That'd be great, but it'd be tricky to phase in safely. There's not much use in a car which broadcasts its turn signals if no one else has the HUD to see them, and a HUD that shows surrounding vehicles turn signals, but ignoring older models not equipped with the upgraded gear, is worse than useless, because it can lead to a false sense of security right up until you run into that expensive mint-condition classic car in the next lane that your HUD never knew anything about.
You'd really have to segregate the vehicles by capability, at least at first -- e.g. only "smart" vehicles can travel on interstates, while existing vehicles can take the back roads. You'd also have to make it easy to modify older vehicles to include at least the broadcast capabilities, if not the HUD itself.
I think hate speech is protected and all other kinds of censorship is wrong, but I have to agree here. There can be no artistic, social or any other benefit from this industry.
So you're against censorship right up until we come to something you want to censor? How, exactly, does that differ from the pro-censorship position?
Your hair splitting of saying that "prostitution" is victimless, is contentious at best. The activity of prostitution has a victim 999 times out of a 1000. By all means tell me about the girl you know who cheerfully sells sex and is perfectly well adjusted and doesn't need to do so, but I don't know of such cases myself.
To say that something is a victimless crime is to say that the criminal is harming, at most, him- or herself by committing it. It does not say anything one way or the other about whether the criminal is simultaneously a victim of some other crime. If A extorts B into committing the crime of prostitution then A is the ultimate criminal, and B is both a victim and a criminal. However, the crime that B commits has no victim, and thus shouldn't be considered a crime in the first place.
If they're choosing to do it -- and it is a choice, whatever you may think of the alternatives
I am really sorry to say that you are wrong. There are girls... who are kept prisoner and sold against their will... who have been told that their families will be punished if they try to escape. To call that a choice and to say that they should pursue an alternative is unfair.
Every action is a choice. It's not always a free choice, but it is a choice nonetheless. I did not say that they should pursue an alternative; you are assuming that calling it a choice implies looking down on them for making that choice, where no such slight was intended. What I said was that what they chose to do was the best alternative they knew of given their circumstances, including the threats and force others have used against them, and that if you (or anyone else) wants to change their lives for the better you need to change those circumstances, in this case by protecting them from these threats, because just outlawing the behavior can only make their situation worse than it already is.
I think we agree, really, except for the part where I consider prostitution, a victimless crime, to be separate from kidnapping and extortion, which both have clear victims. If someone is forced into prostitution due to someone else's crime of kidnapping and/or extortion then they are a victim of those crimes, not a victim of prostitution itself. If anything, prostitution performed under duress is even less eligible for the label "criminal" than the same action chosen freely.
If they remove the newsserver, and the user then switches to bt/http/whatever, that *will* cost the isp upstream bandwidth costs, so from that economic point of view, its cheaper to maintain the servers.
Not necessarily. An individual user only downloads a small portion of the messages in a limited set of groups. Without the local server the upstream connection only has to cover what those users are actually interested in, whereas to maintain a local copy the ISP has to download all the messages from all the groups.
The local server only makes sense if there is a large enough overlap in the interests of the various users that significant caching effects come into play, with hundreds of users interested in the same data. Even then one must consider the potential liability of taking an active part in the distribution process.
... for most prostitutes, the circumstances are so bad that you can't really apply the word "choice" any more.
So offer them something better. If they're choosing to do it -- and it is a choice, whatever you may think of the alternatives -- then they clearly don't think there is anything better available, and they are in a better position than you to know what their options are. Take away what they consider to be their best option and you force them to turn to something they consider even worse. Banning specific behaviors, even ones you think of as self-destructive, helps no one. Before you can offer them a way out you need to find out why they've been avoiding the choices you think they should have made.
It's still victimless, by the way, because the victimization you describe, though very real, is entirely the result of other crimes.
The concept of property is inevitable. Whether or not it is formally recognized, someone always has the last word on how a resource is to be used; that person is the de facto property owner. The specific arrangement of homesteading and voluntary, contractual transfer of ownership is simply the one people naturally gravitate to as the most just, stable, and equitable system available.
