Technically, what you "own" in that description is the physical media.
So you're saying that "it" is the DVD. Fair enough. So you "own [the DVD] on dvd"?
No, it's perfectly obvious that the "it" in that advertising campaign refers to the information content, not the physical media it's stored on. That may not be what they mean, or even legally correct, but it is what they say.
Anyway, who cares about owning a (non-recordable) DVD, apart from the included content? Would you pay $20 for a DVD without knowing what information it contained (if any)? It only makes sense for the subject of the advertisement to be the content, not the media.
An AI could definitely help advise the humans actually responsible for making decisions regarding allocation of their own resources. To an extent, we already do that—consider the algorithms in charge of high-speed trading. However, that is hardly the same thing as placing an AI in charge of allocation of all resources throughout society, without regard to their actual ownership.
Venus' concept is a massive global supercomputer network that monitors the worlds resources, allocating them only where they are needed and in reasonable quantities, eliminating waste and misuse, but being auditing and controlled by human-elect.
Putting aside the totalitarian distopia this would imply, the idea is simply unworkable for lack of global information. The same issue applies to all central planning, really. Economically efficient allocation of resources depends not just on historical data you can study and model, but people's current preferences. At best you can study people's past choices and build a society ideally suited to them, but by the time you've done so those preferences have inevitably changed—and the first real indication you have that they have changed is widespread surpluses and shortages, exactly what you were trying to prevent.
The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.
people could live simple, happier lives and not be wage-slaves
True. Instead of being "wage-slaves" (a term which stretches the idea of slavery well beyond its natural limits) they'd simply be slaves, with no control over the allocation of their own labor or its fruits. That's so much simpler.
This is a common fallacy. It is true that prices are set to maximize revenues, regardless of production costs, but the point at which revenues are maximized is influenced by supply and demand. When prices and costs are such that there is an economic profit to be made (vs. the opportunity cost), competition increases the supply and thus drives prices downward toward the cost of production. An increase in production costs drives marginal producers out of the market, reducing supply and thus raising prices. The correlation is indirect, but quite real.
Of course, supply and demand apply to wages as well. At the moment all indications are that there is no shortage of workers willing to accept these conditions in exchange for the current rate of pay. If you wish to better their conditions you won't do that by outlawing or otherwise penalizing the best jobs currently available in the region. You might consider driving up the demand by preferring high-value products manufactured in China; that would give the workers there a stronger bargaining position.
But in humans, carrying over genes is not the only reason. There is also the matter of respect, and trustworthiness. In order to convince your allies that you are trustworthy and 'good', you would exhibit selfless acts, with no expectation of return from the person concerned, but definite returns from those you know.
You can take the argument even further. Even when no one else will ever credit you for your actions, there is still your own self-image to consider, as well as simple empathy. If you prefer to see yourself as unselfish and interested in the welfare of others, or even if you simply empathize with them and prefer to assuage the source of that pain, your "altruistic" actions ultimately carry a personal motive.
According to the strict definition, I don't think any theory of evolution could ever explain true altruism, because for altruism in it's pure definition, there simply is no reason. If it has a personal reason, then it is, by definition, not altruism.
Regarding the biological basis for instinctive altruism and empathy, it is worth remembering that evolutionary processes rarely result in a perfectly targeted response. Compromise solutions with myriad chaotically-interacting side-effects are the norm. The main evolutionary benefit may derive from helping out your close genetic relatives, but that does not prevent the bias from "bleeding over" toward others who are less closely related. With the recent increase in urbanization, it is also possible that the benefactors of such altruistic actions were historically more likely to be closely related than they are today.
Fortunately, there is no need to explain "true" altruism, as a deliberate choice rather than instinctive behavior—it simply doesn't exist. Instincts are either random, directly beneficial, or a misapplication of behavior which would be beneficial in other contexts, and thus never constitute deliberate acts of altruism. Every deliberate action is taken for one or more reasons, and those reasons are always related to one's own preferences—which are axiomatic, and need not be explained—which makes them personal. However, the more common use of "altruism" which considers only the absence of expected material gain is perfectly compatible with philosophical models which reject any widespread influence of "true" altruism in human behavior.
