Good to know it's not just me. I get at least a once per day attempt from there checking my mailserver for an open relay. Attention stupid spammers: It wasn't an open relay last year, it wasn't one last month, it wasn't one yesterday, and it's NOT GOING TO BE ONE TOMORROW. Grrrr....
Sure, there's a cost in switching service providers. My company is not going to switch ISPs for leased lines and colo for a lousy $100/month price break. But, I can choose between different airlines quickly, and with no transaction costs. I go to Expedia.com, enter my flight search info, and pick the one with the cheapest price at the times I'm willing to fly. I could care less whether they are Continental or US Air. It's so easy to choose between the two, I won't care.
Frequent flier systems are an attempt to get vendor lock-in, and I have a friend who flys Southwest whenever he can because his every 5th flight is free. But, for most airlines, frequent flyer isn't enough of a lock in because you'll never know when your preferred vendor "sells out" early, and the only thing you could get with them is the $1200 seat. You'd tell them not to offer the $1200 seat so they could make it worth my while to show brand loyalty, but they've obviously done the math and decided it's better to gouge the late traveller for $1200 then have me as a regular customer at $250. (Why? The late travellers travel the most. How many occasional travellers need to book a flight one day in advance? The sales reps for my company do it all the time.)
And the fast food industry falls completely short. Fast food doesn't "perish" so instantly. If I get to the door at 11:55, they aren't going to tell me I have to pay 5 times for my lunch cause it's the last minute. It's trivial and easy for me to go somewhere else. I never have to have food *right now*, where many people need to get on a flight *right now*.
The airlines' prices change so drastically because they have the ability to charge very high profit margin rates at the last minute. I can't think of a single other industry that can do this.
Note that you can game the system. Find an underbooked plane at the last minute, and say you want a ticket, but it's not an emergency and you *won't* pay more than $100. They'll take your money versus let the plane fly empty. This is what flying standby is all about.
If there is no DRM what incentive is there for a content provider to create content?
Yeah, 'cause as we all know, before DRM was invented in the last few years, no content existed. All those movies, music, works of art, books, and software created before the existence of DRM are just a big collective hallucination. After all, we all know people would never create anything without absolute total control until the end of time, right? This website is a perfect example. Would slashdot even exist if DRM wasn't stopping us from cut-and-pasting the slashdot headlines, blantantly stealing Malda's content? Would Linus Torvalds have ever created Linux without DRM to protect it? I think not.
And how, by chance, is a device that fools caller ID "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"? Last I checked, no one's TeleZapper or caller ID box is protecting copyrighted works.
Sheesh, you'd think that with all the DMCA articles on slashdot, people would actually *understand* the law...
I'm sure they would mind if my parents', who happen to have a major trunk line that runs under their property, decided to dig that up.
Not to mention the fact that since they essentially have a government-funded monopoly, I'm not allowed to go digging up public land to lay my own cables, so I couldn't compete with them even if I did have the money. The ILECs want special rights, they can allow *competition* (That silly thing that I thought conservatives/libertarians were supposed to be *for*) as the cost of those rights.
You mean that country with this highest rate of broadband adoption? That country where broadband is subsidized in a true socialist fashion?
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Oh, and if the bells' lines are their "property" then their property is illegally tresspassing on my land. I demand rent starting now at $1000/day, or I'll dig them up. I expect them to also begin paying rent to the government for any of their equipment that passes through public property, under streets that my tax dollars have paid for, for example.
The most sensible thing to do is compile a fresh copy of perl using the compiler of choice, and then install it into a different directory, and modify the system wide PATH.
Basically what I do, but I install perl from here. They have versions compiled for older Solaris versions too, and everything's in Sun's pkg format, so it's real easy to manage.
And to continue this already played-out joke, don't forget such educational films as "Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly" and "Here Comes the Metric System!":-)
From the CNET article: "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
From the O'Reilly link in the parent post: Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.
