You really weren't naïve enough tho think that they cared about anything besides profits for the shareholders did you?
It's a myth that shareholders only care about short term profits (e.g. revenue from a subset of their customers held hostage by a privacy-invading government) at the expense of long-term profits (e.g. revenue from the entire set of their customers who are now more worried about their data security). People who are uncomfortable with delayed gratification don't put their money in stocks, they put it in retailers' cash registers.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of US copyright law differs from yours...
The bad news, about that $150,000: you're not going to get it. Statutory damages are only awardable if your work was registered with the Copyright Office prior to the infringement. Without registration, you're eligible for actual damages, basically just how much money the infringer made off of your work. Unless Wired regularly pays $1 per copy per image (they don't) then you're not going to get that much either.
The good news, about those DMCA notices: you can skip them and go straight to a lawsuit if you want. DMCA notices are for the infringer's service provider; their ISP, or their web host, or the blog they commented on, or whatever. The service provider gets a chance to pass the notice on, then cut off service for the infringed work if the notice is unchallenged, without becoming liable for infringement themselves. But Wired isn't a service provider for its own employees. If they're copying your work without permission, they're already guilty, no backsies.
I always wondered who was ignorant or stupid enough to be sent into a panic by those banner ads which announced that your computer used a unique ID to communicate and some other people could see that ID. Now I know. Politicians.
But if Wikipedia's to be believed, only 2 out of 7 of Activision's 2010 games have PC versions, as do 4 out of 11 of its 2009 games.
Actions speak louder than words. Words like "we can provide more value outside of walled gardens" don't matter when the corresponding actions are "Thank you sir, may I have another!"
I grew up with a swamp cooler in Abq, and it did do a decent job, and it did not cause any problems with electronics. (How could it? It merely raised the interior humidity to a level that occurs naturally in non-desert locations, which is lower still than the 100% that an AC cycle without reheating can leave you with.) The only thing incorrect about the grandparent post is the "can't afford AC" premise; although cool dessicated air would have been more expensive than cool humidified air, that wasn't the main reason we didn't want it.
Not all of AZ and NM may be subject to the same experience, though. A mid-summer heat wave in Abq could sometimes be strong enough to raise swamp-cooled temperatures above 80; that probably occurs much more often in more southern cities.
And that is the wet dream of the "libertarians" - unlimited power to the OWNING class
Which includes the power to receive compensation when the things you own (including just your own life) are damaged by the actions of others which infringe on the scope of that ownership. In the wet dream of libertarians, Shell and BP would be forced to repay all the damage they caused to the people they damaged.
So no, mostly they don't want to "fuck everyone". Do you think the current reality of all-powerful government passing thousand-page bills written by lobbyists (and thus containing fun surprises like liability caps for oil spills!!) is better?
So no, it's not clear how "top-heavy" the US government was supposed to be, because no one ever really agreed on it.
There was a big argument between:
The Federalists, who authored the Federalist papers justifying the decentralized government in the Constitution, and who believed that a Bill of Rights was redundant because the limited federal government wouldn't have any enumerated powers sufficient to allow it to infringe upon any of those rights anyway.
The Anti-Federalists, who believed in an even less powerful central government.
Now, who were arguing in favor of a powerful, top-heavy government?
Ridiculous. A foot a mile is the same as two feet per two miles.
Yes, hence the grandparent's ""a foot per mile" is really a useless statement"
Put a stick in the ground and have a friend stand a mile away from that. He can't see the the bottom foot of the stick.
Yes he can. That's not what "a foot a mile" means. In fact, it's impossible to say what your friend can and cannot see over the horizon without making some assumption about his height.
If the curvature really was quadratic the Earth would have a really weird shape.
The curvature is not quadratic, just quadratic to a second approximation. Look at what happens to a Taylor series when all the odd-numbered derivatives are zero.
