That's right, he wants to tie our currency's value to an international commodity's price. He complains about how 1-2% annual inflation has been devaluing our savings, failing to note that, had we been on a gold standard, the money supply would have experienced 50% deflation in five years, matching the 1929-1933 10% annual deflation that caused the Great Depression. Wouldn't that be a great way to stabilize the currency?
Where do people get this stuff? Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression. The primary cause of the intensity and length of the Great Depression was the goverment's idiotic monetary policies following the inflationary boom from 1921-1929 and the inevitable corrective depression starting late in 1929. The Austrian economists of the time (including Ludwig von Mises) accurately forecasted the depression during the inflationary period, and when the boom ended the government did exactly the opposite of what the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) recommended. All the boom-depression cycles up to that point had been sharp but quickly over, a result of predominately laisse-fair government policies. In 1929 the government took a different, disasterous approach: instead of leaving things well enough alone they tried to stave off the depression (the cure for the economy, though they failed to realize it) by pumping even more money into the economy (inflation), raising taxes to institute make-work projects and subsidies (with similar effects), and instituting mandatory price controls on commodities and labor. As a result, unlike the previous depressions, the Great Depression lingered on until the beginning of the next World War.
It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work.
All this ignores the fact that the inflationary period from 1921-1929 was itself due in large part to the policies of the Federal Reserve since its creation in 1913, in particular the absurdly low 3% reserve ratio on time-deposit accounts.
This is just the summary; for the full analysis of the events leading up to and contributing to the Great Depression see America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard.
That quote looks funny. Maybe because it's actually
Erm, you do realize that it is illegal for you to carry and deliver letters for money, right? It's called a monopoly, and the USPS has one.
Fine, the OP was wrong to say that all carrying and delivering of letters for money was illegal, since it isn't. That doesn't mean the USPS isn't granted a protected position, though. As the OP said in a more recent post any private carrier must pay the USPS for the delivery in addition to normal delivery costs (section 601(a)(2), cited from the linked Wikipedia article). I think that matches the OP's statement "you have to pay the post office what they would have gotten anyway by buying and canceling stamps in addition to the private postage." It is, in other words, legally impossible to undercut the USPS on price. I'd say that gives them an effective legal monopoly on letter delivery. Also, 601(a)(1) prevents private couriers from carrying any mail that isn't in an envelope, which would rule out most bulk mailings entirely.
I shouldn't respond this late. My apologies if my response seems a bit harsh; it wasn't meant that way.
The Republic is simply a way of enshrining the most important beliefs of the group into doctrine (the constitution) and buffering the decision making process to reduce the emergence of mob behaviour.
I can agree with this. Note that I don't think republics are perfect, or any more justified than any other form of government -- just that they represent a more advanced form of society than democracy.
Natural rights don't exist -- the closest thing that exists are the rights that the group chooses to enshrine as doctrine. And there isn't even agreement on what those rights are.
Again, I don't believe in "natural rights" as conceived by the authors of the Constitution, an independent entity with its own authority, something obvious to everyone by which moral and immoral behavior can be objectively judged. In a sense rights are a subjective framework, something by which we choose to judge our own behavior. The tendency for society is toward minimization of conflict and thus harmonization of the moral frameworks of each individual within the community; if it were otherwise (increasing conflict, disharmonious moral frameworks) society could never have formed in the first place.
As it turns out most individuals are decidedly libertarian when it comes to their day-to-day actions. Most people tend to respect other individuals and their property, and decline to participate directly in acts of aggression except in the most dire need; I doubt many would seriously contemplate personally robbing someone, even with the intention of giving the proceeds to charity, and most of the people I've met hold enough respect for individual autonomy to resist the impulse to tell others how to live their lives. This is primary danger of a democratic government: through its seeming legitimacy it abstracts the process of aggression, removing the visible link between the service provided the members of the ruling majority (on a given issue) and the corresponding aggression against the minorities. People who otherwise believe strongly in personal freedom end up heading to the ballot box to cast a vote for more programs, more taxation, more regulation. They should add another list to those ballots: the names of all the people you'll have to steal from to fund your pet programs. Of course the list would be so long they'd never manage to make it fit; perhaps they could customize it for each region . ..
I totally agree that mutual respect for individual rights is the basis of, well, pretty much every positive aspect of society. And I'd certainly agree that the founders of the US had great vision in establishing constitutional limitations on the federal government, to shift the responsibility of democratic governance as close to the people as possible.
No argument there.
The modern republic is the result of the people choosing to formalize the functioning of their democracy in a particular way. . . . Democracy is as much the freedom of the people to choose a constitutionally-limited Republic as it is the freedom to have the least popular 50%-1 of the society put into camps and turned into a cheap source of orphanage-grade heating-oil. That's why it's so great.
A republic is defined by its fundamental principles. If those principles are subject to popular consensus -- if the republic is justified solely on the basis of its democratic appeal -- then it isn't much of a republic. The only principle it then could hold would be that of majority rule, which is inherent in any form of government, no matter how despotic. The potential for democratic rule exists under any government, but cannot grant legitimacy. That has to be earned, through persistent adherence to just principles. A society is no more free under a democratic form of government than it would be under a state of anarchy; it may be far less so as the
As I read the regulations, if perfectly legal for me to contract a special messenger to deliver private mail. In fact, it's written into Title 18, Part I, Chapter 83, section 1696(c).
How did you manage to equate carrying "normal mail" and contracting a "special messenger" to carry "private mail"? The section you cited is clearly intended to grant the USPS an incomplete, but effective monopoly on the delivery of non-parcel mail:
(c) This chapter shall not prohibit the conveyance or transmission
of letters or packets by private hands without compensation, or by
special messenger employed for the particular occasion only. Whenever
more than twenty-five such letters or packets are conveyed or
transmitted by such special messenger, the requirements of section 601
of title 39, shall be observed as to each piece. [emphasis added]
Sure, you can hire a private courier to carry a single letter. As the courier, though, I'd have to carry the letter for free and/or avoid all repeat business, and never carry more than 25 letters for the same customer. The only time someone would use such a courier -- guaranteed to be expensive due to the limitations -- would be if the document was itself valuable and/or confidential. The government doesn't care about special deliveries; I doubt they care much whether you use the USPS to carry major contracts or confidential information, as that occurs relatively infrequently. These regulations exist purely to keep UPS/FedEx/etc. from competing with the USPS in the far more lucrative commercial mail business.
The real crux of it is that democracy trumps economics. If 50%+1 of the people say that we should all pay taxes for a health care system, we do it. If 50%+1 of the people say we turn the rest into dog food, we do it. There are balances to prevent rash, insane changes, but ultimately the people can do anything.
And this would be why the Greeks classified democracy among the three worst forms of government. Sure, any sufficient majority of people bent on doing something will be able to overpower the minority; this is as true in a dictatorship as it is in a democracy. No government can persist in the face of the active opposition of a majority of its citizens. Democratic governments are naturally stable and resistant to revolution, their one benefit, and a dubious one at that: revolution every now and then tends to keep the protection racket known as government from becoming excessively onerous; democracies tend to last longer and become far more invasive before they're finally overthrown.
