I believe that of you take an OLD idea and do it on a computer, doing it on a computer doesn't matter, it's still an old idea and not patentable.
That implies that if you create a NEW idea, doing it on a computer still doesn't matter.
I agree. The sorts of things that are being patented "on a computer" shouldn't be patentable without a computer, either. The computer is ultimately just a mechanism for speeding up math. With or without that speedup, the underlying subject of the patent application is pure math—and math, as such, is not supposed to be patentable subject matter. It doesn't matter whether the idea is new or old.
Every customer who had bitcoins or USD on deposit at Mt. Gox entered into a contract with them when they created their account. It was part of the signup process.
The bigger obstacle, I suspect, is that most of their customers were not Japanese citizens (AFAIK). Bringing a suit against a company based in another country, as an individual, is far from trivial; even if you win a judgement in your home country, you may find it difficult to collect.
Most things aren't. Euros aren't legal tender in the U.S., for example, and vice-versa. If Bitcoin were legal tender it would only mean that if someone owed you $50 they could offer you $50 worth of Bitcoin and you would be compelled to either accept the Bitcoin to pay off the debt or give up on collecting at all. No one is seriously suggesting that Bitcoin should be made legal tender. A number of Bitcoin supporters would probably rather do away with the idea altogether. I can see a use for it, though; an arbiter (public or private) may well decide not to hear your case unless you agree to accept a standard form of reparations, as other party may not have access to the specific goods owed. That would be well within the arbiter's rights—as long as they aren't preventing you from seeing justice elsewhere.
Yes, precedent was surely set when EVE Bank failed. Oh, wait.
EVE is a game. The players are aware of that. There is no expectation that anyone will step in and enforce real-world rules inside the game; that would ruin the game. Bitcoin is different. The protocol is just as virtual, but the contracts relating to it are entirely real, and ought to be just as enforceable as any other contract.
That doesn't mean any particular government is obligated to do the enforcing, of course, but they claim a monopoly in that field; if they're not going to uphold perfectly legitimate contracts themselves they at least ought to step aside and let someone else do it.
Even better: Make the navigation app stop responding to input whenever the phone is moving.
The phone can't distinguish between the driver using the phone while it's moving and a passenger using the phone while it's moving. I, for one, would be very annoyed if my phone stopped working whenever I was riding in someone else's car, or on public transportation. There's also the fact that this misfeature would actively prevent a passenger from assisting the driver with navigation functions.
Bitcoins are just bits on your harddrive. They have no intrinsic value.
Neither does anything else. Intrinsic value is a myth. So what? They have a market value, which is all that's needed to determine liability.
If that makes you feel better, think of it in terms of a contract to provide a service on demand (creating a value transaction, signing it, and uploading it to the blockchain) rather than goods. That service has an associated value, for which Mt. Gox received payment at the time of deposit, and (through its own unbelievable degree of incompetence) Mt. Gox is no longer capable of performing it as previously agreed.
This doesn't have anything to do with whether Bitcoin is a "government-regulated currency". Bottles of soda aren't a government-regulated currency either, but if I gave 100,000 bottles of soda to a company with the understanding that they would store them and return them on demand, and they managed to lose them, I would still have a legal claim against that company for the value of the goods they were supposed to be holding for me. This is squarely in common-law contract territory; no special regulations are required.
All around, it's hard to imagine what you could come up with that would beat a safety deposit box at a bank, i.e. letting somebody else hold your bitcoin.
You can do that with Bitcoin—perhaps even a bit better. A safety deposit box generally requires two keys, one held by the bank and one held by the customer. The bank has custody of the deposit box, but doesn't have access to the contents without the customer's key (short of breaking it open). You can set up a Bitcoin address which similarly requires two keys to create a spend transaction, one held by the bank/exchange and one you keep to yourself. You can even create a two-of-three address where a neutral third-party can supply the second signature in the event one of the main keys is lost. (Or the bank/exchange could hold the extra key in secure offline storage, etc.)
