These jobs were already moving overseas. Now IBM's offering their existing employees a chance to keep their jobs, plus assistance with travel, visas, etc., provided they're willing to move with the jobs and accept local wages (along with a corresponding decrease in cost-of-living). This can only be seen as an improvement for their American engineers compared to the original plan.
Obviously IBM is also benefiting from the arrangement, since they manage to keep some of their trained employees, but they had already committed to relocating the jobs -- and hiring local engineers to fill them -- at the time the offer was made.
There certainly are ways to discover someone's genome other than taking a sample from them directly, but these other methods aren't as suitable for identification. It would be quite a bit more difficult to prove that a random strand of hair picked off a public floor came from a particular person, vs. a cheek swab or blood sample. Note, too, that you haven't abandoned something simply because it's no longer in your possession -- you can continue to claim ownership even over your fallen hairs, bits of skin, etc., although you would the have to take responsibility for leaving them on others' property.
I have no problem with law enforcement taking advantage of people's negligence or apathy, but I do have a problem with them taking DNA samples by force. This may be a mere technicality in terms of results, but the difference between passive observation and active violation is significant from the moral, ethical and legal points of view.
You're absolutely right. However, this article isn't about collecting some abandoned hair off the ground and analyzing it; it's about forcibly extracting a part of your physical body, without so much as a criminal conviction. The fact that no one has any exclusive right to the information encoded in their DNA does not imply that they have no ownership rights in the DNA itself, or in the tissue/fluids surrounding it.
You don't own your genome, but you do own your DNA (until such time as you abandon it).
The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them. No one else has any right or reason to get involved. If you think these companies are being mismanaged, don't invest in them; it really is that simple.
On the other hand, if you wish to complain about the tax money going to pay some of these extravagant bonuses, be my guest. You would do well to start with the original crime: the theft of property from its rightful owners. It hardly matters what the money is spent on, bridges or welfare or corporate bonuses; the injustice lies entirely in the taking itself.
We were discussing rights, not ethics or morals. If you want to discuss ethics, however, then I would pose a similar same question: how does legitimizing a coercive response (loss of life, liberty, or use of property) to a non-coercive action (copyright infringement) make the world a better place? From my point of view, it doesn't appear that the resulting widespread escalation of violence could possibly be in anyone's best interest.
You can choose to approve or disapprove of freeloading according to your own subjective tastes. It is an objective fact, however, that freeloading--in the form of copyright infringement--causes no harm to others: it does not violate anyone's right to life or liberty, or does it deprive anyone of the use of their property. The same cannot be said of copyright enforcement.
Of course, I'm assuming you were referring to legitimate privacy rights here, not to a non-existent right to download material in breach of copyright.
The right to act in any way which does not cause harm to others is far more substantial than any so-called "privacy right", recent attempts to undermine real rights in favor of exclusive copyright privileges notwithstanding.
It's not about "importance", it's about sensitivity to latency. Interactive streams like VOIP require low latency and jitter to be usable. In exchange, they're limited to a very low bandwidth. Bulk transfers, like FTP or BitTorrent, aren't sensitive to a few tens (or hundreds) of milliseconds of jitter here and there; overall bandwidth is far more critical.
All that it means to give VOIP higher priority is that when there are both VOIP and FTP/BitTorrent packets in the transmit queue, the VOIP packets should be sent first, up to certain predefined bandwidth limits. (The limits ensure that VOIP isn't prioritized to the point of crowding out all other traffic; once they're exceeded VOIP is treated as just another form of bulk traffic.)
Just as importantly, it's not like the Chinese government and the US government plan to do much trade with each other; this is mainly about whether private citizens living in each country can engage in trade. From the citizens' point of view these treaties are decidedly non-voluntary, regardless of whether they're accepted (involuntary conditions) or declined (involuntary interference in trade).
Based on your description, your credit-report site used single-factor authentication. You asked for more than one data point, but all the data together amounted to just one factor, something the user knows. It's not multi-factor authentication unless you add something the use has, or is.
