I thought I had offered such an explanation. I suppose that I was not clear enough if you didn't understand.
A judgment of "not guilty" means that the court has weighed the evidence and has found that there is not enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Basically it is the court saying to the prosecuting attorney, "you did not prove your case." Just because the prosecution failed to prove its case does not mean that the defendant is innocent. It just means that the prosecutor didn't have enough evidence to convict.
A judgment of "innocent" would mean that the court has weighed the evidence and has found positive proof that the defendant did not commit the crime. Instead of the above statement directed to the prosecutor, "you did not prove your case", it would be a statement directed to the defendant, "you proved your case, that you did not commit the crime."
If courts in the US declared innocence, then OJ Simpson would not have lost his wrongful death lawsuit. All the defense would have had to do is to bring the judgment from the criminal trial forward as evidence "the courts have declared me innocent." But, as it were, the criminal trial only proved that the prosecutor's office did not have enough evidence to convict. That's far short of declaring innocence.
I suspect that you don't know what "actually" means.
That the state will act/as if/ the defendant is innocent in now way implies that the defendant/actually is/ innocent.
As but one example, if finding a defendant "not guilty" was a determination of actual innocense, there would be no need for double jeaopordy rules. A defendant found "not guilty" at the first trial would have an absolute, concrete affirmative defense in any subsequent trial.
As another example, people such as OJ Simpson can be found "not guilty" in criminal trials yet lose lawsuits that are predicated on actual guilt such as the wrongful death lawsuit Mr. SImpson lost following his acquittal in the criminal suit.
As another example, sometimes rulings are vacated. Take Ken Lay's conviction. Since he died before he could appeal, his conviction was vacated. In your world, this means that he was not only presumed innocent as there no longer any ruling that he was guilty but that he was "actually" innocent.
The fact of the matter is that, unless a court issues a finding of fact that gives actual innocense to the defendant, a ruling of "not guilty" does not mean "innocent." (And such findings of fact are very rare.) That the US considers people to be/presumed/ innocent until/proven/ guilty is not a statement of/actual/ innocence. Rather, it is a methodological device that is useful in unsuring that the state cannot abuse its power. But it doesn't actually determine innocence. It's purpose is to limit the manner in which the state can determine guilt.
The video out cables for an iPad/iPhone will only work with video display from A/V apps like iTunes. There are apps out there that will capture the screen output and send it through the display cable but those apps will only work on a device that's been jailbroken.
Limitations aside, it sounds like an improvement over the HTC situation you describe.
Before I bought an iPad last summer, I looked at quite a few netbooks. Spec wise, app wise, price wise, the netbooks seemed better. But where they fell short was mostly in weight and battery life. (Toshiba had an offering that fell short in software, it ran Android that I was looking forward to but they ended up crippling it.)
Or, look at it another way, the iPhone came to dominate the smartphone market even though it was far more expensive than many other offerings.
Android doesn't need to meet the iPhone/iPad on price. It needs to meet it at getting the job done in a way that most people prefer.
Nokia is going to have less money to invest in future technology every year that passes. As this cycle accelerates even their non-smartphone offerings will be passed by featurewise by other vendors selling better phones for less.
Which is why he lost that wrongful death civil case. Or, in other words, there are gray areas where people might be "legally innocent" in some contexts but not in others.
The presumption of innocence is not the same thing as being innocent. Only in very rare cases will a court contain a determination of innocence as part of a finding of fact. It's a bit like the position of an agnostic compared to a hard atheist. Just as the agnostic states "I don't know if God exists", the courts state "I don't know that the defendant is guilty." This is a different judgment in kind than if the courts stated bluntly, "I know that the defendant did not commit the crime" which is pretty comparable to the hard atheists' position "I know that God does not exist."
For example, one can very well be guilty but not found as such by a court of law. This is why the courts do not generally attempt to answer the question "is the defendant innocent?" Rather, the courts try to answer the question, "is there enough evidence to prove the defendant did this?"
This is why, at least in the US, you will sometimes see someone win a criminal case (get judged not-guilty) but then lose a civil case that presupposes that the defendant is, in fact, guilty. The criminal and civil courts tend to use different standards (reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of evidence).