The point, of course, was that simply being in the house doesn't give you any more right to let someone else in to search it than any random stranger would have.
The cops don't need to find the people who are actually on the lease. They don't need to find who paid the last rent check.
You're right, they don't—as long as they have a warrant. If they're going to claim consent, however, then it needs to be from someone with the right to give consent, which means the actual, verified owner of the property, or someone to whom the owner has consciously delegated that right.
Otherwise they wouldn't need consent at all. Anyone could give it for any search, meaning that the police could just give themselves consent.
The police shouldn't have to verify that the person answering the door is a resident or owner.
They should if they're claiming to have consent to search the place. They can't get consent from anyone else; it would just as much sense for a complete stranger such as myself to give consent for them to search your home. If they can't get consent from someone confirmed to have the right to give it then they are welcome to come back later with a warrant.
Of course, I'd like more clarification on occupant
That was my question as well. The premise behind searching with consent is that the person giving the consent has the right to allow anyone to perform a search—the police aren't using any special privileges to gain access. It makes sense that they would only need permission from one person, but that person would need to be in a position to give said permission legally. That may not be true for everyone in the house, or even everyone who lives there permanently. A minor, for example, should not be able to give consent for a search. Neither should guests be able to give consent for the search of someone else's home.
Nope, a programmer—though computer science is a branch of mathematics. The comment I was replying to was referring to real math as taught in the classroom, however, not computer-math. Even there "undefined" is an option; that's what "NaN" is for.
Part of the problem is that IEEE FP can't really represent the value zero. Instead, it has a pair of values "too small to represent", one positive and one negative. (If it were really zero then -0 would be equal to +0.) Similarly, positive and negative "infinity" don't really correspond to infinity in mathematics so much as finite numbers too large to represent given the limited range of the exponent. If you combine that with thinking of IEEE +/-0 as "infinitesimal" rather than actually zero then the result makes somewhat more sense. (And 0/0 does give NaN, as you would expect.)
The real difference is that Mt. Gox claimed to be running a full-reserve system—that they actually had all the bitcoins and USD in their customers' accounts. Thus the outrage when we find that hasn't been true for years, and that they've been covering it up. The traditional banks run this sort of scam openly 24/7 and most people don't blink an eye at it.
Don't like how it went down? Become more active in politics (griping on Slashdot doesn't count).
Oh yeah, great suggestion. Don't like how much the local protection racket extorts from you, or how they spend your money? Just become more active in the protection racket business...
When it comes to use of your property, the standard shouldn't be some vague and non-binding "representation", it should be direct veto. It's your property; that means that you get to decide how it's used, not someone else, even if they happen to ask your opinion first (before proceeding to do whatever they wanted in the first place).
Oldsters here remember 90-s with multiple competing dial-up ISPs - switching them was literally as easy as it gets, yet almost every city had multiple ISPs.
Ah, but how difficult was it to switch your local phone service to a different provider? A dial-up ISP takes advantage of another company's last-mile infrastructure, which is why it's so easy to switch. That isn't true for most cable, DSL, or fiber Internet connections.
You could force them to split up again, but that would only get you competition over provision of upstream Internet connectivity; you'd still have limited options for the connection to the ISP. As with most local utilities where extensive competition is considered impractical, I would recommend turning to a co-op for the last-mile infrastructure. That way the members have some influence over the decisions that affect them, while the co-op remains independent of any municipal government and its potential conflicts of interest.
Can you suggest any way short of some hypotheical mind-control in which a person could be deprived of free will?
I'm not sure there is any objective way to determine whether a person has free will in the first place, which would imply that there is no objective way to determine whether they've lost it. Manipulation of the information you receive would be one way to create a barrier between your apparent ability to make choices and their actual consequences, though you could still argue that you made the choices freely within the context of the information you had. Your ability to exercise your free will within the real world would be eliminated, however.
