Look: The fact that Somalia is covered by a mass of tribal governments rather than one big government does not make it a "place without a government." If anything, the problem with Somalia is the presence of too many governments, both their own tribal hierarchies and various outside governments seeking to establish centralized rule.
No, you're paying less than your part, as is everyone else who considers this an appropriate and/or worthwhile endeavor. The remainder is being distributed across those who do not consider a bit of hypothetical battery technology--which they'll naturally still end up paying full price for when and if it ever reaches mass-market--worth what they're being forced to pay right now.
Personally, I favor mandatory sunset clauses. Any law which can't maintain a simple majority vote in its favor gets thrown out automatically after so many years. Repealing a law before it expires should require no more than a 2/3 majority at two suitably-spaced sessions; actually passing a new law should require the maintenance of at least a 4/5 majority for three sessions.
Judges don't like corporations that hide surprises for consumers in their legalese.
I don't blame them. Nevertheless, which side wins a lawsuit shouldn't have anything to do with how much the judge may or may not like them. I have my own doubts about EULAs*, but users should not assert that they have read and understood and agree with a license without actually reading and understanding its terms. Blind agreement is what got us into this mess in the first place; if people would simply refuse to agree to licenses too long and/or too complicated for them to understand, companies would be forced to write shorter licenses with more understandable language. In the absence of demonstrable fraud, if someone does agree to a contract which they claim to have read and understood, said contract should be fully enforceable no matter how long and complex it may be.
(*) In my opinion no license should be necessary to simply install software, and EULAs go well beyond what I would consider to be a legitimate implicit contract. That leaves only the software roadblocks in the installer (requiring "I Agree" to continue), which offer no consideration and are nothing more than purely mechanical actions required to use the software one purchased, and which consequently should not be taken to indicate actual, binding agreement on the part of the user.
Moreover, unlike ODF, the OOXML standards were not accompanied by a fully open-source reference implementation. Knowing exactly how existing applications read and write ODF documents goes a long way toward making up for any ambiguities.
Which services were you thinking of that have costs proportional to living space? Certainly not schools, which was the GP's example (number of kids). Apartments tend to have higher crime rates, so probably not police. The risks of fire are probably about the same--there are tradeoffs either way. One apartment complex catching fire costs more to deal with, but apartments have more built-in fire protection than most houses. Roads, to the extent that they are covered by property taxes, are also subject to tradeoffs: it takes more of them to cover sparse housing, but the maintenance costs would be higher near apartments due to the increased traffic density. I'll grant that public transportation costs favor high population density, but every other service I can think of has costs proportional to be number of people covered.
Somalia is the product of decades of outside influences attempting to set up various conflicting government, along with a massive degree of culturally-ingrained tribalism.
Somalia is a dense mass of petty tribal governments, each holding absolute power over their limited domains, each at war with all the others, and none having the slightest respect for the personal and property rights of the individuals under their rule, much less those with whom they are at war. Nothing could be further from the libertarian ideal.
To have a libertarian society it is not sufficient to merely lack a strong central government; aggression itself must not be tolerated. The libertarian objection to government is in truth an objection to aggression itself, of which government is merely the most prominent form. Somalia lacks a central government--despite various outside nations, including the U.S., further destabilizing the region by repeatedly attempting to impose one--but in its place there exist a multitude of regional governments, among other criminal organizations, bent on practicing aggression against the Somalian people. The essence of the problem is a culture which grants these tribal leaders unquestioned authority. (This is also why central government fail to take root there: the local culture has no place for them.)
Without the initial illegal act... there would be no further acts.
Truism.
The fact is that it is illegal.
Obvious.
The fact is that they should not be doing it...
Non-sequitor. You are assuming a proposition which you have not even supported, much less proven: that illegality implies immorality.
... and if they were not doing [it], no harm would result AT ALL.
Except, as I said, the harm to those who have been deprived of their freedom by the law itself.