So, in other words, if the case is dropped (or the defendant is acquitted of all charges), that really says nothing about guilt or innocence. Rather it only says something about the amount of evidence in play. In this case, the amount of evidence is being limited by government fiat. They aren't willing to diclose certain evidence. Consequently, the courts do not have sufficient evidence to convict. That is a far different decision than the court determining that someone is innocent.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the case of decompiling a binary to source and then recompiling, copyright infringement would probably be trivially easy to prove.
Consider movies. Copyright infringement of a plot is devilishly hard to prove. But if a chain can be demonstrated where a producer starts with a script and alters it bit by bit into a different product, the author of the original script has a good chance at successfully suing the producer. (Such happened to Steve Spielberg IIRC.) Your decompile -> recompile scenario would exactly fit this sort of situation.
But a clean room reverse engineering project would not infringe copyright. It might, however, infringe a patent.
From the time that they knew what the Internet was, I've tried to impress one rule upon their minds, "never put anything on the Internet that you're not willing to see on the front page of the newspaper."
That goes for email, "the cloud", discussion forums, blogs, etc. While various courts disagree with me, I don't think that there is any reasonable expectation of privacy in any communication sent over the Internet. IP packets are like handing a postcard to a stranger who happens to be traveling from Orange County to Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, the postcard gets handed off to someone else that happens to be traveling to Aspen, Colorado where it ends up in the hands of someone traveling to St. Louis. In St. Louis, a kind stranger picks it up and carries it as far as Chicago where yet another person picks it up and carries it to Cleveland. In Cleveland, someone carries it to NYC. And the postcard just sort of sits in NYC until someone headed to the a particular neighborhood notices that the address is close to home, picks it up and carries it to the mailbox.
If someone wants to send a "private" message in such a situation, the need for encryption is obvious.
So, yes, one should be wary about storing sensitive information in the cloud and where it resides in the cloud is mostly irrelevant. Even if the data center is in the most secure of locations, to get there the packets had to travel through all sorts of insecure locations.
Don't confuse the idea of "free markets" spoken of in the realm of economics with the idea of "free" markets where buyers and sellers have the freedom to do whatever they want.
In fhe former, buyers and sellers always act rationally, that is to say sellers always sell at the maximum price that they can get for a good and buyers always buy at the minimum price they can pay for a good. The equilibrium between price taking and price setting is supposed to produce the most efficient price.
Contrast this with a market where sellers act against their economic interest as the result of various other interests. For example, a shop keeper might want to refuse serve customers whose skin hue is a particular shade. Another shop keeper might want to refuse to stock merchandise by a manufacturer that implicitly (or explicitly) supports certain political causes. And then, there are the buyers. Some consumers might choose higher priced items that are functionally equivalent based on ideological reasons. Other consumers might choose to buy products based on advertising campaigns rather than on whether the product actually meets their needs. The market where this sort of thing is "free" in the laissez-faire sense of the term. But it is not the "free market" of Neoclassical economics.
Ultimately, libertarians have to decide whether the freedom of the seller to sell (or not to sell) takes priority (or not) over the freedom of they buyer to buy (or not to buy). Some try to argue that there is no tension in these freedoms. They are deluded as the lunch counter boycotts of the sixties demonstrated. Libertarians that are not deluded sometimes come down on the side of the sellers and sometimes on the side of the sellers. And, very infrequently, on the side of neither in support of the "free market" of Neoclassical economics.
Look at Israel to see what I mean. For quite some time, it looked like the increasing number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin was going to doom Israel as a Jewish state. But, as Isrealis of Palestinian origin increasingly adopted western culture, the birth rate increasingly declined. As a consequence, the projected date at which Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin will outnumber Israeli citizens of Jewish origin keeps getting pushed out.
Or, if you want a different example, look at the way that the development of the nuclear family influenced the economic development of the Byzantine empire. Even if you don't count the Byzantines as part of the Roman empire, you've got a run from Constantine up through most of the fifteenth century. The longevity of the eastern Roman empire was largely a function of the economic consequences of a social emphasis on the nuclear family.
