The reason we can't have nice things is not because bad people use them, but because bad people shut them down, using the other bad people as a pretense.
Sibal is asking companies to help him filter the Internet because the country has several religions and faiths. He argues what might seem humorous to someone can be really offensive to another and he wants to avoid further incidents of communities taking to the streets and vandalizing public property.
Bear with me, I have a solution to propose for this, from the Bible, from a time when another large country in Asia faced a problem with the presence of several faiths and ethnicities and some were getting ready to take to the streets in violence.
the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil. (Esther 8:11)
It worked. When the Jews were granted the legal right to defend themselves, only idiots got violent against them, and they received a rough justice as a result, with little cost to the government.
Just a suggestion. It's a lot better than taking away civil rights.
Word. This is one reason why I no longer believe in democracy. Possession of tyrannical power does not become better just because we take turns, or only award turns to those who win a stupid popularity contest. It's not that we need somebody to possess these tyrannical powers and need a safe and rational way to hand it out -- it's that we need nobody to possess these powers!
I just watch Twilight Zone on Netflix. Actually I never watched it in my life before Netflix. We've seen several episodes, and I'm pretty sure they are all full length.
Without the coercion, other companies could continue to offer overtime as an incentive to attract away other workers.
Yes, the companies certainly want to maximize profit, so they are colluding, and they are trying to use the force of law to bludgeon anyone who doesn't participate in colluding. The losers are the non-colluding companies, and the workers.
If people did not give the government the power to do this stuff, then it couldn't happen, because there'd always be someone willing to stand up and reap the economic benefits of being more competitive.
You've got it backwards. It removes my options to work at an employer who does otherwise. My employer already has the option to not pay me overtime if they don't want to. Standardizing the employment market on that count reduces options for me, as well as taking away options from the employers (removes their ability to make themselves more competitive by offering overtime).
Exactly! I prefer my employment be a private matter between myself and my employer. The company I work for has actually done this both ways. I accept the present way of doing it, voluntarily; I don't need somebody to come in and coerce something else and take away my options.
The problem with the idea of "digital theft" is that it's somebody's religious convictions, accepted only on faith, forced on me against my will. As you correctly point out, after copyright infringement, the original owner has not lost his data. I've long said that copyright infringement is less like theft and more like devaluing the shoes in a shoestore by building a competing store and making more shoes. To me there's nothing intrinsically immoral about making more stuff, in general, whether it be shoes or digital patterns. But others have a vested interest in making this out to be an immoral act, and they want to use force to make the rest of us live by that "moral."
Look, I'm a religious guy. I believe in God, and I try to follow the Bible. But I don't advocate forcing my convictions on other people who don't believe the evidence points to the conclusions I've come to. I don't advocate for laws forcing people to go to church, I don't want to educate your children in creation science, and this year when my formerly-dry town went wet, I refused to go vote to try to keep it dry, even though I personally don't drink. My religion and morals are my own, and if you don't accept them, well, as long as you respect my right to life, liberty, and property, we're cool. Go smoke some weed and enjoy your premarital or same gender sexual relations.:)
I'd like the same treatment from other people. I'd like for people to not be able to force me to do or not do something solely because they put it in a "moral" realm and say it's "wrong." My personal belief that something is wrong doesn't make it Gospel truth, and doesn't make it right for me to go fine people and throw them in jail for not following my moral scruples.
Are you under the impression that spam continues for the fun of it, just to annoy people?
Did you read what I wrote correctly? Spam goes out to make money, and it does make money, so the original article's weak suggestion of letting them know in no uncertain terms that we really don't like what they are doing and could they please stop now sounds pretty ludicrous to me.
Yes, that was exactly my point. Spam is sent out to make money. They don't care if we like it or not. They do not need to be "made to understand that we really don't like it." They already know this and don't give a rip, so I thought this wording in the original article sounded extremely wimpy and ineffective.
I appreciate the fake resellers for creating this situation, and Slashdot for bringing it to my attention. Now I am aware of this product and will be keeping an eye out for it and may buy one from the manufacturer when they are available.
How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?
Are you under the impression that spam continues because people think we like it? That if they only understood how much we don't like it, they would stop?