A bit off topic, the US needs to fix up their ratings system before they start criticising ours. Some of the PG13 films really should be rated ma15+ or even R18+ due to realistic violence/language/nudity.
The thing about community standards is that they only apply within specific communities. Your attempt to apply Australian community standards to U.S. ratings is sadly misguided.
Cue the people who don't understand the crucial difference between anarchy and minarchy to come in and state that Somalia is a "libertarian paradise".
First, for those of us who are not persuaded that government serves any necessary function, there is no difference between anarchy and minarchy—the minimum practical level of government is no government at all.
Second, a "libertarian paradise" is a society without aggression. It makes no difference whether the source of that aggression calls itself a government, although governments tend to be the primary sources of aggression in any region where they exercise effective control. Somalia may not have an effective central government, but that hardly means it is free from aggression, both internal (tribal hierarchy, warlords, organized crime) and external (outside nations attempting to prop up a series of unwanted central governments).
Finally, whatever you may think of the state of Somalia now, you might want to consider that it was even worse before their previous central government was overthrown. Whether or not one considers some level of government to be beneficial, the history of Somalia proves that it is possible for a state to be worse than anarchy.
If you'd bothered to look up the text of the document you cite, you would have found that the right to a speedy trial is granted to "the accused" in any criminal proceeding. There is no mention of citizenship, American or otherwise. The same is true of many other rights identified in the U.S. Constitution which refer to "person" or "persons" (setting aside instances of "the people" as reasonably referring to "the people of the United States", i.e. U.S. citizens).
In any event, while certain rights may only be guaranteed to U.S. citizens, the rights themselves are not exclusive to U.S. citizens—they are inherent to all human beings. The rights of citizens and non-citizens alike share a common philosophical basis, and failure to recognize one undermines the other. The U.S. government has no constitutional obligation to actively guarantee certain rights of non-citizens, but that does not equate to a blanket license to violate their rights.
The question of POWs is a red herring. POWs have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to a fair and speedy trial. The fact that they were captured by the military rather than a civilian law-enforcement branch does not change that. More to the point, perhaps, the reasons for guaranteeing fair, impartial, and timely trials to civilian citizens—namely, to ensure that the detainment and punishment are shown to be legitimate, and that the innocent not be punished unjustly—apply equally well to military POWs and foreigners. The opposition to Guantanamo demonstrates what happens when you throw out established judicial procedures on the basis of a minor technicality like unclear jurisdiction or POW status.
The anarcho-syndicalists would argue that their goal isn't just to remove the state, but to eliminate all hierarchal power relationships, something which is lacking in the anarcho-capitalist philosophy.
That's assuming a rather broad definition of "hierarchical power relationships". The only power people have over each other in an anarcho-capitalist society is that which is granted voluntarily. If people choose to form hierarchies, on what basis do the anarcho-syndicalists justify coercive interference against those relationships?
In a capitalist society, if all property is owned by a small capitalist class, that puts them in a position of power over anyone who doesn't own property.
First, that's a big "if"; capitalism does not require or imply highly concentrated ownership of property. That does, however, tend to be a consequence of corporatism, the use of political power toward the aggrandizement of certain wealthy or well-connected individuals or organizations. Second, even if wealth is concentrated, that does not mean those with more wealth have "power" over those with less. Influence, to be sure—but that's true whenever one person has what someone else wants, even in the case of inalienable goods like labor, skill, or information. Wealth alone cannot compel others to behave according to your wishes; it can only provide an incentive to encourage coorperation.
The honest truth is, there's no fundamental difference between a government and any other large organization with lots of guns. The US government is just the largest and most powerful security organization, which also happens to build roads and schools. They take your money (via taxes) because they can, because they have the guns.
You are glossing over at least one very important distinction, which is how those guns are used. Any security organization worthy of the name will naturally have the ability to act coercively; that's their purpose. However, the difference between a genuine security organization and a government (if perceived as legitimate) or criminal organization (if not) is that the security organization only uses its coercive abilities defensively, to counter prior aggression. A government / criminal organization is not so selective. As you say, the latter practice aggression simply "because they can, because they have the guns."
What makes you think that the anarcho-capitalist version of say, Walmart or Halliburton or GE or ExxonMobil or whatever other large company wouldn't do the same, just because they can?
