No! This is win-win for TPB. If they win the case they get to publically point out the hypocracy of the anti-piracy lobby, as well as solidly discredit their 'expertise' (as pointed out by engeekner below). If they lose, presumably because of fair use/parody being used as a defense, they have a precedent set that is actually supportive of their larger goals, i.e. that parody and fair use are applicable defences in cases of copyright infringement. The only other ways it could go are, in the worst case the case is thrown out, and TPB get to say "We aren't even given fair access to the justice system anymore", or they lose because the situation isn't considered infringement, i.e. that their claims are false. If this is the case, then there's a precedent that a direct digital copy does not constitute infrigment.
I disagree! A year after graduating high school, most people can't do basic arithmetic nearly as proficiently as they did when in school. You get rusty at those skills real fast if you're not using them daily. As for trigonometry, basic calculus and stuff you may have had less than a year learning (Maths until final year was compulsory in my school) that's even worse.
You are wrong in that it never existed, but it sure hasn't in quite some time. I'm pretty sure people 10,000 years ago were pretty "free market".
No! I'm pretty sure that 10,000 years ago, one over sized caveman intimidated better prices out of one nerdy caveman. Without the protection, and thus regulation, of law there can't be a free market
The point here is to reform the system so that there is a regulated priority of payouts. As a company grows and becomes "too big to fail", it comes under increasing regulation regarding distribution and liquidation. First step: employees are retrenched with a minimum of 2 years cost to company payout before any other debts or bonuses are paid. Executives get paid last and receive no bonuses, incentives, increases to salary, exceptional payouts, or other weasle word names for bonuses. Second Step: creditor clients get paid before shareholders/other debtors. (maybe make this first in the case of financial institutions). Third step: increase minimum asset/cash reserves required to cover one and two accordingly. Basically the idea is that as a company grows to become single point of failure in an economy it is forced to become more secure/less risky, and less profitable. Shares price will fall as new regulations get introduced, because higher profit from higher risk becomes less faesible, generally making the idea of profiteering off an attitude of 'fuck you: you can't take me down down because I have the entire economy by the goolies!" unworkable. It extends the idea of laws against monopolies beyond anti-trust and raqueteering, and also addresses the industry wide abuses rather than single company abuses.
Indeed! Only 150 requests compared to 500,000 memebership within 14 hours of going live. Clearly this site exists substantially for piracy purposes, after all 0.003% of users (assuming those requests each targeted a unique user) are known infiringers!
(By contrast, in the peer-to-peer proxying model outlined above, every new downloader can also be made to act as a proxy for other users, so additional users don't slow down the system because they contribute as much as they take out of it.)
I know we're about 10 years beind the times here (South Africa) but most people here are on ADSL (max 20mbit, mode 2Mbit). While the speeds may be higher elsewhere in the world, it seems from other similar discussions that ADSL or Async cable is still the primary method of connection. So the quote above isn't true, every downloader is contributing only as much upload bandwidth as they have, which is a lot less than their download bandwidth, unless the protocol allows a difference in proportion, e.g. 1kb up gives you credit for 10kb down; either that, or its one-for-one, but that means your download speed is effectively limited to your upload speed.
Assuming there's advertising revenue involved in the views as well, artificially inflating your count would constitute fraud wouldn't it. No need for a shareholder complaint.
Actually, if I go into my local Incredible Connection (a local computer retail chain in South Africa, more fondly called the the terrible infection, incredible decption etc) and buy a brand new laptop with windows and ask about support I get told pretty much exactly the same thing. If want windows support in this country, it costs me roughly $20 an hour extra, more if I want to phone microsofts support line directly because it's an international phone call for me. Sorry, support costs no matter the operating system. If your complaint is about being told to go somewhere else and pay for it, instead of the strore at which you bought it, then again I have to say there are a ton of retail stores that don't offer desktop support (only hardware repairs) too.