At first glance, I thought they were talking about implementing something like the HURD, where every "file" could potentially be a service behind the scenes. Reading a little further, I thought they were talking about implementing something like the old Macintosh HFS resource forks.
But then I kept reading and realized they were just making some noise about DRM. Nice try, Microsoft; you almost had me going, there.
When the President took office, he directed all of his policymakers to develop policies based on science and research, not ideology or politics
In other words, this is rule by an elite few who say how things should be, rather than rule according to principles like the belief that people should be able to pursue their own happiness in whatever way they choose so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.
Once upon a time society also generally recognized that the earth was flat, that the world was created by God, and that homosexuals should be tortured and burned. Popularity contests are no way to decide morality.
All of the objections you raise were answered thirty years ago by Murray Rothbard in his book For a New Liberty, which is available for free online in PDF and MP3.
reasonable expectation of privacy: An objective, legitimate or reasonable expectation of privacy is an expectation of privacy generally recognized by society
You are repeating your beliefs instead of addressing my point.
if the US didn't have a military presence- all the above may have felt the wrath of China by now.
I don't agree with the troll you responded to, but I just wanted to point out that just because those countries might have been endangered by China, that does not mean that it is right to save them at the expense of American taxes, lives, and freedoms. I think if people want to protect other countries, they should support doing so out of their own lives and livelihood. Then they can more accurately appraise costs and decide if it's worth it to them.
In other words, you'd like everyone to see this issue the way you do, so you call your expectations reasonable and anyone who disagrees with you is unreasonable.
Privacy costs. Not necessarily money, but it costs. Sure I avert my eyes if I run into someone's private moment, but if I really want to be private, I consider it my own responsibility to take precautions to achieve that.
This is sad to hear. The government reserves the right to spy on literally everybody, but will not permit itself to be observed. Who does watch the watchers, anyway?
Like all institutions, the government is concerned mainly with perpetuating its own existence. And since the general public equates the government's existence with their security and their own existence, they tolerate all kinds of wrong deeds and imbalances of power like this.
When the United States was young with newly won independence from Britain, each state minted its own currency and this was a debacle. How would one determine how much New Jersey dollars would one get in trade for, say, Connecticut dollars?
Not so. I'd love to see a source for these assertions.
I agree that bitcoins are a commodity in a sense. They do provide some value. They have provided quite a bit of entertainment and education for me. They may also provide value in the way they facilitate certain types of transactions (i.e., private irreversible transfers, or international transfers, or transfers not involving a monopolistic third party who gets a cut, or transfers not involving any government currency, or...). Whether any of these things makes them valuable enough to ultimately serve as a currency is a question I don't consider to be answered.
To correct this, I think the next generation of digital currency should reward miners with only transaction fees. Or else have a much sharper dropoff in the reward.
It would be simple now to recompile bitcoin to give no payoff in transactions other than transaction fees, or to make the dropoff much sharper, and start a new block chain. I am betting that someone will attempt this at some point.
The initial problem that "mining" was attempting to solve was proliferation of currency: how do you get bitcoins into people's possession so that they can use them? IMO, they went way overboard with this, and became enamored with the resemblance to "mining" and all the other "really neat" facts about this approach, losing sight of the basic problem they were intending to solve. Creation of new bitcoins could've ceased much, much sooner and the problem still would've been solved. Or the problem could've been solved in other ways.
The initial bitcoin block could award a large amount of bitcoins to one or more issuing authorities. Or the protocol could be modified to allow any arbitrary issuing authority to issue coins in the new chain with a promise to redeem for some commodity, and the protocol could be modified to track the issuing authority along with each unit of currency so that coins can be redeemed. In such a scheme issuing authorities could compete on reliability, convenience, and other factors, and the value of a coin from one authority would not necessarily be the same as the value of a coin from another authority. This would essentially allow bitcoin to track any number of competing currencies with new ones arising at any time, and only dependable issuing authorities would be able to get much traction, if at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we can't have nice things is not because bad people use them, but because bad people shut them down, using the other bad people as a pretense.
Yep, bad news for Koreans, but not for Westerners, since North Korea doesn't actually possess the strength to affect the West.