I fully expect some organizations would make the attempt. However, even ignoring the resistance they would face from rival organizations, such acts would be clearly recognized as criminal and illegitimate. Governments get away with collecting taxes not just "because they have the guns" but also because far too many people see them as "legitimate" and refuse to stand up against them, even going so far as to demonize their neighbors who do choose to resist. They accept taxes because they have been systematically indoctrinated to accept them from birth; few can even imagine a society without them. Even the more well-armed protection rackets tend not to fare nearly so well without that cloak of "legitimacy".
The only consistent libertarian position is a state of anarchy. Any society which is not in a state of anarchy endorses the use of aggression by the state, which violates the most fundamental of libertarian principles—which is that aggression, and only aggression, is forbidden, and never legitimate.
There are some anarchists (mainly anarcho-syndicalists) who disagree with the libertarian anarchists / anarcho-capitalists on the matter of property rights, but (IMHO) these difference are largely academic. If anarcho-syndicalists can take property from anarcho-capitalists without considering it "theft", they can hardly complain when the anarcho-capitalists reciprocate in kind as permitted under the doctrine of proportional response. If anything, the anarcho-capitalist's options are the more limited of the two, since nothing in the anarcho-syndicalist philosophy demands that the response be proportional.
(Again, assuming an amoral economically rational person.)
First, what you describe is not economically rational; murdering one's suppliers is a guaranteed net loss in the not-so-long-term, reprisals or no. Second, it is irrational to base your design for all of society on the exceptions, in this case stupid or irrational sociopaths. Certainly there will be a few like that, but they aren't anywhere near a majority, and even if a few of them actually managed to succeed in carving out a place for themselves they would still represent a far lower degree of systematic aggression than any modern government.
Anyway, your argument amounts to "If we succeed in eliminating the greatest source of aggression which exists in society right now (organized government), a lesser and clearly illegitimate form of that same aggression (individual criminals and organized crime) might arise in the future." It's not much of an argument; in the worst case we would be no worse off than we are now. Moreover, we know for certain from history that crime can be kept at bay with far less aggression than is currently accepted—most of which does not contribute in the slightest toward keeping the peace—so we would remain better off even if the experiment was not wholly successful in eliminating government once and for all.
Essentially, yes. However, that does not mean all engineering problems are also physics problems. A physics problem would be "we don't know whether this is even possible without violating the laws of physics". An engineering problem, on the other hand, is more along the lines of "we know this is possible, but actually building it would require massive investments of time / energy / raw materials and/or the development of new engineering design / analysis methods to manage the complexity."
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
We know how to do that already—create a vacuum around the vehicle, e.g. a maglev train traveling through a depressurized tube. That would eliminate both the sonic boom and atmospheric drag. It's more of an engineering problem than a physics problem.
In this case, yes. Just like UTF-16, UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character up to 31 bits (U+7FFFFFFF).
Up to U+10FFFF, but still.
You are correct. The final version of UTF-8 was restricted to U+10FFFF, which is sufficient to cover all 17 Unicode character planes, including those reserved for future use. Technically, however, one could unambiguously encode any 31-bit value in one to six bytes via the UTF-8 translation scheme; values above U+10FFFF simply do not correspond to valid Unicode codepoints.
Don't applaud just yet. The problem with the AC's argument is that unjust punishment would, by itself, be a violation of your natural rights. You do not have a natural right to representation or a trial by jury—but the court does not have the right to punish the innocent, either. The procedures imposed on the court—the so-called "rights of the accused"—are there to ensure that the court does not violate the rights of the innocent, as much for the sake of the court's reputation and the perceived legitimacy of its rulings as for the protection of the accused.
However, what you cannot (should not) do is discriminate against an entire class or group of people based solely on their membership in that class.
Regarding "should not", I agree. It's generally a fairly stupid thing to do, particularly if the bias is unwarranted (which is often assumed, but not always true). However, "cannot" goes too far. Everyone has the right to choose not to part with their property or to perform a specific service on a case-by-case basis, even their reasoning is limited to "I don't want to associate with people in this class."
In which case, you don't have the right to an attorney. You don't have the right to a trial by jury.
