That is what "Violence in the name of self-defense" is. "My violence is necessary because there is violence (elsewhere)!"
It sounds like you're arguing for the pacifist position. While I would agree that there is never any good reason to start a war, nor to escalate one, I have to say that simply laying down and dying on cue when an enemy attacks is not a particularly attractive option, nor one I feel anyone is obligated to accept. As a universal principle it would inevitably be self-defeating, as the more ethical side would always be wiped out, leaving those inclined toward war to dominate by default.
It may take two sides to fight a war, but it only takes one side to start it. The victim of an attack has a right to proportional self-defense. I moreover have no objection to others voluntarily choosing to aid in that defense. The key point is to consciously limit yourself to just stopping the attack, as decisively as possible but with a minimum of collateral damage, without becoming the very thing you're fighting against.
just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it
The question no one seems able to answer is this: how do you "give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing" when no one is producing food or housing for sale? Coming up with extra money is trivial; getting goods onto shelves so people can spend that money on things they need is the hard part, particularly if you don't intend to resort to forced labor.
I have no doubt that people will find ways to occupy themselves and perhaps earn some extra spending money for luxuries, but there are plenty of hard, dirty, unpleasant jobs that no one would choose to do if their basic needs were already met for free, and they can't all be automated with near-term levels of technology. I foresee a glut of artists and entertainers, and precious few farmers, janitors, and sanitation engineers.
Hoover after the 1929 crash let the free market work on its own. After 3 years of worsening depression, the people wanted a New Deal.
Between increased inflation, new public works projects, the Federal Farm Board, immigration restrictions, tax increases, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Bacon-Davis Act, the Home Loan Bank System, pressure enacted on the NYSE to block short selling, and various other examples of interference from 1929 to 1932, I don't see how you can possibly say that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". In hindsight the New Deal was really Hoover's creation, not Roosevelt's.
Laisse-faire had been the policy prior to 1929. It's no accident that 1929 is remembered as the start of "The Great Depression", in contrast to previous events such as the depression of 1819, the Panic of 1837, and the depression of 1920-1921. The Great Depression is the first case where the federal government tried to end a depression by decree and regulation and public spending rather than taking the hands-off approach. The result was a disaster, from which they seem to have learned very little.
The free market is the problem. It does not care about the General Welfare. The market is quite happy to let poor people suffer. Government is mandated to provide for the vulnerable.
The free market may not operate under a mandate, but it has the effect of improving the general welfare. Government, by contrast, has the mandate, but is incapable of carrying it out. Interference by central planners just makes matters worse. This is a case where principles and pragmatism are in perfect alignment.
War should be our last option after all other options are exhausted.
There is a big difference between "war should be considered as a last resort to get our way" and "war shouldn't be considered at all except as a way to prevent something even worse" (where the list of things considered "worse than war" is extremely short). Whether war is justified at all is a more important issue than where it ranks on a list of options, though I do agree that other options should always come first.
You knew that at Slashdot.org, you'd find "news for nerds". You intentionally loaded Slashdot to get what is on Slashdot (news, discussion).
You knew that at Slashdot.org, you'd find ads. You intentionally loaded Slashdot to get what is on Slashdot (ads).
While you did know that you'd find ads, that doesn't imply that you "intentionally loaded Slashdot to get... ads". You just wanted the news & discussion; the ads are an unwanted side effect, impurities in the data stream. You agreed to accept whatever the site sends you in response to your request, but that doesn't imply you have to display it, run embedded code, or follow the links. A good web-browser with plugins like Ad Block will help to refine the signal from the noise, simultaneously improving both load times and security.
That said, how is any network of any size supposed to protect itself again ISP outages other than multihoming?
The logical place to deal with this issue would be higher up in the stack, like with SCTP's multihoming support. Rather than advertising multiple routes to the same IP address, you let the other endpoint know that you can be reached at multiple IP addresses. If one ISP has an outage, you transparently switch the traffic over to another address.
Unfortunately, this requires updating applications to use different protocols; there is no backward-compatible way to retrofit this form of multihoming into TCP or UDP.
