You've ignored externalities - for example, why are contract killings illegal if all trade is mutually beneficial?
I'm not arguing that it should be illegal for people to purchase your graphic novel - I'm arguing that the mechanism currently used to distort the market to prevent the price of your graphic novel from dropping to the marginal cost of reproduction (essentially zero for digital copies) should be re-examined. Perhaps a mechanism that requires state supervision of every digital information transaction is not, on balance, beneficial to society.
There are two decisions involved: the creator's decision to produce the work, and society's decision to grant the creator exclusive control over distribution of the work (ie copyright). You're quite right that the first decision doesn't create a tragedy of the commons, but the second does.
I completely agree that I haven't lost anything if you decide not to produce work, just as you haven't lost anything if someone decides not to pay for your work.
I don't really claim to have an answer, just saying that if almost everybody does "X" voluntarily, then "X" surely can't really be all that insane.
Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? Copyright law creates a situation where individuals can benefit at society's cost: instead of releasing their work into the public domain, creators can control its distribution for their own profit. Of course it's individually sane for each creator to do so - but that doesn't mean it's sane for society to allow them to do so! It was certainly sane three hundred years ago, and society did pretty well out of the copyright bargain until the invention of cheap copying and remixing technology. But things have changed drastically in the last thirty years and it's time to reevaluate the bargain.
If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the lowest number of first-choice votes is eliminated and the second-choice votes from those ballots are used instead. If there's still no candidate with a majority, the candidate with the next-lowest number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and so on. (But I could be wrong about this because it seems to me that someone must win when you get down to 2 candidates, which would make the third choice redundant.)
The scenario you described is tricky because there's a tie between X and Z for the fewest first-choice votes. If X is eliminated then Y gets 3 second-choice votes and wins 7-3; if Z is eliminated then X gets 3 second-choice votes and wins 6-4. I'm not sure how ties are handled in real life (although of course they're very unlikely in large elections).
I remember struggling one Christmas morning to get iChat AV to work because iChat and PostgreSQL were fighting over the same shmget() key_t (54321, IIRC).
See, people say OSX isn't a real Unix, but I think this example of inexplicable behaviour caused by a hardcoded value buried in an arcane decades-old API proves how wrong they are. Welcome to the family.;-)
What part of "rare or non-existent" did you miss? Terrorist attacks are rare. They cost very few lives compared to other risks of modern life (car accidents, swimming pools, eating too many cakes). We should not structure our entire society around a single risk.
Like 3 million other people, I was on the Tube on the morning of the London bombings. 54/3,000,000 = 0.000018. If the same number of people were killed every day I could expect to survive for 3,000,000/54/365 = 152 years.
By stating a Turing machine is universal, one is saying that the machine can handle the entire spectrum of possible inputs
No, "universal" means it can simulate any other Turing machine, represented as an appropriately formatted input. It does not follow that all possible inputs are valid representations of Turing machines.
And since they're actually cops, you won't care if they ARE arrested, right?
Wrong. A violent act by an undercover officer gives the uniformed officers an excuse to break up the protest violently, arrest everyone present, confiscate cameras that might provide evidence of police misbehaviour, take photographs, fingerprints and DNA samples, and put the protestors' names on a list of "violent criminals" for future harassment.
people who are arrested for being violent at a protest march are still people who were being violent
Arrested does not mean convicted. People can be arrested without committing or threatening to commit any crime, just as a means of breaking up or containing a protest. Nevertheless, the fact that a person has been arrested (not convicted in a court of law, just arrested) can lead to permanent consequences such as problems obtaining visas.
Not necessarily - many UDP-based protocols use some kind of connection setup and teardown, just like TCP does, but in flow-based routing (unlike virtual circuits) the routers don't have to care about setup or teardown: they just see a series of packets with the same source address, source port, destination address, destination port, and protocol identifier, which they treat as a flow.
If you cannot distinguish between modulation by an external cause and a change of state due to internal causes, then you can't ever know if the external exists at all. It might all be a figment of your imagination.
That's true, but I don't see why you conclude that such a system can't exist. Our brains are in a constant state of uncertainty, weighing imperfect sensory data and imperfect memories, holding contradictory possibilities in mind while waiting for further evidence, often having to make decisions before that evidence arrives. We make a lot of mistakes, including mistaking the real for the imaginary. But natural selection prefers a good guess now to a perfect answer later. (You see something coiled on the floor - it could be a rope or a snake - how much information do you gather before reacting?)
I think we need to make a distinction between (a) moral rights, (b) legal rights, and (c) illegal power. In your example of the 14-year-old girl, I'd say it's morally wrong for her to be married against her will; in some countries it's also illegal; in some of those countries it's actually prevented. Clearly I can't expect everyone to agree with my moral position, and I certainly don't expect legal or illegal power to bow to my moral sensibilities, but that doesn't stop me from saying "here is what's right, and there is what's happening, and they're not the same".
The point I was trying to make in my previous post was that if you just say "whatever happens is right" or "anyone who does anything has the right to do it" then the concept of rights becomes redundant and worthless. The value of the concept lies in its counterfactuality: rights describe a possible world, an aspiration, which doesn't necessarily coincide with the actual world.
