What? Binary or ASCII, it makes no difference. Unix programs tend to use ASCII because it makes the communication transparent; humans can see what's going on, interact with the program for debugging or testing without learning specialized tools, etc. That, however, is orthogonal to the modularity aspect.
Please, just read the book: The Art of Unix Programming. It explains all these issues. I don't have the time or the inclination to teach you every lesson learned during the development of Unix in a comment thread. Suffice it to say that to someone used to working with applications designed with the Unix design philosophy in mind, working with Mac OS or Windows applications often feels like putting on a straitjacket.
Well, what would you suggest instead? I already stated that the only IPC mechanism with better performance is shared memory. Given that shared memory involves a great deal more complexity, synchronization issues and deadlocks being only the most obvious drawbacks, resorting to it without trying sockets first is a case of premature optimization.
I.e. if the Client/Server model of X11 were merged into simply the X11 renderer, GUI applications would be an order of magnitude easier to write.
What are you proposing, exactly? The client is the GUI application. Merging "the Client/Server model" into the X11 renderer would mean integrating the GUI application (rather, all GUI applications) into X11's codebase and runtime address space. This is obviously impractical. However, so long as the GUI applications remain separate processes there must be a client and a server and the only question is how they communicate, to which socket-based IPC is the obvious answer.
I'm all for removing unneeded middle-layers; a general rule-of-thumb in Unix software design is that anything over three layers is too many. However, shifting the boundary between "client" and "server" by merging the toolkits into X11 (as seems more likely to have been your intent) would not eliminate the need for IPC or the possibility of network transparency. It would also force the overhead of a GUI toolkit on applications which have no need for it; for example, most games just want an empty window to draw into and receive events from, and couldn't care less about the standard system widgets.
If you make an honest comparison of a complete desktop package based on X11 that matches Windows Vista/7 or Mac OSX and there is no question as far as quality. The X11 based setup is harder to use and generally less useful than the Windows or Mac counterparts. Incidentally, I've used OSX the least but found it the easiest to pick up - good design counts.
That depends entirely on both your prior experience and what you're trying to do with the interface. I've used all three myself. Good design does count, which is why I honestly find most Unix interfaces to be easier to use and more useful than either Windows or OS X.
There are multiple reasons, but the main one is simple: Unix applications are designed as modular tools, with clean interfaces, and in particular are designed to the integrated with other tools in ways their designers never imagined. Good up-front design thus ensures that you are not limited by the interface-designer's imagination. Windows and Mac OS applications, on the other hand, are generally designed as complete, stand-alone interfaces, and are not scriptable or extensible. There are some exceptions, but they are exactly that: exceptions. To be fair, Mac OS does have a better track-record in this regard than Windows, but neither approaches the separation between engine and UI which is a staple of Unix software design.
I agree; there are issues with the core protocol, or at least with how it is used. In particular, interactivity is not ideal when high-latency connections are involved. Some of that is the toolkits—the protocol is designed to be asynchronous, but many recent toolkits don't take full advantage of that design. That works fine when the server is local, but doesn't scale otherwise.
However, once these issues with the protocol and toolkits were resolved the result would still be based on Unix-domain sockets, and so would still naturally support network transparency. The only way to eliminate the "indirection", as you put it, would be to integrate the clients into the same process and codebase as the server; in every other case you will have an indirect interface of some sort. Integrating the clients into the server is obviously not a general solution; you would lose all the benefits of a modular design: privilege separation, independent development, transparency, etc. However, so long as the client and server are separate processes there is no reason not to support network transparency.
The thing is, X11 gets network-transparency essentially for free. The system requires some sort of inter-process communication, even when running on a local machine, and Unix-domain sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms available short of shared memory (which is orders of magnitude harder to get right). X11 supports shared memory for local processes, to speed up communication of large objects like pixmaps, but the core protocol is socket-based and there is absolutely no reason to change that. So long as this is the case, why not support network transparency? BSD network sockets are interchangeable with Unix-domain local sockets once the connection has been established, so it's not like there's much more effort involved.
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal.... At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem:
What I said was not an ad hominem. I did not say "you're wrong because you are, or you think like, a common criminal"; I said "those who violate property rights are criminals (thieves, murderers, extortionists, etc., by definition), and the concept of 'public good' is only used in practice to justify such violations." That is simply a statement of fact. (Or definition, if you prefer.) I am challenging you to show that your appear to non-defensive force is somehow meaningfully different from those criminal acts. That is the standard which I set for others' behavior; you don't have to use it yourself, but if you are trying to justify the concept of "public good" to me then this is a barrier you would have to clear first.
