The free market includes the "black" market—or at least those parts of it which don't deal directly in aggression, e.g. murder-for-hire, fencing, etc. Allowing such aggression wouldn't increase overall freedom, though, since it must result, via inherent violation of property rights, in an equal or greater decrease in the freedom of others.
I can see ambiguous situations though where many people are collectively guilty through a chain of events that led unknowingly to harm. In that situation the collective/corporation is to blame for the damage and not the individuals.
I agree that such situations may exist. Unforeseeable and accidental harm is a tricky subject. However, this applies equally well to issues of diffuse responsibility outside of any formal organization, so I don't see it as a particular problem of corporations. The existence of a formal organization may make it easier to define the group responsible, but then again it may simply be misleading: there could be members who did not contribute to the harm, or there could be others outside the organization who did contribute.
Does intent to harm matter at all?
When harm is done, there are two kinds of consequences to consider: restitution and retribution.
Restitution applies regardless of intent; even in the case of purest accident, if you harm someone you must "make them whole". In my opinion, if one refuses to make full restitution then the remaining harm should be considered deliberate, regardless of any previous intent.
Retribution only applies in cases of deliberate harm, and is based on the principle of estoppel: if one person harms another deliberately and without proportional provocation then their actions speak for themselves, preventing them from arguing that this harm was right then but wrong now. If what they did is right—according to them, since this is properly a subjective matterthen doing the same to them in punishment must also be right; if they instead argue that what they did is wrong then they admit that they deserve punishment. If they attack universality by arguing that right and wrong differ from person to person, or place to place, or time to time, then their opponent can make an identical argument to justify their punishment. In short, once cannot claim protection from a particular action after denying said protection to others. (See Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach by N. Stephen Kinsella for a more complete treatment of this position.)
All of this hinges on the presence of intent, however: one cannot justify a deliberate response to accidental harm on the basis that the response is equivalent to the original act, as the circumstances differ. Provided restitution is made, unintentional harm does not invite retribution.
The primary complaint against corporations is the privilege of limited liability for torts. Limited liability for debts is something that could exist in a free market; that would be a private matter between the members of an organization and their creditors. Limited liability for torts, however, is something that cannot exist in a free market. Those injured by actions taken on behalf of any organization have the right to seek compensation from the individuals responsible, not just the organization they were working for. In essence, in a free market tort claims must always "piece the corporate veil."
It doesn't matter if you read them, understand them, whatever. Only that you sign them.
On the contrary, there must be "meeting of the minds"—agreement by both parties regarding the terms of the contract—before a contract is considered valid or enforceable. However, it is typical for the signature line on a contract to explicitly state that you have read it and understand the terms. Why should anyone doubt your own word on the matter? Aside from cases of coercion or misrepresentation by the other party, your statement that you read and understood the contract is rightfully the final word on the subject.
There are 22 printable symbols on a standard keyboard, not 12: `~!@#$%^&*()-_=+[{]}\|;:'",<.>/?
Also, there should be 74^16 (8.09 * 10^29) combinations with 12 symbols (not 76^16), or 84^16 (6.14 * 10^33) using all symbols. Still far more than anyone could expect to test, of course—though other weaknesses could save an attacker the trouble of brute-forcing every single combination. For example, many common systems use hashes much weaker than MD5.
Your free time is worth more than the time you spend at work, as evidenced by the fact that you chose not to sell it.
Unless, of course, you are "involuntarily" unemployed or underemployed, by which I mean that you would be willing to work extra hours at a standard hourly rate but are unable to find work on those terms; in that case some or all of your free time may be worth no more to you than the time you currently spend at work. However, that situation should be fairly rare.
Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.
If this virus ever got loose it would no longer be inside the microgel matrix, so it would soon lose its efficiency at generating hydrogen, becoming just another virus among many—and one ill-adapted to survive outside a lab.
There's a bigger bug than that: you can't trust the referrer. It's completely controlled by the browser, not the page the link was on. Users can easily set the referrer to any string they wish, e.g. with the RefControl extension for Firefox, which will happily set it to the address of the current page—or the home page of the site—by default.
If you really want to know whether the user is authorized to view a page you need to track their session, either with (secure) cookies or (secure) URL parameters. Better yet, use standard Digest authentication and let the browser take care of the credentials. The referrer string has no place in a proper authentication protocol.