These are not "rights" per se, but rather procedural limitation imposed on the courts to ensure the legitimacy of any judgment against you. What you actually have a right to is yourself and your property; these rights would be violated by an unjust ruling. Guarantees of competent representation and trial by your peers merely help to ensure against such injustices, as much for the protection of the court and its reputation as for you.
You don't have the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing.
Exactly so. Forcing someone to sell their house to you against their will would be theft, as would forcing someone to pay you in the absence of a voluntary employment agreement. You do not have a right to either, regardless of whether their decision may be considered "discriminatory".
Any "right" which depends on positive action by someone else cannot exist without diminishing the fundamental rights of others. Such "rights" are a contradiction. The only meaningful rights are negative ones, i.e. those which you can exercise on your own or through voluntary association with others in the absence of outside interference.
Assignment could be a left arrow (←, U+2190), as in Smalltalk. Now that we have UTF-8 text files and Unicode fonts we wouldn't even need to play around with character substitutions. Of course, we'd need to fix Slashdot's handling of simple printable Unicode characters at some point...
In this case, yes. Just like UTF-16, UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character up to 31 bits (U+7FFFFFFF). Since both are variable-length encodings, UTF-16 is no simpler to work with. UTF-8 has the additional advantages of being identical to ASCII for the first 128 codepoints, using a single byte order vs. big-endian/little-endian UTF-16, not embedding NUL characters, generally taking less space, not being confused for UCS-2, etc.
The only time copyright is good for the economy, is when it provides a strong incentive to produce more artistic and literary works.
Even that would only be true if there was actual demand for these new artistic and literary works (as opposed to, for example, demand for mere copies of existing works in the absence of copyright) which exceeded the demand for whatever else might have been produced instead. As you pointed out yourself, in the absence of copyright the current beneficiaries wouldn't simply stop working; they would work on something else. Copyright doesn't create value, it just shifts it around—inevitably away from the optimum allocation of the undistorted market.
Theft is depriving someone of something they would otherwise have had.
You may want to rethink your definition; among other things, it would apply equally well to competition, or a boycott, or even just self-control. Merely depriving someone of potential, unrealized future income is not theft, no matter how far you stretch the concept.
Theft is depriving someone of the use of property they already have.
...lots of people now believe crime is not criminal so long as they can convince themselves, true or otherwise, no one is hurt.
You've got that backwards. If no one is hurt by an action then that action is not legitimately a crime, even if those in power wrongfully criminalize it. The only actions which are rightfully crimes (i.e. legitimately incurring a debt of restitution, and possible retribution/punishment if deliberate) are those which harm others—and making a copy of something, by itself, does no harm to anyone. Unlike copyright, which consists of the use of government-backed force to secure a commercial distribution monopoly, doing obvious harm to a massive number of people on a continuing basis.
If you copy something which you never had the intention to buy, no one is the worse for it.
You can drop the qualifiers: no one is ever worse off for the making of a copy, whether or not you might have bought it if that wasn't an option.
(On the other hand, you are worse off if you could have made a copy, but someone used force—e.g. copyright—to stop you. Not because you were entitled to the copy, mind, but because force was used or threatened against you, depriving you of your natural rights of self-ownership.)
We're not talking about "development versions" here. Devices have already been released to end-users (e.g. Motorola Xoom) running Android 3.0 binaries, without any source code in sight. Still want to argue that Android 3.0 isn't closed-source right now, whatever their future intentions might be?
Loss of property is a direct harm to the owner of the property. Ergo, defending one's own property is defending oneself, i.e. self-defense.
That said, the standard for preemptive self-defense is generally taken to be "imminent threat of irreversible harm", meaning that if you can reasonably expect to recover all your losses from the invader after the fact (reversing the harm) you would not be justified in using lethal (or otherwise disproportionate) force to prevent the loss. Of course, "irreversible" can be a flexible term in the face of conditions ranging from "thief is eventually caught, property returned, no real harm done" to "no realistic hope of recovery", plus nuances like "property may eventually be recovered, but is needed now" (consider e.g. theft of vital life-support equipment).
Personally, while I would encourage restraint where lethal force is concerned, I tend toward the position that anyone who knowingly invades another's property with malicious intent is wholly responsible for any harm which may come to them as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
"own it on dvd today!"
