It was a pain that they could remote wipe my phone, but with Android and root, it was pretty easy to block that ability.
Where I work, rooting an enrolled device, or otherwise taking steps to circumvent the device policy, is a violation of the terms you must agree to to enroll in the BYOD program. Devices which the employer cannot remote-wipe are not eligible for the program, regardless of the reason. It's probably the same at most other places. Is the cost and inconvenience of a separate work device worth losing your job over?
It is not hypocritical to do so if they could not reasonably determine if child labor went into the production of the cell phone.
If they couldn't reasonably determine whether child labor was used to manufacture their batteries, neither could the companies that they're accusing.
It is quite reasonable for them to have iPhones, do a study find out if child labor was used and then not purchase any more phones from those manufactures until the address the issue.
But did they stop buying iPhones after they made their accusations? And what about all the other devices they use which depend on cobalt from these same sources? It seems implausible that they would have stopped buying smartphones, tablets, and laptops altogether, which is what they would need to do to avoid any risk of contamination by child-labor-mined cobalt.
I don't necessarily agree with what Amnesty International is saying, but they certainly have a right to say it, regardless of what cellphones they use.
Sure they do. It's still hypocritical when they benefit from cobalt of dubious providence just as much as everyone else. When and if they can prove that their own supply chain is free of child-labor-sourced cobalt, then they can make such accusations without hypocrisy—not before.
If Amnesty International actually wants to do something about child labor in cobalt mining, they should go there themselves and make sure that the children have better options than hiring themselves out to mine cobalt. On the other hand, if they just want to make themselves look ridiculous, pointing accusing fingers at Apple and Samsung for using standard batteries will get the job done.
... I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
And if they later find out that the same code from the same source was included without any such comment, do you think they would take that any better?
The MIT license, at least, doesn't require anything beyond attribution in the code. Up to this point the default license for anything copied from Stack Overflow was CC-BY-SA, which is "viral" much like the GPL: any derivative works must be offered under the same terms.
Of course, there is still the question of whether S.O. has the right to apply this license to everything posted to their site, including not only posts from before this policy was announced but also code from other sources with licenses which are not compatible with the MIT license or with S.O.'s interpretation of the attribution requirement.
Anything that you post to Stack Overflow will be under the terms of the Creative Commons license
But which Creative Commons license? They range from CC0 (effectively Public Domain) all the way down to CC-BY-NC-ND, which is one step short of "all rights reserved" and not really a contribution to the commons in any meaningful sense. The one thing they all share is that you can distribute the work non-commercially with attribution in its original form—which is rarely a useful set of terms when applied to incomplete snippets of source code.
That's small-time thugs. Large corporate thugs can take things, and they'll blame you if you say anything against it.
Blaming the victim is a common tactic for thugs of all sizes. However, it's much less common for your neighbors to side with the thugs and blame you for fighting back—unless the thug in question happens to be a government. Then you find yourself labelled "dissident", "anarchist", and/or "terrorist", and those you once considered your friends turn against you for no better reason than that you defended yourself against an unjustified attack on yourself and/or your property. Apparently when a thug with a badge comes to steal from you or kidnap you the expected response is not to resist, but instead to file a protest with the thug's cohorts and hope they'll change their mind about attacking you.
This is not about excusing corporations when they step over the line and act like thugs, it's about getting people to recognize that it is not legitimate for any organization or individual to act that way, even when the organization calls itself a government and the action is consistent with laws it has chosen for itself. To recognize, in effect, that there are natural laws beyond the reach of legislators by which even a government can be judged.
... or give up the fight against rooting and give their users root access in order to make the installation of low-level encryption tools possible. None of these things seem like options that either Apple or Google are going to be okay with...
Apple might have an issue, but the Android devices that you can buy from Google (the Nexus line) already include full manufacturer support for rooting in the form of the "fastboot oem unlock" command, no exploits required. For security reasons this wipes any user data on the phone (like a factory reset), but once it's been done you can continue to run the default OS or install whatever other software you wish.