Meaning: The reason why those USL copyrights are in OS X is because the code was taken from FreeBSD, which took the code from 4.4BSD-Lite, which had permission to do so from Novell, the owner at the time of the copyrights. That settlement is still legally binding, even if the ownership of the USL code is now SCO. Looks like SCO has no case against the BSDs (nor against MS or Apple, who use BSD code in accordance with the BSD license.) Linux, I wouldn't be sure about, but I always thought Linux never had any AT&T/USL code.
And this statement is true as long as we ignore the fact that whoever you paid the 5k to now has $4500 to spend. Which is taxable.
So let's continue. The person with this $4500 spends it, so it's now income to someone else, and is taxed at 10%, or another $450 for the government, leaving this new person with $4050 to spend. The question becomes "how long does it take for the money going into the government to equal the $5000 it would have had if not for the tax cut?"
The answer: It *never* will. Carry it out, you'll see that as the number of taxable transactions involving this money approaches infinity, the total tax revenue on the money approaches the original $5000 the government would have had if they had not lowered taxes in the first place.
This even makes some assumptions such as "people will *always* spend the money they gain in tax cuts", and "the government will not spend the money it takes in". Fact is, some of that tax money the government gets is spent employing people, building roads, etc.
This doesn't mean tax cuts are always bad, or that the government is always the best place for money, both of which are obviously false. It just shows that if you want to cut taxes, you need to accept the fact that the government will have to either cut spending (thus making life more expensive for citizens. i.e., less money spent on medicare means more money out of someone's pocket for health care) or raise deficits (which of course acts as a drag on the economy. The historical facts clearly show that tax cuts do *not* increase tax revenue, something that should be obvious.
Heh, too funny. I live about 5 minutes away from their colo facility.
My employer is taking bids on colo service right now, and they are quite competitive. They'll let you burst too, which I've noticed many providers won't. It's something to watch out for, it prevents "surprise" bandwidth bills when your site gets linked to from slashdot.:-)
I have recently learned of a company with a rather similar name to yours, Petswarehouse.com.
This other company has enganged in numerous frivolous lawsuits against ordinary Internet consumers for speaking their mind. Information here.
Due to the similarity of your company's name to his, I wanted to inform you that their could be a risk of potential customers confusing your site with his. All the bad publicity his site has recieved could potentially hurt your business, as potential customers get confused, and think your company is the one performing these consumer-unfriendly, immoral acts.
You may want to bring it to the attention of your lawyers that there is a company with a confusingly similar name, that has generated a large amount of bad publicity that could potentially hurt your business. I'm sure your lawyers can advise you of an appropriate course of action.
Just for a minute consider, what if your wrong. I know I will fair a lot better if I'm wrong than you will if you are.
What if you're wrong, and the Muslims are correct? Or the Jews? Or the Hindus? Ancient Greeks, Babylonians, or Egyptians?
That's leaving aside that if there is a god, I'm betting he's clever enough (omnipotence and all that) to see through me if I'm just pretending. Beliefs aren't something you can just up and change. Atheists can't just wake up and say "I'll beleive in god today" any more than a Christian can wake up and say they've decided to worship Ra.
A 5% drop in music sales.... Hmm, well, we've had a recession at the end of a huge economic boom, large companies that used to employ a ton of people go bankrupt and get caught comitting fraud, (Enron, Global Crossing) terrorist attacks on US soil, CD prices have increased, (little economic tip, when you increase prices, sales will decrease) mass consolidation in the radio market and a general homogenization of music, leading to less consumer choice, and, yes, people are pirating music on file-sharing services.
And there's *only* been a 5% drop in sales? Sounds like RIAA's doing pretty well to me. There's quite a few businesses that would be jumping for joy if they only suffered a 5% sales drop.
This is something my uncle (who worked in the shipping industry, where I work in IT) warned me about. Never burn bridges, because you never know when you'll encounter someone again. He says he's had former employees be his boss, and vice versa after several job switches. One of the reasons I always try to be fair when I switch jobs, and with those I work with.
For example, my current employer is a customer of my old employer. (Old employer is an ISP, current employer has T1s through them) Since I left on such good terms with the people I used to work with, they tend to give me spectacular service when I call them because of a problem with a T1. It's good for them they didn't piss me off when I worked for them, since I'm now in a position where if I was bitter, I could switch vendors on them and cost them a customer who pays them several grand each month.
