Wait 'til we invade North Korea - those boys ain't gonna run like Iraqi farmboys. We'll take ten thousand or more casualties (even assuming they don't nuke the 30,000 we have there now) and American morons will learn again as we did in Vietnam that war is not a video game...
In a free market, you wouldn't have IP laws - and probably you wouldn't have companies the size of Microsoft either - in fact, since corporations are state creations, you might not have that form of company at all - nor could they sue small companies for frivolous patent infringements...
OTOH, they could copy small companies technology and use their marketing clout to beat them - except that usually small companies are much more adept at that than big ones...
What about him? Why can't he make his money off first sale? Why does he need royalties? Because the industry can rip him off by "Hollywood accounting" with royalties, that's why...
So ask somebody in their thirties... Women over thirty start to prefer older, heavier set men with money...according to the surveys...
20-year-olds still haven't realized that looks fade and money is permanent...
And the reason the youngest woman you asked still thought he was hot is father-figure effect...
Of course, Sean hasn't done too many movies lately, which can also account for his apparent lack of sex appeal... Most of these morons only remember the last person they saw in a movie...Look at any survey of "who's hot" - it is always skewed toward whoever's movie was out last week...
- By 'society' I simply mean the collection of - people who live within a commonly agreed upon - boundary and who (mostly) agree to live under - the rule of law.
No problem with that definition except the second part which implies reasoned agreement (as opposed to social conditioning).
- 'rights' are simply ideas about actions that - society has determined can be applied to - members.
Well, no, "rights" are supposedly inherent requirements for certain human needs. Actions are usually justified by reference to these "rights". The problem is, once you've identified these "needs", what do you accomplish by referring to them as "rights". My answer: mystical justification for calling ANY "need" a "right". My approach is better - justify behavior based on its economic impact on the advancement of the human species in the long run. No need to refer to mystical concepts...
- Rights exist in the same way that laws exist,
Well, yes, and no. "Rights" are nebulous concepts, as indicated above, and laws are simply codified justifications for the use of coercion. Both exist without reference to concrete logical evaluations of their actual impact in human economic behavioral terms. In that respect, they are the same.
- because we all (mostly) agree that they do. - Rights are just one of those made up things that - wouldn't be necessary if we didn't interact with - each other.
Correct about the latter part. The fact that humans are social animals requires behavioral regulation in order to advance the species. This is because humans invest effort in what works, just as an investor invests in an attempt to obtain monopoly profit. If coercion is perceived to be what works, humans will invest in it. The result, however, will be nonproductive, as the investment in coercion eventually results in everyone expending resources on preventing it and not on production of things that really would advance the species. This is the same effect as when the ROI for something in the market eventually reduces to the "general" rate of return.
- IP most certainly is one of those rules, - although it is a relatively new one and thus - hasn't had all the details worked out and isn't - as widely accepted. It is a rule about who gets - to determine how some specific pieces of - information are handled.
It is an attempt to extend principles of contract to overcome principles of property which underly those contract principles. It is an attempt to control a person's use of property, and thereby deny that person any actual property.
- Arguing that IP does not exist is as silly as - arguing that laws do not exist.
Not at all. Property precedes law. Property depends on various characteristics such as scarcity, alienability, and others. IP does not have these characteristics and therefore is not property - as Thomas Jefferson pointed out once.
- Part of the problem with IP is that it is very - much founded in the idea that the only or - primary reason content producers produce is to - gain money. This may not be true. Many writers - write because it is their passion to do so. Most - have hundreds of stories that will never be - published or even read by anyone.
That justification only came in after the original justification - censorship of IP output - was downgraded as the power of English royalty downgraded. See the history of copyright law in England. It's irrelevant, anyway. Whether producers produce for money or ego or whatever doesn't matter in the context of economic effects.
- IP certainly still needs tuning, but as more - aspects of life start to fall into the domain of - pure information, I think we'll see more need - for good methods of handling IP rights. We - shouldn't be throwing out the baby with the - bathwater.
