"Belief that there is no supernatural" (i.e. nothing beyond nature and the material universe) is analogous to "belief in the supernatural".
And then you have atheism, which is neither belief in the supernatural nor belief in the absence of the supernatural, but rather the absence of belief in the supernatural. In other words, atheists do no accept the premise that the supernatural exists (for lack of evidence), but also make no claims that the supernatural does not exist for the same reason.
Note that this does not automatically imply giving equal weight to both possibilities. Paraphrasing Occam's Razor, the explanation most likely to prove useful (whether true or not in an absolute sense) is the simplest one that fits the evidence. In this case that would be the model of the universe that does not include the supernatural. The practical atheist will thus take the non-supernatural explanation as a guide, without making any positive claims that this explanation must be true.
The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
In all real fascist governments so far, people quite willingly brought them to power. They were the choice of their generation.
And here we have the collectivist mindset. Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone; and even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice. Those who did have only themselves to blame, of course, but the remainder who opposed it and were overruled were not given a choice.
Bad comparison. When you leave a company, they expect you to abandon your desk and give back the company car. The comparison would have to be leaving a country - which you can do and then you don't have to pay taxes there anymore.
First, that doesn't always work. The US government, for example, continues to claim incomes taxes for some time after you've renounced your citizenship, and may not recognize the renunciation at all if it deems that it was done for tax reasons.
Second, and more importantly, the country does not belong to the government. Your analogy presumes that the government owns all the land within its borders in the same way that the employer owns the desk and company car, but that simply isn't so. Becoming a property owner requires far more than just drawing an arbitrary line on a map, and certainly cannot occur by conquest (i.e. theft), which is the traditional way for governments to establish their jurisdiction. There are two ways to become the owner of a piece of land: if it has no existing owner then you can homestead it by cultivating it and putting it to productive use, or else you can purchase it from the prior owner via a mutually voluntary contract. The government cannot claim ownership of the land either by homesteading or contract, and consequently is not in a position to demand that anyone leave.
Still, nothing is invisible to your service provider.
Tor traffic isn't "invisible" to your ISP, but it is opaque. The ISP can see that you're running a Tor node, and estimate roughly how much data is being transferred, but not who you're communicating with or what you're saying. The content being transferred over Tor is effectively invisible.
Only insofar as you're not allowed to charge less than the USPS, and you're not allowed to use people's mailboxes. The private express statutes permit you to charge the same or more, though.
It's not just that you have to charge at least as much as the USPS, though that is part of it; you also have to pay the USPS their customary postage for the mail that you delivered. In other words, assuming similar operating costs, you'll have to charge about twice as much as USPS before you can hope to make a profit.
Even if it was just a matter of not being allowed to charge less, though, that would still be an effective ban on direct competition. What else would you compete on for first-class mail delivery, besides price? Delivery speed only matters in rare cases, and there isn't much scope for special add-on services.
Five of us riding our bicycles on the street is a perfectly legitimate thing, and we are riding correctly by each occupying the full width of our lane. You car drivers can wait.
You would be riding correctly only so long as you are not obstructing traffic. In most jurisdictions slower vehicles (including cyclists) are required to pull off to the shoulder, as needed and where practical, to allow faster traffic to pass. For a bicycle, that means pretty much any time there is a car waiting behind you.
Same owner, same donut, nearly double (82.5%)the cost in 20 years, or around 4.2 per annum.
An 82.5% increase over 20 years is 3.05% of price inflation annually, not 4.2%. Keep in mind that inflation is exponential rather than linear. (1.0305^20 ~= 1.825)
The corporation analogy is a bit of a stretch. Corporations are treated as legal persons not only because they are owned by people but because, at the direction of their owners, they hold property, enter into contracts, and interact with others as distinct entities under their own names. Money doesn't do any of that, so it doesn't make sense to treat it as a legal person.
However, the money was seized from someone, and that person ought to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. When funds are seized without proof that a crime was committed it is the owner of the money, not the money itself, whose rights are infringed. If the police seize cash and then fail to prove that it was derived from a crime they should not only return the funds promptly but also pay compensation to the owner, including both interest and any reasonable legal expenses.
Everywhere you look, you see tragedy of the commons. But the libertarians continue to blame regulation.
And why shouldn't they? Commons don't remain commons in the absence of regulation. They become private property instead. Regulation isn't the solution to tragedy of the commons—it's the cause.