In the meantime, our CAPITALIST markets helped create this thing called the Internet...
The Internet was created by the DOD, part of the evil statist socialist government. I guess it must be worthless then, not being created by the holiness of free enterprise.
I hope that the same people who mocked the doctrine of "original intent", particularly with regards to the Second Amendment, aren't the ones promoting the Supreme Court's striking down copyright extension, an interpretation that relies precisely on the philosophy of ascertaining the intent of the framemakers of the Constitution.
Simply because an original intent arguement is the one Lessig is using in this case, hardly makes it the only one. Since the current Supreme Court is dominated by strict constructionalists, it's just the best argument to use on that group of people.
The opponents of copyright extension need to come up with something a little more substantial than an opinion that copyright extension damages the "public good".
For this court, probably. But I can certainly make a logically coherent argument the copyright extension does damage the public good, and protecting that is important. Even miniarchists agree with this to a point, whether they realize it or not, they just think that as little government as possible *does* maximize the public good.
Love them or hate them, people such as Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman at least have consistency in their viewpoints, a true worldview and not opinions that bend with each passing intellectual fad.
Yes, they have. And so have people like Eben Moglin and Jessica Litman.
Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman can argue with clear conscience that they have always been in the fight to limit the role of the federal government over the lives of the people, regardless of the issues.
They sure have. But this is where you really go off the deep end of libertarianism/objectivism blindness. Here's a tip, not everyone bases their political philosophy on that government regulation is either all good or all bad.
You criticize the left saying that they are inconsistent for supporting government regulation in one place, but not others. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the left doesn't view government regulation as inherently good or bad, but capable of being used for both? I concider myself liberal, and my take on government regulation is that it is a necessary evil. Does that confuse your oversimplified political spectrum?
In contrast all of the NIMBY environmentalists and gun control advocates are merely carpetbaggers, passengers of convenience who the moment the issue is gone will revert to readvocating increased expansion of governmental authority and regulation.
This is so flawed I don't know where to start. I can easily formulate a logically consistent position containing any combination of pro/anti environmental regulations, gun control and copyright extenstions. The world isn't so black and white, and people can hold many different views on important issues. To say that one can't be an environmentalist and against copyright extentions at the same time shows that your understanding of any political philosophy other than your own is virtually nonexistant.
In essence the left-wing supporters of the movement to strike down the opinion of the elected representatives of the people are merely seeking to steal property for their own purposes, because they have no intellectual foundation for their critique of the current system.
At this point, you've gone full-bore off the deep end, and continued to show you've never read a freaking thing about modern liberalism. If you had, you'd understand that free speech is very important to the left, and its primary argument against strong copyright laws lies in a pro-free speech basis. Try learning something about why people think a certain way before tarring them unfairly. I've read quite a bit about libertarianism, so I know not to strawman it like this.
See what happens once you decide to jettison the entire opinion of the past for the sake of expediency, it might just come back to bite you.
Sometimes the opinion of the past is good (short copyright terms), sometimes it's bad (slavery). Once again you show a blindness to the fact that life can't be so easily catagorized.
To close, I disagree passionatly with the right-libertarian style philosophies on many issues, (The US health care system being one) but I'm happy to have them as allies on issues we can both agree on (free speech, copyright limits). Instead of criticizing a group of people who *agree* with your position, but just have have a different basis for the reasons why, why not accept them as allies. Just because you agree with an evil statist liberal like me on copyright, doesn't mean you have to be swung to my belief on socializing health care.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A great explanation of the full story is here, which should make it much easier to follow for people who don't read these particular blogs regularly.
Good to know it's not just me. I get at least a once per day attempt from there checking my mailserver for an open relay. Attention stupid spammers: It wasn't an open relay last year, it wasn't one last month, it wasn't one yesterday, and it's NOT GOING TO BE ONE TOMORROW. Grrrr....
Truth in advertising laws.
Restrictions on how/when/where some businesses can advertise. (Tobacco/Alcohol)
Nike v. Kasky
It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound.