Technically, what you "own" in that description is the physical media.
So you're saying that "it" is the DVD. Fair enough. So you "own [the DVD] on dvd"?
No, it's perfectly obvious that the "it" in that advertising campaign refers to the information content, not the physical media it's stored on. That may not be what they mean, or even legally correct, but it is what they say.
Anyway, who cares about owning a (non-recordable) DVD, apart from the included content? Would you pay $20 for a DVD without knowing what information it contained (if any)? It only makes sense for the subject of the advertisement to be the content, not the media.
An AI could definitely help advise the humans actually responsible for making decisions regarding allocation of their own resources. To an extent, we already do that—consider the algorithms in charge of high-speed trading. However, that is hardly the same thing as placing an AI in charge of allocation of all resources throughout society, without regard to their actual ownership.
Venus' concept is a massive global supercomputer network that monitors the worlds resources, allocating them only where they are needed and in reasonable quantities, eliminating waste and misuse, but being auditing and controlled by human-elect.
Putting aside the totalitarian distopia this would imply, the idea is simply unworkable for lack of global information. The same issue applies to all central planning, really. Economically efficient allocation of resources depends not just on historical data you can study and model, but people's current preferences. At best you can study people's past choices and build a society ideally suited to them, but by the time you've done so those preferences have inevitably changed—and the first real indication you have that they have changed is widespread surpluses and shortages, exactly what you were trying to prevent.
The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.
people could live simple, happier lives and not be wage-slaves
True. Instead of being "wage-slaves" (a term which stretches the idea of slavery well beyond its natural limits) they'd simply be slaves, with no control over the allocation of their own labor or its fruits. That's so much simpler.
This is a common fallacy. It is true that prices are set to maximize revenues, regardless of production costs, but the point at which revenues are maximized is influenced by supply and demand. When prices and costs are such that there is an economic profit to be made (vs. the opportunity cost), competition increases the supply and thus drives prices downward toward the cost of production. An increase in production costs drives marginal producers out of the market, reducing supply and thus raising prices. The correlation is indirect, but quite real.
Of course, supply and demand apply to wages as well. At the moment all indications are that there is no shortage of workers willing to accept these conditions in exchange for the current rate of pay. If you wish to better their conditions you won't do that by outlawing or otherwise penalizing the best jobs currently available in the region. You might consider driving up the demand by preferring high-value products manufactured in China; that would give the workers there a stronger bargaining position.
But in humans, carrying over genes is not the only reason. There is also the matter of respect, and trustworthiness. In order to convince your allies that you are trustworthy and 'good', you would exhibit selfless acts, with no expectation of return from the person concerned, but definite returns from those you know.
You can take the argument even further. Even when no one else will ever credit you for your actions, there is still your own self-image to consider, as well as simple empathy. If you prefer to see yourself as unselfish and interested in the welfare of others, or even if you simply empathize with them and prefer to assuage the source of that pain, your "altruistic" actions ultimately carry a personal motive.
According to the strict definition, I don't think any theory of evolution could ever explain true altruism, because for altruism in it's pure definition, there simply is no reason. If it has a personal reason, then it is, by definition, not altruism.
Regarding the biological basis for instinctive altruism and empathy, it is worth remembering that evolutionary processes rarely result in a perfectly targeted response. Compromise solutions with myriad chaotically-interacting side-effects are the norm. The main evolutionary benefit may derive from helping out your close genetic relatives, but that does not prevent the bias from "bleeding over" toward others who are less closely related. With the recent increase in urbanization, it is also possible that the benefactors of such altruistic actions were historically more likely to be closely related than they are today.
Fortunately, there is no need to explain "true" altruism, as a deliberate choice rather than instinctive behavior—it simply doesn't exist. Instincts are either random, directly beneficial, or a misapplication of behavior which would be beneficial in other contexts, and thus never constitute deliberate acts of altruism. Every deliberate action is taken for one or more reasons, and those reasons are always related to one's own preferences—which are axiomatic, and need not be explained—which makes them personal. However, the more common use of "altruism" which considers only the absence of expected material gain is perfectly compatible with philosophical models which reject any widespread influence of "true" altruism in human behavior.
