Additionally, why the hell would you think it's a good idea if the "Top 100 domain name" are at risk!?
I never said it was. I simply said that most domains aren't interesting enough to warrant the degree of paranoia you were displaying over someone hacking into your servers to access your Namecoin keys. For the "Top 100" domains, where someone may actually have an incentive to break in, the extra security measures required to prevent unauthorized access to the authentication tokens aren't much of a hardship.
To be fair, most decent registrars hold on to the domain for two weeks after it expires before letting it go, so if you aren't noticing your domain being inaccessible for an entire week, it's probably not very important.
Nonetheless, it does happen. Perhaps not to you or me, but people have lost their domains this way. Botched management transitions, misfiled e-mail notices, new charge card numbers preventing automatic renewal, admins on vacation at just the wrong time... maybe you don't make these mistakes, but not everyone is as careful as you are, and even the best admins can mess up occasionally.
I run a stupid amount of domains and websites for over a decade without pissing off any three letter agency, I don't think this is likely to effect me.
Then you're participating in the wrong thread. You obviously have no real interest in a distributed name resolution system. We're trying to solve a problem which does not affect you, but does affect others to the point where the cost and risk of managing their own security is far outweighed by the protection against censorship the distributed model offers.
Why are you keeping your domain keys on publically-accessible servers in the first place?
To dynamically change settings as needed on the fly. Not everyone can afford anycasting.... De-automate my work? Yeah, no.
You can still automate the process, even if the system with the keys is not linked to the Internet. The air-gap approach is the most secure, of course, but you could set up a private, filtered network, or even a simple serial connection, and only pass well-defined commands and responses between the key-server and the rest of the network. The Namecoin protocol allows you to run your own traditional nameservers for subdomains, so you're unlikely to require frequent updates to the top-level domain in the first place.
Actually, it's a very good argument. What Santorum didn't point out, however—for obvious reasons—is that it applies equally well to heterosexual couples. In other words, he is arguing (unwittingly, no doubt) against government recognizing marriage at all as a legal concept, placing all relationships—regardless of the genders, or numbers, involved—on equal footing. I can think of few better resolutions to this issue than government getting out of the marriage business entirely.
What do you do when someone obtains your Namecoin hash keys by breaking into one of your servers and then transfers the domain to themselves?
Why are you keeping your domain keys on publically-accessible servers in the first place? Keep the keys on an offline PC, sign any domain changes offline, and transfer the signed transactions to an Internet-connected computer after the fact. Problem solved.
Any distributed system is going to require a certain amount of responsibility on the part of its users. Either you trust some third-party registrar with your domain—in which case you're out of luck if they decide to play games with your domain, or if someone else puts enough pressure on them to do so—or you use a distributed system, where no one—including you—has the ability to override apparently authentic orders, and take responsibility for securing the authentication tokens yourself. Either approach involves a certain amount of risk.
P.S. In case you hadn't noticed, people lose domains all the time with the current system. Forget to renew your domain on time—transferred to some ad agency who will be happy to sell it back for ten times what you originally paid. Annoy the wrong three-letter agency—redirected to an ICE warning page. Unless you're the holder of a Top 100 domain name, I'd say the threat of a zero-day exploit targeting your Namecoin keys should be rather far down the list of things to worry about, especially if you're doing something that requires a distributed name resolution system in the first place.
No, the answer is that copyright doesn't grant all the privileges the publishers are claiming, at least in the USA. In particular, the Doctrine of First Sale pretty much says that you can legally do whatever you want with your copy once they've sold it to you (aside from using it to make more copies). That includes not only obvious things like transportation, but also lending—both free/personal loans and commercial rental.
Rental companies and retailers often do have special agreements with the publishers, but that's because the publishers are offering them a better deal, not because they need the agreement simply to resell or rent out the physical books/DVDs/etc.
Digital media falls into a rather gray area, which is how the publishers like it. They take advantage of the ephemeral nature of digital goods to undermine the First Sale doctrine, while simultaneously claiming that the content has been fixed in a tangible medium in order to gain copyright privileges over it. It should be one or the other, but they leverage the confusion to get their way on both counts.
You don't always have that much control over how close you are. For example, you may be driving along in moderately heavy traffic, leaving a reasonable and safe following distance, when another driver decides to merge into the gap. Shortly thereafter, before you have a chance to open up the distance again, either they or the driver in front slams on their brakes to avoid an unpredictable obstacle. I don't see how anyone could reasonably claim that you were at fault for that situation—you were trying to follow at a safe distance, but were thwarted by the actions of another driver.
It's hard to tell which is crazier these days—the USA or everywhere else. Normally I'd say the USA, but then I hear about someone threatened with arrest for monitoring his own house... What possible expectation of privacy can there be for something which can be seen from a public street, inside someone else's house?
This whole "right to privacy" nonsense has gone too far. The right to privacy legitimately extends only so far as the right to keep things private. Once something becomes public, e.g. plainly visible from a public street, your desire for privacy no longer applies.
There is a separate, private, secret agreement they have with UMG that basically allows them carte blanche to delete your video, though....
No, it's the public ToS (in which they never actually promised to host your videos in perpetuity) which allows them to delete your video from their servers. The private agreement with UMG just commits them to doing so at UMG's request, rather than leaving it to their own discretion.
Coercing you under pain of fines or imprisonment is less coercive on the whole than coercing me under pain of death.