Yea, but only government can take EVERYTHING you have away and give it to someone else, evil corporations cannot do that alone.
Incorrect. Any suitably empowered thug can take everything away.
An important part of the context that is missing from this discussion is that the original quote was referring to legal behavior. The government claims that its actions are "legitimate", and for the most part people let them get away with this claim despite all evidence to the contrary. The "suitably empowered thug", not so much. Sure, they can take whatever they want by force, but it won't be deemed legitimate, and you wouldn't be demonized for daring to defend yourself.
The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't mean that technical terms (jargon) cannot have precise definitions at odds with their common use. It just means that you have to define your terms before you can meaningfully claim that something does or does not qualify. Claiming that someone is not a True Scotsman raises the question, "What attributes must one have to be considered a True Scotsman?". Until that question is properly answered, the claim that one is not a True Scotsman remains an unsupported assertion.
There is a widely-accepted document known as the Agile Manifesto which partially answers that question in the case of agile development. If a development methodology includes elements which are contrary to that Manifesto then it is unreasonable to consider it agile development, even if it is commonly referred to as such.
It's fine to disagree with someone else's choice of terms, but that does not automatically imply that they are committing the No True Scotsman fallacy so long as their terms are consistent and well-defined.
So what happened to the home owners when they couldn't pay up? Bankruptcy! That means they lost everything they owned except maybe their car and some personal items. All their saving and anything material with a salable value were confiscated and given to the banks to cover the unpaid debt. That would pretty much be your definition of "take EVERYTHING you have away".
That isn't an example of corporations taking everything you have. That's an example of you giving away everything you have to the corporation. You agreed to that voluntarily when you took out the loan. It is a simple and perfectly obvious condition of any loan that you have to pay back the borrowed funds at some point. Loans are not "free money". If you don't want to end up in that situation, don't borrow more than you can pay—and investigate taking out a credit insurance policy for your own protection in case you are unable to repay the loan for reasons beyond your control.
Sure, you pay for the smokers, drug users, alcoholics, and obese now...but if you get cancer or get hit by a bus then they will be paying for you. See how that works?
False equivalence. The expected cost (risk times cost) which you pay for them is higher than the expected cost which they pay for you. It doesn't balance out. You are paying more than you should because the insurance company isn't allowed to set proper premiums which reflect each customer's actuarial risk.
If the built in encryption is backdoored, Then you have to add your own encryption layers. And that isn't something the average crook is going to try do, or get right even if he tries.
No, the crook just installs an alternative OS (like CyanogenMod) developed in another country which doesn't have the backdoor, then enable full-device encryption as usual. It's not as if you have to be an expert in programming and cryptography just to install and use secure software which someone else wrote.
JVM and.NET VM makers take note - You could add this to your GC and shutdown code and give all programs automatic support for this easily.
It would be better to put this in the OS cleanup code, clearing the buffers in a background thread before they're returned to the free pool. If the cleanup is left up to the application or framework then the application could exit due to a crash without getting a chance to clear the buffers.
The balance in the Force isn't between the Light Side and the Dark Side. The balance is between order and chaos, creation and destruction, life and death. Those on the Light Side dedicate themselves to maintaining that balance. The Sith don't care about balance; they just want the power to reshape the world to their own will, regardless of the consequences.
Note in particular that the Light Side doesn't consist only in establishing order, creating masterpieces, and preserving the lives of individuals. If anything, exclusive dedication to these aspects of the Force is a Sith attribute. The Empire represented order and civilization, in contrast to the chaos and corruption of the Republic; what ultimately drew Anakin to the Dark Side was the prospect of obtaining the power to prevent those he cared about from dying. But life, and consequently the Force, depends on maintaining a balance. Pure order without some chaos mixed in is simply stagnation. One must destroy in order to create. Life cannot evolve in the absence of death. There is no reward without risk.
... there are free rider problems and a tragedy of the commons.... It's similar to an insurance pool.