In a free market there will be artist who uses restrictive licencing and artists who give away their work for free. Let the free market decide which/who will be the more popular.
No, in a free market there would be no copyright, and thus no need for licenses in the first place.
Copyright only exists because some organization (namely the government, but it really doesn't matter who) threatens to employ violence against anyone who distributes copies or public performances of certain goods. Since such actions are not aggressive, involving no use or threat of force and causing harm to no one, the threats which prop up copyright are aggressive and unjust, and a violation of the primary prerequisite for a free market, the absence of systematic, legitimized use or threat of initiatory violence.
I agree. I am hardly opposed to compensating people for their creative efforts. These efforts are known as "labor", and useful labor is always scarce, commanding a positive price. Copyrights and patents are not required to provide compensation.
[Copyright]'s fair -- it's good for them and good for us.
That "us" is overly inclusive. Clearly the people who choose not to follow copyright laws don't consider it to be good for them. By supporting copyright you're throwing away their liberty as well as your own. That's hardly "fair", must less just.
Yes, anything you can get without cost has no economic value (no one will trade for it).... By your argument, air to breathe has no value. Of course there is a utility, but no one will pay for it until they feel a shortage.
Close, but not quite. In economics, value is purely subjective; the most one can do is determine a lower bound based on what someone is willing to pay. That which can be attained without cost tends to have no demand, which is just another way of saying that no one will pay for it. If people choose to attain it at all, however, then its value must be positive (although still unmeasurable). Air, for example, definitely has a positive value for any given person, being necessary for life. However, almost everyone has an effectively unlimited supply already, so the demand for air -- the aggregate amount people are willing to pay to acquire more of it -- is nearly zero.
One can take economics seriously without confusing zero demand with zero value.
New, unique objects can't simply be copied from old objects, so the first copy does have a value. This means designers and artists can profit, but there's no need for factory owners or publishers to copy originals anymore. Doesn't this increase the profit for, and lower the barriers to entry to, creation?
Exactly right. The same applies to digital objects outside the virtual world -- software, music, movies, etc. The idea that "productive creativity" (the creation of new, unique works for a commercial audience) would cease in the absence of copyrights and patents was never more than a self-serving myth.
In the scenario you descibre, the streets would become choked with dirty, unsafe buses and traffic would grind to a halt.
Only because he didn't go far enough; the roads should be privately owned as well. Then someone has an incentive to keep the traffic moving, and liability for any safety issues.
Most of the complaints against deregulation and privatization come about because major aspects of the original ownerless, responsibility-free public system remain intact.
Also, for the record, most serious libertarians and classic liberals don't care much for Ayn Rand. Our (anti-)political views are based on principles, not a mere desire to maximize efficiency. We believe that a system based on freedom and liberty, and equality under the law for every individual regardless of strength, birth, status, wealth, or popularity, does result in a more efficient use of scarce resources than that possible under centralized control. We would still argue for individual liberty, however, even if it were provably the least efficient system imaginable, simply because it is right.
I did see the movie. The humans were not immersed in virtual worlds; video-conferencing is not VR. There was nothing to suggest that they were involved in a three-dimensional interactive environment like SL. Unless you want to consider any kind of live conversation -- e.g. talking on the telephone -- a "virtual world"?
I think I'm only one-and-a-half activities away from the humans in Wall-E. Unrealistic indeed.
I wasn't referring to mere lack of physical activity, although that part was also difficult to believe. I was referring to the complete absence of creativity and curiosity, and the way that the members of this society inexplicably failed to adjust their plans when their 5-year "vacation" mutated into a 700-year generational voyage. The first-generation passengers and crew could not have been unaware of the inevitable consequences of such prolonged purposelessness.
The "human" characters in the story, both on the ship and earlier, on Earth, acted more like mindless automatons than real human beings. That's fine, because the movie isn't really about them; it's about Wall-E and Eve. The plot essentially presumes that the human race takes the least rational choice at every opportunity, though, and that I find incredibly unrealistic.
