Given that overdraft and other such fees are a substantial part of a bank's income, you'd think they would consider such accounts to be "high net worth"... for the bank's own net worth that is, and provide them good service for things like transaction reports.
Oh wait... if they provided transaction reports, many of these account holders would not be overdrawing. N/M
I don't like banks either (particularly because of the fractional reserve system) but I don't understand your viewpoint here. I'll provide background information to explain.
I keep my own transaction records. Banks are run by humans who can and do make mistakes despite the best of intentions; with no records of my own I'd have a really hard time disputing such a mistake. That's one reason. Another reason is that no one cares about managing my money as much as I do, nor would it be reasonable to expect otherwise. A third reason is that I don't like to needlessly be dependent on someone else to provide important information that can directly impact my life when it's something I can easily take care of myself.
Incidentally, I refuse to carry a debit card and instead I use credit cards as charge cards. They are a bad way to get a loan but they are a wonderful form of payment. The bottom line is that this greatly simplifies my checking account statements from my bank, making my record-keeping trivial.
Now to the main point. There is one and only one event that can possibly cause an overdraft: spending more money than you have placed in your account. How is that the fault of the bank? Why is it their job to make sure you are responsible and do not financially overextend yourself? Is it a problem for you that a fee is attached to an event that shouldn't happen in the first place?
I would not be shocked or amazed in the slightest, no not even a bit, to learn that the people who can't be bothered to keep their own records are the same people who create most overdrafts. They clearly think managing their money is someone else's job. That might leave them open to problems that more responsible adults would have foreseen and been able to prevent or at least mitigate. To me that is simple cause-and-effect and nothing more.
To reiterate, I don't like banks. It'd be petty to let that bias my reasoning, though in this case that isn't even a temptation. Do you know why? Because there's something I like even less than banks, and that's the decline of personal responsibility and the whole victim mentality that is rooted in it.
I'll add one more thing. Study and thoroughly understand the meaning of something terribly important. There are three names for this one technique. It is sometimes called the "Hegelian Dialectic" named after the philosopher Hegel. It is also called "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis." More colloquially, it is known as "Problem, Reaction, Solution".
This technique in combination with what the ancient Romans called "bread and circus" are the two main methods used to subvert the will of the people.
Another thing a healthy republic or "democracy" needs is a thorough and widespread understanding of critical thinking, logic, and how to recognize propaganda techniques such as the "Big Lie", repetition, and fallacies such as the excluded middle. Government-run educational systems consistently fail to produce a population who have mastered this knowledge, and that's not a coincidence.
Hi casualty, I'm a South African, and our democracy -- or our attempt at one -- is much younger than yours. I've been wondering for a while how a country might foster more voters like you; people who seem to me to be able to separate signal from noise. Is it just that you are very smart, and it is impossible to get a lot of your kind of vote because Joe Voter has an IQ of 104? Or can your level of political discernment be taught?
IQ has little or nothing to do with it. A person can be very clever and still be nothing more than a product of his or her environment. The facetious way I explain it is thusly: if you take an egotist and give him a much higher IQ, you will end up with an egotist who is now much better at being an egotist. It won't fundamentally alter the character of the person.
I simply have discernment of my own. In that sense I have what should be absolutely ordinary and not noteworthy at all. I am not just a vessel that can be filled with external viewpoints arranged by clever marketing and PR.
I'll explain the fundamental problem that the power-hungry always exploit. Most people are not self-directed, from within. They are environmentally directed, from without, much like animals except more sophisticated. They are reactive and they react in predictable ways.
Any sense of "selfhood" they have comes from externals, so what other people are doing or what others think is very important to them whether or not it is rational. That leads to the devaluation of individuality (except lip service) and the elevation of group identity.
They can be easily divided because joining one group naturally creates a contrast with opposing groups. You can see this with "Democrat vs. Republican" in the USA. They are so busy bickering with each other they lose the ability to see that neither party represents their interests. The sentiment is: "my party" must be great, because all the problems are caused by "the other party". Meanwhile, nothing changes.
So, most people only believe they have their own viewpoints and ideas. In reality, powerful interests have spent vast sums of money in the form of marketing to put those ideas in their heads. Here's the strange part, the connection to ego. Once a foreign or external idea is adopted, the person identifies with it and forgets that there was ever a time they didn't have that idea.
Now they will defend that position, sometimes passionately. The loss or the rejection of that idea feels like a sort of death to the person because of how thoroughly they have identified with it. It is no longer a matter of fact or evidence. Now it's a matter of who is right, and saving face is everything. That's why political debates are so often more like religious arguments in the sense that few participants ever change their position because of new information.
What I am defining can be described another way. These are broken people who have little sense of purpose or fulfillment in their lives. That's why they have to get their sense of worth and their identity, their very notion of who they are, from external sources. That's why they are not individuals -- they are what you may call "out-dividuals". This is what happens to people before their nation declines.
A noble and principled people are extremely difficult to rule over. They have a real identity as individuals and can always use that as a basis for real discernment. A broken people is easy to gain power over because they only know what they have been taught and they are impressed by positions of authority and official credentials. The powerful interests who have huge media presence are the loudest voice that they hear the most clearly, when in fact they are the least trustworthy.
This can be taught but any teaching on it must be backed up by example.
It seems to me that South Africa could benefit from a wider understanding of the rights that a democracy brings the
Really? Is that all you care about is downloading free music?
The point is that he had a choice between representing a monied interest and representing the people in the form of no such cronyism. He made the same choice that any politician with any distant hope of high office has learned to make.
The born again Christian paranoid Texan who left Obama one fuckwad of a mess to clean up was selling you out far further than trolling IP addresses for illegally sharing content.
Absolutely. Now, consider this: the same sponsors, corporate interests, vested interests in the status quo, and, if you like, the same Establishment brought us both Presidents. This system is sometimes called the "military industrial complex" after a speech given by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Meanwhile, two parties with a complete duopoly on any important public office means an affordably low number of factions to buy off, err I mean to support their campaigns. Do you see the problem?
As an outside observer who is not American, when I look at the mess GWB left for BO to deal with I have to say he's doing one hell of a job. The USA would be a third-world country by now if it wasn't for the crazy hard decisions Obama had to make to keep the US from tanking more than it did!
You're talking about a man who hires staffers with opinions like "never let a good crisis go to waste." If that were me in charge I'd have fired that person immediately as a public service. That's an attitude that is unworthy of proximity to power and not to be trusted with it.