Let's imagine that the Earth is perfectly spherical with radius 20,000,000 feet. Now put a coordinate system with your feet at 0,0,0 and the center of the Earth at 0,-20,000,000,0. Then the surface of the earth satisfies x^2+(y+20,000,000)^2+z^2 = 20,000,000^2.
Some points satisfying that equation (to the nearest tiny fraction of an inch) are (5000,-.625,0) (not quite a foot per mile, but that's just a very approximate rule) and (10000,-2.5,0) (where by doubling the first distance, we quadruple the second, just as a quadratic approximation would suggest).
For the system to function, it has to place trust in a group of people at some point.
Just because it is grammatically true that "group of people" is a singular noun does not mean that it isn't logically true a group of people is a plural concept. Trust in a system which relies on multiple people is enhanced, not reduced, by oversight methods that take into account the fact that any large group will contain untrustworthy individuals.
Those who modify "their religion" based on political influences
I think you misunderstood the intent of the phrase "political influences" - the goal of people who think this way isn't to add modifications based on the influence of modern politics, it's to try and subtract inferred old modifications based on the influence of older politics.
truly have no religion, or at best, have a cult.
I sympathize with the fear of constructing "piecemeal" religion. If your epistemology leads you to twenty tenets, and you later discover that three of those were wrong, simply cutting back to seventeen tenets is only reasonable if you've also figured out what the flaw in your epistemology was. However:
They are chaff being blown about in the wind.
In order to criticize people who don't treat their whole religion literally, you reference a parable, a religious story which is literally fictional and is intended to be interpreted metaphorically? I hope you see the irony.
If a small group of people really really cares about something, and the rest of us don't care too much, it's basic social wisdom to compromise in favor of the people who really do care.
If someone wanted to give me a million dollars, I would care a lot. If they did so by taking ten cents from every taxpayer and wasting most of the proceeds, you probably wouldn't care enough to write a letter to complain. Yet such proposals aren't "basic social wisdom", they're a reduction in total utility. They're also one of the practical defects with unlimited democracy.
That's true in all human relationships, not just at the national level.
Our own democracy was originally designed to have limited and decentralized powers to mitigate the consequences of such defects. The fact that we now have to debate over the definition of "decent" at the national level is part of the problem.
Would you be able to maintain the same suspension of disbelief if the CSI guys asked their in-house leprechaun to solve the crime for them? No? Why not? Because most stories are also about atmosphere and plot, and that all gets destroyed if the realistic atmosphere is unexpectedly contaminated by the surreal and the plot depends on a rescue from a deus ex machina. The difference is that script writers know that their audience isn't "weak minded" enough to buy a magic fairie, but that they can and usually do fall for a magic computer. "Oh, but they meant it to be metaphorical!" is an obvious cop-out, when you should know as well as we do that they just don't understand their setting well enough to accomplish the same conflict accurately. There are script writers who understand science and technology and make a conscious choice to violate it for some dramatic (or comedic, Futurama) effect, but they're the exception, not the rule.
Regulation means that those alternatives to wind farms with large, hidden costs borne actually pay those costs.
Yes, the Code of Fairyland Regulations and the Unicorn Society Code are quite thorough about such things.
Over here in the benighted human world, unfortunately, regulators are more flawed. Regulated established businesses only need to pay the costs necessary to avoid regulations (why worry about pollution limits in the US when we can just move our manufacturing somewhere else?) or to lobby for "better" regulations (liability for oil spill damages is expensive; couldn't we cap it at $75 million and let the government pick up the rest?) And even if the regulations manage to catch businesses that are too small to escape them, that just means less competition and higher profits for the escapees.
Would more regulations help? Possibly - in theory lawmakers ought to be able to codify unfair externalities and foreseeable damages in a fair and accurate way, right? And in theory voters ought to be able to get rid of lawmakers who don't do that, shouldn't we? But the real-world CFR and US Code already fill bookshelves; anyone with enough free time to read and enough skill to understand the flaws in even a small chunk of them is going to be grossly outvoted by people who lack that time and skill, and outshouted by lobbyists who are paid for their time and skill. "Wait until the damage is done and then punish the criminals" is an obviously lousy alternative for it's own reasons, but at least in that scenario the punishment is in the hands of people whose incentives are lined up the right way.
they often have more influence on lawmaking than "we" do.
