Obviously he needs money ("income") to buy that house.
Loans are excluded from taxable income for a very good reason. If you tax loan "income" without fully refundable deductions for loan expenses then you are essentially adding the tax rate to the interest (twice—as income to the borrower up front, and as income to the lender when the loan is repaid), with the effect of eliminating the market for loans entirely. However, if you grant those deduction, the income to the loan recipient is cancelled out by the expense to the lender, and vice-versa when the loan is repaid—a lot of paperwork for little or no actual tax receipts.
Assuming he actually pays off the loan during his lifetime, he will have been taxed on whatever income he repaid it with. There is no need for special rules to handle that case. If not, then presumably the remainder will be covered by the estate (again, already taxed). Given the proclivities of the IRS, I would assume that the estate would also be required to pay capital gains on any assets sold to cover the loan, as well as accumulated capital gains on whatever is left of the estate to be inherited.
The summary implies that this is incorrect, that the capital gains are simply zeroed. If true, it's not surprising that certain people would be envious and resentful of this loophole allowing those with sufficient foresight to keep their rightful property out of the hands of the IRS. However, that has nothing to do with loans per se.
Correction: Willful copyright infringement in the form of selling counterfeit merchandise is a Federal crime.
As I recall, it was "profiting from copyright infringement", not just "selling counterfeit merchandise", and they got around it by saying that benefiting from the copyrighted work(s) was, in itself, a form of profit. (I.e., the "if you hadn't downloaded it you would have been compelled to buy it" fallacy.)
However, this is all second-hand. If you have a more authoritative source I'd be glad to see it.
Back to the birds: interestingly the article did not mention their co-operation with a movie company, promoting some movie with Angry Birds Rio. Playing it a lot myself but actually don't know what movie it is, so promotion works great:-)
Oddly enough, the name of the movie associated with "Angry Birds Rio" is "Rio".:-)
As far as promotions go... I didn't even realize the game was based on a movie until I ran across the movie by itself, months later, and linked the names, so the promotional value in my case was about nil.
We need rational thinking where both sides meet half way...
This topic, like how much murder is tolerable, or what level of slavery is most beneficial, is not one which is amenable to half-hearted compromises. The only difference is that this issue remains undecided.
Depending on the principles you start from, you end up in one of three basic positions: (1) copyright, etc., are fundamental rights, which should persist for at least the lifetime of the producer (and possibly inherited) and should never be infringed upon; (2) copyright, etc., are legitimate constructs, not rights, instituted to promote the social good, and should be set at whatever point optimizes this good, infringement being a crime against society for subverting this policy; or (3) copyright, etc., contradict fundamental rights, such as the right to own and use private property in a non-aggressive manner, and thus have no legitimacy.
Compromise is only really possible within the second category, over issues such as the optimal length, or socially-beneficial exceptions. This is possible because the second position ignores the question of natural rights entirely; it assumes that producers do not have a natural right to control distribution of their work, and that the government has legitimate authority to curtail use of private property. All that remains is to work out the details.
You can't "meet halfway" between category (1) and category (3), or even between either group and category (2), however, without one side or the other forfeiting their integrity. In the case of group (1), while they might be individually willing to shorten their claims or forgo them entirely, they can't make that decision for all producers everywhere. However much they may want to compromise on behalf of "their side", they don't have the authority to do so. Group (3) has the same problem; any compromise would affect not just themselves, but everyone else whose property rights are to be violated to incentivise production of creative works.
A willingness to forgo one's own perogatives and preferences to arrive at a mutually-acceptable compromise is an admirable trait. However, one must never compromise one's core principles—and that is exactly what would be required to "meet halfway" in this situation.
"Someone who had never heard of any deities in their entire life would be an atheist: people must be taught to follow religions or believe in gods."
So people must be taught to believe in a god or else they won't believe in one? Who taught the first believer to believe in a god?
You don't need to believe in something yourself as a precondition to teaching others to do so. Religion has often proven very useful to authority figures, and it is perfectly plausible that the first teachers of religion were themselves non-believers interested only in propagating a means of control over their communities. (Consider scientology.)
That said, I disagree with the GP that people must be taught to believe in religions or gods. People want to believe, to externalize their hopes and fears and formalize their place in the universe, and are perfectly capable of coming to believe in their own wishful thinking, forgetting or overlooking the fact that the object of their belief started out as a mere product of their own imagination.
Insider trading, to the extent that there is anything wrong with it, is a fairly straightforward violation of the trusted agent/principal relationship. The shareholders of a company (the principals) hire agents (the managers / high-level employees) to represent their interests; the agents then take advantage of information and influence they receive in the course of that relationship to benefit themselves, either by trading on that information, by selling it to third parties, or by diverting supplier contracts and the like, at the expense of their principals. By doing so they are committing fraud against the shareholders (who hired them on the understanding that their interests would be represented), and perhaps violating their employment contracts as well.