In fact, as someone else mentioned, once nanotech comes in, ALL property will essentially cease to be scarce and alienable. Nanotech (fully developed, that is) will essentially destroy the notion of economics (not to mention the notion of human). At that time, IP will be even MORE of a waste of time, not less.
More aspects of life becoming information is a good reason for opposing IP, which is a system for creating artifical scarcity, rather than reducing scarcity. The point of property rules is to handle the problem of rational distribution of (relatively) scarce resources. IP increases scarcity, it does not reduce it. Almost by definition, this is unproductive.
The notion that by increasing monopoly profit, one can induce more production, is quite reasonable - since investors invest in the hope of attaining monopoly profit. But if this is done by fiat rather than by economic action, the result is a distortion of market investment.
For example, one could argue that it might be preferably not to even have a massive entertainment industry, but rather expend that investment in disease prevention or scientific research or whatever. By artificially inflating the value of entertainment by granting monopoly profit rights, we are distorting capital and human energy investment patterns to the detriment of the species.
The point of the free market - when and if it is truly free, which has been rare if not nonexistent in history - is that it is merely the sum total of human behavior and therefore most closely reflects the needs and desires of the species (subject to that species stupidity, ignorance, irrationality, maliciousness and fear, of course). It is the only system that self-corrects for those defects rather than amplifying them as the state does.
IP is merely a state-imposed notion that a coercive monopoly is sometimes good. Jefferson didn't buy it and as more economists analyze the effects, it's justification is becoming very porous.
The one time I got a virus, it was from a file downloaded from P2P.
And my antivirus caught it and cleaned it...
If you don't have antivirus on every desktop in your company, you are an idiot.
Therefore, viruses in P2P are no more and no less relevant than viruses in email...which I would guess are at least as prevalent...
Therefore viruses are not an excuse to ban P2P.
Other excuses may be relevant. Bandwidth is probably the best excuse - that is a scarce resource. Just means you need a way to enforce bandwidth usage. If nobody has the bandwidth needed to download large files (i.e., from the Net, not the intranet), nobody will do it.
Sean Connery will be big with women until he's 90...
Which should be next year or so...
His presence in the movie alone recommends it. (Unless he's made a mistake, as he did with "Highlander II" - the worst movie since "Plan 9 From Outer Space"...)
In the nanotech era, scarcity (except perhaps of basic resources like atoms - not exactly a problem, right?) would be a non-issue. Economics deals with rational distribution of resources in a context of scarcity in human society. Nanotech removes scarcity - and probably removes any notion of the word "human".
So who cares?
As Drexler pointed out, you can argue paradigms in a context which nanotech will in fact make irrelevant. So why bother?
- My question is this: in the entertainment - industry (publishing, music, film, etc.) - wouldn't the initial impulse to control the - distribution/reproduction channel be too great - to ignore?
Uuh, I'm not sure what you mean. How can you control a distribution/reproduction channel in the absence of IP laws? Sure, you can buy up all the channels (like Clear Channel is trying to do) - but the point of trying to establish monopoly profit is that you CAN'T - monopoly profit attracts investment which destroys the monopoly profit until the rate of return of the enterprise reduces to the "general" rate of return. The ONLY way to establish monopoly profit (other than in the short term) is through coercive state intervention - i.e., IP (and other) laws.
Of course, there might be technological limitations in the short term, but the monopoly profit in trying to overcome those limitations will attract the necessary research. No one will be able to control all the distribution channels forever without coercive intervention by the state.
The bottom line of all this is that while monopoly profit is the goal of all investment, long-term monopolies are not possible without coercive state intervention. This is basic economics.
You cannot have a (long-term) monopoly without some sort of "GUN".
Entirely wrong. If you operate on the assumption that R&D is invested in strictly by capital, you might be right. If it is invested in by means of profits on previous endeavors (bootstrapping), you are entirely wrong. The R&D has already been paid for in that case, and your only cost is marketing which is the same cost incurred by any other competitor.