Actually, the noise level from my phone is *higher* than with my email.
Sure, there's a cost in switching service providers. My company is not going to switch ISPs for leased lines and colo for a lousy $100/month price break. But, I can choose between different airlines quickly, and with no transaction costs. I go to Expedia.com, enter my flight search info, and pick the one with the cheapest price at the times I'm willing to fly. I could care less whether they are Continental or US Air. It's so easy to choose between the two, I won't care.
Frequent flier systems are an attempt to get vendor lock-in, and I have a friend who flys Southwest whenever he can because his every 5th flight is free. But, for most airlines, frequent flyer isn't enough of a lock in because you'll never know when your preferred vendor "sells out" early, and the only thing you could get with them is the $1200 seat. You'd tell them not to offer the $1200 seat so they could make it worth my while to show brand loyalty, but they've obviously done the math and decided it's better to gouge the late traveller for $1200 then have me as a regular customer at $250. (Why? The late travellers travel the most. How many occasional travellers need to book a flight one day in advance? The sales reps for my company do it all the time.)
And the fast food industry falls completely short. Fast food doesn't "perish" so instantly. If I get to the door at 11:55, they aren't going to tell me I have to pay 5 times for my lunch cause it's the last minute. It's trivial and easy for me to go somewhere else. I never have to have food *right now*, where many people need to get on a flight *right now*.
The airlines' prices change so drastically because they have the ability to charge very high profit margin rates at the last minute. I can't think of a single other industry that can do this.
Note that you can game the system. Find an underbooked plane at the last minute, and say you want a ticket, but it's not an emergency and you *won't* pay more than $100. They'll take your money versus let the plane fly empty. This is what flying standby is all about.
Yeah, 'cause as we all know, before DRM was invented in the last few years, no content existed. All those movies, music, works of art, books, and software created before the existence of DRM are just a big collective hallucination. After all, we all know people would never create anything without absolute total control until the end of time, right? This website is a perfect example. Would slashdot even exist if DRM wasn't stopping us from cut-and-pasting the slashdot headlines, blantantly stealing Malda's content? Would Linus Torvalds have ever created Linux without DRM to protect it? I think not.
And how, by chance, is a device that fools caller ID "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"? Last I checked, no one's TeleZapper or caller ID box is protecting copyrighted works.
Sheesh, you'd think that with all the DMCA articles on slashdot, people would actually *understand* the law...
I'm sure they would mind if my parents', who happen to have a major trunk line that runs under their property, decided to dig that up.
Not to mention the fact that since they essentially have a government-funded monopoly, I'm not allowed to go digging up public land to lay my own cables, so I couldn't compete with them even if I did have the money. The ILECs want special rights, they can allow *competition* (That silly thing that I thought conservatives/libertarians were supposed to be *for*) as the cost of those rights.
You mean that country with this highest rate of broadband adoption? That country where broadband is subsidized in a true socialist fashion?
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Oh, and if the bells' lines are their "property" then their property is illegally tresspassing on my land. I demand rent starting now at $1000/day, or I'll dig them up. I expect them to also begin paying rent to the government for any of their equipment that passes through public property, under streets that my tax dollars have paid for, for example.
Unless you're me, who lives in an area Covad will service, but SBC will *not*. So this consumer's going to lose his service. Thanks, FCC!
The most sensible thing to do is compile a fresh copy of perl using the compiler of choice, and then install it into a different directory, and modify the system wide PATH.
Basically what I do, but I install perl from here. They have versions compiled for older Solaris versions too, and everything's in Sun's pkg format, so it's real easy to manage.
...Is that they could have borrowed code from a BSD instead, and no one would care, as the license specifically permits it.
:-)
If these allegations are true, not only are they violating the GPL, they're morons to boot.
JS: Mr. Hutz, do you have any actual evidence to present?
LH: Well, I have lots of hearsay and conjecture, those are *kinds* of evidence.
LH: I lost the case, so your pizza's free.
MS: But we won the case.
LH: That's ok, the box is empty.
And of course the "No(,) money down" gag...