What you describe isn't similar at all to an insurance pool. An insurance pool needs either a reasonable scale or a large amount of capital set aside to keep the insurance provider from going broke, but the cost and benefit to the individual client is the same regardless of whether anyone else joins. (Speaking of actual insurance, naturally, not the involuntary welfare/transfer scheme that passes for "insurance" in the U.S. medical industry.)
It's even possible to offer insurance without a pool if you have enough capital set aside, and are willing to take the risk of losing it all in the event of a claim. It's all the same to the client. The presence of a pool just allows the insurance company to mitigate its own risk by averaging across many clients. The clients also don't need to be insuring against the same kinds of events so long as the events are reasonably independent of each other.
There is an infinite supply of copies (or streams or viewings or whatever) of movies, but there is definitely not an infinite supply of unique movies.
The supply is close enough to infinite; there is already more content in existence than anyone could reasonably hope to sample in their lifetime. Even if the creation of new movies were to cease (along with all copyright restrictions), no one would lack for entertainment.
It's true that if people want new content beyond what people naturally choose to produce for their own amusement they will need to pay for its production. However, that is merely a "want", not a "need", and as you yourself pointed out there are plenty of ways to fund development without violating the right to freedom of speech.
I think you're reading too much into the name. PFS doesn't guarantee that the message will remain secret forever, or even that the encryption can't be broken by brute force at some point in the future. It just means that the encryption key is ephemeral: it's generated using e.g. Diffie-Hellman, which allows two or more nodes to arrive at a secure shared secret despite the presence of eavesdroppers, and it's discarded by both sides after the communication is complete.
The alternative is encrypting the traffic with a persistent shared secret or private key, which opens up the possibility that someone who records the cyphertext may be able to recover the key later from one of the parties and use it to decrypt the previously captured data. With PFS, once the session is over neither party retains enough information to decrypt it (short of brute force).
For instance if I asked you if it was more likely that my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall, answer "I'm not sure" is making the claim each are at least similarly likely.... So either you make the claim that one side is more likely, or you make the claim they are similarly likely. Those are all claims which require a defense just as much as someone who has faith or is a non-believer.
There is another option: you can choose not to answer the question. There is no need to take a position (even a non-committal one like "not sure") when the answer has no impact on your life. The proper response to the question "is it more likely than not that there are invisible pink unicorns hiding in my back yard" is not "yes", "no", or "not sure", but rather "who cares?".
There was no takedown notice filed against Cox. That's not the issue.
And yet the case was about the DMCA's safe harbour provisions for ISPs. You'll note that there is nothing in there about requiring ISPs to disconnect anyone, short of a court order. It says that ISPs are not liable for infringement merely for carrying traffic on behalf of their users. In other words, the original order claiming that Cox was not protected by the safe harbour provisions was itself in violation of the DMCA.
This effect will occur at any limit you set between small businesses and large businesses. It could be 10 people, 100, 250, 500 or 1000. You will always have businesses growing, and if they cross the line, it's a small business growing. And you will always have businesses shrinking, and if they cross the line, it's a large business shrinking.
That's why there should be a fuzzy line between small and large businesses, rather than a sharp cutoff. Also, any time the company size changes, the weighting should be based on an integral over the range between the old and new sizes. Under 80? 100% small business. Over 120? 100% large business. Growing from 99 employees to 100, or shrinking from 100 to 99? Attribute half of that to small business, and half to large business. From 50 to 120? Weighted more toward small business. Etc.
It was BMG versus Cox, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that Cox was willfully negligent in their handling of DMCA complaints. So all of this stuff about IP address, hacked computers and modems, etc - doesn't matter.
Except that the DMCA says that ISPs have no liability regarding copyright infringement by their users, provided they are not actively involved in the infringement and do not modify the data passing through their network:
``Sec. 512. Limitations on liability relating to material online
``(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications.--A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection ( j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider's transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if-- ``(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider; ``(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider; ``(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person; ``(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and ``(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
So on what basis was a takedown notice filed against Cox as an ISP? Takedown notices are for services hosting user-provided content. Cox isn't hosting any of the supposedly infringing content, so there is nothing for them to take down. Someone is trying to misapply the rules for content-hosting services to a non-hosting service provider.