Democracy is the state of nature, rule by strength. A pack of wolves is democratic. To the extent that humans justify their actions as "democratic" they are acting as animals, not human beings. A democratic form of government cannot make the majority's actions just. It cannot make their actions any less theft or murder than they would be if committed by a lone individual; acting as a majority just makes sure they can't be punished for their crimes. Democracy is a cancer to human society; it undermines the mutual respect for individual rights, a distinctly human quality that allows society to exist in the first place.
When it comes down to it the most primitive societies in the world are democratic. The U.S. began as a republic, an association of free states based on absolute natural rights, with only the slightest hint of majority rule, intended by the founders to remain strictly bound by constitutional limitations (an impossible goal despite their best intentions). Reducing that Republic to the level of a primitive democracy would be a crime against humanity, the elimination of a millenia or more of hard-won social progress.
Paying Haliburton and other US contractors to rebuild Iraq--that's not socialism. The discriminator is this--who makes the money? If money is being spread among a bunch of little people, then that's socialism. If money is poured into a few large corporations whose executives make tens or hundreds of millions, then that's the free market. If it's profitable for the rich, it's the free market, but if you're giving money to a single mother of 2, then that's socialism. If you're helping the working poor pay their medical bills, that's socialism, and probably creeping totalitarianism.
I can't believe this blatant mischaracterization got modded up to (+5, Insightful). No spending by the government is ever related in any way to the free market. The term "free market" expressedly refers to a market unhampered by government interference, including taxation. If there is government spending then there must be taxation; if there is taxation there can be no free market. What you are referring to is not the free market, but rather merchantilism or corporatism.
The problem with socialism isn't related at all to who benefits. The problem is that money (or more generally wealth) must be taken from others before it can be redistributed; socialism necessarily depends on either taxation or invasive regulation. Those who oppose socialism nearly always oppose it on one of these two grounds. Those who oppose it on these grounds would oppose merchantilism and corporatism for exactly the same reasons.
In fact, I would say one of the reasons why MS is a monopoly is because it is difficult to recreate a compatible interface for programs to use, not because of their copyright. Many programs which run on MS windows also depend on the bugs in MS's system. You would have to find and emulate all the bugs to be sure every given program will work. Even if it were legal to copy and do whatever to their software, they only release binaries, so you would still have a lot of work to create a competing system or make an existing one (such as linux) compatible with programs made for MSwin.
If you want to call MS a monopoly on the basis of their market share, go ahead. I wouldn't call them an unfair monopoly though, or impose any extra restrictions on how they do business, unless perhaps if it were for the legal priviledges that copyrights and patents give them. I don't believe their success is at all illegitimate, though I do at time wish that their customers had stopped to consider how dependant they were on MS's products and pushed for additional assurances of quality and compatibility. On the other hand, I do believe that without copyright it would be far easier to create compatible interfaces for Windows-based software; for some parts one could use their binaries and drivers directly, while for other parts one could employ reverse compilation on the original libraries, only replacing the minimum necessary for compatibility. Any hidden API interfaces would be exposed as well. The current implementations are all based on the limited third-party documentation available to the public and reverse-engineering, both of which take time and neither of which gives as much certain information as direct analysis of the binaries would.
Well, the difference with a copyright monopoly you could make a competing work and have a monopoly too.
I assume you were referring to one of the following two passages?
What's the difference, really, between not knowing about the software and not being able to use it?
It is rather odd that despite their rejection of aristocratic titles and Merchantilist legal monopolies the founders chose to grant Congress the authority to grant monopolies on artistic works and inventions. Such monopolies didn't help in business or trade (excluding the individual groups granted the monopolies, of course); what made them think the practice would work any better in the arts and sciences?
If it was the first quote, I don't really see the difference; you could just as easily make your own "competing work" a trade secret, so in one system they would both be trade secrets and in the other they would both be monopolies.
If it was the second quote, then I would point out that while aristocratic titles and legal monopolies were not granted free to all they could usually be acquired by someone with sufficient means; they weren't fixed in stone, merely drawn from a more limited pool. Land and trade routes are limited in supply, while monopolies on ideas and their implementations are less valuable and thus easier to come by. Sure, I technically have a copyright in this post, but no one would buy it from me; it's essentially worthless. If it were not granted automatically I wouldn't bother applying, and certainly wouldn't pay for it. Even a copyright in an artistic masterpiece will typically bring less income and influence than control over a trade route or a decent aristocratic title. Being easily acquired, and thus more widespread, doesn't make them any less merchantilistic in nature, or any more economical.
I think copyright was supposed to bring artistic works and such in line with selling physical goods.
That may have been the intention, but it was not the result. Furthermore, any attempt to "bring artistic works and such in line with" ordinary property rights misses the point of having property rights in the first place: reducing the occurrance of irresolvable conflicts. Assigning rights to both ordinary property and ideas (i.e. archetypes, patterns, ideal objects, etc.) creates conflict: at the point in time when one person's property begins to resemble an idea "owned" by someone else both ownership rules can apply, assigning control over the object to two different people. The original property owner retains the title, since it was never given up voluntarily; on the other hand, the "IP" owner also has control over the object due to ownership of the ideal object it resembles. "IP" requires that the latter claim take precedence, in contrast to ordinary property rights which dictate that the earliest claim be recognized as absolute. One cannot have rights to ideal objects and real property in the same system without conflict.
Of course, the U.S. copyright system, unlike the patent system, doesn't actually claim to grant rights in ideas; it just attempts to restrict the creation of copies. However, creation of copies isn't actually a single, indivisible action. It is composed of observation of an object (the formation of an idea), possibly the communication of that idea to someone else by means of an intermediate representation (language), and then the re-implementation of the resulting idea as a separate object, which may or may not resemble the original depending on accuracy of the observation and the fidelity of the intermediate representation. Which part actually violates the copyright: the observation, the communication, or the re-implementation? None of these actions infringe on any rights unless ownership is granted in the ideas themselves, as with patents, which as I already stated causes conflict with ordinary property ownership.
I see a contradiction here, you can only expect those rights if there's an institution in place that gives them and protects them. If it was a free for all you really couldn't do anything about the guy who was following you around tracking your every move infringing on you privacy.
A "right" isn't an abstract concept dependent on external intervention, it's a justification for self defense. If I have a right to a particular piece of property, for example, that means that I would be justified in acting coercively to the extent necessary to defend that right (this is not aggression, the initiation of coercion, because it is self-defense against external coercion). If people have a right to privacy (which is quite debatable) then they would be justified in taking coercive actions to defend their privacy, or in enlisting the help of some other person or agency to do so. If they do not have that right then such coercive actions would constitute aggression and the roles would be reversed.