There is nothing inherently wrong with possessing private information, or trading based on it. As you said, information is always somewhat imperfect, so most trades involve some amount of information private to one party or the other. The problem is when you obtained private information as part of a relationship based on trust, and then violate that trust by using the information in a way that compromises the other party.
Heck, Hurricane Electric assigned me a/64 IPv6 subnet (2^64 addresses available)
They pretty much had to. That/64 is the only standard IPv6 subnet size. You can't go any smaller without breaking things like link-local autoconfiguration.
What's really impressive is that Hurricane Electric will allocate you a/48 (2^16 complete IPv6 subnets) on request, so that you can set up multiple networks under a common prefix.
Do you have a citation for that? The closest I can see is a requirement for DNS servers to refuse to supply the correct addresses for banned domain names. That does not imply that the servers must respond with incorrect addresses.
The main concern regarding SOPA's effect on DNSSEC seems to be that DNSSEC client are required by the protocol to respond to invalid responses and lookup errors by seeking out other DNS servers to query, which can be construed to look rather like an attempt to circumvent the ban. However, I can't see any rational, non-corrupt judge taking that view. Intent on the part of the DNSSEC designers to circumvent SOPA requirements would be rather hard to demonstrate.
You don't need to provide unsigned SOA records (or any SOA records) to block a domain lookup. Just refuse to respond at all, or report that an unspecified error occurred.
DNSSEC which is not compatable with the DNS blocking provision of SOPA.
I keep seeing this assertion, but there is nothing about DNSSEC which prevents ISPs from blocking domain lookups. What DNSSEC mainly prevents is the forging of DNS responses to redirect users to another server. ISPs can still block the domain resolution by either allowing the request to time out or responding with an error (other than No Such Domain).
A health insurance company doesn't care if they lose you as a customer. They only want you if you are a net profit to them.
Just like every other commercial entity in existence, from the seller at your local farmer's market to the multinational financial groups. If you aren't a net profit to the company you're not much of a customer. Insurance is no different in this regard.
And because the companies can legally collude and share information, no other company will want you either. So there's no parity.
There is plenty of parity here: you don't have to buy their health insurance, and they don't have to sell it to you. Actually, you are getting the better side of that arrangement, as the smaller, more vulnerable party. You can also "collude" with other customers and share information about companies you've worked with.
Insurance is supposed to be a balanced and voluntary arrangement, not a forced subsidy. Within the limits of available information, the actuarial risk of offering you insurance should be approximately equal to your premiums plus overhead, including a degree of profit necessary to justify the opportunity cost. There is no implicit assumption that everyone applying for insurance has the same degree of risk. Those who do have higher risks should expect to pay correspondingly higher premiums. In a competitive market, those with lower risks will similarly pay lower premiums.
Ignoring for the moment the way the government has severely distorted the insurance market, my only real problem with the way insurance companies are run is that the contract should cover the full expense of any insurable condition as soon as it occurs. In other words, if you take out insurance against a disease, and later contract that disease, that particular insurance company should be responsible for the full cost of your care from that point on, whether or not you remain a customer. That would address the "pre-existing condition" problem much more fairly than forcing an unrelated insurer to take you, knowing in advance that you will always be a drain on their insurance pool.
What you are arguing for is essentially a form of mandated insurance fraud; you want insurers to be forced to choose whether or not to accept your application on incomplete information, so that they can't accurately estimate actuarial risk. The benefit to you is that you know, or at least suspect, that you would end up with higher premiums if the risk was accurately assessed. However, this benefit comes at the direct expense of everyone with lower risk than yourself, as they must compensate for your underestimated cost on the insurance pool by paying higher premiums than their own risk would justify.
You forgot about that other class of people: "I voted and the retarded majority won again."
Representative government doesn't mean that you're entitled to have your candidate win.
Perhaps not, but it does mean that—however well the government may represent the population as a whole—it doesn't actually represent you. From the point of view of a minority, there is little difference between a representative government and a dictatorship. So long as they remain in the minority, what matters most is not proportional representation, but the preservation of their natural rights, often against the majority's wishes. The important part of the American system is not majority rule, but rather minority rights. When natural rights are supreme, voluntary democracies arise spontaneously wherever they are needed. Where majority rule dominates, however, minorities must always remain second-class citizens.
The relationship is the other way around. SOPA is a law which forces ISPs and registrars within its jurisdiction to block certain DNS requests. DNSSEC is a means of signing both individual domain records and chains of domains so that you know that the domain data and/or NXDOMAIN (No Such Domain) response to your request is authentic, provided you can trust the operators of the higher-level domains up to the DNS root, or another anchor point for which you can check the key.
Assuming that TPB has a domain outside SOPA's jurisdiction, and you either have an anchor for that TLD or trust the root domain, this means that while your ISP can still refuse to give you the address for TPB's domain (with either no response or a server error), it can't supply the wrong address or claim that the domain doesn't exist, since you would immediately know that it's lying.
