Limited liability is indeed a key difference between corporations and natural persons. Public policy dating back to Elizabethan England has found it to be useful and beneficial to the commonweal. I've yet to see why limited liability justifies imposing political censorship on law-abiding citizens.
The question is: why should limited liability impose a constraint on collective political speech? In the USA, there is a very strong bar against imposing liability for political speech, so why should limited liability disqualify a collective of citizens from speaking on political issues?
Ever since the corporation was invented, it has had many "human rights": the right to hold property, the right to buy and sell, the right to form contracts, the right to sue and be sued, etc. The legal question is not whether corporations have any rights, nor whether they have all the rights of a natural person (no one asserts that) but what non-null subset of human rights they do have.
Corporations are people: living, breathing people. Corporations are comprised neither of space aliens nor of soulless robots, but of real people, organized for collective action. When a corporation acts, it acts through people. The key question regarding human rights, such as the right to free speech, is whether citizens must entirely surrender their right to free speech when they organize together under a corporate form.
If citizens have rights when acting individually, why should those rights disappear when they act collectively?
My bottom line take-away from this is that the most fundamental level of security these days is your primary e-mail account. If you don't have two-factor authentication on it, you are asking for trouble. Relying on one-factor authentication for your primary e-mail seems to be almost as bad as failing to back up your data. (And if you have a credit card on file with Apple, it looks like their e-mail security approaches zero-factor security.)
Some of the standard data can be secure. For example, I have never revealed my first pet's name online, so you could search for it in vain for the rest of your life. At first it just never came up in discussion, but as soon as I realized the security implications, I decided that there were some trivial, obscure data that no one else needed to know.
The author suggests that Apple didn't allow her to mention Amazon. If Apple allowed others to do so, that does not show her statement to be false. Apple may have erred in implementing its policies, either in her case or in the cases you found. Don't rush to blame the victim.
So why, in particular, do you assume that Apple must be consistent in its content filtering? You assume that because Apple has permitted references to Amazon in other cases, they would necessarily have permitted it in this case. It could be that Apple has a policy of filtering out references to Amazon, but does not do so automatically. This book may have been manually reviewed because of the previously-included links to Amazon (another inane Apple policy).
We don't know what all of Apple's policies are in this case, but assuming mendacity on the part of this author is completely unwarranted.
1. A corporation is a 'legal person' in the sense that it can interact with the legal system in almost all the ways a natural person can. In this sense, a corporation is undeniably a person. This is the essence of what it means to be a corporation.
2. An association of people is a group of people, and a corporation is generally both of those things. When you say that a corporation should have no legal rights what you mean is that the people who comprise the corporation should have no legal rights to act collectively, even where they have the right to act individually. Why is this an undeniable fact, as opposed to a political opinion?
3. The Citizens United opinion did not hold that corporations were natural people, nor that they should have all the rights of natural people, It held that people acting collectively under a corporate form should largely have the same rights they have to act individually. One may disagree with this position, but why is it categorically false?
This guy does make some reasonable points, but for all that he thinks himself an uber-geek, he is apparently disconnected from the realities of the tech world today.
I’ll make technologists a deal, I’ll give up my song copyrights if you give up your software patents. Software patents are even less unique than your typical song.
He thinks that technologists like software patents. Most technologists who are familiar with the issue are strongly against them; the only group consistently in favor of software patents is the patent lawyers.
The downside of his proposed deal, in my view, is not abolishing software patents (which would instead be of tremendous benefit), but abolishing music copyrights. For all that the strength of copyright protection has weakened in the Internet era, it is not zero by any means, and still plays its role of promoting the 'progress of science and the useful arts'.
The big problems come if you attempt to recreate, via stringent and draconian restrictions, the strong copyright regime we had before the Internet. These attempts are doomed to failure, and will create significant collateral damage while failing in their intended goal.
US investors in Blueseed and its startups will pay US taxes. US workers aboard Blueseed will pay US taxes. Non-US workers aboard will use the courts of the country of registry (e.g., Bahamas), if they need courts. Blueseed will have to provide its own infrastructure. Why should this foreign vessel on the high seas be treated differently from the thousands of other foreign vessels on the high seas?