No real argument here, though I'm not really interested in comparative degrees of coercion. Any coercion is too much.
In fact, this is exactly the reason why every civilized country has socialized health care by now.
Non sequitor. The equation with socialized health care isn't "coercion via threats of fines/imprisonment" vs. "coercion via threats of death". It's "coercion via threats of fines/imprisonment" vs. "no coercion at all". Not offering health care isn't coercion; neither is offering it conditionally.
Perhaps you would indeed make the same choice if you were being coerced. That doesn't mean you actually are being coerced.
Insisting that limited options equate to coercion is self-defeating. Any contract made under duress is void, for obvious reasons. Why would anyone offer you help, apart from charity, knowing that your agreement to pay them back isn't worth the paper is was written on? The ability to enter into binding agreements gives you the option of escaping the situation. If you claim duress, that option disappears.
I hope you were being sarcastic, but on the Internet one can never be sure. Did you really mean to say that there is no significant difference between receiving an offer which you could refuse without penalty, remaining exactly as you were before, and actual duress, where refusal will result in a violation of either your personal rights or property rights (or both)?
Even in the most extreme case imaginable, if you were dying, and only what they offered could save your life, they didn't put you in that position. They didn't have to make the offer at all—and you don't have to accept. There is no coercion here. If you do accept, you do it of your own free will.
The reason why bank balances... is property is because it is valuable, it is legally tied to you to do with as you please. You may buy it, sell it, or trade it for its afore-mentioned value. What other attributes does it require in order to qualify as property?
Except that you can't actually buy/sell/trade bank account balances without the cooperation of the bank. Your actual rights as a depositor are limited to withdrawing the money owed you from your account, either on demand or after a predetermined time depending on the type of account. The privileges of writing checks and/or performing electronic transfers without first withdrawing the money are the result of a separate agreements between you and the bank, and subject to various limitations.
Perhaps a better counterexample would be private information. Again, private information is valuable, legally tied to you, and able to be bought, sold, or traded. If it is not our property, then an explanation is required as why we should get any control over how it is distributed at all.
That is perhaps an even worse counter-example from my point of view, since I don't hold that we should get any control over how such information is distributed once it leaves our hands. Information is only private to the extent we actually keep it confined to our (tangible) property; once it's out in the wild, others are free to use it as they will. It's only our information in the sense of our parents, our children, our discoveries—something related to us, not something we own or have any exclusive right to.
Besides which, isn't all property just a series of legal obligations and agreements?
No, the legal obligations and agreements are about property, not property in their own right.
At the most fundamental level, an item of property amounts to some aspect of the universe which one can use to accomplish some action. Property need not consist of matter; alternatives include a bounded volume of space, or stored energy.
Property rights, in turn, are freedom from interference in that use, established from the first use of the property in an action consistent with the existing rights of others, and possibly transferred from person to person via contract. Such rights are only meaningful when it is actually possible for others to interfere—something that is only true of tangible property. The right to use your property is not exclusive except insofar as another's use would interfere with your own. With "intangible property" that is an impossibility, which means there is no point in the concept. It would be rather like claiming the right not to be eaten by giant pink unicorns from the ninth dimension. There is no reason for anyone to care whether you have the right or not, since there is no way it could ever be violated.
Money stored electronically at the bank is one of the classic counterexamples to the belief that all property is (or should be) tangible.
It's not a very good counterexample. There is no property "stored electronically at the bank". The bank's records, electronic and otherwise, are merely accounting data, describing the tangible property (cash) which the bank owes to each customer in exchange for their deposits. If those records were wiped out it wouldn't destroy any actual property or the bank's obligations to its creditors (depositors); it would just make it rather more difficult to reconstruct what those obligations were.
When you deposit cash at a bank, you aren't exchanging tangible property for intangible (electronic) property, you're exchanging tangible property in the present for a claim to tangible property in the future. You do this because the bank is offering to pay back more in the future than you deposited (interest), and/or because it's more convenient to hold and trade electronic IOUs, property claims, than the property itself.
TL;DR: You don't need to invent intangible forms of "property" to explain the operation of a bank. Ordinary tangible property is sufficient to the task.
The ghost of Plato offers you one of two pills. If you take the blue pill, from now on your government will precisely represent the will of its people. If you take the red pill, your country will be seized by an intelligent dictator whose political views are identical to yours. Which will it be?
No contest; I'd take the red pill. Of course, my political leanings are such that the "intelligent dictator" would be a pure figurehead, uninterested in exercising any actual political power. It's a bit hard to complain seriously about a "dictator" forever bound from interfering.
The problem with the first option is that "the will of the people" far outstrips "the standing of the people"; in other words, a truly representative government with no other boundaries would exert its will in all kinds of situations where most of those being represented lack any legitimate standing (i.e. are not at risk of being harmed by the outcome) and thus should not have any influence. Democracy is a great idea in the context of running a voluntary organization, but the only legitimate option for any group you are not able to opt out of is unanimous consent.
No, the statute applies to all first-class letter delivery via "post routes", which includes, among other things, all public roads. No official US mail boxes need be involved. Private carriers can carry letters if they pay the USPS stamp fees in addition to their own delivery costs, ensuring that private delivery is always the more expensive option. There are a few other less-common exceptions, listed in the linked Wikipedia article, including "special messenger services" and free delivery. On the whole, however, the system is specifically designed to make it impossible to compete on level footing with the USPS for normal delivery of first-class letters.