The operator of TPB would have to be stupid not to enable DNSSEC, if it's available for that TLD, since it serves to prevent visitors from being silently redirected to some other site. Using DNSSEC doesn't give ISPs an additional way of blocking your site; on the contrary, it makes it much more obvious when they attempt to do so.
The idea that it's wrong to harm someone physically or deprive them of their possessions based merely on something they said, especially if it's true, can be traced all the way back to the idea of proportional response, and even to the Golden Rule. These concepts are among the oldest principles of justice around, predating even the concepts of nations and governments, much less political philosophy and formally recognized rights.
But yes, I should have the right to be heard. If, and only if, someone wishes to listen to what I have to say.
A more general way of stating this is that a group of people of any size (including one) has the right to do absolutely anything which they all agree to, provided it does not violate the personal or property rights of anyone outside the group. Or, equivalently, no one has the right to violate the personal or property rights of others without their consent; all other actions are permissible.
Applied to this case, communication, in the abstract, obviously has no effect on the rights of others. This is true even of false communication, such as slander, which is most effectively opposed by simply speaking the truth in any case; forcible responses tend to have the opposite effect. Certain methods of communication might prove harmful—for example, amplifying your voice to the point where it makes people's ears bleed amounts to physical assault, whether or not speech is involved. In the normal manner of homesteading, people entering a public space are obligated to accept it as-is, including any level and type of sound already present, but you would need their permission, as prior homesteaders, to change the ambient environment. In most cases a private owner will set the standards for acceptable behavior within a given domain.
Your only right is that you can publish your opinion via those media, providing you have legal access to them.
But what determines "legal access"? The right to publish provided you have legal access doesn't mean much if legal access to any form of mass media depends on a government license—or if they tax away everything you earn such that you, or those you care about, are forced to depend on their "charity". Which isn't likely to continue if you displease them.
If you're interested in preserving liberty of any sort, the very first thing you need is the right to freedom from interference in the homesteading, voluntary trade, and non-aggressive use of property, whether by the government or other individuals or organizations. If you have that, every other consistent right naturally follows. If you lack it, the exercise of your other rights will always be subject to someone else's whim.
I can't really disagree that NAT is a problem, or that IPv6 will be a major improvement, though it's more Slashdot and not the ISPs that need IPv6 support at the moment. Even with NAT and without ISP support, you can get IPv6 through a tunnel, but that won't help so long as Slashdot remains IPv4-only. Still, it has long been known that IP addresses do not uniquely identify end users. Even with IPv6 there will be people sharing a single public IP address; IPv6 does not preclude restrictive firewalls and HTTP proxies, for example. Moreover, you can't really count the lower 64 bits, since they can be changed at will, and multiple independent users can access Slashdot from within a single IPv6 subnet without NAT. Some other mechanism is needed.
Two possibilities which come to mind, assuming that there is no fair way to prevent someone from posting anonymously and moderating in the same set of comments, are to either start anonymous comments on point lower (to cancel out the extra self-mod) or halve the effect of positive mod points on anonymous comments, so that they require broader support to achieve visibility. So far as that goes, reducing the impact of individual moderations would, in my opinion, have a positive impact across the board. As things stand you only need three or four votes to get a +5—after which six others can move you down to -1. In controversial cases where more than a dozen or so moderators are involved, the score depends more on the order in which they see your comment than the numbers on either side.
The higher I set the price of software in the app store, the happier my customers are with the product. Go figure!?!?
It's not really all that surprising. If you set the price high, only people who already have a good reason to believe that they'll be happy with the product will bother with it. You're pre-selecting for customers likely to give good reviews. If the price is low, people will be more likely to take the risk, and thus more likely to leave negative reviews.
So if several thousand unrelated individuals are behind one NAT'd IP address—an increasingly common situation, now that all the IPv4 addresses have been allocated—none of them can mod if any of them post? That's messed up. Either there is more involved than just the originating IP address, or the system is seriously broken.
I already gave you evidence regarding insecure installations being exploited on an automated basis. Interesting doesn't matter and yet you simply choose to ignore this fact I highlighted.
I ignored it because it's irrelevant. Important systems won't be left insecure. There are simple processes available to protect the authentication keys, without preventing automated updates, and people will use them if these kinds of attacks become a problem.
I have interest in having a secure system that has proper controls for dealing with problems.
The system you want does not, and cannot, exist. If some third party can override a domain transfer or other update issued with the proper authentication, then they can also practice censorship. The same is true of other systems where authentication is a factor, not just distributed DNS. If you want a secure system you have to take direct responsibility for securing your online identity.
DNS is only but a small part of information exchange.
True, but secure, censorship-resistant name resolution is a critical part of any secure communication system. Just look at I2P—the network is great, with fast, secure, onion-routed data transfers, but the name system still depends on manually synchronized hosts files, because no traditional DNS system is trustworthy enough. Namecoin, adapted to serve I2P hashes rather than IP addresses, would be a vast improvement. Freenet works, at least part of the time, and slowly, but even there the protocol is subject to blocking, and you still need to protect your authentication keys if you want to be able to make secure updates (using SSKs).