He's not a God or the second coming of Christ, but he's doing a pretty good job leading the US out of the tar pits.
He's a puppet but he's a really charismatic one. The whole skill of politics is to adopt a position because of the way that the wind blows and then wear it so naturally that you must have felt that way your entire life. The author of the script he's always reading from a teleprompter is the one you should be looking at.
None of this is new, it's just that Presidents in the past would speak extemporaneously at least some significant portion of the time. The basic motivations that determine their choices remain extremely similar, with insignificant differences to which much attention is called. That's why the whole "Left" and "Right" deal is just two forms of Statism. Their differences concern only implementation details. But the constant bickering over those "ideological differences" distracts from the realization that they are indirect paths to Statism. The name for this effect is "divide and conquer".
The only interesting question is to what degree this arrangement is deliberate. Is it the product of a great deal of intentional engineering, or is the political environment more like an evolutionary pressure in the sense that politicians who aren't like this have no hope of competing with politicians who are? The very high incumbency rate of Congress gives one the impression that failing to really represent the interests of the people carries negligible political consequences.
Another user did a good job of summing up why the court made this decision. That agreement makes it clear that you lose control over any data you submit to Facebook. Even if they provide privacy controls, they apparently have no obligation to make sure they work as the user intended since the data submitted now belongs to Facebook. Personally, I find the arrangement unappealing in the extreme; that's why I don't use Facebook.
That's a technicality. A person's expectation of privacy depends more on the nature of the service (such as the fact that it has privacy controls) than on the contents of a document most people never read. While I don't think there's any problem in allowing access to private data when it's legally warranted, the notion that my Facebook profile is public even when I've made it private is not at all reasonable.
The legal agreement under which you use the site is more than a "technicality", as this judge has reiterated. You can downplay that fact because you don't like it, but that won't change the reality. Personally, I don't like it either, but it makes no sense to me at all to use the site under that agreement and then complain about the agreement. That'd be ridiculous, sort of like ordering salmon at a restaurant and then, when the waiter comes back with it, complaining that I don't like salmon. If I don't like the taste of salmon I don't order it. If I don't like the way a site is managed I don't use it. If I use a site without knowing basic facts about it and get a result I don't like, that's my fault and no one else's. The only downside for some people is that living this way might mean they would run out of things to bitch about and excuses to play the victim card.
I will tell you the other way unrelated to the agreement that the privacy controls are no guarantee of anything. Say you declare something (i.e. a photo) private and allow one other person to have access to it. Now that they have access, that person can download the photo (good old right-click and "save as"). If they feel like it, they can now repost it anywhere, including to their own Facebook page with no privacy controls. I doubt that's an exhaustive list of how your settings can be circumvented.
Very simply, no rational person who takes even a moment to investigate the matter is going to conclude that posting materials to Facebook is a really great way to keep them private. That's hard fact, not somebody's feelings about how they wish things would be. What is "reasonable" is based on the actual facts of the matter and at least a half-assed attempt at learning them, which is not difficult in this case.
What if I decide to commit a crime and I 'arrange' a nice alibi with pictures and well timed postings on my FB page?
Could I use that to defend myself in court?
It'd be up to the prosecution to prove that your alibi is not valid. The fact that the pictures were posted to Facebook doesn't change anything.
Sort of like the way fraud is not some strange new crime requiring new laws merely because a computer was involved (think phishing scam) instead of a telephone or a face-to-face con man.
Insurance companies will be lining up to scour the site for people [who are defrauding them] to dump.
Fixed that for you.
So, Facebook provides opportunities for stupid people to shoot themselves in the foot. Unlike say, driving, said stupid people are unlikely to harm someone other than themselves while proceeding to apply a metaphorical firearm to their foot. This is bad? Why?
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
Does that look like Facebook gives a damn about your rights or your privacy?
A site specifically designed to appeal to petty exhibitionists who need attention, by its very nature, is not going to attract people who have their own best interests at heart and are willing to act accordingly with regard to privacy. This is true for all of the same reasons that there are a lot of alcoholics at AA meetings. If Facebook doesn't give a damn about privacy it's because they have discovered something: you can be a big-name site and attract millions of users without giving a damn about privacy.
I did read the article. The courts can get a search warrant to come into my home and take whatever they want, but I doubt that any judge would ever say about my home that I have "no legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy.” If you have a profile, and you set it to private, than there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any privacy against the actions of the courts. Maybe I'm arguing semantics, I just think it was poorly phrased on the part of the judge.
Another user did a good job of summing up why the court made this decision. That agreement makes it clear that you lose control over any data you submit to Facebook. Even if they provide privacy controls, they apparently have no obligation to make sure they work as the user intended since the data submitted now belongs to Facebook. Personally, I find the arrangement unappealing in the extreme; that's why I don't use Facebook.
The idea that anything you post to a social networking site is going to remain confidential and private is a false one, of which it seems many need to be disabused. The common sense rule still applies: don't ever post anything that you wouldn't want to be fully public. I never understood what was so difficult about this that motivates people to keep trying to find ways around it.
It seems to me that this completely nullifies any privacy policy in force on any website. If you have no "legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy" with a privacy policy in force, than how can an employee of the website in question, or the management themselves, get in trouble for violating said policy? Judges really need to be careful what garbage they spew out, lest they set the wrong precedent.
Had you read the article, you'd have seen where the court actually referenced the privacy policy. From that thing you didn't read:
Supreme Court Judge Allen Spinner reasoned -I think completely correctly – that social networking sites are not private lockboxes where you store your most intimate secrets; in fact their privacy policies tell you that they are public spaces. Therefore he said:
“Plaintiff has no legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy.”
If I tell all my friends that I'm faking my injury, and the person or company I'm suing hears of it, they can put my friend on the stand and my friend has to tell the court what I said, or risk being charged for perjury.
The company can even hire a PI and can submit photos of you doing activities that you wouldn't be able to do if you were uninjured, as long os the PI doesn't break any laws in getting them.
The courts have always been able to do this, and they've always been able to subpoena things like phone records and emails. Why should it be any different for facebook?
Bottom line, don't sue someone for personal injury if you're not really injured.
I always find it amusing whenever there's a story that sums to "social networking sites are like everything else you have ever experienced in your life -- irresponsible/thoughtless use can bite you in the ass" and the people involved seem shocked to discover this.