Plus, you were apparently handing out the user's private information before they were authenticated. Sure, it was mixed in with misleading data, but it would still dramatically narrow down the search space for anyone trying to invade the user's privacy.
No, I'm quite sure the OP meant 1800 gigabytes, or about 15.46 terabits.
Established convention is that bytes are measured in binary (powers of 1024), and bits in decimal (powers of 1000). There's no need to introduce ridiculous-sounding terms like "gibibytes".
(Incidentally, I suspect there would be a lot less resistance to these newfangled units if they'd had the sense to pick names people could be expected to say with a straight face...)
So... you upgraded to a brand-new filesystem without first making a backup? Some glitches are to be expected at this point, just as when ext3 first came out. If everyone followed your advice and avoided ext4 "for at least five years," however, those glitches would never be found, much less fixed.
I believe I already defined duress as "threats of damage or loss of person or property". Even if one party did own all food (an exceedingly unlikely scenario), they aren't threatening to damage or take anyone's property or person, so the contract would remain valid on that point.
Anyway, if the contract were invalid they still wouldn't have any obligation to give you their food; you'd just be eliminating your primary means of persuading them to do so by refusing to keep your word.
Microsoft is not involved in this transaction, as it does not involve their products. However, they exercise their monopoly power to forbid Dell from doing business me me, unless they force me to purchase a Microsoft product...
If the use of "forbid" and "force" were accurate then this would indeed be coercion, but that is not the case. Dell is perfectly free to do business with you, but at the same time MS is free not to do business with them. Whether this latter choice is conditional or not makes no difference whatsoever; neither do absolute or relative market shares invalidate the basic property rights of either Dell or MS. As I have already stated, you are presuming that MS's market share imposes an obligation on them to provide certain goods and services on your terms -- an obligation directly contrary to their property rights.
I'm not arguing that they have an obligation to provide me with specific goods or services; but that it reduces individual freedom and is a form of coercion if they attempt to prevent others from providing me goods or services unless I purchase their goods and services as well.
First, the two "they"s in this sentence refer to two different entities; in my response, the first was the system manufacturers and the second was Microsoft. It is the system manufacturers who are not obligated to provide you with a specific good, the MS-free computer you want. In turn, putting aside issues of copyright for the moment, MS is not obligated to provide them with software to run on those computers. Refusing to do so, at all or unless specific terms are met, is not coercion, either toward the manufacturers or toward you. To say that it is presumes an obligation on their part.
In general, I only consider contracts valid when entered into by individuals with roughly equal bargaining power. A contract signed by a destitute man desperate for lunch, with a megacorporation who has achieved a monopoly on food supply, is not a "meeting of the mind".
It is your prerogative to feel that way, but all you accomplish by refusing to hold both sides to the terms they understood and agreed to is to ensure that the destitute man goes hungry. Or perhaps you think so little of your fellow human beings that you would expect them to enter into an "unconscionable" contract when other options were available?
Do you really think you know how others should manage their affairs better than they do themselves?
A valid contract requires just three components: a common understanding of the terms ("meeting of the minds"), willing agreement by both parties (lack of duress caused by the other party), and truthfulness regarding the factors which lead to that acceptance (absence of fraud). If these conditions are all met, but one party still refuses to abide by the contract, that person is at best a liar, possibly a thief, and entirely without honor.
That's exactly the benefit of government funding, that private investors only want investments that provide instant, guaranteed big profits, and aren't willing to invest in long-term projects.
If short-term projects consistently provide faster returns than long-term ones, then such projects should receive more investment -- they'll provide better returns over the long term as well. Anything else just wastes valuable resources by allocating them toward providing goods which won't fulfill as much demand, at the expense of more-demanded ones.
If your aim is to fulfill some political goal, regardless of the cost, then governments are indeed an ideal way to do that. If you wish instead to benefit society as a whole, government is inherently counter-productive. Private investors may be interested mainly in their own benefit, but the only way they can turn a profit is by persuading others to buy their goods and services. That will only happen if those others value the goods and services more than the money they're giving up in exchange. In the private sector, profit is evidence of benefit provided to society as a whole.