Now, there might be fewer IPv6 prefixes at this time than IPv4, but intrinsically there's nothing about IPv6 that addresses the problem that all prefixes must have global visibility.... To fix this kind of problem requires changing how routing is done.
IPv6 is intended to change how routing is done. The larger addresses make it easier to allocate prefixes hierarchically, as opposed to the smaller blocks which must be joined together for IPv4. For example, top-level prefixes could be naively assigned by combining 8 bits of latitude with 10 bits of longitude to create 256k/18s each covering approximately 800 square miles. Each/18 would have room to allocate each of up to ~1 billion customers a/48 prefix composed of 64k/64 subnets, each having 2**64 unique addresses. The resulting routing tables should be highly compressible; for example, there would probably be a single preferred route from a given location for all packets destined for a particular country or state. Only the closer destinations would need individual routes.
People agree to pay for things outside of their control all the time. Consider the contract you have with your auto insurance company, for example, in which they agree to pay in the event that you get into an accident. If you agree to the terms of your own free will, in the absence of fraud or duress, you should assume that they're binding, at least morally if not legally. The real problem would be if they were trying to fine the people posting negative reviews directly, when they weren't a party to the contract.
I see no reason why this contract shouldn't be considered binding—which is not to say that I think it's a good idea. I find it a bit surprising that they still have any customers after pulling a stunt like this, which was a clear sign of desperation in its own right. One doesn''t go to such lengths to suppress negative reviews unless one has something to hide.
...they also don't have the same justification for refusal, since compliance will not implicate them in anything...
In that particular case, perhaps, but they have their own interests and obligations outside the case which may be harmed by turning over the documents. For example, in this case compliance with the order could conceivably place Microsoft in violation of foreign data privacy laws, which this court cannot grant immunity from as it lacks jurisdiction.
...unless, of course, it would implicate them in something else, in which case they can negotiate a deal for qualified immunity.
Given that you're compelled to comply regardless, under threat of more or less whatever punishment the court happens to deem fit, there isn't much scope for negotiation. The court holds all the cards. You can ask for consideration, but there isn't much you can do about it if they refuse.
In case it wasn't obvious, I am wholly opposed to dragging third-parties into a case against their will when they haven't even been accused of any wrongdoing. That includes both compulsory testimony and the involuntary production of evidence. The courts exist to resolve disputes and protect rights, not to create new disputes and violate rights.
That sounds like a great idea. Since you're coding for the least common denominator, you obviously get none of the benefits of the target language, while still suffering from all of its issues, plus whatever additional issues are introduced by your under-spec'd and idiosyncratic "meta language" and "meta compiler".
To top it off, no one else will ever be able to maintain or build on what you write, so you're stuck with that job forever, unable to move on to something better—or at least until TPTB wake up and realize that it's far more trouble than it's worth and throw it out in favor of something which is properly idiomatic and standardized and which doesn't make them wholly dependent on you and your "meta compiler".
I'm not sure that's exactly the same thing. First, perhaps I'm just reading too much into your wording, but it sounds like you would have to admit guilt, as opposed to the court ruling against you for failure to comply while you continue to maintain your innocence. Second, and more importantly, only the defendant can "stipulate in court to the prosecution's allegations". What about subpoenas issued to third parties who would otherwise not have anything at stake? Like Microsoft in this case—they aren't the defendant, they're just holding the data.
The only reasonable way to handle this, so far as I can see, would be for the court to order the actual defendant in the case to direct Microsoft to turn over the data, or in extreme cases to do so in the defendant's stead. Microsoft would then be following the directions of their customer according to the terms of their contract, and not under the duress of a court order.
...your failure to comply would result in you being held in contempt of court, and jailed or otherwise punished until you do comply.
And this is pretty much the entire problem, right here. The very concept of "contempt of court"—arbitrary punishments handed out by judges at their sole discretion, with no consideration for proportionality or due process—runs counter to the principle of rule of law. I have no problem with a court saying that if you refuse to turn over relevant documents then they will be assumed to be as damaging as possible to your case. I do have a problem with them saying that if you don't turn over the documents you'll be subject to potentially indefinite jail time and fines in excess of whatever damages you were accused of inflicting on the other party.