Metered service is a great idea so long as you're only paying for what you send (or request). It wouldn't be fair to charge you more based on what you receive so long as you don't have any control over what others choose to send your way.
Then why bother with the players' input at all? Just have the GM choose the result. While the GM may be the ultimate authority, the players clearly do care about the GM's ability to influence the result, or they would just let the GM roll the dice for them.
Anyway, the principle is applicable to situations other than role-playing games where it is important that neither side has the ability to cheat. For example, online blockchain-based lottery systems like SatoshiDice are based on a similar principle, with one random number coming from the hash of a future block on the blockchain (and thus potentially influenced by miners) and the other locked in ahead of time by the operator.
I'm not sure if any societies are still against markup but modern society with distribution channels and super markets would have a hard time functioning without markup.
You couldn't have any society of significant size with a functioning economy under those restrictions, provided they were actually implemented and enforced. Even those modern societies with a formal/traditional objection to "usury" accomplish the same result by other means. It certainly doesn't mean you get to borrow money for free, and in practice there are still means of obtaining money temporarily for which you pay some form of premium—it just isn't called "interest".
You can believe and apply the principles of copyright and apply the doctrine of first sale
Not as it applies to ebooks you cannot.Copyright restricts making copies and first sale doctrine applies to original items, not copies. You cannot distribute an ebook without making copies - it is technologically impossible to do otherwise unless you distribute the device containing the ebook along with the ebook.
The topic was the principles of copyright, not the implementation. Even if dated copyright laws make irrelevant distinctions between transferring a copy embedded into a physical substrate, e.g. a printed page, and making a perfect copy on a new substrate while simultaneously destroying the original, the principle of copyright does not. As far as the principle is concerned, all that matters is how many people have access to the work before and after. If the number is the same, no new copies were created.
It is not logically inconsistent to believe that the copyright holder should be able to control the number of copies in existence, public performance, etc., but not who holds each copy, or its specific physical form.
the cost to the creator is to put the work in to the public domain in a timely manner
That is not a cost to the creator, as without copyright the work would be in the public domain from the beginning. This is instead a limitation on the cost imposed on the public (a cost which has been increasing steadily with little public gain to show for it).
The cost to the creator is merely that they have to create something people want copies of before they can benefit from copyright. Aside from that copyright law is purely in favor of the content creator.
If you want the ability to re-sell an electronic copy of a work, then you have to accept DRM (and consequences for cracking it.)
No, you don't. That's what the copyright holders want, but there is absolutely no reason to give it to them. The terms for legally reselling an electronic copy would be exactly the same as the terms for reselling a physical one: the seller must transfer all copies to the new owner. There is no need to enforce this requirement with DRM.
A physical book (say, a 500-page novel), has built-in "copy protection" in that it is tedious, at best, to make a copy to keep for yourself prior to sale.
It's really not that difficult to copy a physical book, much less already-digital media like CDs or DVDs, which you can legally resell. Specialized (but not necessarily expensive or hard to acquire) scanning equipment helps, of course, and it would be much less "tedious" if we had settled on a format like scrolls or microfilm for books rather than bound stacks of pages. The difficulties related to scanning books are merely a historical accident, and one which e-books are finally correcting.
That would depend on the type of company, wouldn't it? A sole proprietorship, for example, makes no distinction between the company's property and the proprietor's property. When the company is sold, it's actually the company's assets that are being sold.
Though perhaps this offers a way out of this mess... create a corporation to be the official owner of all your digital goods. Then you can just sell the corporation, which would retain the licenses for the benefit of its new owner. (Q: When a corporation is "split", who ends up with the license? It would be most efficient to be able to create a single corporation and divide up the licenses later for sale, rather than creating separate corporations up front.)
I'm sure that even services like Netflix and Steam use cloud servers to distribute the actual content.
That's a completely different situation. Those "cloud servers" are owned/rented by Netflix or Steam and operate under their direction and control. If all they did was link to content hosted by someone else, with no control over what is offered, then that other party should be responsible for any copyright infringement. (Note that an entry on TPB is not required for a torrent to function; all the participants need is the magnet link, which can be obtained via any number of other channels.)
TPB does not own, operate, or control any of the servers offering copyright-infringing content; all that is done by third parties. If those third parties did not provide the content there would be nothing to download.
Does saying that really change anything?