Don't take my word for it, however. This is what the USPS has to say:
The Private Express Statutes (PES) are a group of federal civil and criminal laws that, for the most part, make it unlawful for any entity other than the U.S. Postal Service® to send or carry letters over post routes for compensation unless appropriate postage is paid in an amount equaling what would have been paid had the letters been sent through the Postal Service(TM).
The problem is that if the banks were allowed to fail on their own, not only would the investors of those banks be (rightly) wiped out, but the collateral damage would have been tragic.... Runs on ALL the banks, savings and investments wiped out, massive, depression-style unemployment.
That's the risk you run by doing business with banks known to run the fractional-reserve scam, simultaneously promising immediate access to deposits and lending them out to other customers. When a bank fails, not only is the bank (rightly) wiped out, but so are (rightly) those who deposited their funds into those banks knowing that they wouldn't be held in reserve, that they may not be there on demand in the event of a run on the bank, or perhaps ever if enough of those loans happen to default.
Those who knew better than to trust fractional-reserve banks with their money will be in a relatively good position to buy up foreclosed assets and businesses, extend loans at profitable rates, and, more generally, to begin the recovery process. I'm not saying that the failure is a good thing, but anyone able to overlook the growing risk of fractional reserves must be economically blind. This disaster has been a long time coming, and it's not because the banks were "too big to fail" or "not regulated enough", it's because they were legally permitted to commit outright fraud on a grand scale, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve.
The problem is it creates the wrong incentives. Data is not like water or gas where you can save it by not using it. The fixed costs are the same no matter how much bandwith we use, and any bandwidth we don't use is lost forever.
That's superficially true, but it fails when you look at the whole system. For one thing, supplying water or gas is not that dissimilar to supplying data. In either case, you have both a peak delivery rate determined by your distribution infrastructure, and an actual amount used. Parts of either kind of infrastructure may be shared between multiple users. A higher peak delivery rate costs more not only for the increased amount used but also for the more expensive infrastructure necessary to deliver it.
In the ISP's case they're paying for both the infrastructure ("last mile") and the upstream connection to their Internet provider(s). The latter part is the "actual amount used". These sorts of connections are generally one-way (mostly downloads), so the ISP is paying for transit based on the amount used / peak capacity required, rather than peering. If the ISP's overall bandwidth requirements drop, they can shut down some extra outside connections or renegotiate their peak transit requirements. They can't "conserve" bandwidth, saving it for later use, but they can avoid purchasing more transit than they actually need, and save the money instead. It works out the same in the end.
The actual "last mile" aspect of the infrastructure is, of course, a fixed cost, and might as well be utilized to its full capacity. However, large parts of the ISP's local infrastructure are still shared resources (upstream of the DSLAM or its cable equivalent), and the same arguments apply for this shared portion as for the ISP's upstream connections.
To summarize, there are basically three different kinds of costs associated with an Internet connection from an ISP. First, you have the ISP's transit costs, which scale roughly linearly with actual use. This is the part most compatible with usage-based billing. Second, you have the ISP's shared infrastructure, which scales with the peak bandwidth requirements for your neighborhood, plus a certain amount of fixed cost. Since the ISP probably doesn't want to vary their prices based on your location, they'll most likely be forced to rely on prioritization. The shared infrastructure should be sufficient to cover the median use for each end-user connection speed during peak hours, but above-average users may find themselves throttled in proportion to their rated speed to ensure the available bandwidth is allocated fairly.
Finally, you have the unshared connection to each end user, which is a combination of fixed costs and an additional amount depending on required peak connection speed. The final price should thus include a fixed component, a component proportional to the peak bandwidth for the local infrastructure, and a component proportional to the actual amount of data transferred. The last component may vary based on peak/off-peak hours to ensure that the fixed costs (infrastructure) are utilized efficiently.
Done properly, the "community" doesn't have that power. The utility doesn't provide an actual Internet connection, just a fast local network linking the various residences, businesses, and other organizations in the area. For Internet access you subscribe to an independent ISP, who is also connected to this local network, and route your non-local traffic through them over a secure tunnel. Only you and your ISP can see your actual Internet traffic. Since the ISP doesn't need to worry about the "last mile" it should be much more competitive than the current system. Anyone with at least one fast outside connection to the Internet can set up shop as an ISP.
If there are no panic-induced injuries then there will be no (legal) consequences.
And if there are any panic-induced injuries then they should (legally) be the responsibility of the ones who panicked and crushed or trampled others in their haste to save themselves, not the person who yelled "Fire!", regardless of their intentions. That sort of behavior isn't acceptable even if there really is a fire.
That person could be subject to civil penalties for violating their contract with the owner of the venue, however. That's a property and contract issue, not a freedom-of-speech issue.
PS: I hate that particular example, a much better example of legitimate restriction on speech is that of slander or harassment.
Harassment law isn't so much about speech as it is about forcing others to listen. Whatever you're actually saying, you can't inflict it on others against their will without violating their right of self-ownership. Laws against slander/libel/defamation, on the other hand, are a form of censorship. They're also counter-productive. There are few better ways to lend someone's lies legitimacy than trying to shut them up with a court order. You need to challenge them in public, not in a courtroom.
