Especially given how much copyright infringement is going on between nations and how hard it is to enforce laws nationally when the economy and the access is global.
From and international standpoint, who gives a crap? We have the Iranians building a bomb, two major wars, an ongoing threat of terrorist attacks, and the pirates of Somalia, global warming. I don't know about anyone else, but IMHO copyright should be pretty far down the list of international priorities right now. The reality outside the first world right now is basically open warfare. In fact, it is arguable that the world hasn't been this dangerous since the end of WWII. The terrorists, pirates, international drug gangs, arms smugglers, and the like don't give two-shits about copyright infringement, they are already looting and killing so we are way beyond polite at this point. This is going to be an interesting century (interesting as in the ancient Chinese curse), but not because a few copyrights get infringed.
If the process can't hold up to scrutiny then it doesn't need to take place at all.
I'm not sure that I would take it that far; there are some cases where the secrecy argument makes more sense. For example, when the stakes are much higher, like an armistice to stop fighting in an ongoing war. However, it is probably safe to say that copyrights do not rise to the necessary level of urgency to justify the amount of secrecy this deal is getting. This is basically about money, nobody is going to lose their life because a copyright was infringed.
I know that we are talking specifically about phone based VMs here and that the issue of better OS vs VM has been discussed before, but I cannot understand why we need to virtualize any time an OS is involved. Perhaps I am missing something? If the hypervisor becomes, essentially, the operating system why is it not possible to integrate the process isolation and partitioning features of the hypervisor into the OS in the first place? Are these types of features even really needed on the more limited environments offered by phones (even smartphones)? I agree that virtualization is a valuable technology that has its uses, but sometimes it seems that virtualization and VMs are becoming the proverbial golden hammers (along with the ubiquitous "cloud" computing).
IMHO, it would be a mistake to equate what is happening right now in Iran right now with the 1960s of the west; the culture of the middle east in general and Iran in particular is very different. As others have said, the ayatollahs are quite popular with the poorly educated and rural majority of the Iranian population who are religious, suspicious of the west, and to whom information is very carefully metered and controlled by the state. Combine this with the repressive and violent nature of the Iranian regime and perhaps you will begin to see that nothing much is likely to change in Iran any time soon. In fact, it is my own belief that things will become much worse. An armed showdown between Iran and the west is practically inevitable now. The real turning point will come when Iran effectively withdraws from nuclear non-proliferation (I say effectively because once it becomes patently obvious to everyone that inspections are useless, it will be the same as if they formally withdrew from the treaty). Once that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel, and perhaps the United States, are forced to strike before Iran completes "the bomb".
The John Gottis of the world are not generally the sort that honest people come across in their everyday lives and dealings. While I don't speak from experience on this one, I would wager that most professional criminals seek to avoid involving innocent bystanders, if possible, because harming or killing uninvolved people tends to attract unwanted attention and provoking the authorities gains them nothing in the long run; it just makes it harder to conduct business (legal and otherwise). Those who find trouble with the mob are usually those who go looking for it in the first place.
The ENRONs of the world often use the power of governments and regulations to their own advantage in order to achieve their ends. In fact, they would find their schemes greatly reduced or even thwarted if not for the power of governments and their propensity to intervene in the markets for selected goods and services. In other words, government intervention very often creates opportunities for the very corrupt practices they are seeking to prevent.
Why are juries stacked with idiots too stupid to see that they could just as likely be in the defendant's seat for a multitude of offenses?
Many of thhe smarter people in the potential jury pool use excuses or claims of false bias to have themselves dismissed for reasons which are plausible and impossible to disprove? Many people have jobs which don't pay for jury time (i.e. it is unpaid time or low paid time considering that courts pay mostly pittance to jurors), business to run, or generally care more about their money than other people's lives. When the majority of society would just as soon step over your dead body as stop to help, then we have reached the beginning of the end; in fact, we are probably already past that point. Honest and functional juries depend upon honest citizens doing their best civic minded duty. I think we can all see how quaint and unrealistic that notion is these days; Indeed, your experience with the drug case proves that.
How long do we keep tolerating this, and how far do we let it go?