Subsection (j) does allow for injunctions to be issued prohibiting an ISP from providing service to a particular user, but only with a court order—not merely a notice of infringement from the copyright holder.
It would have been far better to capture it, if they could pull that off. Even if they have no use for a Death Star per se, it represents a huge quantity of high-value dual-use technology and raw materials which could be put to better use. Destroying it is still preferable, of course, to leaving it in the hands of the Empire.
If you transfer money from Peter to Paul, there is no direct loss to any economy which includes them both...
If you're talking about a voluntary transfer in a competitive market, sure. But that's not the case here. A forced transfer of property is pretty much always a direct loss—not of money, of course, but of economic value. The owner loses more value than the thief gains.
A right is protection against government abuse and oppression, nothing else.
You're defining the term much too narrowly. A law which states that you have a certain legal right offers protection against violation of that right by the government. Rights themselves are more general than that: the violation of a natural right by anyone, not just the goverment, inherently justifies the use of proportional force in self-defense. (That is why they are referred to as natural rights, and also why they are limited to negative rights prohibiting the initiation of force against non-aggressors.)
1- Why are you changing the game to "settlement"? No one cares how long it takes to write a check to clear your credit card balance.
You made this about settlement when you complained that bitcoin was slow because it takes 30 minutes or so to get the transaction recorded and confirmed on the blockchain. That's settlement: once on the blockchain the transaction is irreversible. If you don't care about settlement then broadcasting a transaction with Bitcoin such that it can be seen and validated by the recipient takes mere seconds, which is at least as fast as any other payment system in general use.
With a lot of work and some luck it's possible to get an unconfirmed transaction reversed, but that's the price you pay, in any payment system, for not waiting for settlement. With Bitcoin that wait is short enough that in most cases it doesn't matter—if the transaction did get reversed you would still have plenty of opportunity to block delivery of whatever the payment was for. Exceptions include point-of-sale transactions, digital goods for immediate delivery, and some services, but in those cases you can simply make sure you know who the buyer is so that you'll have some recourse should it ever prove necessary.
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It was a pain that they could remote wipe my phone, but with Android and root, it was pretty easy to block that ability.
Where I work, rooting an enrolled device, or otherwise taking steps to circumvent the device policy, is a violation of the terms you must agree to to enroll in the BYOD program. Devices which the employer cannot remote-wipe are not eligible for the program, regardless of the reason. It's probably the same at most other places. Is the cost and inconvenience of a separate work device worth losing your job over?
It is not hypocritical to do so if they could not reasonably determine if child labor went into the production of the cell phone.
If they couldn't reasonably determine whether child labor was used to manufacture their batteries, neither could the companies that they're accusing.
It is quite reasonable for them to have iPhones, do a study find out if child labor was used and then not purchase any more phones from those manufactures until the address the issue.
But did they stop buying iPhones after they made their accusations? And what about all the other devices they use which depend on cobalt from these same sources? It seems implausible that they would have stopped buying smartphones, tablets, and laptops altogether, which is what they would need to do to avoid any risk of contamination by child-labor-mined cobalt.
I don't necessarily agree with what Amnesty International is saying, but they certainly have a right to say it, regardless of what cellphones they use.
Sure they do. It's still hypocritical when they benefit from cobalt of dubious providence just as much as everyone else. When and if they can prove that their own supply chain is free of child-labor-sourced cobalt, then they can make such accusations without hypocrisy—not before.
If Amnesty International actually wants to do something about child labor in cobalt mining, they should go there themselves and make sure that the children have better options than hiring themselves out to mine cobalt. On the other hand, if they just want to make themselves look ridiculous, pointing accusing fingers at Apple and Samsung for using standard batteries will get the job done.
... I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
And if they later find out that the same code from the same source was included without any such comment, do you think they would take that any better?
The MIT license, at least, doesn't require anything beyond attribution in the code. Up to this point the default license for anything copied from Stack Overflow was CC-BY-SA, which is "viral" much like the GPL: any derivative works must be offered under the same terms.
