If the computer was going to be on anyway then the increase in power required to seed a file is insignificant. For that matter, based on my own UPS-measured power requirements of ~150W (including peripherals) and an average cost of about $0.08/kW*h, running my PC 24/7 would cost only 28.8 cents per day, or $8.77 per month. That's relatively insignificant compared to the recurring cost of a cell phone or an Internet connection--and anyone worried about such a small part of their power bill probably wouldn't leave their computer on just to seed a torrent anyway.
Unless you're up against a monthly transfer cap, seeding while you're not otherwise using the network doesn't cost you anything. On the other hand, running the WiFi and Bluetooth radios (and the CPU) may significantly reduce your mobile's battery life, which is already much too short for most people's tastes already.
Copyright is an attempt by the government to interfere in the economy by inhibiting property rights in favor of monopoly incentives granted to a favored group (authors and inventors). This a case of, if not full "socialism" (a term with unclear semantics in casual conversation), than at least a socialistically-inclined ideology.
In plain terms, the GP's example illustrates exactly how "socialism" limits freedoms.
You wish. Democracies have been just as guilty of miscarriages of justice as other forms of government, even against their own citizens. See also: War on Drugs, military conscription, proliferation of taxes, et al.
... either the "anarchy" part breaks down and devolves into oligarchy..., or capitalism... breaks down..., and you simply get anarchism as it is, a state of chaos, where you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have.
Which is different from the non-anarcho-capitalist system how, exactly? Democracies naturally devolve into oligarchies as well, without exactly the same application of constant vigilance required to maintain a state of non-aggressive anarchy. Under a democracy capitalism has already broken down, since by definition your (property) rights are subject to popular vote rather than absolute, and "you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have"--that strength just takes the form of popularity rather than force of arms.
Libertarianism / anarcho-capitalism is definitely not a stable system; like anything worth having, acquiring and maintaining it requires constant effort. That is no reason to settle for the systemic injustice and involuntary servitude inherent in any lesser system, however.
Note: I hit the wrong 'reply' button the first time. Re-posting to the correct parent comment.
Storage is often given in bits. For example, the size of every one of the NAND Flash ICs listed in Micron's online part catalog is given in gigabits.
The GP could have checked the article before commenting, but it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the submitter intended "1Tb" to be one terabit (exactly 125 * 10^9 bytes), as written, or one terabyte (about 1.0737 * 10^9 bytes, or exactly 2^30 bytes).
... either the "anarchy" part breaks down and devolves into oligarchy..., or capitalism... breaks down..., and you simply get anarchism as it is, a state of chaos, where you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have.
Which is different from the non-anarcho-capitalist system how, exactly? Democracies naturally devolve into oligarchies as well, without exactly the same application of constant vigilance required to maintain a state of non-aggressive anarchy. Under a democracy capitalism has already broken down, since by definition your (property) rights are subject to popular vote rather than absolute, and "you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have"--that strength just takes the form of popularity rather than force of arms.
Libertarianism / anarcho-capitalism is definitely not a stable system; like anything worth having, acquiring and maintaining it requires constant effort. That is no reason to settle for the systemic injustice and involuntary servitude inherent in any lesser system, however.
Corporations have sucked plenty of money from people's wallets, in many cases without any hope of recourse (thanks to mandatory-binding-arbitration clauses in non-negotiable contracts; read Consumerist sometime).
Of course there is recourse; you were never forced to enter into the agreement in the first place. If you choose to voluntarily accept binding arbitration then you should expect that part of the contract to be enforced. If you fail to perform due diligence by reading the contract before signing it, and refusing to sign unless you agree, then your troubles are your own doing and you have no cause for complaint.
They cannot directly jail you, because we've done away with debtor's prison, but they have pet governments to do that job for them.... funny you bring up the wars, given the overwhelming involvement of private industry in the American way of war these days.... Corporations do all of those things, thanks to the undue power money grants over the government.
As you said, these are things done by the government, not the corporations.
And lest you say that it's still government doing those things, let me preemptively point out that the corps would be quite happy to do them as well, only the government stands in the way of private armies and police forces.
If a "private corporation" did any of those things it would, by definition, be the government. Ergo, it would still be the government which was responsible, just not the same one. It's the pattern of behavior (aggression vs. non-aggression) which distinguishes private corporations from governments, not the specific people involved, the organizational details, or what they may choose to call themselves.
