What are they teaching people in schools these day? Apparently not logic.
Democracy means majority rule, either directly or through representatives. In any democratic State there are always those who oppose majority, including both the State and its policies; logically, these people cannot also be the State, because if that were true it would mean they were opposed to their own policies.
Most concisely, the State is that set of individuals whose actions show that they consider the "political means" of theft and prohibitions, backed by the threat of force, a legitimate way to achieve their goals. (The alternative, of course, is the "economic means": voluntary exchange and respect for universal, individual rights, a.k.a. the rule of law.)
Taxation always involves a threat of force. Tell me, what happens if you decide not to pay up? Obviously, they'll first attempt to take what they want indirectly, through your bank or your employer -- an act of force in itself. If that doesn't work they'll try to arrest you (another act of force) and take your property directly (ditto). If you manage to successfully resist these efforts they will increase in intensity until you either give in or die (it's happened, several times).
Failing to call any of that a "threat of force" makes a mockery of the term, not to mention the rule of law.
No, it's called socialism. In libertarianism you compensate individuals, not "society", and each of those individuals has to demonstrate harm resulting from an act of aggression willingly carried out by the offender. You're trying to gloss over the primary difference between socialism and libertarianism as though it were some insignificant detail! Libertarianism is about the rights of individuals. Socialism is about the "rights" of groups over their individual members.
Look at it as an encouragement to save. Which is a good thing.
Not if its accomplished through a threat of force. Saving is only a good thing when it's voluntary. The end goal of saving is more efficient (less costly) consumption, which means there has to be a balance between the two. That balance is how individuals would choose to allocate their resources if left free to decide for themselves. When you distort that balance -- in either direction -- you create a net decrease of wealth.
Correct. The state doesn't build roads, private contractors do.
When it comes down to it, the only role the state plays in road-building is to take money away from private citizens so that it can be spent on things the state wants (the aforementioned roads) and not what those citizens wanted.
The problem with income tax is, you get taxed no matter what. You have no control over your tax rate.
Income tax is just as "voluntary" as sales tax. When it comes down to it, an income tax is just a sales tax on labor, and the same principles apply. You can simply choose not to work -- i.e. become "self-sufficient". Nothing forces you to engage in trade with others.
In reality, of course, no form of taxation is ever voluntary.
I don't know of too many people here who would argue that its OK to SELL copies of music without the copyright holders permission.
I would. If individuals can make copies, there's no reason why businesses shouldn't be able to at well. Furthermore, if anyone in either group has more copies than they need for personal use, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to sell those copies to others. Combining the first and second points, I see no reason why anyone should be prevented from running a business wherein they make copies and sell them to others.
Totally diffrent [sic]. People who copy CDs for their own use, dont [sic] sell them for profit. While what they did was scarry [sic], its [sic] pretty well justified. They were indeed selling counterfit [sic] CDs and DVDs for sale. NOT personal use.
What difference does it make? If copyright were a justifiable concept, the copyright holders would have just as much right to prohibit personal copying as commercial copying. On the other hand, since copyright isn't a valid concept then there is no more justification for going after so-called "counterfeiters" than there is for prosecuting private infringers.
Nonsense. There are plenty of things humans are good at that computers are rubbish at. How about displaying four photographs with the question "which image contains a bottle?"
Your search space wouldn't be large enough -- you can only have a limited number of photographs, since they have to be manually generated, and once the correct answers have been identified the captcha-breaking algorithm would reduce to "which image is closest to something in this set", a fairly trivial image-matching problem. This is exactly the issue the GP was referring to: the captchas must be randomly computer-generated to create a suitably large search space, but they mustn't be computer-solvable.
Economics, the only science where ethics and morality are thrown out the window.
I believe the word you were looking for was "politics". Economic science is predicated on ethical behavior, although I will admit that it -- like all other forms of science -- is essentially amoral (though not immoral -- it simply leaves morality up to the individual participants).
Your war on economics is badly misguided.
Re:there is something greater in importance
on
China Censoring Flickr
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ummm, the chinese have a *right* to live however they want
Exactly. The individual Chinese have every right to live however they want, until they try to force their preferences onto others, or make threats against them. If some (or all) of them don't want to be censored, they have every right not to be.
that's assuming that someone who believes they will pay more for insurance than will get out of it wont sign up, which is clearly not the case. the average person pays more than they get from it, otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.