I am not an Objectivist. However, I do believe that matters involving the interpersonal use of force do require an objective (as opposed to subjective) and rational basis differentiating them from aggression in order to remain both consistent and bounded, the alternative being ad hoc (chaotic) and escalatory. If one's use of defensive force cannot be defended rationally from everyone's point of view (objectively) then it is not significantly different from aggression.
You're assuming that every taxpayer is a consumer, and that every consumer uses the product (and contributes to the pollution) in equal amounts. Neither assumption is well-founded, which means that there is a significant difference between holding the company responsible for its pollution and taxing everyone to clean it up. The tax-based approach creates major externalities, imposing the cost of cleanup disproportionately on users and non-users alike. It's also an after-the-fact approach, and "justice delayed is justice denied." The company should be held responsible when the pollution occurs, and not permitted to let the pollution accumulate.
Someone must enforce the property rights to have a free market. That someone does not have to be a government, however, nor any other kind of monopoly over the use of force. In fact, if you have a monopoly backed by force, even over the (non-aggressive) use of force, then you are violating property rights and do not have a free market. Ergo, any system involving a government, defined as an organization claiming a monopoly on the use of force, is not a free market by its very definition, even ignoring other inevitable property-right violations such as taxes to fund the enforcement.
In a free market the enforcement of property rights is ultimately the right and responsibility of every property owner. There are no rulers required or permitted. Not all forms of anarchy have free markets, but all free markets are anarchic in nature.
Perfectly true, but no system will be demonstrably efficient with high transaction costs, barriers to entry, or non-existent or unenforced property rights, so on the whole the free-market system wins out anyway. Particularly since having a free market implies that you at least have reasonably enforced property rights; otherwise it would be called something else. As you pointed out, the system the GP is railing against was not a free market, not even an inefficient one, as property rights were not enforced.
That is clearly an error in the law. One cannot abdicate one's responsibilities regarding the effects of one's property on others simply by abandoning it. The responsibility remains until the property is claimed by another (or the ownership is fully severed by death).
Anyone who would oppose holding polluters responsible for damages evidenced by clear cases of cancer rationally attributed to their emission of carcinogens is no "pro-free-market libertarian," whatever they may call themselves. Yes, I know about the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but the only possible point of your comment would have to be an accusation that I would make such an argument based on my similarity to "libertarians" you've encountered in the past. I have made no such argument, and I have no plans to do so, so feel free to check your stereotypes at the door.
Of course, I'm not the one you have to convince. It would be up to a suitably impartial court to decide whether causation exists—and up to you to convince them that it does. Naturally (if there is no out-of-court settlement) the polluter is going to argue exactly the opposite, just as in any other court case.
Of course that would have been better. Only the property owner has any right to object to how others' actions might affect it. If the property owners don't mind the pollution then there is no complaint in the first place.
Naturally, if this property is being rented or leased others then their contracts should include terms governing the level of pollution they're willing to tolerate, just as similar terms govern access to utilities, noise levels, cleanliness, etc. In that case the tenants would have a valid claim against any landlord which permitted pollution in excess of the agreed-upon limits, but not against the polluter directly.
On a related note...
There can be no concept of "public good" without some way of observing, summing and comparing values quantitatively across many unique individuals. This is impossible. A partial, per-individual ordering of past values can be observed in the choices which people make, if their choices are completely uncoerced, but even within the context of a single individual such values are only ordinal; you cannot say that one good is worth twice as much as another, only that it is worth more (or less). If goods A and B would both be chosen in preference to C, that doesn't imply that goods A and B together would be preferred to two of C. Precisely predicting even one individual's future preferences based on past behavior is an insoluble problem, and when it comes to current preferences, expressions of value (e.g. statements, polls, voting) without action are unreliable indicators at best, and people's value scales change over time in unpredictable ways. The only preferences others can know with certainty are the ones expressed through action, which are useless for determining future policies intended to maximize the good of the individual in question.