And to continue this already played-out joke, don't forget such educational films as "Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly" and "Here Comes the Metric System!" :-)
...Since it makes a lot of things clear.
From the CNET article: "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
From the O'Reilly link in the parent post: Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed.
Meaning: The reason why those USL copyrights are in OS X is because the code was taken from FreeBSD, which took the code from 4.4BSD-Lite, which had permission to do so from Novell, the owner at the time of the copyrights. That settlement is still legally binding, even if the ownership of the USL code is now SCO. Looks like SCO has no case against the BSDs (nor against MS or Apple, who use BSD code in accordance with the BSD license.) Linux, I wouldn't be sure about, but I always thought Linux never had any AT&T/USL code.
...run Windows 2000? :-)
And this statement is true as long as we ignore the fact that whoever you paid the 5k to now has $4500 to spend. Which is taxable.
So let's continue. The person with this $4500 spends it, so it's now income to someone else, and is taxed at 10%, or another $450 for the government, leaving this new person with $4050 to spend. The question becomes "how long does it take for the money going into the government to equal the $5000 it would have had if not for the tax cut?"
The answer: It *never* will. Carry it out, you'll see that as the number of taxable transactions involving this money approaches infinity, the total tax revenue on the money approaches the original $5000 the government would have had if they had not lowered taxes in the first place.
This even makes some assumptions such as "people will *always* spend the money they gain in tax cuts", and "the government will not spend the money it takes in". Fact is, some of that tax money the government gets is spent employing people, building roads, etc.
This doesn't mean tax cuts are always bad, or that the government is always the best place for money, both of which are obviously false. It just shows that if you want to cut taxes, you need to accept the fact that the government will have to either cut spending (thus making life more expensive for citizens. i.e., less money spent on medicare means more money out of someone's pocket for health care) or raise deficits (which of course acts as a drag on the economy. The historical facts clearly show that tax cuts do *not* increase tax revenue, something that should be obvious.
Heh, too funny. I live about 5 minutes away from their colo facility.
:-)
My employer is taking bids on colo service right now, and they are quite competitive. They'll let you burst too, which I've noticed many providers won't. It's something to watch out for, it prevents "surprise" bandwidth bills when your site gets linked to from slashdot.
I have recently learned of a company with a rather similar name to yours, Petswarehouse.com.
This other company has enganged in numerous frivolous lawsuits against ordinary Internet consumers for speaking their mind. Information here.
Due to the similarity of your company's name to his, I wanted to inform you that their could be a risk of potential customers confusing your site with his. All the bad publicity his site has recieved could potentially hurt your business, as potential customers get confused, and think your company is the one performing these consumer-unfriendly, immoral acts.
You may want to bring it to the attention of your lawyers that there is a company with a confusingly similar name, that has generated a large amount of bad publicity that could potentially hurt your business. I'm sure your lawyers can advise you of an appropriate course of action.
Thank you for your time, A concerned citizen.
Just for a minute consider, what if your wrong. I know I will fair a lot better if I'm wrong than you will if you are.
What if you're wrong, and the Muslims are correct? Or the Jews? Or the Hindus? Ancient Greeks, Babylonians, or Egyptians?
That's leaving aside that if there is a god, I'm betting he's clever enough (omnipotence and all that) to see through me if I'm just pretending. Beliefs aren't something you can just up and change. Atheists can't just wake up and say "I'll beleive in god today" any more than a Christian can wake up and say they've decided to worship Ra.
A 5% drop in music sales.... Hmm, well, we've had a recession at the end of a huge economic boom, large companies that used to employ a ton of people go bankrupt and get caught comitting fraud, (Enron, Global Crossing) terrorist attacks on US soil, CD prices have increased, (little economic tip, when you increase prices, sales will decrease) mass consolidation in the radio market and a general homogenization of music, leading to less consumer choice, and, yes, people are pirating music on file-sharing services.
And there's *only* been a 5% drop in sales? Sounds like RIAA's doing pretty well to me. There's quite a few businesses that would be jumping for joy if they only suffered a 5% sales drop.