Sibal is asking companies to help him filter the Internet because the country has several religions and faiths. He argues what might seem humorous to someone can be really offensive to another and he wants to avoid further incidents of communities taking to the streets and vandalizing public property.
Bear with me, I have a solution to propose for this, from the Bible, from a time when another large country in Asia faced a problem with the presence of several faiths and ethnicities and some were getting ready to take to the streets in violence.
the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil. (Esther 8:11)
It worked. When the Jews were granted the legal right to defend themselves, only idiots got violent against them, and they received a rough justice as a result, with little cost to the government.
Just a suggestion. It's a lot better than taking away civil rights.
Speech doesn't commit violence. Governments do.
Word. This is one reason why I no longer believe in democracy. Possession of tyrannical power does not become better just because we take turns, or only award turns to those who win a stupid popularity contest. It's not that we need somebody to possess these tyrannical powers and need a safe and rational way to hand it out -- it's that we need nobody to possess these powers!
I just watch Twilight Zone on Netflix. Actually I never watched it in my life before Netflix. We've seen several episodes, and I'm pretty sure they are all full length.
This is not economic behavior, it is coercion.
Without the coercion, other companies could continue to offer overtime as an incentive to attract away other workers.
Yes, the companies certainly want to maximize profit, so they are colluding, and they are trying to use the force of law to bludgeon anyone who doesn't participate in colluding. The losers are the non-colluding companies, and the workers.
If people did not give the government the power to do this stuff, then it couldn't happen, because there'd always be someone willing to stand up and reap the economic benefits of being more competitive.
You've got it backwards. It removes my options to work at an employer who does otherwise. My employer already has the option to not pay me overtime if they don't want to. Standardizing the employment market on that count reduces options for me, as well as taking away options from the employers (removes their ability to make themselves more competitive by offering overtime).
Exactly! I prefer my employment be a private matter between myself and my employer. The company I work for has actually done this both ways. I accept the present way of doing it, voluntarily; I don't need somebody to come in and coerce something else and take away my options.
The problem with the idea of "digital theft" is that it's somebody's religious convictions, accepted only on faith, forced on me against my will. As you correctly point out, after copyright infringement, the original owner has not lost his data. I've long said that copyright infringement is less like theft and more like devaluing the shoes in a shoestore by building a competing store and making more shoes. To me there's nothing intrinsically immoral about making more stuff, in general, whether it be shoes or digital patterns. But others have a vested interest in making this out to be an immoral act, and they want to use force to make the rest of us live by that "moral."
Look, I'm a religious guy. I believe in God, and I try to follow the Bible. But I don't advocate forcing my convictions on other people who don't believe the evidence points to the conclusions I've come to. I don't advocate for laws forcing people to go to church, I don't want to educate your children in creation science, and this year when my formerly-dry town went wet, I refused to go vote to try to keep it dry, even though I personally don't drink. My religion and morals are my own, and if you don't accept them, well, as long as you respect my right to life, liberty, and property, we're cool. Go smoke some weed and enjoy your premarital or same gender sexual relations. :)
I'd like the same treatment from other people. I'd like for people to not be able to force me to do or not do something solely because they put it in a "moral" realm and say it's "wrong." My personal belief that something is wrong doesn't make it Gospel truth, and doesn't make it right for me to go fine people and throw them in jail for not following my moral scruples.
Are you under the impression that spam continues for the fun of it, just to annoy people?
Did you read what I wrote correctly? Spam goes out to make money, and it does make money, so the original article's weak suggestion of letting them know in no uncertain terms that we really don't like what they are doing and could they please stop now sounds pretty ludicrous to me.
Yes, that was exactly my point. Spam is sent out to make money. They don't care if we like it or not. They do not need to be "made to understand that we really don't like it." They already know this and don't give a rip, so I thought this wording in the original article sounded extremely wimpy and ineffective.
I appreciate the fake resellers for creating this situation, and Slashdot for bringing it to my attention. Now I am aware of this product and will be keeping an eye out for it and may buy one from the manufacturer when they are available.
How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?
Are you under the impression that spam continues because people think we like it? That if they only understood how much we don't like it, they would stop?