When moving from one individual to a group the difficulty becomes even greater, as each individuals' ordinal scale of values is only meaningful in the context of their own preferences. You can't say "the good person A wants has more value than the good person B wants," and thus satisfy person B at the expense of person A for an increase in "the public good," without imposing yet another subjective value scale, generally your own. There is just one limited exception: any completely voluntary choice with no involuntary externalities imposed on others can only be an objective ex ante net increase in overall "public good". (Lest you reply that ex ante is not necessarily ex post: true, but public policy is also limited to the information available beforehand. When making any decision, private or public, the ex ante expectation of the outcome is all anyone has to work with. Adaptation and self-interest ensure that ex ante approaches ex post over time.)
In short, "the public good" in its idealized form is a meaningless concept, impossible to measure, or even to show a clear improvement outside the context of an aggression-free society with no externalities. However, arguments involving "public good" inevitable use it to justify imposing such externalities, claiming that doing so will result in a net increase, when in fact any such increase cannot be objectively demonstrated. In actual use it's nothing more than a more palatable stand-in for "the way I think goods and services should be allocated, regardless of the owners' wishes," which is little more than the position of any common criminal.
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
Actually, most torrents nowadays seem to use openbittorrent.com (or similar), which is just a tracker: no.torrent hosting, no searches, barely any public website at all. The actual.torrent files can be hosted anywhere, or you can just use a "magnet" link and get the.torrent file itself from another peer. TPB is no longer a critical component.
In that time, the only way to travel was via roads.
I think you mean the only way to travel was by land. (Or by river, if there's a suitable one nearby.) Obviously there were no planes or trains at the time, but even so one is not constrained to follow the established paths. If the road-tolls are too high you can always set out cross-country, perhaps working with others to construct a new road under your own management.
(P.S. When did the purpose of the travel enter this discussion?)
That's an interesting system, and not without its merits, but I'd still prefer to keep the private keys private. I also note that identity-based encryption requires that the PKG have a published public key, so it merely reduces the scope of the problem somewhat rather than solving it completely. (If you get a malicious PKG's public key instead then they can generate the corresponding private key and decrypt the message.)
I get the impression that this form of encryption is designed to be used with a limited number of PKGs, similar to SSL's Certification Authorities, such that all their public keys can be pre-installed on each client. If you need the public key for everyone's "techie friend" then you still have a key-distribution problem, even assuming each "techie" acts as PKG for several other unique individuals. At that point you might as well just use normal private keys, even ignoring the trust issues.
Why should any third party need to know your private key? It can be trivially generated on the client machine, and ought to stay there. The whole point of a "private" key is that no one else has access to it.
There is a need for a trusted third party, but only with regard to your public key. The logical choice would be the mail server, running a service which maps user names (e-mail addresses) to public keys. The vulnerability is that the mail server could hand out its own public key and then decrypt the messages it receives, re-encrypting them with your key before passing them on. However, this would be detectable if the message was signed by the sender after encryption, unless both servers were compromised (or you have the same mail server) and you didn't already have their public key.
I'll admit that the problem is more difficult when there is only one server involved; I don't see a solution to that aside from traditional out-of-band fingerprint verification of the public key(s). Perhaps something like Perspectives is the answer? Get some other random mail server of your choice to retrieve the public key remotely? Of course, then you have to take into account the possibility of a malicious or buggy server sending back false keys and creating a DoS attack...
Sounds like you'd be better off to just remove (delete or overwrite) each of the differences, rather than attempting to blend them. Can you still identify the marked sources if all you have is a handful of deletions, rather than specific substitutions?
Better yet, given enough sources you may be able to identify the original text, and thus fully remove any watermarks which may have been added. E.g.:
Three sources allowed all but one of the original bits to be recovered. If you had another source you could do this three times and randomize the bits that differ between the three results, further reducing the chance that any inputs could be determined from a combination of errors.
If you really want to precisely tax road users you can always switch to the toll-road model for inter-city roads and use municipal property taxes (or better yet, co-ops) for intra-city.
The indirect-benefit comes up a lot, but it's completely misguided. Any indirect benefits derived from the existence of roads are paid for indirectly as well. If response times are efficiently improved by good roads then the police and fire-protection providers will pass on the direct costs of building and using the road to their subscribers. If a business would benefit from improving a road then that business will contribute to funding the improvement. If air quality is becoming an issue then that's naturally an issue for the courts, in the direct sense, but in a similar manner those who care about the decreasing air quality will pay to mitigate it. Thus everyone pays, voluntarily, in proportion to their perceived benefit. Your precept that the only way to provide these goods is by forcing everyone to pay without regard to their perceived benefit is both short-sighted and incorrect.