The tragedy of the commons sums up the failure of capitalism, and why socialism is so important.
Seriously? The tragedy of the commons is an example of what happens when you have socialism. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is strict property rights -- i.e., capitalism.
Everyone benefits from reduced carbon emissions.
If that were true everyone would be in favor of reducing emissions, and the regulations would be unnecessary. You are once again ignoring the costs of achieving your goals, costs you choose to impose on others. (You can also blame the courts for refusing to treat pollution as the property-rights violation that it is. That's how it was classified, until some judge decided to ignore property rights for the benefit of "society as a whole".)
You and I obviously mean completely different things by "coercion". When I say that the private sector is funded voluntarily and government project aren't, I mean that the private sector can't damage you or your property or assume ownership of your property without a valid contract. (By "valid" I refer to the "meeting of the mind", i.e. mutual agreement over what the terms of the contract are, as well as a lack of duress (threats of damage or loss of person or property) on either side.)
I do not consider a perceived lack of options to be coercion; the only basis for that position would be the idea that other people have an obligation to provide you with specific goods or services. Such a principle would completely undermine private property rights. If someone doesn't want to sell to you that's their right, whether it results from their own preferences or outside influence.
If you want to treat influence in the market as a form of coercion, however, at least note that it's a form of power both businesses and governments possess -- the latter to a far greater extent than the former.
I can't help but notice that you're completely overlooking the main difference, which is that the private sector can only pool money from those who choose voluntarily to participate, whereas the taxes which fund government projects are extracted from supporters and detractors alike. This is no trivial matter; refusing to address it undermines your entire case.
If it were just a matter of "people working together... to accomplish some social goal" a simple (private-sector) non-profit organization would suffice. The only reason to turn the project over to the government is to impose involuntary costs and/or regulations on those with a lesser degree of political influence, so that some can benefit at others' expense.
Some distros may work like that -- it's one of the things I disliked about (k)Ubuntu which I tried it -- but others, such as Debian, will happily update to a new major version when it becomes available in your repository. For desktop systems using the testing and/or "unstable" repositories that tends to be shortly after the official release.
Agree. If I had written something using the same format and terminology used in that section of the Constitution, I would expect it to be read as a specific list of things the government is permitted to do in order to promote the general welfare, not blanket permission to do whatever some may believe falls under that general heading. Can anyone here say, with a straight face, that the latter interpretation is one intended by the authors, or by those who voted for ratification?
The point the GP was trying to make is that most people who have coded for any amount of time indent consistently as part of their routine.
This is true. Of course, most people avoid typos as part of their routine as well, but such are still a common source of bugs. (At least one can see that kind of error...)
The real problem, however, is in sharing code between multiple developers. Each may individually follow a consistent indentation pattern, but (if my experience is any indication) no two members of any dev. team follow the same pattern. Spaces vs. tabs, different levels of indentation, custom tab stops, editors that automatically change tabs to spaces or visa-versa, etc. It's bad enough when these differences only affect the appearance of the code, and not its function. I agree with Toonol (#26525455):
...two programs can, visually, be absolutely identical and yet not behave consistently? Who would design a language like that?
You wouldn't say, "You're right. I still have my original property in its original state. I haven't lost anything." No, you would say that you have the right to control how your property is used at all times.
Actually, I would say that I haven't lost anything. In the abstract, one could say that my property rights were violated, but as I never even knew it was gone until afterward there were no damages, and thus no compensation is justified.
Moreover, I would never say that I have the right to control how my property is used. Rather, I have the right to use my property. For most material things the difference is subtle, since I can't use my property if someone happens to be borrowing it at the time, even if they later return it unchanged. However, my property right doesn't exclude others from benefiting from the property so long as their benefit doesn't interfere with my use. Applied to copyrights, other's use of an idea or process or abstract representation of a work, with or without authorization, in no way prevents the erstwhile owner from doing the same. Ergo, even if one allows for the "ownership" of ideas, such copyrights cannot be infringed upon in the same way in which theft infringes upon the rights of an ordinary property owner, by preventing the owner's use of the property.