It's called Regulatory capture. You don't have the time to study every effect of every regulation proposed by someone who was appointed by someone who was elected within a district where you can vote. But business-paid lobbyists do have that time. So you demand that something must be done, and when a new thousand pages of laws and regulations are created you're appeased, because what voter has time to hunt through those laws for corporate giveaways like $75 million liability limits?
Yeah, businesses hate regulation. "We'll write a bunch of lawyerese that acts as a barrier to entry for would-be new competitors, and we'll promise to bail you out at the expense of your victims if your risk-taking backfires - but watch out if it does backfire, because then the furious voters will demand that we do the same thing again!"
Yes, but their last-mile monopolies were granted by diligent local governments who will keep an eye out for any abuse of that privilege, and those governments in turn are subject to the astute oversight of voters who...
even if you believe that rights derive from some other source, such as nature or God, you still have to convince other people, a.k.a society, of that fact
Fortunately for humanity, that hasn't ever been the only way to have your rights recognized. There are many other successful tactics, but a few worth mentioning:
- Get people to agree to principles that are too general to allow micromanagement of how each application of the principle might affect their individual utility. This works because we still have enough people agreeing to the meta-principle that principles can trump individual utility and majority rule, although support for that one is frighteningly eroded by sentiments like the ones in your earlier posts. Everyone approves of "freedom of speech" for speech they approve of, for example, not necessarily for speech they disapprove of. But we've managed to convince enough people of that principle in general, and now we don't have to convince so many people to prevent having exceptions carved out for "anti-patriotic" speech, "radical" or "reactionary" speech, "pro-corporate" speech, or whatever else manages to make a majority angry or fearful of the speech's potential negative consequences.
- Keep your business private. It helps if you've already got privacy respected as one of those general principles, but it's not entirely necessary. If person A and person B want to engage in an actual contract, and person C insists that he gets to trump that with an unwritten "social contract", A and B can just leave him out of the loop. It doesn't always work so ideally. If you want to invite person A and his friends to your speakeasy, you have to hope that C isn't pretending to be such a friend. Smuggling someone else's property carries similar risks whether the smuggler works with petty thieves or the Underground Railroad. But in general society has always been good at ordering unjust restraints on individuals' private lives and less good at enforcing those orders.
- Keep your powder dry. Defenders often have an advantage in a fight. Not always a decisive advantage, of course, but enough to have often been helpful for those of us who think that people have more rights to their own bodies and property than to each others'. "Live and let live" is often good tactics as well as good ethics.
Utility to the individual is the only real way to argue for rights.
What we have here seems to be not just a real disagreement, but also an argument about vocabulary. Under you definition of "rights", it makes no sense to "argue for rights". Is society denying someone their civil rights? Impossible - by your definition, if society chooses to deny something then it can't be a right! But if you think that society is denying someone something that they deserve, and you want to be able to argue for that something, then you have to first admit that it is theoretically possible for people to deserve something that society is not giving them. Historically, the word "rights" has been used for that something. What word would you prefer instead?
There may be some advantage, but the disadvantage is obvious to everyone: you may be the person owned or locked up.
Exactly - "You're not the boss of me!" sounds quite reasonable when you imagine yourself in the non-boss role, doesn't it?
You can start with individual utility, but to do so safely you have to recognize that in many cases you will end up having to decrease individual utility in favor of individual liberty, in the hope that by doing so you establish a precedent that will preserve your own liberty when the time comes. But to really be safe, that liberty has to apply not just to freedoms that you would want to use yourself, but also to freedoms that you wouldn't. Have you talked to many people who can't imagine themselves wanting a beer? Your "freedom" to drink a beer is indistinguishable from "license" in some of their minds! What definition of "license" woul
Without the social decision, we do not have rights.