Not that having an industrial base might not accelerate the inculturation of western style family values, mind you. It may very well do that. But that isn't the only way to do so. And in countries that are still primarily agrarian, it seems to me that there may be better ways of changing social mores.
As but one example, to date there is no word processor on the iPad that properly handles footnotes or endnotes. The closes is Apple's own Pages which will display footnotes in a document that already has them but has not functionality for creating new ones unless you count copying and pasting an existing footnote, changing the text, and then forcing a repagination which renumbers the notes. Otherwise, by copying and pasting, you'd have two notes with the same number.
The closest is using one of the many text editors to write in LaTeX and then doing final edits on a Mac or PC.
Sure, kids who are uninvolved in any extracurricular activities and don't use the school bus for transportation are only "on the clock" 8 hours per day. But this ignores extracurricular activities, sports, bussing, breakfast programs prior to the start of the school day, etc. It's not unusual for a child to catch the bus at 6 or 6:30 in the morning not be dropped back off until 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon. Some schools also offer breakfast programs prior to the start of the school day. And if a child is involved in sports programs, drama programs, has been assigned detention, etc., he or she may be on campus until late evening. It also ignores dances (homecomings, proms, etc.) and attendance of spectators at sporting events. And what about summer programs?
So a simplified 180 * 8 calculation for hours per child per year isn't really any more fair than just comparing annual amounts spent per warm body.
I needed a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 connector. The sales guy didn't understand what I wanted and went to consult his big book. He came back and tried to sell me a 4 pin Firewire 400 to 6 pin Firewire 400 connector. I can understand that a sales guy may not have enough breadth of knowledge to know every connector off the top of his head. But you'd think that the average electronics store sales guy would be smart enough to look such things up correctly.
It sounds to me like they were programmed how to ostensively code and decode tokens. If it were the case that meaning is entirely reducible to ostensive definitions, then it is the case that they learned to communicate meaning. I'm not certain that many (if any) linguists, philosophers of language, or psychologists hold to an ostensive theory of language these days. Wittgenstein pretty much exploded the ostensive theory of language in such a way that no one takes it seriously.
If you weren't playing the game, I'm not certain that the patent would apply.
And if you were playing the game, was the beer instrumental to you winning the game? If not, I don't think the patent would apply.
Not that I think the patent is necessarily valid, mind you, I just don't think the analogy is apt. Paying to view a game and then purchasing a beverage while viewing the game is not the same thing as entering a game and then paying for materials, etcetera to help win the game.
Adam Smith, along with most of the pther pioneers of classical economics, were well aware of the problems of monopoly and of anti-competetive collusion between firms. Moreover, most western nations have all sorts of anti-trust legislation on the books.
You have to turn to the Austrians (Hayek, etc.), and to a lesser extent the Chicagoans (Friedman, tc.) to get the sort of pure laissez-faire capitalism that suggests that trusts, monopolies and the like would not form--or at least be less likely to form--in a purely free market. While such theories are pretty popular with certain groups such as the Tea Party movement in the US, I don't know how much currency they actually have in the realm of policy makers and their economic advisors.
I'd like to see fifty different, or even five different, cable companies all get all the requisite right of way access to wire any metropolitan area of significant size. And, even if they could, the duplication in physical plant would likely lead to higher prices over all. Multiply the costs of existing "last mile" infrastructure by 10 and then spread that total cost over ten different carriers. Each carrier ends up having to charge far more per customer to recoup its fixed costs.
Here's a hint, its that last bit that puts the "natural" in "natural monopoly." It's not a question of possibility, or even of convenience, it's whether the efficiencies involved are such that a single firm can deliver at a lower cost per unit than if multiple firms are involved. Whether these efficiencies are "natural" due to the laws of nature or "artificial" in that they are mandated by a municipality is of no consequence. For it to be a natural monopoly all that needs to obtain is that the average price of the good or service be lower if provided by a single firm than a free market with multiple suppliers would produce.