Events like this should have the capitalists and free market supporters up in arms. But it doesn't. Why?
What makes you think it doesn't? I haven't seen a single comment supportive of TDS so far. The municipal government is hardly an ideal free-market actor, but TDS is clearly behaving worse in this case, just as TDS is clearly on the losing side of public opinion in this forum.
You should stop making claims which are demonstrably false. You are not "as free market" as I am, ergo you are not "as free market as anybody."
Where are you going to get the funds to act as an ISP to clearly non-cost-effective houses? The private providers (incl. any non-profits, such as co-ops) will provide services to the rest, so you'll be left with just the ones which lose money at $20/mo. Taxes? Anyone who advocates theft, even a little, is not in any way supportive of free markets.
Sounds to me that the problem in your example was the customs barriers (a by-product of the regulations and taxes of the city-states), not the toll roads. Unless, of course, the only purpose of the barriers was collecting tolls from those actually using the roads?
Naturally a mass of small, greedy governments in close proximity, each imposing its own taxes and regulations, is going to negatively impact travel and trade. That has nothing to do with the use of toll roads in a free society, however, where there are no such restrictions, and all you have to do to avoid paying a given toll is travel by a different route.
Actually there are several privately-operated toll roads in the U.S. today; for example, the Dulles Greenway in Virginia. All or part of the Indiana Toll Road and the Chicago Expressway are also privately-operated on a 99-year lease with terms amounting to temporary full-ownership.
Toll roads in general have recently started to come back into style after a long period of decline. To make a long story short, toll roads can't normally compete with similar fully-tax-funded roads because their customers have to pay the taxes and the toll, whereas users of "free" roads only have to pay the taxes. This is a problem with competition against any tax-funded provider. However, they're coming back into style because gas taxes are effectively at a maximum, and the federal road funds have dried up to the point where they're insufficient to maintain the roads, so tolls are being instituted in key places (where alternate routes are limited) to provide supplementary revenue.
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What? Binary or ASCII, it makes no difference. Unix programs tend to use ASCII because it makes the communication transparent; humans can see what's going on, interact with the program for debugging or testing without learning specialized tools, etc. That, however, is orthogonal to the modularity aspect.
Please, just read the book: The Art of Unix Programming. It explains all these issues. I don't have the time or the inclination to teach you every lesson learned during the development of Unix in a comment thread. Suffice it to say that to someone used to working with applications designed with the Unix design philosophy in mind, working with Mac OS or Windows applications often feels like putting on a straitjacket.
Well, what would you suggest instead? I already stated that the only IPC mechanism with better performance is shared memory. Given that shared memory involves a great deal more complexity, synchronization issues and deadlocks being only the most obvious drawbacks, resorting to it without trying sockets first is a case of premature optimization.
I.e. if the Client/Server model of X11 were merged into simply the X11 renderer, GUI applications would be an order of magnitude easier to write.
What are you proposing, exactly? The client is the GUI application. Merging "the Client/Server model" into the X11 renderer would mean integrating the GUI application (rather, all GUI applications) into X11's codebase and runtime address space. This is obviously impractical. However, so long as the GUI applications remain separate processes there must be a client and a server and the only question is how they communicate, to which socket-based IPC is the obvious answer.
I'm all for removing unneeded middle-layers; a general rule-of-thumb in Unix software design is that anything over three layers is too many. However, shifting the boundary between "client" and "server" by merging the toolkits into X11 (as seems more likely to have been your intent) would not eliminate the need for IPC or the possibility of network transparency. It would also force the overhead of a GUI toolkit on applications which have no need for it; for example, most games just want an empty window to draw into and receive events from, and couldn't care less about the standard system widgets.
If you make an honest comparison of a complete desktop package based on X11 that matches Windows Vista/7 or Mac OSX and there is no question as far as quality. The X11 based setup is harder to use and generally less useful than the Windows or Mac counterparts. Incidentally, I've used OSX the least but found it the easiest to pick up - good design counts.
That depends entirely on both your prior experience and what you're trying to do with the interface. I've used all three myself. Good design does count, which is why I honestly find most Unix interfaces to be easier to use and more useful than either Windows or OS X.