A bit off topic, the US needs to fix up their ratings system before they start criticising ours. Some of the PG13 films really should be rated ma15+ or even R18+ due to realistic violence/language/nudity.
The thing about community standards is that they only apply within specific communities. Your attempt to apply Australian community standards to U.S. ratings is sadly misguided.
Cue the people who don't understand the crucial difference between anarchy and minarchy to come in and state that Somalia is a "libertarian paradise".
First, for those of us who are not persuaded that government serves any necessary function, there is no difference between anarchy and minarchy—the minimum practical level of government is no government at all.
Second, a "libertarian paradise" is a society without aggression. It makes no difference whether the source of that aggression calls itself a government, although governments tend to be the primary sources of aggression in any region where they exercise effective control. Somalia may not have an effective central government, but that hardly means it is free from aggression, both internal (tribal hierarchy, warlords, organized crime) and external (outside nations attempting to prop up a series of unwanted central governments).
Finally, whatever you may think of the state of Somalia now, you might want to consider that it was even worse before their previous central government was overthrown. Whether or not one considers some level of government to be beneficial, the history of Somalia proves that it is possible for a state to be worse than anarchy.
If you'd bothered to look up the text of the document you cite, you would have found that the right to a speedy trial is granted to "the accused" in any criminal proceeding. There is no mention of citizenship, American or otherwise. The same is true of many other rights identified in the U.S. Constitution which refer to "person" or "persons" (setting aside instances of "the people" as reasonably referring to "the people of the United States", i.e. U.S. citizens).
In any event, while certain rights may only be guaranteed to U.S. citizens, the rights themselves are not exclusive to U.S. citizens—they are inherent to all human beings. The rights of citizens and non-citizens alike share a common philosophical basis, and failure to recognize one undermines the other. The U.S. government has no constitutional obligation to actively guarantee certain rights of non-citizens, but that does not equate to a blanket license to violate their rights.
The question of POWs is a red herring. POWs have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to a fair and speedy trial. The fact that they were captured by the military rather than a civilian law-enforcement branch does not change that. More to the point, perhaps, the reasons for guaranteeing fair, impartial, and timely trials to civilian citizens—namely, to ensure that the detainment and punishment are shown to be legitimate, and that the innocent not be punished unjustly—apply equally well to military POWs and foreigners. The opposition to Guantanamo demonstrates what happens when you throw out established judicial procedures on the basis of a minor technicality like unclear jurisdiction or POW status.
The anarcho-syndicalists would argue that their goal isn't just to remove the state, but to eliminate all hierarchal power relationships, something which is lacking in the anarcho-capitalist philosophy.
That's assuming a rather broad definition of "hierarchical power relationships". The only power people have over each other in an anarcho-capitalist society is that which is granted voluntarily. If people choose to form hierarchies, on what basis do the anarcho-syndicalists justify coercive interference against those relationships?
In a capitalist society, if all property is owned by a small capitalist class, that puts them in a position of power over anyone who doesn't own property.
First, that's a big "if"; capitalism does not require or imply highly concentrated ownership of property. That does, however, tend to be a consequence of corporatism, the use of political power toward the aggrandizement of certain wealthy or well-connected individuals or organizations. Second, even if wealth is concentrated, that does not mean those with more wealth have "power" over those with less. Influence, to be sure—but that's true whenever one person has what someone else wants, even in the case of inalienable goods like labor, skill, or information. Wealth alone cannot compel others to behave according to your wishes; it can only provide an incentive to encourage coorperation.
The honest truth is, there's no fundamental difference between a government and any other large organization with lots of guns. The US government is just the largest and most powerful security organization, which also happens to build roads and schools. They take your money (via taxes) because they can, because they have the guns.
You are glossing over at least one very important distinction, which is how those guns are used. Any security organization worthy of the name will naturally have the ability to act coercively; that's their purpose. However, the difference between a genuine security organization and a government (if perceived as legitimate) or criminal organization (if not) is that the security organization only uses its coercive abilities defensively, to counter prior aggression. A government / criminal organization is not so selective. As you say, the latter practice aggression simply "because they can, because they have the guns."
What makes you think that the anarcho-capitalist version of say, Walmart or Halliburton or GE or ExxonMobil or whatever other large company wouldn't do the same, just because they can?