Consider that one could make exactly the same argument in favor of slavery, or any number of untenable positions. "Without the attempt at escape, there would be no further acts (theft, murder, etc.; use your imagination). The fact is that attempting to escape from slavery is illegal. The fact is that slaves should not attempt escape and if they were not doing so, no harm would result AT ALL." Your argument, were it true, would prove far too much.
In the end it doesn't really matter where you place the blame. The simple facts of the matter are that what prohibition inhibits is not harmful in the absence of prohibition, and with prohibition comes harm which would not exist otherwise, both as a direct result of the law and due to unintended, though predictable, side-effects. The former is a sufficient argument against prohibition by itself; both arguments taken together should be sufficient to render prohibition unconscionable to anyone seeking to minimize harm.
I was naturally referring to loss of use, not permanent loss--although that has been known to happen as well, from time to time. Non-commercial losses are likewise a perfectly legitimate complaint, and a frequent source of successful lawsuits. Or do you truly value your memories so little as to acquiesce quietly to their loss, however temporary, and regardless of any proffered compensation?
If everyone followed the law there would still be harm, in the form of the loss of essential freedom which the law itself represents. Such is the case with all victimless crimes.
Anyway, your correction is false. The harm results not from performing the illegal act--using or trafficking in drugs--but rather from other (but also illegal) actions which occur only because the primary, non-harmful action has been made illegal.
I am fully aware that QM is not the main reason that weather prediction is so difficult. I mentioned it only because it introduces a qualitative barrier--without QM it would be possible to predict future weather with 100% certainty, given all the initial conditions; with QM the best you can do is calculate the probability of each possible future.
Going back to economics, I can see the benefits of using value transactions as fundamental, although I think "people" might be less jargon-laden and thus more understandable outside of technical discourse. I might even take it one step further, and assert that the fundamental unit is actually choices--but then we're talking about praxeology (the study of human action), which some would say is a superset of economics. I'm more inclined to see the two as equivalent, but my view of economics is more all-inclusive than most.
And just what sort of compensation would you consider just for the loss of your irreplaceable personal data, for any length of time? It's not like they can just hand you a shiny new computer and all is well with the world. Holding your computer and all its data is not fundamentally different from holding you. This is before one even considers the enormous potential for privacy violations while your data is kept outside your reach being examined by strangers.
I never said humans were random. I also wasn't assuming that humans always pick their goals rationally. "Rational self-interest" doesn't mean that humans are completely rational, but rather that given subjective (and possibly irrational) goals, and a possibly inaccurate and certainly incomplete subset of the relevant knowledge, humans will tend to act in ways which appear likely to them to bring them closer to their goals. Anything else would be, as I said, the essence of insanity.
I acknowledge that crowd behavior can be more predictable than individual behavior. I think you'll find, however, that even crowds are difficult to control deterministically over the long term, in part due to the ways in which individual contributors can influence the result entirely out of proportion to their apparent power and in part due to the effects of creative adaptation, which grow more pronounced over time. The system is far from random, but it is chaotic.
It's worse than that, actually. Weather prediction is at least based on physical processes, which, allowing for some minor concessions to quantum mechanics, are based on fundamental particles which follow deterministic rules. Given all the initial conditions and sufficient computing power you could accurately simulate what the weather will be at any point in the future. Moreover, you can use simulations to predict how that future weather will change in response to deliberate artificial influences; weather doesn't have goals of its own, and won't actively resist attempts to control it.
Economics isn't like that. The "fundamental particle" of economics is people, and people are adaptive. Under many conditions is it possible to predict how they will behave--assuming rational self-interest (i.e. sanity) and decent psychological models of their personal value scales--but all that breaks down when someone attempts to use the models to control the outcome. At that point you have a competition between the people being studied, who seek to achieve their original goals and thwart any attempt at outside control, and those seeking to do the controlling. As with any long-running competition between creative individuals, the outcome is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy.