I'd actually expand this idea. If you pay for the medical service, that information is commsioned work and you own the copyright on it (yeah, yeah, can't copyright facts), but I'm saying the principle should apply in this case too. You pay for the device, you pay for the service, you comission the information... It's not their's to do with as they please, it's yours!
Maybe there should be a law that follows on the the old Chinese(?) proverb, "Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, thrice is enemy action", a three strikes law for coporations/businesses. You take the company to small claims court once, win. They try it again next month, you go again and win. If they try the same thing (in general) a third time, you get the right as an individual to large damages (Thousands of dollars) damages and the right to publicise your win. Also, since a third strike judgement has been made against the company, anyone else with the same complaint can come forward to any small claims court in the country and also receive large damages on their second strike case. I know that class action suits are also preferred by the courts because they consolidate many smaller cases into a single big one, thereby using less resources. Once a company has had its third strike it's liable to start defending against claims in court which would bog the system down... I'm open to idead on how to fix this. I'd say that once the company has lost a certain number of second strike cases, all new cases get lumped into a class action, regardless of language of contract, i.e. making the right to join a class action suit inalienable. The flip side is that a class action suit cannot be started until the company loses a third strike case and multiple second strike cases (say 15 or so), assuming the amounts are small enough for it to fall within the jurisdiction of the small claims court. If the amounts are large enough (I'm thinking smallish class actions of maybe 30~100 people where the damages amount to several thousand dollars or more each) then class action should always be an option.
One counter argument to this might be that companies could make damned sure they never screw the same person three times. But since in most cases the screwing is automated, they'll probably end up paying more trying to keep track of can still be screwed that it won't be worth their while. Also, if they do keep track of this, it clearly demonstrates *intent*.
Basically the idea is that systematic abuse/infraction must be established. There is an incentive to the little guy to go in to court and fight small abuses, because of the reasonable personal payoff on the third strike, which will make the non-defense of a claim costly to the company. This incentive is removed as the number of cases increases enough to force a class action suit. Also, if it really is a once off infraction, the company doesn't get nailed for something it didn't do. And finally, lawyers can't start frivilous class action suits.
Well, they probably can, they ALWAYS find a way...
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record. No need to bana anonymous numbers or anything quite so drastic. Instead, set up a system where if you are robocalled, you can call a number at the FTC and give them your number, and the time you were robocalled, and permission to request your phone records for that number for that time +/- 5 minutes. Given such information, the FTC should be given streamlined acces to warrants to access the phone company(-ies) involved records to identify the calling number, the legal entity billed, and then issue a HEFTY fine of say 10% of that legal entities net worth... The legal mechanisms are already in place, someone just needs to get off their ass and use them. To be fair, they may need some tweaking so it isn't too diffcult to do.
A lot depends on what one views as an effective long term crime prevention strategy.
First there's the top down approach. Assuming that the majority of the worst criminal activity is perpetrated by experieced life long criminals (think ring leaders, organised crime, career criminals etc) then it stands to reason you want to target those individuals for arrest and incarceration. Yes, there are outliers; nutjobs going on shooting sprees, crimes of passion, serial killers, and the odd person who comes up with a scam that works, etc. The problem is, removing the head does't always help. Someone else might step up, or removing the head might cause more chaos, criminal organisation to split into competing units, etc.
Then there's the bottom up apporach, which is focusing on 'small' crimes according to the theory this increases the preception of the risk of being caught, thus ultimately preventing crimes from being commited, as opposed to catching criminals after the act. Of course there are always going to be those people who are going to ignore the preceived risk, or even see past the charade. And this approach doesn't address organised crime and/or career criminals very well.
As far as mandatory tagging of vehicles is concerned, this very much fits in with the bottom up approach. It's not intended to make it harder for (semi-)professional car thieves to work. But it will increase the barrier of entry into the car thief profession, assuming it takes some skill and practice to get around the tagging system. And of course assuming that dumb-user devices that do the job for you don't become readily available, a la backdoor software packages for script kiddies. In general the bottom up approach also has the long term effect of reducing the size of the criminal labour pool, over a period of decades.