Exactly. If society decides that some people should be owned by others, or should be locked up in camps, who are those people to say otherwise? They're not society, and they clearly have no power, so they have no rights other than what each society says they do.
We trade a freedom we don't desire, like the freedom to punch someone in the nose, for a freedom we do desire, like freedom from being punched.
That's a funny phrase: "the nose". Who is "the nose" attached to? Doesn't matter. You can't, like, own a nose, man. We're in a society, so surely we've got to make a social decisions about all these noses that seem to be strewn about! Anything else would be anarchy, for weird hermits who want to make unreasonable demands on what happens to all society's noses. We depend on each other now, and how can you possibly have an interdependent relationship which doesn't involve one person giving the other orders? It's just inconceivable.
The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is.
For the most part, no, but surely you admit there's a few big exceptions? But on the bright side, maybe the last genocide ended this spring, knock on wood, in which case the greatest evil around is a measly few million women and children enslaved and forced to work as prostitutes. Things are definitely looking up now that only a third of the world is ruled by totalitarianism, but perhaps it's not time to beat all the swords into plowshares yet?
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
Good idea.
In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies
Irrelevant and unnecessary. You seem to have stumbled into the movie execs' fantasy world, where their products won't be pirated if only they can be made just a little harder to copy. Nonsense. They're being copied like mad despite being made as hard to copy as multimillion dollar corporations can make them, because making bits hard to copy is like making water hard to get wet, and because any anti-copying scheme only has to be broken once to be broken a million times.
So, trying to figure out how to offer uncopyable downloads is just a distraction that's delaying the advent of paid downloads. There are already easily copyable downloads out there, the pirates don't care if you add another.
I'd just like to point out that, among a significant fraction of humanity, we're starting to work out how to get along with each other without the assumption that one person has the right to make statements and decisions in the name of millions or billions of others. Give us another couple centuries before you give up hope and sterilize the lot of us, please?
refusing to comply with a law enforcement official has a couple hundred years precedent stating that it amounts to criminal behavior
A couple hundred years? At least several thousand. Ironically, it's been in the last few hundred years that we've made the most progress against the idea that one class of people can give orders without justification to another class of people who must obey without exception.
The only real surprise will be if they don't find such clever ways to skirt the First Amendment when it comes to the Internet.
Why is that phrased in the future tense? They just failed, by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, an attempt to ban a political movie on the basis of an "it was funded by a (non-profit) corporation!" excuse. And they had two thirds of the internet cheering them on.
(Disclaimer: this comment is funded by Sprint and GeekNet, Inc., according to the banner ad above and the boilerplate below. Ironically, half of the idiots on the internet decrying that SC decision were in a similar situation.)
The point was not the scope or extent of the power. The point was the arbitrary way that it is exercised and the fact that justification of its use is an afterthought if it is provided at all.
By that weak definition, everyone is a "dictatorship", and so your definition is useless. For example, you have absolutely no power to change the color of my bathroom walls. I did nothing to justify their color to you, and any justification I gave you now would sound quite arbitrary. I'm in charge of my own property, and I said so.
There is a huge difference between a dictatorship that you can leave by abandoning your home along with much of your culture, family, friends, and possessions, vs. a "dictatorship" that you can leave by buying a different product or going home before you have to pee. Dictatorship isn't just about having control over something, it's about having control over someone else's life.
That applies to the original example, too. It's a shame when a corporation doesn't want to allow openness, but compared to a real dictatorship it's also pretty trivial. If GE doesn't want your ideas openly discussed on NBC, take them to Fox, or the Washington Post, or Digg, or Slashdot, or your blog. If China doesn't want your ideas openly discussed, then your ideas disappear, and if you put them on your blog then so do you. Chavez is talking about China-style control now, not just GE-style.