Obviously your self-defense will be more effective if others also believe it to be justified and are willing to lend their aid in your support, which tends to encourage harmonization of the concepts of rights and aggression between individuals, besides lending weight to the golden rule: help others protect themselves, as you may one day be the one in need of assistance.
Equating "Intellectual property" with "redistribution of wealth" is complete nonsense. Intellectual property is about claiming exclusive rights to ideas, not redistributing anything.
Wealth isn't (always) about money; it's a pseudo-measurement of one's ability to achieve one's own goals ("pseudo" because one can't really measure wealth objectively). Intellectual monopolies (actually, all government-created monopolies) are wealth redistribution in that they inhibit some people's goals (violating their rights in their own property in the process) in order to allow other people to achieve their goals (by granting them control over the use of others' property).
There is always contention between contrasting goals held by separate individuals; property rights are the boundary line, the determinant of which goals can be ethically achieved and which cannot. They specify the actions one cannot take in furtherance of one's goals; these actions are collectively known as aggression. Aggression can be equivilently defined as anything that upsets the balance between competing goals; that would include the enforcement of government monopolies (e.g. "IP"). Wealth redistribution -- involuntary reassignment (violation) of property rights -- is thus ultimately just another word for aggression, and "IP" does qualify as wealth redistribution by this definition.
One point that the other respondents didn't mention is that law is licensed in a manner akin to medicine in order (at least theoretically) to protect the public. In a free marketplace, it can be difficult to judge the quality of one provider as opposed to another.
Which, of course, is why private "consumer report" agencies exist. There is no reason why there could not be private bar associations, or medical licensing organizations, run on the same model as the private ASE certification for auto mechanics or the private A+ certification for computer technicians. Such an agency would have complete freedom to grant or withhold membership, subject only to the necessity of maintaining the value of their brand, and consumers can easily restrict their purchases to licensed providers -- or choose an unlicensed provider at their own risk.
You claim these rules exist to protect me. You claim you know better than I do what would be in my best interest. I don't want to be protected from my own choices, even if my choices are bad ones. I think I deserve the freedom to stand or fall according to my own choices without unsolicited help or hinderance from you. Let me live my own life!
Although I have libertarian-leaning views and I remain a staunch individualist, I also recognize that we don't live in a vacuum; it is very inconvienent (and almost impossible these days) to live on an island or another secluded area by yourself, with no help from anybody. Nobody to grow your food, nobody to make your clothes, nobody to build your housing, nothing. Nobody to talk to, nobody to be with, just lonely. There is a cost to living in a society. We all have some implicit social contract to obey both the explicit rules of society (governmental laws) as well as the implicit rules (moral codes). Sometimes those rules are bad rules that are flawed, foolish, or downright stupid. But you must either live with them, change them, or leave.
Who sets the terms of this "social contract" (which, BTW, wouldn't even meet the qualifications for a normal contract, much less an implicit one)? This particular "contract" you talk about isn't necessary for social relationships. Certainly society does depend on recognition of and adherence to certain guiding principles, such as self-ownership (no slavery or other aggression) and private property (necessary for survival and for saving for the future). Society does not, however, depend on the existance of a government. At most government is required to enforce these principles (and I would say it is not even needed for that, and can only exist in contradiction to those same principles; e.g. taxation, a defining part of government, violates private property rights at the direction of other "member(s) of society").
The "necessity" of government is itself based on a contradiction. Government supposedly exists to protect against lawless individuals, as there is no need to protect you from the law-abiding. However, if there were many such lawless individuals then the government (made up of that same proportion of lawless individuals) would not be willing to protect you anyway. If man is good, no government is necessary; if man is evil government is insufficient.
You have attempted to create a false dicotomy between acceptance of government and complete isolationist autarky. There are plenty of reasonable alternatives. Consider: at what population (community size, i.e. number of direct relationships per person) does a government become "necessary"? Two? Three? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? A population of 12 or less would be unlikely to feel a need for a government, but could still form a society with all the interpersonal relationships that exist in a larger group. They would, of course, have to defend themselves against the occasional aggressor (internal or external) but self-defense (and, by extension, collective or private defense agencies) can easily deal with that. The situation would be similar with community of a hundred people, or a thousand, which is approaching the upper limit for any one person's active relationships (ignoring mere aquaintances). Assisted self-defense is a perfectly good way to defend against such aggression without turning to government (which, in practice, does very little actual defense to begin with; it concentrates more on punishing aggressors after the fact).
The "social contract", if it exists, should cover the smallest possible set of universal rules, which for human society essentially amounts to respect for self-ownership and private property; the smaller the "contract" becomes (without compromising these essential elements) the fewer conflicts will result which cannot be resolved without violence (the only way of resolving conflicts between people with incompatible social "contracts").
Maybe society can mandate a "cultural" tax, but allow each taxpayer to decide how (and to whom) they want those tax monies to be spent (just throwing out an idea). There's no need to violate free market economics & peoples' private property rights to encourage "innovation".
On the whole I agree with you, but you do realize that this part is a contradiction, right? Taxes violate both free market economics and peoples' private property rights. (It is, however, worth considering that outright theft through taxes may be better than the insidious restrictions on which copyright enforcement depends, or the hidden costs that it creates.)
One proposal that would be consistent with property rights (and thus free market principles) would be to sell artistic works in advance, as preorders. For something relatively expensive (a movie, for example) the studio could create an inexpensive trailor (or other marketing material) and use it to collect preorders from interested customers; the actual production would commence once enough people demonstrated interest (and promised payment). Since the preorder is a binding contract the studio would be guaranteed the revenue necessary to cover their costs, provided they meet the terms of the contract (which would probably include independent review of the final product, to hold the studio accountable).
Another option is collective bargaining, conducted through a variety of subscription-supported consumer organizations; the consumers would subscribe to organizations reflecting their tastes in art, and the organizations would then use their subscriptions to fund the production of artistic works suitable for their members. This could be used independently for small projects (music, paintings, photographs, books, etc.) or combined with the above proposal for larger items spanning the interests of multiple organizations.
Best of all, either of the above proposals could be implemented right now, although it would help if they weren't competing with a system based on government-granted monopolies. I'm sure there are also other systems that could work, but we probably won't discover them so long as copyright remains in force.
. . . Even if I internally develop software to enhance my business of selling widgets, I'm not going to be inclined to distribute it for free (eating possibly hundreds of man years of cost!) so that someone else selling similar widgets can benefit with no cost.
The abolishment of copyright would mean that software like this becomes a trade secret -- far more secretive and locked down than today's software.
I'd rather that software remain a trade secret rather than be publicised in a way that places involuntary restrictions on its use. (What's the difference, really, between not knowing about the software and not being able to use it?) In practice, of course, most software is already developed in-house, and most in-house software (being useless in any other line of work) is already treated as a trade secret, copyright or no.