The original problem was much simpler; I was merely objecting to the idea that if one person is an automaton, everyone else must also be automatons. Looking at this from the opposite perspective, the fact that some people have free will would not imply that everything they interact with must also have free will. They may interact with machines, for example, which emulate human appearance and behavior to an arbitrary degree and yet are controlled by deterministic programs. The program may recognize that it has no free will, while granting that presumption to the humans around it. Also, humans under a certain age are not generally considered to have developed the capacity for making deliberate choices, and instinctive responses can interfere with a person's ability to choose how they behave, to varying degrees.
I suppose the short version is that the scope for free will can vary between no impact on the real world and complete control over all your interactions. It's not a binary question of "do you have free will", but rather a continuum—and the result can vary depending on the individual and their circumstances. I wouldn't think of that as giving anyone a "free pass" however; the consequence of admitting that you can't or won't take responsibility (regardless of whether you were acting out of free will or not) is the forfeiture of your rights as a free human being. You would indeed be rendered free of any blame, but it's not a "get out of jail free" card; quite the opposite, in fact.
Division by zero results in positive or negative infinity, depending upon the sign of the numerator.
False. Division by zero is simply undefined. Sometimes you can determine the limit of some function as it approaches a discontinuity due to division by zero, but the limit will depend on the function (not just the numerator) and possibly on which side you approach the discontinuity from. For example, the function x/x has a discontinuity at x=0, but the limit isn't infinity, it's 1. The function 1/x approaches positive infinity as x goes to zero from the right, and negative infinity as x goes to zero from the left; since these are not equal, the limit does not exist at x=0. On the other hand, the limit of 1/(x*x) at x=0 is in fact positive infinity, because the function approaches positive infinity from both sides.
If X divided by zero were actually defined to be "equal to" positive infinity for all X > 0, then you could turn that equation around and say that 0 * infinity = X. Since 1/0 = infinity, 0 * infinity = 1. And 2/0 = infinity, so 0 * infinity = 2. Ergo 1 = 2. (Or not...)
The problem is that infinity isn't a number you can calculate with; it's more of a trend, or a way to express the absence of a finite boundary. An expression is never "equal to" infinity, though it may approach infinity as some other condition changes.
if you claim to be an automaton then the logical extension is that everyone else is as well
I'm not sure I can buy that argument in general. It's true if you're claiming to be an automaton because we're in a deterministic clockwork universe, but you could also be arguing that you're different from other people, either permanently or temporarily—perhaps there's something wrong with the way your mind works, or you're in a special circumstance which overrules your free will. In that case you may be functioning as an automaton while others are not.
Even those solidly on the side of free will generally allow for the existence of things one is in some way responsible for, yet are beyond one's control. For example, you may set some process in motion without knowing the end result. If someone is harmed in the process you would be responsible even though you didn't intend to cause that particular effect. In general we handle this by giving you the opportunity to make up for the accidental harm. The really hard questions relate to the cases where that isn't possible.
I never said the current system was completely rational. There is a lot of confusion over who pays for what in comparison to something like the postal service. Still, connectivity wouldn't be completely free even with all the actual traffic paid for by the sender. The ISP needs some way of getting packets to you, and there is a continuous cost for that infrastructure even if you never receive any data. The postal service takes advantage of public roads, which amount to a subscription service you can't opt out of. The Internet at large could be thought of as a network of toll roads, but I don't see that working for the "last mile"--local roads are more of a utility service.
At a minimum, the end-user would need to pay for their own equipment (the "mail box"), a public IP address, and the connection to their ISP (the equivalent of local roads). Maintaining a connection of sufficient capacity for the expected inbound data should be the recipient's responsibility; the costs related to getting a specific packet to the recipient should be up to the sender. A residential user could expect to pay whatever the fixed cost is for an idle 20 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up connection, for example, plus the "delivery fees" for however much upstream traffic they used during that period. They wouldn't pay anything based on how much they received; the sender pays that part.