The DNS servers are automatically rotated to prevent DDoS attacks from taking it out and to make it more difficult to gather all the different name servers for attack lists. For obvious reasons, your method isn't applicable to dealing with this particular issue.
I don't see why not. Anything you can do with traditional DNS servers you can do under a Namecoin domain; it's not like you need control over.com or the root servers to run your rotating DNS scheme.
Concerning DDoS attacks, you are perhaps unaware that anyone can run the Namecoin software to download the directory, peer-to-peer, into their own DNS server. There is no central point of failure for a DDoS to attack.
Also, by not taking security into consideration, such as hash collisions (which are fairly easy with how the bitcoin [Namecoin?] cipher is currently done)...
Care to back that up with a practical attack? That shouldn't be a problem if it's as "easy" as you say, and the payoff could be huge. All you need to do is generate a collision in a 256-bit hash, while following a very specific transaction format. Shouldn't take much more than the lifetime of the universe.
Seriously, it hasn't happened yet, despite plenty of incentive for governments and private parties alike. Nothing is truly impervious, yet clearly the designers were not the idiots you're trying to make them out to be, or the system would already be broken.
So how exactly does this help when (for example) I go to a restaurant and my kid dies from eating tainted food? No amount of private arbitration will bring someone back from the dead;...
No amount of civil suits or criminal prosecution will bring someone back from the dead, either. As I said, the purpose of arbitration is simply to establish the legitimacy of your grievance.
... you have to take preventative measures in the first place, which would definitely not happen if the only system of redress was private arbitration.
I disagree; arbitration may be enough on its own. Still, it's a good thing that the system of redress is not limited to arbitration. The restaurant takes preventative measures, not because you might pursue private arbitration, but because, arbitration or no arbitration, if they poison your child you have a right to seek restitution, as well as retribution in kind if the attack was deliberate or they refuse to pay the compensation owed (which effectively makes the harm deliberate). And what could they possibly pay that would be sufficient restitution for the loss of a child? They would end up owing you everything. Considering that risk, the preventative measures pay for themselves.
It matters because of two possibilities. First, the end result may not be truly identical, despite appearing the same to every objective test we can devise. If there is a non-physical component to consciousness (and I'm not saying that there is), it would almost have to be beyond our ability to measure or quantify. The end result may be the same, physically, and even have your memories and thought processes and quirks, and yet not actually be you in a way that you, and perhaps others, can perceive but not quite explain.
Second, and more objectively, the alternatives generally involve creating a clone. At some point there are two complete living entities, and, to complete the transfer, one of them has to be killed. The end result may be the same, but I think most people would be very uncomfortable with the idea of being killed by or for their clone, even if no one else could tell the difference afterward.
Roger Penrose argued in The Emperor's New Mind that the patient might not realize their decreasing consciousness during the process, and observers noticed no drop in function, yet by the end, there was an unconscious thing mimicking a conscious entity.
I was assuming that it is possible to transfer consciousness to a computer in the first place. If you can't do that as part of a gradual replacement process, you probably won't be able to do it as an atomic transfer either. If it is possible to perform the transfer without forfeiting consciousness, however—assuming that is even a real factor, something yet to be proven—then the gradual approach is probably the only way to do it without creating a clone, however temporarily.
Wait wait wait - we're talking about a libertarian economy here, right? By what mechanism will this "punishment" be allocated? Will that be the sole responsibility of the government?
No, you don't need a government to punish someone who harms you. You have the right to do that yourself. Practically speaking, most would choose to establish their claim through arbitration before turning to direct action, and would probably hire out the actual enforcement rather than doing it themselves, but so long as you're truly in the right, and willing to accept the full responsibility for your actions, there is nothing wrong with seeking restitution and even retribution on your own. The courts don't grant you the right to respond; they just help to publicly establish your grievance and spread out the responsibility for the decision.
Most cases would probably be resolved peaceably. For one thing, many disputes are already handled via private arbitration, as it's more cost-effective than turning to the government courts, so the system has plenty of precedent. Unless they're showing plain partiality to your opponent, bypassing or ignoring the arbiters is a great way to ensure that no one will feel safe doing business with you, even if there was no further enforcement. However, the right to pursue restitution and retribution privately remains should someone actually choose to flaunt the ruling.
I believe I read somewhere that the transporters in the Star Trek shows actually transferred the original matter of your body from one point to another, in the form of energy, so there is no replacement. In theory, at least, it's exactly the same person that steps out one the other side, not a clone, and the connection to the "mind" or "soul" or "sense of self", or whatever you want to call it, remains unbroken. The original models provoked riots for exactly the reason you stated, once people understood how they worked.
Anyway, I think the brain-upload could be done without cloning you or destroying your identity, if it was done gradually enough. Replace one cell at a time with a computer simulation of that cell's function, in the same way that the cells continually rebuild themselves from raw materials any yet maintain the same identity. In the end you would have an all-electronic brain, and yet your individuality would have remained intact throughout the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously he needs money ("income") to buy that house.