It should, since it determines the answer to the core question of whether TPB is actually committing copyright infringement. If what TPB does is deemed illegal, exactly the same reasoning would imply that anyone who merely describes a work that they don't have the rights to distribute is infringing on the copyright. Which is, of course, absurd.
... I had them roll a die and tell me the result. Then I flipped a coin. Heads, their die roll stood. Tails I used 7 minus their die roll (we were playing Traveller, which only used d6), which inverted the result of their roll. They got the satisfaction of controlling their own fate by rolling their own dice, and I was satisfied there was no cheating going on.
While this solved the immediate problem of being able to trust the players, it fails to provide any guarantee to the players that you aren't cheating when it comes to the coin-flip. You know their dice roll before you report the coin result, so you could easily manipulate the outcome (to an extent; you can only choose between N and 7-N).
I'm not quite sure how to reduce this to something you could easily do by hand, but there is a way around this issue when computers are involved. Instead of a dice roll, generate a large random number. The other party does the same. The two of you exchange hashes of your random values—at this point neither of you know what the other chose, and you can't change your own value later because the hash would be different. Now you can exchange the actual random values (validating the hashes) and XOR them together. The final dice roll is the XOR result modulo the number of sides.
Don't worry, Windows 10 has an option to use a strong secure 4 digit PIN number instead of a weak 8 alpha-numeric characters consisting of upper, lower case letters, numbers and at least one special character!
It's not really as bad as you're making it sound. The account still has a password, and the PIN can only be used to log on as a local user. That makes it a form of two-factor authentication—you have to have physical (or at least console) access to the computer in addition to the PIN. If you guess wrong enough times the PIN is disabled and you have to provide the full password.
You wouldn't want to rely on it for disk encryption, of course, but if you can effectively limit the number of failing login attempts, even a four-digit (random!) PIN can provide more than enough security for authentication. If Microsoft made a mistake here, it was in not forcing the PIN to be random. User-provided PINs (and passwords) tend to be fairly predictable.
TPB doesn't distribute anything. It's just an index. You can play games with terms like "facilitating", but the fact is that TPB does not make or hold copies (authorized or otherwise) of any of the files listed on the site. TPB doesn't even say who is providing the content—that role falls to the peer-to-peer DHT system. The only things you can get from TPB itself are a list of files, some commentary and statistics, and a hash which uniquely identifies the content. None of this information infringes on anyone's copyrights.
Remember, in nature, life has existed for billions of years without minimum wage, welfare, or capital.
I'll grant you the first two, but capital has existed for as long as life itself. The process of evolution can be viewed in terms of accumulating and maintaining means of production, mechanisms for taking what nature provides and turning it into something more useful to the organism. The concept is just as applicable to single-celled organisms as it is to entire societies.
Even if you're not willing to generalize quite that far, hand-tools are unambiguously a form of capital, ergo capital has existed at least since early proto-humans started making and using tools.
It [the National Debt] would be counted as equity not liability on the national accounts if it wasn't for History.
We're paying interest on it. That makes it a liability. One doesn't pay interest on equity.
The National Debt is actually the (base) money in circulation. If the National Debt was ever to be paid off nobody would have any money to spend.
How do you explain the money people used before we had trillions in national debt? The debt might make up a portion of the base money now, but it isn't the entire sum. If it were payed off there would still be plenty of money left to transact with. Worst case, people come up with their own medium for indirect exchange, one based on assets rather than debts, as people have done for thousands of years—it's not as if money can only come from the government.
For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection.
No one is asking for a dedicated connection, so you can drop the hyperbole. What is wanted is (a) a guaranteed and realistic minimum (dedicated) bandwidth for each user—as a percentage of the user's peak burst rate—and (b) a fair division of the remaining bandwidth between all active users. Oh, and no extra charges for unplanned overages. "The vast majority of users" as you've defined them should generally be able to achieve the advertised burst transfer rates; those who use their connection 24/7 won't be able to burst as fast but should generally get well above the minimum rate outside of peak hours. The prioritization formula should be open to the public.
The *only* effective way to have companies pay corporate income tax is to fix the tax laws. That way, everyone's playing by the same rules and it doesn't hurt a company competitively to repatriate cash. This is a Congress problem, not a corporate problem.... That being said, the current rate of US corporate income tax is kinda ludicrous; it's the highest in the world.