I fully expect some organizations would make the attempt. However, even ignoring the resistance they would face from rival organizations, such acts would be clearly recognized as criminal and illegitimate. Governments get away with collecting taxes not just "because they have the guns" but also because far too many people see them as "legitimate" and refuse to stand up against them, even going so far as to demonize their neighbors who do choose to resist. They accept taxes because they have been systematically indoctrinated to accept them from birth; few can even imagine a society without them. Even the more well-armed protection rackets tend not to fare nearly so well without that cloak of "legitimacy".
The only consistent libertarian position is a state of anarchy. Any society which is not in a state of anarchy endorses the use of aggression by the state, which violates the most fundamental of libertarian principles—which is that aggression, and only aggression, is forbidden, and never legitimate.
There are some anarchists (mainly anarcho-syndicalists) who disagree with the libertarian anarchists / anarcho-capitalists on the matter of property rights, but (IMHO) these difference are largely academic. If anarcho-syndicalists can take property from anarcho-capitalists without considering it "theft", they can hardly complain when the anarcho-capitalists reciprocate in kind as permitted under the doctrine of proportional response. If anything, the anarcho-capitalist's options are the more limited of the two, since nothing in the anarcho-syndicalist philosophy demands that the response be proportional.
(Again, assuming an amoral economically rational person.)
First, what you describe is not economically rational; murdering one's suppliers is a guaranteed net loss in the not-so-long-term, reprisals or no. Second, it is irrational to base your design for all of society on the exceptions, in this case stupid or irrational sociopaths. Certainly there will be a few like that, but they aren't anywhere near a majority, and even if a few of them actually managed to succeed in carving out a place for themselves they would still represent a far lower degree of systematic aggression than any modern government.
Anyway, your argument amounts to "If we succeed in eliminating the greatest source of aggression which exists in society right now (organized government), a lesser and clearly illegitimate form of that same aggression (individual criminals and organized crime) might arise in the future." It's not much of an argument; in the worst case we would be no worse off than we are now. Moreover, we know for certain from history that crime can be kept at bay with far less aggression than is currently accepted—most of which does not contribute in the slightest toward keeping the peace—so we would remain better off even if the experiment was not wholly successful in eliminating government once and for all.
Essentially, yes. However, that does not mean all engineering problems are also physics problems. A physics problem would be "we don't know whether this is even possible without violating the laws of physics". An engineering problem, on the other hand, is more along the lines of "we know this is possible, but actually building it would require massive investments of time / energy / raw materials and/or the development of new engineering design / analysis methods to manage the complexity."
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
We know how to do that already—create a vacuum around the vehicle, e.g. a maglev train traveling through a depressurized tube. That would eliminate both the sonic boom and atmospheric drag. It's more of an engineering problem than a physics problem.
In this case, yes. Just like UTF-16, UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character up to 31 bits (U+7FFFFFFF).
Up to U+10FFFF, but still.
You are correct. The final version of UTF-8 was restricted to U+10FFFF, which is sufficient to cover all 17 Unicode character planes, including those reserved for future use. Technically, however, one could unambiguously encode any 31-bit value in one to six bytes via the UTF-8 translation scheme; values above U+10FFFF simply do not correspond to valid Unicode codepoints.
Don't applaud just yet. The problem with the AC's argument is that unjust punishment would, by itself, be a violation of your natural rights. You do not have a natural right to representation or a trial by jury—but the court does not have the right to punish the innocent, either. The procedures imposed on the court—the so-called "rights of the accused"—are there to ensure that the court does not violate the rights of the innocent, as much for the sake of the court's reputation and the perceived legitimacy of its rulings as for the protection of the accused.
However, what you cannot (should not) do is discriminate against an entire class or group of people based solely on their membership in that class.
Regarding "should not", I agree. It's generally a fairly stupid thing to do, particularly if the bias is unwarranted (which is often assumed, but not always true). However, "cannot" goes too far. Everyone has the right to choose not to part with their property or to perform a specific service on a case-by-case basis, even their reasoning is limited to "I don't want to associate with people in this class."
In which case, you don't have the right to an attorney. You don't have the right to a trial by jury.