We live in an age of overzealous criminal prosecutions, unlimited liability, and NO forgiveness. The people wanted politicians to "get tough on crime" and they got exactly what they wanted. Who wants to touch that third rail? Who needs that hassle? This just proves once again that it is not your interest to cooperate with the authorities; even if you believe that you are an honest citizen, you should never talk to the police
Technically isn't a copyright a privilege granted by government and NOT a property right (IANAL)? The rights holders often like to confuse the public on the issue for their own benefit, but the distinction is important legally speaking. If copyright made written words "intellectual property" then why was it necessary to separately describe "copyright infringement" as a separate criminal or civil offense? If it copyright is a legal property right then there are already laws governing "theft" of property. I think that they are separately described precisely because copyright is NOT a property right.
Or would you rather have intellectual property law enforced by its owners through force?
I would rather that there simply NOT be "intellectual property" (actually there isn't; there is only patent and copyright but that is a whole other debate). I agree with government enforcing private property rights (i.e. real property, personal property, etc) as a proper role of a limited government. However, the present copyright laws are extremely broken and need to be fixed, at the very least, or perhaps even abolished (I haven't thought enough on this issue to form a firm opinion about which option I prefer at this time).
The cops are required to enforce all laws, no matter how stupid, that they are called upon to enforce; they cannot ignore a call because they think the theater owner is a moron or the law is stupid. I don't blame the police officers, they are just doing their jobs.
After all, you don't think less of Dell just because their laptops can be used to browse for porn, do you?
Personally, as a libertarian, I think that people should be allowed to do as they wish as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same (i.e. your ability to swing you fist freely is limited by the proximity of my chin). If the product is NOT marketed as "official" and trademarked Nintendo terms are NOT used in the packaging or promotion (pretty hard to market a Wii game without saying Wii though, don't you think?) then it should be permitted (or at least not prohibited by law). However, in practice how likely is that? Some street vendor is going to copy it, slap the "wii wanker" logo on the flash card, and then sell it as a "wii game". In such cases it is the distributors who should be liable.
Unregulated free markets. It's funny how the unregulated *free* market seems to regulate us so well.
How is it the "free market" when copyright law (i.e. the court) is used, backed up by the police power of the government, to enforce the restrictions? The law is under the control of the government and the courts, not the free market. Your anger has been misdirected. If you want to see what a really free market looks like then look up the history of copyright (a relatively recent invention) and how things were before government started enforcing "limited" (haha) monopolies on written (and later recorded) works.
As a side note I have always found it ironic that those on the left are so quick to support expanded government powers and involvement in the economy without realizing that it is precisely those powers and involvement, co-opted by the corporations (which is inevitable), that are ultimately used to take away their freedoms and quash their rights. Then, to add insult to injury, they have the gall to accuse libertarians and others who support limited government of being "fascists" or worse. I am not accusing the parent of doing these things specifically, but there seems to be an almost unconscious bias on the left against more limited government in spite of the fact that at the root of many "free market" problems lies...the government.
Also, as a practical matter, I find many people who whine about open source really just want to not pay for software, but won't admit that is their main motivation easily.
In my experience, many people are willing to pay something for software (the illegal street vendors prove that much), but often the asking price is simply too high. This makes legitimate software a luxury, at they very least, or simply unaffordable at worst. For example, why must Windows 7 or Mac OS cost more than $99 for a basic fully functional (non-crippled) retail version (not counting upgrades here)? If the manufacturers could hit the $99.99 or even a $49.99 price point here in the United States there would be substantially less incentive to pirate or violate the terms of the license by installing multiple copies.
But its completely OK for a console maker to force me NOT to do things with something I outright purchased with my own hard earned money? Since when should their wishes be law?
The issue, as others have pointed out, is that the console and the games are perceived to be part of the "official" package by the general public. If you were permitted to market any game on their console, it could effect the overall perception of the brand in the marketplace; particularly if the public is confused about what is and what is not an officially sanctioned product.
For example, suppose that someone produced an M-rated game with adult content for the Nintendo Wii console and marketed the game as "Wii Wanker". Wouldn't that harm the family-friendly image that Nintendo has so carefully cultivated and protected? If it does, shouldn't Nintendo at the very least be compensated for you harming their brand?
I agree that one should be able to do what one wishes with one's own console, but there has to be some line drawn at marketing arbitrary games for a console brand owned by another. Nintendo has decided that it is cheaper to do this with some level of technical enforcement and legal action rather than through legal action alone. I can certainly understand where Nintendo is coming from on this one.
and probably had more game discs laying on the floor around our beds than the total number of unique game cartridges for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Atari 5200, Odyssey 3, *and* Colecovision that had ever existed since the dawn of the videogame era.