For the rest, when was the last time you got to vote for a corporation's leadership? Yeah, I thought so. Therefore the corporation is the greater evil: it cannot even in principle be restrained by the popular will.
"Popular will" has nothing to do with good or evil. When was the last time you got to vote on your neighbor's internal decorating? Yeah, I thought so. But that doesn't make your neighbor "evil", just free of your decorating tyranny. In the same way, you don't get a vote on what a corporation's shareholders do with their own property (unless you happen to be one of them, of course) any more than they get a vote on what you do with yours, but that doesn't make them "evil", just free. So long as they remain merely a corporation and not a government, or other form of criminal organization, there is no just reason to allow you to veto their choices. If they do cross that line, anyone affected by their aggression has an absolute right to veto said choices, no voting required. To paraphrase what is sometime said of (bad) logic, the popular vote is often nothing more than another way to err with confidence.
Nothing you just said contradicts the GP at all. In every single one of your examples it's the government which acts the part of the villain. A corporation can, at most, ask the government to do something on its behalf, and perhaps offer some form of material incentive (i.e. a bribe). In every case, however, it's the government which actually violates your rights, not the corporation.
Incidentally, on Linux you can address most USB devices by the ports they're plugged in to, courtesy of udev. Have a look at/dev/disk/by-path/ or/dev/input/by-path/ sometime. Selection by ID, label, or UUID is generally more convenient, but the option is there if you want it.
Where are all these "negative indirect costs" coming from, I wonder? Oh, that's right--the government. They create the externality by forcing non-practitioners to subsidize the self-imposed costs to the practitioners (in the extreme case, universal health care), and then "solve" the problem they created by instituting a tax (which won't really solve the problem anyway, even if it does have some influence on the proscribed behavior).
Why not just re-institute personal responsibility, and thus eliminate the externality entirely? It would be ever-so-much more effective than a tax. Moreover, such an approach would actually reduce the scope for corruption, rather than increasing it as any new tax or regulation must.
You could still complain if they actually lied, since that would be fraud. You just can't (meaningfully) complain if they choose to refrain from disclosing the source entirely.
Sure, IPv6 allows for far more individual addresses than we'll probably ever use. The idea is that, unlike with IPv4, we won't be forced to use every single one of those addresses. Instead we'll have the freedom to group them in ways which make sense--like purely hierarchical assignments, which greatly simplify routing, and unique, locally auto-generated host addresses. It's sort of like the way the name "John Smith" (which is hardly unique) consists of around 47.5 bits, assuming 4.75 bits per letter (26 letters + space). That leaves far more addressing possibilities than we need (about 10^14, vs. less than 10^10 humans), but the extra bits are useful in that they lets us skip inconvenient identifiers like Efmq Duisx.
It's not capitalism if you can "buy up all the technology" (as opposed to the physical facilities) such that no one can compete with you without your permission.
More generally, capitalism is incompatible with widespread aggression of any sort. Patents and the like are merely one all-too-common variety.
Required by what? I was attempting to describe the closest one can get to the concept of "truth" within science, which is also a rule-of-thumb. Occam's Razor allows you to take the nearly-infinite variety of possible models which fully satisfy all known observations and select the one(s) which are most useful / least vulnerable to later falsification.
As I said, this does not give you an absolute truth, just something to base your decisions on until more information becomes available. Minimizing assumptions in one's working model, without ruling out alternate explanations, is also a fundamental aspect of the scientific method.
All knowledge about the universe—as opposed to logical tautologies, which, while often useful, tell us nothing about the world around us—is suspect. That's the most fundamental principle of scientific reasoning. For a given set of observations there exist two classes of models explaining them: those which may be true, and those which have been proven false via contradiction (either internal or in relation to the observations).
The closest anyone can get to the "truth" within the realm of science is a model which is self-consistent and compatible with all known observations and which involves no unnecessary assumptions or entities (Occum's Razor). The model could still be demonstrated false by future observations, however. The concept of absolute truth, propositions which once (correctly) proven can never be falsified, is the domain of pure logic and/or philosophy, not science.
