Yeah, and how'd that work out for them? Wikileaks is still there and going strong. They accept Bitcoin; as soon as someone sets up an ad network to do the same, attacking the CCs to attack the piracy "problem" will become equally as futile.
In New Hampshire, a couple of our libertarian legislators sponsored and successfully passed a bill to prohibit utility companies from installing these things without the owner's express consent to do so.
Unfortunately, it is upon publication when a study is picked up by the media and exposed to the general public. By the time other scientists try to replicate the experiments and find they're bullshit, it's "too late" in a sense.
Some sort of independent verification needs to be worked into the process before a new study is put out there for general consumption. This either means before "publication" or the media needs to learn (hah) not to cite studies that haven't been independently verified, no matter how sensationalistically important they sound.
Just flashed the last of my routers with dd-wrt today. Will be doing the same with the handful of routers I maintain for others over the next few days. Goodbye, Cisco crap.
Cisco is now on my permanent boycott list, right alongside Belkin.
Simple encrypting of torrent traffic wont help, as you still make connections. If you connect to one of their tracking clients, poof, you are busted.
You are correct, but the encryption will prevent ISP and other MITM surveillance. Encryption will stop, for example, deep-packet inspection.
And even though there isn't a solution to the problem you describe, this six-strikes law will only serve to drive the development of technology to solve the problem. Perhaps the torrent-over-TOR problem will be mitigated or fixed. Or someone will invent something else to "route around" the damage these ISPs will now be doing to the Internet. I don't know. But I do know that every single roadblock to a free Internet that the government and their "private" business allies have thrown up, has been knocked down, punched through, routed around, avoided, or evaded---so far at least. Nothing seems insurmountable about this latest annoyance, does it?
Remember to enable encryption in your torrent client. Use TOR for web downloading (Don't use it for torrents, unfortunately).
And I'm sure within a year or less there'll be even better solutions for evading the eye of your ISP. Prohibition didn't stop alcohol sales, it just drove it underground. That'll happen here, too.
Switch to a different ISP and stop funding these companies. Don't complain about "monopolies"---none of these ISPs have a monopoly in providing Internet services; they have at most a monopoly in the specific kind of service they provide (e.g., only DSL provider in town, only cable company). Satellite is available everywhere, as is dialup. In many places, if Verizon is providing DSL service, there are also often other small companies providing DSL as CLECs. All that these big ISPs may have "monopolies" on is speed or convenience, and if you keep paying for their services, you're part of the problem.
"Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem..."
What's his point? Most countries in the world have nothing remotely resembling the U.S. Bill of Rights. Even countries that make an attempt to craft a bill of rights sprinkle phrases such as "subject to reasonable limits prescribed by law," or "subject to the public interest," or something to that effect, throughout every "right" their constitution claims to "protect," rendering the document meaningless.
We're talking about information, not acts. Digital encodings, bits on a hard drive. The acts are long since gone, and may have been committed years prior and by someone dozens of degrees away. Your logic is akin to claiming that distributing copies of murder scene photographs makes one a murderer.
But I rarely expect to see rational thought on this topic.
I don't see why Gates' charitable work will make him memorable. He's going to fund the discovery of a cure for malaria, not find it himself. Anyone here know who funded Louis Pasteur, or Edward Jenner, or Jonas Salk?
Nobody? Exactly.
Gates will probably be remembered like people like Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller: Capitalists who engaged in a great deal of philanthropic and charitable work, but are still remembered by most people for being capitalists (and "robber barons" to many of those people).
Liberty activists in New Hampshire have had a system set up like this for years, Porcupine 411. It's just a basic audio recording and distribution system, so it works on anyone's cell phone, not just smart phones. Call the number and, typically within less than a minute after you hang up, every subscriber receives either an MMS message on their phone, or an email with an MP3 attachment.
Sick of this shit? Move to New Hampshire. We had a state representative propose similar legislation here in 2010. It failed, in large part due to the work of the N.H. Liberty Alliance, and the rep herself lost her seat in the 2010 elections. The liberty movement here, largely through the NHLA, has helped elect about 30-40 pro-liberty reps to our State House (400 members total) and 4-5 senators (24 total), helped defeat hundreds of other anti-liberty bills, and helped get a handful of pro-liberty ones passed, too.