Loans are excluded from taxable income for a very good reason. If you tax loan "income" without fully refundable deductions for loan expenses then you are essentially adding the tax rate to the interest (twice—as income to the borrower up front, and as income to the lender when the loan is repaid), with the effect of eliminating the market for loans entirely. However, if you grant those deduction, the income to the loan recipient is cancelled out by the expense to the lender, and vice-versa when the loan is repaid—a lot of paperwork for little or no actual tax receipts.
Assuming he actually pays off the loan during his lifetime, he will have been taxed on whatever income he repaid it with. There is no need for special rules to handle that case. If not, then presumably the remainder will be covered by the estate (again, already taxed). Given the proclivities of the IRS, I would assume that the estate would also be required to pay capital gains on any assets sold to cover the loan, as well as accumulated capital gains on whatever is left of the estate to be inherited.
The summary implies that this is incorrect, that the capital gains are simply zeroed. If true, it's not surprising that certain people would be envious and resentful of this loophole allowing those with sufficient foresight to keep their rightful property out of the hands of the IRS. However, that has nothing to do with loans per se.
Correction: Willful copyright infringement in the form of selling counterfeit merchandise is a Federal crime.
As I recall, it was "profiting from copyright infringement", not just "selling counterfeit merchandise", and they got around it by saying that benefiting from the copyrighted work(s) was, in itself, a form of profit. (I.e., the "if you hadn't downloaded it you would have been compelled to buy it" fallacy.)
However, this is all second-hand. If you have a more authoritative source I'd be glad to see it.
Back to the birds: interestingly the article did not mention their co-operation with a movie company, promoting some movie with Angry Birds Rio. Playing it a lot myself but actually don't know what movie it is, so promotion works great :-)
Oddly enough, the name of the movie associated with "Angry Birds Rio" is "Rio". :-)
As far as promotions go... I didn't even realize the game was based on a movie until I ran across the movie by itself, months later, and linked the names, so the promotional value in my case was about nil.
We need rational thinking where both sides meet half way...
This topic, like how much murder is tolerable, or what level of slavery is most beneficial, is not one which is amenable to half-hearted compromises. The only difference is that this issue remains undecided.
Depending on the principles you start from, you end up in one of three basic positions: (1) copyright, etc., are fundamental rights, which should persist for at least the lifetime of the producer (and possibly inherited) and should never be infringed upon; (2) copyright, etc., are legitimate constructs, not rights, instituted to promote the social good, and should be set at whatever point optimizes this good, infringement being a crime against society for subverting this policy; or (3) copyright, etc., contradict fundamental rights, such as the right to own and use private property in a non-aggressive manner, and thus have no legitimacy.
Compromise is only really possible within the second category, over issues such as the optimal length, or socially-beneficial exceptions. This is possible because the second position ignores the question of natural rights entirely; it assumes that producers do not have a natural right to control distribution of their work, and that the government has legitimate authority to curtail use of private property. All that remains is to work out the details.
You can't "meet halfway" between category (1) and category (3), or even between either group and category (2), however, without one side or the other forfeiting their integrity. In the case of group (1), while they might be individually willing to shorten their claims or forgo them entirely, they can't make that decision for all producers everywhere. However much they may want to compromise on behalf of "their side", they don't have the authority to do so. Group (3) has the same problem; any compromise would affect not just themselves, but everyone else whose property rights are to be violated to incentivise production of creative works.
A willingness to forgo one's own perogatives and preferences to arrive at a mutually-acceptable compromise is an admirable trait. However, one must never compromise one's core principles—and that is exactly what would be required to "meet halfway" in this situation.
"Someone who had never heard of any deities in their entire life would be an atheist: people must be taught to follow religions or believe in gods."
So people must be taught to believe in a god or else they won't believe in one? Who taught the first believer to believe in a god?
You don't need to believe in something yourself as a precondition to teaching others to do so. Religion has often proven very useful to authority figures, and it is perfectly plausible that the first teachers of religion were themselves non-believers interested only in propagating a means of control over their communities. (Consider scientology.)
That said, I disagree with the GP that people must be taught to believe in religions or gods. People want to believe, to externalize their hopes and fears and formalize their place in the universe, and are perfectly capable of coming to believe in their own wishful thinking, forgetting or overlooking the fact that the object of their belief started out as a mere product of their own imagination.
Insider trading, to the extent that there is anything wrong with it, is a fairly straightforward violation of the trusted agent/principal relationship. The shareholders of a company (the principals) hire agents (the managers / high-level employees) to represent their interests; the agents then take advantage of information and influence they receive in the course of that relationship to benefit themselves, either by trading on that information, by selling it to third parties, or by diverting supplier contracts and the like, at the expense of their principals. By doing so they are committing fraud against the shareholders (who hired them on the understanding that their interests would be represented), and perhaps violating their employment contracts as well.