Not sure how that helps your argument that the "crash", as perceived by the adults, didn't matter. Is it possible that many of those games were exactly the crap that retailers wouldn't touch? How many times did you pick them up off the floor to replay them or were they put there after the first play precisely because they were crap?
If videogames went away in 1983, someone forgot to tell us;-)
They didn't so much go away as go back to serving the niches they had always served. The nice thing about the C64, Amiga, IBM PC, and eventually the PCs we have today is that they allow for many niche games that, while potentially profitable, are not popular enough to justify the enormous fixed costs of console development. There have been more successful crossovers recently were a popular game appears on multiple consoles and the PC simultaneously, but I for one still prefer the PC gaming platform to consoles which I view as the McDonald's of gaming; good enough for the masses, but lacking in the sophistication and depth necessary to satisfy the more mature and demanding PC gamer audience.
There's no way that a pigment can cost thousands of dollars per liter.
It doesn't, but the cost to the company is not just the cost of the pigments, it is also the loss leader price for just about every printer they sell; especially true with the consumer grade laser and photo printers. The market has demonstrated, whether through ignorance or otherwise, that they prefer the razor and blades model to paying what the individual items actually cost. This could happen even in the absence of any collusion.
No, I believe in the government stepping on corporate toes, and the the people stepping up to the ballot box to make sure the government doesn't go too far.
Then you are a fool. The government is already controlled by the corporations (which are in turn controlled by the elite) because they control the money and it is extremely difficult to be elected to high office without their assistance and approval. You are permitted the illusion by those with power that your vote maters, but for all practical purposes it rarely does.
While it is true that many techs, and programmers especially, dislike writing documentation; there are some technical writers out there who both enjoy compiling the information and assembling the text (particularly if they are paid to do it). There are many well-edited and professionally produced Linux books out there for all levels and learning tracks. What are you paying for some might ask? The professional job of assembling the information from disparate sources, editing, and presentation in consistent and high quality format. The documentation is there for those who want to track it down themselves or those who are willing to fork over a few bucks for an well edited Linux book on the distro of their choice.
And you think the people who get hassled by your government drones 'deserve it'?
It doesn't matter whether the 'deserve it' or not; certain things are just reality. I find it amusing when people find that their view of how the world should be is revealed to be false by an ironic reality check. It is better to live without illusions and understand how the real world works, even if one doesn't like it, so that there will be no (or at least fewer) surprises.
you feel like you are living in a situation similar to post war East Germany?
Not at all, I was merely suggesting that the answer to the first question was "yes" by posing a rhetorical second question that everyone also knows was true. The East German situation was undoubtedly much worse and I sympathize with those who, compelled by circumstances of time or birth, were forced to endure it; however, it does serve as another useful reminder of how government power can get out of hand if we the people collectively allow it to happen.
Excuse me, but wouldn't libertarians (who by definition claim individual liberty as the highest ideal) and anarchists (who believe in no government whatsoever) be among the last people to argue for more government power over individuals? Do not confuse the libertarians with the neoconservatives, as some here on Slashdot have been known to do; we are not one in the same.
The problem with "nothing to hide", as Bruce Schneier has noted on his blog, is that is based upon the fallacious assumption that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity. Now, you say that you are an honest citizen and I believe you, but here is the problem: the laws, as they exist today, are so complex and convoluted that it is practically impossible for ordinary Americans to live their everyday lives without breaking at least some of them. This is a common tool used by many governments, not just the United States, to maintain power over individual citizens. The implicit threat is that any one of us could be selected for "special attention" or "selective enforcement" at any time if the government (or some faction within the government) decides that it doesn't like us or that we are "troublemakers". In light of this truth, what do I gain from making it easier for the government to profile and watch me? You might argue that my efforts to remain anonymous, or at least pseudo-anonymous are futile and perhaps they are, but that doesn't mean that I am going to hand them my privacy on a silver platter.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially given how much copyright infringement is going on between nations and how hard it is to enforce laws nationally when the economy and the access is global.