Both of the items you mentioned have intrinsic value. Intrinsic means: Innate, inherent, inseparable from the thing itself, essential. The value of both of your objects is tightly connected to the object itself. People find these objects valuable based on what they are, not some outside authority's fiat. The value of fiat currency, however, is not intrinsic: The value is tied to the reputation of the backer, and is typically legally mandated by that backer. If that reputation goes down the drain (e.g., a nation-state collapses) or that law is repealed (e.g., "demonetization" of old currency), the fiat currency isn't worth the paper it's printed on... except, perhaps, in the distant future as "numismatic" value for collectors.
As for your distinction between "useful" objects like shoes vs. "useless" objects like a famous photograph, this is meaningless economically. Things have value simply because people want them, and are willing to trade what they have for what they want. To someone who doesn't wear shoes, those shoes of yours are equally as useless as a Trump photograph. Equally, to someone who collects photographs of celebrities, that Trump photo might be highly useful. If someone were collecting such photos and you tried to sell them a pair of shoes instead, they'd probably laugh at you and walk away.
You think one object is "useful" and another "useless." Other people's ideas of utility differ. There is no universal standard of "useful" that automatically translates into value, and that so many people think there is, and want to impose this concept onto free markets, is probably one of the biggest problems with modern economics and centrally-planned monetary policy.
What should we do about Wikipedia's porn problem? Recognize that there is no "problem"---that this is no more a "problem" than any other content on Wikipedia that some people don't like---and move on to something that's actually important?
Sure, but the government is only regulating itself (and their political subdivisions). I read the bill; all they're doing is regulating what their boards, agencies, commissions, &al., may in turn do.
I guess this is yet another unintended consequence of having the government create such boards, agencies, and commissions in the first place. The government creates regulatory agencies with the hope of doing something good, people and businesses come to trust the word of such agencies (e.g., insurance companies making risk determinations), and then the agencies get captured by interests that co-opt them. Now they agencies are untrustworthy, but since they're a government monopoly with no competition, what are people to do?
The libertarian idea is guided by the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which states that only the initiation of force or fraud against another is immoral. Anything else is permitted, including using force or fraud to stop someone who has initiated such against another. Another way to frame it is that it's never moral to interfere with another's freedom of choice. This all stems from the idea of self-ownership: That a person is absolutely the owner and controller of their own mind and body, and that no one else can own or control them without their consent.
The NAP therefore prohibits stuff like theft, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder. All of these actions are initiations of force or fraud, all of them are interfering with another's freedom of choice, all of them are disrespecting a person's absolute self-ownership. The NAP does not allow for common laws such as paying nonconsensual fees to the government (taxes, licenses, permits, &c.), requiring permission from the government to engage in various activities (drive a motor vehicle, engage in certain professions, develop a piece of land, hunt, fish, purchase or carry a firearm, &c.), and prohibitions against things such as drug and alcohol use, assisted suicide, or any consensual sexual activities. In fact, since all of these laws interfere with a person's freedom of choice, the laws themselves are violations of the NAP.
I didn't say that corporations should be considered people ("artificial persons" in legal parlance, actually). That is indeed a legal fiction, which is useful in some contexts, but highly dangerous in others. What I said is that corporations are composed of individuals ("natural persons" in legal parlance) who have rights, and those individuals do not lose those rights simply because they are acting in concert.
That said, the Citizens United decision is a great example of an unintended consequence so often seen when the government tries to legislate away our rights. The only reason that corporations have sought to donate money to political campaigns is because the government has imposed campaign contribution limits on individuals, and myriad other regulations. If the government wasn't meddling in individuals' right to fund and support other's freedom of speech, said individuals wouldn't need to come up with clever, convoluted ways of enhancing their ability to contribute to campaigns via artificial persons. This is the same reason cryptic entities like 527s, PACs, "Super PACs," and so on, have been invented: As yet another way around laws that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"Copy-written"?
Sweet.
Yeah, and how'd that work out for them? Wikileaks is still there and going strong. They accept Bitcoin; as soon as someone sets up an ad network to do the same, attacking the CCs to attack the piracy "problem" will become equally as futile.