That said, bottom up approaches tend to affect law abiding citizens disproportionately when tecnology comes into play. Having a police force focus on jay-walking, drunk and disorderly, and disturbing the peace charges is different from implementing a system monitors widely and throughly. The first still works on the presumption of innocence; you have to commit the offence before the cop targets you. The second means information is collected prior the any crime being commited, the exact opposite: "We're collecting eveidence against you in case you commit a crime"
Benjamin Franklin said it best: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
It's not about turning Linux into a crappy OS. The windows 'shell' or GUI isn't all that bad but the underlying OS is appaling to work. It's still rooted in DOS, maybe DOS+multitasking. To be clear I'd lump filesystem design and management, device management, process management and networking into the OS. There's no reason you couldn't put a good_as_windows_clone (even better_than_windows_clone) graphical shell on top of a linux OS. This wouldn't make linux as crappy. Now, it's fair to say that most people aren't going to make this distinction between OS and shell, but if you're not making the distinction then you probably don't have a concept of a crappy OS, you just "don't like it".
It occurs to me, that if enough people actually did this, it would start affecting the US economy negatively. So don't do this quietly. Do it, and advertise why you are doing it. Who knows, maybe someone will listen eventually.
There is nothing (apart from cost and practicality) stopping other vendors/distros/organisations from negotiating with hardware manufacturers to have their keys pre-installed, but consider this. Microsoft's action are restraining trade. Microsoft is using their dominant market market position to have hardware manufacturers ship with UEFI enabled by default, with microsoft keys enabled by default. They are saying to the manufacturers, if you want to label your hardware windows complaint you must do X, where X affects other vendors by making their product more difficult to use. Microsoft doesn't need to pay for this 'service' from the manufacturers, the manufacturers are forced to comply in oder to sell their products (because of window's dominant market share). Isn't this is already anti-trust, but against the manufacturers. Other vendors who don't have the market share have two choices:
Don't use secure boot, and provide instructions for user's to disable secure-boot, and re-enable it in the case of dual booting. And before anyone shouts boohoo, it only affects a bunch of hobbyist geeks with home servers, think of the industry/corporate servers that would very much benefit from being able to market secure-boot. This option is abusive because it makes Microsoft's products appear siginificantly better, essentially preventing other vendors from effectively and practically providing the same STANDARDS COMPLIANT feature
Approach the manufacturers and ask for their own keys to be included on the firmware, but without the market dominance factor, they will probably be asked to pay. There's nothing wrong with being forced to pay I guess, but the amount shouldn't be ludicrous. Also, opening up the firmware to keys from anyone who is willing to pay kind of defeats the point. Hardware manufacturers should only be shipping firmware with bona fide keys. Who decides keys are bona fides? There's a tricky question. UEFI appears to support the idea of trust agility, in that users can add or remove keys from the system, but practically, we'll end up in the same situation as we are in now. Geeks and pros haves secure machines, end users have security holes in the firware cause some mob organisation ponies up for a key becasue there's profit in it. Otherwise, if you want a central authority to decide which keys are 'secure', then it's a slippery slope. Who is big enough to warrant a free key. Smaller distros and research OS's lose out, effectively killing competition.
Both options sound like anti-trust to me. In my mind it would be better for manufacturers to ship with NO keys, and if you want to install an OS, then the OS installation instructions just have to include the extra step explaining what needs to be done. Again, for Joe Schmo who buys his whole PC retail, this doesn't affect him, because some IT guy in a backroom does the installation. The machine comes with one key, for whatever OS Joe wants installed. Practically speaking, this means that everyone will preinstall windows whether or not the customer wants it, same as now. Nothing would stop larger or smaller *nix distro users from installing the approriate keys. Microsoft's advantage would be that the retail industry does work for them for free, same as now. I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's not a catastrophe. Microsoft pays for this advantage in a way, through marketing, lobbying, etc.