1. below market, or even interest free, loans 2. construction bonds for new drilling sites 3. the feds assuming liability for new exploration
And then there are more indirect subsidies
1. the federal interstate system (imagine how much less oil would be needed without that money being spent) 2. miitary costs for escorting tankers through pirate infested waters 3. cleanup costs for superfund sites and other poluted grounds (how much did the feds pay for BP's spill last year alone)
What he's saying is that the choice to live by this system of morality (or that system of morality, or o system of morality) is fundamentally a private chioce in that no one has right to impose his or her system of morals upon anyone else.
This is not to say that such systems are fundamentally private in all senses of the term. They may very well have come into being through complicated sets of social relations. Moreover, they may consist entirely of rules (or obligations or rights) that only make sense in a social context. And the any ethical decision, regardless of being made privately, may very well have an effect on society.
(Note that I'm not necessarily agreeing with him. There are a number of good reasons to criticize this view. I'm just pointing out that it isn't an incoherent view. For a longer, more sophisticated, coverage of what I believe amounts to the same theory, check out Richard Posners The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.)
One does not expect prices to approach costs in a free market, but to approach the equilibrium between how much people are willing to pay and how much producers are willing to sell for. Costs usually, but not always, set a floor for one side of this equilibrium. But So long as people are willing to pay substantially above costs, sellers have no motivation to lower costs. They are in the profit maximization game after all. There is only motive to lower costs if by doing so the seller will increase sales volume by a large enough amount to make up the difference in the lower profit margin per unit.
If a service, such as SMS, is practically free to provide and yet people are willing to pay a premium for it, Telcos would be nuts to lower prices.
Now, there may also be collusion at play in the US market, but the high price of SMS services compared to the cost of providing those services won't by itself tell you anything about such collusion.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I had offered such an explanation. I suppose that I was not clear enough if you didn't understand.
A judgment of "not guilty" means that the court has weighed the evidence and has found that there is not enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Basically it is the court saying to the prosecuting attorney, "you did not prove your case." Just because the prosecution failed to prove its case does not mean that the defendant is innocent. It just means that the prosecutor didn't have enough evidence to convict.
A judgment of "innocent" would mean that the court has weighed the evidence and has found positive proof that the defendant did not commit the crime. Instead of the above statement directed to the prosecutor, "you did not prove your case", it would be a statement directed to the defendant, "you proved your case, that you did not commit the crime."
If courts in the US declared innocence, then OJ Simpson would not have lost his wrongful death lawsuit. All the defense would have had to do is to bring the judgment from the criminal trial forward as evidence "the courts have declared me innocent." But, as it were, the criminal trial only proved that the prosecutor's office did not have enough evidence to convict. That's far short of declaring innocence.
I suspect that you don't know what "actually" means.
That the state will act /as if/ the defendant is innocent in now way implies that the defendant /actually is/ innocent.
As but one example, if finding a defendant "not guilty" was a determination of actual innocense, there would be no need for double jeaopordy rules. A defendant found "not guilty" at the first trial would have an absolute, concrete affirmative defense in any subsequent trial.
As another example, people such as OJ Simpson can be found "not guilty" in criminal trials yet lose lawsuits that are predicated on actual guilt such as the wrongful death lawsuit Mr. SImpson lost following his acquittal in the criminal suit.
As another example, sometimes rulings are vacated. Take Ken Lay's conviction. Since he died before he could appeal, his conviction was vacated. In your world, this means that he was not only presumed innocent as there no longer any ruling that he was guilty but that he was "actually" innocent.
The fact of the matter is that, unless a court issues a finding of fact that gives actual innocense to the defendant, a ruling of "not guilty" does not mean "innocent." (And such findings of fact are very rare.) That the US considers people to be /presumed/ innocent until /proven/ guilty is not a statement of /actual/ innocence. Rather, it is a methodological device that is useful in unsuring that the state cannot abuse its power. But it doesn't actually determine innocence. It's purpose is to limit the manner in which the state can determine guilt.
The video out cables for an iPad/iPhone will only work with video display from A/V apps like iTunes. There are apps out there that will capture the screen output and send it through the display cable but those apps will only work on a device that's been jailbroken.
