other crap off the page (if I find i need it later i'll bush the back button).
8) make it so I can get arround easier using the keyboard. I mean, cmon guys. I got TunnelCarpal, if I get 500 field form I don't want to half to click in each field, or continually half to move the focus from the scroll bar to the main page and back.
9) I want better screen/context controll. Have you ever had 20 or so windows open on the same page, and sorta wished they were all consolidated into one screen. or have you ever wanted to click on a link and not wipe out the page you were on (well you can do that, but it would be nice if it was more intuitive. On the same note, i just absolutely hate it when I visit a site and it shoves half a dozen useless piece of shit popups down my throat, please do something about that too. Thankyou, since I know noone's gonna listen anyhow, please feel free to moderate this down to negative infinity.
David
Something similar happened with rail-road and factory technology just before the economic presures of plantations trying to expand and factories trying to get labor boiled over into an outright disaster. There were a lot of smart, rich, and educated people who never saw it comming then - and I doubt they will see it now, but with so much at stake it is bound to happen and there really isn't any turning back. And unfortunately in this case there is no defined north and south - if all hell breaks loose it will be much more localized and much more confusing.
The best thing to do is just to understand how bad copyrights and patents really are and aviod them whenever you can.
After millions and millions of people died, I guess the european culture decided that maybe it isn't such a good idea for peoples lives to always be transparent to the government. Funy thing is that the germans considered themselves to be the most civalized, educated, and mature society in the world. These were smart people who elected Hitler as a democratic leader. The USA is very arrogant to assume that their immune from government (or corporate america it seems now days) from raging out of controll. I hope we never pay such a bitter price.
I totally agree, our worst enemy has gone from being the soviet union to being ourselves. Copyrights are a more effective tool for censorship and controll of information than anything the soviet union ever came up with. It not only "fines" people who try to dissapate usefull information, but also disproportionately rewards people who produce a lot of noise and hype. (hollywood)
I think if people here in the states work to maximize their own personal liberties, that that in itself will create economic and political pressures for china to get with it or get out. Don't get me wrong. I despize what they're doing, and I think that the consequences are deadly, but we certinly can't help the people of china if we can't help ourselves.
As I was reading this and seeing how these people came to the same intellectual conclusions using totally different creativity, knowledge bases, and independent thinking. It becomes obvious that something like the concept of IP is completely unworkable because people will undoubtedly approach similar technologies from different paths.
There is really no way IP could be an incentive to creators, but it can do plenty to inhibit them from applying the labor of their work without fear of penalty.
The main reason why standard processes go so badly is the whole array of companies who have copyrights and patents and are trying to position themselves to be at a competitive advantage. Without these, there is plenty of motive to comply to common standards and to create rational new ones as the need arrises. You only see the standards problems between closed software and hardware vendors. Communities like the Linux community have a much better agreement about standards.