Slashdot Mirror
You really weren't naïve enough tho think that they cared about anything besides profits for the shareholders did you?
It's a myth that shareholders only care about short term profits (e.g. revenue from a subset of their customers held hostage by a privacy-invading government) at the expense of long-term profits (e.g. revenue from the entire set of their customers who are now more worried about their data security). People who are uncomfortable with delayed gratification don't put their money in stocks, they put it in retailers' cash registers.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of US copyright law differs from yours...
The bad news, about that $150,000: you're not going to get it. Statutory damages are only awardable if your work was registered with the Copyright Office prior to the infringement. Without registration, you're eligible for actual damages, basically just how much money the infringer made off of your work. Unless Wired regularly pays $1 per copy per image (they don't) then you're not going to get that much either.
The good news, about those DMCA notices: you can skip them and go straight to a lawsuit if you want. DMCA notices are for the infringer's service provider; their ISP, or their web host, or the blog they commented on, or whatever. The service provider gets a chance to pass the notice on, then cut off service for the infringed work if the notice is unchallenged, without becoming liable for infringement themselves. But Wired isn't a service provider for its own employees. If they're copying your work without permission, they're already guilty, no backsies.
I always wondered who was ignorant or stupid enough to be sent into a panic by those banner ads which announced that your computer used a unique ID to communicate and some other people could see that ID. Now I know. Politicians.
Yeah, but Russia probably signed the same "We promise to hack Google first" agreement that China did, so from Microsoft's perspective it's win/win.
But if Wikipedia's to be believed, only 2 out of 7 of Activision's 2010 games have PC versions, as do 4 out of 11 of its 2009 games.
Actions speak louder than words. Words like "we can provide more value outside of walled gardens" don't matter when the corresponding actions are "Thank you sir, may I have another!"
I grew up with a swamp cooler in Abq, and it did do a decent job, and it did not cause any problems with electronics. (How could it? It merely raised the interior humidity to a level that occurs naturally in non-desert locations, which is lower still than the 100% that an AC cycle without reheating can leave you with.) The only thing incorrect about the grandparent post is the "can't afford AC" premise; although cool dessicated air would have been more expensive than cool humidified air, that wasn't the main reason we didn't want it.
Not all of AZ and NM may be subject to the same experience, though. A mid-summer heat wave in Abq could sometimes be strong enough to raise swamp-cooled temperatures above 80; that probably occurs much more often in more southern cities.
And that is the wet dream of the "libertarians" - unlimited power to the OWNING class
Which includes the power to receive compensation when the things you own (including just your own life) are damaged by the actions of others which infringe on the scope of that ownership. In the wet dream of libertarians, Shell and BP would be forced to repay all the damage they caused to the people they damaged.
So no, mostly they don't want to "fuck everyone". Do you think the current reality of all-powerful government passing thousand-page bills written by lobbyists (and thus containing fun surprises like liability caps for oil spills!!) is better?
So no, it's not clear how "top-heavy" the US government was supposed to be, because no one ever really agreed on it.
There was a big argument between:
The Federalists, who authored the Federalist papers justifying the decentralized government in the Constitution, and who believed that a Bill of Rights was redundant because the limited federal government wouldn't have any enumerated powers sufficient to allow it to infringe upon any of those rights anyway.
The Anti-Federalists, who believed in an even less powerful central government.
Now, who were arguing in favor of a powerful, top-heavy government?
Ridiculous. A foot a mile is the same as two feet per two miles.
Yes, hence the grandparent's ""a foot per mile" is really a useless statement"
Put a stick in the ground and have a friend stand a mile away from that. He can't see the the bottom foot of the stick.
Yes he can. That's not what "a foot a mile" means. In fact, it's impossible to say what your friend can and cannot see over the horizon without making some assumption about his height.
If the curvature really was quadratic the Earth would have a really weird shape.
The curvature is not quadratic, just quadratic to a second approximation. Look at what happens to a Taylor series when all the odd-numbered derivatives are zero.