Not to mention that your model ignores all the other aspects of making money - better marketing, better implementation, better customer service, etc., all of which impact the value of a product perhaps as much as the orginal R&D value of the idea. Not to mention lead time for the originator to make profit before his product can be reverse-engineered.
There is nothing in economics which says that someone is guaranteed to make a profit. In fact, economics says it is a very complicated matter to make money consistently. More importantly, economics says that ALL markets must inevitably reduce the rate of return to the "general" rate of return which is historically around a few percent. This is WHY you do R&D - to keep entering NEW markets where you can make monopoly profit UNTIL someone reverse-engineers your product or finds a way to do the same thing cheaper than your way.
This is common business sense. To declare that R&D is impossible without IP protection is nonsense.
While they may be in support of the concept of IP (disclaimer - I haven't read the piece yet, I just downloaded it), you cannot have IP without intellectual monopoly.
There are reasons having to do with the proper definition of property that an idea cannot be property. Except in the one sense that if I know something you don't, I can sell it to you - once.
The key is once. Any attempt to prevent or control my use or resale of that idea constitutes coercive intervention against my freedom. Therefore the only way to do so is to institute a coercive monopoly through state coercion - which is exactly what IP laws do.
Actually this is true regardless of whether the patent is obvious or not. Any IP is by definition imposing restrictions on the otherwise free action of everyone else but the IP holder. Which is coercion, plain and simple. This is the main reason various libertarians argue against IP - that regardless of the supposed (unproven) benefits to "society", IP is still immoral. I am not a moralist, so I don't argue from this position. I use the position that coercion is economically unproductive for the human species, however, which is a different position, but results in the same conclusion - IP is coercion and therefore is necessarily bad despite any supposed benefits.
So your dad makes his money at the point of the government's gun, right?
Why doesn't he just join the FBI?
- My company takes the risk the risk to develop a - new product or process. We patent it, market it, - it becomes successful, and we profit. Then it - becomes wildly successful and we should give up - the profit just because it is SO useful!?!
In case you don't know, this is exactly how patents are supposed to work...you are granted a monopoly for a LIMITED TIME - specifically until people know how to do what you do. Read the history of patent law - or for that matter any of umpteen/. posts on this issue over the last month...
Actually, I would argue that that first three shouldn't be illegal either.
1) National Security Info - again, if you can't keep it secret, that's not my problem...Jail the idiot who let the info slip (unless of course I stole it fair and square like some James Bond guy.)
2) Fraudulent information - well, if I'm paying money for it, yes, that's coercion, but if you're just broadcasting it like the three news networks and CNN do every day, well...it's up to me to not get taken in...In ordinary commerce, spreading the word that the product is not as advertised usually clears that problem up.
3) Insider Information - As one of the guys on Animal House told Flounder, "Hey! You screwed up! You trusted us!" - again, that's not my problem. If a company screws up, why should it be the law's problem? Government should not exist (at all, but that's another rant) to protect somebody's business model or business practices from their own incompetence. That simple.
If I run a satellite and my encryption is so bad that some people get free service, who cares? If they start selling the hacked cards to thousands of my customers, I care - so I better make sure my encryption is good (or change it constantly, or whatever). Calling the cops just means I can't do my job and I prefer to use someone else's gun to make my point.
Besides, what evidence is there that this sort of piracy has any significant economic effect on the viability of satellite television? I'm not talking about hypothetical lost revenue, I'm talking about are the companies profitable or not despite the piracy? If they are, they have no beef that can't be resolved by doing their job competently.
- Society grants to the individual the right to - 'own' things.
Nope. There is no such entity as "society" and there are no "rights". What the human species determined over time was that obtaining resources by coercion was an unproductive use of resources, whereas trade was a productive use of resources. Therefore coercion is unjustified on "economic" grounds, which do not depend on the notion of rights.