You're thinking too small. As I said, sufficiently high propellant velocities reduce the mass requirements to feasible levels. If you were to accelerate that water to 80% of light speed (increasing its relativistic mass by 2/3 in the process) then you would contribute 4.0e6 kg*m/s per kilogram of water to Earth's momentum, for a maximum of 80 km/s increase in orbital velocity. Doubling the orbital velocity from 27 km/s to 54 km/s would then require just 1/3 of the water mass. Acceleration to 95% of c would let you do the same thing with only 15% of the available water.
The problem isn't reaction mass. The problem is coming up with the necessary energy to influence a planetary orbit.
The mass requirements go down significantly if you can accelerate it to a high enough velocity, and seawater would make a much better source of reaction mass than land, being plentiful, dense, and easy to harvest. The idea is still far-fetched, but it remains within the realm of possibility and wouldn't require the loss of entire continents. It might even uncover some new ones by reducing the sea level.
And if you object to patents in general, then this doesn't really change things for you, so making a stand against this particular case doesn't make much sense.
It changes things in that a single, global patent system would make it easier to claim and enforce a given patent in multiple jurisdictions. If you're opposed to patents in general then it only makes sense to oppose anything that encourages their proliferation and/or influence.
Some areas have multiple cable providers. "Phone line" can cover a variety of dial-up ISPs as well as DSL. Moreover, you're completely disregarding terrestrial wireless, "tethered" cell data plans, and satellite Internet. All of these are "options for Internet", though not all of them are broadband. There's also the option of ordering a T1 and starting your own co-op or corporate ISP. Competition in the field of Internet service is alive and well. No, that doesn't mean everyone gets exactly what they wanted at their choice of price, but where is that ever the case?
SI prefixes only make sense in combination with SI base units. You don't measure things in kilofeet or nanoyears or decipounds, for example.
The byte is not an SI base unit. If there were a base unit for information it would be the bit, not the byte.
If you want to insist on using power-of-ten SI prefixes, fine--just don't combine them with non-SI base units. The kilobit has always referred to 1000 bits, the megabit 10**6 bits, etc. There is no confusion there.
P.S. If you want people to use different names for the binary prefixes, you're going to have to come up with something that can be pronounced without suffering from overwhelming embarrassment. "Mebibyte"? "Kibibyte"? You've got to be kidding... Those names were practically designed for rejection.
Saying "well, people should" is counterproductive because you know in practice that very few people will. By that logic, you can reduce all law to "well, people really shouldn't hurt each other."
No, you can't. The two are not equivalent. In the case of contracts, you know that the fine print exists and will be binding regardless of whether you actually read it. Accepting a contract without researching the terms--including the fine print--is gross negligence, but still a voluntary choice. The contract isn't deceptive just because the other party didn't put their conditions in bold font at the top of the form. You had the option of either reading the terms or rejecting the contract, and instead you knowingly chose the option that put you at risk. For that matter, most contracts require you (and not just in the fine print) to explicitly assert that you read the entire contract before signing, so if you sign without reading the contract in full you're the one being deceptive.
If you really want to reform standard contract terms--a laudable goal, to be sure--then persuade people not to sign contracts they haven't read, or which contain terms they don't agree with. Throwing such terms out in court can only confuse matters, as the terms aren't actually removed from the contracts and you can never know whether the fine print you agreed to (knowingly or unknowingly) will be upheld by a particular court should the other party attempt to enforce it. Confusion in the legal domain is something to be avoided at almost any cost; everyone should be able to determine their rights and responsibilities up front without going to court.
Note that I'm not saying that it's impossible for contracts to be deceptive, just that fine print alone does not make it so--even if no one actually reads it. For a contract to be fraudulent the other party must actually lie, not just de-emphasize the parts you probably won't like.
People make rational decisions more often than you assume. They simply aren't looking at things from your rarefied, academic point of view. The rational decision is not necessarily the one that brings the best long-term (monetary) R.O.I. Keeping the wife happy now might just be more valuable to some than shoring up their long-term financial security. Your other example is even worse; if a homeowner doesn't stand to benefit from better insulation--because someone else is paying the bill--then installing some would clearly be an irrational decision on a purely financial basis.
True, people do sometimes act irrationally. Sometimes critical information is unavailable or inaccurate, or they fail to think things through, or they're mislead by emotion. For the most part, however, people do act in a manner they believe to be consistent with accomplishing their goals. Truly irrational behavior plays a very minor role in economic life.