Robbery, burglary, murder, and rape are obviously harmful in and of themselves. These are, in fact, simply names for specific kinds of harm. If they were legalized it might result in a reduction of certain negative side effects, but the actions themselves would remain just as harmful. Unlike with drugs, the harm to others is not purely a side effect of such actions being declared illegal.
Slavery was just an excuse. The South could've kept on practicing slavery--for a while, as it was already on its way out due to economic inefficiency--if it had only been willing to stay inside the Union. Somehow it just wasn't worth going to war over until the South seceded, at which point it instantly became a major issue and justification for all manner of atrocities.
This is why we have patent systems. The government is really bad at valuing inventions.
That's so true it isn't even funny. The patent system exists because the government continually overvalues patentable processes, and simultaneously underestimates the cost of handing out sweeping exclusive privileges like candy.
This isn't a bug in Firefox. The update process is running as Administrator (if not Local System) and has write access to every file on the system including the Firefox binaries themselves. The updater shouldn't be modifying third-party software, but if that's what Microsoft chooses to do there isn't much third-party developers can do to stop them.
As for the inability to uninstall the extension, that's standard for extensions installed into the main Firefox application directory. You can only uninstall extensions installed into your personal profile; this behavior is the same under Linux for extensions installed via the package manager. You can disable any extension via your profile regardless of where it was installed, assuming the extensions themselves don't interfere--they have full access to and control over the Firefox UI while it's running. Once an extension is disabled it is no longer loaded at startup (apart from the manifest) and should be completely inert.
I do agree that system extensions should probably be disabled by default, with some sort of prompt to enable them when they're first detected. That would be a bit more user-friendly, but can't ultimately prevent system-level processes from messing with how Firefox operates.
Wikipedia has a lot of de facto power. We gave them this power by using the service and promoting it among our acquaintances. We didn't give Jimmy Wales this power so that he could use it to advance a personal agenda of changing social perceptions or silencing arbitrary voices.
Sure, fine. However, your personal motivations for using, promoting and possibly donating to Wikipedia are irrelevant here. Some minuscule assistance in making a site popular does not give you any right to control how it may be used in the future. If that doesn't sit well with you, too bad--you should've considered it before contributing.
There's a certain amount of accountability here.
Not really. Their servers, their rules. The only real "accountability" here is that they can't offend too many contributors--or the wrong contributors, e.g. major donors--and still remain relevant and functional. Your lone dissent doesn't qualify as either.
Micropayments are something of a "holy grail" to the financial industry; as you say, they would solve many problems. The issue is that no one has managed to get the overhead down to the point where you don't spend more processing the transaction than you would otherwise receive in profit. Some of that cost is real enough, but a big part is due to regulations intended to ensure that every financial transaction is traceable by various governments.
Essentially, anyone who tries to set up a micropayment system ends up being shut down for "money laundering" or classified as a bank; in the latter case they end up failing at micropayments anyway, since the overhead of a fully-regulated bank is too high to support massive numbers of minuscule transactions.
It may be "interesting" but it's hardly surprising. It took thousands of years (at least) to develop business models suitable for capital-intensive essential industries like agriculture and manufacturing, producing, marketing and selling products with a relatively high value to consumers. There are pitfalls to be found here as well, and no doubt many of the early models didn't work out, but those which have survived are time-tested and proven. Business models for luxury goods have a much higher turnover rate, though even there the capital needed for manufacturing offers a constricted path--a "toll booth", as it were--through which consumers must pass to acquire goods. Competition remains limited. Given the inherent scarcity of material goods, this is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, although tools like RepRap and Fab@Home may reduce the capital requirements somewhat.
These "web-based models", on the other hand, are all luxury goods. Furthermore, they are all built on the obsolete principle that the distribution of ideas and information can be controlled in the presence of widespread, instant, cheap publication. That has never been true over the long term, although before the printing press one could at least count on passive distribution to be slow enough that one could make some profit out of helping it along. Now that instantaneous communication is nearly ubiquitous, and becoming more so all the time, that is no longer true. There is no genuine profit to be had from distributing electronic copies at this point outside bulk communication services. All that remains is handouts from governments in the form of exclusivity deals brokered at the involuntary expense of one's fellow citizens.