Offering anonymous internet access to random persons passing by your house *does* promote free speech, and *is* thus a possible threat to your government.
Fixed that for you. If they're "corporate overlords" then they are the government. Incorporation, or lack thereof, is irrelevant. The attempt to govern the actions of others is the problem, regardless of who's responsible.
RFC 4025 provides a method for opportunistic encryption between hosts using keys stored in DNS (type "IPSECKEY").
Which is great, provided you have a static IP address and control over its reverse DNS entry. It doesn't really help the majority of Internet users with dynamic addresses and ISP-controlled DNS.
That will protect against application-level corruption, but not OS-level or hardware-level faults. You're placing a lot of trust in that filesystem and the hardware and software that manipulate it. Anyway, you've reinforced my point somewhat: RAID by itself isn't a backup system. You need more than one copy of the data, even if it is on the same storage medium.
RAID isn't a backup. It only protects against disk failures, not OS or application faults or user error. To have a backup you need at least one copy of the data as it was at some point in the past, in addition to the most current version.
RAID reduces downtime by allowing the system to continue to function after a disk failure. That's often important, but you still need proper backups. The home user doesn't need 99.999% uptime, but does care about preserving their data; the redundant HDDs required for a RAID setup would be better utilized storing independent snapshots.
Do you think that there is something after death? If so, why extend life?
Do you think that there is something after death? If so, why not commit suicide?
Regardless of irrational belief in some sort of afterlife, almost everyone tries to live this life as long as they can manage--even when they supposedly believe the afterlife to be immeasurably superior. Perhaps they understand deep down that this is the only life they can count on? "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and all that?
So those who don't vote are counted as a "No" vote? That seems as arbitrary as counting them as "Yes".
Not if your goal is to require proof of majority support before changing the status quo. I would say it's reasonable to leave things as they are unless most people actively demonstrate a desire for change; otherwise unrepresentative vocal minorities end up making all the decisions.
It is possible to split an HDMI video signal, provided it's not tainted with HDCP. HDCP encodes the signal for a specific receiver, so even though you can split the signal only one screen can decode it. It is true that all (licensed) Blu-Ray players require HDCP on their digital outputs, but one could create an unencrypted, full-HD signal some other way. For example, by applying a cheap DVI-to-HDMI adapter to the output from a PC. The resulting signal could then be distributed to multiple HD screens. Suitable PC-compatible HD video for a simple demo shouldn't be hard to come by.
So much for civilized society, not to mention equality under the law. In your mind she's guilty -- even though they couldn't prove it in court -- and that's apparently sufficient to justify any form or degree of punishment imaginable.
We're so fortunate to have role models like you to dictate right and wrong, with your flawless, instinctive understanding of justice and omniscience perception of the reality behind each case. No need for proof or debate; the judgment is plain: guilty!
We're nowhere near the kind of "scarcity-free" society you envision. Even given such major advances in energy production and engineering as you describe, the raw resources required will still be scarce, and will have to be mined from land owned by someone. Human labor will be required to come up with the original design. Space for living and working is limited in supply; you can build more and better houses and offices, but there are only so many places to put them, short of leaving the planet entirely. Finally, unless these magic machines have unlimited parallel production capacity there will have to be some system in place to prioritize the production and distribution of the various end products.
Time, space, human creativity, and raw materials. Four essential ingredients of any production process; four items whose scarcity you can't simply engineer away. Four items which will always command a positive price.
In democratic countries at least, the government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the corporations.
All government serve some citizens at the expense of others. You simply object to the fact that you're on the losing end in this case.
(No, I'm not calling corporations "citizens". The politicians are working for the owners of said corporations, who are indeed citizens, and not for the corporations themselves. The latter would be meaningless, as an abstract concept like a corporation doesn't have a will of its own to serve.)
Most people get insurance through their employer and can't afford it otherwise. They don't have any choice.