Well, that and the fact that they seem to be trying to apply subpoena rules to a search warrant. A search warrant doesn't impose any obligations beyond staying out of law enforcement's way while they search the place. A subpoena, on the other hand, is an order for someone within the court's jurisdiction to testify or produce evidence. This is being described as a search warrant for reasons that are not at all clear to me, but the court apparently wants the company to perform the search itself and produce evidence as if it were subpoenaed.
people are also responsible for manipulating other people to do harm
I agree with you here, but as I see it, people weren't manipulated into panicking; they were manipulated into thinking that there was a fire. The panicking and its consequences were a separate matter, and their own fault, not that of whoever shouted "fire".
I see this boils down to free will of pepole in a situation they perceive threatening.
I agree, but much like free will itself, I don't see that we have any real choice except to extend people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are in control of their own actions, even if it seems likely that their response was more or less "automatic". If you take away someone's personal responsibility, you also take away their right to self-determination, reducing them to the level of animals. So long as people want to be treated as people, they have to take responsibility for their actions, even if those actions were driven by instinct rather than logic.
So that mass panic in the theater would have happened anyway, without anyone shouting "fire"?
Perhaps not, but the supposed "crime" was falsely shouting "fire", and the panic would have happened even if there really was a fire. In any case, no one forced the other patrons to panic. If they did, it was entirely their own fault, and they—not whoever shouted "fire"—are wholly responsible for the consequences.
Looking at the events after they're happened, we can conclude that someone unnecessarily shouting "fire" in a crowded theater was a sufficient condition (thus, leading) to people getting hurt. Was it a necessary condition for people getting hurt that way? Common sense says it was.. also anyone who's looking someone to blame.
Wrong on both counts. It is neither a sufficient condition, since people could simply refrain from panicking despite the (maybe false) warning, nor a necessary one, as there could be a panic even if the warning was true, or for that matter without anyone shouting "fire" at all.
If you offer an incentive (survive a theatre fire / money) to someone for committing a crime (trampling someone to death / shooting someone), did you cause it, or was it all on the person who committed the act?
Obviously, the person who committed the act. Otherwise one would be forced into the absurd conclusion that property owners are at least partly responsible for the theft of their property, since simply by having it they give potential thieves an incentive to steal. The same could be said of many other crimes. Responsibility rests with the one whose choices led directly to the outcome. Merely offering an incentive does not make one responsible for the consequences of someone else's choice.
If you manipulate someone by giving them false information, that could be said to take away their ability to choose freely, making you responsible for the consequences when they make the right choice given the information you provided and harm results because it was false. However, that does not apply here, because trampling others in one's haste to escape is something one would be responsible for even if the fire were real; the harm was not due to the information being false.
You can't, from outside of a NAT'd host, easily identify any internal hosts and you certainly can't connect to arbitrary ports on them - that's technically impossible since 65536 isn't going to somehow become 2 or more times it's own number.
None of which will matter unless you have an unwanted local service listening on those ports. On the other hand, if there is a malicious service inside your network which wants to allow incoming connections, there are any number of ways to implement NAT traversal. It's even fairly common for common services to incorporate NAT traversal these days due to the prevalence of NAT and the ways it breaks network routing. If you want to reliably filter traffic—even incoming traffic—you need a proper firewall customized to your traffic requirements, NAT or no NAT.
The electrons are being run through the experiment one at a time, so they can't be interfering with each other. There is no "electron build up"; even if you tore the apparatus down and rebuilt it from scratch each time, guaranteeing that there was no leftover state from previous experiments, you'd still get the same results.
You only get one discrete "hit" per electron, but the location varies according to some statistical distribution—and that distribution, measured over a series of single-electron experiments, matches what one would expect for interfering wave patterns.
In fact anything digital is lossy because it has a finite (lossy) sampling rate.