Also, you could consider cooperating with your fellow widget-sellers for mutual benefit. Sure, that eliminates the (time-limited) monopoly profit of being the only one with the software, but it would still help you significantly--along with everyone else in that industry--by reducing the cost of production.
That said, the producers of works still have the right to decide how those works are distributed.
No, they don't have that right. What they have (in the U.S. at least) is an exclusive priviledge, granted or withheld at the whim of Congress (supposedly representing the will of the people) on the basis of their supposed authority under the Constitution. Unlike theft, which violates an individual right both older and more fundamental than the government, and would be wrong even if the government were not present to punish it, copyright infringement is a challenge to the government's authority to grant and enforce that priviledge.
It is rather odd that despite their rejection of aristocratic titles and Merchantilist legal monopolies the founders chose to grant Congress the authority to grant monopolies on artistic works and inventions. Such monopolies didn't help in business or trade (excluding the individual groups granted the monopolies, of course); what made them think the practice would work any better in the arts and sciences?
In Washington state for example, the State Bar Act defines who can and cannot practice law under various circumstances. It looks like the meat of the prohibition is at RCW 2.48.170 and RCW 2.48.180(2) & (3). So google for your state's statutes -- they're almost certainly provided free online. This isn't legal advice.
Ah, thanks for that. It appears to be a simple licensing requirement, which would put it squarely in the category of state-supported monopoly priviledge and competition-avoidance. (An easy way to see this: you're allowed to represent yourself, but prohibited from doing exactly the same thing for others at their request.)
The bar association can condition the practice of law on adherence to regulations that, were they laws rather than conditions attached to the practice of law, would be Constitutionally barred, because practicing law isn't a right.
Assuming that the bar association is a private organization, I agree that they have the perogative to certify (or not certify) whoever they wish. However, one thing I've never seen properly explained: what keeps someone who isn't certified by the bar association from practicing law? After all, if it's legal for me to represent myself in court (or prepare my own legal documents, etc.) why can't I choose whoever I wish to assist me in this task, certified or no? If this is in fact not prohibited then what benefits or priviledges (besides credibility/reputation) would membership in a bar association provide, and why are they not extended to the general populace?
Or is it perhaps just a way of avoiding competition? It certainly does help to raise the barrier to entry into the legal profession, limiting the supply of legal services and driving up the price.
careful, sounds like you're hinting at fraud there...
How so? It is a real diamond ring, after all, even if the diamond was created in a lab. As long as he doesn't try to pass it off as a DeBeers diamond he should be fine.
" (a) using an open-source wrapper, so their real driver doesn't use any of the Linux kernel interfaces directly" - This wrapper is indeed open in that you can look at it, but it is not GPL, or free software of any kind, making it just as illegal to link to the GPLed kernel as if it were not open at all.
As I understand it, the glue layer is GPL -- or else why would they bother with the glue layer at all, rather than just linking their binary driver directly to the kernel, if both impose the same restrictions? However, even assuming that the glue layer isn't GPL, there's nothing illegal about linking the glue layer to a GPL kernel. The GPL is a distribution license, not an EULA, and linking is not a form of distribution. If anyone were at fault it would be nVidia for distributing a derived product of GPL'd software (APIs) under a license incompatible with the GPL, not the end user who links the resulting module into the kernel. (Further distributing the glue layer or the compiled module would also be an infringement of the GPL, of course, if the glue layer isn't GPL-compatible.)
The glue code links to the kernel directly. So it must be GPL. The user space code links to the glue code directly. So it must be.... (fill in here).
nVidia owns the glue layer and thus can freely link against it, and derive from it, without violating the copyright holder's (i.e. their own) "rights." The glue layer must be released with a GPL license, as it links to and derives from the Linux kernel, and any software that links against the glue layer under the terms of the GPL must itself be GPL'd. However, nVidia can easily grant the right to link to (or derive from) the glue layer, or do so itself, above and beyond the rights granted to third parties by the GPL. The glue code must be GPL, but not necessarily only GPL.
This is similar to the situation with dual- or tri-licensed code; license terms are additive, and the GPL is satisfied so long as the derived product is licensed under terms compatible with the GPL -- including GPL with additional rights. (Of course you have to own the copyright on the derived code to grant additional rights; you can't distribute code written by others with more rights than were originally granted. That isn't an issue in this case, since all the glue code is original and "owned" by nVidia.)
I'm not aware of any distinction in the GPL between kernel modules and applications.
There isn't one; the exception (as I recall) is an addition or clarification in the license to the kernel itself (which, though GPL-compatible, isn't purely GPL, since it grants additional rights not granted by the GPL itself). In theory the same derivative-works concept applies to e.g. plugins developed using the APIs of a GPL'd application.
If I distribute something (closed source) that is dynamically linked against a certain GPL library, but I never distributed any GPL code, the GPL doesn't apply to me for that work, I need no authorization to distribute something that merely can potentially utilize a GPL program in a closely tied way.
The argument goes that a driver developed specifically for Linux is a derived work of the Linux kernel, and thus is subject to the conditions of the GPL. IANAL, but it seems to be a fairly sound argument. There is an explicit waiver for the standard user-space interfaces (so applications are not automatically considered derivative works), but no such waiver exists for the Linux-specific kernel interfaces. nVidia gets around this by (a) using an open-source wrapper, so their real driver doesn't use any of the Linux kernel interfaces directly, and (b) using the same driver code on Linux and Windows (so the driver isn't entirely dependent on Linux).
This has nothing to do with whether there is aggregation or dynamic linking, and everything to with whether the module is dependent on the GPL'd kernel API.
IANAL, but I don't think you can avoid libel charges merely by prefacing something with `it is my opinion that...'.
IANAL either, but as I understand it truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel. If that is the case, then any statement which is worded so as to express an opinion cannot be considered libel, as the statement (the existance of the opinion itself) must be true; the only one who could claim otherwise, in any event, would be the defendant. AFAIK there are no defamations laws regarding opinions, whether true or false, and the statement itself describes the opinion, not the plaintiff.
On the other hand, I've always believed that the various defamation laws are not just unconstitutional ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech"), but also harmful in and of themselves. In a society where you can say whatever you wish without (legal) repurcussions, people tend to take random, unsubstanciated remarks with a grain of salt, and perhaps informally censure those who make too many such remarks, which is a logical social solution for a social problem. On the other hand, when defamation is illegal people tend to assume that any false statement will be countered with a lawsuit -- and thus any uncountered statement must be true. This downware trust spiral hurts those who can't affort to sue and floods the courts with pointless suits over ridiculous, unfounded assertions (as in this case).
Any large organization will have an alarming amount of bureaucratic waste, and most governments may have a little more than most private sector entities, but governments can, and in some cases do, do more than generate paper and hot air.
No one's arguing that the government can't get anything done at all -- most libertarians would be quite glad if that were the case, since it would mean they couldn't collect taxes, enforce regulations, etc. No, the reason one can't call what governments do productive is that they can only support themselves (or at least choose to support themselves) by force, through taxation. When a government spends money the products and/or services the government chooses to fund are ends in and of themselves (i.e. consumption), not a part of a productive process ending in voluntary purchase by consumers.