You are correct in your analysis of the baker.
You are also correct in that all of these things are rules people made up in order to survive.
However the notion that IP is one of those rules is incorrect. IP was created by states for coercive purposes - read the history of copyright in English law - it was a charter from royalty for purposes of censorship. Later, those who profited from copyright and looked to lose when royalty lost its power sought to justify the principle by reference to its alleged practical result of encouraging production of IP and the supposed increased compensation to the producers of such and therefore the supposed benefit to "society" - none of which has been established as an economic fact.
What we do know - as is established by Ms. McElroy at the referenced page and by Austrian School economists elsewhere - is that "IP" is an oxymoron and all forms of IP protection (copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc.) are coercive interventions in the free market that distort the market and therefore harm that market - which market is everyone who is not a direct beneficiary of such laws. (And in fact, it could be argued that even the beneficiaries may well be harmed.)
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Wait 'til we invade North Korea - those boys ain't gonna run like Iraqi farmboys. We'll take ten thousand or more casualties (even assuming they don't nuke the 30,000 we have there now) and American morons will learn again as we did in Vietnam that war is not a video game...
No, such are the wonders of STATE capitalism.
In a free market, you wouldn't have IP laws - and probably you wouldn't have companies the size of Microsoft either - in fact, since corporations are state creations, you might not have that form of company at all - nor could they sue small companies for frivolous patent infringements...
OTOH, they could copy small companies technology and use their marketing clout to beat them - except that usually small companies are much more adept at that than big ones...
You know, the black helicopters, the jets spraying the sky with poison chemicals, maybe even UFOs...
What about him? Why can't he make his money off first sale? Why does he need royalties? Because the industry can rip him off by "Hollywood accounting" with royalties, that's why...
So ask somebody in their thirties... Women over thirty start to prefer older, heavier set men with money...according to the surveys...
20-year-olds still haven't realized that looks fade and money is permanent...
And the reason the youngest woman you asked still thought he was hot is father-figure effect...
Of course, Sean hasn't done too many movies lately, which can also account for his apparent lack of sex appeal... Most of these morons only remember the last person they saw in a movie...Look at any survey of "who's hot" - it is always skewed toward whoever's movie was out last week...
- By 'society' I simply mean the collection of
- people who live within a commonly agreed upon
- boundary and who (mostly) agree to live under
- the rule of law.
No problem with that definition except the second part which implies reasoned agreement (as opposed to social conditioning).
- 'rights' are simply ideas about actions that
- society has determined can be applied to
- members.
Well, no, "rights" are supposedly inherent requirements for certain human needs. Actions are usually justified by reference to these "rights". The problem is, once you've identified these "needs", what do you accomplish by referring to them as "rights". My answer: mystical justification for calling ANY "need" a "right". My approach is better - justify behavior based on its economic impact on the advancement of the human species in the long run. No need to refer to mystical concepts...
- Rights exist in the same way that laws exist,
Well, yes, and no. "Rights" are nebulous concepts, as indicated above, and laws are simply codified justifications for the use of coercion.
Both exist without reference to concrete logical evaluations of their actual impact in human economic behavioral terms. In that respect, they are the same.
- because we all (mostly) agree that they do.
- Rights are just one of those made up things that
- wouldn't be necessary if we didn't interact with
- each other.
Correct about the latter part. The fact that humans are social animals requires behavioral regulation in order to advance the species. This is because humans invest effort in what works, just as an investor invests in an attempt to obtain monopoly profit. If coercion is perceived to be what works, humans will invest in it. The result, however, will be nonproductive, as the investment in coercion eventually results in everyone expending resources on preventing it and not on production of things that really would advance the species. This is the same effect as when the ROI for something in the market eventually reduces to the "general" rate of return.
- IP most certainly is one of those rules,
- although it is a relatively new one and thus
- hasn't had all the details worked out and isn't
- as widely accepted. It is a rule about who gets
- to determine how some specific pieces of
- information are handled.