Cananonical and red hat could negotiate similar advantages directly for example with dell/hp/best-buy... it's probably not worth their while.
Yeah, the basic premise here is to store the key in muscle memory, which is a fantastic idea. It's difficult to forget (not impossible, but difficult) and near impossible to extract without the owner's knowledge and permission; An attacker might be able to induce finger tapping but capturing it and recording it will be extremely difficult. Also, it comes with an indirect from of biometric identification, because even if an attacker somehow manages to extract the correct key, the input mechanism can presumably pick out the pattern of entry far more precisely than an attacker could mimic without a hell of a lot of training. I'm still not sure about playing a game every time I want to log in to something, but as a access to an encrypted volume or a key ring at the beginning of my day... makes sense.
Your arguments assumes that drugs are elastic goods, and that 'providing' for a person implies that is a good thing and they need the drug. Health products are not elastic goods; People will pay for them at whatever price they can afford when they need them. There is no point (from the consumer's point of view) in marketing a drug because if a person needs a drug, it will be prescribed to them. If a person doesn't need a drug, why should they be encouraged to buy it. Obviously some drugs (vitamins, viagra, smart drugs, narcotics) are elastic goods, in that they are not necessary, but are pleasant to use. Viagra is a good example here. It made pfizer a ton of money, and there's nothing wrong with that. Any public monet spent researching the drug was for health cocerns completely unrelated to the eventual use of the drug. Pfizer saw an opportunity and ran with it. That's a good example of how pharmaceutical companies can and should make money, and be allowed to patent their products. But when the research that goes intoa product is publically funded and the product developed leads directly out of that research, then no pharmaceuticals shouldn't get to patent. The funding government should get the patent and license it to pharmaceutical companies. There's nothing wrong with a big pharma company that helped in the research licensing the patent exclusively for say 5 years, but the government still gets a cut, which should then be fed back into research, or used to subsidize costs if the drug is expensive or... or... or. There are plenty of ways to make this work for the taxpayers.
No, socialists don't mistrust individuals thinking for themselves. They distrust individuals ACTING for themselves unchecked, and binding together to anonymise and abbrogate individual responsibility for collective action, usually in guise of practising business. I might trust a man with my life, but never a businessman. I like my life even when it isn't profitable for someone else, and I don't see why it has be proftiable to someone else at all.
Slashdot Mirror
No! This is win-win for TPB. If they win the case they get to publically point out the hypocracy of the anti-piracy lobby, as well as solidly discredit their 'expertise' (as pointed out by engeekner below). If they lose, presumably because of fair use/parody being used as a defense, they have a precedent set that is actually supportive of their larger goals, i.e. that parody and fair use are applicable defences in cases of copyright infringement. The only other ways it could go are, in the worst case the case is thrown out, and TPB get to say "We aren't even given fair access to the justice system anymore", or they lose because the situation isn't considered infringement, i.e. that their claims are false. If this is the case, then there's a precedent that a direct digital copy does not constitute infrigment.
I disagree! A year after graduating high school, most people can't do basic arithmetic nearly as proficiently as they did when in school. You get rusty at those skills real fast if you're not using them daily. As for trigonometry, basic calculus and stuff you may have had less than a year learning (Maths until final year was compulsory in my school) that's even worse.
You are wrong in that it never existed, but it sure hasn't in quite some time. I'm pretty sure people 10,000 years ago were pretty "free market".