Why do you consider it aggression to make people reduce CO2 usage, but not aggression to dump enough CO2 into the atmosphere that sea levels rise, displacing millions from their property? Why do you consider it "breaking a window" to made businesses have to retool for greener tech, but you don't consider it "breaking a window" for a dinosaur industry to dump toxic crap (like coal, while also causes GHG) into everyone's lungs just so workers in that industry can keep their jobs?
If you can show that a specific legal entity or group thereof is contributing significantly to either rising sea levels or health issue resulting from pollution then you are quite welcome to organize the victims into a group and sue for damages. That would count as "significant evidence". You are also welcome to employ liberal degrees of social pressure, which tends to be even more effective in regard to broad externalities such as these and is not limited by hard evidence.
Your "most efficient, easiest option" of prior restraint ("limited permits") and arbitrary fines ("taxes") as a means of coercively regulating others' behavior, however, is simply unacceptable. The proper place for disputes of this nature is the courtroom, where rulings are guided on a case-by-case basis by evidence of damage and intent and ultimately bounded in proportion to the specific offense.
You are missing the point that 'green' technologies are more efficient.
I'm not missing the point, I'm saying that it's irrelevant. If the efficiency gains of "green" tech were sufficient to justify the costs (in the opinions of those paying for them) then there would be no need to encourage their adoption by force.
The same counter-argument applies to your broken-window scenario. The owner could have replaced his or her own window with a double-glazed variety at any time. That this was not done proves that the owner did not consider the replacement worthwhile--there was a benefit to be had, perhaps, but other things took priority. When you break the window the owner gets the benefit of the double-glazing, but is also forced to forgo these other goods which the owner considered more urgent, resulting in a net loss.
What it comes down to, really, is sheer arrogance. You're claiming that you know better than others how they should utilize their own property, that by forcing them to take actions they would not have chosen of their own free will you can improve their situation. Why? Because you're better than they are, of course. Because you know best.
Adult human beings are not game pieces to be manipulated for your own ends, or young children--or pets--requiring your governance "for their own good". They are free agents, self-owners, deserving of a chance to make their own choices, and mistakes, regarding both themselves and their property.
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If the computer was going to be on anyway then the increase in power required to seed a file is insignificant. For that matter, based on my own UPS-measured power requirements of ~150W (including peripherals) and an average cost of about $0.08/kW*h, running my PC 24/7 would cost only 28.8 cents per day, or $8.77 per month. That's relatively insignificant compared to the recurring cost of a cell phone or an Internet connection--and anyone worried about such a small part of their power bill probably wouldn't leave their computer on just to seed a torrent anyway.
Unless you're up against a monthly transfer cap, seeding while you're not otherwise using the network doesn't cost you anything. On the other hand, running the WiFi and Bluetooth radios (and the CPU) may significantly reduce your mobile's battery life, which is already much too short for most people's tastes already.
Copyright is an attempt by the government to interfere in the economy by inhibiting property rights in favor of monopoly incentives granted to a favored group (authors and inventors). This a case of, if not full "socialism" (a term with unclear semantics in casual conversation), than at least a socialistically-inclined ideology.
In plain terms, the GP's example illustrates exactly how "socialism" limits freedoms.
You wish. Democracies have been just as guilty of miscarriages of justice as other forms of government, even against their own citizens. See also: War on Drugs, military conscription, proliferation of taxes, et al.
... either the "anarchy" part breaks down and devolves into oligarchy..., or capitalism ... breaks down..., and you simply get anarchism as it is, a state of chaos, where you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have.
Which is different from the non-anarcho-capitalist system how, exactly? Democracies naturally devolve into oligarchies as well, without exactly the same application of constant vigilance required to maintain a state of non-aggressive anarchy. Under a democracy capitalism has already broken down, since by definition your (property) rights are subject to popular vote rather than absolute, and "you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have"--that strength just takes the form of popularity rather than force of arms.
Libertarianism / anarcho-capitalism is definitely not a stable system; like anything worth having, acquiring and maintaining it requires constant effort. That is no reason to settle for the systemic injustice and involuntary servitude inherent in any lesser system, however.
Note: I hit the wrong 'reply' button the first time. Re-posting to the correct parent comment.
Storage is often given in bits. For example, the size of every one of the NAND Flash ICs listed in Micron's online part catalog is given in gigabits.