From and international standpoint, who gives a crap? We have the Iranians building a bomb, two major wars, an ongoing threat of terrorist attacks, and the pirates of Somalia, global warming. I don't know about anyone else, but IMHO copyright should be pretty far down the list of international priorities right now. The reality outside the first world right now is basically open warfare. In fact, it is arguable that the world hasn't been this dangerous since the end of WWII. The terrorists, pirates, international drug gangs, arms smugglers, and the like don't give two-shits about copyright infringement, they are already looting and killing so we are way beyond polite at this point. This is going to be an interesting century (interesting as in the ancient Chinese curse), but not because a few copyrights get infringed.
If the process can't hold up to scrutiny then it doesn't need to take place at all.
I'm not sure that I would take it that far; there are some cases where the secrecy argument makes more sense. For example, when the stakes are much higher, like an armistice to stop fighting in an ongoing war. However, it is probably safe to say that copyrights do not rise to the necessary level of urgency to justify the amount of secrecy this deal is getting. This is basically about money, nobody is going to lose their life because a copyright was infringed.
I know that we are talking specifically about phone based VMs here and that the issue of better OS vs VM has been discussed before, but I cannot understand why we need to virtualize any time an OS is involved. Perhaps I am missing something? If the hypervisor becomes, essentially, the operating system why is it not possible to integrate the process isolation and partitioning features of the hypervisor into the OS in the first place? Are these types of features even really needed on the more limited environments offered by phones (even smartphones)? I agree that virtualization is a valuable technology that has its uses, but sometimes it seems that virtualization and VMs are becoming the proverbial golden hammers (along with the ubiquitous "cloud" computing).
IMHO, it would be a mistake to equate what is happening right now in Iran right now with the 1960s of the west; the culture of the middle east in general and Iran in particular is very different. As others have said, the ayatollahs are quite popular with the poorly educated and rural majority of the Iranian population who are religious, suspicious of the west, and to whom information is very carefully metered and controlled by the state. Combine this with the repressive and violent nature of the Iranian regime and perhaps you will begin to see that nothing much is likely to change in Iran any time soon. In fact, it is my own belief that things will become much worse. An armed showdown between Iran and the west is practically inevitable now. The real turning point will come when Iran effectively withdraws from nuclear non-proliferation (I say effectively because once it becomes patently obvious to everyone that inspections are useless, it will be the same as if they formally withdrew from the treaty). Once that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel, and perhaps the United States, are forced to strike before Iran completes "the bomb".
The John Gottis of the world are not generally the sort that honest people come across in their everyday lives and dealings. While I don't speak from experience on this one, I would wager that most professional criminals seek to avoid involving innocent bystanders, if possible, because harming or killing uninvolved people tends to attract unwanted attention and provoking the authorities gains them nothing in the long run; it just makes it harder to conduct business (legal and otherwise). Those who find trouble with the mob are usually those who go looking for it in the first place.
The ENRONs of the world often use the power of governments and regulations to their own advantage in order to achieve their ends. In fact, they would find their schemes greatly reduced or even thwarted if not for the power of governments and their propensity to intervene in the markets for selected goods and services. In other words, government intervention very often creates opportunities for the very corrupt practices they are seeking to prevent.
Why are juries stacked with idiots too stupid to see that they could just as likely be in the defendant's seat for a multitude of offenses?
Many of thhe smarter people in the potential jury pool use excuses or claims of false bias to have themselves dismissed for reasons which are plausible and impossible to disprove? Many people have jobs which don't pay for jury time (i.e. it is unpaid time or low paid time considering that courts pay mostly pittance to jurors), business to run, or generally care more about their money than other people's lives. When the majority of society would just as soon step over your dead body as stop to help, then we have reached the beginning of the end; in fact, we are probably already past that point. Honest and functional juries depend upon honest citizens doing their best civic minded duty. I think we can all see how quaint and unrealistic that notion is these days; Indeed, your experience with the drug case proves that.
We place a lot of trust in our federal prosecutors.
That trust is misplaced. The feds have proven time and time again that they are not worthy of our trust.
How long do we keep tolerating this, and how far do we let it go?
We live in an age of overzealous criminal prosecutions, unlimited liability, and NO forgiveness. The people wanted politicians to "get tough on crime" and they got exactly what they wanted. Who wants to touch that third rail? Who needs that hassle? This just proves once again that it is not your interest to cooperate with the authorities; even if you believe that you are an honest citizen, you should never talk to the police
Copyright is a legal property right.