Let's imagine that the Earth is perfectly spherical with radius 20,000,000 feet. Now put a coordinate system with your feet at 0,0,0 and the center of the Earth at 0,-20,000,000,0. Then the surface of the earth satisfies x^2+(y+20,000,000)^2+z^2 = 20,000,000^2.
Some points satisfying that equation (to the nearest tiny fraction of an inch) are (5000,-.625,0) (not quite a foot per mile, but that's just a very approximate rule) and (10000,-2.5,0) (where by doubling the first distance, we quadruple the second, just as a quadratic approximation would suggest).
For the system to function, it has to place trust in a group of people at some point.
Just because it is grammatically true that "group of people" is a singular noun does not mean that it isn't logically true a group of people is a plural concept. Trust in a system which relies on multiple people is enhanced, not reduced, by oversight methods that take into account the fact that any large group will contain untrustworthy individuals.
I think you misunderstood the intent of the phrase "political influences" - the goal of people who think this way isn't to add modifications based on the influence of modern politics, it's to try and subtract inferred old modifications based on the influence of older politics.
I sympathize with the fear of constructing "piecemeal" religion. If your epistemology leads you to twenty tenets, and you later discover that three of those were wrong, simply cutting back to seventeen tenets is only reasonable if you've also figured out what the flaw in your epistemology was. However:
In order to criticize people who don't treat their whole religion literally, you reference a parable, a religious story which is literally fictional and is intended to be interpreted metaphorically? I hope you see the irony.
If someone wanted to give me a million dollars, I would care a lot. If they did so by taking ten cents from every taxpayer and wasting most of the proceeds, you probably wouldn't care enough to write a letter to complain. Yet such proposals aren't "basic social wisdom", they're a reduction in total utility. They're also one of the practical defects with unlimited democracy.
Our own democracy was originally designed to have limited and decentralized powers to mitigate the consequences of such defects. The fact that we now have to debate over the definition of "decent" at the national level is part of the problem.
Would you be able to maintain the same suspension of disbelief if the CSI guys asked their in-house leprechaun to solve the crime for them? No? Why not? Because most stories are also about atmosphere and plot, and that all gets destroyed if the realistic atmosphere is unexpectedly contaminated by the surreal and the plot depends on a rescue from a deus ex machina. The difference is that script writers know that their audience isn't "weak minded" enough to buy a magic fairie, but that they can and usually do fall for a magic computer. "Oh, but they meant it to be metaphorical!" is an obvious cop-out, when you should know as well as we do that they just don't understand their setting well enough to accomplish the same conflict accurately. There are script writers who understand science and technology and make a conscious choice to violate it for some dramatic (or comedic, Futurama) effect, but they're the exception, not the rule.
Regulation means that those alternatives to wind farms with large, hidden costs borne actually pay those costs.
Yes, the Code of Fairyland Regulations and the Unicorn Society Code are quite thorough about such things.
Over here in the benighted human world, unfortunately, regulators are more flawed. Regulated established businesses only need to pay the costs necessary to avoid regulations (why worry about pollution limits in the US when we can just move our manufacturing somewhere else?) or to lobby for "better" regulations (liability for oil spill damages is expensive; couldn't we cap it at $75 million and let the government pick up the rest?) And even if the regulations manage to catch businesses that are too small to escape them, that just means less competition and higher profits for the escapees.
Would more regulations help? Possibly - in theory lawmakers ought to be able to codify unfair externalities and foreseeable damages in a fair and accurate way, right? And in theory voters ought to be able to get rid of lawmakers who don't do that, shouldn't we? But the real-world CFR and US Code already fill bookshelves; anyone with enough free time to read and enough skill to understand the flaws in even a small chunk of them is going to be grossly outvoted by people who lack that time and skill, and outshouted by lobbyists who are paid for their time and skill. "Wait until the damage is done and then punish the criminals" is an obviously lousy alternative for it's own reasons, but at least in that scenario the punishment is in the hands of people whose incentives are lined up the right way.