This is something my uncle (who worked in the shipping industry, where I work in IT) warned me about. Never burn bridges, because you never know when you'll encounter someone again. He says he's had former employees be his boss, and vice versa after several job switches. One of the reasons I always try to be fair when I switch jobs, and with those I work with.
For example, my current employer is a customer of my old employer. (Old employer is an ISP, current employer has T1s through them) Since I left on such good terms with the people I used to work with, they tend to give me spectacular service when I call them because of a problem with a T1. It's good for them they didn't piss me off when I worked for them, since I'm now in a position where if I was bitter, I could switch vendors on them and cost them a customer who pays them several grand each month.
We can't afford a mineshaft gap!
In the meantime, our CAPITALIST markets helped create this thing called the Internet...
The Internet was created by the DOD, part of the evil statist socialist government. I guess it must be worthless then, not being created by the holiness of free enterprise.
I hope that the same people who mocked the doctrine of "original intent", particularly with regards to the Second Amendment, aren't the ones promoting the Supreme Court's striking down copyright extension, an interpretation that relies precisely on the philosophy of ascertaining the intent of the framemakers of the Constitution.
Simply because an original intent arguement is the one Lessig is using in this case, hardly makes it the only one. Since the current Supreme Court is dominated by strict constructionalists, it's just the best argument to use on that group of people.
The opponents of copyright extension need to come up with something a little more substantial than an opinion that copyright extension damages the "public good".
For this court, probably. But I can certainly make a logically coherent argument the copyright extension does damage the public good, and protecting that is important. Even miniarchists agree with this to a point, whether they realize it or not, they just think that as little government as possible *does* maximize the public good.
Love them or hate them, people such as Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman at least have consistency in their viewpoints, a true worldview and not opinions that bend with each passing intellectual fad.
Yes, they have. And so have people like Eben Moglin and Jessica Litman.
Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman can argue with clear conscience that they have always been in the fight to limit the role of the federal government over the lives of the people, regardless of the issues.
They sure have. But this is where you really go off the deep end of libertarianism/objectivism blindness. Here's a tip, not everyone bases their political philosophy on that government regulation is either all good or all bad.
You criticize the left saying that they are inconsistent for supporting government regulation in one place, but not others. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the left doesn't view government regulation as inherently good or bad, but capable of being used for both? I concider myself liberal, and my take on government regulation is that it is a necessary evil. Does that confuse your oversimplified political spectrum?
In contrast all of the NIMBY environmentalists and gun control advocates are merely carpetbaggers, passengers of convenience who the moment the issue is gone will revert to readvocating increased expansion of governmental authority and regulation.
This is so flawed I don't know where to start. I can easily formulate a logically consistent position containing any combination of pro/anti environmental regulations, gun control and copyright extenstions. The world isn't so black and white, and people can hold many different views on important issues. To say that one can't be an environmentalist and against copyright extentions at the same time shows that your understanding of any political philosophy other than your own is virtually nonexistant.
In essence the left-wing supporters of the movement to strike down the opinion of the elected representatives of the people are merely seeking to steal property for their own purposes, because they have no intellectual foundation for their critique of the current system.
At this point, you've gone full-bore off the deep end, and continued to show you've never read a freaking thing about modern liberalism. If you had, you'd understand that free speech is very important to the left, and its primary argument against strong copyright laws lies in a pro-free speech basis. Try learning something about why people think a certain way before tarring them unfairly. I've read quite a bit about libertarianism, so I know not to strawman it like this.
See what happens once you decide to jettison the entire opinion of the past for the sake of expediency, it might just come back to bite you.
Sometimes the opinion of the past is good (short copyright terms), sometimes it's bad (slavery). Once again you show a blindness to the fact that life can't be so easily catagorized.
To close, I disagree passionatly with the right-libertarian style philosophies on many issues, (The US health care system being one) but I'm happy to have them as allies on issues we can both agree on (free speech, copyright limits). Instead of criticizing a group of people who *agree* with your position, but just have have a different basis for the reasons why, why not accept them as allies. Just because you agree with an evil statist liberal like me on copyright, doesn't mean you have to be swung to my belief on socializing health care. :-)