In New Hampshire, a couple of our libertarian legislators sponsored and successfully passed a bill to prohibit utility companies from installing these things without the owner's express consent to do so.
Unfortunately, it is upon publication when a study is picked up by the media and exposed to the general public. By the time other scientists try to replicate the experiments and find they're bullshit, it's "too late" in a sense.
Some sort of independent verification needs to be worked into the process before a new study is put out there for general consumption. This either means before "publication" or the media needs to learn (hah) not to cite studies that haven't been independently verified, no matter how sensationalistically important they sound.
Just flashed the last of my routers with dd-wrt today. Will be doing the same with the handful of routers I maintain for others over the next few days. Goodbye, Cisco crap.
Cisco is now on my permanent boycott list, right alongside Belkin.
You are correct, but the encryption will prevent ISP and other MITM surveillance. Encryption will stop, for example, deep-packet inspection.
And even though there isn't a solution to the problem you describe, this six-strikes law will only serve to drive the development of technology to solve the problem. Perhaps the torrent-over-TOR problem will be mitigated or fixed. Or someone will invent something else to "route around" the damage these ISPs will now be doing to the Internet. I don't know. But I do know that every single roadblock to a free Internet that the government and their "private" business allies have thrown up, has been knocked down, punched through, routed around, avoided, or evaded---so far at least. Nothing seems insurmountable about this latest annoyance, does it?
Remember to enable encryption in your torrent client. Use TOR for web downloading (Don't use it for torrents, unfortunately).
And I'm sure within a year or less there'll be even better solutions for evading the eye of your ISP. Prohibition didn't stop alcohol sales, it just drove it underground. That'll happen here, too.
Switch to a different ISP and stop funding these companies. Don't complain about "monopolies"---none of these ISPs have a monopoly in providing Internet services; they have at most a monopoly in the specific kind of service they provide (e.g., only DSL provider in town, only cable company). Satellite is available everywhere, as is dialup. In many places, if Verizon is providing DSL service, there are also often other small companies providing DSL as CLECs. All that these big ISPs may have "monopolies" on is speed or convenience, and if you keep paying for their services, you're part of the problem.
What's his point? Most countries in the world have nothing remotely resembling the U.S. Bill of Rights. Even countries that make an attempt to craft a bill of rights sprinkle phrases such as "subject to reasonable limits prescribed by law," or "subject to the public interest," or something to that effect, throughout every "right" their constitution claims to "protect," rendering the document meaningless.
I've also heard of people running open wireless networks expressly for this purpose.
All this will do is help drive the advancement of technologies like TOR, Freenet, &c., which is a good thing.
We're talking about information, not acts. Digital encodings, bits on a hard drive. The acts are long since gone, and may have been committed years prior and by someone dozens of degrees away. Your logic is akin to claiming that distributing copies of murder scene photographs makes one a murderer.
But I rarely expect to see rational thought on this topic.
Surveillance thwarted? Sounds like TOR is functioning exactly as it should.
If there's any actual "problem" here, that problem is the FBI.
I don't see why Gates' charitable work will make him memorable. He's going to fund the discovery of a cure for malaria, not find it himself. Anyone here know who funded Louis Pasteur, or Edward Jenner, or Jonas Salk?
Nobody? Exactly.
Gates will probably be remembered like people like Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller: Capitalists who engaged in a great deal of philanthropic and charitable work, but are still remembered by most people for being capitalists (and "robber barons" to many of those people).
Liberty activists in New Hampshire have had a system set up like this for years, Porcupine 411. It's just a basic audio recording and distribution system, so it works on anyone's cell phone, not just smart phones. Call the number and, typically within less than a minute after you hang up, every subscriber receives either an MMS message on their phone, or an email with an MP3 attachment.
Sick of this shit? Move to New Hampshire. We had a state representative propose similar legislation here in 2010. It failed, in large part due to the work of the N.H. Liberty Alliance, and the rep herself lost her seat in the 2010 elections. The liberty movement here, largely through the NHLA, has helped elect about 30-40 pro-liberty reps to our State House (400 members total) and 4-5 senators (24 total), helped defeat hundreds of other anti-liberty bills, and helped get a handful of pro-liberty ones passed, too.