Business doesn't like regulation, and
this is false because:
they often have more influence on lawmaking than "we" do.
It's called Regulatory capture. You don't have the time to study every effect of every regulation proposed by someone who was appointed by someone who was elected within a district where you can vote. But business-paid lobbyists do have that time. So you demand that something must be done, and when a new thousand pages of laws and regulations are created you're appeased, because what voter has time to hunt through those laws for corporate giveaways like $75 million liability limits?
Yeah, businesses hate regulation. "We'll write a bunch of lawyerese that acts as a barrier to entry for would-be new competitors, and we'll promise to bail you out at the expense of your victims if your risk-taking backfires - but watch out if it does backfire, because then the furious voters will demand that we do the same thing again!"
Remember, they have the monopoly, they can do it.
Yes, but their last-mile monopolies were granted by diligent local governments who will keep an eye out for any abuse of that privilege, and those governments in turn are subject to the astute oversight of voters who...
HAHAHA!
Yes, of course I'm just kidding. We're screwed.
even if you believe that rights derive from some other source, such as nature or God, you still have to convince other people, a.k.a society, of that fact
Fortunately for humanity, that hasn't ever been the only way to have your rights recognized. There are many other successful tactics, but a few worth mentioning:
- Get people to agree to principles that are too general to allow micromanagement of how each application of the principle might affect their individual utility. This works because we still have enough people agreeing to the meta-principle that principles can trump individual utility and majority rule, although support for that one is frighteningly eroded by sentiments like the ones in your earlier posts. Everyone approves of "freedom of speech" for speech they approve of, for example, not necessarily for speech they disapprove of. But we've managed to convince enough people of that principle in general, and now we don't have to convince so many people to prevent having exceptions carved out for "anti-patriotic" speech, "radical" or "reactionary" speech, "pro-corporate" speech, or whatever else manages to make a majority angry or fearful of the speech's potential negative consequences.
- Keep your business private. It helps if you've already got privacy respected as one of those general principles, but it's not entirely necessary. If person A and person B want to engage in an actual contract, and person C insists that he gets to trump that with an unwritten "social contract", A and B can just leave him out of the loop. It doesn't always work so ideally. If you want to invite person A and his friends to your speakeasy, you have to hope that C isn't pretending to be such a friend. Smuggling someone else's property carries similar risks whether the smuggler works with petty thieves or the Underground Railroad. But in general society has always been good at ordering unjust restraints on individuals' private lives and less good at enforcing those orders.
- Keep your powder dry. Defenders often have an advantage in a fight. Not always a decisive advantage, of course, but enough to have often been helpful for those of us who think that people have more rights to their own bodies and property than to each others'. "Live and let live" is often good tactics as well as good ethics.
Utility to the individual is the only real way to argue for rights.
What we have here seems to be not just a real disagreement, but also an argument about vocabulary. Under you definition of "rights", it makes no sense to "argue for rights". Is society denying someone their civil rights? Impossible - by your definition, if society chooses to deny something then it can't be a right! But if you think that society is denying someone something that they deserve, and you want to be able to argue for that something, then you have to first admit that it is theoretically possible for people to deserve something that society is not giving them. Historically, the word "rights" has been used for that something. What word would you prefer instead?
There may be some advantage, but the disadvantage is obvious to everyone: you may be the person owned or locked up.
Exactly - "You're not the boss of me!" sounds quite reasonable when you imagine yourself in the non-boss role, doesn't it?
You can start with individual utility, but to do so safely you have to recognize that in many cases you will end up having to decrease individual utility in favor of individual liberty, in the hope that by doing so you establish a precedent that will preserve your own liberty when the time comes. But to really be safe, that liberty has to apply not just to freedoms that you would want to use yourself, but also to freedoms that you wouldn't. Have you talked to many people who can't imagine themselves wanting a beer? Your "freedom" to drink a beer is indistinguishable from "license" in some of their minds! What definition of "license" woul
Without the social decision, we do not have rights.