In that case, any unauthorized copies that surfaced would be evidence that someone, somewhere, must have either broken their contract with me, or stole my property from the person I leased it to.
This is what is known as a false dichotomy. These are two possibilities, but they are not the only possibilities. Your contract said nothing about restricting access, for example; perhaps someone other than the contractee made a copy without stealing the book. Even if the copies are evidence that someone broke the contract, you still don't have a property right in the copies themselves. In particular, the person who made the copy may not own the copy, which would place it out of reach of your contract.
In any event, the contract would need to be explicit, as with an NDA -- and if you think the masses would agree to (and abide by) an NDA just to read the latest pop fiction novel I'd like to know what world you've visiting from. Even if they did agree, you'd still have the enforcement issue; you'd have to prove not only that unauthorized duplication took place, but also that the specific people making the copies agreed to be bound by the contract. As with NDAs, you could only go after the people who agreed to keep the contents of the book private, and those who deliberately induced them to break the contract; once the information is public knowledge anyone can distribute it without penalty.
In your scenario, I would agree that someone broke their contract with you, which isn't by itself a violation of your property rights. Obviously I wouldn't agree that you deserve compensation for every unauthorized copy, but rather only such compensation as was specified in the contract, and only from those who agreed to it and subsequently broke it.
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to simply copy the recorded work of an artist or musician.
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to prevent someone from making a copy of any recorded work.
You can argue until you are blue in the fact that there is a major difference between copyright infringement and outright theft, but in the end, the entitlement mentality that justifies both on moral grounds is the same in both cases.
The justification isn't the same unless you've already made the assumption that copyright is a legitimate form of property. The moral argument supporting private property rights is a product of scarcity, which doesn't apply to copyrights. Even the pro-copyright crowd doesn't really treat copyrights as though they were property; differences include time limits, statutory damages, higher penalties than are imposed for outright theft, etc.
If the law simply set the same standards for damages for copyright infringement as for theft it would resolve the issue instantly, as there are no damages for copyright infringement -- not unless you consider competition itself to be a tort demanding recompense (the "lost sale" argument). It is copyright itself, not infringement, which demands justification.
I have an Eee, and use it for reading rather frequently. Have you ever tried turning it on its side? (Either with screen rotation, e.g. xrandr, or a program like FBReader which includes a rotated mode?) The Eee 900, at least, is even balanced such that you can lay it with the back of the screen flat against a horizontal surface (when it's not plugged in). Also, unlike most paperbacks, it actually stays open on its own at whatever angle you choose.
A matte-reflective screen (e.g. e-Ink) would be an improvement, but otherwise I generally find FBReader on the Eee to be just as readable as any printed book.
Public-key encryption would resolve that issue. Only the decryption key need be protected by a passphrase; encryption can take place non-interactively via the public key.
The billions and billions of dollars that sit in corporate bank accounts shouldn't be taxed?
No. Money sitting in bank accounts, corporate or otherwise, isn't even taxed as income under current laws; eliminating corporate taxes wouldn't affect that. Assuming rates were adjusted to maintain a constant tax revenue, individual taxes would likely increase, but prices would fall to compensate. It's entirely possible that there would be less overall distortion of the market due to removing tax considerations at the corporate level, which would result in a net increase in wealth via more efficient allocation of goods and services.
CEOs will just start using expense accounts for everything instead of multi-million dollar salaries.
Goods or services received for personal use, as opposed to some form of business use, are already considered income, even if they were paid for through an expense account. The CEOs could keep their savings and investments inside the company for a time, but they'd still get taxed when they actually withdrew the money.
Ethically, one means of theft is as bad as another; moving the tax from corporations to individuals doesn't make it any less wrong. The GP's idea has merit, however, as a means of increasing the efficiency of the process of tax-collecting.