There is nothing inherently wrong with possessing private information, or trading based on it. As you said, information is always somewhat imperfect, so most trades involve some amount of information private to one party or the other. The problem is when you obtained private information as part of a relationship based on trust, and then violate that trust by using the information in a way that compromises the other party.
Heck, Hurricane Electric assigned me a /64 IPv6 subnet (2^64 addresses available)
They pretty much had to. That /64 is the only standard IPv6 subnet size. You can't go any smaller without breaking things like link-local autoconfiguration.
What's really impressive is that Hurricane Electric will allocate you a /48 (2^16 complete IPv6 subnets) on request, so that you can set up multiple networks under a common prefix.
Do you have a citation for that? The closest I can see is a requirement for DNS servers to refuse to supply the correct addresses for banned domain names. That does not imply that the servers must respond with incorrect addresses.
The main concern regarding SOPA's effect on DNSSEC seems to be that DNSSEC client are required by the protocol to respond to invalid responses and lookup errors by seeking out other DNS servers to query, which can be construed to look rather like an attempt to circumvent the ban. However, I can't see any rational, non-corrupt judge taking that view. Intent on the part of the DNSSEC designers to circumvent SOPA requirements would be rather hard to demonstrate.
You don't need to provide unsigned SOA records (or any SOA records) to block a domain lookup. Just refuse to respond at all, or report that an unspecified error occurred.
DNSSEC which is not compatable with the DNS blocking provision of SOPA.
I keep seeing this assertion, but there is nothing about DNSSEC which prevents ISPs from blocking domain lookups. What DNSSEC mainly prevents is the forging of DNS responses to redirect users to another server. ISPs can still block the domain resolution by either allowing the request to time out or responding with an error (other than No Such Domain).
A health insurance company doesn't care if they lose you as a customer. They only want you if you are a net profit to them.
Just like every other commercial entity in existence, from the seller at your local farmer's market to the multinational financial groups. If you aren't a net profit to the company you're not much of a customer. Insurance is no different in this regard.
And because the companies can legally collude and share information, no other company will want you either. So there's no parity.
There is plenty of parity here: you don't have to buy their health insurance, and they don't have to sell it to you. Actually, you are getting the better side of that arrangement, as the smaller, more vulnerable party. You can also "collude" with other customers and share information about companies you've worked with.
Insurance is supposed to be a balanced and voluntary arrangement, not a forced subsidy. Within the limits of available information, the actuarial risk of offering you insurance should be approximately equal to your premiums plus overhead, including a degree of profit necessary to justify the opportunity cost. There is no implicit assumption that everyone applying for insurance has the same degree of risk. Those who do have higher risks should expect to pay correspondingly higher premiums. In a competitive market, those with lower risks will similarly pay lower premiums.
Ignoring for the moment the way the government has severely distorted the insurance market, my only real problem with the way insurance companies are run is that the contract should cover the full expense of any insurable condition as soon as it occurs. In other words, if you take out insurance against a disease, and later contract that disease, that particular insurance company should be responsible for the full cost of your care from that point on, whether or not you remain a customer. That would address the "pre-existing condition" problem much more fairly than forcing an unrelated insurer to take you, knowing in advance that you will always be a drain on their insurance pool.
What you are arguing for is essentially a form of mandated insurance fraud; you want insurers to be forced to choose whether or not to accept your application on incomplete information, so that they can't accurately estimate actuarial risk. The benefit to you is that you know, or at least suspect, that you would end up with higher premiums if the risk was accurately assessed. However, this benefit comes at the direct expense of everyone with lower risk than yourself, as they must compensate for your underestimated cost on the insurance pool by paying higher premiums than their own risk would justify.
You forgot about that other class of people: "I voted and the retarded majority won again."
Representative government doesn't mean that you're entitled to have your candidate win.
Perhaps not, but it does mean that—however well the government may represent the population as a whole—it doesn't actually represent you. From the point of view of a minority, there is little difference between a representative government and a dictatorship. So long as they remain in the minority, what matters most is not proportional representation, but the preservation of their natural rights, often against the majority's wishes. The important part of the American system is not majority rule, but rather minority rights. When natural rights are supreme, voluntary democracies arise spontaneously wherever they are needed. Where majority rule dominates, however, minorities must always remain second-class citizens.
The relationship is the other way around. SOPA is a law which forces ISPs and registrars within its jurisdiction to block certain DNS requests. DNSSEC is a means of signing both individual domain records and chains of domains so that you know that the domain data and/or NXDOMAIN (No Such Domain) response to your request is authentic, provided you can trust the operators of the higher-level domains up to the DNS root, or another anchor point for which you can check the key.
Assuming that TPB has a domain outside SOPA's jurisdiction, and you either have an anchor for that TLD or trust the root domain, this means that while your ISP can still refuse to give you the address for TPB's domain (with either no response or a server error), it can't supply the wrong address or claim that the domain doesn't exist, since you would immediately know that it's lying.