Exactly, and the right way to fix the tax laws would be to eliminate corporate income taxes altogether. Treat dividends and income from sale of shares as ordinary income (after deducting the cost basis, of course), and leave the rest alone. Taxes should not levied against intermediaries—no taxation without representation, etc. The voting citizen should be able to see exactly how much they earn from their investments before taxes, and how much is being taken for public use.
While we're at it, individuals should be able to deduct their own labor costs (e.g. minimum wage) from their income. The time and effort individual employees expend to provide their labor are not substantially different from the expenses businesses are able to deduct. By failing to include a deduction for labor, the current system discriminates against anyone with a day job.
Corporate taxes come out of profits so prices don't rise (because of all of that wonderful free market competition) unless the corporation has a monopoly (which the government should prevent).
On the off chance that you actually believe this... Corporations are not charities. Those profits are the entire reason that they are in business. Reduce the profits and some of them, the marginal producers, will decide it's not profitable to continue, thus reducing the overall supply. If you reduce the supply without changing the demand, there isn't as much to go around, and prices increase. (Or you institute price controls and get shortages and rationing, which is worse.)
The net effect is that taxing corporate profits reduces competition (thus contributing to monopolies) while hurting both the remaining producers and consumers. Exactly how much of the extra cost is born by each party depends on price elasticity, but it's almost never one-sided. And capital investment is very sensitive to small differences in returns, compared to most forms of consumer demand.
And when I pay my gardener with my wages (which already are taxed) he has to pay taxes again.
The income tax is effectively a tax on labor, as that's the one significant expense—in the form of time, consumables, and "human capital investment" i.e. training—which you can't deduct. (If individuals could deduct the true cost of their labor the way businesses deduct their own operating expenses there wouldn't be much left to tax among the lower and middle classes; mainly just savings and entertainment.) As such, it is only natural that when you take the revenues you earned with your labor and use it to pay someone else for their labor, the income from the two instances of labor would be taxed separately.
That does not, however, imply that income taxes should be levied every time money changes hands. While morally speaking there is little to distinguish it from single-taxation, the practice of multiple-taxation serves to obfuscate just how much of one's hard-earned income is being seized for public use. A few percent here, a few percent there... the individual rates may not seem like much but they add up to a sizable fraction of the productive capacity of the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Belief that there is no supernatural" (i.e. nothing beyond nature and the material universe) is analogous to "belief in the supernatural".
And then you have atheism, which is neither belief in the supernatural nor belief in the absence of the supernatural, but rather the absence of belief in the supernatural. In other words, atheists do no accept the premise that the supernatural exists (for lack of evidence), but also make no claims that the supernatural does not exist for the same reason.
Note that this does not automatically imply giving equal weight to both possibilities. Paraphrasing Occam's Razor, the explanation most likely to prove useful (whether true or not in an absolute sense) is the simplest one that fits the evidence. In this case that would be the model of the universe that does not include the supernatural. The practical atheist will thus take the non-supernatural explanation as a guide, without making any positive claims that this explanation must be true.
The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
In all real fascist governments so far, people quite willingly brought them to power. They were the choice of their generation.
And here we have the collectivist mindset. Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone; and even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice. Those who did have only themselves to blame, of course, but the remainder who opposed it and were overruled were not given a choice.
Bad comparison. When you leave a company, they expect you to abandon your desk and give back the company car. The comparison would have to be leaving a country - which you can do and then you don't have to pay taxes there anymore.
First, that doesn't always work. The US government, for example, continues to claim incomes taxes for some time after you've renounced your citizenship, and may not recognize the renunciation at all if it deems that it was done for tax reasons.
Second, and more importantly, the country does not belong to the government. Your analogy presumes that the government owns all the land within its borders in the same way that the employer owns the desk and company car, but that simply isn't so. Becoming a property owner requires far more than just drawing an arbitrary line on a map, and certainly cannot occur by conquest (i.e. theft), which is the traditional way for governments to establish their jurisdiction. There are two ways to become the owner of a piece of land: if it has no existing owner then you can homestead it by cultivating it and putting it to productive use, or else you can purchase it from the prior owner via a mutually voluntary contract. The government cannot claim ownership of the land either by homesteading or contract, and consequently is not in a position to demand that anyone leave.
Still, nothing is invisible to your service provider.
Tor traffic isn't "invisible" to your ISP, but it is opaque. The ISP can see that you're running a Tor node, and estimate roughly how much data is being transferred, but not who you're communicating with or what you're saying. The content being transferred over Tor is effectively invisible.