To borrow from an analogy used by the parent's sibling: a position answering the phone (to avoid work-stoppage on an assembly line) can certainly be productive, but answering the phone just because you want to is consumption, particularly it prevents the managers from employing someone else more cheaply (taxation), or with fewer unwanted side-effects (regulation), or when the phone didn't need answering in the first place (politics & beaurocracy).
A properly written piece of legislation wouldn't prevent that.
I have no idea whether or not the proposed bill in the USA is properly written though;)
I've read the proposal, and it would prevent what I just described. Can you propose any way of writing the legislation that wouldn't have that effect?
The issue is not giving YouTube faster access to customers at a price, it's prioritizing their traffic over providers that don't pay - and thus penalizing the providers that don't pay, due to the fact that bandwidth is finite.
The situation you describe wouldn't cause that - in fact, it would be better for everyone, because traffic to YouTube that would normally slow down regular internet traffic would instead be going through the dedicated link.
The system I described and the one you describe differ only in perspective, not in substance. In my system some content providers pay one or more ISPs to get faster access to the ISPs' customers than the non-paying providers; in your system non-paying providers get slower access than paying providers: these are just different ways of saying the same thing. Either way there is some fixed amount of total upstream bandwidth available (the upper limit of which is determined by how much the ISP gets paid, by customers and content providers alike), of which paying providers get priority over XX% and non-paying providers split the balance. It doesn't really matter if the ISP has a separate physical link to YouTube or simply reserves a portion of its (possibly expanded) upstream bandwidth to give YouTube priority (or exclusive) access. In any event, the current proposal doesn't make any distinction between the two, and I don't see how it could.
The proposal has other issues as well, such as (apparently) requiring every "broadband network provider" to provide equal access to every "broadband network", not just hosts on the Internet. Section 4(a)(1): "Each broadband network provider has the duty to enable users to utilize their broadband service to access all lawful content, applications, and services available over broadband networks, including the Internet". A "broadband network" is defined as any network capable of transmitting at least 200 kbps of user-"designed" or user-chosen data "in at least one direction." The definitions of "broadband network" and "broadband network provider" include networks provided free-of-charge by private operators; they could probably even be construed to include internal LANs if one were so inclined. I really don't want to be forced to provide Internet access to everyone connecting to my wireless access point, particularly at speeds equivalent to local network access to services on my PC -- but, as I read it, that's what this proposal would require.
As far as section 4(a)(7) goes (the heart of Net Neutrality; prohibits discrimination between data streams of the same type), it could be easily bypassed by using a proprietary protocol and defining that as the "type" of data prioritized: prioritize all YouTube Video streams (playable with a special plugin), not all HTTP; prioritize all Skype streams, not all VoIP. It wouldn't matter what the actual origin of the data is, just that the stream type can be linked to a paying content provider. Who cares which IP YouTube is streaming videos from as long as only YouTube can create YouTube Video streams?
And having no electron moving wouldn't violate any physical laws that I'm aware of (even though the quote in question was someone elses, I was responding, but forgot the quotes). It would just mean a very low temperature.
Absolute certainty of the momentum of a particle (including knowledge that the particle was completely stationary, i.e. has exactly zero momentum) would violate the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, which states that the product of the standard deviation in the momentum of a partical and the uncertainty in its position must be no less than a fundamental (non-zero) physical constant. Either value can approach zero (in which case the opposite term must approach infinity), but neither term can be exactly zero.
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Where do people get this stuff? Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression. The primary cause of the intensity and length of the Great Depression was the goverment's idiotic monetary policies following the inflationary boom from 1921-1929 and the inevitable corrective depression starting late in 1929. The Austrian economists of the time (including Ludwig von Mises) accurately forecasted the depression during the inflationary period, and when the boom ended the government did exactly the opposite of what the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) recommended. All the boom-depression cycles up to that point had been sharp but quickly over, a result of predominately laisse-fair government policies. In 1929 the government took a different, disasterous approach: instead of leaving things well enough alone they tried to stave off the depression (the cure for the economy, though they failed to realize it) by pumping even more money into the economy (inflation), raising taxes to institute make-work projects and subsidies (with similar effects), and instituting mandatory price controls on commodities and labor. As a result, unlike the previous depressions, the Great Depression lingered on until the beginning of the next World War.
It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work.
All this ignores the fact that the inflationary period from 1921-1929 was itself due in large part to the policies of the Federal Reserve since its creation in 1913, in particular the absurdly low 3% reserve ratio on time-deposit accounts.
This is just the summary; for the full analysis of the events leading up to and contributing to the Great Depression see America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard.
Fine, the OP was wrong to say that all carrying and delivering of letters for money was illegal, since it isn't. That doesn't mean the USPS isn't granted a protected position, though. As the OP said in a more recent post any private carrier must pay the USPS for the delivery in addition to normal delivery costs (section 601(a)(2), cited from the linked Wikipedia article). I think that matches the OP's statement "you have to pay the post office what they would have gotten anyway by buying and canceling stamps in addition to the private postage." It is, in other words, legally impossible to undercut the USPS on price. I'd say that gives them an effective legal monopoly on letter delivery. Also, 601(a)(1) prevents private couriers from carrying any mail that isn't in an envelope, which would rule out most bulk mailings entirely.
I shouldn't respond this late. My apologies if my response seems a bit harsh; it wasn't meant that way.
I can agree with this. Note that I don't think republics are perfect, or any more justified than any other form of government -- just that they represent a more advanced form of society than democracy.
Again, I don't believe in "natural rights" as conceived by the authors of the Constitution, an independent entity with its own authority, something obvious to everyone by which moral and immoral behavior can be objectively judged. In a sense rights are a subjective framework, something by which we choose to judge our own behavior. The tendency for society is toward minimization of conflict and thus harmonization of the moral frameworks of each individual within the community; if it were otherwise (increasing conflict, disharmonious moral frameworks) society could never have formed in the first place.
As it turns out most individuals are decidedly libertarian when it comes to their day-to-day actions. Most people tend to respect other individuals and their property, and decline to participate directly in acts of aggression except in the most dire need; I doubt many would seriously contemplate personally robbing someone, even with the intention of giving the proceeds to charity, and most of the people I've met hold enough respect for individual autonomy to resist the impulse to tell others how to live their lives. This is primary danger of a democratic government: through its seeming legitimacy it abstracts the process of aggression, removing the visible link between the service provided the members of the ruling majority (on a given issue) and the corresponding aggression against the minorities. People who otherwise believe strongly in personal freedom end up heading to the ballot box to cast a vote for more programs, more taxation, more regulation. They should add another list to those ballots: the names of all the people you'll have to steal from to fund your pet programs. Of course the list would be so long they'd never manage to make it fit; perhaps they could customize it for each region . . .
No argument there.