Yep, that's precisely the meaning of "giving the customer choice". Take the worst of all possible options, segment it and get rid of all other options.
That's true, but only because marketing Newspeak is so thoroughly tolerated.
That's just it, though, the only way to truly securely establish a separate network would be to run separate lines -- build in separate hardware, build in an air gap. Attempting to "partition" the Internet at the software level is pure silliness -- unless you command both ends of the pipe, and all points in between, there's a chance that someone may be able to intercept your traffic. And with deep packet inspection and similar tools these days, they could thus also alter your traffic, meaning any communications over the Internet cannot be secure, at least not in the way this Keith Alexander is talking about.
Cheers,
I think a much better approach is to assume that the intermediate network is insecure and beyond your control. Then, use very strong end-to-end encryption to make a secure tunnel, much like the SSH approach. I mean, this is the NSA here. It's not like they wouldn't know how to use good encryption.
Their goal is probably to get an excuse to somehow restructure the internet.. Who knows what "partitioning" may entail?
This could be a great "excuse" for us, too. We should make him a deal. Partition off the governmental and "critical industry". Now the public Internet has no more high-profile targets. Then, drop all the warrantless wiretapping, eavesdropping, and other monitoring from the public Internet and use it to lock down the governmental and critical parts. All of the resources and manpower focused on a much smaller target should do wonders towards securing us against the currently trendy bogeyman of "cyberattack".
You don't seem to appreciate the deliberate way in which I phrased my response. I said I know of no such person. I did not claim that no such person exists.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lying. I was specifically worried about the NTS possibility since ESR is fairly well kown for his views among geekish libertarians, and so it struck me as relatively unlikely that someone with your understanding of the subject would be unaware of the existence of anarchist+libertarian views, to the extent of concluding that the association a result of propaganda from people opposed to libertarianism.
I apologize if this came across as unnecessarily confrontational; no personal attacks were intended.
I'm glad my post was informative for you:)
No offense was taken, sir. I felt that you had misinterpreted me, but at no time did I believe you were attacking me personally. Even if you were, getting offended would be the most counterproductive thing I could have possibly done:). If anything, the short time I have spent dealing with you has been refreshing. For that reason, I'd like to further explain my views. I'll add that I have certainly heard of ESR but only in the context of programming and *nix-related topics. I'm not one for celebrity or personalities of people I don't actually know and so it never occurred to me to investigate his political views. You really did expose me to an example I did not before know about.
Most of the time that I see libertarianism demagogued it's some variation of a single technique. The technique is simple enough; I consider it a type of straw-man. It's to portray only its most extreme possible form and highlight everything that could potentially go wrong with it. Usually this amounts to equating libertarianism with anarchy as though those were exactly the same thing, as though it's a waste of two perfectly good English words when only one is necessary to describe a single concept.
I may or may not depart from ESR in that I consider libertarianism and anarchy to be two distinct ideas. They are not mutually exclusive, and in fact can be blended as you explain ESR has done. You've provided a good example of someone who wants to constructively blend these two ideas. That's rare in my experience. My primary exposure to the blending of those two is from people who want to look down their nose at something they hardly seem to understand. "Small l" libertarianism is very much like the Electric Universe theory, in that the people who denigrate it the most tend to know the least about it.
Back to my point, usually libertarian thought is demagogued by portraying it as straight up unmitigated anarcho-capitalism. As in, there is no public police protection. You can either afford to hire your own private guards or you're subject to anyone who wants to threaten you. The guards in this case are more like mercenaries and it's a "might makes right" scenario that is not compatible with notions like rule of law. The key point is that if you think the rich and powerful are screwing the little guy now, it'd be far worse if any semblance of rule-of-law were completely abandoned. It'd be like feudalism more than anything. Now, maybe there are other factors that would prevent this from being the case. Maybe there aren't. Someone who subscribes to this view would do a better job than I of explaining that.
I will say that ESR's point about gigantic government becoming a tool of the elite is absolutely correct. I just think that moving from one extreme (gigantic, all-powerful government) to another extreme (anarchy) is not such an improvement. Most attempts to protest a hated thing by being its exact opposite don't work out so well, as they are still a reaction to that hated thing and therefore an effect of its cause, a continuation of its momentum. A minimal government that derives all of its authority from clearly articulated core principle
The whole point of a justice system is so that the people can see that justice was done by the proper officials, that the matter has been settled and needs no further response. Fail to achieve that and what you will find is that the difference between decent people and bad people is that decent people will wait longer before taking matters into their own hands. Right or wrong, this is quite predictable.
I agree, but I would say the difference is between "patient" people and "impatient" ones. The end result is the same.
Most of the difference between "decent" and "bad" boils down to patience. If it helps, patience and a willingness to forgive others for their faults while seeking the best in them go hand-in-hand.
Though, when it is necessary, patience is not incompatible with putting someone firmly in their place when they are clearly out of order. The difference is that patience equips you to realize that this is better and more powerful when it is not done out of a base thing like anger.
Almost. I am a small "L" libertarian, or at least I self-label myself a "social libertarian", and find your definition correct but overly broad, and too close to capital "L" Libertarian dogma. Consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they please, but with the caveat, as long as it does no harm to anyone else, or infringes on the rights, freedoms or wellbeing of other people.
Actually I covered that in my post. In a later paragraph I said (quoting my own previous text):
The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property. They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others. The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.
Emhasis added. I definitely understand this concept. I like to use drunk driving as an analogy. Let's say you purchase or make alcohol and are the rightful owner of that alcohol (i.e. you have not stolen it). You most certainly "own" your body. So you put alcohol into your body. It's not the role of government to tell you as an adult not to do that.
But then you consume alcohol and drive drunk. Now you threaten others. Now, because of the threat you pose to others, the government does have a legitimate reason to stop you. Those others didn't consent to having you pose a threat of bodily harm and property damage to them. At that point you fail to confine the consequences of your actions to yourself.
The Libertarians do fine until they start ranting about free markets and Ayn Rand, which to me violates libertarianism as often they HATE the idea of any regulation, which opens up abuse of the rights and freedoms of others more often than not. Also small "l" libertarianism is not against government regulation, or governance in general, since it realizes the whole aspect of a "social contract" and not just blind egotism.