At first glance, I thought they were talking about implementing something like the HURD, where every "file" could potentially be a service behind the scenes. Reading a little further, I thought they were talking about implementing something like the old Macintosh HFS resource forks.
But then I kept reading and realized they were just making some noise about DRM. Nice try, Microsoft; you almost had me going, there.
When the President took office, he directed all of his policymakers to develop policies based on science and research, not ideology or politics
In other words, this is rule by an elite few who say how things should be, rather than rule according to principles like the belief that people should be able to pursue their own happiness in whatever way they choose so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others.
But there's no news for me, there.
Once upon a time society also generally recognized that the earth was flat, that the world was created by God, and that homosexuals should be tortured and burned. Popularity contests are no way to decide morality.
All of the objections you raise were answered thirty years ago by Murray Rothbard in his book For a New Liberty, which is available for free online in PDF and MP3.
reasonable expectation of privacy: An objective, legitimate or reasonable expectation of privacy is an expectation of privacy generally recognized by society
You are repeating your beliefs instead of addressing my point.
Is it a public service for the researcher to walk inside and help themselves to your wife and your beer? Absolutely not.
Nothing of the sort has happened, unless I'm missing something.
if the US didn't have a military presence- all the above may have felt the wrath of China by now.
I don't agree with the troll you responded to, but I just wanted to point out that just because those countries might have been endangered by China, that does not mean that it is right to save them at the expense of American taxes, lives, and freedoms. I think if people want to protect other countries, they should support doing so out of their own lives and livelihood. Then they can more accurately appraise costs and decide if it's worth it to them.
reasonably expected privacy
In other words, you'd like everyone to see this issue the way you do, so you call your expectations reasonable and anyone who disagrees with you is unreasonable.
Privacy costs. Not necessarily money, but it costs. Sure I avert my eyes if I run into someone's private moment, but if I really want to be private, I consider it my own responsibility to take precautions to achieve that.
This is sad to hear. The government reserves the right to spy on literally everybody, but will not permit itself to be observed. Who does watch the watchers, anyway?
Like all institutions, the government is concerned mainly with perpetuating its own existence. And since the general public equates the government's existence with their security and their own existence, they tolerate all kinds of wrong deeds and imbalances of power like this.
When the United States was young with newly won independence from Britain, each state minted its own currency and this was a debacle. How would one determine how much New Jersey dollars would one get in trade for, say, Connecticut dollars?
Not so. I'd love to see a source for these assertions.
I agree that bitcoins are a commodity in a sense. They do provide some value. They have provided quite a bit of entertainment and education for me. They may also provide value in the way they facilitate certain types of transactions (i.e., private irreversible transfers, or international transfers, or transfers not involving a monopolistic third party who gets a cut, or transfers not involving any government currency, or ...). Whether any of these things makes them valuable enough to ultimately serve as a currency is a question I don't consider to be answered.
To correct this, I think the next generation of digital currency should reward miners with only transaction fees. Or else have a much sharper dropoff in the reward.
It would be simple now to recompile bitcoin to give no payoff in transactions other than transaction fees, or to make the dropoff much sharper, and start a new block chain. I am betting that someone will attempt this at some point.
The initial problem that "mining" was attempting to solve was proliferation of currency: how do you get bitcoins into people's possession so that they can use them? IMO, they went way overboard with this, and became enamored with the resemblance to "mining" and all the other "really neat" facts about this approach, losing sight of the basic problem they were intending to solve. Creation of new bitcoins could've ceased much, much sooner and the problem still would've been solved. Or the problem could've been solved in other ways.
The initial bitcoin block could award a large amount of bitcoins to one or more issuing authorities. Or the protocol could be modified to allow any arbitrary issuing authority to issue coins in the new chain with a promise to redeem for some commodity, and the protocol could be modified to track the issuing authority along with each unit of currency so that coins can be redeemed. In such a scheme issuing authorities could compete on reliability, convenience, and other factors, and the value of a coin from one authority would not necessarily be the same as the value of a coin from another authority. This would essentially allow bitcoin to track any number of competing currencies with new ones arising at any time, and only dependable issuing authorities would be able to get much traction, if at all.