A republic is defined by its fundamental principles. If those principles are subject to popular consensus -- if the republic is justified solely on the basis of its democratic appeal -- then it isn't much of a republic. The only principle it then could hold would be that of majority rule, which is inherent in any form of government, no matter how despotic. The potential for democratic rule exists under any government, but cannot grant legitimacy. That has to be earned, through persistent adherence to just principles. A society is no more free under a democratic form of government than it would be under a state of anarchy; it may be far less so as the
How did you manage to equate carrying "normal mail" and contracting a "special messenger" to carry "private mail"? The section you cited is clearly intended to grant the USPS an incomplete, but effective monopoly on the delivery of non-parcel mail:
Sure, you can hire a private courier to carry a single letter. As the courier, though, I'd have to carry the letter for free and/or avoid all repeat business, and never carry more than 25 letters for the same customer. The only time someone would use such a courier -- guaranteed to be expensive due to the limitations -- would be if the document was itself valuable and/or confidential. The government doesn't care about special deliveries; I doubt they care much whether you use the USPS to carry major contracts or confidential information, as that occurs relatively infrequently. These regulations exist purely to keep UPS/FedEx/etc. from competing with the USPS in the far more lucrative commercial mail business.
And this would be why the Greeks classified democracy among the three worst forms of government. Sure, any sufficient majority of people bent on doing something will be able to overpower the minority; this is as true in a dictatorship as it is in a democracy. No government can persist in the face of the active opposition of a majority of its citizens. Democratic governments are naturally stable and resistant to revolution, their one benefit, and a dubious one at that: revolution every now and then tends to keep the protection racket known as government from becoming excessively onerous; democracies tend to last longer and become far more invasive before they're finally overthrown.
Democracy is the state of nature, rule by strength. A pack of wolves is democratic. To the extent that humans justify their actions as "democratic" they are acting as animals, not human beings. A democratic form of government cannot make the majority's actions just. It cannot make their actions any less theft or murder than they would be if committed by a lone individual; acting as a majority just makes sure they can't be punished for their crimes. Democracy is a cancer to human society; it undermines the mutual respect for individual rights, a distinctly human quality that allows society to exist in the first place.
When it comes down to it the most primitive societies in the world are democratic. The U.S. began as a republic, an association of free states based on absolute natural rights, with only the slightest hint of majority rule, intended by the founders to remain strictly bound by constitutional limitations (an impossible goal despite their best intentions). Reducing that Republic to the level of a primitive democracy would be a crime against humanity, the elimination of a millenia or more of hard-won social progress.
I can't believe this blatant mischaracterization got modded up to (+5, Insightful). No spending by the government is ever related in any way to the free market. The term "free market" expressedly refers to a market unhampered by government interference, including taxation. If there is government spending then there must be taxation; if there is taxation there can be no free market. What you are referring to is not the free market, but rather merchantilism or corporatism.
The problem with socialism isn't related at all to who benefits. The problem is that money (or more generally wealth) must be taken from others before it can be redistributed; socialism necessarily depends on either taxation or invasive regulation. Those who oppose socialism nearly always oppose it on one of these two grounds. Those who oppose it on these grounds would oppose merchantilism and corporatism for exactly the same reasons.
If you want to call MS a monopoly on the basis of their market share, go ahead. I wouldn't call them an unfair monopoly though, or impose any extra restrictions on how they do business, unless perhaps if it were for the legal priviledges that copyrights and patents give them. I don't believe their success is at all illegitimate, though I do at time wish that their customers had stopped to consider how dependant they were on MS's products and pushed for additional assurances of quality and compatibility. On the other hand, I do believe that without copyright it would be far easier to create compatible interfaces for Windows-based software; for some parts one could use their binaries and drivers directly, while for other parts one could employ reverse compilation on the original libraries, only replacing the minimum necessary for compatibility. Any hidden API interfaces would be exposed as well. The current implementations are all based on the limited third-party documentation available to the public and reverse-engineering, both of which take time and neither of which gives as much certain information as direct analysis of the binaries would.
I assume you were referring to one of the following two passages?
If it was the first quote, I don't really see the difference; you could just as easily make your own "competing work" a trade secret, so in one system they would both be trade secrets and in the other they would both be monopolies.
If it was the second quote, then I would point out that while aristocratic titles and legal monopolies were not granted free to all they could usually be acquired by someone with sufficient means; they weren't fixed in stone, merely drawn from a more limited pool. Land and trade routes are limited in supply, while monopolies on ideas and their implementations are less valuable and thus easier to come by. Sure, I technically have a copyright in this post, but no one would buy it from me; it's essentially worthless. If it were not granted automatically I wouldn't bother applying, and certainly wouldn't pay for it. Even a copyright in an artistic masterpiece will typically bring less income and influence than control over a trade route or a decent aristocratic title. Being easily acquired, and thus more widespread, doesn't make them any less merchantilistic in nature, or any more economical.
That may have been the intention, but it was not the result. Furthermore, any attempt to "bring artistic works and such in line with" ordinary property rights misses the point of having property rights in the first place: reducing the occurrance of irresolvable conflicts. Assigning rights to both ordinary property and ideas (i.e. archetypes, patterns, ideal objects, etc.) creates conflict: at the point in time when one person's property begins to resemble an idea "owned" by someone else both ownership rules can apply, assigning control over the object to two different people. The original property owner retains the title, since it was never given up voluntarily; on the other hand, the "IP" owner also has control over the object due to ownership of the ideal object it resembles. "IP" requires that the latter claim take precedence, in contrast to ordinary property rights which dictate that the earliest claim be recognized as absolute. One cannot have rights to ideal objects and real property in the same system without conflict.
Of course, the U.S. copyright system, unlike the patent system, doesn't actually claim to grant rights in ideas; it just attempts to restrict the creation of copies. However, creation of copies isn't actually a single, indivisible action. It is composed of observation of an object (the formation of an idea), possibly the communication of that idea to someone else by means of an intermediate representation (language), and then the re-implementation of the resulting idea as a separate object, which may or may not resemble the original depending on accuracy of the observation and the fidelity of the intermediate representation. Which part actually violates the copyright: the observation, the communication, or the re-implementation? None of these actions infringe on any rights unless ownership is granted in the ideas themselves, as with patents, which as I already stated causes conflict with ordinary property ownership.
A "right" isn't an abstract concept dependent on external intervention, it's a justification for self defense. If I have a right to a particular piece of property, for example, that means that I would be justified in acting coercively to the extent necessary to defend that right (this is not aggression, the initiation of coercion, because it is self-defense against external coercion). If people have a right to privacy (which is quite debatable) then they would be justified in taking coercive actions to defend their privacy, or in enlisting the help of some other person or agency to do so. If they do not have that right then such coercive actions would constitute aggression and the roles would be reversed.
Obviously your self-defense will be more effective if others also believe it to be justified and are willing to lend their aid in your support, which tends to encourage harmonization of the concepts of rights and aggression between individuals, besides lending weight to the golden rule: help others protect themselves, as you may one day be the one in need of assistance.