The GP could have checked the article before commenting, but it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the submitter intended "1Tb" to be one terabit (exactly 125 * 10^9 bytes), as written, or one terabyte (about 1.0737 * 10^9 bytes, or exactly 2^30 bytes).
... either the "anarchy" part breaks down and devolves into oligarchy..., or capitalism ... breaks down..., and you simply get anarchism as it is, a state of chaos, where you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have.
Which is different from the non-anarcho-capitalist system how, exactly? Democracies naturally devolve into oligarchies as well, without exactly the same application of constant vigilance required to maintain a state of non-aggressive anarchy. Under a democracy capitalism has already broken down, since by definition your (property) rights are subject to popular vote rather than absolute, and "you own only what you can take and hold with whatever strength you have"--that strength just takes the form of popularity rather than force of arms.
Libertarianism / anarcho-capitalism is definitely not a stable system; like anything worth having, acquiring and maintaining it requires constant effort. That is no reason to settle for the systemic injustice and involuntary servitude inherent in any lesser system, however.
Corporations have sucked plenty of money from people's wallets, in many cases without any hope of recourse (thanks to mandatory-binding-arbitration clauses in non-negotiable contracts; read Consumerist sometime).
Of course there is recourse; you were never forced to enter into the agreement in the first place. If you choose to voluntarily accept binding arbitration then you should expect that part of the contract to be enforced. If you fail to perform due diligence by reading the contract before signing it, and refusing to sign unless you agree, then your troubles are your own doing and you have no cause for complaint.
They cannot directly jail you, because we've done away with debtor's prison, but they have pet governments to do that job for them. ... funny you bring up the wars, given the overwhelming involvement of private industry in the American way of war these days. ... Corporations do all of those things, thanks to the undue power money grants over the government.
As you said, these are things done by the government, not the corporations.
And lest you say that it's still government doing those things, let me preemptively point out that the corps would be quite happy to do them as well, only the government stands in the way of private armies and police forces.
If a "private corporation" did any of those things it would, by definition, be the government. Ergo, it would still be the government which was responsible, just not the same one. It's the pattern of behavior (aggression vs. non-aggression) which distinguishes private corporations from governments, not the specific people involved, the organizational details, or what they may choose to call themselves.
For the rest, when was the last time you got to vote for a corporation's leadership? Yeah, I thought so. Therefore the corporation is the greater evil: it cannot even in principle be restrained by the popular will.
"Popular will" has nothing to do with good or evil. When was the last time you got to vote on your neighbor's internal decorating? Yeah, I thought so. But that doesn't make your neighbor "evil", just free of your decorating tyranny. In the same way, you don't get a vote on what a corporation's shareholders do with their own property (unless you happen to be one of them, of course) any more than they get a vote on what you do with yours, but that doesn't make them "evil", just free. So long as they remain merely a corporation and not a government, or other form of criminal organization, there is no just reason to allow you to veto their choices. If they do cross that line, anyone affected by their aggression has an absolute right to veto said choices, no voting required. To paraphrase what is sometime said of (bad) logic, the popular vote is often nothing more than another way to err with confidence.
Nothing you just said contradicts the GP at all. In every single one of your examples it's the government which acts the part of the villain. A corporation can, at most, ask the government to do something on its behalf, and perhaps offer some form of material incentive (i.e. a bribe). In every case, however, it's the government which actually violates your rights, not the corporation.
Incidentally, on Linux you can address most USB devices by the ports they're plugged in to, courtesy of udev. Have a look at /dev/disk/by-path/ or /dev/input/by-path/ sometime. Selection by ID, label, or UUID is generally more convenient, but the option is there if you want it.
Where are all these "negative indirect costs" coming from, I wonder? Oh, that's right--the government. They create the externality by forcing non-practitioners to subsidize the self-imposed costs to the practitioners (in the extreme case, universal health care), and then "solve" the problem they created by instituting a tax (which won't really solve the problem anyway, even if it does have some influence on the proscribed behavior).
Why not just re-institute personal responsibility, and thus eliminate the externality entirely? It would be ever-so-much more effective than a tax. Moreover, such an approach would actually reduce the scope for corruption, rather than increasing it as any new tax or regulation must.
You could still complain if they actually lied, since that would be fraud. You just can't (meaningfully) complain if they choose to refrain from disclosing the source entirely.