Limitations aside, it sounds like an improvement over the HTC situation you describe.
Before I bought an iPad last summer, I looked at quite a few netbooks. Spec wise, app wise, price wise, the netbooks seemed better. But where they fell short was mostly in weight and battery life. (Toshiba had an offering that fell short in software, it ran Android that I was looking forward to but they ended up crippling it.)
Or, look at it another way, the iPhone came to dominate the smartphone market even though it was far more expensive than many other offerings.
Android doesn't need to meet the iPhone/iPad on price. It needs to meet it at getting the job done in a way that most people prefer.
Nokia is going to have less money to invest in future technology every year that passes. As this cycle accelerates even their non-smartphone offerings will be passed by featurewise by other vendors selling better phones for less.
Which is why he lost that wrongful death civil case. Or, in other words, there are gray areas where people might be "legally innocent" in some contexts but not in others.
The presumption of innocence is not the same thing as being innocent. Only in very rare cases will a court contain a determination of innocence as part of a finding of fact. It's a bit like the position of an agnostic compared to a hard atheist. Just as the agnostic states "I don't know if God exists", the courts state "I don't know that the defendant is guilty." This is a different judgment in kind than if the courts stated bluntly, "I know that the defendant did not commit the crime" which is pretty comparable to the hard atheists' position "I know that God does not exist."
For example, one can very well be guilty but not found as such by a court of law. This is why the courts do not generally attempt to answer the question "is the defendant innocent?" Rather, the courts try to answer the question, "is there enough evidence to prove the defendant did this?"
This is why, at least in the US, you will sometimes see someone win a criminal case (get judged not-guilty) but then lose a civil case that presupposes that the defendant is, in fact, guilty. The criminal and civil courts tend to use different standards (reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of evidence).
So, in other words, if the case is dropped (or the defendant is acquitted of all charges), that really says nothing about guilt or innocence. Rather it only says something about the amount of evidence in play. In this case, the amount of evidence is being limited by government fiat. They aren't willing to diclose certain evidence. Consequently, the courts do not have sufficient evidence to convict. That is a far different decision than the court determining that someone is innocent.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the case of decompiling a binary to source and then recompiling, copyright infringement would probably be trivially easy to prove.
Consider movies. Copyright infringement of a plot is devilishly hard to prove. But if a chain can be demonstrated where a producer starts with a script and alters it bit by bit into a different product, the author of the original script has a good chance at successfully suing the producer. (Such happened to Steve Spielberg IIRC.) Your decompile -> recompile scenario would exactly fit this sort of situation.
But a clean room reverse engineering project would not infringe copyright. It might, however, infringe a patent.
Yeah, it sucks that they have to go through life with a nose that they inherited from me.
Fortunately, they have other assets.
From the time that they knew what the Internet was, I've tried to impress one rule upon their minds, "never put anything on the Internet that you're not willing to see on the front page of the newspaper."
That goes for email, "the cloud", discussion forums, blogs, etc. While various courts disagree with me, I don't think that there is any reasonable expectation of privacy in any communication sent over the Internet. IP packets are like handing a postcard to a stranger who happens to be traveling from Orange County to Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, the postcard gets handed off to someone else that happens to be traveling to Aspen, Colorado where it ends up in the hands of someone traveling to St. Louis. In St. Louis, a kind stranger picks it up and carries it as far as Chicago where yet another person picks it up and carries it to Cleveland. In Cleveland, someone carries it to NYC. And the postcard just sort of sits in NYC until someone headed to the a particular neighborhood notices that the address is close to home, picks it up and carries it to the mailbox.
If someone wants to send a "private" message in such a situation, the need for encryption is obvious.
So, yes, one should be wary about storing sensitive information in the cloud and where it resides in the cloud is mostly irrelevant. Even if the data center is in the most secure of locations, to get there the packets had to travel through all sorts of insecure locations.
Don't confuse the idea of "free markets" spoken of in the realm of economics with the idea of "free" markets where buyers and sellers have the freedom to do whatever they want.