No! I'm pretty sure that 10,000 years ago, one over sized caveman intimidated better prices out of one nerdy caveman. Without the protection, and thus regulation, of law there can't be a free market
The point here is to reform the system so that there is a regulated priority of payouts. As a company grows and becomes "too big to fail", it comes under increasing regulation regarding distribution and liquidation. First step: employees are retrenched with a minimum of 2 years cost to company payout before any other debts or bonuses are paid. Executives get paid last and receive no bonuses, incentives, increases to salary, exceptional payouts, or other weasle word names for bonuses. Second Step: creditor clients get paid before shareholders/other debtors. (maybe make this first in the case of financial institutions). Third step: increase minimum asset/cash reserves required to cover one and two accordingly. Basically the idea is that as a company grows to become single point of failure in an economy it is forced to become more secure/less risky, and less profitable. Shares price will fall as new regulations get introduced, because higher profit from higher risk becomes less faesible, generally making the idea of profiteering off an attitude of 'fuck you: you can't take me down down because I have the entire economy by the goolies!" unworkable. It extends the idea of laws against monopolies beyond anti-trust and raqueteering, and also addresses the industry wide abuses rather than single company abuses.
Indeed! Only 150 requests compared to 500,000 memebership within 14 hours of going live. Clearly this site exists substantially for piracy purposes, after all 0.003% of users (assuming those requests each targeted a unique user) are known infiringers!
I know we're about 10 years beind the times here (South Africa) but most people here are on ADSL (max 20mbit, mode 2Mbit). While the speeds may be higher elsewhere in the world, it seems from other similar discussions that ADSL or Async cable is still the primary method of connection. So the quote above isn't true, every downloader is contributing only as much upload bandwidth as they have, which is a lot less than their download bandwidth, unless the protocol allows a difference in proportion, e.g. 1kb up gives you credit for 10kb down; either that, or its one-for-one, but that means your download speed is effectively limited to your upload speed.
Assuming there's advertising revenue involved in the views as well, artificially inflating your count would constitute fraud wouldn't it. No need for a shareholder complaint.
Actually, if I go into my local Incredible Connection (a local computer retail chain in South Africa, more fondly called the the terrible infection, incredible decption etc) and buy a brand new laptop with windows and ask about support I get told pretty much exactly the same thing. If want windows support in this country, it costs me roughly $20 an hour extra, more if I want to phone microsofts support line directly because it's an international phone call for me. Sorry, support costs no matter the operating system. If your complaint is about being told to go somewhere else and pay for it, instead of the strore at which you bought it, then again I have to say there are a ton of retail stores that don't offer desktop support (only hardware repairs) too.
You see this as a problem ... I see this as an opportunity!
I'm all for turning my local politicians into clothes... I've always wanted to skin them ... prefereably alive, but I'm not picky ;)
I'd actually expand this idea. If you pay for the medical service, that information is commsioned work and you own the copyright on it (yeah, yeah, can't copyright facts), but I'm saying the principle should apply in this case too. You pay for the device, you pay for the service, you comission the information... It's not their's to do with as they please, it's yours!
Maybe there should be a law that follows on the the old Chinese(?) proverb, "Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, thrice is enemy action", a three strikes law for coporations/businesses. You take the company to small claims court once, win. They try it again next month, you go again and win. If they try the same thing (in general) a third time, you get the right as an individual to large damages (Thousands of dollars) damages and the right to publicise your win. Also, since a third strike judgement has been made against the company, anyone else with the same complaint can come forward to any small claims court in the country and also receive large damages on their second strike case. I know that class action suits are also preferred by the courts because they consolidate many smaller cases into a single big one, thereby using less resources. Once a company has had its third strike it's liable to start defending against claims in court which would bog the system down... I'm open to idead on how to fix this. I'd say that once the company has lost a certain number of second strike cases, all new cases get lumped into a class action, regardless of language of contract, i.e. making the right to join a class action suit inalienable. The flip side is that a class action suit cannot be started until the company loses a third strike case and multiple second strike cases (say 15 or so), assuming the amounts are small enough for it to fall within the jurisdiction of the small claims court. If the amounts are large enough (I'm thinking smallish class actions of maybe 30~100 people where the damages amount to several thousand dollars or more each) then class action should always be an option.
One counter argument to this might be that companies could make damned sure they never screw the same person three times. But since in most cases the screwing is automated, they'll probably end up paying more trying to keep track of can still be screwed that it won't be worth their while. Also, if they do keep track of this, it clearly demonstrates *intent*.