Sure, IPv6 allows for far more individual addresses than we'll probably ever use. The idea is that, unlike with IPv4, we won't be forced to use every single one of those addresses. Instead we'll have the freedom to group them in ways which make sense--like purely hierarchical assignments, which greatly simplify routing, and unique, locally auto-generated host addresses. It's sort of like the way the name "John Smith" (which is hardly unique) consists of around 47.5 bits, assuming 4.75 bits per letter (26 letters + space). That leaves far more addressing possibilities than we need (about 10^14, vs. less than 10^10 humans), but the extra bits are useful in that they lets us skip inconvenient identifiers like Efmq Duisx.
It's not capitalism if you can "buy up all the technology" (as opposed to the physical facilities) such that no one can compete with you without your permission.
More generally, capitalism is incompatible with widespread aggression of any sort. Patents and the like are merely one all-too-common variety.
Required by what? I was attempting to describe the closest one can get to the concept of "truth" within science, which is also a rule-of-thumb. Occam's Razor allows you to take the nearly-infinite variety of possible models which fully satisfy all known observations and select the one(s) which are most useful / least vulnerable to later falsification.
As I said, this does not give you an absolute truth, just something to base your decisions on until more information becomes available. Minimizing assumptions in one's working model, without ruling out alternate explanations, is also a fundamental aspect of the scientific method.
All knowledge about the universe—as opposed to logical tautologies, which, while often useful, tell us nothing about the world around us—is suspect. That's the most fundamental principle of scientific reasoning. For a given set of observations there exist two classes of models explaining them: those which may be true, and those which have been proven false via contradiction (either internal or in relation to the observations).
The closest anyone can get to the "truth" within the realm of science is a model which is self-consistent and compatible with all known observations and which involves no unnecessary assumptions or entities (Occum's Razor). The model could still be demonstrated false by future observations, however. The concept of absolute truth, propositions which once (correctly) proven can never be falsified, is the domain of pure logic and/or philosophy, not science.
You're thinking too small. As I said, sufficiently high propellant velocities reduce the mass requirements to feasible levels. If you were to accelerate that water to 80% of light speed (increasing its relativistic mass by 2/3 in the process) then you would contribute 4.0e6 kg*m/s per kilogram of water to Earth's momentum, for a maximum of 80 km/s increase in orbital velocity. Doubling the orbital velocity from 27 km/s to 54 km/s would then require just 1/3 of the water mass. Acceleration to 95% of c would let you do the same thing with only 15% of the available water.
The problem isn't reaction mass. The problem is coming up with the necessary energy to influence a planetary orbit.
The mass requirements go down significantly if you can accelerate it to a high enough velocity, and seawater would make a much better source of reaction mass than land, being plentiful, dense, and easy to harvest. The idea is still far-fetched, but it remains within the realm of possibility and wouldn't require the loss of entire continents. It might even uncover some new ones by reducing the sea level.
And if you object to patents in general, then this doesn't really change things for you, so making a stand against this particular case doesn't make much sense.
It changes things in that a single, global patent system would make it easier to claim and enforce a given patent in multiple jurisdictions. If you're opposed to patents in general then it only makes sense to oppose anything that encourages their proliferation and/or influence.
Some areas have multiple cable providers. "Phone line" can cover a variety of dial-up ISPs as well as DSL. Moreover, you're completely disregarding terrestrial wireless, "tethered" cell data plans, and satellite Internet. All of these are "options for Internet", though not all of them are broadband. There's also the option of ordering a T1 and starting your own co-op or corporate ISP. Competition in the field of Internet service is alive and well. No, that doesn't mean everyone gets exactly what they wanted at their choice of price, but where is that ever the case?
SI prefixes only make sense in combination with SI base units. You don't measure things in kilofeet or nanoyears or decipounds, for example.
The byte is not an SI base unit. If there were a base unit for information it would be the bit, not the byte.
If you want to insist on using power-of-ten SI prefixes, fine--just don't combine them with non-SI base units. The kilobit has always referred to 1000 bits, the megabit 10**6 bits, etc. There is no confusion there.
P.S. If you want people to use different names for the binary prefixes, you're going to have to come up with something that can be pronounced without suffering from overwhelming embarrassment. "Mebibyte"? "Kibibyte"? You've got to be kidding... Those names were practically designed for rejection.