In fhe former, buyers and sellers always act rationally, that is to say sellers always sell at the maximum price that they can get for a good and buyers always buy at the minimum price they can pay for a good. The equilibrium between price taking and price setting is supposed to produce the most efficient price.
Contrast this with a market where sellers act against their economic interest as the result of various other interests. For example, a shop keeper might want to refuse serve customers whose skin hue is a particular shade. Another shop keeper might want to refuse to stock merchandise by a manufacturer that implicitly (or explicitly) supports certain political causes. And then, there are the buyers. Some consumers might choose higher priced items that are functionally equivalent based on ideological reasons. Other consumers might choose to buy products based on advertising campaigns rather than on whether the product actually meets their needs. The market where this sort of thing is "free" in the laissez-faire sense of the term. But it is not the "free market" of Neoclassical economics.
Ultimately, libertarians have to decide whether the freedom of the seller to sell (or not to sell) takes priority (or not) over the freedom of they buyer to buy (or not to buy). Some try to argue that there is no tension in these freedoms. They are deluded as the lunch counter boycotts of the sixties demonstrated. Libertarians that are not deluded sometimes come down on the side of the sellers and sometimes on the side of the sellers. And, very infrequently, on the side of neither in support of the "free market" of Neoclassical economics.
Western manufacturing? Not so much.
Western culture? That will do the trick.
Look at Israel to see what I mean. For quite some time, it looked like the increasing number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin was going to doom Israel as a Jewish state. But, as Isrealis of Palestinian origin increasingly adopted western culture, the birth rate increasingly declined. As a consequence, the projected date at which Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin will outnumber Israeli citizens of Jewish origin keeps getting pushed out.
Or, if you want a different example, look at the way that the development of the nuclear family influenced the economic development of the Byzantine empire. Even if you don't count the Byzantines as part of the Roman empire, you've got a run from Constantine up through most of the fifteenth century. The longevity of the eastern Roman empire was largely a function of the economic consequences of a social emphasis on the nuclear family.
Not that having an industrial base might not accelerate the inculturation of western style family values, mind you. It may very well do that. But that isn't the only way to do so. And in countries that are still primarily agrarian, it seems to me that there may be better ways of changing social mores.
As but one example, to date there is no word processor on the iPad that properly handles footnotes or endnotes. The closes is Apple's own Pages which will display footnotes in a document that already has them but has not functionality for creating new ones unless you count copying and pasting an existing footnote, changing the text, and then forcing a repagination which renumbers the notes. Otherwise, by copying and pasting, you'd have two notes with the same number.
The closest is using one of the many text editors to write in LaTeX and then doing final edits on a Mac or PC.
Yeah, it's not like Lessig ever clerked for high profile appellate judges like Richard Posner or supreme court justices like Scalia.
He doesn't really have any practical experience with the higher courts and how judges make up their mind.
Sure, kids who are uninvolved in any extracurricular activities and don't use the school bus for transportation are only "on the clock" 8 hours per day. But this ignores extracurricular activities, sports, bussing, breakfast programs prior to the start of the school day, etc. It's not unusual for a child to catch the bus at 6 or 6:30 in the morning not be dropped back off until 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon. Some schools also offer breakfast programs prior to the start of the school day. And if a child is involved in sports programs, drama programs, has been assigned detention, etc., he or she may be on campus until late evening. It also ignores dances (homecomings, proms, etc.) and attendance of spectators at sporting events. And what about summer programs?
So a simplified 180 * 8 calculation for hours per child per year isn't really any more fair than just comparing annual amounts spent per warm body.
I needed a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 connector. The sales guy didn't understand what I wanted and went to consult his big book. He came back and tried to sell me a 4 pin Firewire 400 to 6 pin Firewire 400 connector. I can understand that a sales guy may not have enough breadth of knowledge to know every connector off the top of his head. But you'd think that the average electronics store sales guy would be smart enough to look such things up correctly.
Did they learn how to communicate meaning?