Don't forget that analog is lossy too; there is no such thing as a signal with infinite bandwidth in the real world. Per the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, a discrete (digital) signal with sampling rate f is equivalent to a continuous (analog) signal with bandwidth f/2. In other words, you're not losing anything by sampling a low-pass-filtered signal at 44.1 kHz unless you care about frequencies above 22 kHz. The range of human hearing is generally considered to max out at around 20 kHz; if you want to go higher, you'll probably need to invest in specialized amplifiers and speakers (not to mention a scope to detect the difference).
You may not have used the word "absolute", but you did speak of "Palestinians in Gaza" as if they were a homogeneous group of Hamas supporters:
So it's a bit of a cop out to pretend that civilians in Gaza can't be blamed for Hamas - they can, they voted for them, and they supported the ousting of the far more moderate and reasonable Fatah, those who supported Fatah were killed or fled to the West Bank.
So Palestinians in Gaza share an awful lot of the blame for Hamas is actions - they actively create and support the environment in which Hamas can do what it keeps doing.
(2) a system that has the same functional characteristics as the Serial Copy Management System and requires that copyright and generation status information be accurately sent, received, and acted upon between devices using the system's method of serial copying regulation and devices using the Serial Copy Management System;
If I understand correctly, this is the "loophole" that MP3 player were able to take advantage of. Since they only receive and store audio data, and don't transmit it for storage anywhere else, they effectively implement a system which is strictly more limited than what the SCMS would permit: they can't make copies regardless of copyright or generation status. The same argument should apply to car entertainment systems, which only store and play back audio from CDs without providing any way to move the audio data off the device.
The fact remains that while support for Hamas in Gaza may be higher than for Palestine as a whole, it's still well short of absolute. There are plenty of Palestinian citizens in Gaza who do not deserve any blame for the actions of Hamas.
I wasn't trying to imply that the election was illegitimate; at least, no more so than any other plurality-based democratic election[1]. Possible duress aside, Hamas did end up with the most votes. I only meant that with less than half of the population actually voting in favor of Hamas, the majority are not to blame for putting Hamas in power. The unfair blame and possible duress issues were my only points, so we would appear to be in complete agreement.
[1] I'd personally prefer a system where the winner was the least objectionable candidate, which favors centrist positions with broad support, rather than a mere plurality out of voters' first picks, which favors the extremes.
So it's a bit of a cop out to pretend that civilians in Gaza can't be blamed for Hamas - they can, they voted for them, and they supported the ousting of the far more moderate and reasonable Fatah, those who supported Fatah were killed or fled to the West Bank.
Hamas won the election with only 44.45% of the popular vote, with about 25% of the eligible population abstaining (Palestinian legislative election, 2006). You're blaming all Palestinians for a choice made by less than half of the voters, which is hardly fair. Those who voted against Hamas aren't to blame for the actions of Hamas just because they were unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of the election. On top of that, the way Hamas has dealt with Fatah supporters means that even some of the 44.45% who voted for Hamas could reasonably be considered to be under duress.
Ahh so there are no scarce resources that go into digital creations ? Nobody puts time, money, consumable resources to make entertainment ?
I didn't say that at all, and you know it. It's the "digital creations" themselves which are not scarce. Producing new ones requires labor and other scarce resources. However, artificial copyright monopolies are hardly the only way to fund the production of new media. In the absence of copyright you still have options like patronage and crowd-funding, not to mention volunteer efforts (which already make up a significant fraction of copyrighted works).
Really, while I certainly think that the media companies have been shooting themselves in the foot with machineguns by not maximizing the digital presence of their works,.... But that's their right.
No, punishing those who distribute copies of digital media without their authorization isn't a right. It's just a privilege invented as part of a scheme to incentivize the creation of new works. And like any legal privilege, it can only exist by infringing on the natural rights of others. There are other, better options.
Seriously why don't you just try justifying why you limit access to your property or person for your own material interests.
That's easy. If someone else is using my property or person, I can't use it myself. Use of scare resources is inherently competitive and zero-sum. The same is not true for non-scarce resources like digital media.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what "Violence in the name of self-defense" is. "My violence is necessary because there is violence (elsewhere)!"