Apparently I over-simplified things a bit. I realize that people will generally choose to spend more on insurance than just what they expect to get out of it. (Otherwise insurance would be impractical as a for-profit business.) On the other hand, there are limits to how much people are willing to overpay. Given high enough premiums, some would choose to do without, and those with the least risk would probably be among the first to leave, all else being equal.
the average person is paying about average healthcare. you're probably paying close to average. if you believed you were low risk, would you opt-out? i wouldnt.
Obviously there are quite a few variables involved. If I knew I had no risk (to consider the extreme case), I'd opt out for sure and save myself $50/month that would otherwise get spent on something I'll never need. Over the next ten years I could save $6,000 by opting out. (That's the most I could get back, given our company insurance policy, though I have no doubt they actually spend a good deal more per employee.)
If "low risk" meant, say, a less than 1% chance of having to pay out a total of $20,000 or more over that time period I'd probably opt out. It really depends on the risk distribution and the size of loan one can afford.
Is it to our long-term interests to force insurers to operate in ignorance?
isnt that the point of insurance? if insurance companies knew with 100% accuracy how much they're going to have to shell out for you, then they're going to charge at least that much, and then there's no point in getting insurance.
The purpose of insurance is to mitigate unknown, future risk. Anything that can be used to reduce the present uncertainty in the risk is a perfectly reasonably factor in determining premiums. Insurance is a way of trading future risk for present cost within a given risk-class equivilency group. It works best when the risk classes are finely divided; in other words, when the premiums paid reflect the best known estimate of the individual insuree's risk.
If you were to force the insurance agency to charge a single premium, ignoring individual risk factors, then those who know they have less risk will find the premiums excessive and choose not to participate. As a result the premiums would have to be increased, and yet more marginal customers would leave. In the end you'd be left with just the highest-risk customer(s) paying a premium appropriate to their level of risk. All "non-discriminatory" insurance really does is make it impossible to get low-risk insurance.
As for the specific problem of being born with an expensive genetic issue, I think there is a way to leverage insurance here as well: the parents can take out an insurance policy on the child prior to conception, based on their own genetic risk factors.
Don't buy their CDs. Done, and without all that messy authoritarianism.
If they were against authoritarianism they wouldn't've granted the copyrights in the first place. Granting a monopoly is a far greater (ab)use of authority than dissolving one.
That may not be your personal reason, but it is an effect of the regulations nonetheless. Also, forcing others out to protect your reputation isn't significantly different from forcing them out to restrict the supply. The underlying principle remains the same: you are employing force against other for your own benefit at their expense.
consider the financial equity markets: heavily regulated and you won't find an investment banker (paragons of free market capitalism) who'd want it any other way
They're not exactly "paragons of free-market capitalism". State-backed corporatism, perhaps. The regulations (in this case as elsewhere) act like a union, restricting the supply of their sort of labor. This ensures that those who find themselves able to meet the regulations command a higher price than they could in an unregulated environment. Those investment bankers support the regulations because they personally benefit from them, at the expense of the marginal suppliers those same regulations drove out of business.
In general you'll find that the larger players in any industry tend to support regulation for this exact reason -- it provides them with a legal way to force their smaller competitors out of the market.
Our society says murder is illegal, theft is illegal, B&E are illegal, these are all societally "wrong".
"Society" doesn't have any say in whether those things are wrong either. If something is wrong it remains wrong regardless of the majority opinion. In any event, it doesn't really matter. For all property-right violations the legitimacy of the punishment is inherent in the offence. A murderer cannot rationally argue against corporal punishment; a thief cannot rationally argue against being fined. Either the defendent must agree that the action was wrong, and thus deserves punishment, or they must claim that the action was right, and thus the punishment (being the same action) must also be right.
Subjective morality only becomes an issue when you attempt to criminalize things that are either victimless, or acceptable to those committing the "crime". Copyright violations fall in the latter category (or possibly both, depending on your point of view). Let the punishment fit the crime -- prohibit "pirates" from holding copyrights. See if they care.
However, even those applications won't replay everything from the very start, or pretty soon it'll be a hell to do a single undo.
Obviously there are several easy solutions to this problem. The program doesn't have to track all the steps from the beginning, for one; it can simply track the image as of e.g. 100 steps ago, and the operations after that point. It can also record more than one starting point, limiting the number of operations to be replayed without reducing the total number of undo steps. Finally, as I pointed out before, it could cache the last few steps to make single undos instantaneous. The overall undo history would resemble a compressed video file, with large, sparse I-frames (checkpoints) and small P-frames (operations). Just as with a video file you could seek to the middle without decoding the entire history.
every single time over the past 15 years that I've tried Emacs I've ended up killing it from another terminal window because I can't even figure out how to exit the... program.