Basically the idea is that systematic abuse/infraction must be established. There is an incentive to the little guy to go in to court and fight small abuses, because of the reasonable personal payoff on the third strike, which will make the non-defense of a claim costly to the company. This incentive is removed as the number of cases increases enough to force a class action suit. Also, if it really is a once off infraction, the company doesn't get nailed for something it didn't do. And finally, lawyers can't start frivilous class action suits.
Well, they probably can, they ALWAYS find a way...
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record. No need to bana anonymous numbers or anything quite so drastic. Instead, set up a system where if you are robocalled, you can call a number at the FTC and give them your number, and the time you were robocalled, and permission to request your phone records for that number for that time +/- 5 minutes. Given such information, the FTC should be given streamlined acces to warrants to access the phone company(-ies) involved records to identify the calling number, the legal entity billed, and then issue a HEFTY fine of say 10% of that legal entities net worth... The legal mechanisms are already in place, someone just needs to get off their ass and use them. To be fair, they may need some tweaking so it isn't too diffcult to do.
A lot depends on what one views as an effective long term crime prevention strategy.
First there's the top down approach. Assuming that the majority of the worst criminal activity is perpetrated by experieced life long criminals (think ring leaders, organised crime, career criminals etc) then it stands to reason you want to target those individuals for arrest and incarceration. Yes, there are outliers; nutjobs going on shooting sprees, crimes of passion, serial killers, and the odd person who comes up with a scam that works, etc. The problem is, removing the head does't always help. Someone else might step up, or removing the head might cause more chaos, criminal organisation to split into competing units, etc.
Then there's the bottom up apporach, which is focusing on 'small' crimes according to the theory this increases the preception of the risk of being caught, thus ultimately preventing crimes from being commited, as opposed to catching criminals after the act. Of course there are always going to be those people who are going to ignore the preceived risk, or even see past the charade. And this approach doesn't address organised crime and/or career criminals very well.
As far as mandatory tagging of vehicles is concerned, this very much fits in with the bottom up approach. It's not intended to make it harder for (semi-)professional car thieves to work. But it will increase the barrier of entry into the car thief profession, assuming it takes some skill and practice to get around the tagging system. And of course assuming that dumb-user devices that do the job for you don't become readily available, a la backdoor software packages for script kiddies. In general the bottom up approach also has the long term effect of reducing the size of the criminal labour pool, over a period of decades.
That said, bottom up approaches tend to affect law abiding citizens disproportionately when tecnology comes into play. Having a police force focus on jay-walking, drunk and disorderly, and disturbing the peace charges is different from implementing a system monitors widely and throughly. The first still works on the presumption of innocence; you have to commit the offence before the cop targets you. The second means information is collected prior the any crime being commited, the exact opposite: "We're collecting eveidence against you in case you commit a crime"
Benjamin Franklin said it best: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
What else do you need to get work done, in the responsibilily area of the "desktop"?
A convenient interace to handle multiple frequently added and removed peripheral devices
It's not about turning Linux into a crappy OS. The windows 'shell' or GUI isn't all that bad but the underlying OS is appaling to work. It's still rooted in DOS, maybe DOS+multitasking. To be clear I'd lump filesystem design and management, device management, process management and networking into the OS. There's no reason you couldn't put a good_as_windows_clone (even better_than_windows_clone) graphical shell on top of a linux OS. This wouldn't make linux as crappy. Now, it's fair to say that most people aren't going to make this distinction between OS and shell, but if you're not making the distinction then you probably don't have a concept of a crappy OS, you just "don't like it".
It occurs to me, that if enough people actually did this, it would start affecting the US economy negatively. So don't do this quietly. Do it, and advertise why you are doing it. Who knows, maybe someone will listen eventually.
even if it's on a remote system in Europe... and don't sell any products in the U.S.A. directly. Outsource the importation into the U.S.A.