It sounds like you're arguing for the pacifist position. While I would agree that there is never any good reason to start a war, nor to escalate one, I have to say that simply laying down and dying on cue when an enemy attacks is not a particularly attractive option, nor one I feel anyone is obligated to accept. As a universal principle it would inevitably be self-defeating, as the more ethical side would always be wiped out, leaving those inclined toward war to dominate by default.
It may take two sides to fight a war, but it only takes one side to start it. The victim of an attack has a right to proportional self-defense. I moreover have no objection to others voluntarily choosing to aid in that defense. The key point is to consciously limit yourself to just stopping the attack, as decisively as possible but with a minimum of collateral damage, without becoming the very thing you're fighting against.
just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it
The question no one seems able to answer is this: how do you "give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing" when no one is producing food or housing for sale? Coming up with extra money is trivial; getting goods onto shelves so people can spend that money on things they need is the hard part, particularly if you don't intend to resort to forced labor.
I have no doubt that people will find ways to occupy themselves and perhaps earn some extra spending money for luxuries, but there are plenty of hard, dirty, unpleasant jobs that no one would choose to do if their basic needs were already met for free, and they can't all be automated with near-term levels of technology. I foresee a glut of artists and entertainers, and precious few farmers, janitors, and sanitation engineers.
Hoover after the 1929 crash let the free market work on its own. After 3 years of worsening depression, the people wanted a New Deal.
Between increased inflation, new public works projects, the Federal Farm Board, immigration restrictions, tax increases, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Bacon-Davis Act, the Home Loan Bank System, pressure enacted on the NYSE to block short selling, and various other examples of interference from 1929 to 1932, I don't see how you can possibly say that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". In hindsight the New Deal was really Hoover's creation, not Roosevelt's.
Laisse-faire had been the policy prior to 1929. It's no accident that 1929 is remembered as the start of "The Great Depression", in contrast to previous events such as the depression of 1819, the Panic of 1837, and the depression of 1920-1921. The Great Depression is the first case where the federal government tried to end a depression by decree and regulation and public spending rather than taking the hands-off approach. The result was a disaster, from which they seem to have learned very little.
America's Great Depression
The free market is the problem. It does not care about the General Welfare. The market is quite happy to let poor people suffer. Government is mandated to provide for the vulnerable.
The free market may not operate under a mandate, but it has the effect of improving the general welfare. Government, by contrast, has the mandate, but is incapable of carrying it out. Interference by central planners just makes matters worse. This is a case where principles and pragmatism are in perfect alignment.
War should be our last option after all other options are exhausted.
There is a big difference between "war should be considered as a last resort to get our way" and "war shouldn't be considered at all except as a way to prevent something even worse" (where the list of things considered "worse than war" is extremely short). Whether war is justified at all is a more important issue than where it ranks on a list of options, though I do agree that other options should always come first.
You knew that at Slashdot.org, you'd find "news for nerds". You intentionally loaded Slashdot to get what is on Slashdot (news, discussion).
You knew that at Slashdot.org, you'd find ads. You intentionally loaded Slashdot to get what is on Slashdot (ads).
While you did know that you'd find ads, that doesn't imply that you "intentionally loaded Slashdot to get ... ads". You just wanted the news & discussion; the ads are an unwanted side effect, impurities in the data stream. You agreed to accept whatever the site sends you in response to your request, but that doesn't imply you have to display it, run embedded code, or follow the links. A good web-browser with plugins like Ad Block will help to refine the signal from the noise, simultaneously improving both load times and security.
That said, how is any network of any size supposed to protect itself again ISP outages other than multihoming?
The logical place to deal with this issue would be higher up in the stack, like with SCTP's multihoming support. Rather than advertising multiple routes to the same IP address, you let the other endpoint know that you can be reached at multiple IP addresses. If one ISP has an outage, you transparently switch the traffic over to another address.
Unfortunately, this requires updating applications to use different protocols; there is no backward-compatible way to retrofit this form of multihoming into TCP or UDP.