The Internet is less than fifty years old at this point, and those employing web-based business models are trying something which has never worked anywhere else--making a market out of something essentially superabundant, with near-zero marginal costs. The only reason it's working at all is that the sellers have managed to get governments on board with their scheme to manufacture artificial scarcity through force. When people's patience with that finally runs out, hopefully sooner rather than later, they'll be forced to go back to the tried-and-true pre-Internet model of selling labor directly via patronage, live performance, and other traditional means.
If you really wanted to support someone it would be far more effective to cut out the middlemen and just send them a check.
Pay-via-advertising is unreliable at best, annoyingly disruptive to readers, and has a tendency to alienate those who would otherwise support you. It only exists due to the lack of an economical micro-payment system. Direct-charge with automatic negotiation would be far superior, but the overhead of handling many small payments is just too high--for now. The incredible degree of regulatory interference regarding anything to do with finances is a big part of the problem; everyone who comes close to implementing a viable electronic cash-equivalent gets charged with "money laundering", or some other such catch-all offense--never mind that ordinary cash can be used the same way.
Morals are what we feel is right or wrong to do unto each other in our society.
20% or more of us feel its their right to download entertainment content.
The problem with putting these two statements together is that downloading "entertainment content" isn't actually doing anything to anyone. There need not be any sort of positive right to download content; the position which requires (and lacks) hard justification is the one which seeks to declare non-aggressive behavior illegal.
We are not against the system, we are against the abuse.
This is a distinction without a difference. The system is such that it cannot help but be abused.
Slashdot Mirror
Look: The fact that Somalia is covered by a mass of tribal governments rather than one big government does not make it a "place without a government." If anything, the problem with Somalia is the presence of too many governments, both their own tribal hierarchies and various outside governments seeking to establish centralized rule.
No, you're paying less than your part, as is everyone else who considers this an appropriate and/or worthwhile endeavor. The remainder is being distributed across those who do not consider a bit of hypothetical battery technology--which they'll naturally still end up paying full price for when and if it ever reaches mass-market--worth what they're being forced to pay right now.
Personally, I favor mandatory sunset clauses. Any law which can't maintain a simple majority vote in its favor gets thrown out automatically after so many years. Repealing a law before it expires should require no more than a 2/3 majority at two suitably-spaced sessions; actually passing a new law should require the maintenance of at least a 4/5 majority for three sessions.
Judges don't like corporations that hide surprises for consumers in their legalese.
I don't blame them. Nevertheless, which side wins a lawsuit shouldn't have anything to do with how much the judge may or may not like them. I have my own doubts about EULAs*, but users should not assert that they have read and understood and agree with a license without actually reading and understanding its terms. Blind agreement is what got us into this mess in the first place; if people would simply refuse to agree to licenses too long and/or too complicated for them to understand, companies would be forced to write shorter licenses with more understandable language. In the absence of demonstrable fraud, if someone does agree to a contract which they claim to have read and understood, said contract should be fully enforceable no matter how long and complex it may be.
(*) In my opinion no license should be necessary to simply install software, and EULAs go well beyond what I would consider to be a legitimate implicit contract. That leaves only the software roadblocks in the installer (requiring "I Agree" to continue), which offer no consideration and are nothing more than purely mechanical actions required to use the software one purchased, and which consequently should not be taken to indicate actual, binding agreement on the part of the user.
I feel the GPL is a good example of what an EULA should be.
Great. Except that the GPL isn't an EULA. It's a distribution license, and explicitly does not apply to end-users.
Still, standardized write-once-sign-many contracts would indeed be a significant improvement.
Fine. You pay for it, then.