It is an attempt to extend principles of contract to overcome principles of property which underly those contract principles. It is an attempt to control a person's use of property, and thereby deny that person any actual property.
- Arguing that IP does not exist is as silly as
- arguing that laws do not exist.
Not at all. Property precedes law. Property depends on various characteristics such as scarcity, alienability, and others. IP does not have these characteristics and therefore is not property - as Thomas Jefferson pointed out once.
- Part of the problem with IP is that it is very
- much founded in the idea that the only or
- primary reason content producers produce is to
- gain money. This may not be true. Many writers
- write because it is their passion to do so. Most
- have hundreds of stories that will never be
- published or even read by anyone.
That justification only came in after the original justification - censorship of IP output - was downgraded as the power of English royalty downgraded. See the history of copyright law in England. It's irrelevant, anyway. Whether producers produce for money or ego or whatever doesn't matter in the context of economic effects.
- IP certainly still needs tuning, but as more
- aspects of life start to fall into the domain of
- pure information, I think we'll see more need
- for good methods of handling IP rights. We
- shouldn't be throwing out the baby with the
- bathwater.
In fact, as someone else mentioned, once nanotech comes in, ALL property will essentially cease to be scarce and alienable. Nanotech (fully developed, that is) will essentially destroy the notion of economics (not to mention the notion of human). At that time, IP will be even MORE of a waste of time, not less.
More aspects of life becoming information is a good reason for opposing IP, which is a system for creating artifical scarcity, rather than reducing scarcity. The point of property rules is to handle the problem of rational distribution of (relatively) scarce resources. IP increases scarcity, it does not reduce it. Almost by definition, this is unproductive.
The notion that by increasing monopoly profit, one can induce more production, is quite reasonable - since investors invest in the hope of attaining monopoly profit. But if this is done by fiat rather than by economic action, the result is a distortion of market investment.
For example, one could argue that it might be preferably not to even have a massive entertainment industry, but rather expend that investment in disease prevention or scientific research or whatever. By artificially inflating the value of entertainment by granting monopoly profit rights, we are distorting capital and human energy investment patterns to the detriment of the species.
The point of the free market - when and if it is truly free, which has been rare if not nonexistent in history - is that it is merely the sum total of human behavior and therefore most closely reflects the needs and desires of the species (subject to that species stupidity, ignorance, irrationality, maliciousness and fear, of course). It is the only system that self-corrects for those defects rather than amplifying them as the state does.
IP is merely a state-imposed notion that a coercive monopoly is sometimes good. Jefferson didn't buy it and as more economists analyze the effects, it's justification is becoming very porous.
No, you are ignorant of how economics works.
Do you think you're the only business with problems? That's how your post reads.
And you want the state to solve your problems for you with a gun.
That simple.
You don't have the imagination to solve your business problems, you go out of business. That simple.
Restrict the bandwidth from the the desktop to the Net (not the intranet) and people will stop downloading because it will be too slow.
Don't know how? Better get on it...
Don't write policy - code...
No, you'd rather throw your weight around and prove what a "BMOC" you are...
Morons...
I believe Jefferson did not believe in a personal "Creator", but in Nature as the Creator.
He did write the "Jefferson Bible" which espoused Jesus' moral laws and excised the religious ones...
The Founding Fathers were not, in general, Christians of the sort George Bush admires...
The one time I got a virus, it was from a file downloaded from P2P.
And my antivirus caught it and cleaned it...
If you don't have antivirus on every desktop in your company, you are an idiot.
Therefore, viruses in P2P are no more and no less relevant than viruses in email...which I would guess are at least as prevalent...
Therefore viruses are not an excuse to ban P2P.
Other excuses may be relevant. Bandwidth is probably the best excuse - that is a scarce resource. Just means you need a way to enforce bandwidth usage. If nobody has the bandwidth needed to download large files (i.e., from the Net, not the intranet), nobody will do it.