To me the purpose of regulation is to prevent abuses that would interfere with informed consent. Because of the concentrations of wealth and expertise that corporations represent, the average customer is often not dealing with them as an equal. For example, most people who purchase computers have no idea how they work and could easily be misled by a fast-talking salesman.
The moment that happens, the "without force or fraud" aspect of consentual mutual transaction has been compromised. I have no problem with government sanctions against a salesman who takes advantage of his customers in this fashion, so long as the burden of proof is firmly on the government's shoulders. I don't therefore see "false advertising" penalties as a regulation that should be eliminated.
You need either reasonable regulations or you need for every person who ever purchases every product or service to be an expert in that field. The former is feasible; the latter is not. Most things you would reasonably regulate amount to fraud or deception of one kind or another, such as many stock market scams. Rule of law is a good thing. It just needs to have a reasonable basis.
This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
The other 1/4 (including the author of this FAQ) are out-and-out anarchists who believe that "limited government" is a delusion and the free market can provide better law, order, and security than any goverment monopoly.
Please don't respond with "anyone who says this isn't a real libertarian" unless you have very specific arguments that prevent it from falling into the category of No True Scotsman.
There are self-described libertarians who are also self-described anarchists. From the way many of them talk (see e.g. that FAQ), I have no particular reason they are twisting words either when calling themselves 'libertarian' nor when calling themselves 'anarchist'. Anarchism is an extreme of libertarian thought, but it is definitely part of the spectrum.
You don't seem to appreciate the deliberate way in which I phrased my response. I said I know of no such person. I did not claim that no such person exists. It's a bit reactionary and knee-jerk to tell me about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy (of which I was already aware, for what it's worth).
Otherwise, thank you for revealing to me that my notions of libertarianism were unnecessarily narrow. I have a strong preference for not remaining ignorant and you've been helpful to that end.
I'm asking precisely because I don't think he (or anyone) can come up with a brand new business model that the world has never seen before. There are ownership models, rental models, subscription models, and perhaps one or two others. That's pretty much it. Saying that the record labels or studios need to come up with a new business model is a disingenuous argument.
Or... a new business model would be, by definition, new and therefore not before seen, rendering your references to existing models such as ownership, rental, and subscription completely irrelevant by your own words. If you are claiming that it is not possible to come up with a new business model, backing that up would amount to proving a negative so it is safe to consider this notion invalid. That leaves the alternative notion of these businesses either dying or reinventing themselves, and I don't personally care which happens.
Then there's this other blatantly obvious thing: why would they come up with something new when they have acquired so much political power focused on preserving what is old? Do you not understand the connection between their adamant insistence on clinging to what is old, and their refusal to come up with something new? They have a finite amount of resources. Every resource invested in lobbying for draconian copyright laws is a resource that could have been put towards innovation. They are their own worst enemies here.
You have failed to address my objections. You have succeeded only in attempting to distract attention away from them. Most of all, you have utterly failed to explain why someone who does not own a business and is not employed by that business has any obligation to reinvent that business. Did you think that was just going to go away if you ignored it? Are you afraid to respond to that, or did you imagine I wouldn't notice your failure to address my explcit challenge? Either address that point or admit that you can't. Otherwise you, sir, are not being honest.
This is my second request. I again await your reply. If you can respond to what I have asked twice now, it would be a substantial improvement. Until then, you are as disingenuous as anyone you claim to oppose.
most people who call themselves libertarians are just selfish asshats
Everyone is a selfish asshat.
Most libertarians are just honest about their asshattery.
Who would you prefer? An honest, or a dishonest, selfish asshat?
It's absolutely not true that everyone is a selfish asshat.
I don't know of a single libertarian who wants to have a great deal of freedom but also wants to deny such freedom to everyone else. That sure would be selfish. Instead, libertarian thought is a belief in the greatest possible reasonable amount of freedom for everyone.
Who is selfish? The person who wants everyone to be as free as is reasonably possible? Or the person who wants to punish anyone who does things they don't like even when they aren't infringing anyone else's rights? Seems easy enough to me.
Either every legislator and top-level member of the executive branch is a drooling idiot, or, there is at least one of them who can point this out to the rest and the rest don't care.
You need predictable crises to solve if you want to implement Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
All this legislation would do is drive piracy more underground and more distributed and more encrypted.
That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.
Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.
If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.
That's what the media industry is hoping, anyway.
Most people who use a BitTorrent client have no idea how it works. They are not intimately familiar with the principles of its operation. They are unlikely to even understand the IP stack or the TCP protocol. What they know is how to use a GUI client that obscures most of the technical details. They click a ".torrent" link in their browser, a BitTorrent client pops up, they click "Ok" and the download begins. This requires no specialized knowledge whatsoever.
There's no reason to believe that encrypted peer-to-peer clients could not work the same way, or could not use something like onion routing as their basis. Enough necessity will gladly become the mother of that invention. To think otherwise is a total failure to understand the nature of things like Prohibition, the War on (some) Drugs, and any other instance of what happens when overwhelming widespread public demand is driven underground.
Ha! I said the same thing back in the 80's when I was a 13 year old pirating apple 2 games. Turns out I was just an immature little kid that didn't think the rules applied to me.
Eh, I don't agree with this viewpoint as I find it too polar. You're either an immature kid or you're an adult who follows all the rules all the time. This leaves no room for the possibility of civil disobedience as a response to unjust laws.
Still, it is a real viewpoint and it's not "Flamebait" to state it. Mods, please grow a pair and stop letting your personal offense decide your use of modpoints.
If you believe that, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why the reinvention of a failing business belongs to anyone other than the owners and employees of that business.
It's not his job because he has not entered into a contract that would pay him monetary compensation for saving the failed business model. You want him to perform valuable work for free? Like I said, if you think this is reasonable then the burden of proof is on you.
So what will it be? Demonstrate that he should work for free to save a business he does not own and is not employed by? Or admit that your accusation of "cop-out" is mistaken and amounts to nothing other than a knee-jerk? Methinks you have painted yourself into a corner.
I think that the big problem is that, in democracies of any sort, the mob makes the laws. Force of law is a very big stick to be wielding when so many disagree with the policies being enforced. In other words, people who champion the "law" nowadays are often just applauding their mob.
In this case, it's the "mob" that doesn't want these new laws. They were not the result of popular public pressure. It's a small minority of powerful special interests that have a lot of political clout. This is neither democracy nor a functioning representative republic.