Of course, there is still the question of whether S.O. has the right to apply this license to everything posted to their site, including not only posts from before this policy was announced but also code from other sources with licenses which are not compatible with the MIT license or with S.O.'s interpretation of the attribution requirement.
Anything that you post to Stack Overflow will be under the terms of the Creative Commons license
But which Creative Commons license? They range from CC0 (effectively Public Domain) all the way down to CC-BY-NC-ND, which is one step short of "all rights reserved" and not really a contribution to the commons in any meaningful sense. The one thing they all share is that you can distribute the work non-commercially with attribution in its original form—which is rarely a useful set of terms when applied to incomplete snippets of source code.
That's small-time thugs. Large corporate thugs can take things, and they'll blame you if you say anything against it.
Blaming the victim is a common tactic for thugs of all sizes. However, it's much less common for your neighbors to side with the thugs and blame you for fighting back—unless the thug in question happens to be a government. Then you find yourself labelled "dissident", "anarchist", and/or "terrorist", and those you once considered your friends turn against you for no better reason than that you defended yourself against an unjustified attack on yourself and/or your property. Apparently when a thug with a badge comes to steal from you or kidnap you the expected response is not to resist, but instead to file a protest with the thug's cohorts and hope they'll change their mind about attacking you.
This is not about excusing corporations when they step over the line and act like thugs, it's about getting people to recognize that it is not legitimate for any organization or individual to act that way, even when the organization calls itself a government and the action is consistent with laws it has chosen for itself. To recognize, in effect, that there are natural laws beyond the reach of legislators by which even a government can be judged.
... or give up the fight against rooting and give their users root access in order to make the installation of low-level encryption tools possible. None of these things seem like options that either Apple or Google are going to be okay with...
Apple might have an issue, but the Android devices that you can buy from Google (the Nexus line) already include full manufacturer support for rooting in the form of the "fastboot oem unlock" command, no exploits required. For security reasons this wipes any user data on the phone (like a factory reset), but once it's been done you can continue to run the default OS or install whatever other software you wish.
Yea, but only government can take EVERYTHING you have away and give it to someone else, evil corporations cannot do that alone.
Incorrect. Any suitably empowered thug can take everything away.
An important part of the context that is missing from this discussion is that the original quote was referring to legal behavior. The government claims that its actions are "legitimate", and for the most part people let them get away with this claim despite all evidence to the contrary. The "suitably empowered thug", not so much. Sure, they can take whatever they want by force, but it won't be deemed legitimate, and you wouldn't be demonized for daring to defend yourself.
The No True Scotsman fallacy doesn't mean that technical terms (jargon) cannot have precise definitions at odds with their common use. It just means that you have to define your terms before you can meaningfully claim that something does or does not qualify. Claiming that someone is not a True Scotsman raises the question, "What attributes must one have to be considered a True Scotsman?". Until that question is properly answered, the claim that one is not a True Scotsman remains an unsupported assertion.
There is a widely-accepted document known as the Agile Manifesto which partially answers that question in the case of agile development. If a development methodology includes elements which are contrary to that Manifesto then it is unreasonable to consider it agile development, even if it is commonly referred to as such.
It's fine to disagree with someone else's choice of terms, but that does not automatically imply that they are committing the No True Scotsman fallacy so long as their terms are consistent and well-defined.
So what happened to the home owners when they couldn't pay up? Bankruptcy! That means they lost everything they owned except maybe their car and some personal items. All their saving and anything material with a salable value were confiscated and given to the banks to cover the unpaid debt. That would pretty much be your definition of "take EVERYTHING you have away".
That isn't an example of corporations taking everything you have. That's an example of you giving away everything you have to the corporation. You agreed to that voluntarily when you took out the loan. It is a simple and perfectly obvious condition of any loan that you have to pay back the borrowed funds at some point. Loans are not "free money". If you don't want to end up in that situation, don't borrow more than you can pay—and investigate taking out a credit insurance policy for your own protection in case you are unable to repay the loan for reasons beyond your control.