Wealth isn't (always) about money; it's a pseudo-measurement of one's ability to achieve one's own goals ("pseudo" because one can't really measure wealth objectively). Intellectual monopolies (actually, all government-created monopolies) are wealth redistribution in that they inhibit some people's goals (violating their rights in their own property in the process) in order to allow other people to achieve their goals (by granting them control over the use of others' property).
There is always contention between contrasting goals held by separate individuals; property rights are the boundary line, the determinant of which goals can be ethically achieved and which cannot. They specify the actions one cannot take in furtherance of one's goals; these actions are collectively known as aggression. Aggression can be equivilently defined as anything that upsets the balance between competing goals; that would include the enforcement of government monopolies (e.g. "IP"). Wealth redistribution -- involuntary reassignment (violation) of property rights -- is thus ultimately just another word for aggression, and "IP" does qualify as wealth redistribution by this definition.
Which, of course, is why private "consumer report" agencies exist. There is no reason why there could not be private bar associations, or medical licensing organizations, run on the same model as the private ASE certification for auto mechanics or the private A+ certification for computer technicians. Such an agency would have complete freedom to grant or withhold membership, subject only to the necessity of maintaining the value of their brand, and consumers can easily restrict their purchases to licensed providers -- or choose an unlicensed provider at their own risk.
You claim these rules exist to protect me. You claim you know better than I do what would be in my best interest. I don't want to be protected from my own choices, even if my choices are bad ones. I think I deserve the freedom to stand or fall according to my own choices without unsolicited help or hinderance from you. Let me live my own life!
Who sets the terms of this "social contract" (which, BTW, wouldn't even meet the qualifications for a normal contract, much less an implicit one)? This particular "contract" you talk about isn't necessary for social relationships. Certainly society does depend on recognition of and adherence to certain guiding principles, such as self-ownership (no slavery or other aggression) and private property (necessary for survival and for saving for the future). Society does not, however, depend on the existance of a government. At most government is required to enforce these principles (and I would say it is not even needed for that, and can only exist in contradiction to those same principles; e.g. taxation, a defining part of government, violates private property rights at the direction of other "member(s) of society").
The "necessity" of government is itself based on a contradiction. Government supposedly exists to protect against lawless individuals, as there is no need to protect you from the law-abiding. However, if there were many such lawless individuals then the government (made up of that same proportion of lawless individuals) would not be willing to protect you anyway. If man is good, no government is necessary; if man is evil government is insufficient.
You have attempted to create a false dicotomy between acceptance of government and complete isolationist autarky. There are plenty of reasonable alternatives. Consider: at what population (community size, i.e. number of direct relationships per person) does a government become "necessary"? Two? Three? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? A population of 12 or less would be unlikely to feel a need for a government, but could still form a society with all the interpersonal relationships that exist in a larger group. They would, of course, have to defend themselves against the occasional aggressor (internal or external) but self-defense (and, by extension, collective or private defense agencies) can easily deal with that. The situation would be similar with community of a hundred people, or a thousand, which is approaching the upper limit for any one person's active relationships (ignoring mere aquaintances). Assisted self-defense is a perfectly good way to defend against such aggression without turning to government (which, in practice, does very little actual defense to begin with; it concentrates more on punishing aggressors after the fact).
The "social contract", if it exists, should cover the smallest possible set of universal rules, which for human society essentially amounts to respect for self-ownership and private property; the smaller the "contract" becomes (without compromising these essential elements) the fewer conflicts will result which cannot be resolved without violence (the only way of resolving conflicts between people with incompatible social "contracts").
On the whole I agree with you, but you do realize that this part is a contradiction, right? Taxes violate both free market economics and peoples' private property rights. (It is, however, worth considering that outright theft through taxes may be better than the insidious restrictions on which copyright enforcement depends, or the hidden costs that it creates.)
One proposal that would be consistent with property rights (and thus free market principles) would be to sell artistic works in advance, as preorders. For something relatively expensive (a movie, for example) the studio could create an inexpensive trailor (or other marketing material) and use it to collect preorders from interested customers; the actual production would commence once enough people demonstrated interest (and promised payment). Since the preorder is a binding contract the studio would be guaranteed the revenue necessary to cover their costs, provided they meet the terms of the contract (which would probably include independent review of the final product, to hold the studio accountable).
Another option is collective bargaining, conducted through a variety of subscription-supported consumer organizations; the consumers would subscribe to organizations reflecting their tastes in art, and the organizations would then use their subscriptions to fund the production of artistic works suitable for their members. This could be used independently for small projects (music, paintings, photographs, books, etc.) or combined with the above proposal for larger items spanning the interests of multiple organizations.
Best of all, either of the above proposals could be implemented right now, although it would help if they weren't competing with a system based on government-granted monopolies. I'm sure there are also other systems that could work, but we probably won't discover them so long as copyright remains in force.
I'd rather that software remain a trade secret rather than be publicised in a way that places involuntary restrictions on its use. (What's the difference, really, between not knowing about the software and not being able to use it?) In practice, of course, most software is already developed in-house, and most in-house software (being useless in any other line of work) is already treated as a trade secret, copyright or no.
Also, you could consider cooperating with your fellow widget-sellers for mutual benefit. Sure, that eliminates the (time-limited) monopoly profit of being the only one with the software, but it would still help you significantly--along with everyone else in that industry--by reducing the cost of production.
No, they don't have that right. What they have (in the U.S. at least) is an exclusive priviledge, granted or withheld at the whim of Congress (supposedly representing the will of the people) on the basis of their supposed authority under the Constitution. Unlike theft, which violates an individual right both older and more fundamental than the government, and would be wrong even if the government were not present to punish it, copyright infringement is a challenge to the government's authority to grant and enforce that priviledge.
It is rather odd that despite their rejection of aristocratic titles and Merchantilist legal monopolies the founders chose to grant Congress the authority to grant monopolies on artistic works and inventions. Such monopolies didn't help in business or trade (excluding the individual groups granted the monopolies, of course); what made them think the practice would work any better in the arts and sciences?
Ah, thanks for that. It appears to be a simple licensing requirement, which would put it squarely in the category of state-supported monopoly priviledge and competition-avoidance. (An easy way to see this: you're allowed to represent yourself, but prohibited from doing exactly the same thing for others at their request.)
This isn't legal advice either, of course.
Assuming that the bar association is a private organization, I agree that they have the perogative to certify (or not certify) whoever they wish. However, one thing I've never seen properly explained: what keeps someone who isn't certified by the bar association from practicing law? After all, if it's legal for me to represent myself in court (or prepare my own legal documents, etc.) why can't I choose whoever I wish to assist me in this task, certified or no? If this is in fact not prohibited then what benefits or priviledges (besides credibility/reputation) would membership in a bar association provide, and why are they not extended to the general populace?