1. Use IxQuick for search.
2. Use it through TOR.
3. Profit.
Both of the items you mentioned have intrinsic value. Intrinsic means: Innate, inherent, inseparable from the thing itself, essential. The value of both of your objects is tightly connected to the object itself. People find these objects valuable based on what they are, not some outside authority's fiat. The value of fiat currency, however, is not intrinsic: The value is tied to the reputation of the backer, and is typically legally mandated by that backer. If that reputation goes down the drain (e.g., a nation-state collapses) or that law is repealed (e.g., "demonetization" of old currency), the fiat currency isn't worth the paper it's printed on... except, perhaps, in the distant future as "numismatic" value for collectors.
As for your distinction between "useful" objects like shoes vs. "useless" objects like a famous photograph, this is meaningless economically. Things have value simply because people want them, and are willing to trade what they have for what they want. To someone who doesn't wear shoes, those shoes of yours are equally as useless as a Trump photograph. Equally, to someone who collects photographs of celebrities, that Trump photo might be highly useful. If someone were collecting such photos and you tried to sell them a pair of shoes instead, they'd probably laugh at you and walk away.
You think one object is "useful" and another "useless." Other people's ideas of utility differ. There is no universal standard of "useful" that automatically translates into value, and that so many people think there is, and want to impose this concept onto free markets, is probably one of the biggest problems with modern economics and centrally-planned monetary policy.
What should we do about Wikipedia's porn problem? Recognize that there is no "problem"---that this is no more a "problem" than any other content on Wikipedia that some people don't like---and move on to something that's actually important?
Buttbuttinate. That is all.
Sure, but the government is only regulating itself (and their political subdivisions). I read the bill; all they're doing is regulating what their boards, agencies, commissions, &al., may in turn do.
I guess this is yet another unintended consequence of having the government create such boards, agencies, and commissions in the first place. The government creates regulatory agencies with the hope of doing something good, people and businesses come to trust the word of such agencies (e.g., insurance companies making risk determinations), and then the agencies get captured by interests that co-opt them. Now they agencies are untrustworthy, but since they're a government monopoly with no competition, what are people to do?
The libertarian idea is guided by the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which states that only the initiation of force or fraud against another is immoral. Anything else is permitted, including using force or fraud to stop someone who has initiated such against another. Another way to frame it is that it's never moral to interfere with another's freedom of choice. This all stems from the idea of self-ownership: That a person is absolutely the owner and controller of their own mind and body, and that no one else can own or control them without their consent.
The NAP therefore prohibits stuff like theft, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder. All of these actions are initiations of force or fraud, all of them are interfering with another's freedom of choice, all of them are disrespecting a person's absolute self-ownership. The NAP does not allow for common laws such as paying nonconsensual fees to the government (taxes, licenses, permits, &c.), requiring permission from the government to engage in various activities (drive a motor vehicle, engage in certain professions, develop a piece of land, hunt, fish, purchase or carry a firearm, &c.), and prohibitions against things such as drug and alcohol use, assisted suicide, or any consensual sexual activities. In fact, since all of these laws interfere with a person's freedom of choice, the laws themselves are violations of the NAP.
Sure. What you're describing is close to what libertarians call the Non-Aggression Principle.
Indeed it's different, but its intent was the same: Social engineering via legislation.
I didn't say that corporations should be considered people ("artificial persons" in legal parlance, actually). That is indeed a legal fiction, which is useful in some contexts, but highly dangerous in others. What I said is that corporations are composed of individuals ("natural persons" in legal parlance) who have rights, and those individuals do not lose those rights simply because they are acting in concert.
That said, the Citizens United decision is a great example of an unintended consequence so often seen when the government tries to legislate away our rights. The only reason that corporations have sought to donate money to political campaigns is because the government has imposed campaign contribution limits on individuals, and myriad other regulations. If the government wasn't meddling in individuals' right to fund and support other's freedom of speech, said individuals wouldn't need to come up with clever, convoluted ways of enhancing their ability to contribute to campaigns via artificial persons. This is the same reason cryptic entities like 527s, PACs, "Super PACs," and so on, have been invented: As yet another way around laws that shouldn't exist in the first place.