There is nothing (apart from cost and practicality) stopping other vendors/distros/organisations from negotiating with hardware manufacturers to have their keys pre-installed, but consider this. Microsoft's action are restraining trade. Microsoft is using their dominant market market position to have hardware manufacturers ship with UEFI enabled by default, with microsoft keys enabled by default. They are saying to the manufacturers, if you want to label your hardware windows complaint you must do X, where X affects other vendors by making their product more difficult to use. Microsoft doesn't need to pay for this 'service' from the manufacturers, the manufacturers are forced to comply in oder to sell their products (because of window's dominant market share). Isn't this is already anti-trust, but against the manufacturers. Other vendors who don't have the market share have two choices:
Both options sound like anti-trust to me. In my mind it would be better for manufacturers to ship with NO keys, and if you want to install an OS, then the OS installation instructions just have to include the extra step explaining what needs to be done. Again, for Joe Schmo who buys his whole PC retail, this doesn't affect him, because some IT guy in a backroom does the installation. The machine comes with one key, for whatever OS Joe wants installed. Practically speaking, this means that everyone will preinstall windows whether or not the customer wants it, same as now. Nothing would stop larger or smaller *nix distro users from installing the approriate keys. Microsoft's advantage would be that the retail industry does work for them for free, same as now. I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's not a catastrophe. Microsoft pays for this advantage in a way, through marketing, lobbying, etc. Cananonical and red hat could negotiate similar advantages directly for example with dell/hp/best-buy ... it's probably not worth their while.
Yeah, the basic premise here is to store the key in muscle memory, which is a fantastic idea. It's difficult to forget (not impossible, but difficult) and near impossible to extract without the owner's knowledge and permission; An attacker might be able to induce finger tapping but capturing it and recording it will be extremely difficult. Also, it comes with an indirect from of biometric identification, because even if an attacker somehow manages to extract the correct key, the input mechanism can presumably pick out the pattern of entry far more precisely than an attacker could mimic without a hell of a lot of training. I'm still not sure about playing a game every time I want to log in to something, but as a access to an encrypted volume or a key ring at the beginning of my day... makes sense.
+1 Agree Wholeheartedly
Why not for publishing software?
That's an ambitious... nay, generous term
Be pure, be vigilant, behave!
Actually, if the naturals want to win, shouldn't they misbehaving... a lot.. and winning by force of numbers
Your arguments assumes that drugs are elastic goods, and that 'providing' for a person implies that is a good thing and they need the drug. Health products are not elastic goods; People will pay for them at whatever price they can afford when they need them. There is no point (from the consumer's point of view) in marketing a drug because if a person needs a drug, it will be prescribed to them. If a person doesn't need a drug, why should they be encouraged to buy it. Obviously some drugs (vitamins, viagra, smart drugs, narcotics) are elastic goods, in that they are not necessary, but are pleasant to use. Viagra is a good example here. It made pfizer a ton of money, and there's nothing wrong with that. Any public monet spent researching the drug was for health cocerns completely unrelated to the eventual use of the drug. Pfizer saw an opportunity and ran with it. That's a good example of how pharmaceutical companies can and should make money, and be allowed to patent their products. But when the research that goes intoa product is publically funded and the product developed leads directly out of that research, then no pharmaceuticals shouldn't get to patent. The funding government should get the patent and license it to pharmaceutical companies. There's nothing wrong with a big pharma company that helped in the research licensing the patent exclusively for say 5 years, but the government still gets a cut, which should then be fed back into research, or used to subsidize costs if the drug is expensive or ... or ... or. There are plenty of ways to make this work for the taxpayers.
No, socialists don't mistrust individuals thinking for themselves. They distrust individuals ACTING for themselves unchecked, and binding together to anonymise and abbrogate individual responsibility for collective action, usually in guise of practising business. I might trust a man with my life, but never a businessman. I like my life even when it isn't profitable for someone else, and I don't see why it has be proftiable to someone else at all.