That's a fairly recent development, the result of Depression-era wage-fixing laws which required employers to come up with creative incentives (like employer-provided insurance) rather than simply increasing their base salaries. The cost of insurance is the same no matter who pays for it, and it seems to me that the practice of bundling insurance with employment is gradually falling out of favor.
In the meantime, any failings of the bundled insurance simply make the job that much less rewarding, encouraging people to seek employment elsewhere. There is always a choice.
Without a medical degree, how can you effectively evaluate (in advance, no less) the skills of someone whose actions potentially put your life in definite, immediate risk?
Simple. You hire out the evaluation process to a well-known group that does have the necessary experience. Preferably one with a valuable reputation at stake. You choose this group in advance, at you leisure, and when the time comes that you need immediate medical attention they direct you to a competent provider.
You're kidding, right? What your health insurer has is a clear incentive to send you to the cheapest dumbass they can find, and then simply disbelieve you and deny your claim when you complain that he screwed up.
You can't keep something like that a secret. If they do that more that once or twice people will choose some other health insurer. Why deal with someone you know is going to weasel out of their side of the bargain?
Anyway, they can't just unilaterally deny the claim; you have a contract. If you can demonstrate that your claim is valid to an impartial third part they'll have no choice but to pay up.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be great, but it'd be tricky to phase in safely. There's not much use in a car which broadcasts its turn signals if no one else has the HUD to see them, and a HUD that shows surrounding vehicles turn signals, but ignoring older models not equipped with the upgraded gear, is worse than useless, because it can lead to a false sense of security right up until you run into that expensive mint-condition classic car in the next lane that your HUD never knew anything about.
You'd really have to segregate the vehicles by capability, at least at first -- e.g. only "smart" vehicles can travel on interstates, while existing vehicles can take the back roads. You'd also have to make it easy to modify older vehicles to include at least the broadcast capabilities, if not the HUD itself.
So you're against censorship right up until we come to something you want to censor? How, exactly, does that differ from the pro-censorship position?
To say that something is a victimless crime is to say that the criminal is harming, at most, him- or herself by committing it. It does not say anything one way or the other about whether the criminal is simultaneously a victim of some other crime. If A extorts B into committing the crime of prostitution then A is the ultimate criminal, and B is both a victim and a criminal. However, the crime that B commits has no victim, and thus shouldn't be considered a crime in the first place.
Every action is a choice. It's not always a free choice, but it is a choice nonetheless. I did not say that they should pursue an alternative; you are assuming that calling it a choice implies looking down on them for making that choice, where no such slight was intended. What I said was that what they chose to do was the best alternative they knew of given their circumstances, including the threats and force others have used against them, and that if you (or anyone else) wants to change their lives for the better you need to change those circumstances, in this case by protecting them from these threats, because just outlawing the behavior can only make their situation worse than it already is.
I think we agree, really, except for the part where I consider prostitution, a victimless crime, to be separate from kidnapping and extortion, which both have clear victims. If someone is forced into prostitution due to someone else's crime of kidnapping and/or extortion then they are a victim of those crimes, not a victim of prostitution itself. If anything, prostitution performed under duress is even less eligible for the label "criminal" than the same action chosen freely.
Not necessarily. An individual user only downloads a small portion of the messages in a limited set of groups. Without the local server the upstream connection only has to cover what those users are actually interested in, whereas to maintain a local copy the ISP has to download all the messages from all the groups.
The local server only makes sense if there is a large enough overlap in the interests of the various users that significant caching effects come into play, with hundreds of users interested in the same data. Even then one must consider the potential liability of taking an active part in the distribution process.
So offer them something better. If they're choosing to do it -- and it is a choice, whatever you may think of the alternatives -- then they clearly don't think there is anything better available, and they are in a better position than you to know what their options are. Take away what they consider to be their best option and you force them to turn to something they consider even worse. Banning specific behaviors, even ones you think of as self-destructive, helps no one. Before you can offer them a way out you need to find out why they've been avoiding the choices you think they should have made.
It's still victimless, by the way, because the victimization you describe, though very real, is entirely the result of other crimes.