There are multiple reasons, but the main one is simple: Unix applications are designed as modular tools, with clean interfaces, and in particular are designed to the integrated with other tools in ways their designers never imagined. Good up-front design thus ensures that you are not limited by the interface-designer's imagination. Windows and Mac OS applications, on the other hand, are generally designed as complete, stand-alone interfaces, and are not scriptable or extensible. There are some exceptions, but they are exactly that: exceptions. To be fair, Mac OS does have a better track-record in this regard than Windows, but neither approaches the separation between engine and UI which is a staple of Unix software design.
I agree; there are issues with the core protocol, or at least with how it is used. In particular, interactivity is not ideal when high-latency connections are involved. Some of that is the toolkits—the protocol is designed to be asynchronous, but many recent toolkits don't take full advantage of that design. That works fine when the server is local, but doesn't scale otherwise.
However, once these issues with the protocol and toolkits were resolved the result would still be based on Unix-domain sockets, and so would still naturally support network transparency. The only way to eliminate the "indirection", as you put it, would be to integrate the clients into the same process and codebase as the server; in every other case you will have an indirect interface of some sort. Integrating the clients into the server is obviously not a general solution; you would lose all the benefits of a modular design: privilege separation, independent development, transparency, etc. However, so long as the client and server are separate processes there is no reason not to support network transparency.
The thing is, X11 gets network-transparency essentially for free. The system requires some sort of inter-process communication, even when running on a local machine, and Unix-domain sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms available short of shared memory (which is orders of magnitude harder to get right). X11 supports shared memory for local processes, to speed up communication of large objects like pixmaps, but the core protocol is socket-based and there is absolutely no reason to change that. So long as this is the case, why not support network transparency? BSD network sockets are interchangeable with Unix-domain local sockets once the connection has been established, so it's not like there's much more effort involved.
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal. ... At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem:
What I said was not an ad hominem. I did not say "you're wrong because you are, or you think like, a common criminal"; I said "those who violate property rights are criminals (thieves, murderers, extortionists, etc., by definition), and the concept of 'public good' is only used in practice to justify such violations." That is simply a statement of fact. (Or definition, if you prefer.) I am challenging you to show that your appear to non-defensive force is somehow meaningfully different from those criminal acts. That is the standard which I set for others' behavior; you don't have to use it yourself, but if you are trying to justify the concept of "public good" to me then this is a barrier you would have to clear first.
I am not an Objectivist. However, I do believe that matters involving the interpersonal use of force do require an objective (as opposed to subjective) and rational basis differentiating them from aggression in order to remain both consistent and bounded, the alternative being ad hoc (chaotic) and escalatory. If one's use of defensive force cannot be defended rationally from everyone's point of view (objectively) then it is not significantly different from aggression.
You're assuming that every taxpayer is a consumer, and that every consumer uses the product (and contributes to the pollution) in equal amounts. Neither assumption is well-founded, which means that there is a significant difference between holding the company responsible for its pollution and taxing everyone to clean it up. The tax-based approach creates major externalities, imposing the cost of cleanup disproportionately on users and non-users alike. It's also an after-the-fact approach, and "justice delayed is justice denied." The company should be held responsible when the pollution occurs, and not permitted to let the pollution accumulate.
Someone must enforce the property rights to have a free market. That someone does not have to be a government, however, nor any other kind of monopoly over the use of force. In fact, if you have a monopoly backed by force, even over the (non-aggressive) use of force, then you are violating property rights and do not have a free market. Ergo, any system involving a government, defined as an organization claiming a monopoly on the use of force, is not a free market by its very definition, even ignoring other inevitable property-right violations such as taxes to fund the enforcement.
In a free market the enforcement of property rights is ultimately the right and responsibility of every property owner. There are no rulers required or permitted. Not all forms of anarchy have free markets, but all free markets are anarchic in nature.
Perfectly true, but no system will be demonstrably efficient with high transaction costs, barriers to entry, or non-existent or unenforced property rights, so on the whole the free-market system wins out anyway. Particularly since having a free market implies that you at least have reasonably enforced property rights; otherwise it would be called something else. As you pointed out, the system the GP is railing against was not a free market, not even an inefficient one, as property rights were not enforced.
That is clearly an error in the law. One cannot abdicate one's responsibilities regarding the effects of one's property on others simply by abandoning it. The responsibility remains until the property is claimed by another (or the ownership is fully severed by death).
Anyone who would oppose holding polluters responsible for damages evidenced by clear cases of cancer rationally attributed to their emission of carcinogens is no "pro-free-market libertarian," whatever they may call themselves. Yes, I know about the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but the only possible point of your comment would have to be an accusation that I would make such an argument based on my similarity to "libertarians" you've encountered in the past. I have made no such argument, and I have no plans to do so, so feel free to check your stereotypes at the door.