While most people who call themselves libertarians are just selfish asshats, they do have a good point that we can't regulate everything. If something isn't covered by a basic law such as "don't steal", we have to look more closely to decide whether it's something we should be regulating, or something we should allow to self-regulate.
The idea of libertarian (small 'l') thought is simplicity itself. Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they please with their property and their own body and should be free to believe whatever they want. They should be able to exercise those freedoms whether or not someone else doesn't like it; anyone who doesn't like their actions is free to provide a counter-example in the form of how they deal with their own body, property, and beliefs.
The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property. They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others. The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.
This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
And even if we decide that it would be nice to regulate that thing, we also need to ask if it's feasible, cost-effective, or paid for in a fair manner. When it comes to almost anything, and the perfect example here is copyright, if people aren't generally ashamed to be caught doing something, there's no way a law is going to be effective without huge costs both in money and unintended consequences.
Copyright has become out of control. If it returned to a 12-year term after which time the work became public domain, it would regain respectability. It would then fulfill its intended purpose of granting a temporary monopoly to creators in exchange for an enriched public domain.
Think about it; the original 12-year term was during a time when the printing press and paper was the most technologically advanced means of distribution. We can now distribute many more works in far less time yet copyright lasts much longer. People don't respect copyright today for the simple reason that it is not respectable. It is no wonder they feel no shame for violating it. This is also easy to understand unless you subscribe to such a strict "law-and-order" mentality that you have abandoned all concept of understanding human nature and wish to replace that understanding with harsher threats of penalty.
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Given that overdraft and other such fees are a substantial part of a bank's income, you'd think they would consider such accounts to be "high net worth" ... for the bank's own net worth that is, and provide them good service for things like transaction reports.
Oh wait ... if they provided transaction reports, many of these account holders would not be overdrawing. N/M
I don't like banks either (particularly because of the fractional reserve system) but I don't understand your viewpoint here. I'll provide background information to explain.
I keep my own transaction records. Banks are run by humans who can and do make mistakes despite the best of intentions; with no records of my own I'd have a really hard time disputing such a mistake. That's one reason. Another reason is that no one cares about managing my money as much as I do, nor would it be reasonable to expect otherwise. A third reason is that I don't like to needlessly be dependent on someone else to provide important information that can directly impact my life when it's something I can easily take care of myself.
Incidentally, I refuse to carry a debit card and instead I use credit cards as charge cards. They are a bad way to get a loan but they are a wonderful form of payment. The bottom line is that this greatly simplifies my checking account statements from my bank, making my record-keeping trivial.
Now to the main point. There is one and only one event that can possibly cause an overdraft: spending more money than you have placed in your account. How is that the fault of the bank? Why is it their job to make sure you are responsible and do not financially overextend yourself? Is it a problem for you that a fee is attached to an event that shouldn't happen in the first place?
I would not be shocked or amazed in the slightest, no not even a bit, to learn that the people who can't be bothered to keep their own records are the same people who create most overdrafts. They clearly think managing their money is someone else's job. That might leave them open to problems that more responsible adults would have foreseen and been able to prevent or at least mitigate. To me that is simple cause-and-effect and nothing more.
To reiterate, I don't like banks. It'd be petty to let that bias my reasoning, though in this case that isn't even a temptation. Do you know why? Because there's something I like even less than banks, and that's the decline of personal responsibility and the whole victim mentality that is rooted in it.
I'll add one more thing. Study and thoroughly understand the meaning of something terribly important. There are three names for this one technique. It is sometimes called the "Hegelian Dialectic" named after the philosopher Hegel. It is also called "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis." More colloquially, it is known as "Problem, Reaction, Solution".
This technique in combination with what the ancient Romans called "bread and circus" are the two main methods used to subvert the will of the people.
Another thing a healthy republic or "democracy" needs is a thorough and widespread understanding of critical thinking, logic, and how to recognize propaganda techniques such as the "Big Lie", repetition, and fallacies such as the excluded middle. Government-run educational systems consistently fail to produce a population who have mastered this knowledge, and that's not a coincidence.
IQ has little or nothing to do with it. A person can be very clever and still be nothing more than a product of his or her environment. The facetious way I explain it is thusly: if you take an egotist and give him a much higher IQ, you will end up with an egotist who is now much better at being an egotist. It won't fundamentally alter the character of the person.
I simply have discernment of my own. In that sense I have what should be absolutely ordinary and not noteworthy at all. I am not just a vessel that can be filled with external viewpoints arranged by clever marketing and PR.
I'll explain the fundamental problem that the power-hungry always exploit. Most people are not self-directed, from within. They are environmentally directed, from without, much like animals except more sophisticated. They are reactive and they react in predictable ways.
Any sense of "selfhood" they have comes from externals, so what other people are doing or what others think is very important to them whether or not it is rational. That leads to the devaluation of individuality (except lip service) and the elevation of group identity.
They can be easily divided because joining one group naturally creates a contrast with opposing groups. You can see this with "Democrat vs. Republican" in the USA. They are so busy bickering with each other they lose the ability to see that neither party represents their interests. The sentiment is: "my party" must be great, because all the problems are caused by "the other party". Meanwhile, nothing changes.
So, most people only believe they have their own viewpoints and ideas. In reality, powerful interests have spent vast sums of money in the form of marketing to put those ideas in their heads. Here's the strange part, the connection to ego. Once a foreign or external idea is adopted, the person identifies with it and forgets that there was ever a time they didn't have that idea.
Now they will defend that position, sometimes passionately. The loss or the rejection of that idea feels like a sort of death to the person because of how thoroughly they have identified with it. It is no longer a matter of fact or evidence. Now it's a matter of who is right, and saving face is everything. That's why political debates are so often more like religious arguments in the sense that few participants ever change their position because of new information.
What I am defining can be described another way. These are broken people who have little sense of purpose or fulfillment in their lives. That's why they have to get their sense of worth and their identity, their very notion of who they are, from external sources. That's why they are not individuals -- they are what you may call "out-dividuals". This is what happens to people before their nation declines.
A noble and principled people are extremely difficult to rule over. They have a real identity as individuals and can always use that as a basis for real discernment. A broken people is easy to gain power over because they only know what they have been taught and they are impressed by positions of authority and official credentials. The powerful interests who have huge media presence are the loudest voice that they hear the most clearly, when in fact they are the least trustworthy.
This can be taught but any teaching on it must be backed up by example.