The problem with Anguilla, BWI is that it is situated in the Caribbean Sea, and stubbornly refuses to budge from that location. Blueseed is for people who place a high value on physical proximity to and face-to-face interaction with people in Silicon Valley, but for whom a location in the US doesn't work. These people may be wrong, but it's at least a plausible idea.
You may well be right, in which case Blueseed will fail. It could be that physical proximity to Silicon Valley is as valuable as Blueseed thinks it is, in which case the hassles and expense will be worth it. I see no reason not to let them try.
The key word is 'almost'. They are not in the US. There is no duty, legal or moral, to pay for being close to the US. Should the people in Tijuana pay US taxes for the privilege of being close to the US?
What Blueseed is proposing to do is create a new sliver of foreign territory (probably Bahamian or Marshallese) 12 miles outside Silicon Valley. Locating a new business there is no more a tax or immigration dodge than setting up across the Canadian or Mexican border would be. Even though some people might like it otherwise, US tax and immigration law applies only to US territory and US citizens and residents.
The US VC's funding the startups will pay US taxes. US citizens working onboard will pay US taxes. As for the others, why do you think foreigners who work outside the US should pay US taxes and have to get US work visas?
Are you saying that the amount paid to CEO's is enough to have material negative impact on patient care? In decrying CEO compensation, are you not instead motivated primarily by envy?
So? Even though I hold a PhD from MIT, it's in an unrelated field and I don't consider myself a climate expert in any way. But I can think for myself, and the WSJ piece pointed out that even if we accept the AGW thesis, in the chain of reasoning from "the climate is warming" to "we must reduce carbon emissions" there are many steps that are economic and political in nature, not within the expertise of climatologists.
The real tragedy, to my mind, is that, based on this questionable chain of reasoning, so many people are now true believers that reducing carbon emissions is a vital necessity or mankind, and that anyone who questions that conclusion is as bad as those who deny the Holocaust.
I have a Safepass card. It's been some time since I got it, but I think it cost me about $20. Whenever I want to make an online payment to a previously-unknown payee, I need to enter the code from the hardware token. While it's true that the token could be stolen, thieves would have to intercept my username/password, then steal the token without my discovering the theft in time to notify the bank. Not impossible by any means, but probably difficult enough to induce the thieves to look for easier prey. I think my investment of $20 and a few extra keystrokes is well worth it.
Geohot didn't do anything illegal, so why is he a 'criminal'? How is restoring the Linux functionality that Sony originally sold, and then disabled though updates, a 'misdeed'?
It is not true only in theory. I have done it for a TiVo with two different cable companies. It's true that most people, especially the technology-challenged, won't bother, but the option is there.
By comparison to women, yes, men do ignore the fashion industry. There are real gender-based differences in behavior, and these are reflected in buying preferences. I doubt that we will ever see gender equality in the market for haute couture, or for videogames.
Please don't be pedantic. In English usage, Finland can be part of Scandinavia. While the Finns and other peoples of the Nordic countries might disagree with this, their views are not definitive since we are conversing in English.
Trying to secure something by decreasing your signal strength is an excellent way to be more secure. It's just not a way to be absolutely secure, as AliasMarlowe seems to think. Even if he cannot detect a signal outside the property, someone with an ultra-high-gain antenna could. Having said that, minimizing the RF signal leakage, hiding the SSID, and MAC restrictions are all steps that increase security by making interception more difficult, even if none of them produce an absolutely secure system.
Saying that these steps for wireless security are useless because they can be breached with enough effort is like saying that locking your doors is useless because the locks can be broken with enough effort. The point is not to achieve perfect security, but security that is good enough to deter the intruders.
Give me a break. A large proportion of terrorists these days are Muslim, and claim to be motivated by their faith. This is a simple fact. If King wants to investigate the ramifications flowing from this as regards US homeland security, that doesn't add up to an "anti-Islamic hate campaign". If you want everyone to turn a blind eye to what a tiny but dangerous faction of the Muslim community is doing, I think you're crazy.