There appears to be some misunderstanding. Please point out where in my previous comment I said anything related to peering relationships.
Peering is a fairly simple arrangement. You have two networks with different owners. Each network needs to send some traffic to hosts reachable through the other. The amount of traffic is about the same in each direction. Rather than paying each other roughly equal amounts to carry each others' traffic, they implement a form of clearing and split the costs instead. The alternative, when the networks are not peers, is that the smaller or more remote network purchases access from someone more centrally connected, much as end-users purchase access from their ISPs.
The more external influences we see on brain function, the less sure I am of how appropriate it is to hold people responsible for their actions.
If you want to consider yourself a free individual, you have to accept responsibility for your own actions. In that sense it doesn't matter whether you are really acting out of free will or not. It's all about how you choose to see yourself. Personally, I don't see the attraction of thinking of myself as an automaton, but if I did then I certainly couldn't object if others (automaton or not) took steps to protect themselves from me, since I'm claiming to have no control over my effects on them.
If you harm someone and refuse to make amends, then in a legal sense it doesn't really matter whether you're being punished (proportionally) for your actions or merely experiencing reciprocation. There is no need to assign blame; the response is the same whether you're a free agent intent on doing someone harm or merely a dangerous machine.
No, because the ISP owns the infrastructure and you're the intended recipient. They're not asking you to deliver packets to someone else on their behalf.
Logically, everyone should just pay for the packets they send, much like you pay (via stamps) to send an envelope. A company like Netflix would pay to have their content delivered to their customers, and would recoup the cost of "shipping" that content across the Internet in the form of subscription fees. Unfortunately, while that might work for Netflix, it would be problematic for sites serving small amounts of traffic to a large number of visitors—we still lack a practical and widespread means of micropayment.
Of course, one significant difference between the Internet and the postal service is that the postal service is required to deliver (or return) every envelope they accept—they can't just drop excess mail in the nearest incinerator when they become overloaded. At that, it would still be an improvement over the current Internet model, where not only do you have to pay for packets which were never delivered due to congestion or technical problems, you even have to pay for packets you never requested and had no opportunity to opt out of.
That's not really the same thing. Airports can hire their own screening personnel, but they still "have to follow T.S.A. guidelines and fall under its supervision". All the policy decisions continue to be made by the TSA; the only difference is that they are carried out by private contractors rather than federal employees.
The GP's proposal was to leave all the security decisions up to the airlines, which would assume full liability in the event of a breach. The TSA wouldn't be involved at any point in the process.
I don't think "freedom of speech" provides any cover for arrest or legal action from the results of that speech.
What "results"? It's speech. It doesn't do anything on its own. If someone hears it and chooses to act in a criminal manner, that's their choice and their action—the speaker is not responsible for what others choose to do.
In private properties, physical and logical, "freedom of speech" as an amendment to the US Constitution is not in force. E.G. I can tell you to leave my house if I don't like what you are saying, you have absolutely no right to speech in that context.
You still have every right to freedom of speech—though not, of course, because of the U.S. Constitution, which merely recognizes free speech as a pre-existing natural right. You just don't have the right to be on the property after the owner has told you to leave. That's trespassing, and again has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
For an action to be legal you need to have all the rights associated with that action, not just some of them. In this case, in order to speak in that particular location you need not only the right to freedom of speech, which you have, but also the right to be on that property, which you lack. On your own property, or property you otherwise have permission to use, you can say whatever you want to anyone who cares to listen.
This is a common misconception; reporters are free to report anything, but must face consequences if they choose to report state secrets...
By the same reasoning, you are free to commit murder (or any other crime), but must face the consequences. That word "free"... I don't think it means what you think it means.
The concept of "state secrets" which cannot be reported to the public without legal consequences is fundamentally incompatible with freedom of speech, or of the press.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that of you take an OLD idea and do it on a computer, doing it on a computer doesn't matter, it's still an old idea and not patentable.