I think as an upper limit only inflicting harm proportional to the harm done to you is a pretty reasonable ethical and moral standard regardless of your ethical/moral/religious views.
I don't accept that standard.... The reason is that sometimes the amount of harm done is reduced through no desire of the attacker.
I agree that limiting yourself to the actual harm done is overly strict. There are two components involved here. Whether the harm was accidental or deliberate, the one causing the harm owes restitution for actual damages, i.e. must "make whole" the one who was harmed. A choice not to make restitution can itself be classified as deliberate harm. In addition, if the harm was deliberate, I would suggest that the upper limit for retribution be set proportional to what the other party chose to do, even if outside factors reduced the actual impact. Having chosen to do something to someone else, you can't rationally argue (due to estoppel) that they would be wrong to make the same choice toward you, even if your attempt fell short of your goal.
If you go beyond that, and enact a form of retribution which exceeds what the other person chose to do to you, you can't argue that their choice legitimizes your own.
I'd suggest a different standard: you're allowed to use whatever force on the people causing the harm to stop them from doing you harm.
That goes much too far. For example, it would authorize killing someone to prevent them from picking your pocket. The general standard for a preemptive coercive response, to stop harm rather than respond to it after the fact, is that a reasonable level of preemptive force is justified in response to an imminent threat of irreversible harm, meaning harm which cannot be fully compensated via restitution. (The practicality of actually enforcing restitution may be taken into account.) Typical examples would include threats against your life or long-term health, or the destruction or permanent loss of irreplaceable property. There is still the possibility of excessive force, above and beyond that necessary to prevent the harm, though that standard should be applied leniently, in favor of the defender rather than the attacker.
The "rule" you quoted is for monopolies, not for competitive environments, and it is something we try hard, and even regulate, to avoid.
Except in the case of copyright, where the distribution monopoly is enshrined by law, and is something the publishing industry and government collude on very closely, and even regulate, to protect.
Even more ironically, it's the same folks who love to talk about "life, liberty and the persuit of happiness" the most that seem to forget the bit about the next clause, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men" more often than not.
It's not forgotten, although whether that approach is effective or even justified if effective is debatable. Either way, the nature of government is in conflict with liberty (which incorporates both "life" and "pursuit of happiness"); it can only be justified to the extent that it does more to secure these rights than its existence detracts from them. Every action it takes which is not directly in support of these rights increases that conflict and serves to undermine its legitimacy.
The downside to that is that it affects the final score based on whichever type of mod won out, not the individual mods.
For example, a comment which started out at +1 and received +1 Insightful and +3 Funny (and was thus tagged as Funny) would end up buried at -1, even though you might have been interested in the comment at +2 Insightful had the Funny mods simply been ignored.
My preference would be to track the uncapped totals for each mod type, and sum the product of each total and a per-user weight when the comment is displayed. Using that scheme, you could set Funny to 0x (ignored), or even -0.2x for a slight negative influence, while leaving the other mods alone.
I would also try to do something about the saturation effect caused by every mod having an influence of +1 or -1 on the final score, with only seven levels to choose from (-1 to +5). That isn't a problem if the number of moderators; however, if there are 20+ moderators for the same controversial comment the outcome is essentially dependent on the order in which they spend their mod points, which might as well be random. Perhaps an asymptotic function would work better, e.g. 5*N/((abs(N)+1), where N is the sum of the scaled mods.
The problem with the definition of freedom, as defined by teenagers (not chronological teenagers, but psychological teenagers) is that it does not take into account how some "freedoms" naturally and automatically impinge on the freedoms of others.
The problem is with the definition, but you're making the same mistake. Liberty is about negative rights, freedom from something. You are speaking in terms of positive rights, freedom to have or do something. Naturally the latter form are often in conflict. Negative rights, however, never conflict with each other. There is no need to prioritize or balance one freedom against another. Any action which does not violate anyone else's liberty, their negative rights, is permitted without reprisal. Any action which does violate anyone's liberty, to any degree, demands compensation ("making whole"). If the action was deliberate, there is also a case for retribution—if you choose to do something, you can hardly if others choose to do the same to you.
In this case, you possess the right of self-ownership—freedom from interference in the use of your own mind and body. If someone else infects you with a disease they carry, through malice or negligence, they have violated that freedom, which means that they owe you compensation. In extreme cases, where there is an imminent risk of irreversible harm, you may even be justified in practicing preemptive self-defense to prevent the infection. However, one is only responsible for actual damage, not the mere possibility of damage.
For example: your freedom to play your music as loud as you want, my freedom to get a good night's sleep. Your freedom to consume nicotine, my freedom to breathe clean air when I walk down the sidewalk. You freedom to talk on your cellphone, my freedom to enjoy a movie. Etc.
The same principle applies here. You don't have a right to play your music or talk on your cell phone—you have a right to freedom from interference in playing your music or talking, just as others have a right to freedom from interference in use of their body and property (e.g. their house), including interference from the noise. The combination of the two means you can play music or talk on your phone provided you don't force others to listen to it. In the case of a shared space, like the cinema, the owner of the venue coordinates what visitors are allowed to do, or required to put up with, as a condition of entry. Similarly with smoking vs. dumping the smoke and other byproducts in the air for others to breath.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, why the hell would you think it's a good idea if the "Top 100 domain name" are at risk!?