Now, there might be fewer IPv6 prefixes at this time than IPv4, but intrinsically there's nothing about IPv6 that addresses the problem that all prefixes must have global visibility. ... To fix this kind of problem requires changing how routing is done.
IPv6 is intended to change how routing is done. The larger addresses make it easier to allocate prefixes hierarchically, as opposed to the smaller blocks which must be joined together for IPv4. For example, top-level prefixes could be naively assigned by combining 8 bits of latitude with 10 bits of longitude to create 256k /18s each covering approximately 800 square miles. Each /18 would have room to allocate each of up to ~1 billion customers a /48 prefix composed of 64k /64 subnets, each having 2**64 unique addresses. The resulting routing tables should be highly compressible; for example, there would probably be a single preferred route from a given location for all packets destined for a particular country or state. Only the closer destinations would need individual routes.
People agree to pay for things outside of their control all the time. Consider the contract you have with your auto insurance company, for example, in which they agree to pay in the event that you get into an accident. If you agree to the terms of your own free will, in the absence of fraud or duress, you should assume that they're binding, at least morally if not legally. The real problem would be if they were trying to fine the people posting negative reviews directly, when they weren't a party to the contract.
I see no reason why this contract shouldn't be considered binding—which is not to say that I think it's a good idea. I find it a bit surprising that they still have any customers after pulling a stunt like this, which was a clear sign of desperation in its own right. One doesn''t go to such lengths to suppress negative reviews unless one has something to hide.
...they also don't have the same justification for refusal, since compliance will not implicate them in anything...
In that particular case, perhaps, but they have their own interests and obligations outside the case which may be harmed by turning over the documents. For example, in this case compliance with the order could conceivably place Microsoft in violation of foreign data privacy laws, which this court cannot grant immunity from as it lacks jurisdiction.
...unless, of course, it would implicate them in something else, in which case they can negotiate a deal for qualified immunity.
Given that you're compelled to comply regardless, under threat of more or less whatever punishment the court happens to deem fit, there isn't much scope for negotiation. The court holds all the cards. You can ask for consideration, but there isn't much you can do about it if they refuse.
In case it wasn't obvious, I am wholly opposed to dragging third-parties into a case against their will when they haven't even been accused of any wrongdoing. That includes both compulsory testimony and the involuntary production of evidence. The courts exist to resolve disputes and protect rights, not to create new disputes and violate rights.
That sounds like a great idea. Since you're coding for the least common denominator, you obviously get none of the benefits of the target language, while still suffering from all of its issues, plus whatever additional issues are introduced by your under-spec'd and idiosyncratic "meta language" and "meta compiler".
To top it off, no one else will ever be able to maintain or build on what you write, so you're stuck with that job forever, unable to move on to something better—or at least until TPTB wake up and realize that it's far more trouble than it's worth and throw it out in favor of something which is properly idiomatic and standardized and which doesn't make them wholly dependent on you and your "meta compiler".
No thanks.
I'm not sure that's exactly the same thing. First, perhaps I'm just reading too much into your wording, but it sounds like you would have to admit guilt, as opposed to the court ruling against you for failure to comply while you continue to maintain your innocence. Second, and more importantly, only the defendant can "stipulate in court to the prosecution's allegations". What about subpoenas issued to third parties who would otherwise not have anything at stake? Like Microsoft in this case—they aren't the defendant, they're just holding the data.
The only reasonable way to handle this, so far as I can see, would be for the court to order the actual defendant in the case to direct Microsoft to turn over the data, or in extreme cases to do so in the defendant's stead. Microsoft would then be following the directions of their customer according to the terms of their contract, and not under the duress of a court order.
...your failure to comply would result in you being held in contempt of court, and jailed or otherwise punished until you do comply.
And this is pretty much the entire problem, right here. The very concept of "contempt of court"—arbitrary punishments handed out by judges at their sole discretion, with no consideration for proportionality or due process—runs counter to the principle of rule of law. I have no problem with a court saying that if you refuse to turn over relevant documents then they will be assumed to be as damaging as possible to your case. I do have a problem with them saying that if you don't turn over the documents you'll be subject to potentially indefinite jail time and fines in excess of whatever damages you were accused of inflicting on the other party.