The point is that he had a choice between representing a monied interest and representing the people in the form of no such cronyism. He made the same choice that any politician with any distant hope of high office has learned to make.
Absolutely. Now, consider this: the same sponsors, corporate interests, vested interests in the status quo, and, if you like, the same Establishment brought us both Presidents. This system is sometimes called the "military industrial complex" after a speech given by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Meanwhile, two parties with a complete duopoly on any important public office means an affordably low number of factions to buy off, err I mean to support their campaigns. Do you see the problem?
You're talking about a man who hires staffers with opinions like "never let a good crisis go to waste." If that were me in charge I'd have fired that person immediately as a public service. That's an attitude that is unworthy of proximity to power and not to be trusted with it.
He's a puppet but he's a really charismatic one. The whole skill of politics is to adopt a position because of the way that the wind blows and then wear it so naturally that you must have felt that way your entire life. The author of the script he's always reading from a teleprompter is the one you should be looking at.
None of this is new, it's just that Presidents in the past would speak extemporaneously at least some significant portion of the time. The basic motivations that determine their choices remain extremely similar, with insignificant differences to which much attention is called. That's why the whole "Left" and "Right" deal is just two forms of Statism. Their differences concern only implementation details. But the constant bickering over those "ideological differences" distracts from the realization that they are indirect paths to Statism. The name for this effect is "divide and conquer".
The only interesting question is to what degree this arrangement is deliberate. Is it the product of a great deal of intentional engineering, or is the political environment more like an evolutionary pressure in the sense that politicians who aren't like this have no hope of competing with politicians who are? The very high incumbency rate of Congress gives one the impression that failing to really represent the interests of the people carries negligible political consequences.
That's a technicality. A person's expectation of privacy depends more on the nature of the service (such as the fact that it has privacy controls) than on the contents of a document most people never read. While I don't think there's any problem in allowing access to private data when it's legally warranted, the notion that my Facebook profile is public even when I've made it private is not at all reasonable.
The legal agreement under which you use the site is more than a "technicality", as this judge has reiterated. You can downplay that fact because you don't like it, but that won't change the reality. Personally, I don't like it either, but it makes no sense to me at all to use the site under that agreement and then complain about the agreement. That'd be ridiculous, sort of like ordering salmon at a restaurant and then, when the waiter comes back with it, complaining that I don't like salmon. If I don't like the taste of salmon I don't order it. If I don't like the way a site is managed I don't use it. If I use a site without knowing basic facts about it and get a result I don't like, that's my fault and no one else's. The only downside for some people is that living this way might mean they would run out of things to bitch about and excuses to play the victim card.
I will tell you the other way unrelated to the agreement that the privacy controls are no guarantee of anything. Say you declare something (i.e. a photo) private and allow one other person to have access to it. Now that they have access, that person can download the photo (good old right-click and "save as"). If they feel like it, they can now repost it anywhere, including to their own Facebook page with no privacy controls. I doubt that's an exhaustive list of how your settings can be circumvented.
Very simply, no rational person who takes even a moment to investigate the matter is going to conclude that posting materials to Facebook is a really great way to keep them private. That's hard fact, not somebody's feelings about how they wish things would be. What is "reasonable" is based on the actual facts of the matter and at least a half-assed attempt at learning them, which is not difficult in this case.
What if I decide to commit a crime and I 'arrange' a nice alibi with pictures and well timed postings on my FB page? Could I use that to defend myself in court?
It'd be up to the prosecution to prove that your alibi is not valid. The fact that the pictures were posted to Facebook doesn't change anything.
Sort of like the way fraud is not some strange new crime requiring new laws merely because a computer was involved (think phishing scam) instead of a telephone or a face-to-face con man.
And nothing of value was lost.
Fixed that for you.
So, Facebook provides opportunities for stupid people to shoot themselves in the foot. Unlike say, driving, said stupid people are unlikely to harm someone other than themselves while proceeding to apply a metaphorical firearm to their foot. This is bad? Why?
You have to be kidding. From Facebook's TOS:
Does that look like Facebook gives a damn about your rights or your privacy?
A site specifically designed to appeal to petty exhibitionists who need attention, by its very nature, is not going to attract people who have their own best interests at heart and are willing to act accordingly with regard to privacy. This is true for all of the same reasons that there are a lot of alcoholics at AA meetings. If Facebook doesn't give a damn about privacy it's because they have discovered something: you can be a big-name site and attract millions of users without giving a damn about privacy.
I did read the article. The courts can get a search warrant to come into my home and take whatever they want, but I doubt that any judge would ever say about my home that I have "no legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy.” If you have a profile, and you set it to private, than there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any privacy against the actions of the courts. Maybe I'm arguing semantics, I just think it was poorly phrased on the part of the judge.
Another user did a good job of summing up why the court made this decision. That agreement makes it clear that you lose control over any data you submit to Facebook. Even if they provide privacy controls, they apparently have no obligation to make sure they work as the user intended since the data submitted now belongs to Facebook. Personally, I find the arrangement unappealing in the extreme; that's why I don't use Facebook.
The idea that anything you post to a social networking site is going to remain confidential and private is a false one, of which it seems many need to be disabused. The common sense rule still applies: don't ever post anything that you wouldn't want to be fully public. I never understood what was so difficult about this that motivates people to keep trying to find ways around it.
It seems to me that this completely nullifies any privacy policy in force on any website. If you have no "legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy" with a privacy policy in force, than how can an employee of the website in question, or the management themselves, get in trouble for violating said policy? Judges really need to be careful what garbage they spew out, lest they set the wrong precedent.
Had you read the article, you'd have seen where the court actually referenced the privacy policy. From that thing you didn't read:
Supreme Court Judge Allen Spinner reasoned -I think completely correctly – that social networking sites are not private lockboxes where you store your most intimate secrets; in fact their privacy policies tell you that they are public spaces. Therefore he said:
“Plaintiff has no legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Uh no.
If I tell all my friends that I'm faking my injury, and the person or company I'm suing hears of it, they can put my friend on the stand and my friend has to tell the court what I said, or risk being charged for perjury.
The company can even hire a PI and can submit photos of you doing activities that you wouldn't be able to do if you were uninjured, as long os the PI doesn't break any laws in getting them.
The courts have always been able to do this, and they've always been able to subpoena things like phone records and emails. Why should it be any different for facebook?
Bottom line, don't sue someone for personal injury if you're not really injured.