I never said it was. I simply said that most domains aren't interesting enough to warrant the degree of paranoia you were displaying over someone hacking into your servers to access your Namecoin keys. For the "Top 100" domains, where someone may actually have an incentive to break in, the extra security measures required to prevent unauthorized access to the authentication tokens aren't much of a hardship.
To be fair, most decent registrars hold on to the domain for two weeks after it expires before letting it go, so if you aren't noticing your domain being inaccessible for an entire week, it's probably not very important.
Nonetheless, it does happen. Perhaps not to you or me, but people have lost their domains this way. Botched management transitions, misfiled e-mail notices, new charge card numbers preventing automatic renewal, admins on vacation at just the wrong time... maybe you don't make these mistakes, but not everyone is as careful as you are, and even the best admins can mess up occasionally.
I run a stupid amount of domains and websites for over a decade without pissing off any three letter agency, I don't think this is likely to effect me.
Then you're participating in the wrong thread. You obviously have no real interest in a distributed name resolution system. We're trying to solve a problem which does not affect you, but does affect others to the point where the cost and risk of managing their own security is far outweighed by the protection against censorship the distributed model offers.
Why are you keeping your domain keys on publically-accessible servers in the first place?
To dynamically change settings as needed on the fly. Not everyone can afford anycasting. ... De-automate my work? Yeah, no.
You can still automate the process, even if the system with the keys is not linked to the Internet. The air-gap approach is the most secure, of course, but you could set up a private, filtered network, or even a simple serial connection, and only pass well-defined commands and responses between the key-server and the rest of the network. The Namecoin protocol allows you to run your own traditional nameservers for subdomains, so you're unlikely to require frequent updates to the top-level domain in the first place.
Actually, it's a very good argument. What Santorum didn't point out, however—for obvious reasons—is that it applies equally well to heterosexual couples. In other words, he is arguing (unwittingly, no doubt) against government recognizing marriage at all as a legal concept, placing all relationships—regardless of the genders, or numbers, involved—on equal footing. I can think of few better resolutions to this issue than government getting out of the marriage business entirely.
What do you do when someone obtains your Namecoin hash keys by breaking into one of your servers and then transfers the domain to themselves?
Why are you keeping your domain keys on publically-accessible servers in the first place? Keep the keys on an offline PC, sign any domain changes offline, and transfer the signed transactions to an Internet-connected computer after the fact. Problem solved.
Any distributed system is going to require a certain amount of responsibility on the part of its users. Either you trust some third-party registrar with your domain—in which case you're out of luck if they decide to play games with your domain, or if someone else puts enough pressure on them to do so—or you use a distributed system, where no one—including you—has the ability to override apparently authentic orders, and take responsibility for securing the authentication tokens yourself. Either approach involves a certain amount of risk.
P.S. In case you hadn't noticed, people lose domains all the time with the current system. Forget to renew your domain on time—transferred to some ad agency who will be happy to sell it back for ten times what you originally paid. Annoy the wrong three-letter agency—redirected to an ICE warning page. Unless you're the holder of a Top 100 domain name, I'd say the threat of a zero-day exploit targeting your Namecoin keys should be rather far down the list of things to worry about, especially if you're doing something that requires a distributed name resolution system in the first place.
No, the answer is that copyright doesn't grant all the privileges the publishers are claiming, at least in the USA. In particular, the Doctrine of First Sale pretty much says that you can legally do whatever you want with your copy once they've sold it to you (aside from using it to make more copies). That includes not only obvious things like transportation, but also lending—both free/personal loans and commercial rental.
Rental companies and retailers often do have special agreements with the publishers, but that's because the publishers are offering them a better deal, not because they need the agreement simply to resell or rent out the physical books/DVDs/etc.
Digital media falls into a rather gray area, which is how the publishers like it. They take advantage of the ephemeral nature of digital goods to undermine the First Sale doctrine, while simultaneously claiming that the content has been fixed in a tangible medium in order to gain copyright privileges over it. It should be one or the other, but they leverage the confusion to get their way on both counts.
The distributed name resolution system you described already exists: Namecoin
I agree, but I was responding to this comment:
You should never be so close to the car in front of you that this happens. If you are, you absolutely are at fault.
which left no room for exceptions.
You don't always have that much control over how close you are. For example, you may be driving along in moderately heavy traffic, leaving a reasonable and safe following distance, when another driver decides to merge into the gap. Shortly thereafter, before you have a chance to open up the distance again, either they or the driver in front slams on their brakes to avoid an unpredictable obstacle. I don't see how anyone could reasonably claim that you were at fault for that situation—you were trying to follow at a safe distance, but were thwarted by the actions of another driver.
It's hard to tell which is crazier these days—the USA or everywhere else. Normally I'd say the USA, but then I hear about someone threatened with arrest for monitoring his own house... What possible expectation of privacy can there be for something which can be seen from a public street, inside someone else's house?
This whole "right to privacy" nonsense has gone too far. The right to privacy legitimately extends only so far as the right to keep things private. Once something becomes public, e.g. plainly visible from a public street, your desire for privacy no longer applies.
There is a separate, private, secret agreement they have with UMG that basically allows them carte blanche to delete your video, though....
No, it's the public ToS (in which they never actually promised to host your videos in perpetuity) which allows them to delete your video from their servers. The private agreement with UMG just commits them to doing so at UMG's request, rather than leaving it to their own discretion.