Only insofar as you're not allowed to charge less than the USPS, and you're not allowed to use people's mailboxes. The private express statutes permit you to charge the same or more, though.
It's not just that you have to charge at least as much as the USPS, though that is part of it; you also have to pay the USPS their customary postage for the mail that you delivered. In other words, assuming similar operating costs, you'll have to charge about twice as much as USPS before you can hope to make a profit.
Even if it was just a matter of not being allowed to charge less, though, that would still be an effective ban on direct competition. What else would you compete on for first-class mail delivery, besides price? Delivery speed only matters in rare cases, and there isn't much scope for special add-on services.
Five of us riding our bicycles on the street is a perfectly legitimate thing, and we are riding correctly by each occupying the full width of our lane. You car drivers can wait.
You would be riding correctly only so long as you are not obstructing traffic. In most jurisdictions slower vehicles (including cyclists) are required to pull off to the shoulder, as needed and where practical, to allow faster traffic to pass. For a bicycle, that means pretty much any time there is a car waiting behind you.
Same owner, same donut, nearly double (82.5%)the cost in 20 years, or around 4.2 per annum.
An 82.5% increase over 20 years is 3.05% of price inflation annually, not 4.2%. Keep in mind that inflation is exponential rather than linear. (1.0305^20 ~= 1.825)
The corporation analogy is a bit of a stretch. Corporations are treated as legal persons not only because they are owned by people but because, at the direction of their owners, they hold property, enter into contracts, and interact with others as distinct entities under their own names. Money doesn't do any of that, so it doesn't make sense to treat it as a legal person.
However, the money was seized from someone, and that person ought to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. When funds are seized without proof that a crime was committed it is the owner of the money, not the money itself, whose rights are infringed. If the police seize cash and then fail to prove that it was derived from a crime they should not only return the funds promptly but also pay compensation to the owner, including both interest and any reasonable legal expenses.
Everywhere you look, you see tragedy of the commons. But the libertarians continue to blame regulation.
And why shouldn't they? Commons don't remain commons in the absence of regulation. They become private property instead. Regulation isn't the solution to tragedy of the commons—it's the cause.
Metered service is a great idea so long as you're only paying for what you send (or request). It wouldn't be fair to charge you more based on what you receive so long as you don't have any control over what others choose to send your way.
GM = God. It doesn't matter if God cheats.
Then why bother with the players' input at all? Just have the GM choose the result. While the GM may be the ultimate authority, the players clearly do care about the GM's ability to influence the result, or they would just let the GM roll the dice for them.
Anyway, the principle is applicable to situations other than role-playing games where it is important that neither side has the ability to cheat. For example, online blockchain-based lottery systems like SatoshiDice are based on a similar principle, with one random number coming from the hash of a future block on the blockchain (and thus potentially influenced by miners) and the other locked in ahead of time by the operator.
I'm not sure if any societies are still against markup but modern society with distribution channels and super markets would have a hard time functioning without markup.
You couldn't have any society of significant size with a functioning economy under those restrictions, provided they were actually implemented and enforced. Even those modern societies with a formal/traditional objection to "usury" accomplish the same result by other means. It certainly doesn't mean you get to borrow money for free, and in practice there are still means of obtaining money temporarily for which you pay some form of premium—it just isn't called "interest".
You can believe and apply the principles of copyright and apply the doctrine of first sale
Not as it applies to ebooks you cannot.Copyright restricts making copies and first sale doctrine applies to original items, not copies. You cannot distribute an ebook without making copies - it is technologically impossible to do otherwise unless you distribute the device containing the ebook along with the ebook.
The topic was the principles of copyright, not the implementation. Even if dated copyright laws make irrelevant distinctions between transferring a copy embedded into a physical substrate, e.g. a printed page, and making a perfect copy on a new substrate while simultaneously destroying the original, the principle of copyright does not. As far as the principle is concerned, all that matters is how many people have access to the work before and after. If the number is the same, no new copies were created.
It is not logically inconsistent to believe that the copyright holder should be able to control the number of copies in existence, public performance, etc., but not who holds each copy, or its specific physical form.
the cost to the creator is to put the work in to the public domain in a timely manner
That is not a cost to the creator, as without copyright the work would be in the public domain from the beginning. This is instead a limitation on the cost imposed on the public (a cost which has been increasing steadily with little public gain to show for it).