Moreover, unlike ODF, the OOXML standards were not accompanied by a fully open-source reference implementation. Knowing exactly how existing applications read and write ODF documents goes a long way toward making up for any ambiguities.
Which services were you thinking of that have costs proportional to living space? Certainly not schools, which was the GP's example (number of kids). Apartments tend to have higher crime rates, so probably not police. The risks of fire are probably about the same--there are tradeoffs either way. One apartment complex catching fire costs more to deal with, but apartments have more built-in fire protection than most houses. Roads, to the extent that they are covered by property taxes, are also subject to tradeoffs: it takes more of them to cover sparse housing, but the maintenance costs would be higher near apartments due to the increased traffic density. I'll grant that public transportation costs favor high population density, but every other service I can think of has costs proportional to be number of people covered.
Somalia is the product of decades of outside influences attempting to set up various conflicting government, along with a massive degree of culturally-ingrained tribalism.
Somalia is a dense mass of petty tribal governments, each holding absolute power over their limited domains, each at war with all the others, and none having the slightest respect for the personal and property rights of the individuals under their rule, much less those with whom they are at war. Nothing could be further from the libertarian ideal.
To have a libertarian society it is not sufficient to merely lack a strong central government; aggression itself must not be tolerated. The libertarian objection to government is in truth an objection to aggression itself, of which government is merely the most prominent form. Somalia lacks a central government--despite various outside nations, including the U.S., further destabilizing the region by repeatedly attempting to impose one--but in its place there exist a multitude of regional governments, among other criminal organizations, bent on practicing aggression against the Somalian people. The essence of the problem is a culture which grants these tribal leaders unquestioned authority. (This is also why central government fail to take root there: the local culture has no place for them.)
Without the initial illegal act ... there would be no further acts.
Truism.
The fact is that it is illegal.
Obvious.
The fact is that they should not be doing it...
Non-sequitor. You are assuming a proposition which you have not even supported, much less proven: that illegality implies immorality.
... and if they were not doing [it], no harm would result AT ALL.
Except, as I said, the harm to those who have been deprived of their freedom by the law itself.
Consider that one could make exactly the same argument in favor of slavery, or any number of untenable positions. "Without the attempt at escape, there would be no further acts (theft, murder, etc.; use your imagination). The fact is that attempting to escape from slavery is illegal. The fact is that slaves should not attempt escape and if they were not doing so, no harm would result AT ALL." Your argument, were it true, would prove far too much.
In the end it doesn't really matter where you place the blame. The simple facts of the matter are that what prohibition inhibits is not harmful in the absence of prohibition, and with prohibition comes harm which would not exist otherwise, both as a direct result of the law and due to unintended, though predictable, side-effects. The former is a sufficient argument against prohibition by itself; both arguments taken together should be sufficient to render prohibition unconscionable to anyone seeking to minimize harm.
I was naturally referring to loss of use, not permanent loss--although that has been known to happen as well, from time to time. Non-commercial losses are likewise a perfectly legitimate complaint, and a frequent source of successful lawsuits. Or do you truly value your memories so little as to acquiesce quietly to their loss, however temporary, and regardless of any proffered compensation?
If everyone followed the law there would still be harm, in the form of the loss of essential freedom which the law itself represents. Such is the case with all victimless crimes.
Anyway, your correction is false. The harm results not from performing the illegal act--using or trafficking in drugs--but rather from other (but also illegal) actions which occur only because the primary, non-harmful action has been made illegal.
I am fully aware that QM is not the main reason that weather prediction is so difficult. I mentioned it only because it introduces a qualitative barrier--without QM it would be possible to predict future weather with 100% certainty, given all the initial conditions; with QM the best you can do is calculate the probability of each possible future.
Going back to economics, I can see the benefits of using value transactions as fundamental, although I think "people" might be less jargon-laden and thus more understandable outside of technical discourse. I might even take it one step further, and assert that the fundamental unit is actually choices--but then we're talking about praxeology (the study of human action), which some would say is a superset of economics. I'm more inclined to see the two as equivalent, but my view of economics is more all-inclusive than most.