Sure, you can leak resources in C++ in all the same ways as in C. However, C++ does have two major advantages when it comes to resource management:
1) Via destructors, you can register a block of code to run automatically when something goes out of scope through any standard flow control construct, e.g. return, break, continue, etc. In C, when you may return from a block in more than one way, you must either duplicate the clean-up code at each exit point or distort the structure of your routine to always pass through the clean-up code on its way out.
As clean-up function, C++ destructors aren't anything particularly new; you can do the same in C by manually calling a clean-up routine. However, the fact that destructors for stack variables are invoked automatically at the end of the block is unique to C++, and (when used properly) helps to eliminate a significant source of leaks by grouping initialization and clean-up rules in a single declaration.
2) C++ has built-in, first-class exception handling which runs these destructors while unwinding the stack, so you don't leak resources as easily when recovering from errors. The closest C equivalent, setjmp/longjmp, does not release resources when longjmp is invoked. A common alternative, returning an error code and testing for it in the caller, tends to suffer from the multiple-exit issue described above.
On the contrary, one should not need to be a member of a special, protected "common carrier" class to avoid liability for torts or crimes which one did not knowingly and willingly participate in. The entire concept of "common carrier" is a grave mistake as best, and possibly much worse: a threadbare attempt to blackmail carriers into accepting onerous regulations under threat of unjust prosecution for offenses committed by others.
If you deliberately single out offending packets and give them preferential treatment, fine: you're as liable as anyone can be, aside from the original sender.[1] In all other cases there can be no just liability, as there was no intent to contribute to the crime or tort.
[1] "As anyone can be"; personally I consider any presumption of liability over pure communication to be a 1st Amendment violation--infringement of free speech. Naturally this line of reasoning concludes that other things which depend on restricting communication, e.g. copyright, are likewise violations of free speech.
The government's policy is (one form of) "Net Neutrality", but "Net Neutrality" does not necessarily refer to the government's policy, so the original headline was ambiguous.
You are free to renounce your citizenship and move out of the jurisdiction of the government...
Great idea. Where do you propose one should move to? If you move to an area which has a government then you're back where you started; if you move to one of the few unclaimed (or more accurately, disputed) regions, you'll still have to contend with multiple surrounding governments which will not respect your claims to sovereign ownership. Simply put, there nowhere you can go to get away from government. It can only be resisted from the inside.
This completely overlooks the fact that renouncing citizenship goes far beyond breaking ties with the government; disassociation should not require one to forfeit one's property, or job, or freedom to visit family and friends. If it were a simple matter of giving up any claim to public services, in exchange for no more taxes or regulations (or interference in free trade, of course), then my response would be "where do I sign?". You could almost consider that voluntary. Sadly, that isn't the case.
P.S. Somalia is not "out of government control". First, several major nations, including the US, routinely intervene within its borders, contributing to the instability of the region. Second, even without that intervention it still has government, distributed amongst numerous tribal elders. Lack of a strong central government is not the same as lack of government itself.
Last I checked, it was still one man - one vote with U.S. electoral system. With a company, those who purchase more shares have more direct say...
Sure, in theory. And yet in practice the best-funded political candidates almost always win, and "vote buying" schemes are commonplace. Anyway, your vote is worth the same regardless of who controls the rest. If you're in the minority it hardly matters whether the opposing votes are held by a single, monolithic entity or a mass of individuals. At least with a corporation minorities are protected both through the principal/agent relationship (the board works for all shareholders, not just the majority) and the fact that continued association is voluntary.
A threat of inaction... is quite often just as potent as a threat of action.
It can be. So? It is the means that I care about, not the outcome. No matter how constrained one's option may appear, there is still a difference between freely choosing to trade for a service because one believes the trade to be in one's best interests, vs. being compelled to purchase goods or services (if one is lucky) under threat of force.
Anyway, who do you think created the monopolies and barriers to entry in the first place? Widespread monopolies don't tend to occur on their own, you know, and one of the biggest barriers to entry is regulation--particularly the phenomenon known as regulatory capture.
Unlike corporations, you have a direct say in how your government is run, including how much needs to be paid up, and what it is used for.