The concept of property is inevitable. Whether or not it is formally recognized, someone always has the last word on how a resource is to be used; that person is the de facto property owner. The specific arrangement of homesteading and voluntary, contractual transfer of ownership is simply the one people naturally gravitate to as the most just, stable, and equitable system available.
No, in a free market there would be no copyright, and thus no need for licenses in the first place.
Copyright only exists because some organization (namely the government, but it really doesn't matter who) threatens to employ violence against anyone who distributes copies or public performances of certain goods. Since such actions are not aggressive, involving no use or threat of force and causing harm to no one, the threats which prop up copyright are aggressive and unjust, and a violation of the primary prerequisite for a free market, the absence of systematic, legitimized use or threat of initiatory violence.
I agree. I am hardly opposed to compensating people for their creative efforts. These efforts are known as "labor", and useful labor is always scarce, commanding a positive price. Copyrights and patents are not required to provide compensation.
That "us" is overly inclusive. Clearly the people who choose not to follow copyright laws don't consider it to be good for them. By supporting copyright you're throwing away their liberty as well as your own. That's hardly "fair", must less just.
Close, but not quite. In economics, value is purely subjective; the most one can do is determine a lower bound based on what someone is willing to pay. That which can be attained without cost tends to have no demand, which is just another way of saying that no one will pay for it. If people choose to attain it at all, however, then its value must be positive (although still unmeasurable). Air, for example, definitely has a positive value for any given person, being necessary for life. However, almost everyone has an effectively unlimited supply already, so the demand for air -- the aggregate amount people are willing to pay to acquire more of it -- is nearly zero.
One can take economics seriously without confusing zero demand with zero value.
Exactly right. The same applies to digital objects outside the virtual world -- software, music, movies, etc. The idea that "productive creativity" (the creation of new, unique works for a commercial audience) would cease in the absence of copyrights and patents was never more than a self-serving myth.
Only because he didn't go far enough; the roads should be privately owned as well. Then someone has an incentive to keep the traffic moving, and liability for any safety issues.
Most of the complaints against deregulation and privatization come about because major aspects of the original ownerless, responsibility-free public system remain intact.
Also, for the record, most serious libertarians and classic liberals don't care much for Ayn Rand. Our (anti-)political views are based on principles, not a mere desire to maximize efficiency. We believe that a system based on freedom and liberty, and equality under the law for every individual regardless of strength, birth, status, wealth, or popularity, does result in a more efficient use of scarce resources than that possible under centralized control. We would still argue for individual liberty, however, even if it were provably the least efficient system imaginable, simply because it is right.
I did see the movie. The humans were not immersed in virtual worlds; video-conferencing is not VR. There was nothing to suggest that they were involved in a three-dimensional interactive environment like SL. Unless you want to consider any kind of live conversation -- e.g. talking on the telephone -- a "virtual world"?
I wasn't referring to mere lack of physical activity, although that part was also difficult to believe. I was referring to the complete absence of creativity and curiosity, and the way that the members of this society inexplicably failed to adjust their plans when their 5-year "vacation" mutated into a 700-year generational voyage. The first-generation passengers and crew could not have been unaware of the inevitable consequences of such prolonged purposelessness.
The "human" characters in the story, both on the ship and earlier, on Earth, acted more like mindless automatons than real human beings. That's fine, because the movie isn't really about them; it's about Wall-E and Eve. The plot essentially presumes that the human race takes the least rational choice at every opportunity, though, and that I find incredibly unrealistic.
1) Wall-E had nothing to do with virtual worlds.
2) One shouldn't base real-world hopes or fears on unrealistic movie plot elements.
Fixed that for you. If they're "corporate overlords" then they are the government. Incorporation, or lack thereof, is irrelevant. The attempt to govern the actions of others is the problem, regardless of who's responsible.
Which is great, provided you have a static IP address and control over its reverse DNS entry. It doesn't really help the majority of Internet users with dynamic addresses and ISP-controlled DNS.