Yeah, Britney's job is in real danger...
Nitwit...
Obviously an attempt to imitate the big X in the X-men ads...
They gave Begin - a known terrorist in the 1940's - the same prize, I believe...
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Did you misspell "good" for "could"?
Either way, you are so wrong...
BUSH IS FROM AN OIL FAMILY, YOU DOLT!
Typical /.'er - has no clue what women like...
Sean Connery will be big with women until he's 90...
Which should be next year or so...
His presence in the movie alone recommends it. (Unless he's made a mistake, as he did with "Highlander II" - the worst movie since "Plan 9 From Outer Space"...)
In the nanotech era, scarcity (except perhaps of basic resources like atoms - not exactly a problem, right?) would be a non-issue. Economics deals with rational distribution of resources in a context of scarcity in human society. Nanotech removes scarcity - and probably removes any notion of the word "human".
So who cares?
As Drexler pointed out, you can argue paradigms in a context which nanotech will in fact make irrelevant. So why bother?
- My question is this: in the entertainment
- industry (publishing, music, film, etc.)
- wouldn't the initial impulse to control the
- distribution/reproduction channel be too great
- to ignore?
Uuh, I'm not sure what you mean. How can you control a distribution/reproduction channel in the absence of IP laws? Sure, you can buy up all the channels (like Clear Channel is trying to do) - but the point of trying to establish monopoly profit is that you CAN'T - monopoly profit attracts investment which destroys the monopoly profit until the rate of return of the enterprise reduces to the "general" rate of return. The ONLY way to establish monopoly profit (other than in the short term) is through coercive state intervention - i.e., IP (and other) laws.
Of course, there might be technological limitations in the short term, but the monopoly profit in trying to overcome those limitations will attract the necessary research. No one will be able to control all the distribution channels forever without coercive intervention by the state.
The bottom line of all this is that while monopoly profit is the goal of all investment, long-term monopolies are not possible without coercive state intervention. This is basic economics.
You cannot have a (long-term) monopoly without some sort of "GUN".
Entirely wrong. If you operate on the assumption that R&D is invested in strictly by capital, you might be right. If it is invested in by means of profits on previous endeavors (bootstrapping), you are entirely wrong. The R&D has already been paid for in that case, and your only cost is marketing which is the same cost incurred by any other competitor.
Not to mention that your model ignores all the other aspects of making money - better marketing, better implementation, better customer service, etc., all of which impact the value of a product perhaps as much as the orginal R&D value of the idea. Not to mention lead time for the originator to make profit before his product can be reverse-engineered.
There is nothing in economics which says that someone is guaranteed to make a profit. In fact, economics says it is a very complicated matter to make money consistently. More importantly, economics says that ALL markets must inevitably reduce the rate of return to the "general" rate of return which is historically around a few percent. This is WHY you do R&D - to keep entering NEW markets where you can make monopoly profit UNTIL someone reverse-engineers your product or finds a way to do the same thing cheaper than your way.
This is common business sense. To declare that R&D is impossible without IP protection is nonsense.
While they may be in support of the concept of IP (disclaimer - I haven't read the piece yet, I just downloaded it), you cannot have IP without intellectual monopoly.
There are reasons having to do with the proper definition of property that an idea cannot be property. Except in the one sense that if I know something you don't, I can sell it to you - once.
The key is once. Any attempt to prevent or control my use or resale of that idea constitutes coercive intervention against my freedom. Therefore the only way to do so is to institute a coercive monopoly through state coercion - which is exactly what IP laws do.
Actually this is true regardless of whether the patent is obvious or not. Any IP is by definition imposing restrictions on the otherwise free action of everyone else but the IP holder. Which is coercion, plain and simple. This is the main reason various libertarians argue against IP - that regardless of the supposed (unproven) benefits to "society", IP is still immoral. I am not a moralist, so I don't argue from this position. I use the position that coercion is economically unproductive for the human species, however, which is a different position, but results in the same conclusion - IP is coercion and therefore is necessarily bad despite any supposed benefits.