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These jobs were already moving overseas. Now IBM's offering their existing employees a chance to keep their jobs, plus assistance with travel, visas, etc., provided they're willing to move with the jobs and accept local wages (along with a corresponding decrease in cost-of-living). This can only be seen as an improvement for their American engineers compared to the original plan.
Obviously IBM is also benefiting from the arrangement, since they manage to keep some of their trained employees, but they had already committed to relocating the jobs -- and hiring local engineers to fill them -- at the time the offer was made.
There certainly are ways to discover someone's genome other than taking a sample from them directly, but these other methods aren't as suitable for identification. It would be quite a bit more difficult to prove that a random strand of hair picked off a public floor came from a particular person, vs. a cheek swab or blood sample. Note, too, that you haven't abandoned something simply because it's no longer in your possession -- you can continue to claim ownership even over your fallen hairs, bits of skin, etc., although you would the have to take responsibility for leaving them on others' property.
I have no problem with law enforcement taking advantage of people's negligence or apathy, but I do have a problem with them taking DNA samples by force. This may be a mere technicality in terms of results, but the difference between passive observation and active violation is significant from the moral, ethical and legal points of view.
You're absolutely right. However, this article isn't about collecting some abandoned hair off the ground and analyzing it; it's about forcibly extracting a part of your physical body, without so much as a criminal conviction. The fact that no one has any exclusive right to the information encoded in their DNA does not imply that they have no ownership rights in the DNA itself, or in the tissue/fluids surrounding it.
You don't own your genome, but you do own your DNA (until such time as you abandon it).
At the very least, being required to provide a DNA sample before you've been convicted of a crime is a loss of both liberty and property.
The matter of corporate bonuses is entirely between the managers receiving the bonuses and the shareholders who hire them. No one else has any right or reason to get involved. If you think these companies are being mismanaged, don't invest in them; it really is that simple.
On the other hand, if you wish to complain about the tax money going to pay some of these extravagant bonuses, be my guest. You would do well to start with the original crime: the theft of property from its rightful owners. It hardly matters what the money is spent on, bridges or welfare or corporate bonuses; the injustice lies entirely in the taking itself.
We were discussing rights, not ethics or morals. If you want to discuss ethics, however, then I would pose a similar same question: how does legitimizing a coercive response (loss of life, liberty, or use of property) to a non-coercive action (copyright infringement) make the world a better place? From my point of view, it doesn't appear that the resulting widespread escalation of violence could possibly be in anyone's best interest.
You can choose to approve or disapprove of freeloading according to your own subjective tastes. It is an objective fact, however, that freeloading--in the form of copyright infringement--causes no harm to others: it does not violate anyone's right to life or liberty, or does it deprive anyone of the use of their property. The same cannot be said of copyright enforcement.
Of course, I'm assuming you were referring to legitimate privacy rights here, not to a non-existent right to download material in breach of copyright.
The right to act in any way which does not cause harm to others is far more substantial than any so-called "privacy right", recent attempts to undermine real rights in favor of exclusive copyright privileges notwithstanding.
It's not about "importance", it's about sensitivity to latency. Interactive streams like VOIP require low latency and jitter to be usable. In exchange, they're limited to a very low bandwidth. Bulk transfers, like FTP or BitTorrent, aren't sensitive to a few tens (or hundreds) of milliseconds of jitter here and there; overall bandwidth is far more critical.
All that it means to give VOIP higher priority is that when there are both VOIP and FTP/BitTorrent packets in the transmit queue, the VOIP packets should be sent first, up to certain predefined bandwidth limits. (The limits ensure that VOIP isn't prioritized to the point of crowding out all other traffic; once they're exceeded VOIP is treated as just another form of bulk traffic.)
Just as importantly, it's not like the Chinese government and the US government plan to do much trade with each other; this is mainly about whether private citizens living in each country can engage in trade. From the citizens' point of view these treaties are decidedly non-voluntary, regardless of whether they're accepted (involuntary conditions) or declined (involuntary interference in trade).
Based on your description, your credit-report site used single-factor authentication. You asked for more than one data point, but all the data together amounted to just one factor, something the user knows. It's not multi-factor authentication unless you add something the use has, or is.