I always find it amusing whenever there's a story that sums to "social networking sites are like everything else you have ever experienced in your life -- irresponsible/thoughtless use can bite you in the ass" and the people involved seem shocked to discover this.
Yep, that's precisely the meaning of "giving the customer choice". Take the worst of all possible options, segment it and get rid of all other options.
That's true, but only because marketing Newspeak is so thoroughly tolerated.
That's just it, though, the only way to truly securely establish a separate network would be to run separate lines -- build in separate hardware, build in an air gap. Attempting to "partition" the Internet at the software level is pure silliness -- unless you command both ends of the pipe, and all points in between, there's a chance that someone may be able to intercept your traffic. And with deep packet inspection and similar tools these days, they could thus also alter your traffic, meaning any communications over the Internet cannot be secure, at least not in the way this Keith Alexander is talking about.
Cheers,
I think a much better approach is to assume that the intermediate network is insecure and beyond your control. Then, use very strong end-to-end encryption to make a secure tunnel, much like the SSH approach. I mean, this is the NSA here. It's not like they wouldn't know how to use good encryption.
Their goal is probably to get an excuse to somehow restructure the internet.. Who knows what "partitioning" may entail?
This could be a great "excuse" for us, too. We should make him a deal. Partition off the governmental and "critical industry". Now the public Internet has no more high-profile targets. Then, drop all the warrantless wiretapping, eavesdropping, and other monitoring from the public Internet and use it to lock down the governmental and critical parts. All of the resources and manpower focused on a much smaller target should do wonders towards securing us against the currently trendy bogeyman of "cyberattack".
I didn't mean to imply that you were lying. I was specifically worried about the NTS possibility since ESR is fairly well kown for his views among geekish libertarians, and so it struck me as relatively unlikely that someone with your understanding of the subject would be unaware of the existence of anarchist+libertarian views, to the extent of concluding that the association a result of propaganda from people opposed to libertarianism. I apologize if this came across as unnecessarily confrontational; no personal attacks were intended. I'm glad my post was informative for you :)
No offense was taken, sir. I felt that you had misinterpreted me, but at no time did I believe you were attacking me personally. Even if you were, getting offended would be the most counterproductive thing I could have possibly done :). If anything, the short time I have spent dealing with you has been refreshing. For that reason, I'd like to further explain my views. I'll add that I have certainly heard of ESR but only in the context of programming and *nix-related topics. I'm not one for celebrity or personalities of people I don't actually know and so it never occurred to me to investigate his political views. You really did expose me to an example I did not before know about.
Most of the time that I see libertarianism demagogued it's some variation of a single technique. The technique is simple enough; I consider it a type of straw-man. It's to portray only its most extreme possible form and highlight everything that could potentially go wrong with it. Usually this amounts to equating libertarianism with anarchy as though those were exactly the same thing, as though it's a waste of two perfectly good English words when only one is necessary to describe a single concept.
I may or may not depart from ESR in that I consider libertarianism and anarchy to be two distinct ideas. They are not mutually exclusive, and in fact can be blended as you explain ESR has done. You've provided a good example of someone who wants to constructively blend these two ideas. That's rare in my experience. My primary exposure to the blending of those two is from people who want to look down their nose at something they hardly seem to understand. "Small l" libertarianism is very much like the Electric Universe theory, in that the people who denigrate it the most tend to know the least about it.
Back to my point, usually libertarian thought is demagogued by portraying it as straight up unmitigated anarcho-capitalism. As in, there is no public police protection. You can either afford to hire your own private guards or you're subject to anyone who wants to threaten you. The guards in this case are more like mercenaries and it's a "might makes right" scenario that is not compatible with notions like rule of law. The key point is that if you think the rich and powerful are screwing the little guy now, it'd be far worse if any semblance of rule-of-law were completely abandoned. It'd be like feudalism more than anything. Now, maybe there are other factors that would prevent this from being the case. Maybe there aren't. Someone who subscribes to this view would do a better job than I of explaining that.
I will say that ESR's point about gigantic government becoming a tool of the elite is absolutely correct. I just think that moving from one extreme (gigantic, all-powerful government) to another extreme (anarchy) is not such an improvement. Most attempts to protest a hated thing by being its exact opposite don't work out so well, as they are still a reaction to that hated thing and therefore an effect of its cause, a continuation of its momentum. A minimal government that derives all of its authority from clearly articulated core principle
The whole point of a justice system is so that the people can see that justice was done by the proper officials, that the matter has been settled and needs no further response. Fail to achieve that and what you will find is that the difference between decent people and bad people is that decent people will wait longer before taking matters into their own hands. Right or wrong, this is quite predictable.
I agree, but I would say the difference is between "patient" people and "impatient" ones. The end result is the same.
Most of the difference between "decent" and "bad" boils down to patience. If it helps, patience and a willingness to forgive others for their faults while seeking the best in them go hand-in-hand.
Though, when it is necessary, patience is not incompatible with putting someone firmly in their place when they are clearly out of order. The difference is that patience equips you to realize that this is better and more powerful when it is not done out of a base thing like anger.
Actually I covered that in my post. In a later paragraph I said (quoting my own previous text):
Emhasis added. I definitely understand this concept. I like to use drunk driving as an analogy. Let's say you purchase or make alcohol and are the rightful owner of that alcohol (i.e. you have not stolen it). You most certainly "own" your body. So you put alcohol into your body. It's not the role of government to tell you as an adult not to do that.
But then you consume alcohol and drive drunk. Now you threaten others. Now, because of the threat you pose to others, the government does have a legitimate reason to stop you. Those others didn't consent to having you pose a threat of bodily harm and property damage to them. At that point you fail to confine the consequences of your actions to yourself.
To me the purpose of regulation is to prevent abuses that would interfere with informed consent. Because of the concentrations of wealth and expertise that corporations represent, the average customer is often not dealing with them as an equal. For example, most people who purchase computers have no idea how they work and could easily be misled by a fast-talking salesman.
The moment that happens, the "without force or fraud" aspect of consentual mutual transaction has been compromised. I have no problem with government sanctions against a salesman who takes advantage of his customers in this fashion, so long as the burden of proof is firmly on the government's shoulders. I don't therefore see "false advertising" penalties as a regulation that should be eliminated.