Sure, you pay for the smokers, drug users, alcoholics, and obese now...but if you get cancer or get hit by a bus then they will be paying for you. See how that works?
False equivalence. The expected cost (risk times cost) which you pay for them is higher than the expected cost which they pay for you. It doesn't balance out. You are paying more than you should because the insurance company isn't allowed to set proper premiums which reflect each customer's actuarial risk.
If the built in encryption is backdoored, Then you have to add your own encryption layers. And that isn't something the average crook is going to try do, or get right even if he tries.
No, the crook just installs an alternative OS (like CyanogenMod) developed in another country which doesn't have the backdoor, then enable full-device encryption as usual. It's not as if you have to be an expert in programming and cryptography just to install and use secure software which someone else wrote.
JVM and .NET VM makers take note - You could add this to your GC and shutdown code and give all programs automatic support for this easily.
It would be better to put this in the OS cleanup code, clearing the buffers in a background thread before they're returned to the free pool. If the cleanup is left up to the application or framework then the application could exit due to a crash without getting a chance to clear the buffers.
The balance in the Force isn't between the Light Side and the Dark Side. The balance is between order and chaos, creation and destruction, life and death. Those on the Light Side dedicate themselves to maintaining that balance. The Sith don't care about balance; they just want the power to reshape the world to their own will, regardless of the consequences.
Note in particular that the Light Side doesn't consist only in establishing order, creating masterpieces, and preserving the lives of individuals. If anything, exclusive dedication to these aspects of the Force is a Sith attribute. The Empire represented order and civilization, in contrast to the chaos and corruption of the Republic; what ultimately drew Anakin to the Dark Side was the prospect of obtaining the power to prevent those he cared about from dying. But life, and consequently the Force, depends on maintaining a balance. Pure order without some chaos mixed in is simply stagnation. One must destroy in order to create. Life cannot evolve in the absence of death. There is no reward without risk.
... there are free rider problems and a tragedy of the commons.... It's similar to an insurance pool.
What you describe isn't similar at all to an insurance pool. An insurance pool needs either a reasonable scale or a large amount of capital set aside to keep the insurance provider from going broke, but the cost and benefit to the individual client is the same regardless of whether anyone else joins. (Speaking of actual insurance, naturally, not the involuntary welfare/transfer scheme that passes for "insurance" in the U.S. medical industry.)
It's even possible to offer insurance without a pool if you have enough capital set aside, and are willing to take the risk of losing it all in the event of a claim. It's all the same to the client. The presence of a pool just allows the insurance company to mitigate its own risk by averaging across many clients. The clients also don't need to be insuring against the same kinds of events so long as the events are reasonably independent of each other.
There is an infinite supply of copies (or streams or viewings or whatever) of movies, but there is definitely not an infinite supply of unique movies.
The supply is close enough to infinite; there is already more content in existence than anyone could reasonably hope to sample in their lifetime. Even if the creation of new movies were to cease (along with all copyright restrictions), no one would lack for entertainment.
It's true that if people want new content beyond what people naturally choose to produce for their own amusement they will need to pay for its production. However, that is merely a "want", not a "need", and as you yourself pointed out there are plenty of ways to fund development without violating the right to freedom of speech.
I think you're reading too much into the name. PFS doesn't guarantee that the message will remain secret forever, or even that the encryption can't be broken by brute force at some point in the future. It just means that the encryption key is ephemeral: it's generated using e.g. Diffie-Hellman, which allows two or more nodes to arrive at a secure shared secret despite the presence of eavesdroppers, and it's discarded by both sides after the communication is complete.
The alternative is encrypting the traffic with a persistent shared secret or private key, which opens up the possibility that someone who records the cyphertext may be able to recover the key later from one of the parties and use it to decrypt the previously captured data. With PFS, once the session is over neither party retains enough information to decrypt it (short of brute force).
For instance if I asked you if it was more likely that my brother is 1 millimeter tall or 6 feet tall, answer "I'm not sure" is making the claim each are at least similarly likely.... So either you make the claim that one side is more likely, or you make the claim they are similarly likely. Those are all claims which require a defense just as much as someone who has faith or is a non-believer.