Try C-x C-s (to save) and C-x C-c (to close). I agree that it's not particularly intuitive to the uninitiated. Incidently, you don't need a separate terminal: C-z from almost anything (not just Emacs) will suspend the active program and give you a command-line, from which you can run "kill %" to terminate the program or "fg" to return to it.
Undoing a brush stroke isn't the same as running the rubber along the same path, the previous pixels needs to be stored as they are totally unrelated from the action that's being undone (except by position).
True. However, it is possible to work the other way: store the original image once, from before the first undo event, along with a simple list of the operations that took place since that point. To undo just reload the original image and reapply all the chances except the most recent. Then you'd only need to store additional pixels if an operation involved bringing in data from outside -- e.g. merging two images, or performing a non-deterministic operation.
Obviously this arrangement trades memory for CPU time, since reapplying those operations could take a while, but that's probably not a bad trade for such memory-intensive undo steps. One could always cache the last few steps to speed things up.
some new, cheap source of energy (like, say, dilithium crystals)
As I recall, the dilithium crystals were not the source of energy; they were merely there to regulate the matter-antimatter reaction. As far as I know the origin of the antimatter was never explained. Forget dilithium; if we had their (presumably unlimited) supply of antimatter, energy would become the least of our worries.
Unfortunately, doing that would sort of imply Mozilla would need to vouch for the extension developers (hey, they're letting them use a cert; that's what it's for, right?). As it is they barely have enough people to just try installing extensions before approving for the main site...
I don't really see how this would be any more time- or reputation-intensive than granting accounts on the official Mozilla add-on site; it would simply be another step in the account-creation process. It might even help with the updates, since they could automatically pre-screen updates to reject any add-on that isn't signed by the owner of the account to which it's being uploaded. (They'd still need to perform their live tests, of course -- aside from any security issues, the extension could interfere with built-in functionality or other common extensions.)
Alternately, the Mozilla team could create their own signing certificate and add it to Firefox's whitelist; add-on developers could then get Mozilla-signed certificates for themselves. That would at least narrow the list a bit -- as you say, anyone can get a Verisign certificate, in part because there are just so many possible uses for one, but there should be few enough official Mozilla-signed add-on certificates to allow for some proper screening.
The certificates could also be used for authentication of the updates themselves, as you suggested.
Yes, and it makes an excellent maxim when trying to teach children to behave in a civilised manner.
The reason it's taught to children is that we hope they'll act the same way as adults. Or are you implying that you think adults shouldn't "behave in a civilized manner"? If you mean that the actions of governments are necessarily uncivilized I'd agree, but that's no reason to encourage such behavior.
On the other hand, as a principle of government, it would require us to repeal the laws against highway robbery, since it would be wrong of us to incarcerate armed robbers just because they were doing something wrong themselves. So maybe it isn't terribly useful in this context.
No, there's a difference between the initiation of force (the armed robbery) and the use of force in a defensive or restitutionary role (taking back the stolen property, and possibly incarcerating the thief). The former is wrong; the latter isn't.
This is unlike the case we were discussing in that both the subsidy and the restrictions involve the initiation of force against a non-aggressor -- the taxpayers in the first case, and the telecom company (and/or its owners, customers, suppliers, etc.) in the second. If anyone is to be punished for the subsidy, it ought to be those that created it, not those that received it.
Anyone who's been subsidized in any way should be forced to be neutral. Period.
Ever hear the saying, "two wrongs don't make a right"? Don't force anyone to do anything -- just end the subsidy. The solution to intervention isn't more intervention.
Slashdot Mirror
What are they teaching people in schools these day? Apparently not logic.
Democracy means majority rule, either directly or through representatives. In any democratic State there are always those who oppose majority, including both the State and its policies; logically, these people cannot also be the State, because if that were true it would mean they were opposed to their own policies.
Most concisely, the State is that set of individuals whose actions show that they consider the "political means" of theft and prohibitions, backed by the threat of force, a legitimate way to achieve their goals. (The alternative, of course, is the "economic means": voluntary exchange and respect for universal, individual rights, a.k.a. the rule of law.)
Taxation always involves a threat of force. Tell me, what happens if you decide not to pay up? Obviously, they'll first attempt to take what they want indirectly, through your bank or your employer -- an act of force in itself. If that doesn't work they'll try to arrest you (another act of force) and take your property directly (ditto). If you manage to successfully resist these efforts they will increase in intensity until you either give in or die (it's happened, several times).
Failing to call any of that a "threat of force" makes a mockery of the term, not to mention the rule of law.