And just what sort of compensation would you consider just for the loss of your irreplaceable personal data, for any length of time? It's not like they can just hand you a shiny new computer and all is well with the world. Holding your computer and all its data is not fundamentally different from holding you. This is before one even considers the enormous potential for privacy violations while your data is kept outside your reach being examined by strangers.
I never said humans were random. I also wasn't assuming that humans always pick their goals rationally. "Rational self-interest" doesn't mean that humans are completely rational, but rather that given subjective (and possibly irrational) goals, and a possibly inaccurate and certainly incomplete subset of the relevant knowledge, humans will tend to act in ways which appear likely to them to bring them closer to their goals. Anything else would be, as I said, the essence of insanity.
I acknowledge that crowd behavior can be more predictable than individual behavior. I think you'll find, however, that even crowds are difficult to control deterministically over the long term, in part due to the ways in which individual contributors can influence the result entirely out of proportion to their apparent power and in part due to the effects of creative adaptation, which grow more pronounced over time. The system is far from random, but it is chaotic.
It's worse than that, actually. Weather prediction is at least based on physical processes, which, allowing for some minor concessions to quantum mechanics, are based on fundamental particles which follow deterministic rules. Given all the initial conditions and sufficient computing power you could accurately simulate what the weather will be at any point in the future. Moreover, you can use simulations to predict how that future weather will change in response to deliberate artificial influences; weather doesn't have goals of its own, and won't actively resist attempts to control it.
Economics isn't like that. The "fundamental particle" of economics is people, and people are adaptive. Under many conditions is it possible to predict how they will behave--assuming rational self-interest (i.e. sanity) and decent psychological models of their personal value scales--but all that breaks down when someone attempts to use the models to control the outcome. At that point you have a competition between the people being studied, who seek to achieve their original goals and thwart any attempt at outside control, and those seeking to do the controlling. As with any long-running competition between creative individuals, the outcome is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy.
Now you're just trolling.
Robbery, burglary, murder, and rape are obviously harmful in and of themselves. These are, in fact, simply names for specific kinds of harm. If they were legalized it might result in a reduction of certain negative side effects, but the actions themselves would remain just as harmful. Unlike with drugs, the harm to others is not purely a side effect of such actions being declared illegal.
Slavery was just an excuse. The South could've kept on practicing slavery--for a while, as it was already on its way out due to economic inefficiency--if it had only been willing to stay inside the Union. Somehow it just wasn't worth going to war over until the South seceded, at which point it instantly became a major issue and justification for all manner of atrocities.
This is why we have patent systems. The government is really bad at valuing inventions.
That's so true it isn't even funny. The patent system exists because the government continually overvalues patentable processes, and simultaneously underestimates the cost of handing out sweeping exclusive privileges like candy.
This isn't a bug in Firefox. The update process is running as Administrator (if not Local System) and has write access to every file on the system including the Firefox binaries themselves. The updater shouldn't be modifying third-party software, but if that's what Microsoft chooses to do there isn't much third-party developers can do to stop them.
As for the inability to uninstall the extension, that's standard for extensions installed into the main Firefox application directory. You can only uninstall extensions installed into your personal profile; this behavior is the same under Linux for extensions installed via the package manager. You can disable any extension via your profile regardless of where it was installed, assuming the extensions themselves don't interfere--they have full access to and control over the Firefox UI while it's running. Once an extension is disabled it is no longer loaded at startup (apart from the manifest) and should be completely inert.
I do agree that system extensions should probably be disabled by default, with some sort of prompt to enable them when they're first detected. That would be a bit more user-friendly, but can't ultimately prevent system-level processes from messing with how Firefox operates.