The operator of TPB would have to be stupid not to enable DNSSEC, if it's available for that TLD, since it serves to prevent visitors from being silently redirected to some other site. Using DNSSEC doesn't give ISPs an additional way of blocking your site; on the contrary, it makes it much more obvious when they attempt to do so.
The idea that it's wrong to harm someone physically or deprive them of their possessions based merely on something they said, especially if it's true, can be traced all the way back to the idea of proportional response, and even to the Golden Rule. These concepts are among the oldest principles of justice around, predating even the concepts of nations and governments, much less political philosophy and formally recognized rights.
But yes, I should have the right to be heard. If, and only if, someone wishes to listen to what I have to say.
A more general way of stating this is that a group of people of any size (including one) has the right to do absolutely anything which they all agree to, provided it does not violate the personal or property rights of anyone outside the group. Or, equivalently, no one has the right to violate the personal or property rights of others without their consent; all other actions are permissible.
Applied to this case, communication, in the abstract, obviously has no effect on the rights of others. This is true even of false communication, such as slander, which is most effectively opposed by simply speaking the truth in any case; forcible responses tend to have the opposite effect. Certain methods of communication might prove harmful—for example, amplifying your voice to the point where it makes people's ears bleed amounts to physical assault, whether or not speech is involved. In the normal manner of homesteading, people entering a public space are obligated to accept it as-is, including any level and type of sound already present, but you would need their permission, as prior homesteaders, to change the ambient environment. In most cases a private owner will set the standards for acceptable behavior within a given domain.
Your only right is that you can publish your opinion via those media, providing you have legal access to them.
But what determines "legal access"? The right to publish provided you have legal access doesn't mean much if legal access to any form of mass media depends on a government license—or if they tax away everything you earn such that you, or those you care about, are forced to depend on their "charity". Which isn't likely to continue if you displease them.
If you're interested in preserving liberty of any sort, the very first thing you need is the right to freedom from interference in the homesteading, voluntary trade, and non-aggressive use of property, whether by the government or other individuals or organizations. If you have that, every other consistent right naturally follows. If you lack it, the exercise of your other rights will always be subject to someone else's whim.
I can't really disagree that NAT is a problem, or that IPv6 will be a major improvement, though it's more Slashdot and not the ISPs that need IPv6 support at the moment. Even with NAT and without ISP support, you can get IPv6 through a tunnel, but that won't help so long as Slashdot remains IPv4-only. Still, it has long been known that IP addresses do not uniquely identify end users. Even with IPv6 there will be people sharing a single public IP address; IPv6 does not preclude restrictive firewalls and HTTP proxies, for example. Moreover, you can't really count the lower 64 bits, since they can be changed at will, and multiple independent users can access Slashdot from within a single IPv6 subnet without NAT. Some other mechanism is needed.
Two possibilities which come to mind, assuming that there is no fair way to prevent someone from posting anonymously and moderating in the same set of comments, are to either start anonymous comments on point lower (to cancel out the extra self-mod) or halve the effect of positive mod points on anonymous comments, so that they require broader support to achieve visibility. So far as that goes, reducing the impact of individual moderations would, in my opinion, have a positive impact across the board. As things stand you only need three or four votes to get a +5—after which six others can move you down to -1. In controversial cases where more than a dozen or so moderators are involved, the score depends more on the order in which they see your comment than the numbers on either side.
The higher I set the price of software in the app store, the happier my customers are with the product. Go figure!?!?
It's not really all that surprising. If you set the price high, only people who already have a good reason to believe that they'll be happy with the product will bother with it. You're pre-selecting for customers likely to give good reviews. If the price is low, people will be more likely to take the risk, and thus more likely to leave negative reviews.
So if several thousand unrelated individuals are behind one NAT'd IP address—an increasingly common situation, now that all the IPv4 addresses have been allocated—none of them can mod if any of them post? That's messed up. Either there is more involved than just the originating IP address, or the system is seriously broken.
I already gave you evidence regarding insecure installations being exploited on an automated basis. Interesting doesn't matter and yet you simply choose to ignore this fact I highlighted.
I ignored it because it's irrelevant. Important systems won't be left insecure. There are simple processes available to protect the authentication keys, without preventing automated updates, and people will use them if these kinds of attacks become a problem.
I have interest in having a secure system that has proper controls for dealing with problems.
The system you want does not, and cannot, exist. If some third party can override a domain transfer or other update issued with the proper authentication, then they can also practice censorship. The same is true of other systems where authentication is a factor, not just distributed DNS. If you want a secure system you have to take direct responsibility for securing your online identity.
DNS is only but a small part of information exchange.
True, but secure, censorship-resistant name resolution is a critical part of any secure communication system. Just look at I2P—the network is great, with fast, secure, onion-routed data transfers, but the name system still depends on manually synchronized hosts files, because no traditional DNS system is trustworthy enough. Namecoin, adapted to serve I2P hashes rather than IP addresses, would be a vast improvement. Freenet works, at least part of the time, and slowly, but even there the protocol is subject to blocking, and you still need to protect your authentication keys if you want to be able to make secure updates (using SSKs).