If you own a single share of voting stock in any publicly-traded corporation then you have more say (one vote / outstanding shares) regarding their prices and internal operations than you have with the federal government (one vote / adult population of the US). Moreover, the officers of the corporation are legally bound to act in the shareholders' best interests--even the minority shareholders who would otherwise have little say. Politicians do not share any such obligation toward their constituents.
As if that wasn't enough, corporations are much more tightly bound by their status as private organizations than the government is bound by the Constitution: the government can compel you to act by threat of force, albeit in supposedly limited ways, whereas interaction with a private organization is always voluntary.
First time I've seen a judge equated with a bureaucrat.
I believe the GP was referring to the FCC, not the judge in this article.
And I believe the FCC Charter (created by those people in Congress) states that the FCC has this regulatory authority:
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
The scope of the FCC's charter is limited by Congress' Constitutional authority, which extends only to inter-state commerce. The federal government, including Congress and the FCC, has no authority over intra-state communications services. This is implied by the Constitution itself ("To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States..."; nothing is said about commerce within any state), and made explicit by the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Wherever did you get that idea? Of course you have the option of not buying their services. No one is going to garnish your wages or throw you in prison for not buying Internet service from a local ISP. You don't even have to go without: you can bypass the ISPs entirely by purchasing transit from a higher-level provider, form your own ISP, or subscribe to dial-up, terrestrial wireless, or satellite Internet service.
Even if your only choices were DSL, cable, or no Internet at all, however, that's still far more of an option than you'll get from the government. They only give you one choice: pay up.
First, "Slashdotters" are not a hive mind. If you want to throw around the "hypocrite" label, first find some individual Slashdotter deserving of the term.
Second, not all technicalities are created equal. There is a difference between letting off someone who clearly did cause harm to others just because e.g. they weren't reminded of a procedural detail they should have known already, vs. letting someone off because the evidence is inconclusive, or because their action may have been similar to something illegal, or indirectly contributing to something illegal, but was not quite illegal per se. These are all technicalities, but in the first case they definitely did something both illegal and harmful, whereas in the other cases either the illegality of their actions or the resulting harm has not been definitively established.
Finally, in a world where the law itself is often unjust, if said justice is best served by technicalities in some instances, and undermined by them in others, then one's approval will naturally depend on the context in which they are used. This is no more hypocritical than liking water when it's in a swimming pool but not when it's flooding one's basement.
The Constitution sets up the right of an owner to control their works for some finite time and gives Congress the power to set the details.
Actually, that's wrong. The Constitution doesn't require Congress to implement copyrights or patents at all; it merely grants them the option of doing so. Moreover, this is clearly described as a privilege optionally granted to authors/inventors to achieve a specific social goal (more writing/inventing), not any sort of natural right.
Oh, and about that shared IP thing... blame it on your ISP for not giving you a nice big/64 block in IPv6.
Actually, assuming that the NAT is on the subscriber's side, the ISP did give them not just one/64 subnet, but an entire/48 in IPv6. Every IPv4 address a.b.c.d corresponds to 65,536 IPv6 subnets of the form 2002:aabb:ccdd:xxxx::/64, where xxxx is any 16-bit subnet number. You just need to set up 6to4 tunneling on your router.
Of course, as long as you want to connect to other IPv4 hosts you're still going to need NAT and a shared IP address. IPv6 won't help there.
Good luck with that. I use Open Source software almost exclusively, and consider it more secure, but don't delude yourself: you can never be completely certain that any software is free of exploitable bugs. For that matter even hardware authentication can be subverted, but the idea is to minimize the surface-area exposed to attack.
A general-purpose PC—whatever OS/apps it's running—has a much larger surface-area than a locked-down, non-updatable, special-purpose device intended exclusively for previewing and signing sensitive data, such as money-transfer orders. (Note that both parts are important: the device must be able to show the user what they're signing, and include that exact bitmap image in the signature for later verification.)
These can help protect against keyloggers and the like; once you've logged out of your account you should be fairly safe (unless some other attack altered your login credentials). However, if you can't trust the local PC then you're still subject to the other attacks I mentioned: uncertain security against phishing, redirects, etc., and local malware taking advantage of your authenticated connection while you're logged in.