The cost to the creator is merely that they have to create something people want copies of before they can benefit from copyright. Aside from that copyright law is purely in favor of the content creator.
If you want the ability to re-sell an electronic copy of a work, then you have to accept DRM (and consequences for cracking it.)
No, you don't. That's what the copyright holders want, but there is absolutely no reason to give it to them. The terms for legally reselling an electronic copy would be exactly the same as the terms for reselling a physical one: the seller must transfer all copies to the new owner. There is no need to enforce this requirement with DRM.
A physical book (say, a 500-page novel), has built-in "copy protection" in that it is tedious, at best, to make a copy to keep for yourself prior to sale.
It's really not that difficult to copy a physical book, much less already-digital media like CDs or DVDs, which you can legally resell. Specialized (but not necessarily expensive or hard to acquire) scanning equipment helps, of course, and it would be much less "tedious" if we had settled on a format like scrolls or microfilm for books rather than bound stacks of pages. The difficulties related to scanning books are merely a historical accident, and one which e-books are finally correcting.
That would depend on the type of company, wouldn't it? A sole proprietorship, for example, makes no distinction between the company's property and the proprietor's property. When the company is sold, it's actually the company's assets that are being sold.
Though perhaps this offers a way out of this mess... create a corporation to be the official owner of all your digital goods. Then you can just sell the corporation, which would retain the licenses for the benefit of its new owner. (Q: When a corporation is "split", who ends up with the license? It would be most efficient to be able to create a single corporation and divide up the licenses later for sale, rather than creating separate corporations up front.)
I'm sure that even services like Netflix and Steam use cloud servers to distribute the actual content.
That's a completely different situation. Those "cloud servers" are owned/rented by Netflix or Steam and operate under their direction and control. If all they did was link to content hosted by someone else, with no control over what is offered, then that other party should be responsible for any copyright infringement. (Note that an entry on TPB is not required for a torrent to function; all the participants need is the magnet link, which can be obtained via any number of other channels.)
TPB does not own, operate, or control any of the servers offering copyright-infringing content; all that is done by third parties. If those third parties did not provide the content there would be nothing to download.
Does saying that really change anything?
It should, since it determines the answer to the core question of whether TPB is actually committing copyright infringement. If what TPB does is deemed illegal, exactly the same reasoning would imply that anyone who merely describes a work that they don't have the rights to distribute is infringing on the copyright. Which is, of course, absurd.
... I had them roll a die and tell me the result. Then I flipped a coin. Heads, their die roll stood. Tails I used 7 minus their die roll (we were playing Traveller, which only used d6), which inverted the result of their roll. They got the satisfaction of controlling their own fate by rolling their own dice, and I was satisfied there was no cheating going on.
While this solved the immediate problem of being able to trust the players, it fails to provide any guarantee to the players that you aren't cheating when it comes to the coin-flip. You know their dice roll before you report the coin result, so you could easily manipulate the outcome (to an extent; you can only choose between N and 7-N).
I'm not quite sure how to reduce this to something you could easily do by hand, but there is a way around this issue when computers are involved. Instead of a dice roll, generate a large random number. The other party does the same. The two of you exchange hashes of your random values—at this point neither of you know what the other chose, and you can't change your own value later because the hash would be different. Now you can exchange the actual random values (validating the hashes) and XOR them together. The final dice roll is the XOR result modulo the number of sides.
Don't worry, Windows 10 has an option to use a strong secure 4 digit PIN number instead of a weak 8 alpha-numeric characters consisting of upper, lower case letters, numbers and at least one special character!
It's not really as bad as you're making it sound. The account still has a password, and the PIN can only be used to log on as a local user. That makes it a form of two-factor authentication—you have to have physical (or at least console) access to the computer in addition to the PIN. If you guess wrong enough times the PIN is disabled and you have to provide the full password.
You wouldn't want to rely on it for disk encryption, of course, but if you can effectively limit the number of failing login attempts, even a four-digit (random!) PIN can provide more than enough security for authentication. If Microsoft made a mistake here, it was in not forcing the PIN to be random. User-provided PINs (and passwords) tend to be fairly predictable.
TPB is a content distributor.
TPB doesn't distribute anything. It's just an index. You can play games with terms like "facilitating", but the fact is that TPB does not make or hold copies (authorized or otherwise) of any of the files listed on the site. TPB doesn't even say who is providing the content—that role falls to the peer-to-peer DHT system. The only things you can get from TPB itself are a list of files, some commentary and statistics, and a hash which uniquely identifies the content. None of this information infringes on anyone's copyrights.