Well, that and the fact that they seem to be trying to apply subpoena rules to a search warrant. A search warrant doesn't impose any obligations beyond staying out of law enforcement's way while they search the place. A subpoena, on the other hand, is an order for someone within the court's jurisdiction to testify or produce evidence. This is being described as a search warrant for reasons that are not at all clear to me, but the court apparently wants the company to perform the search itself and produce evidence as if it were subpoenaed.
people are also responsible for manipulating other people to do harm
I agree with you here, but as I see it, people weren't manipulated into panicking; they were manipulated into thinking that there was a fire. The panicking and its consequences were a separate matter, and their own fault, not that of whoever shouted "fire".
I see this boils down to free will of pepole in a situation they perceive threatening.
I agree, but much like free will itself, I don't see that we have any real choice except to extend people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are in control of their own actions, even if it seems likely that their response was more or less "automatic". If you take away someone's personal responsibility, you also take away their right to self-determination, reducing them to the level of animals. So long as people want to be treated as people, they have to take responsibility for their actions, even if those actions were driven by instinct rather than logic.
So that mass panic in the theater would have happened anyway, without anyone shouting "fire"?
Perhaps not, but the supposed "crime" was falsely shouting "fire", and the panic would have happened even if there really was a fire. In any case, no one forced the other patrons to panic. If they did, it was entirely their own fault, and they—not whoever shouted "fire"—are wholly responsible for the consequences.
Looking at the events after they're happened, we can conclude that someone unnecessarily shouting "fire" in a crowded theater was a sufficient condition (thus, leading) to people getting hurt. Was it a necessary condition for people getting hurt that way? Common sense says it was.. also anyone who's looking someone to blame.
Wrong on both counts. It is neither a sufficient condition, since people could simply refrain from panicking despite the (maybe false) warning, nor a necessary one, as there could be a panic even if the warning was true, or for that matter without anyone shouting "fire" at all.
If you offer an incentive (survive a theatre fire / money) to someone for committing a crime (trampling someone to death / shooting someone), did you cause it, or was it all on the person who committed the act?
Obviously, the person who committed the act. Otherwise one would be forced into the absurd conclusion that property owners are at least partly responsible for the theft of their property, since simply by having it they give potential thieves an incentive to steal. The same could be said of many other crimes. Responsibility rests with the one whose choices led directly to the outcome. Merely offering an incentive does not make one responsible for the consequences of someone else's choice.
If you manipulate someone by giving them false information, that could be said to take away their ability to choose freely, making you responsible for the consequences when they make the right choice given the information you provided and harm results because it was false. However, that does not apply here, because trampling others in one's haste to escape is something one would be responsible for even if the fire were real; the harm was not due to the information being false.
You can't, from outside of a NAT'd host, easily identify any internal hosts and you certainly can't connect to arbitrary ports on them - that's technically impossible since 65536 isn't going to somehow become 2 or more times it's own number.
None of which will matter unless you have an unwanted local service listening on those ports. On the other hand, if there is a malicious service inside your network which wants to allow incoming connections, there are any number of ways to implement NAT traversal. It's even fairly common for common services to incorporate NAT traversal these days due to the prevalence of NAT and the ways it breaks network routing. If you want to reliably filter traffic—even incoming traffic—you need a proper firewall customized to your traffic requirements, NAT or no NAT.
The electrons are being run through the experiment one at a time, so they can't be interfering with each other. There is no "electron build up"; even if you tore the apparatus down and rebuilt it from scratch each time, guaranteeing that there was no leftover state from previous experiments, you'd still get the same results.
You only get one discrete "hit" per electron, but the location varies according to some statistical distribution—and that distribution, measured over a series of single-electron experiments, matches what one would expect for interfering wave patterns.
In fact anything digital is lossy because it has a finite (lossy) sampling rate.