Do you wonder why no one wants to invest in providing you broadband? If anyone risked the investment, wading through the vast sewer of regulatory red tape and expense and risking all sorts of new ex post facto restrictions after the investment was sunk and irretreivable (all for the greater good, of course), and they wanted to reap a reward for taking the risk, people like you would accuse them of being as bad as those who commit forcible sodomy. Why would anyone want to bother?
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Limited liability is indeed a key difference between corporations and natural persons. Public policy dating back to Elizabethan England has found it to be useful and beneficial to the commonweal. I've yet to see why limited liability justifies imposing political censorship on law-abiding citizens.
The question is: why should limited liability impose a constraint on collective political speech? In the USA, there is a very strong bar against imposing liability for political speech, so why should limited liability disqualify a collective of citizens from speaking on political issues?
Corporations are bought and sold by people. When this happens, the set of people comprising the corporation changes, but it is still a set of people.
Ever since the corporation was invented, it has had many "human rights": the right to hold property, the right to buy and sell, the right to form contracts, the right to sue and be sued, etc. The legal question is not whether corporations have any rights, nor whether they have all the rights of a natural person (no one asserts that) but what non-null subset of human rights they do have.
Corporations are people: living, breathing people. Corporations are comprised neither of space aliens nor of soulless robots, but of real people, organized for collective action. When a corporation acts, it acts through people. The key question regarding human rights, such as the right to free speech, is whether citizens must entirely surrender their right to free speech when they organize together under a corporate form.
If citizens have rights when acting individually, why should those rights disappear when they act collectively?
My bottom line take-away from this is that the most fundamental level of security these days is your primary e-mail account. If you don't have two-factor authentication on it, you are asking for trouble. Relying on one-factor authentication for your primary e-mail seems to be almost as bad as failing to back up your data. (And if you have a credit card on file with Apple, it looks like their e-mail security approaches zero-factor security.)
Some of the standard data can be secure. For example, I have never revealed my first pet's name online, so you could search for it in vain for the rest of your life. At first it just never came up in discussion, but as soon as I realized the security implications, I decided that there were some trivial, obscure data that no one else needed to know.
The author suggests that Apple didn't allow her to mention Amazon. If Apple allowed others to do so, that does not show her statement to be false. Apple may have erred in implementing its policies, either in her case or in the cases you found. Don't rush to blame the victim.
So why, in particular, do you assume that Apple must be consistent in its content filtering? You assume that because Apple has permitted references to Amazon in other cases, they would necessarily have permitted it in this case. It could be that Apple has a policy of filtering out references to Amazon, but does not do so automatically. This book may have been manually reviewed because of the previously-included links to Amazon (another inane Apple policy). We don't know what all of Apple's policies are in this case, but assuming mendacity on the part of this author is completely unwarranted.
This guy does make some reasonable points, but for all that he thinks himself an uber-geek, he is apparently disconnected from the realities of the tech world today.
He thinks that technologists like software patents. Most technologists who are familiar with the issue are strongly against them; the only group consistently in favor of software patents is the patent lawyers.
The downside of his proposed deal, in my view, is not abolishing software patents (which would instead be of tremendous benefit), but abolishing music copyrights. For all that the strength of copyright protection has weakened in the Internet era, it is not zero by any means, and still plays its role of promoting the 'progress of science and the useful arts'.
The big problems come if you attempt to recreate, via stringent and draconian restrictions, the strong copyright regime we had before the Internet. These attempts are doomed to failure, and will create significant collateral damage while failing in their intended goal.
US investors in Blueseed and its startups will pay US taxes. US workers aboard Blueseed will pay US taxes. Non-US workers aboard will use the courts of the country of registry (e.g., Bahamas), if they need courts. Blueseed will have to provide its own infrastructure. Why should this foreign vessel on the high seas be treated differently from the thousands of other foreign vessels on the high seas?
The problem with Anguilla, BWI is that it is situated in the Caribbean Sea, and stubbornly refuses to budge from that location. Blueseed is for people who place a high value on physical proximity to and face-to-face interaction with people in Silicon Valley, but for whom a location in the US doesn't work. These people may be wrong, but it's at least a plausible idea.