If the keyfob is required for each transaction, and not just the initial login, then your security is marginally better. In this case malware can't just make up arbitrary transactions and file them in your name. However, this does not completely close the security hole: malware can substitute its own data (destination, amount) in place of yours every time you transfer money, using the code you entered from your keyfob to authenticate the false transaction. This is largely how the malware against e-Gold worked.
expect to be able to bank from computers at cafes, work, and friends' houses
From a security point-of-view this expectation is frightening. Using their own trusted computer on an untrusted network, sure—that's what TLS was designed for. Using an untrusted client computer, however, is just asking for trouble in the form of keyloggers, malware, insecure settings (are you sure they didn't enter an exception for that invalid certificate?), etc.
As far as that goes, the prevalence of malware in general should make anyone think twice about online banking, even from their own PC. Remember, any program on your computer can pretend to be you as long as you're logged in to your online banking site. Someone even wrote a virus/trojan to this effect directed against e-Gold (back when they were still active), and there's no reason it wouldn't work just as well against any other site. There is very little you can do, short of self-contained hardware authentication for each transaction, to protect against this sort of local attack.
We should not be taxing things we want people to do, we should be taxing the things we don't want people doing.
If you tax things you want people to do then you act contrary to your own interests. On the other hand, if you seek revenue through taxes on things you don't want people doing then you become dependent on the "unwanted" behavior, which curtails any incentive to actually persuade them to stop—which is also contrary to your own interests.
The correct approach is to give up the reliance on coercion. Anything worth doing can be done voluntarily.
If you want protection from your government, you have to do something about your government.
Even assuming this were a practical solution, what about all the other governments out there, and the CAs within their jurisdictions? It only takes one CA caving to one government—not necessarily yours—to circumvent the trust authentication for any site.
Number of companies isn't necessarily a good measure of competition. You can have cutthroat competition between two providers (even if one is only potential!), or collusion among ten.
Whether there is "sufficient" competition is inherently subjective. They might as well have asked whether one felt one was getting a "good deal".
Slashdot Mirror
The free market includes the "black" market—or at least those parts of it which don't deal directly in aggression, e.g. murder-for-hire, fencing, etc. Allowing such aggression wouldn't increase overall freedom, though, since it must result, via inherent violation of property rights, in an equal or greater decrease in the freedom of others.
I can see ambiguous situations though where many people are collectively guilty through a chain of events that led unknowingly to harm. In that situation the collective/corporation is to blame for the damage and not the individuals.
I agree that such situations may exist. Unforeseeable and accidental harm is a tricky subject. However, this applies equally well to issues of diffuse responsibility outside of any formal organization, so I don't see it as a particular problem of corporations. The existence of a formal organization may make it easier to define the group responsible, but then again it may simply be misleading: there could be members who did not contribute to the harm, or there could be others outside the organization who did contribute.
Does intent to harm matter at all?
When harm is done, there are two kinds of consequences to consider: restitution and retribution.
Restitution applies regardless of intent; even in the case of purest accident, if you harm someone you must "make them whole". In my opinion, if one refuses to make full restitution then the remaining harm should be considered deliberate, regardless of any previous intent.
Retribution only applies in cases of deliberate harm, and is based on the principle of estoppel: if one person harms another deliberately and without proportional provocation then their actions speak for themselves, preventing them from arguing that this harm was right then but wrong now. If what they did is right—according to them, since this is properly a subjective matterthen doing the same to them in punishment must also be right; if they instead argue that what they did is wrong then they admit that they deserve punishment. If they attack universality by arguing that right and wrong differ from person to person, or place to place, or time to time, then their opponent can make an identical argument to justify their punishment. In short, once cannot claim protection from a particular action after denying said protection to others. (See Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach by N. Stephen Kinsella for a more complete treatment of this position.)
All of this hinges on the presence of intent, however: one cannot justify a deliberate response to accidental harm on the basis that the response is equivalent to the original act, as the circumstances differ. Provided restitution is made, unintentional harm does not invite retribution.