That implies that if you create a NEW idea, doing it on a computer still doesn't matter.
I agree. The sorts of things that are being patented "on a computer" shouldn't be patentable without a computer, either. The computer is ultimately just a mechanism for speeding up math. With or without that speedup, the underlying subject of the patent application is pure math—and math, as such, is not supposed to be patentable subject matter. It doesn't matter whether the idea is new or old.
Every customer who had bitcoins or USD on deposit at Mt. Gox entered into a contract with them when they created their account. It was part of the signup process.
The bigger obstacle, I suspect, is that most of their customers were not Japanese citizens (AFAIK). Bringing a suit against a company based in another country, as an individual, is far from trivial; even if you win a judgement in your home country, you may find it difficult to collect.
It isn't legal tender.
Most things aren't. Euros aren't legal tender in the U.S., for example, and vice-versa. If Bitcoin were legal tender it would only mean that if someone owed you $50 they could offer you $50 worth of Bitcoin and you would be compelled to either accept the Bitcoin to pay off the debt or give up on collecting at all. No one is seriously suggesting that Bitcoin should be made legal tender. A number of Bitcoin supporters would probably rather do away with the idea altogether. I can see a use for it, though; an arbiter (public or private) may well decide not to hear your case unless you agree to accept a standard form of reparations, as other party may not have access to the specific goods owed. That would be well within the arbiter's rights—as long as they aren't preventing you from seeing justice elsewhere.
Yes, precedent was surely set when EVE Bank failed. Oh, wait.
EVE is a game. The players are aware of that. There is no expectation that anyone will step in and enforce real-world rules inside the game; that would ruin the game. Bitcoin is different. The protocol is just as virtual, but the contracts relating to it are entirely real, and ought to be just as enforceable as any other contract.
That doesn't mean any particular government is obligated to do the enforcing, of course, but they claim a monopoly in that field; if they're not going to uphold perfectly legitimate contracts themselves they at least ought to step aside and let someone else do it.
Even better: Make the navigation app stop responding to input whenever the phone is moving.
The phone can't distinguish between the driver using the phone while it's moving and a passenger using the phone while it's moving. I, for one, would be very annoyed if my phone stopped working whenever I was riding in someone else's car, or on public transportation. There's also the fact that this misfeature would actively prevent a passenger from assisting the driver with navigation functions.
Bitcoins are just bits on your harddrive. They have no intrinsic value.
Neither does anything else. Intrinsic value is a myth. So what? They have a market value, which is all that's needed to determine liability.
If that makes you feel better, think of it in terms of a contract to provide a service on demand (creating a value transaction, signing it, and uploading it to the blockchain) rather than goods. That service has an associated value, for which Mt. Gox received payment at the time of deposit, and (through its own unbelievable degree of incompetence) Mt. Gox is no longer capable of performing it as previously agreed.
This doesn't have anything to do with whether Bitcoin is a "government-regulated currency". Bottles of soda aren't a government-regulated currency either, but if I gave 100,000 bottles of soda to a company with the understanding that they would store them and return them on demand, and they managed to lose them, I would still have a legal claim against that company for the value of the goods they were supposed to be holding for me. This is squarely in common-law contract territory; no special regulations are required.
All around, it's hard to imagine what you could come up with that would beat a safety deposit box at a bank, i.e. letting somebody else hold your bitcoin.
You can do that with Bitcoin—perhaps even a bit better. A safety deposit box generally requires two keys, one held by the bank and one held by the customer. The bank has custody of the deposit box, but doesn't have access to the contents without the customer's key (short of breaking it open). You can set up a Bitcoin address which similarly requires two keys to create a spend transaction, one held by the bank/exchange and one you keep to yourself. You can even create a two-of-three address where a neutral third-party can supply the second signature in the event one of the main keys is lost. (Or the bank/exchange could hold the extra key in secure offline storage, etc.)