Wikipedia has a lot of de facto power. We gave them this power by using the service and promoting it among our acquaintances. We didn't give Jimmy Wales this power so that he could use it to advance a personal agenda of changing social perceptions or silencing arbitrary voices.
Sure, fine. However, your personal motivations for using, promoting and possibly donating to Wikipedia are irrelevant here. Some minuscule assistance in making a site popular does not give you any right to control how it may be used in the future. If that doesn't sit well with you, too bad--you should've considered it before contributing.
There's a certain amount of accountability here.
Not really. Their servers, their rules. The only real "accountability" here is that they can't offend too many contributors--or the wrong contributors, e.g. major donors--and still remain relevant and functional. Your lone dissent doesn't qualify as either.
Micropayments are something of a "holy grail" to the financial industry; as you say, they would solve many problems. The issue is that no one has managed to get the overhead down to the point where you don't spend more processing the transaction than you would otherwise receive in profit. Some of that cost is real enough, but a big part is due to regulations intended to ensure that every financial transaction is traceable by various governments.
Essentially, anyone who tries to set up a micropayment system ends up being shut down for "money laundering" or classified as a bank; in the latter case they end up failing at micropayments anyway, since the overhead of a fully-regulated bank is too high to support massive numbers of minuscule transactions.
It may be "interesting" but it's hardly surprising. It took thousands of years (at least) to develop business models suitable for capital-intensive essential industries like agriculture and manufacturing, producing, marketing and selling products with a relatively high value to consumers. There are pitfalls to be found here as well, and no doubt many of the early models didn't work out, but those which have survived are time-tested and proven. Business models for luxury goods have a much higher turnover rate, though even there the capital needed for manufacturing offers a constricted path--a "toll booth", as it were--through which consumers must pass to acquire goods. Competition remains limited. Given the inherent scarcity of material goods, this is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, although tools like RepRap and Fab@Home may reduce the capital requirements somewhat.
These "web-based models", on the other hand, are all luxury goods. Furthermore, they are all built on the obsolete principle that the distribution of ideas and information can be controlled in the presence of widespread, instant, cheap publication. That has never been true over the long term, although before the printing press one could at least count on passive distribution to be slow enough that one could make some profit out of helping it along. Now that instantaneous communication is nearly ubiquitous, and becoming more so all the time, that is no longer true. There is no genuine profit to be had from distributing electronic copies at this point outside bulk communication services. All that remains is handouts from governments in the form of exclusivity deals brokered at the involuntary expense of one's fellow citizens.
The Internet is less than fifty years old at this point, and those employing web-based business models are trying something which has never worked anywhere else--making a market out of something essentially superabundant, with near-zero marginal costs. The only reason it's working at all is that the sellers have managed to get governments on board with their scheme to manufacture artificial scarcity through force. When people's patience with that finally runs out, hopefully sooner rather than later, they'll be forced to go back to the tried-and-true pre-Internet model of selling labor directly via patronage, live performance, and other traditional means.
If you really wanted to support someone it would be far more effective to cut out the middlemen and just send them a check.
Pay-via-advertising is unreliable at best, annoyingly disruptive to readers, and has a tendency to alienate those who would otherwise support you. It only exists due to the lack of an economical micro-payment system. Direct-charge with automatic negotiation would be far superior, but the overhead of handling many small payments is just too high--for now. The incredible degree of regulatory interference regarding anything to do with finances is a big part of the problem; everyone who comes close to implementing a viable electronic cash-equivalent gets charged with "money laundering", or some other such catch-all offense--never mind that ordinary cash can be used the same way.
Morals are what we feel is right or wrong to do unto each other in our society.
20% or more of us feel its their right to download entertainment content.
The problem with putting these two statements together is that downloading "entertainment content" isn't actually doing anything to anyone. There need not be any sort of positive right to download content; the position which requires (and lacks) hard justification is the one which seeks to declare non-aggressive behavior illegal.
We are not against the system, we are against the abuse.
This is a distinction without a difference. The system is such that it cannot help but be abused.