The primary complaint against corporations is the privilege of limited liability for torts. Limited liability for debts is something that could exist in a free market; that would be a private matter between the members of an organization and their creditors. Limited liability for torts, however, is something that cannot exist in a free market. Those injured by actions taken on behalf of any organization have the right to seek compensation from the individuals responsible, not just the organization they were working for. In essence, in a free market tort claims must always "piece the corporate veil."
It doesn't matter if you read them, understand them, whatever. Only that you sign them.
On the contrary, there must be "meeting of the minds"—agreement by both parties regarding the terms of the contract—before a contract is considered valid or enforceable. However, it is typical for the signature line on a contract to explicitly state that you have read it and understand the terms. Why should anyone doubt your own word on the matter? Aside from cases of coercion or misrepresentation by the other party, your statement that you read and understood the contract is rightfully the final word on the subject.
There are 22 printable symbols on a standard keyboard, not 12: `~!@#$%^&*()-_=+[{]}\|;:'",<.>/?
Also, there should be 74^16 (8.09 * 10^29) combinations with 12 symbols (not 76^16), or 84^16 (6.14 * 10^33) using all symbols. Still far more than anyone could expect to test, of course—though other weaknesses could save an attacker the trouble of brute-forcing every single combination. For example, many common systems use hashes much weaker than MD5.
Your free time is worth more than the time you spend at work, as evidenced by the fact that you chose not to sell it.
Unless, of course, you are "involuntarily" unemployed or underemployed, by which I mean that you would be willing to work extra hours at a standard hourly rate but are unable to find work on those terms; in that case some or all of your free time may be worth no more to you than the time you currently spend at work. However, that situation should be fairly rare.
Sure, except for this bit:
Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.
If this virus ever got loose it would no longer be inside the microgel matrix, so it would soon lose its efficiency at generating hydrogen, becoming just another virus among many—and one ill-adapted to survive outside a lab.
There's a bigger bug than that: you can't trust the referrer. It's completely controlled by the browser, not the page the link was on. Users can easily set the referrer to any string they wish, e.g. with the RefControl extension for Firefox, which will happily set it to the address of the current page—or the home page of the site—by default.
If you really want to know whether the user is authorized to view a page you need to track their session, either with (secure) cookies or (secure) URL parameters. Better yet, use standard Digest authentication and let the browser take care of the credentials. The referrer string has no place in a proper authentication protocol.
Sure, you can leak resources in C++ in all the same ways as in C. However, C++ does have two major advantages when it comes to resource management:
1) Via destructors, you can register a block of code to run automatically when something goes out of scope through any standard flow control construct, e.g. return, break, continue, etc. In C, when you may return from a block in more than one way, you must either duplicate the clean-up code at each exit point or distort the structure of your routine to always pass through the clean-up code on its way out.
As clean-up function, C++ destructors aren't anything particularly new; you can do the same in C by manually calling a clean-up routine. However, the fact that destructors for stack variables are invoked automatically at the end of the block is unique to C++, and (when used properly) helps to eliminate a significant source of leaks by grouping initialization and clean-up rules in a single declaration.
2) C++ has built-in, first-class exception handling which runs these destructors while unwinding the stack, so you don't leak resources as easily when recovering from errors. The closest C equivalent, setjmp/longjmp, does not release resources when longjmp is invoked. A common alternative, returning an error code and testing for it in the caller, tends to suffer from the multiple-exit issue described above.
On the contrary, one should not need to be a member of a special, protected "common carrier" class to avoid liability for torts or crimes which one did not knowingly and willingly participate in. The entire concept of "common carrier" is a grave mistake as best, and possibly much worse: a threadbare attempt to blackmail carriers into accepting onerous regulations under threat of unjust prosecution for offenses committed by others.
If you deliberately single out offending packets and give them preferential treatment, fine: you're as liable as anyone can be, aside from the original sender.[1] In all other cases there can be no just liability, as there was no intent to contribute to the crime or tort.
[1] "As anyone can be"; personally I consider any presumption of liability over pure communication to be a 1st Amendment violation--infringement of free speech. Naturally this line of reasoning concludes that other things which depend on restricting communication, e.g. copyright, are likewise violations of free speech.
The government's policy is (one form of) "Net Neutrality", but "Net Neutrality" does not necessarily refer to the government's policy, so the original headline was ambiguous.
You are free to renounce your citizenship and move out of the jurisdiction of the government...