The point, of course, was that simply being in the house doesn't give you any more right to let someone else in to search it than any random stranger would have.
The cops don't need to find the people who are actually on the lease. They don't need to find who paid the last rent check.
You're right, they don't—as long as they have a warrant. If they're going to claim consent, however, then it needs to be from someone with the right to give consent, which means the actual, verified owner of the property, or someone to whom the owner has consciously delegated that right.
Otherwise they wouldn't need consent at all. Anyone could give it for any search, meaning that the police could just give themselves consent.
The police shouldn't have to verify that the person answering the door is a resident or owner.
They should if they're claiming to have consent to search the place. They can't get consent from anyone else; it would just as much sense for a complete stranger such as myself to give consent for them to search your home. If they can't get consent from someone confirmed to have the right to give it then they are welcome to come back later with a warrant.
Of course, I'd like more clarification on occupant
That was my question as well. The premise behind searching with consent is that the person giving the consent has the right to allow anyone to perform a search—the police aren't using any special privileges to gain access. It makes sense that they would only need permission from one person, but that person would need to be in a position to give said permission legally. That may not be true for everyone in the house, or even everyone who lives there permanently. A minor, for example, should not be able to give consent for a search. Neither should guests be able to give consent for the search of someone else's home.
Obviously, a math major not a programmer.
Nope, a programmer—though computer science is a branch of mathematics. The comment I was replying to was referring to real math as taught in the classroom, however, not computer-math. Even there "undefined" is an option; that's what "NaN" is for.
Part of the problem is that IEEE FP can't really represent the value zero. Instead, it has a pair of values "too small to represent", one positive and one negative. (If it were really zero then -0 would be equal to +0.) Similarly, positive and negative "infinity" don't really correspond to infinity in mathematics so much as finite numbers too large to represent given the limited range of the exponent. If you combine that with thinking of IEEE +/-0 as "infinitesimal" rather than actually zero then the result makes somewhat more sense. (And 0/0 does give NaN, as you would expect.)
The real difference is that Mt. Gox claimed to be running a full-reserve system—that they actually had all the bitcoins and USD in their customers' accounts. Thus the outrage when we find that hasn't been true for years, and that they've been covering it up. The traditional banks run this sort of scam openly 24/7 and most people don't blink an eye at it.
Don't like how it went down? Become more active in politics (griping on Slashdot doesn't count).
Oh yeah, great suggestion. Don't like how much the local protection racket extorts from you, or how they spend your money? Just become more active in the protection racket business...
When it comes to use of your property, the standard shouldn't be some vague and non-binding "representation", it should be direct veto. It's your property; that means that you get to decide how it's used, not someone else, even if they happen to ask your opinion first (before proceeding to do whatever they wanted in the first place).
Oldsters here remember 90-s with multiple competing dial-up ISPs - switching them was literally as easy as it gets, yet almost every city had multiple ISPs.
Ah, but how difficult was it to switch your local phone service to a different provider? A dial-up ISP takes advantage of another company's last-mile infrastructure, which is why it's so easy to switch. That isn't true for most cable, DSL, or fiber Internet connections.
You could force them to split up again, but that would only get you competition over provision of upstream Internet connectivity; you'd still have limited options for the connection to the ISP. As with most local utilities where extensive competition is considered impractical, I would recommend turning to a co-op for the last-mile infrastructure. That way the members have some influence over the decisions that affect them, while the co-op remains independent of any municipal government and its potential conflicts of interest.
Can you suggest any way short of some hypotheical mind-control in which a person could be deprived of free will?
I'm not sure there is any objective way to determine whether a person has free will in the first place, which would imply that there is no objective way to determine whether they've lost it. Manipulation of the information you receive would be one way to create a barrier between your apparent ability to make choices and their actual consequences, though you could still argue that you made the choices freely within the context of the information you had. Your ability to exercise your free will within the real world would be eliminated, however.