Remember, in nature, life has existed for billions of years without minimum wage, welfare, or capital.
I'll grant you the first two, but capital has existed for as long as life itself. The process of evolution can be viewed in terms of accumulating and maintaining means of production, mechanisms for taking what nature provides and turning it into something more useful to the organism. The concept is just as applicable to single-celled organisms as it is to entire societies.
Even if you're not willing to generalize quite that far, hand-tools are unambiguously a form of capital, ergo capital has existed at least since early proto-humans started making and using tools.
It [the National Debt] would be counted as equity not liability on the national accounts if it wasn't for History.
We're paying interest on it. That makes it a liability. One doesn't pay interest on equity.
The National Debt is actually the (base) money in circulation. If the National Debt was ever to be paid off nobody would have any money to spend.
How do you explain the money people used before we had trillions in national debt? The debt might make up a portion of the base money now, but it isn't the entire sum. If it were payed off there would still be plenty of money left to transact with. Worst case, people come up with their own medium for indirect exchange, one based on assets rather than debts, as people have done for thousands of years—it's not as if money can only come from the government.
For some REAL perspective, bandwidth without caps requires a dedicated connection.
No one is asking for a dedicated connection, so you can drop the hyperbole. What is wanted is (a) a guaranteed and realistic minimum (dedicated) bandwidth for each user—as a percentage of the user's peak burst rate—and (b) a fair division of the remaining bandwidth between all active users. Oh, and no extra charges for unplanned overages. "The vast majority of users" as you've defined them should generally be able to achieve the advertised burst transfer rates; those who use their connection 24/7 won't be able to burst as fast but should generally get well above the minimum rate outside of peak hours. The prioritization formula should be open to the public.
The *only* effective way to have companies pay corporate income tax is to fix the tax laws. That way, everyone's playing by the same rules and it doesn't hurt a company competitively to repatriate cash. This is a Congress problem, not a corporate problem. ... That being said, the current rate of US corporate income tax is kinda ludicrous; it's the highest in the world.
Exactly, and the right way to fix the tax laws would be to eliminate corporate income taxes altogether. Treat dividends and income from sale of shares as ordinary income (after deducting the cost basis, of course), and leave the rest alone. Taxes should not levied against intermediaries—no taxation without representation, etc. The voting citizen should be able to see exactly how much they earn from their investments before taxes, and how much is being taken for public use.
While we're at it, individuals should be able to deduct their own labor costs (e.g. minimum wage) from their income. The time and effort individual employees expend to provide their labor are not substantially different from the expenses businesses are able to deduct. By failing to include a deduction for labor, the current system discriminates against anyone with a day job.
Corporate taxes come out of profits so prices don't rise (because of all of that wonderful free market competition) unless the corporation has a monopoly (which the government should prevent).
On the off chance that you actually believe this... Corporations are not charities. Those profits are the entire reason that they are in business. Reduce the profits and some of them, the marginal producers, will decide it's not profitable to continue, thus reducing the overall supply. If you reduce the supply without changing the demand, there isn't as much to go around, and prices increase. (Or you institute price controls and get shortages and rationing, which is worse.)
The net effect is that taxing corporate profits reduces competition (thus contributing to monopolies) while hurting both the remaining producers and consumers. Exactly how much of the extra cost is born by each party depends on price elasticity, but it's almost never one-sided. And capital investment is very sensitive to small differences in returns, compared to most forms of consumer demand.
And when I pay my gardener with my wages (which already are taxed) he has to pay taxes again.
The income tax is effectively a tax on labor, as that's the one significant expense—in the form of time, consumables, and "human capital investment" i.e. training—which you can't deduct. (If individuals could deduct the true cost of their labor the way businesses deduct their own operating expenses there wouldn't be much left to tax among the lower and middle classes; mainly just savings and entertainment.) As such, it is only natural that when you take the revenues you earned with your labor and use it to pay someone else for their labor, the income from the two instances of labor would be taxed separately.
That does not, however, imply that income taxes should be levied every time money changes hands. While morally speaking there is little to distinguish it from single-taxation, the practice of multiple-taxation serves to obfuscate just how much of one's hard-earned income is being seized for public use. A few percent here, a few percent there... the individual rates may not seem like much but they add up to a sizable fraction of the productive capacity of the economy.