Coercing you under pain of fines or imprisonment is less coercive on the whole than coercing me under pain of death.
No real argument here, though I'm not really interested in comparative degrees of coercion. Any coercion is too much.
In fact, this is exactly the reason why every civilized country has socialized health care by now.
Non sequitor. The equation with socialized health care isn't "coercion via threats of fines/imprisonment" vs. "coercion via threats of death". It's "coercion via threats of fines/imprisonment" vs. "no coercion at all". Not offering health care isn't coercion; neither is offering it conditionally.
Perhaps you would indeed make the same choice if you were being coerced. That doesn't mean you actually are being coerced.
Insisting that limited options equate to coercion is self-defeating. Any contract made under duress is void, for obvious reasons. Why would anyone offer you help, apart from charity, knowing that your agreement to pay them back isn't worth the paper is was written on? The ability to enter into binding agreements gives you the option of escaping the situation. If you claim duress, that option disappears.
I hope you were being sarcastic, but on the Internet one can never be sure. Did you really mean to say that there is no significant difference between receiving an offer which you could refuse without penalty, remaining exactly as you were before, and actual duress, where refusal will result in a violation of either your personal rights or property rights (or both)?
Even in the most extreme case imaginable, if you were dying, and only what they offered could save your life, they didn't put you in that position. They didn't have to make the offer at all—and you don't have to accept. There is no coercion here. If you do accept, you do it of your own free will.
The reason why bank balances ... is property is because it is valuable, it is legally tied to you to do with as you please. You may buy it, sell it, or trade it for its afore-mentioned value. What other attributes does it require in order to qualify as property?
Except that you can't actually buy/sell/trade bank account balances without the cooperation of the bank. Your actual rights as a depositor are limited to withdrawing the money owed you from your account, either on demand or after a predetermined time depending on the type of account. The privileges of writing checks and/or performing electronic transfers without first withdrawing the money are the result of a separate agreements between you and the bank, and subject to various limitations.
Perhaps a better counterexample would be private information. Again, private information is valuable, legally tied to you, and able to be bought, sold, or traded. If it is not our property, then an explanation is required as why we should get any control over how it is distributed at all.
That is perhaps an even worse counter-example from my point of view, since I don't hold that we should get any control over how such information is distributed once it leaves our hands. Information is only private to the extent we actually keep it confined to our (tangible) property; once it's out in the wild, others are free to use it as they will. It's only our information in the sense of our parents, our children, our discoveries—something related to us, not something we own or have any exclusive right to.
Besides which, isn't all property just a series of legal obligations and agreements?
No, the legal obligations and agreements are about property, not property in their own right.
At the most fundamental level, an item of property amounts to some aspect of the universe which one can use to accomplish some action. Property need not consist of matter; alternatives include a bounded volume of space, or stored energy.
Property rights, in turn, are freedom from interference in that use, established from the first use of the property in an action consistent with the existing rights of others, and possibly transferred from person to person via contract. Such rights are only meaningful when it is actually possible for others to interfere—something that is only true of tangible property. The right to use your property is not exclusive except insofar as another's use would interfere with your own. With "intangible property" that is an impossibility, which means there is no point in the concept. It would be rather like claiming the right not to be eaten by giant pink unicorns from the ninth dimension. There is no reason for anyone to care whether you have the right or not, since there is no way it could ever be violated.
Money stored electronically at the bank is one of the classic counterexamples to the belief that all property is (or should be) tangible.
It's not a very good counterexample. There is no property "stored electronically at the bank". The bank's records, electronic and otherwise, are merely accounting data, describing the tangible property (cash) which the bank owes to each customer in exchange for their deposits. If those records were wiped out it wouldn't destroy any actual property or the bank's obligations to its creditors (depositors); it would just make it rather more difficult to reconstruct what those obligations were.
When you deposit cash at a bank, you aren't exchanging tangible property for intangible (electronic) property, you're exchanging tangible property in the present for a claim to tangible property in the future. You do this because the bank is offering to pay back more in the future than you deposited (interest), and/or because it's more convenient to hold and trade electronic IOUs, property claims, than the property itself.
TL;DR: You don't need to invent intangible forms of "property" to explain the operation of a bank. Ordinary tangible property is sufficient to the task.
The ghost of Plato offers you one of two pills. If you take the blue pill, from now on your government will precisely represent the will of its people. If you take the red pill, your country will be seized by an intelligent dictator whose political views are identical to yours. Which will it be?
No contest; I'd take the red pill. Of course, my political leanings are such that the "intelligent dictator" would be a pure figurehead, uninterested in exercising any actual political power. It's a bit hard to complain seriously about a "dictator" forever bound from interfering.
The problem with the first option is that "the will of the people" far outstrips "the standing of the people"; in other words, a truly representative government with no other boundaries would exert its will in all kinds of situations where most of those being represented lack any legitimate standing (i.e. are not at risk of being harmed by the outcome) and thus should not have any influence. Democracy is a great idea in the context of running a voluntary organization, but the only legitimate option for any group you are not able to opt out of is unanimous consent.
Yeah, to an official US mail box.
No, the statute applies to all first-class letter delivery via "post routes", which includes, among other things, all public roads. No official US mail boxes need be involved. Private carriers can carry letters if they pay the USPS stamp fees in addition to their own delivery costs, ensuring that private delivery is always the more expensive option. There are a few other less-common exceptions, listed in the linked Wikipedia article, including "special messenger services" and free delivery. On the whole, however, the system is specifically designed to make it impossible to compete on level footing with the USPS for normal delivery of first-class letters.