No, it's called socialism. In libertarianism you compensate individuals, not "society", and each of those individuals has to demonstrate harm resulting from an act of aggression willingly carried out by the offender. You're trying to gloss over the primary difference between socialism and libertarianism as though it were some insignificant detail! Libertarianism is about the rights of individuals. Socialism is about the "rights" of groups over their individual members.
Not if its accomplished through a threat of force. Saving is only a good thing when it's voluntary. The end goal of saving is more efficient (less costly) consumption, which means there has to be a balance between the two. That balance is how individuals would choose to allocate their resources if left free to decide for themselves. When you distort that balance -- in either direction -- you create a net decrease of wealth.
Correct. The state doesn't build roads, private contractors do.
When it comes down to it, the only role the state plays in road-building is to take money away from private citizens so that it can be spent on things the state wants (the aforementioned roads) and not what those citizens wanted.
Income tax is just as "voluntary" as sales tax. When it comes down to it, an income tax is just a sales tax on labor, and the same principles apply. You can simply choose not to work -- i.e. become "self-sufficient". Nothing forces you to engage in trade with others.
In reality, of course, no form of taxation is ever voluntary.
I would. If individuals can make copies, there's no reason why businesses shouldn't be able to at well. Furthermore, if anyone in either group has more copies than they need for personal use, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to sell those copies to others. Combining the first and second points, I see no reason why anyone should be prevented from running a business wherein they make copies and sell them to others.
What difference does it make? If copyright were a justifiable concept, the copyright holders would have just as much right to prohibit personal copying as commercial copying. On the other hand, since copyright isn't a valid concept then there is no more justification for going after so-called "counterfeiters" than there is for prosecuting private infringers.
Your search space wouldn't be large enough -- you can only have a limited number of photographs, since they have to be manually generated, and once the correct answers have been identified the captcha-breaking algorithm would reduce to "which image is closest to something in this set", a fairly trivial image-matching problem. This is exactly the issue the GP was referring to: the captchas must be randomly computer-generated to create a suitably large search space, but they mustn't be computer-solvable.
I believe the word you were looking for was "politics". Economic science is predicated on ethical behavior, although I will admit that it -- like all other forms of science -- is essentially amoral (though not immoral -- it simply leaves morality up to the individual participants).
Your war on economics is badly misguided.
Exactly. The individual Chinese have every right to live however they want, until they try to force their preferences onto others, or make threats against them. If some (or all) of them don't want to be censored, they have every right not to be.
Apparently I over-simplified things a bit. I realize that people will generally choose to spend more on insurance than just what they expect to get out of it. (Otherwise insurance would be impractical as a for-profit business.) On the other hand, there are limits to how much people are willing to overpay. Given high enough premiums, some would choose to do without, and those with the least risk would probably be among the first to leave, all else being equal.
Obviously there are quite a few variables involved. If I knew I had no risk (to consider the extreme case), I'd opt out for sure and save myself $50/month that would otherwise get spent on something I'll never need. Over the next ten years I could save $6,000 by opting out. (That's the most I could get back, given our company insurance policy, though I have no doubt they actually spend a good deal more per employee.)
If "low risk" meant, say, a less than 1% chance of having to pay out a total of $20,000 or more over that time period I'd probably opt out. It really depends on the risk distribution and the size of loan one can afford.
The purpose of insurance is to mitigate unknown, future risk. Anything that can be used to reduce the present uncertainty in the risk is a perfectly reasonably factor in determining premiums. Insurance is a way of trading future risk for present cost within a given risk-class equivilency group. It works best when the risk classes are finely divided; in other words, when the premiums paid reflect the best known estimate of the individual insuree's risk.
If you were to force the insurance agency to charge a single premium, ignoring individual risk factors, then those who know they have less risk will find the premiums excessive and choose not to participate. As a result the premiums would have to be increased, and yet more marginal customers would leave. In the end you'd be left with just the highest-risk customer(s) paying a premium appropriate to their level of risk. All "non-discriminatory" insurance really does is make it impossible to get low-risk insurance.
As for the specific problem of being born with an expensive genetic issue, I think there is a way to leverage insurance here as well: the parents can take out an insurance policy on the child prior to conception, based on their own genetic risk factors.
If they were against authoritarianism they wouldn't've granted the copyrights in the first place. Granting a monopoly is a far greater (ab)use of authority than dissolving one.
That may not be your personal reason, but it is an effect of the regulations nonetheless. Also, forcing others out to protect your reputation isn't significantly different from forcing them out to restrict the supply. The underlying principle remains the same: you are employing force against other for your own benefit at their expense.