Exactly. If society decides that some people should be owned by others, or should be locked up in camps, who are those people to say otherwise? They're not society, and they clearly have no power, so they have no rights other than what each society says they do.
We trade a freedom we don't desire, like the freedom to punch someone in the nose, for a freedom we do desire, like freedom from being punched.
That's a funny phrase: "the nose". Who is "the nose" attached to? Doesn't matter. You can't, like, own a nose, man. We're in a society, so surely we've got to make a social decisions about all these noses that seem to be strewn about! Anything else would be anarchy, for weird hermits who want to make unreasonable demands on what happens to all society's noses. We depend on each other now, and how can you possibly have an interdependent relationship which doesn't involve one person giving the other orders? It's just inconceivable.
The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is.
For the most part, no, but surely you admit there's a few big exceptions? But on the bright side, maybe the last genocide ended this spring, knock on wood, in which case the greatest evil around is a measly few million women and children enslaved and forced to work as prostitutes. Things are definitely looking up now that only a third of the world is ruled by totalitarianism, but perhaps it's not time to beat all the swords into plowshares yet?
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
Good idea.
In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies
Irrelevant and unnecessary. You seem to have stumbled into the movie execs' fantasy world, where their products won't be pirated if only they can be made just a little harder to copy. Nonsense. They're being copied like mad despite being made as hard to copy as multimillion dollar corporations can make them, because making bits hard to copy is like making water hard to get wet, and because any anti-copying scheme only has to be broken once to be broken a million times.
So, trying to figure out how to offer uncopyable downloads is just a distraction that's delaying the advent of paid downloads. There are already easily copyable downloads out there, the pirates don't care if you add another.
I'd just like to point out that, among a significant fraction of humanity, we're starting to work out how to get along with each other without the assumption that one person has the right to make statements and decisions in the name of millions or billions of others. Give us another couple centuries before you give up hope and sterilize the lot of us, please?
refusing to comply with a law enforcement official has a couple hundred years precedent stating that it amounts to criminal behavior
A couple hundred years? At least several thousand. Ironically, it's been in the last few hundred years that we've made the most progress against the idea that one class of people can give orders without justification to another class of people who must obey without exception.
The only real surprise will be if they don't find such clever ways to skirt the First Amendment when it comes to the Internet.
Why is that phrased in the future tense? They just failed, by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, an attempt to ban a political movie on the basis of an "it was funded by a (non-profit) corporation!" excuse. And they had two thirds of the internet cheering them on.
(Disclaimer: this comment is funded by Sprint and GeekNet, Inc., according to the banner ad above and the boilerplate below. Ironically, half of the idiots on the internet decrying that SC decision were in a similar situation.)
The point was not the scope or extent of the power. The point was the arbitrary way that it is exercised and the fact that justification of its use is an afterthought if it is provided at all.
By that weak definition, everyone is a "dictatorship", and so your definition is useless. For example, you have absolutely no power to change the color of my bathroom walls. I did nothing to justify their color to you, and any justification I gave you now would sound quite arbitrary. I'm in charge of my own property, and I said so.
There is a huge difference between a dictatorship that you can leave by abandoning your home along with much of your culture, family, friends, and possessions, vs. a "dictatorship" that you can leave by buying a different product or going home before you have to pee. Dictatorship isn't just about having control over something, it's about having control over someone else's life.
That applies to the original example, too. It's a shame when a corporation doesn't want to allow openness, but compared to a real dictatorship it's also pretty trivial. If GE doesn't want your ideas openly discussed on NBC, take them to Fox, or the Washington Post, or Digg, or Slashdot, or your blog. If China doesn't want your ideas openly discussed, then your ideas disappear, and if you put them on your blog then so do you. Chavez is talking about China-style control now, not just GE-style.