So your dad makes his money at the point of the government's gun, right?
/. posts on this issue over the last month...
Why doesn't he just join the FBI?
- My company takes the risk the risk to develop a
- new product or process. We patent it, market it,
- it becomes successful, and we profit. Then it
- becomes wildly successful and we should give up
- the profit just because it is SO useful!?!
In case you don't know, this is exactly how patents are supposed to work...you are granted a monopoly for a LIMITED TIME - specifically until people know how to do what you do. Read the history of patent law - or for that matter any of umpteen
Actually, I would argue that that first three shouldn't be illegal either.
1) National Security Info - again, if you can't keep it secret, that's not my problem...Jail the idiot who let the info slip (unless of course I stole it fair and square like some James Bond guy.)
2) Fraudulent information - well, if I'm paying money for it, yes, that's coercion, but if you're just broadcasting it like the three news networks and CNN do every day, well...it's up to me to not get taken in...In ordinary commerce, spreading the word that the product is not as advertised usually clears that problem up.
3) Insider Information - As one of the guys on Animal House told Flounder, "Hey! You screwed up! You trusted us!" - again, that's not my problem. If a company screws up, why should it be the law's problem? Government should not exist (at all, but that's another rant) to protect somebody's business model or business practices from their own incompetence. That simple.
If I run a satellite and my encryption is so bad that some people get free service, who cares? If they start selling the hacked cards to thousands of my customers, I care - so I better make sure my encryption is good (or change it constantly, or whatever). Calling the cops just means I can't do my job and I prefer to use someone else's gun to make my point.
Besides, what evidence is there that this sort of piracy has any significant economic effect on the viability of satellite television? I'm not talking about hypothetical lost revenue, I'm talking about are the companies profitable or not despite the piracy? If they are, they have no beef that can't be resolved by doing their job competently.
- Society grants to the individual the right to
- 'own' things.
Nope. There is no such entity as "society" and there are no "rights". What the human species determined over time was that obtaining resources by coercion was an unproductive use of resources, whereas trade was a productive use of resources. Therefore coercion is unjustified on "economic" grounds, which do not depend on the notion of rights.
You are correct in your analysis of the baker.
You are also correct in that all of these things are rules people made up in order to survive.
However the notion that IP is one of those rules is incorrect. IP was created by states for coercive purposes - read the history of copyright in English law - it was a charter from royalty for purposes of censorship. Later, those who profited from copyright and looked to lose when royalty lost its power sought to justify the principle by reference to its alleged practical result of encouraging production of IP and the supposed increased compensation to the producers of such and therefore the supposed benefit to "society" - none of which has been established as an economic fact.
What we do know - as is established by Ms. McElroy at the referenced page and by Austrian School economists elsewhere - is that "IP" is an oxymoron and all forms of IP protection (copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc.) are coercive interventions in the free market that distort the market and therefore harm that market - which market is everyone who is not a direct beneficiary of such laws. (And in fact, it could be argued that even the beneficiaries may well be harmed.)
On the one hand, we have posts pointing out the apparent egregiousness of the Microsoft "fix" for an alleged Opera "bug".
On the other hand, we have posts pointing out that Opera did "in fact" have a bug which Microsoft needed to fix with a special style sheet.
When is someone going to analyze these two positions and determine which one is correct?
WAS THERE A BUG IN OPERA WHICH WOULD EXPLAIN WHY MICROSOFT DID WHAT THEY DID OR NOT?
And I'd like Opera to address that point directly since they are posting here...
I personally don't know enough about style sheets or whatever to comment, but I would like to know the FACTS here.
Having said that, the Bork version of the page is hilarious and justifies itself.
Half your email is about big dicks?
Say it ain't so...
Unless the other half is about big tits...