They're not exactly "paragons of free-market capitalism". State-backed corporatism, perhaps. The regulations (in this case as elsewhere) act like a union, restricting the supply of their sort of labor. This ensures that those who find themselves able to meet the regulations command a higher price than they could in an unregulated environment. Those investment bankers support the regulations because they personally benefit from them, at the expense of the marginal suppliers those same regulations drove out of business.
In general you'll find that the larger players in any industry tend to support regulation for this exact reason -- it provides them with a legal way to force their smaller competitors out of the market.
"Society" doesn't have any say in whether those things are wrong either. If something is wrong it remains wrong regardless of the majority opinion. In any event, it doesn't really matter. For all property-right violations the legitimacy of the punishment is inherent in the offence. A murderer cannot rationally argue against corporal punishment; a thief cannot rationally argue against being fined. Either the defendent must agree that the action was wrong, and thus deserves punishment, or they must claim that the action was right, and thus the punishment (being the same action) must also be right.
Subjective morality only becomes an issue when you attempt to criminalize things that are either victimless, or acceptable to those committing the "crime". Copyright violations fall in the latter category (or possibly both, depending on your point of view). Let the punishment fit the crime -- prohibit "pirates" from holding copyrights. See if they care.
Obviously there are several easy solutions to this problem. The program doesn't have to track all the steps from the beginning, for one; it can simply track the image as of e.g. 100 steps ago, and the operations after that point. It can also record more than one starting point, limiting the number of operations to be replayed without reducing the total number of undo steps. Finally, as I pointed out before, it could cache the last few steps to make single undos instantaneous. The overall undo history would resemble a compressed video file, with large, sparse I-frames (checkpoints) and small P-frames (operations). Just as with a video file you could seek to the middle without decoding the entire history.
Try C-x C-s (to save) and C-x C-c (to close). I agree that it's not particularly intuitive to the uninitiated. Incidently, you don't need a separate terminal: C-z from almost anything (not just Emacs) will suspend the active program and give you a command-line, from which you can run "kill %" to terminate the program or "fg" to return to it.
True. However, it is possible to work the other way: store the original image once, from before the first undo event, along with a simple list of the operations that took place since that point. To undo just reload the original image and reapply all the chances except the most recent. Then you'd only need to store additional pixels if an operation involved bringing in data from outside -- e.g. merging two images, or performing a non-deterministic operation.
Obviously this arrangement trades memory for CPU time, since reapplying those operations could take a while, but that's probably not a bad trade for such memory-intensive undo steps. One could always cache the last few steps to speed things up.
As I recall, the dilithium crystals were not the source of energy; they were merely there to regulate the matter-antimatter reaction. As far as I know the origin of the antimatter was never explained. Forget dilithium; if we had their (presumably unlimited) supply of antimatter, energy would become the least of our worries.
I don't really see how this would be any more time- or reputation-intensive than granting accounts on the official Mozilla add-on site; it would simply be another step in the account-creation process. It might even help with the updates, since they could automatically pre-screen updates to reject any add-on that isn't signed by the owner of the account to which it's being uploaded. (They'd still need to perform their live tests, of course -- aside from any security issues, the extension could interfere with built-in functionality or other common extensions.)
Alternately, the Mozilla team could create their own signing certificate and add it to Firefox's whitelist; add-on developers could then get Mozilla-signed certificates for themselves. That would at least narrow the list a bit -- as you say, anyone can get a Verisign certificate, in part because there are just so many possible uses for one, but there should be few enough official Mozilla-signed add-on certificates to allow for some proper screening.
The certificates could also be used for authentication of the updates themselves, as you suggested.
The reason it's taught to children is that we hope they'll act the same way as adults. Or are you implying that you think adults shouldn't "behave in a civilized manner"? If you mean that the actions of governments are necessarily uncivilized I'd agree, but that's no reason to encourage such behavior.
No, there's a difference between the initiation of force (the armed robbery) and the use of force in a defensive or restitutionary role (taking back the stolen property, and possibly incarcerating the thief). The former is wrong; the latter isn't.
This is unlike the case we were discussing in that both the subsidy and the restrictions involve the initiation of force against a non-aggressor -- the taxpayers in the first case, and the telecom company (and/or its owners, customers, suppliers, etc.) in the second. If anyone is to be punished for the subsidy, it ought to be those that created it, not those that received it.
Ever hear the saying, "two wrongs don't make a right"? Don't force anyone to do anything -- just end the subsidy. The solution to intervention isn't more intervention.