Or is it perhaps just a way of avoiding competition? It certainly does help to raise the barrier to entry into the legal profession, limiting the supply of legal services and driving up the price.
How so? It is a real diamond ring, after all, even if the diamond was created in a lab. As long as he doesn't try to pass it off as a DeBeers diamond he should be fine.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
As I understand it, the glue layer is GPL -- or else why would they bother with the glue layer at all, rather than just linking their binary driver directly to the kernel, if both impose the same restrictions? However, even assuming that the glue layer isn't GPL, there's nothing illegal about linking the glue layer to a GPL kernel. The GPL is a distribution license, not an EULA, and linking is not a form of distribution. If anyone were at fault it would be nVidia for distributing a derived product of GPL'd software (APIs) under a license incompatible with the GPL, not the end user who links the resulting module into the kernel. (Further distributing the glue layer or the compiled module would also be an infringement of the GPL, of course, if the glue layer isn't GPL-compatible.)
Disclaimer: IANAL and this is not legal advise.
nVidia owns the glue layer and thus can freely link against it, and derive from it, without violating the copyright holder's (i.e. their own) "rights." The glue layer must be released with a GPL license, as it links to and derives from the Linux kernel, and any software that links against the glue layer under the terms of the GPL must itself be GPL'd. However, nVidia can easily grant the right to link to (or derive from) the glue layer, or do so itself, above and beyond the rights granted to third parties by the GPL. The glue code must be GPL, but not necessarily only GPL.
This is similar to the situation with dual- or tri-licensed code; license terms are additive, and the GPL is satisfied so long as the derived product is licensed under terms compatible with the GPL -- including GPL with additional rights. (Of course you have to own the copyright on the derived code to grant additional rights; you can't distribute code written by others with more rights than were originally granted. That isn't an issue in this case, since all the glue code is original and "owned" by nVidia.)
Disclaimer: IANAL and this is not legal advise.
There isn't one; the exception (as I recall) is an addition or clarification in the license to the kernel itself (which, though GPL-compatible, isn't purely GPL, since it grants additional rights not granted by the GPL itself). In theory the same derivative-works concept applies to e.g. plugins developed using the APIs of a GPL'd application.
The argument goes that a driver developed specifically for Linux is a derived work of the Linux kernel, and thus is subject to the conditions of the GPL. IANAL, but it seems to be a fairly sound argument. There is an explicit waiver for the standard user-space interfaces (so applications are not automatically considered derivative works), but no such waiver exists for the Linux-specific kernel interfaces. nVidia gets around this by (a) using an open-source wrapper, so their real driver doesn't use any of the Linux kernel interfaces directly, and (b) using the same driver code on Linux and Windows (so the driver isn't entirely dependent on Linux).
This has nothing to do with whether there is aggregation or dynamic linking, and everything to with whether the module is dependent on the GPL'd kernel API.
IANAL either, but as I understand it truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel. If that is the case, then any statement which is worded so as to express an opinion cannot be considered libel, as the statement (the existance of the opinion itself) must be true; the only one who could claim otherwise, in any event, would be the defendant. AFAIK there are no defamations laws regarding opinions, whether true or false, and the statement itself describes the opinion, not the plaintiff.
On the other hand, I've always believed that the various defamation laws are not just unconstitutional ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech"), but also harmful in and of themselves. In a society where you can say whatever you wish without (legal) repurcussions, people tend to take random, unsubstanciated remarks with a grain of salt, and perhaps informally censure those who make too many such remarks, which is a logical social solution for a social problem. On the other hand, when defamation is illegal people tend to assume that any false statement will be countered with a lawsuit -- and thus any uncountered statement must be true. This downware trust spiral hurts those who can't affort to sue and floods the courts with pointless suits over ridiculous, unfounded assertions (as in this case).
No one's arguing that the government can't get anything done at all -- most libertarians would be quite glad if that were the case, since it would mean they couldn't collect taxes, enforce regulations, etc. No, the reason one can't call what governments do productive is that they can only support themselves (or at least choose to support themselves) by force, through taxation. When a government spends money the products and/or services the government chooses to fund are ends in and of themselves (i.e. consumption), not a part of a productive process ending in voluntary purchase by consumers.
To borrow from an analogy used by the parent's sibling: a position answering the phone (to avoid work-stoppage on an assembly line) can certainly be productive, but answering the phone just because you want to is consumption, particularly it prevents the managers from employing someone else more cheaply (taxation), or with fewer unwanted side-effects (regulation), or when the phone didn't need answering in the first place (politics & beaurocracy).
I've read the proposal, and it would prevent what I just described. Can you propose any way of writing the legislation that wouldn't have that effect?
The system I described and the one you describe differ only in perspective, not in substance. In my system some content providers pay one or more ISPs to get faster access to the ISPs' customers than the non-paying providers; in your system non-paying providers get slower access than paying providers: these are just different ways of saying the same thing. Either way there is some fixed amount of total upstream bandwidth available (the upper limit of which is determined by how much the ISP gets paid, by customers and content providers alike), of which paying providers get priority over XX% and non-paying providers split the balance. It doesn't really matter if the ISP has a separate physical link to YouTube or simply reserves a portion of its (possibly expanded) upstream bandwidth to give YouTube priority (or exclusive) access. In any event, the current proposal doesn't make any distinction between the two, and I don't see how it could.
The proposal has other issues as well, such as (apparently) requiring every "broadband network provider" to provide equal access to every "broadband network", not just hosts on the Internet. Section 4(a)(1): "Each broadband network provider has the duty to enable users to utilize their broadband service to access all lawful content, applications, and services available over broadband networks, including the Internet". A "broadband network" is defined as any network capable of transmitting at least 200 kbps of user-"designed" or user-chosen data "in at least one direction." The definitions of "broadband network" and "broadband network provider" include networks provided free-of-charge by private operators; they could probably even be construed to include internal LANs if one were so inclined. I really don't want to be forced to provide Internet access to everyone connecting to my wireless access point, particularly at speeds equivalent to local network access to services on my PC -- but, as I read it, that's what this proposal would require.
As far as section 4(a)(7) goes (the heart of Net Neutrality; prohibits discrimination between data streams of the same type), it could be easily bypassed by using a proprietary protocol and defining that as the "type" of data prioritized: prioritize all YouTube Video streams (playable with a special plugin), not all HTTP; prioritize all Skype streams, not all VoIP. It wouldn't matter what the actual origin of the data is, just that the stream type can be linked to a paying content provider. Who cares which IP YouTube is streaming videos from as long as only YouTube can create YouTube Video streams?
Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is not legal advice.
Absolute certainty of the momentum of a particle (including knowledge that the particle was completely stationary, i.e. has exactly zero momentum) would violate the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, which states that the product of the standard deviation in the momentum of a partical and the uncertainty in its position must be no less than a fundamental (non-zero) physical constant. Either value can approach zero (in which case the opposite term must approach infinity), but neither term can be exactly zero.