The original problem was much simpler; I was merely objecting to the idea that if one person is an automaton, everyone else must also be automatons. Looking at this from the opposite perspective, the fact that some people have free will would not imply that everything they interact with must also have free will. They may interact with machines, for example, which emulate human appearance and behavior to an arbitrary degree and yet are controlled by deterministic programs. The program may recognize that it has no free will, while granting that presumption to the humans around it. Also, humans under a certain age are not generally considered to have developed the capacity for making deliberate choices, and instinctive responses can interfere with a person's ability to choose how they behave, to varying degrees.
I suppose the short version is that the scope for free will can vary between no impact on the real world and complete control over all your interactions. It's not a binary question of "do you have free will", but rather a continuum—and the result can vary depending on the individual and their circumstances. I wouldn't think of that as giving anyone a "free pass" however; the consequence of admitting that you can't or won't take responsibility (regardless of whether you were acting out of free will or not) is the forfeiture of your rights as a free human being. You would indeed be rendered free of any blame, but it's not a "get out of jail free" card; quite the opposite, in fact.
Division by zero results in positive or negative infinity, depending upon the sign of the numerator.
False. Division by zero is simply undefined. Sometimes you can determine the limit of some function as it approaches a discontinuity due to division by zero, but the limit will depend on the function (not just the numerator) and possibly on which side you approach the discontinuity from. For example, the function x/x has a discontinuity at x=0, but the limit isn't infinity, it's 1. The function 1/x approaches positive infinity as x goes to zero from the right, and negative infinity as x goes to zero from the left; since these are not equal, the limit does not exist at x=0. On the other hand, the limit of 1/(x*x) at x=0 is in fact positive infinity, because the function approaches positive infinity from both sides.
If X divided by zero were actually defined to be "equal to" positive infinity for all X > 0, then you could turn that equation around and say that 0 * infinity = X. Since 1/0 = infinity, 0 * infinity = 1. And 2/0 = infinity, so 0 * infinity = 2. Ergo 1 = 2. (Or not...)
The problem is that infinity isn't a number you can calculate with; it's more of a trend, or a way to express the absence of a finite boundary. An expression is never "equal to" infinity, though it may approach infinity as some other condition changes.
if you claim to be an automaton then the logical extension is that everyone else is as well
I'm not sure I can buy that argument in general. It's true if you're claiming to be an automaton because we're in a deterministic clockwork universe, but you could also be arguing that you're different from other people, either permanently or temporarily—perhaps there's something wrong with the way your mind works, or you're in a special circumstance which overrules your free will. In that case you may be functioning as an automaton while others are not.
Even those solidly on the side of free will generally allow for the existence of things one is in some way responsible for, yet are beyond one's control. For example, you may set some process in motion without knowing the end result. If someone is harmed in the process you would be responsible even though you didn't intend to cause that particular effect. In general we handle this by giving you the opportunity to make up for the accidental harm. The really hard questions relate to the cases where that isn't possible.
I never said the current system was completely rational. There is a lot of confusion over who pays for what in comparison to something like the postal service. Still, connectivity wouldn't be completely free even with all the actual traffic paid for by the sender. The ISP needs some way of getting packets to you, and there is a continuous cost for that infrastructure even if you never receive any data. The postal service takes advantage of public roads, which amount to a subscription service you can't opt out of. The Internet at large could be thought of as a network of toll roads, but I don't see that working for the "last mile"--local roads are more of a utility service.
At a minimum, the end-user would need to pay for their own equipment (the "mail box"), a public IP address, and the connection to their ISP (the equivalent of local roads). Maintaining a connection of sufficient capacity for the expected inbound data should be the recipient's responsibility; the costs related to getting a specific packet to the recipient should be up to the sender. A residential user could expect to pay whatever the fixed cost is for an idle 20 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up connection, for example, plus the "delivery fees" for however much upstream traffic they used during that period. They wouldn't pay anything based on how much they received; the sender pays that part.