Don't forget that analog is lossy too; there is no such thing as a signal with infinite bandwidth in the real world. Per the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, a discrete (digital) signal with sampling rate f is equivalent to a continuous (analog) signal with bandwidth f/2. In other words, you're not losing anything by sampling a low-pass-filtered signal at 44.1 kHz unless you care about frequencies above 22 kHz. The range of human hearing is generally considered to max out at around 20 kHz; if you want to go higher, you'll probably need to invest in specialized amplifiers and speakers (not to mention a scope to detect the difference).
You may not have used the word "absolute", but you did speak of "Palestinians in Gaza" as if they were a homogeneous group of Hamas supporters:
So it's a bit of a cop out to pretend that civilians in Gaza can't be blamed for Hamas - they can, they voted for them, and they supported the ousting of the far more moderate and reasonable Fatah, those who supported Fatah were killed or fled to the West Bank.
So Palestinians in Gaza share an awful lot of the blame for Hamas is actions - they actively create and support the environment in which Hamas can do what it keeps doing.
(2) a system that has the same functional characteristics as the Serial Copy Management System and requires that copyright and generation status information be accurately sent, received, and acted upon between devices using the system's method of serial copying regulation and devices using the Serial Copy Management System;
If I understand correctly, this is the "loophole" that MP3 player were able to take advantage of. Since they only receive and store audio data, and don't transmit it for storage anywhere else, they effectively implement a system which is strictly more limited than what the SCMS would permit: they can't make copies regardless of copyright or generation status. The same argument should apply to car entertainment systems, which only store and play back audio from CDs without providing any way to move the audio data off the device.
The fact remains that while support for Hamas in Gaza may be higher than for Palestine as a whole, it's still well short of absolute. There are plenty of Palestinian citizens in Gaza who do not deserve any blame for the actions of Hamas.
I wasn't trying to imply that the election was illegitimate; at least, no more so than any other plurality-based democratic election[1]. Possible duress aside, Hamas did end up with the most votes. I only meant that with less than half of the population actually voting in favor of Hamas, the majority are not to blame for putting Hamas in power. The unfair blame and possible duress issues were my only points, so we would appear to be in complete agreement.
[1] I'd personally prefer a system where the winner was the least objectionable candidate, which favors centrist positions with broad support, rather than a mere plurality out of voters' first picks, which favors the extremes.
So it's a bit of a cop out to pretend that civilians in Gaza can't be blamed for Hamas - they can, they voted for them, and they supported the ousting of the far more moderate and reasonable Fatah, those who supported Fatah were killed or fled to the West Bank.
Hamas won the election with only 44.45% of the popular vote, with about 25% of the eligible population abstaining (Palestinian legislative election, 2006). You're blaming all Palestinians for a choice made by less than half of the voters, which is hardly fair. Those who voted against Hamas aren't to blame for the actions of Hamas just because they were unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of the election. On top of that, the way Hamas has dealt with Fatah supporters means that even some of the 44.45% who voted for Hamas could reasonably be considered to be under duress.
Ahh so there are no scarce resources that go into digital creations ? Nobody puts time, money, consumable resources to make entertainment ?
I didn't say that at all, and you know it. It's the "digital creations" themselves which are not scarce. Producing new ones requires labor and other scarce resources. However, artificial copyright monopolies are hardly the only way to fund the production of new media. In the absence of copyright you still have options like patronage and crowd-funding, not to mention volunteer efforts (which already make up a significant fraction of copyrighted works).
Really, while I certainly think that the media companies have been shooting themselves in the foot with machineguns by not maximizing the digital presence of their works, .... But that's their right.
No, punishing those who distribute copies of digital media without their authorization isn't a right. It's just a privilege invented as part of a scheme to incentivize the creation of new works. And like any legal privilege, it can only exist by infringing on the natural rights of others. There are other, better options.
Seriously why don't you just try justifying why you limit access to your property or person for your own material interests.
That's easy. If someone else is using my property or person, I can't use it myself. Use of scare resources is inherently competitive and zero-sum. The same is not true for non-scarce resources like digital media.