Of course, I'm not the one you have to convince. It would be up to a suitably impartial court to decide whether causation exists—and up to you to convince them that it does. Naturally (if there is no out-of-court settlement) the polluter is going to argue exactly the opposite, just as in any other court case.
Of course that would have been better. Only the property owner has any right to object to how others' actions might affect it. If the property owners don't mind the pollution then there is no complaint in the first place.
Naturally, if this property is being rented or leased others then their contracts should include terms governing the level of pollution they're willing to tolerate, just as similar terms govern access to utilities, noise levels, cleanliness, etc. In that case the tenants would have a valid claim against any landlord which permitted pollution in excess of the agreed-upon limits, but not against the polluter directly.
On a related note...
There can be no concept of "public good" without some way of observing, summing and comparing values quantitatively across many unique individuals. This is impossible. A partial, per-individual ordering of past values can be observed in the choices which people make, if their choices are completely uncoerced, but even within the context of a single individual such values are only ordinal; you cannot say that one good is worth twice as much as another, only that it is worth more (or less). If goods A and B would both be chosen in preference to C, that doesn't imply that goods A and B together would be preferred to two of C. Precisely predicting even one individual's future preferences based on past behavior is an insoluble problem, and when it comes to current preferences, expressions of value (e.g. statements, polls, voting) without action are unreliable indicators at best, and people's value scales change over time in unpredictable ways. The only preferences others can know with certainty are the ones expressed through action, which are useless for determining future policies intended to maximize the good of the individual in question.
When moving from one individual to a group the difficulty becomes even greater, as each individuals' ordinal scale of values is only meaningful in the context of their own preferences. You can't say "the good person A wants has more value than the good person B wants," and thus satisfy person B at the expense of person A for an increase in "the public good," without imposing yet another subjective value scale, generally your own. There is just one limited exception: any completely voluntary choice with no involuntary externalities imposed on others can only be an objective ex ante net increase in overall "public good". (Lest you reply that ex ante is not necessarily ex post: true, but public policy is also limited to the information available beforehand. When making any decision, private or public, the ex ante expectation of the outcome is all anyone has to work with. Adaptation and self-interest ensure that ex ante approaches ex post over time.)
In short, "the public good" in its idealized form is a meaningless concept, impossible to measure, or even to show a clear improvement outside the context of an aggression-free society with no externalities. However, arguments involving "public good" inevitable use it to justify imposing such externalities, claiming that doing so will result in a net increase, when in fact any such increase cannot be objectively demonstrated. In actual use it's nothing more than a more palatable stand-in for "the way I think goods and services should be allocated, regardless of the owners' wishes," which is little more than the position of any common criminal.
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
Actually, most torrents nowadays seem to use openbittorrent.com (or similar), which is just a tracker: no .torrent hosting, no searches, barely any public website at all. The actual .torrent files can be hosted anywhere, or you can just use a "magnet" link and get the .torrent file itself from another peer. TPB is no longer a critical component.
Phase-change RAM (PRAM) is non-volatile, just like Flash.
In that time, the only way to travel was via roads.
I think you mean the only way to travel was by land. (Or by river, if there's a suitable one nearby.) Obviously there were no planes or trains at the time, but even so one is not constrained to follow the established paths. If the road-tolls are too high you can always set out cross-country, perhaps working with others to construct a new road under your own management.
(P.S. When did the purpose of the travel enter this discussion?)
That's an interesting system, and not without its merits, but I'd still prefer to keep the private keys private. I also note that identity-based encryption requires that the PKG have a published public key, so it merely reduces the scope of the problem somewhat rather than solving it completely. (If you get a malicious PKG's public key instead then they can generate the corresponding private key and decrypt the message.)
I get the impression that this form of encryption is designed to be used with a limited number of PKGs, similar to SSL's Certification Authorities, such that all their public keys can be pre-installed on each client. If you need the public key for everyone's "techie friend" then you still have a key-distribution problem, even assuming each "techie" acts as PKG for several other unique individuals. At that point you might as well just use normal private keys, even ignoring the trust issues.
Why should any third party need to know your private key? It can be trivially generated on the client machine, and ought to stay there. The whole point of a "private" key is that no one else has access to it.