You need either reasonable regulations or you need for every person who ever purchases every product or service to be an expert in that field. The former is feasible; the latter is not. Most things you would reasonably regulate amount to fraud or deception of one kind or another, such as many stock market scams. Rule of law is a good thing. It just needs to have a reasonable basis.
You make some good points. That said:
That can be fixed. Take a look at ESR's take on this:
Please don't respond with "anyone who says this isn't a real libertarian" unless you have very specific arguments that prevent it from falling into the category of No True Scotsman.
There are self-described libertarians who are also self-described anarchists. From the way many of them talk (see e.g. that FAQ), I have no particular reason they are twisting words either when calling themselves 'libertarian' nor when calling themselves 'anarchist'. Anarchism is an extreme of libertarian thought, but it is definitely part of the spectrum.
You don't seem to appreciate the deliberate way in which I phrased my response. I said I know of no such person. I did not claim that no such person exists. It's a bit reactionary and knee-jerk to tell me about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy (of which I was already aware, for what it's worth).
Otherwise, thank you for revealing to me that my notions of libertarianism were unnecessarily narrow. I have a strong preference for not remaining ignorant and you've been helpful to that end.
I'm asking precisely because I don't think he (or anyone) can come up with a brand new business model that the world has never seen before. There are ownership models, rental models, subscription models, and perhaps one or two others. That's pretty much it. Saying that the record labels or studios need to come up with a new business model is a disingenuous argument.
Or ... a new business model would be, by definition, new and therefore not before seen, rendering your references to existing models such as ownership, rental, and subscription completely irrelevant by your own words. If you are claiming that it is not possible to come up with a new business model, backing that up would amount to proving a negative so it is safe to consider this notion invalid. That leaves the alternative notion of these businesses either dying or reinventing themselves, and I don't personally care which happens.
Then there's this other blatantly obvious thing: why would they come up with something new when they have acquired so much political power focused on preserving what is old? Do you not understand the connection between their adamant insistence on clinging to what is old, and their refusal to come up with something new? They have a finite amount of resources. Every resource invested in lobbying for draconian copyright laws is a resource that could have been put towards innovation. They are their own worst enemies here.
You have failed to address my objections. You have succeeded only in attempting to distract attention away from them. Most of all, you have utterly failed to explain why someone who does not own a business and is not employed by that business has any obligation to reinvent that business. Did you think that was just going to go away if you ignored it? Are you afraid to respond to that, or did you imagine I wouldn't notice your failure to address my explcit challenge? Either address that point or admit that you can't. Otherwise you, sir, are not being honest.
This is my second request. I again await your reply. If you can respond to what I have asked twice now, it would be a substantial improvement. Until then, you are as disingenuous as anyone you claim to oppose.
most people who call themselves libertarians are just selfish asshats
Everyone is a selfish asshat. Most libertarians are just honest about their asshattery. Who would you prefer? An honest, or a dishonest, selfish asshat?
It's absolutely not true that everyone is a selfish asshat.
I don't know of a single libertarian who wants to have a great deal of freedom but also wants to deny such freedom to everyone else. That sure would be selfish. Instead, libertarian thought is a belief in the greatest possible reasonable amount of freedom for everyone.
Who is selfish? The person who wants everyone to be as free as is reasonably possible? Or the person who wants to punish anyone who does things they don't like even when they aren't infringing anyone else's rights? Seems easy enough to me.
What makes you think this is unintended?
Either every legislator and top-level member of the executive branch is a drooling idiot, or, there is at least one of them who can point this out to the rest and the rest don't care.
You need predictable crises to solve if you want to implement Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.
Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.
If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.
That's what the media industry is hoping, anyway.
Most people who use a BitTorrent client have no idea how it works. They are not intimately familiar with the principles of its operation. They are unlikely to even understand the IP stack or the TCP protocol. What they know is how to use a GUI client that obscures most of the technical details. They click a ".torrent" link in their browser, a BitTorrent client pops up, they click "Ok" and the download begins. This requires no specialized knowledge whatsoever.
There's no reason to believe that encrypted peer-to-peer clients could not work the same way, or could not use something like onion routing as their basis. Enough necessity will gladly become the mother of that invention. To think otherwise is a total failure to understand the nature of things like Prohibition, the War on (some) Drugs, and any other instance of what happens when overwhelming widespread public demand is driven underground.
Ha! I said the same thing back in the 80's when I was a 13 year old pirating apple 2 games. Turns out I was just an immature little kid that didn't think the rules applied to me.
Eh, I don't agree with this viewpoint as I find it too polar. You're either an immature kid or you're an adult who follows all the rules all the time. This leaves no room for the possibility of civil disobedience as a response to unjust laws.
Still, it is a real viewpoint and it's not "Flamebait" to state it. Mods, please grow a pair and stop letting your personal offense decide your use of modpoints.
And that's a cop-out.
If you believe that, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why the reinvention of a failing business belongs to anyone other than the owners and employees of that business.
It's not his job because he has not entered into a contract that would pay him monetary compensation for saving the failed business model. You want him to perform valuable work for free? Like I said, if you think this is reasonable then the burden of proof is on you.
So what will it be? Demonstrate that he should work for free to save a business he does not own and is not employed by? Or admit that your accusation of "cop-out" is mistaken and amounts to nothing other than a knee-jerk? Methinks you have painted yourself into a corner.
I await your reply.
In this case, it's the "mob" that doesn't want these new laws. They were not the result of popular public pressure. It's a small minority of powerful special interests that have a lot of political clout. This is neither democracy nor a functioning representative republic.
The idea of libertarian (small 'l') thought is simplicity itself. Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they please with their property and their own body and should be free to believe whatever they want. They should be able to exercise those freedoms whether or not someone else doesn't like it; anyone who doesn't like their actions is free to provide a counter-example in the form of how they deal with their own body, property, and beliefs.
The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property. They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others. The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.
This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
Copyright has become out of control. If it returned to a 12-year term after which time the work became public domain, it would regain respectability. It would then fulfill its intended purpose of granting a temporary monopoly to creators in exchange for an enriched public domain.
Think about it; the original 12-year term was during a time when the printing press and paper was the most technologically advanced means of distribution. We can now distribute many more works in far less time yet copyright lasts much longer. People don't respect copyright today for the simple reason that it is not respectable. It is no wonder they feel no shame for violating it. This is also easy to understand unless you subscribe to such a strict "law-and-order" mentality that you have abandoned all concept of understanding human nature and wish to replace that understanding with harsher threats of penalty.