That will protect against application-level corruption, but not OS-level or hardware-level faults. You're placing a lot of trust in that filesystem and the hardware and software that manipulate it. Anyway, you've reinforced my point somewhat: RAID by itself isn't a backup system. You need more than one copy of the data, even if it is on the same storage medium.
RAID isn't a backup. It only protects against disk failures, not OS or application faults or user error. To have a backup you need at least one copy of the data as it was at some point in the past, in addition to the most current version.
RAID reduces downtime by allowing the system to continue to function after a disk failure. That's often important, but you still need proper backups. The home user doesn't need 99.999% uptime, but does care about preserving their data; the redundant HDDs required for a RAID setup would be better utilized storing independent snapshots.
Do you think that there is something after death? If so, why not commit suicide?
Regardless of irrational belief in some sort of afterlife, almost everyone tries to live this life as long as they can manage--even when they supposedly believe the afterlife to be immeasurably superior. Perhaps they understand deep down that this is the only life they can count on? "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and all that?
Not if your goal is to require proof of majority support before changing the status quo. I would say it's reasonable to leave things as they are unless most people actively demonstrate a desire for change; otherwise unrepresentative vocal minorities end up making all the decisions.
It is possible to split an HDMI video signal, provided it's not tainted with HDCP. HDCP encodes the signal for a specific receiver, so even though you can split the signal only one screen can decode it. It is true that all (licensed) Blu-Ray players require HDCP on their digital outputs, but one could create an unencrypted, full-HD signal some other way. For example, by applying a cheap DVI-to-HDMI adapter to the output from a PC. The resulting signal could then be distributed to multiple HD screens. Suitable PC-compatible HD video for a simple demo shouldn't be hard to come by.
So much for civilized society, not to mention equality under the law. In your mind she's guilty -- even though they couldn't prove it in court -- and that's apparently sufficient to justify any form or degree of punishment imaginable.
We're so fortunate to have role models like you to dictate right and wrong, with your flawless, instinctive understanding of justice and omniscience perception of the reality behind each case. No need for proof or debate; the judgment is plain: guilty!
We're nowhere near the kind of "scarcity-free" society you envision. Even given such major advances in energy production and engineering as you describe, the raw resources required will still be scarce, and will have to be mined from land owned by someone. Human labor will be required to come up with the original design. Space for living and working is limited in supply; you can build more and better houses and offices, but there are only so many places to put them, short of leaving the planet entirely. Finally, unless these magic machines have unlimited parallel production capacity there will have to be some system in place to prioritize the production and distribution of the various end products.
Time, space, human creativity, and raw materials. Four essential ingredients of any production process; four items whose scarcity you can't simply engineer away. Four items which will always command a positive price.
All government serve some citizens at the expense of others. You simply object to the fact that you're on the losing end in this case.
(No, I'm not calling corporations "citizens". The politicians are working for the owners of said corporations, who are indeed citizens, and not for the corporations themselves. The latter would be meaningless, as an abstract concept like a corporation doesn't have a will of its own to serve.)
That's a fairly recent development, the result of Depression-era wage-fixing laws which required employers to come up with creative incentives (like employer-provided insurance) rather than simply increasing their base salaries. The cost of insurance is the same no matter who pays for it, and it seems to me that the practice of bundling insurance with employment is gradually falling out of favor.
In the meantime, any failings of the bundled insurance simply make the job that much less rewarding, encouraging people to seek employment elsewhere. There is always a choice.
Simple. You hire out the evaluation process to a well-known group that does have the necessary experience. Preferably one with a valuable reputation at stake. You choose this group in advance, at you leisure, and when the time comes that you need immediate medical attention they direct you to a competent provider.
You can't keep something like that a secret. If they do that more that once or twice people will choose some other health insurer. Why deal with someone you know is going to weasel out of their side of the bargain?
Anyway, they can't just unilaterally deny the claim; you have a contract. If you can demonstrate that your claim is valid to an impartial third part they'll have no choice but to pay up.