Plus, you were apparently handing out the user's private information before they were authenticated. Sure, it was mixed in with misleading data, but it would still dramatically narrow down the search space for anyone trying to invade the user's privacy.
No, I'm quite sure the OP meant 1800 gigabytes, or about 15.46 terabits.
Established convention is that bytes are measured in binary (powers of 1024), and bits in decimal (powers of 1000). There's no need to introduce ridiculous-sounding terms like "gibibytes".
(Incidentally, I suspect there would be a lot less resistance to these newfangled units if they'd had the sense to pick names people could be expected to say with a straight face...)
So... you upgraded to a brand-new filesystem without first making a backup? Some glitches are to be expected at this point, just as when ext3 first came out. If everyone followed your advice and avoided ext4 "for at least five years," however, those glitches would never be found, much less fixed.
I believe I already defined duress as "threats of damage or loss of person or property". Even if one party did own all food (an exceedingly unlikely scenario), they aren't threatening to damage or take anyone's property or person, so the contract would remain valid on that point.
Anyway, if the contract were invalid they still wouldn't have any obligation to give you their food; you'd just be eliminating your primary means of persuading them to do so by refusing to keep your word.
Microsoft is not involved in this transaction, as it does not involve their products. However, they exercise their monopoly power to forbid Dell from doing business me me, unless they force me to purchase a Microsoft product...
If the use of "forbid" and "force" were accurate then this would indeed be coercion, but that is not the case. Dell is perfectly free to do business with you, but at the same time MS is free not to do business with them. Whether this latter choice is conditional or not makes no difference whatsoever; neither do absolute or relative market shares invalidate the basic property rights of either Dell or MS. As I have already stated, you are presuming that MS's market share imposes an obligation on them to provide certain goods and services on your terms -- an obligation directly contrary to their property rights.
I'm not arguing that they have an obligation to provide me with specific goods or services; but that it reduces individual freedom and is a form of coercion if they attempt to prevent others from providing me goods or services unless I purchase their goods and services as well.
First, the two "they"s in this sentence refer to two different entities; in my response, the first was the system manufacturers and the second was Microsoft. It is the system manufacturers who are not obligated to provide you with a specific good, the MS-free computer you want. In turn, putting aside issues of copyright for the moment, MS is not obligated to provide them with software to run on those computers. Refusing to do so, at all or unless specific terms are met, is not coercion, either toward the manufacturers or toward you. To say that it is presumes an obligation on their part.
In general, I only consider contracts valid when entered into by individuals with roughly equal bargaining power. A contract signed by a destitute man desperate for lunch, with a megacorporation who has achieved a monopoly on food supply, is not a "meeting of the mind".
It is your prerogative to feel that way, but all you accomplish by refusing to hold both sides to the terms they understood and agreed to is to ensure that the destitute man goes hungry. Or perhaps you think so little of your fellow human beings that you would expect them to enter into an "unconscionable" contract when other options were available?
Do you really think you know how others should manage their affairs better than they do themselves?
A valid contract requires just three components: a common understanding of the terms ("meeting of the minds"), willing agreement by both parties (lack of duress caused by the other party), and truthfulness regarding the factors which lead to that acceptance (absence of fraud). If these conditions are all met, but one party still refuses to abide by the contract, that person is at best a liar, possibly a thief, and entirely without honor.
That's exactly the benefit of government funding, that private investors only want investments that provide instant, guaranteed big profits, and aren't willing to invest in long-term projects.
If short-term projects consistently provide faster returns than long-term ones, then such projects should receive more investment -- they'll provide better returns over the long term as well. Anything else just wastes valuable resources by allocating them toward providing goods which won't fulfill as much demand, at the expense of more-demanded ones.
If your aim is to fulfill some political goal, regardless of the cost, then governments are indeed an ideal way to do that. If you wish instead to benefit society as a whole, government is inherently counter-productive. Private investors may be interested mainly in their own benefit, but the only way they can turn a profit is by persuading others to buy their goods and services. That will only happen if those others value the goods and services more than the money they're giving up in exchange. In the private sector, profit is evidence of benefit provided to society as a whole.