Don't take my word for it, however. This is what the USPS has to say:
The Private Express Statutes (PES) are a group of federal civil and criminal laws that, for the most part, make it unlawful for any entity other than the U.S. Postal Service® to send or carry letters over post routes for compensation unless appropriate postage is paid in an amount equaling what would have been paid had the letters been sent through the Postal Service(TM).
Publication 542 - 1-1 What Are the Private Express Statutes?
The problem is that if the banks were allowed to fail on their own, not only would the investors of those banks be (rightly) wiped out, but the collateral damage would have been tragic.... Runs on ALL the banks, savings and investments wiped out, massive, depression-style unemployment.
That's the risk you run by doing business with banks known to run the fractional-reserve scam, simultaneously promising immediate access to deposits and lending them out to other customers. When a bank fails, not only is the bank (rightly) wiped out, but so are (rightly) those who deposited their funds into those banks knowing that they wouldn't be held in reserve, that they may not be there on demand in the event of a run on the bank, or perhaps ever if enough of those loans happen to default.
Those who knew better than to trust fractional-reserve banks with their money will be in a relatively good position to buy up foreclosed assets and businesses, extend loans at profitable rates, and, more generally, to begin the recovery process. I'm not saying that the failure is a good thing, but anyone able to overlook the growing risk of fractional reserves must be economically blind. This disaster has been a long time coming, and it's not because the banks were "too big to fail" or "not regulated enough", it's because they were legally permitted to commit outright fraud on a grand scale, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve.
The problem is it creates the wrong incentives. Data is not like water or gas where you can save it by not using it. The fixed costs are the same no matter how much bandwith we use, and any bandwidth we don't use is lost forever.
That's superficially true, but it fails when you look at the whole system. For one thing, supplying water or gas is not that dissimilar to supplying data. In either case, you have both a peak delivery rate determined by your distribution infrastructure, and an actual amount used. Parts of either kind of infrastructure may be shared between multiple users. A higher peak delivery rate costs more not only for the increased amount used but also for the more expensive infrastructure necessary to deliver it.
In the ISP's case they're paying for both the infrastructure ("last mile") and the upstream connection to their Internet provider(s). The latter part is the "actual amount used". These sorts of connections are generally one-way (mostly downloads), so the ISP is paying for transit based on the amount used / peak capacity required, rather than peering. If the ISP's overall bandwidth requirements drop, they can shut down some extra outside connections or renegotiate their peak transit requirements. They can't "conserve" bandwidth, saving it for later use, but they can avoid purchasing more transit than they actually need, and save the money instead. It works out the same in the end.
The actual "last mile" aspect of the infrastructure is, of course, a fixed cost, and might as well be utilized to its full capacity. However, large parts of the ISP's local infrastructure are still shared resources (upstream of the DSLAM or its cable equivalent), and the same arguments apply for this shared portion as for the ISP's upstream connections.
To summarize, there are basically three different kinds of costs associated with an Internet connection from an ISP. First, you have the ISP's transit costs, which scale roughly linearly with actual use. This is the part most compatible with usage-based billing. Second, you have the ISP's shared infrastructure, which scales with the peak bandwidth requirements for your neighborhood, plus a certain amount of fixed cost. Since the ISP probably doesn't want to vary their prices based on your location, they'll most likely be forced to rely on prioritization. The shared infrastructure should be sufficient to cover the median use for each end-user connection speed during peak hours, but above-average users may find themselves throttled in proportion to their rated speed to ensure the available bandwidth is allocated fairly.
Finally, you have the unshared connection to each end user, which is a combination of fixed costs and an additional amount depending on required peak connection speed. The final price should thus include a fixed component, a component proportional to the peak bandwidth for the local infrastructure, and a component proportional to the actual amount of data transferred. The last component may vary based on peak/off-peak hours to ensure that the fixed costs (infrastructure) are utilized efficiently.
Done properly, the "community" doesn't have that power. The utility doesn't provide an actual Internet connection, just a fast local network linking the various residences, businesses, and other organizations in the area. For Internet access you subscribe to an independent ISP, who is also connected to this local network, and route your non-local traffic through them over a secure tunnel. Only you and your ISP can see your actual Internet traffic. Since the ISP doesn't need to worry about the "last mile" it should be much more competitive than the current system. Anyone with at least one fast outside connection to the Internet can set up shop as an ISP.
If there are no panic-induced injuries then there will be no (legal) consequences.
And if there are any panic-induced injuries then they should (legally) be the responsibility of the ones who panicked and crushed or trampled others in their haste to save themselves, not the person who yelled "Fire!", regardless of their intentions. That sort of behavior isn't acceptable even if there really is a fire.
That person could be subject to civil penalties for violating their contract with the owner of the venue, however. That's a property and contract issue, not a freedom-of-speech issue.
PS: I hate that particular example, a much better example of legitimate restriction on speech is that of slander or harassment.
Harassment law isn't so much about speech as it is about forcing others to listen. Whatever you're actually saying, you can't inflict it on others against their will without violating their right of self-ownership. Laws against slander/libel/defamation, on the other hand, are a form of censorship. They're also counter-productive. There are few better ways to lend someone's lies legitimacy than trying to shut them up with a court order. You need to challenge them in public, not in a courtroom.