There is a need for a trusted third party, but only with regard to your public key. The logical choice would be the mail server, running a service which maps user names (e-mail addresses) to public keys. The vulnerability is that the mail server could hand out its own public key and then decrypt the messages it receives, re-encrypting them with your key before passing them on. However, this would be detectable if the message was signed by the sender after encryption, unless both servers were compromised (or you have the same mail server) and you didn't already have their public key.
I'll admit that the problem is more difficult when there is only one server involved; I don't see a solution to that aside from traditional out-of-band fingerprint verification of the public key(s). Perhaps something like Perspectives is the answer? Get some other random mail server of your choice to retrieve the public key remotely? Of course, then you have to take into account the possibility of a malicious or buggy server sending back false keys and creating a DoS attack...
Sounds like you'd be better off to just remove (delete or overwrite) each of the differences, rather than attempting to blend them. Can you still identify the marked sources if all you have is a handful of deletions, rather than specific substitutions?
Better yet, given enough sources you may be able to identify the original text, and thus fully remove any watermarks which may have been added. E.g.:
Source 0: AABBABBBABBABBAABBABABBA (original)
Source 1: AABAABBBABBABBBABBABABBA
Source 2: AABBABBBABBBBBAABBABABAA
Source 3: ABBAABBBABBAABAABBABABBA
Best out of three: AABAABBBABBABBAABBABABBA
Three sources allowed all but one of the original bits to be recovered. If you had another source you could do this three times and randomize the bits that differ between the three results, further reducing the chance that any inputs could be determined from a combination of errors.
If you really want to precisely tax road users you can always switch to the toll-road model for inter-city roads and use municipal property taxes (or better yet, co-ops) for intra-city.
The indirect-benefit comes up a lot, but it's completely misguided. Any indirect benefits derived from the existence of roads are paid for indirectly as well. If response times are efficiently improved by good roads then the police and fire-protection providers will pass on the direct costs of building and using the road to their subscribers. If a business would benefit from improving a road then that business will contribute to funding the improvement. If air quality is becoming an issue then that's naturally an issue for the courts, in the direct sense, but in a similar manner those who care about the decreasing air quality will pay to mitigate it. Thus everyone pays, voluntarily, in proportion to their perceived benefit. Your precept that the only way to provide these goods is by forcing everyone to pay without regard to their perceived benefit is both short-sighted and incorrect.
If they're taking money out of the gas-tax funds to pay for light rail then they must have a surplus even after these other costs are considered.
Events like this should have the capitalists and free market supporters up in arms. But it doesn't. Why?
What makes you think it doesn't? I haven't seen a single comment supportive of TDS so far. The municipal government is hardly an ideal free-market actor, but TDS is clearly behaving worse in this case, just as TDS is clearly on the losing side of public opinion in this forum.
I'm as free market as anybody, ...
You should stop making claims which are demonstrably false. You are not "as free market" as I am, ergo you are not "as free market as anybody."
Where are you going to get the funds to act as an ISP to clearly non-cost-effective houses? The private providers (incl. any non-profits, such as co-ops) will provide services to the rest, so you'll be left with just the ones which lose money at $20/mo. Taxes? Anyone who advocates theft, even a little, is not in any way supportive of free markets.
Sounds to me that the problem in your example was the customs barriers (a by-product of the regulations and taxes of the city-states), not the toll roads. Unless, of course, the only purpose of the barriers was collecting tolls from those actually using the roads?
Naturally a mass of small, greedy governments in close proximity, each imposing its own taxes and regulations, is going to negatively impact travel and trade. That has nothing to do with the use of toll roads in a free society, however, where there are no such restrictions, and all you have to do to avoid paying a given toll is travel by a different route.
Actually there are several privately-operated toll roads in the U.S. today; for example, the Dulles Greenway in Virginia. All or part of the Indiana Toll Road and the Chicago Expressway are also privately-operated on a 99-year lease with terms amounting to temporary full-ownership.
Toll roads in general have recently started to come back into style after a long period of decline. To make a long story short, toll roads can't normally compete with similar fully-tax-funded roads because their customers have to pay the taxes and the toll, whereas users of "free" roads only have to pay the taxes. This is a problem with competition against any tax-funded provider. However, they're coming back into style because gas taxes are effectively at a maximum, and the federal road funds have dried up to the point where they're insufficient to maintain the roads, so tolls are being instituted in key places (where alternate routes are limited) to provide supplementary revenue.