The tragedy of the commons sums up the failure of capitalism, and why socialism is so important.
Seriously? The tragedy of the commons is an example of what happens when you have socialism. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is strict property rights -- i.e., capitalism.
Everyone benefits from reduced carbon emissions.
If that were true everyone would be in favor of reducing emissions, and the regulations would be unnecessary. You are once again ignoring the costs of achieving your goals, costs you choose to impose on others. (You can also blame the courts for refusing to treat pollution as the property-rights violation that it is. That's how it was classified, until some judge decided to ignore property rights for the benefit of "society as a whole".)
You and I obviously mean completely different things by "coercion". When I say that the private sector is funded voluntarily and government project aren't, I mean that the private sector can't damage you or your property or assume ownership of your property without a valid contract. (By "valid" I refer to the "meeting of the mind", i.e. mutual agreement over what the terms of the contract are, as well as a lack of duress (threats of damage or loss of person or property) on either side.)
I do not consider a perceived lack of options to be coercion; the only basis for that position would be the idea that other people have an obligation to provide you with specific goods or services. Such a principle would completely undermine private property rights. If someone doesn't want to sell to you that's their right, whether it results from their own preferences or outside influence.
If you want to treat influence in the market as a form of coercion, however, at least note that it's a form of power both businesses and governments possess -- the latter to a far greater extent than the former.
I can't help but notice that you're completely overlooking the main difference, which is that the private sector can only pool money from those who choose voluntarily to participate, whereas the taxes which fund government projects are extracted from supporters and detractors alike. This is no trivial matter; refusing to address it undermines your entire case.
If it were just a matter of "people working together ... to accomplish some social goal" a simple (private-sector) non-profit organization would suffice. The only reason to turn the project over to the government is to impose involuntary costs and/or regulations on those with a lesser degree of political influence, so that some can benefit at others' expense.
Some distros may work like that -- it's one of the things I disliked about (k)Ubuntu which I tried it -- but others, such as Debian, will happily update to a new major version when it becomes available in your repository. For desktop systems using the testing and/or "unstable" repositories that tends to be shortly after the official release.
Agree. If I had written something using the same format and terminology used in that section of the Constitution, I would expect it to be read as a specific list of things the government is permitted to do in order to promote the general welfare, not blanket permission to do whatever some may believe falls under that general heading. Can anyone here say, with a straight face, that the latter interpretation is one intended by the authors, or by those who voted for ratification?
The point the GP was trying to make is that most people who have coded for any amount of time indent consistently as part of their routine.
This is true. Of course, most people avoid typos as part of their routine as well, but such are still a common source of bugs. (At least one can see that kind of error...)
The real problem, however, is in sharing code between multiple developers. Each may individually follow a consistent indentation pattern, but (if my experience is any indication) no two members of any dev. team follow the same pattern. Spaces vs. tabs, different levels of indentation, custom tab stops, editors that automatically change tabs to spaces or visa-versa, etc. It's bad enough when these differences only affect the appearance of the code, and not its function. I agree with Toonol (#26525455):
...two programs can, visually, be absolutely identical and yet not behave consistently? Who would design a language like that?
You wouldn't say, "You're right. I still have my original property in its original state. I haven't lost anything." No, you would say that you have the right to control how your property is used at all times.
Actually, I would say that I haven't lost anything. In the abstract, one could say that my property rights were violated, but as I never even knew it was gone until afterward there were no damages, and thus no compensation is justified.
Moreover, I would never say that I have the right to control how my property is used. Rather, I have the right to use my property. For most material things the difference is subtle, since I can't use my property if someone happens to be borrowing it at the time, even if they later return it unchanged. However, my property right doesn't exclude others from benefiting from the property so long as their benefit doesn't interfere with my use. Applied to copyrights, other's use of an idea or process or abstract representation of a work, with or without authorization, in no way prevents the erstwhile owner from doing the same. Ergo, even if one allows for the "ownership" of ideas, such copyrights cannot be infringed upon in the same way in which theft infringes upon the rights of an ordinary property owner, by preventing the owner's use of the property.