You may well be right, in which case Blueseed will fail. It could be that physical proximity to Silicon Valley is as valuable as Blueseed thinks it is, in which case the hassles and expense will be worth it. I see no reason not to let them try.
The key word is 'almost'. They are not in the US. There is no duty, legal or moral, to pay for being close to the US. Should the people in Tijuana pay US taxes for the privilege of being close to the US?
What Blueseed is proposing to do is create a new sliver of foreign territory (probably Bahamian or Marshallese) 12 miles outside Silicon Valley. Locating a new business there is no more a tax or immigration dodge than setting up across the Canadian or Mexican border would be. Even though some people might like it otherwise, US tax and immigration law applies only to US territory and US citizens and residents.
The US VC's funding the startups will pay US taxes. US citizens working onboard will pay US taxes. As for the others, why do you think foreigners who work outside the US should pay US taxes and have to get US work visas?
Are you saying that the amount paid to CEO's is enough to have material negative impact on patient care? In decrying CEO compensation, are you not instead motivated primarily by envy?
So? Even though I hold a PhD from MIT, it's in an unrelated field and I don't consider myself a climate expert in any way. But I can think for myself, and the WSJ piece pointed out that even if we accept the AGW thesis, in the chain of reasoning from "the climate is warming" to "we must reduce carbon emissions" there are many steps that are economic and political in nature, not within the expertise of climatologists. The real tragedy, to my mind, is that, based on this questionable chain of reasoning, so many people are now true believers that reducing carbon emissions is a vital necessity or mankind, and that anyone who questions that conclusion is as bad as those who deny the Holocaust.
I have a Safepass card. It's been some time since I got it, but I think it cost me about $20. Whenever I want to make an online payment to a previously-unknown payee, I need to enter the code from the hardware token. While it's true that the token could be stolen, thieves would have to intercept my username/password, then steal the token without my discovering the theft in time to notify the bank. Not impossible by any means, but probably difficult enough to induce the thieves to look for easier prey. I think my investment of $20 and a few extra keystrokes is well worth it.
Geohot didn't do anything illegal, so why is he a 'criminal'? How is restoring the Linux functionality that Sony originally sold, and then disabled though updates, a 'misdeed'?
It is not true only in theory. I have done it for a TiVo with two different cable companies. It's true that most people, especially the technology-challenged, won't bother, but the option is there.
By comparison to women, yes, men do ignore the fashion industry. There are real gender-based differences in behavior, and these are reflected in buying preferences. I doubt that we will ever see gender equality in the market for haute couture, or for videogames.
Please don't be pedantic. In English usage, Finland can be part of Scandinavia. While the Finns and other peoples of the Nordic countries might disagree with this, their views are not definitive since we are conversing in English.
Trying to secure something by decreasing your signal strength is an excellent way to be more secure. It's just not a way to be absolutely secure, as AliasMarlowe seems to think. Even if he cannot detect a signal outside the property, someone with an ultra-high-gain antenna could. Having said that, minimizing the RF signal leakage, hiding the SSID, and MAC restrictions are all steps that increase security by making interception more difficult, even if none of them produce an absolutely secure system.
Saying that these steps for wireless security are useless because they can be breached with enough effort is like saying that locking your doors is useless because the locks can be broken with enough effort. The point is not to achieve perfect security, but security that is good enough to deter the intruders.
Give me a break. A large proportion of terrorists these days are Muslim, and claim to be motivated by their faith. This is a simple fact. If King wants to investigate the ramifications flowing from this as regards US homeland security, that doesn't add up to an "anti-Islamic hate campaign". If you want everyone to turn a blind eye to what a tiny but dangerous faction of the Muslim community is doing, I think you're crazy.
Do you wonder why no one wants to invest in providing you broadband? If anyone risked the investment, wading through the vast sewer of regulatory red tape and expense and risking all sorts of new ex post facto restrictions after the investment was sunk and irretreivable (all for the greater good, of course), and they wanted to reap a reward for taking the risk, people like you would accuse them of being as bad as those who commit forcible sodomy. Why would anyone want to bother?