Technically isn't a copyright a privilege granted by government and NOT a property right (IANAL)? The rights holders often like to confuse the public on the issue for their own benefit, but the distinction is important legally speaking. If copyright made written words "intellectual property" then why was it necessary to separately describe "copyright infringement" as a separate criminal or civil offense? If it copyright is a legal property right then there are already laws governing "theft" of property. I think that they are separately described precisely because copyright is NOT a property right.
Or would you rather have intellectual property law enforced by its owners through force?
I would rather that there simply NOT be "intellectual property" (actually there isn't; there is only patent and copyright but that is a whole other debate). I agree with government enforcing private property rights (i.e. real property, personal property, etc) as a proper role of a limited government. However, the present copyright laws are extremely broken and need to be fixed, at the very least, or perhaps even abolished (I haven't thought enough on this issue to form a firm opinion about which option I prefer at this time).
I could have killed myself instead of watching that, and it might have been a more productive use of my time.
That is what you get for reading the Idle section on Slashdot; you asked for it and you got it.
The cops are required to enforce all laws, no matter how stupid, that they are called upon to enforce; they cannot ignore a call because they think the theater owner is a moron or the law is stupid. I don't blame the police officers, they are just doing their jobs.
Are there any adults left?
They're not sitting with a bunch of teenagers watching a Twilight film, that's for sure.
After all, you don't think less of Dell just because their laptops can be used to browse for porn, do you?
Personally, as a libertarian, I think that people should be allowed to do as they wish as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same (i.e. your ability to swing you fist freely is limited by the proximity of my chin). If the product is NOT marketed as "official" and trademarked Nintendo terms are NOT used in the packaging or promotion (pretty hard to market a Wii game without saying Wii though, don't you think?) then it should be permitted (or at least not prohibited by law). However, in practice how likely is that? Some street vendor is going to copy it, slap the "wii wanker" logo on the flash card, and then sell it as a "wii game". In such cases it is the distributors who should be liable.
Unregulated free markets. It's funny how the unregulated *free* market seems to regulate us so well.
How is it the "free market" when copyright law (i.e. the court) is used, backed up by the police power of the government, to enforce the restrictions? The law is under the control of the government and the courts, not the free market. Your anger has been misdirected. If you want to see what a really free market looks like then look up the history of copyright (a relatively recent invention) and how things were before government started enforcing "limited" (haha) monopolies on written (and later recorded) works.
As a side note I have always found it ironic that those on the left are so quick to support expanded government powers and involvement in the economy without realizing that it is precisely those powers and involvement, co-opted by the corporations (which is inevitable), that are ultimately used to take away their freedoms and quash their rights. Then, to add insult to injury, they have the gall to accuse libertarians and others who support limited government of being "fascists" or worse. I am not accusing the parent of doing these things specifically, but there seems to be an almost unconscious bias on the left against more limited government in spite of the fact that at the root of many "free market" problems lies...the government.
Also, as a practical matter, I find many people who whine about open source really just want to not pay for software, but won't admit that is their main motivation easily.
In my experience, many people are willing to pay something for software (the illegal street vendors prove that much), but often the asking price is simply too high. This makes legitimate software a luxury, at they very least, or simply unaffordable at worst. For example, why must Windows 7 or Mac OS cost more than $99 for a basic fully functional (non-crippled) retail version (not counting upgrades here)? If the manufacturers could hit the $99.99 or even a $49.99 price point here in the United States there would be substantially less incentive to pirate or violate the terms of the license by installing multiple copies.
But its completely OK for a console maker to force me NOT to do things with something I outright purchased with my own hard earned money? Since when should their wishes be law?
The issue, as others have pointed out, is that the console and the games are perceived to be part of the "official" package by the general public. If you were permitted to market any game on their console, it could effect the overall perception of the brand in the marketplace; particularly if the public is confused about what is and what is not an officially sanctioned product.
For example, suppose that someone produced an M-rated game with adult content for the Nintendo Wii console and marketed the game as "Wii Wanker". Wouldn't that harm the family-friendly image that Nintendo has so carefully cultivated and protected? If it does, shouldn't Nintendo at the very least be compensated for you harming their brand?