There appears to be some misunderstanding. Please point out where in my previous comment I said anything related to peering relationships.
Peering is a fairly simple arrangement. You have two networks with different owners. Each network needs to send some traffic to hosts reachable through the other. The amount of traffic is about the same in each direction. Rather than paying each other roughly equal amounts to carry each others' traffic, they implement a form of clearing and split the costs instead. The alternative, when the networks are not peers, is that the smaller or more remote network purchases access from someone more centrally connected, much as end-users purchase access from their ISPs.
The more external influences we see on brain function, the less sure I am of how appropriate it is to hold people responsible for their actions.
If you want to consider yourself a free individual, you have to accept responsibility for your own actions. In that sense it doesn't matter whether you are really acting out of free will or not. It's all about how you choose to see yourself. Personally, I don't see the attraction of thinking of myself as an automaton, but if I did then I certainly couldn't object if others (automaton or not) took steps to protect themselves from me, since I'm claiming to have no control over my effects on them.
If you harm someone and refuse to make amends, then in a legal sense it doesn't really matter whether you're being punished (proportionally) for your actions or merely experiencing reciprocation. There is no need to assign blame; the response is the same whether you're a free agent intent on doing someone harm or merely a dangerous machine.
No, because the ISP owns the infrastructure and you're the intended recipient. They're not asking you to deliver packets to someone else on their behalf.
Logically, everyone should just pay for the packets they send, much like you pay (via stamps) to send an envelope. A company like Netflix would pay to have their content delivered to their customers, and would recoup the cost of "shipping" that content across the Internet in the form of subscription fees. Unfortunately, while that might work for Netflix, it would be problematic for sites serving small amounts of traffic to a large number of visitors—we still lack a practical and widespread means of micropayment.
Of course, one significant difference between the Internet and the postal service is that the postal service is required to deliver (or return) every envelope they accept—they can't just drop excess mail in the nearest incinerator when they become overloaded. At that, it would still be an improvement over the current Internet model, where not only do you have to pay for packets which were never delivered due to congestion or technical problems, you even have to pay for packets you never requested and had no opportunity to opt out of.
That's not really the same thing. Airports can hire their own screening personnel, but they still "have to follow T.S.A. guidelines and fall under its supervision". All the policy decisions continue to be made by the TSA; the only difference is that they are carried out by private contractors rather than federal employees.
The GP's proposal was to leave all the security decisions up to the airlines, which would assume full liability in the event of a breach. The TSA wouldn't be involved at any point in the process.
I don't think "freedom of speech" provides any cover for arrest or legal action from the results of that speech.
What "results"? It's speech. It doesn't do anything on its own. If someone hears it and chooses to act in a criminal manner, that's their choice and their action—the speaker is not responsible for what others choose to do.
In private properties, physical and logical, "freedom of speech" as an amendment to the US Constitution is not in force. E.G. I can tell you to leave my house if I don't like what you are saying, you have absolutely no right to speech in that context.
You still have every right to freedom of speech—though not, of course, because of the U.S. Constitution, which merely recognizes free speech as a pre-existing natural right. You just don't have the right to be on the property after the owner has told you to leave. That's trespassing, and again has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
For an action to be legal you need to have all the rights associated with that action, not just some of them. In this case, in order to speak in that particular location you need not only the right to freedom of speech, which you have, but also the right to be on that property, which you lack. On your own property, or property you otherwise have permission to use, you can say whatever you want to anyone who cares to listen.
This is a common misconception; reporters are free to report anything, but must face consequences if they choose to report state secrets...
By the same reasoning, you are free to commit murder (or any other crime), but must face the consequences. That word "free"... I don't think it means what you think it means.
The concept of "state secrets" which cannot be reported to the public without legal consequences is fundamentally incompatible with freedom of speech, or of the press.