Great idea. Where do you propose one should move to? If you move to an area which has a government then you're back where you started; if you move to one of the few unclaimed (or more accurately, disputed) regions, you'll still have to contend with multiple surrounding governments which will not respect your claims to sovereign ownership. Simply put, there nowhere you can go to get away from government. It can only be resisted from the inside.
This completely overlooks the fact that renouncing citizenship goes far beyond breaking ties with the government; disassociation should not require one to forfeit one's property, or job, or freedom to visit family and friends. If it were a simple matter of giving up any claim to public services, in exchange for no more taxes or regulations (or interference in free trade, of course), then my response would be "where do I sign?". You could almost consider that voluntary. Sadly, that isn't the case.
P.S. Somalia is not "out of government control". First, several major nations, including the US, routinely intervene within its borders, contributing to the instability of the region. Second, even without that intervention it still has government, distributed amongst numerous tribal elders. Lack of a strong central government is not the same as lack of government itself.
Last I checked, it was still one man - one vote with U.S. electoral system. With a company, those who purchase more shares have more direct say...
Sure, in theory. And yet in practice the best-funded political candidates almost always win, and "vote buying" schemes are commonplace. Anyway, your vote is worth the same regardless of who controls the rest. If you're in the minority it hardly matters whether the opposing votes are held by a single, monolithic entity or a mass of individuals. At least with a corporation minorities are protected both through the principal/agent relationship (the board works for all shareholders, not just the majority) and the fact that continued association is voluntary.
A threat of inaction ... is quite often just as potent as a threat of action.
It can be. So? It is the means that I care about, not the outcome. No matter how constrained one's option may appear, there is still a difference between freely choosing to trade for a service because one believes the trade to be in one's best interests, vs. being compelled to purchase goods or services (if one is lucky) under threat of force.
Anyway, who do you think created the monopolies and barriers to entry in the first place? Widespread monopolies don't tend to occur on their own, you know, and one of the biggest barriers to entry is regulation--particularly the phenomenon known as regulatory capture.
Unlike corporations, you have a direct say in how your government is run, including how much needs to be paid up, and what it is used for.
If you own a single share of voting stock in any publicly-traded corporation then you have more say (one vote / outstanding shares) regarding their prices and internal operations than you have with the federal government (one vote / adult population of the US). Moreover, the officers of the corporation are legally bound to act in the shareholders' best interests--even the minority shareholders who would otherwise have little say. Politicians do not share any such obligation toward their constituents.
As if that wasn't enough, corporations are much more tightly bound by their status as private organizations than the government is bound by the Constitution: the government can compel you to act by threat of force, albeit in supposedly limited ways, whereas interaction with a private organization is always voluntary.
First time I've seen a judge equated with a bureaucrat.
I believe the GP was referring to the FCC, not the judge in this article.
And I believe the FCC Charter (created by those people in Congress) states that the FCC has this regulatory authority:
For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio
The scope of the FCC's charter is limited by Congress' Constitutional authority, which extends only to inter-state commerce. The federal government, including Congress and the FCC, has no authority over intra-state communications services. This is implied by the Constitution itself ("To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States..."; nothing is said about commerce within any state), and made explicit by the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
You also don't have that option with ISPs.
Wherever did you get that idea? Of course you have the option of not buying their services. No one is going to garnish your wages or throw you in prison for not buying Internet service from a local ISP. You don't even have to go without: you can bypass the ISPs entirely by purchasing transit from a higher-level provider, form your own ISP, or subscribe to dial-up, terrestrial wireless, or satellite Internet service.
Even if your only choices were DSL, cable, or no Internet at all, however, that's still far more of an option than you'll get from the government. They only give you one choice: pay up.
First, "Slashdotters" are not a hive mind. If you want to throw around the "hypocrite" label, first find some individual Slashdotter deserving of the term.
Second, not all technicalities are created equal. There is a difference between letting off someone who clearly did cause harm to others just because e.g. they weren't reminded of a procedural detail they should have known already, vs. letting someone off because the evidence is inconclusive, or because their action may have been similar to something illegal, or indirectly contributing to something illegal, but was not quite illegal per se. These are all technicalities, but in the first case they definitely did something both illegal and harmful, whereas in the other cases either the illegality of their actions or the resulting harm has not been definitively established.