It sounds to me like they were programmed how to ostensively code and decode tokens. If it were the case that meaning is entirely reducible to ostensive definitions, then it is the case that they learned to communicate meaning. I'm not certain that many (if any) linguists, philosophers of language, or psychologists hold to an ostensive theory of language these days. Wittgenstein pretty much exploded the ostensive theory of language in such a way that no one takes it seriously.
Knowledge workers are more productive with each additional monitor up to four monitors. After that additional gains in productivity trail off.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15basics.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/multiple-monitors-and-productivity.html
If you weren't playing the game, I'm not certain that the patent would apply.
And if you were playing the game, was the beer instrumental to you winning the game? If not, I don't think the patent would apply.
Not that I think the patent is necessarily valid, mind you, I just don't think the analogy is apt. Paying to view a game and then purchasing a beverage while viewing the game is not the same thing as entering a game and then paying for materials, etcetera to help win the game.
Adam Smith, along with most of the pther pioneers of classical economics, were well aware of the problems of monopoly and of anti-competetive collusion between firms. Moreover, most western nations have all sorts of anti-trust legislation on the books.
You have to turn to the Austrians (Hayek, etc.), and to a lesser extent the Chicagoans (Friedman, tc.) to get the sort of pure laissez-faire capitalism that suggests that trusts, monopolies and the like would not form--or at least be less likely to form--in a purely free market. While such theories are pretty popular with certain groups such as the Tea Party movement in the US, I don't know how much currency they actually have in the realm of policy makers and their economic advisors.
Sure they are natural monopolies.
I'd like to see fifty different, or even five different, cable companies all get all the requisite right of way access to wire any metropolitan area of significant size. And, even if they could, the duplication in physical plant would likely lead to higher prices over all. Multiply the costs of existing "last mile" infrastructure by 10 and then spread that total cost over ten different carriers. Each carrier ends up having to charge far more per customer to recoup its fixed costs.
Here's a hint, its that last bit that puts the "natural" in "natural monopoly." It's not a question of possibility, or even of convenience, it's whether the efficiencies involved are such that a single firm can deliver at a lower cost per unit than if multiple firms are involved. Whether these efficiencies are "natural" due to the laws of nature or "artificial" in that they are mandated by a municipality is of no consequence. For it to be a natural monopoly all that needs to obtain is that the average price of the good or service be lower if provided by a single firm than a free market with multiple suppliers would produce.
1. below market, or even interest free, loans
2. construction bonds for new drilling sites
3. the feds assuming liability for new exploration
And then there are more indirect subsidies
1. the federal interstate system (imagine how much less oil would be needed without that money being spent)
2. miitary costs for escorting tankers through pirate infested waters
3. cleanup costs for superfund sites and other poluted grounds (how much did the feds pay for BP's spill last year alone)
GP didn't say "human", but "person". Whales can only beg to differ if they are moral persons.
What he's saying is that the choice to live by this system of morality (or that system of morality, or o system of morality) is fundamentally a private chioce in that no one has right to impose his or her system of morals upon anyone else.
This is not to say that such systems are fundamentally private in all senses of the term. They may very well have come into being through complicated sets of social relations. Moreover, they may consist entirely of rules (or obligations or rights) that only make sense in a social context. And the any ethical decision, regardless of being made privately, may very well have an effect on society.
(Note that I'm not necessarily agreeing with him. There are a number of good reasons to criticize this view. I'm just pointing out that it isn't an incoherent view. For a longer, more sophisticated, coverage of what I believe amounts to the same theory, check out Richard Posners The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.)
One does not expect prices to approach costs in a free market, but to approach the equilibrium between how much people are willing to pay and how much producers are willing to sell for. Costs usually, but not always, set a floor for one side of this equilibrium. But So long as people are willing to pay substantially above costs, sellers have no motivation to lower costs. They are in the profit maximization game after all. There is only motive to lower costs if by doing so the seller will increase sales volume by a large enough amount to make up the difference in the lower profit margin per unit.
If a service, such as SMS, is practically free to provide and yet people are willing to pay a premium for it, Telcos would be nuts to lower prices.
Now, there may also be collusion at play in the US market, but the high price of SMS services compared to the cost of providing those services won't by itself tell you anything about such collusion.