Saying "well, people should" is counterproductive because you know in practice that very few people will. By that logic, you can reduce all law to "well, people really shouldn't hurt each other."
No, you can't. The two are not equivalent. In the case of contracts, you know that the fine print exists and will be binding regardless of whether you actually read it. Accepting a contract without researching the terms--including the fine print--is gross negligence, but still a voluntary choice. The contract isn't deceptive just because the other party didn't put their conditions in bold font at the top of the form. You had the option of either reading the terms or rejecting the contract, and instead you knowingly chose the option that put you at risk. For that matter, most contracts require you (and not just in the fine print) to explicitly assert that you read the entire contract before signing, so if you sign without reading the contract in full you're the one being deceptive.
If you really want to reform standard contract terms--a laudable goal, to be sure--then persuade people not to sign contracts they haven't read, or which contain terms they don't agree with. Throwing such terms out in court can only confuse matters, as the terms aren't actually removed from the contracts and you can never know whether the fine print you agreed to (knowingly or unknowingly) will be upheld by a particular court should the other party attempt to enforce it. Confusion in the legal domain is something to be avoided at almost any cost; everyone should be able to determine their rights and responsibilities up front without going to court.
Note that I'm not saying that it's impossible for contracts to be deceptive, just that fine print alone does not make it so--even if no one actually reads it. For a contract to be fraudulent the other party must actually lie, not just de-emphasize the parts you probably won't like.
People make rational decisions more often than you assume. They simply aren't looking at things from your rarefied, academic point of view. The rational decision is not necessarily the one that brings the best long-term (monetary) R.O.I. Keeping the wife happy now might just be more valuable to some than shoring up their long-term financial security. Your other example is even worse; if a homeowner doesn't stand to benefit from better insulation--because someone else is paying the bill--then installing some would clearly be an irrational decision on a purely financial basis.
True, people do sometimes act irrationally. Sometimes critical information is unavailable or inaccurate, or they fail to think things through, or they're mislead by emotion. For the most part, however, people do act in a manner they believe to be consistent with accomplishing their goals. Truly irrational behavior plays a very minor role in economic life.
Why do you consider it aggression to make people reduce CO2 usage, but not aggression to dump enough CO2 into the atmosphere that sea levels rise, displacing millions from their property? Why do you consider it "breaking a window" to made businesses have to retool for greener tech, but you don't consider it "breaking a window" for a dinosaur industry to dump toxic crap (like coal, while also causes GHG) into everyone's lungs just so workers in that industry can keep their jobs?
If you can show that a specific legal entity or group thereof is contributing significantly to either rising sea levels or health issue resulting from pollution then you are quite welcome to organize the victims into a group and sue for damages. That would count as "significant evidence". You are also welcome to employ liberal degrees of social pressure, which tends to be even more effective in regard to broad externalities such as these and is not limited by hard evidence.
Your "most efficient, easiest option" of prior restraint ("limited permits") and arbitrary fines ("taxes") as a means of coercively regulating others' behavior, however, is simply unacceptable. The proper place for disputes of this nature is the courtroom, where rulings are guided on a case-by-case basis by evidence of damage and intent and ultimately bounded in proportion to the specific offense.
You are missing the point that 'green' technologies are more efficient.
I'm not missing the point, I'm saying that it's irrelevant. If the efficiency gains of "green" tech were sufficient to justify the costs (in the opinions of those paying for them) then there would be no need to encourage their adoption by force.
The same counter-argument applies to your broken-window scenario. The owner could have replaced his or her own window with a double-glazed variety at any time. That this was not done proves that the owner did not consider the replacement worthwhile--there was a benefit to be had, perhaps, but other things took priority. When you break the window the owner gets the benefit of the double-glazing, but is also forced to forgo these other goods which the owner considered more urgent, resulting in a net loss.
What it comes down to, really, is sheer arrogance. You're claiming that you know better than others how they should utilize their own property, that by forcing them to take actions they would not have chosen of their own free will you can improve their situation. Why? Because you're better than they are, of course. Because you know best.
Adult human beings are not game pieces to be manipulated for your own ends, or young children--or pets--requiring your governance "for their own good". They are free agents, self-owners, deserving of a chance to make their own choices, and mistakes, regarding both themselves and their property.