Finally, in a world where the law itself is often unjust, if said justice is best served by technicalities in some instances, and undermined by them in others, then one's approval will naturally depend on the context in which they are used. This is no more hypocritical than liking water when it's in a swimming pool but not when it's flooding one's basement.
The Constitution sets up the right of an owner to control their works for some finite time and gives Congress the power to set the details.
Actually, that's wrong. The Constitution doesn't require Congress to implement copyrights or patents at all; it merely grants them the option of doing so. Moreover, this is clearly described as a privilege optionally granted to authors/inventors to achieve a specific social goal (more writing/inventing), not any sort of natural right.
Oh, and about that shared IP thing ... blame it on your ISP for not giving you a nice big /64 block in IPv6.
Actually, assuming that the NAT is on the subscriber's side, the ISP did give them not just one /64 subnet, but an entire /48 in IPv6. Every IPv4 address a.b.c.d corresponds to 65,536 IPv6 subnets of the form 2002:aabb:ccdd:xxxx::/64, where xxxx is any 16-bit subnet number. You just need to set up 6to4 tunneling on your router.
Of course, as long as you want to connect to other IPv4 hosts you're still going to need NAT and a shared IP address. IPv6 won't help there.
Good luck with that. I use Open Source software almost exclusively, and consider it more secure, but don't delude yourself: you can never be completely certain that any software is free of exploitable bugs. For that matter even hardware authentication can be subverted, but the idea is to minimize the surface-area exposed to attack.
A general-purpose PC—whatever OS/apps it's running—has a much larger surface-area than a locked-down, non-updatable, special-purpose device intended exclusively for previewing and signing sensitive data, such as money-transfer orders. (Note that both parts are important: the device must be able to show the user what they're signing, and include that exact bitmap image in the signature for later verification.)
security token keyfobs a option?
These can help protect against keyloggers and the like; once you've logged out of your account you should be fairly safe (unless some other attack altered your login credentials). However, if you can't trust the local PC then you're still subject to the other attacks I mentioned: uncertain security against phishing, redirects, etc., and local malware taking advantage of your authenticated connection while you're logged in.
If the keyfob is required for each transaction, and not just the initial login, then your security is marginally better. In this case malware can't just make up arbitrary transactions and file them in your name. However, this does not completely close the security hole: malware can substitute its own data (destination, amount) in place of yours every time you transfer money, using the code you entered from your keyfob to authenticate the false transaction. This is largely how the malware against e-Gold worked.
expect to be able to bank from computers at cafes, work, and friends' houses
From a security point-of-view this expectation is frightening. Using their own trusted computer on an untrusted network, sure—that's what TLS was designed for. Using an untrusted client computer, however, is just asking for trouble in the form of keyloggers, malware, insecure settings (are you sure they didn't enter an exception for that invalid certificate?), etc.
As far as that goes, the prevalence of malware in general should make anyone think twice about online banking, even from their own PC. Remember, any program on your computer can pretend to be you as long as you're logged in to your online banking site. Someone even wrote a virus/trojan to this effect directed against e-Gold (back when they were still active), and there's no reason it wouldn't work just as well against any other site. There is very little you can do, short of self-contained hardware authentication for each transaction, to protect against this sort of local attack.
We should not be taxing things we want people to do, we should be taxing the things we don't want people doing.
If you tax things you want people to do then you act contrary to your own interests. On the other hand, if you seek revenue through taxes on things you don't want people doing then you become dependent on the "unwanted" behavior, which curtails any incentive to actually persuade them to stop—which is also contrary to your own interests.
The correct approach is to give up the reliance on coercion. Anything worth doing can be done voluntarily.
If you want protection from your government, you have to do something about your government.
Even assuming this were a practical solution, what about all the other governments out there, and the CAs within their jurisdictions? It only takes one CA caving to one government—not necessarily yours—to circumvent the trust authentication for any site.
Number of companies isn't necessarily a good measure of competition. You can have cutthroat competition between two providers (even if one is only potential!), or collusion among ten.
Whether there is "sufficient" competition is inherently subjective. They might as well have asked whether one felt one was getting a "good deal".