I agree that one should be able to do what one wishes with one's own console, but there has to be some line drawn at marketing arbitrary games for a console brand owned by another. Nintendo has decided that it is cheaper to do this with some level of technical enforcement and legal action rather than through legal action alone. I can certainly understand where Nintendo is coming from on this one.
and probably had more game discs laying on the floor around our beds than the total number of unique game cartridges for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Atari 5200, Odyssey 3, *and* Colecovision that had ever existed since the dawn of the videogame era.
Not sure how that helps your argument that the "crash", as perceived by the adults, didn't matter. Is it possible that many of those games were exactly the crap that retailers wouldn't touch? How many times did you pick them up off the floor to replay them or were they put there after the first play precisely because they were crap?
If videogames went away in 1983, someone forgot to tell us ;-)
They didn't so much go away as go back to serving the niches they had always served. The nice thing about the C64, Amiga, IBM PC, and eventually the PCs we have today is that they allow for many niche games that, while potentially profitable, are not popular enough to justify the enormous fixed costs of console development. There have been more successful crossovers recently were a popular game appears on multiple consoles and the PC simultaneously, but I for one still prefer the PC gaming platform to consoles which I view as the McDonald's of gaming; good enough for the masses, but lacking in the sophistication and depth necessary to satisfy the more mature and demanding PC gamer audience.
That's a good question. It must have been back in the "good old days", whenever that was.
There's no way that a pigment can cost thousands of dollars per liter.
It doesn't, but the cost to the company is not just the cost of the pigments, it is also the loss leader price for just about every printer they sell; especially true with the consumer grade laser and photo printers. The market has demonstrated, whether through ignorance or otherwise, that they prefer the razor and blades model to paying what the individual items actually cost. This could happen even in the absence of any collusion.
No, I believe in the government stepping on corporate toes, and the the people stepping up to the ballot box to make sure the government doesn't go too far.
Then you are a fool. The government is already controlled by the corporations (which are in turn controlled by the elite) because they control the money and it is extremely difficult to be elected to high office without their assistance and approval. You are permitted the illusion by those with power that your vote maters, but for all practical purposes it rarely does.
While it is true that many techs, and programmers especially, dislike writing documentation; there are some technical writers out there who both enjoy compiling the information and assembling the text (particularly if they are paid to do it). There are many well-edited and professionally produced Linux books out there for all levels and learning tracks. What are you paying for some might ask? The professional job of assembling the information from disparate sources, editing, and presentation in consistent and high quality format. The documentation is there for those who want to track it down themselves or those who are willing to fork over a few bucks for an well edited Linux book on the distro of their choice.
And you think the people who get hassled by your government drones 'deserve it'?
It doesn't matter whether the 'deserve it' or not; certain things are just reality. I find it amusing when people find that their view of how the world should be is revealed to be false by an ironic reality check. It is better to live without illusions and understand how the real world works, even if one doesn't like it, so that there will be no (or at least fewer) surprises.
you feel like you are living in a situation similar to post war East Germany?
Not at all, I was merely suggesting that the answer to the first question was "yes" by posing a rhetorical second question that everyone also knows was true. The East German situation was undoubtedly much worse and I sympathize with those who, compelled by circumstances of time or birth, were forced to endure it; however, it does serve as another useful reminder of how government power can get out of hand if we the people collectively allow it to happen.
liberatarian, or an anarchist.
Excuse me, but wouldn't libertarians (who by definition claim individual liberty as the highest ideal) and anarchists (who believe in no government whatsoever) be among the last people to argue for more government power over individuals? Do not confuse the libertarians with the neoconservatives, as some here on Slashdot have been known to do; we are not one in the same.
The problem with "nothing to hide", as Bruce Schneier has noted on his blog, is that is based upon the fallacious assumption that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity. Now, you say that you are an honest citizen and I believe you, but here is the problem: the laws, as they exist today, are so complex and convoluted that it is practically impossible for ordinary Americans to live their everyday lives without breaking at least some of them. This is a common tool used by many governments, not just the United States, to maintain power over individual citizens. The implicit threat is that any one of us could be selected for "special attention" or "selective enforcement" at any time if the government (or some faction within the government) decides that it doesn't like us or that we are "troublemakers". In light of this truth, what do I gain from making it easier for the government to profile and watch me? You might argue that my efforts to remain anonymous, or at least pseudo-anonymous are futile and perhaps they are, but that doesn't mean that I am going to hand them my privacy on a silver platter.