The DNS servers are automatically rotated to prevent DDoS attacks from taking it out and to make it more difficult to gather all the different name servers for attack lists. For obvious reasons, your method isn't applicable to dealing with this particular issue.
I don't see why not. Anything you can do with traditional DNS servers you can do under a Namecoin domain; it's not like you need control over .com or the root servers to run your rotating DNS scheme.
Concerning DDoS attacks, you are perhaps unaware that anyone can run the Namecoin software to download the directory, peer-to-peer, into their own DNS server. There is no central point of failure for a DDoS to attack.
Also, by not taking security into consideration, such as hash collisions (which are fairly easy with how the bitcoin [Namecoin?] cipher is currently done)...
Care to back that up with a practical attack? That shouldn't be a problem if it's as "easy" as you say, and the payoff could be huge. All you need to do is generate a collision in a 256-bit hash, while following a very specific transaction format. Shouldn't take much more than the lifetime of the universe.
Seriously, it hasn't happened yet, despite plenty of incentive for governments and private parties alike. Nothing is truly impervious, yet clearly the designers were not the idiots you're trying to make them out to be, or the system would already be broken.
So how exactly does this help when (for example) I go to a restaurant and my kid dies from eating tainted food? No amount of private arbitration will bring someone back from the dead; ...
No amount of civil suits or criminal prosecution will bring someone back from the dead, either. As I said, the purpose of arbitration is simply to establish the legitimacy of your grievance.
... you have to take preventative measures in the first place, which would definitely not happen if the only system of redress was private arbitration.
I disagree; arbitration may be enough on its own. Still, it's a good thing that the system of redress is not limited to arbitration. The restaurant takes preventative measures, not because you might pursue private arbitration, but because, arbitration or no arbitration, if they poison your child you have a right to seek restitution, as well as retribution in kind if the attack was deliberate or they refuse to pay the compensation owed (which effectively makes the harm deliberate). And what could they possibly pay that would be sufficient restitution for the loss of a child? They would end up owing you everything. Considering that risk, the preventative measures pay for themselves.
It matters because of two possibilities. First, the end result may not be truly identical, despite appearing the same to every objective test we can devise. If there is a non-physical component to consciousness (and I'm not saying that there is), it would almost have to be beyond our ability to measure or quantify. The end result may be the same, physically, and even have your memories and thought processes and quirks, and yet not actually be you in a way that you, and perhaps others, can perceive but not quite explain.
Second, and more objectively, the alternatives generally involve creating a clone. At some point there are two complete living entities, and, to complete the transfer, one of them has to be killed. The end result may be the same, but I think most people would be very uncomfortable with the idea of being killed by or for their clone, even if no one else could tell the difference afterward.
Roger Penrose argued in The Emperor's New Mind that the patient might not realize their decreasing consciousness during the process, and observers noticed no drop in function, yet by the end, there was an unconscious thing mimicking a conscious entity.
I was assuming that it is possible to transfer consciousness to a computer in the first place. If you can't do that as part of a gradual replacement process, you probably won't be able to do it as an atomic transfer either. If it is possible to perform the transfer without forfeiting consciousness, however—assuming that is even a real factor, something yet to be proven—then the gradual approach is probably the only way to do it without creating a clone, however temporarily.
Wait wait wait - we're talking about a libertarian economy here, right? By what mechanism will this "punishment" be allocated? Will that be the sole responsibility of the government?
No, you don't need a government to punish someone who harms you. You have the right to do that yourself. Practically speaking, most would choose to establish their claim through arbitration before turning to direct action, and would probably hire out the actual enforcement rather than doing it themselves, but so long as you're truly in the right, and willing to accept the full responsibility for your actions, there is nothing wrong with seeking restitution and even retribution on your own. The courts don't grant you the right to respond; they just help to publicly establish your grievance and spread out the responsibility for the decision.
Most cases would probably be resolved peaceably. For one thing, many disputes are already handled via private arbitration, as it's more cost-effective than turning to the government courts, so the system has plenty of precedent. Unless they're showing plain partiality to your opponent, bypassing or ignoring the arbiters is a great way to ensure that no one will feel safe doing business with you, even if there was no further enforcement. However, the right to pursue restitution and retribution privately remains should someone actually choose to flaunt the ruling.
I believe I read somewhere that the transporters in the Star Trek shows actually transferred the original matter of your body from one point to another, in the form of energy, so there is no replacement. In theory, at least, it's exactly the same person that steps out one the other side, not a clone, and the connection to the "mind" or "soul" or "sense of self", or whatever you want to call it, remains unbroken. The original models provoked riots for exactly the reason you stated, once people understood how they worked.
Anyway, I think the brain-upload could be done without cloning you or destroying your identity, if it was done gradually enough. Replace one cell at a time with a computer simulation of that cell's function, in the same way that the cells continually rebuild themselves from raw materials any yet maintain the same identity. In the end you would have an all-electronic brain, and yet your individuality would have remained intact throughout the process.