These are not "rights" per se, but rather procedural limitation imposed on the courts to ensure the legitimacy of any judgment against you. What you actually have a right to is yourself and your property; these rights would be violated by an unjust ruling. Guarantees of competent representation and trial by your peers merely help to ensure against such injustices, as much for the protection of the court and its reputation as for you.
You don't have the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing.
Exactly so. Forcing someone to sell their house to you against their will would be theft, as would forcing someone to pay you in the absence of a voluntary employment agreement. You do not have a right to either, regardless of whether their decision may be considered "discriminatory".
Any "right" which depends on positive action by someone else cannot exist without diminishing the fundamental rights of others. Such "rights" are a contradiction. The only meaningful rights are negative ones, i.e. those which you can exercise on your own or through voluntary association with others in the absence of outside interference.
Assignment could be a left arrow (←, U+2190), as in Smalltalk. Now that we have UTF-8 text files and Unicode fonts we wouldn't even need to play around with character substitutions. Of course, we'd need to fix Slashdot's handling of simple printable Unicode characters at some point...
In this case, yes. Just like UTF-16, UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character up to 31 bits (U+7FFFFFFF). Since both are variable-length encodings, UTF-16 is no simpler to work with. UTF-8 has the additional advantages of being identical to ASCII for the first 128 codepoints, using a single byte order vs. big-endian/little-endian UTF-16, not embedding NUL characters, generally taking less space, not being confused for UCS-2, etc.
See also: advantages of UTF-8 compared to UTF-16
The only time copyright is good for the economy, is when it provides a strong incentive to produce more artistic and literary works.
Even that would only be true if there was actual demand for these new artistic and literary works (as opposed to, for example, demand for mere copies of existing works in the absence of copyright) which exceeded the demand for whatever else might have been produced instead. As you pointed out yourself, in the absence of copyright the current beneficiaries wouldn't simply stop working; they would work on something else. Copyright doesn't create value, it just shifts it around—inevitably away from the optimum allocation of the undistorted market.
Theft is depriving someone of something they would otherwise have had.
You may want to rethink your definition; among other things, it would apply equally well to competition, or a boycott, or even just self-control. Merely depriving someone of potential, unrealized future income is not theft, no matter how far you stretch the concept.
Theft is depriving someone of the use of property they already have.
...lots of people now believe crime is not criminal so long as they can convince themselves, true or otherwise, no one is hurt.
You've got that backwards. If no one is hurt by an action then that action is not legitimately a crime, even if those in power wrongfully criminalize it. The only actions which are rightfully crimes (i.e. legitimately incurring a debt of restitution, and possible retribution/punishment if deliberate) are those which harm others—and making a copy of something, by itself, does no harm to anyone. Unlike copyright, which consists of the use of government-backed force to secure a commercial distribution monopoly, doing obvious harm to a massive number of people on a continuing basis.
If you copy something which you never had the intention to buy, no one is the worse for it.
You can drop the qualifiers: no one is ever worse off for the making of a copy, whether or not you might have bought it if that wasn't an option.
(On the other hand, you are worse off if you could have made a copy, but someone used force—e.g. copyright—to stop you. Not because you were entitled to the copy, mind, but because force was used or threatened against you, depriving you of your natural rights of self-ownership.)
We're not talking about "development versions" here. Devices have already been released to end-users (e.g. Motorola Xoom) running Android 3.0 binaries, without any source code in sight. Still want to argue that Android 3.0 isn't closed-source right now, whatever their future intentions might be?
Loss of property is a direct harm to the owner of the property. Ergo, defending one's own property is defending oneself, i.e. self-defense.
That said, the standard for preemptive self-defense is generally taken to be "imminent threat of irreversible harm", meaning that if you can reasonably expect to recover all your losses from the invader after the fact (reversing the harm) you would not be justified in using lethal (or otherwise disproportionate) force to prevent the loss. Of course, "irreversible" can be a flexible term in the face of conditions ranging from "thief is eventually caught, property returned, no real harm done" to "no realistic hope of recovery", plus nuances like "property may eventually be recovered, but is needed now" (consider e.g. theft of vital life-support equipment).
Personally, while I would encourage restraint where lethal force is concerned, I tend toward the position that anyone who knowingly invades another's property with malicious intent is wholly responsible for any harm which may come to them as a result.