I think as an upper limit only inflicting harm proportional to the harm done to you is a pretty reasonable ethical and moral standard regardless of your ethical/moral/religious views.
I don't accept that standard. ... The reason is that sometimes the amount of harm done is reduced through no desire of the attacker.
I agree that limiting yourself to the actual harm done is overly strict. There are two components involved here. Whether the harm was accidental or deliberate, the one causing the harm owes restitution for actual damages, i.e. must "make whole" the one who was harmed. A choice not to make restitution can itself be classified as deliberate harm. In addition, if the harm was deliberate, I would suggest that the upper limit for retribution be set proportional to what the other party chose to do, even if outside factors reduced the actual impact. Having chosen to do something to someone else, you can't rationally argue (due to estoppel) that they would be wrong to make the same choice toward you, even if your attempt fell short of your goal.
If you go beyond that, and enact a form of retribution which exceeds what the other person chose to do to you, you can't argue that their choice legitimizes your own.
I'd suggest a different standard: you're allowed to use whatever force on the people causing the harm to stop them from doing you harm.
That goes much too far. For example, it would authorize killing someone to prevent them from picking your pocket. The general standard for a preemptive coercive response, to stop harm rather than respond to it after the fact, is that a reasonable level of preemptive force is justified in response to an imminent threat of irreversible harm, meaning harm which cannot be fully compensated via restitution. (The practicality of actually enforcing restitution may be taken into account.) Typical examples would include threats against your life or long-term health, or the destruction or permanent loss of irreplaceable property. There is still the possibility of excessive force, above and beyond that necessary to prevent the harm, though that standard should be applied leniently, in favor of the defender rather than the attacker.
The "rule" you quoted is for monopolies, not for competitive environments, and it is something we try hard, and even regulate, to avoid.
Except in the case of copyright, where the distribution monopoly is enshrined by law, and is something the publishing industry and government collude on very closely, and even regulate, to protect.
Even more ironically, it's the same folks who love to talk about "life, liberty and the persuit of happiness" the most that seem to forget the bit about the next clause, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men" more often than not.
It's not forgotten, although whether that approach is effective or even justified if effective is debatable. Either way, the nature of government is in conflict with liberty (which incorporates both "life" and "pursuit of happiness"); it can only be justified to the extent that it does more to secure these rights than its existence detracts from them. Every action it takes which is not directly in support of these rights increases that conflict and serves to undermine its legitimacy.
The downside to that is that it affects the final score based on whichever type of mod won out, not the individual mods.
For example, a comment which started out at +1 and received +1 Insightful and +3 Funny (and was thus tagged as Funny) would end up buried at -1, even though you might have been interested in the comment at +2 Insightful had the Funny mods simply been ignored.
My preference would be to track the uncapped totals for each mod type, and sum the product of each total and a per-user weight when the comment is displayed. Using that scheme, you could set Funny to 0x (ignored), or even -0.2x for a slight negative influence, while leaving the other mods alone.
I would also try to do something about the saturation effect caused by every mod having an influence of +1 or -1 on the final score, with only seven levels to choose from (-1 to +5). That isn't a problem if the number of moderators; however, if there are 20+ moderators for the same controversial comment the outcome is essentially dependent on the order in which they spend their mod points, which might as well be random. Perhaps an asymptotic function would work better, e.g. 5*N/((abs(N)+1), where N is the sum of the scaled mods.
The problem with the definition of freedom, as defined by teenagers (not chronological teenagers, but psychological teenagers) is that it does not take into account how some "freedoms" naturally and automatically impinge on the freedoms of others.
The problem is with the definition, but you're making the same mistake. Liberty is about negative rights, freedom from something. You are speaking in terms of positive rights, freedom to have or do something. Naturally the latter form are often in conflict. Negative rights, however, never conflict with each other. There is no need to prioritize or balance one freedom against another. Any action which does not violate anyone else's liberty, their negative rights, is permitted without reprisal. Any action which does violate anyone's liberty, to any degree, demands compensation ("making whole"). If the action was deliberate, there is also a case for retribution—if you choose to do something, you can hardly if others choose to do the same to you.
In this case, you possess the right of self-ownership—freedom from interference in the use of your own mind and body. If someone else infects you with a disease they carry, through malice or negligence, they have violated that freedom, which means that they owe you compensation. In extreme cases, where there is an imminent risk of irreversible harm, you may even be justified in practicing preemptive self-defense to prevent the infection. However, one is only responsible for actual damage, not the mere possibility of damage.
For example: your freedom to play your music as loud as you want, my freedom to get a good night's sleep. Your freedom to consume nicotine, my freedom to breathe clean air when I walk down the sidewalk. You freedom to talk on your cellphone, my freedom to enjoy a movie. Etc.
The same principle applies here. You don't have a right to play your music or talk on your cell phone—you have a right to freedom from interference in playing your music or talking, just as others have a right to freedom from interference in use of their body and property (e.g. their house), including interference from the noise. The combination of the two means you can play music or talk on your phone provided you don't force others to listen to it. In the case of a shared space, like the cinema, the owner of the venue coordinates what visitors are allowed to do, or required to put up with, as a condition of entry. Similarly with smoking vs. dumping the smoke and other byproducts in the air for others to breath.