In that case, any unauthorized copies that surfaced would be evidence that someone, somewhere, must have either broken their contract with me, or stole my property from the person I leased it to.
This is what is known as a false dichotomy. These are two possibilities, but they are not the only possibilities. Your contract said nothing about restricting access, for example; perhaps someone other than the contractee made a copy without stealing the book. Even if the copies are evidence that someone broke the contract, you still don't have a property right in the copies themselves. In particular, the person who made the copy may not own the copy, which would place it out of reach of your contract.
In any event, the contract would need to be explicit, as with an NDA -- and if you think the masses would agree to (and abide by) an NDA just to read the latest pop fiction novel I'd like to know what world you've visiting from. Even if they did agree, you'd still have the enforcement issue; you'd have to prove not only that unauthorized duplication took place, but also that the specific people making the copies agreed to be bound by the contract. As with NDAs, you could only go after the people who agreed to keep the contents of the book private, and those who deliberately induced them to break the contract; once the information is public knowledge anyone can distribute it without penalty.
In your scenario, I would agree that someone broke their contract with you, which isn't by itself a violation of your property rights. Obviously I wouldn't agree that you deserve compensation for every unauthorized copy, but rather only such compensation as was specified in the contract, and only from those who agreed to it and subsequently broke it.
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to simply copy the recorded work of an artist or musician.
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to prevent someone from making a copy of any recorded work.
You can argue until you are blue in the fact that there is a major difference between copyright infringement and outright theft, but in the end, the entitlement mentality that justifies both on moral grounds is the same in both cases.
The justification isn't the same unless you've already made the assumption that copyright is a legitimate form of property. The moral argument supporting private property rights is a product of scarcity, which doesn't apply to copyrights. Even the pro-copyright crowd doesn't really treat copyrights as though they were property; differences include time limits, statutory damages, higher penalties than are imposed for outright theft, etc.
If the law simply set the same standards for damages for copyright infringement as for theft it would resolve the issue instantly, as there are no damages for copyright infringement -- not unless you consider competition itself to be a tort demanding recompense (the "lost sale" argument). It is copyright itself, not infringement, which demands justification.
I have an Eee, and use it for reading rather frequently. Have you ever tried turning it on its side? (Either with screen rotation, e.g. xrandr, or a program like FBReader which includes a rotated mode?) The Eee 900, at least, is even balanced such that you can lay it with the back of the screen flat against a horizontal surface (when it's not plugged in). Also, unlike most paperbacks, it actually stays open on its own at whatever angle you choose.
A matte-reflective screen (e.g. e-Ink) would be an improvement, but otherwise I generally find FBReader on the Eee to be just as readable as any printed book.
Public-key encryption would resolve that issue. Only the decryption key need be protected by a passphrase; encryption can take place non-interactively via the public key.
The billions and billions of dollars that sit in corporate bank accounts shouldn't be taxed?
No. Money sitting in bank accounts, corporate or otherwise, isn't even taxed as income under current laws; eliminating corporate taxes wouldn't affect that. Assuming rates were adjusted to maintain a constant tax revenue, individual taxes would likely increase, but prices would fall to compensate. It's entirely possible that there would be less overall distortion of the market due to removing tax considerations at the corporate level, which would result in a net increase in wealth via more efficient allocation of goods and services.
CEOs will just start using expense accounts for everything instead of multi-million dollar salaries.
Goods or services received for personal use, as opposed to some form of business use, are already considered income, even if they were paid for through an expense account. The CEOs could keep their savings and investments inside the company for a time, but they'd still get taxed when they actually withdrew the money.
Ethically, one means of theft is as bad as another; moving the tax from corporations to individuals doesn't make it any less wrong. The GP's idea has merit, however, as a means of increasing the efficiency of the process of tax-collecting.