There is another option: you can choose not to answer the question. There is no need to take a position (even a non-committal one like "not sure") when the answer has no impact on your life. The proper response to the question "is it more likely than not that there are invisible pink unicorns hiding in my back yard" is not "yes", "no", or "not sure", but rather "who cares?".
There was no takedown notice filed against Cox. That's not the issue.
And yet the case was about the DMCA's safe harbour provisions for ISPs. You'll note that there is nothing in there about requiring ISPs to disconnect anyone, short of a court order. It says that ISPs are not liable for infringement merely for carrying traffic on behalf of their users. In other words, the original order claiming that Cox was not protected by the safe harbour provisions was itself in violation of the DMCA.
This effect will occur at any limit you set between small businesses and large businesses. It could be 10 people, 100, 250, 500 or 1000. You will always have businesses growing, and if they cross the line, it's a small business growing. And you will always have businesses shrinking, and if they cross the line, it's a large business shrinking.
That's why there should be a fuzzy line between small and large businesses, rather than a sharp cutoff. Also, any time the company size changes, the weighting should be based on an integral over the range between the old and new sizes. Under 80? 100% small business. Over 120? 100% large business. Growing from 99 employees to 100, or shrinking from 100 to 99? Attribute half of that to small business, and half to large business. From 50 to 120? Weighted more toward small business. Etc.
It was BMG versus Cox, where BMG+Rightscorp were trying to prove that Cox was willfully negligent in their handling of DMCA complaints. So all of this stuff about IP address, hacked computers and modems, etc - doesn't matter.
Except that the DMCA says that ISPs have no liability regarding copyright infringement by their users, provided they are not actively involved in the infringement and do not modify the data passing through their network:
So on what basis was a takedown notice filed against Cox as an ISP? Takedown notices are for services hosting user-provided content. Cox isn't hosting any of the supposedly infringing content, so there is nothing for them to take down. Someone is trying to misapply the rules for content-hosting services to a non-hosting service provider.
Subsection (j) does allow for injunctions to be issued prohibiting an ISP from providing service to a particular user, but only with a court order—not merely a notice of infringement from the copyright holder.
It would have been far better to capture it, if they could pull that off. Even if they have no use for a Death Star per se, it represents a huge quantity of high-value dual-use technology and raw materials which could be put to better use. Destroying it is still preferable, of course, to leaving it in the hands of the Empire.
If you transfer money from Peter to Paul, there is no direct loss to any economy which includes them both...
If you're talking about a voluntary transfer in a competitive market, sure. But that's not the case here. A forced transfer of property is pretty much always a direct loss—not of money, of course, but of economic value. The owner loses more value than the thief gains.
A right is protection against government abuse and oppression, nothing else.
You're defining the term much too narrowly. A law which states that you have a certain legal right offers protection against violation of that right by the government. Rights themselves are more general than that: the violation of a natural right by anyone, not just the goverment, inherently justifies the use of proportional force in self-defense. (That is why they are referred to as natural rights, and also why they are limited to negative rights prohibiting the initiation of force against non-aggressors.)
1- Why are you changing the game to "settlement"? No one cares how long it takes to write a check to clear your credit card balance.
You made this about settlement when you complained that bitcoin was slow because it takes 30 minutes or so to get the transaction recorded and confirmed on the blockchain. That's settlement: once on the blockchain the transaction is irreversible. If you don't care about settlement then broadcasting a transaction with Bitcoin such that it can be seen and validated by the recipient takes mere seconds, which is at least as fast as any other payment system in general use.
With a lot of work and some luck it's possible to get an unconfirmed transaction reversed, but that's the price you pay, in any payment system, for not waiting for settlement. With Bitcoin that wait is short enough that in most cases it doesn't matter—if the transaction did get reversed you would still have plenty of opportunity to block delivery of whatever the payment was for. Exceptions include point-of-sale transactions, digital goods for immediate delivery, and some services, but in those cases you can simply make sure you know who the buyer is so that you'll have some recourse should it ever prove necessary.