Are you suggesting that the child in question has the power to refuse being raped if the powers that be in her tribal area make said arrangement?
Not at all. I'm saying she has the right to refuse, even if she doesn't have the power to refuse. That's my whole point: rights and power are not the same thing. To rape her would be wrong, even if you have the power to do so.
Sure, it sucks balls, but power is now and always has been the definer of what 'rights' the masses are allowed to have/excercise.
Again, the rights you have and the rights you can exercise are not the same thing. Yes, power defines what you can do, but it doesn't define what it's right for you to do. I realise that's probably cold comfort when you've got a jackboot on your neck, but in my more idealistic moments I like to think it's worthwhile to at least assert the possibility that not everything done by those in power is right.
Let me get this straight: sovereign governments have the "right" to create laws, people don't have the "right" to break them, but the laws don't have to be "morally right", even in the eyes of the people who make them? You have a very unusual conception of "rights" if they're not grounded in any kind of morality.
If "rights" are simply grounded in power, then surely anyone who has sufficient power to break the law also has the "right" to do so? So your conception of "rights" becomes meaningless - it's just a label for the way things are. If anyone who does anything inevitably has the "right" to do it, the concept of "rights" is redundant.
Would it be possible for the open source community to launch a project to essentially make it impossible for a government to cut off its own people from the outside world?
Until recently a charity called Information Without Borders was developing a promising-looking project called Sneakernet: basically an encrypted delay-tolerant network using epidemic routing between Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices. Messages would hop from person to person across the social network until they reached an internet gateway device. The project wasn't perfect - its goal was to ferry messages to a single trusted server in the "free world" rather than to establish an autonomous underground communication system - but it would have been useful for getting photos and eyewitness reports out to the press in a situation like this.
Unfortunately the website seems to have died so I guess the project has been abandoned. If anyone's interested in working on a replacement, please Google my username plus "censorship" and email me.
I guess the Panopticon would cause people to just freak out.
I'm not sure... in the Panopticon you never know when you're being watched, so you internalise the assumption that you're "probably" being watched at any given moment and stop being conscious of it. I can see why constant reminders would freak people out though.
Maybe the pervasive monitoring in some societies (UK, Hong Kong) is both a symptom AND a cause of the very crime it's meant to monitor.
Interesting idea - constant visibility eventually undermines shame?
In fact the fourth amendment makes it explicitly constitutional to violate people's privacy in far more fundamental ways, such as searching their person or possessions, if there is a good reason to believe that this is essential for the wellbeing of the state.
Not true. The Fourth Amendment requires search warrants to specify "the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," and there must be probable cause for a search. It does not authorize surveillance dragnets, even in the name of national security, which is what many people suspect that Verizon and AT&T have facilitated.
Do we have any evidence that *ONLY* 100 people were spied on?
It's worse than that - the summary says that only 100 Americans are under surveillance, but the article says that "fewer than 100 people inside the United States are under surveillance under FISA warrants". FISA's jurisdiction only covers communication with or by foreign powers, so it's likely that most surveillance of Americans is governed by other courts.
It is not okay to send things to people just because you think they need it.
You just described all email. When I send someone a job application, or a photo of a cat with its head stuck in a jar, or a love letter, it's because I think the recipient wants to read it (of course I want them to read it too, but I wouldn't send it unless I thought they'd be interested). Email is inherently push-based, so it's always based on an assumption about what the other person might want to receive.
I don't think intelligent design is what he has in mind. The last sentence of the article mentions "the possibility of resolving the low rate of evolution of organic life by investigating the possibility that the inorganic life 'invents' the organic life." By claiming that DNA is too complex to have evolved spontaneously, he lays the ground for his later suggestion that DNA evolved from simpler inorganic helices, which can be shown to evolve spontaneously.
But really folks, is invisible surveillance really that much more dangerous than the visible kind? I don't think so.
Michel Foucault said it much better than I ever could:
Disciplinary power... is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.
I don't think you could make some kind of uberclient that can trick the entire swarm into unloading their bits in your direction.
That's pretty much what BitTyrant does. It determines the threshold at which each peer will start uploading, sorts the peers by their thresholds, and uploads to as many as necessary to saturate the downstream connection.
I'm aware that they don't run on fresh air, but I still believe they have more editorial independence than profit-driven or government-controlled media. Or perhaps I'm being naive and they just cultivate an air of seriousness and impartiality to keep the donations flowing in.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing that it should be illegal for people to purchase your graphic novel - I'm arguing that the mechanism currently used to distort the market to prevent the price of your graphic novel from dropping to the marginal cost of reproduction (essentially zero for digital copies) should be re-examined. Perhaps a mechanism that requires state supervision of every digital information transaction is not, on balance, beneficial to society.
I completely agree that I haven't lost anything if you decide not to produce work, just as you haven't lost anything if someone decides not to pay for your work.
If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the lowest number of first-choice votes is eliminated and the second-choice votes from those ballots are used instead. If there's still no candidate with a majority, the candidate with the next-lowest number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and so on. (But I could be wrong about this because it seems to me that someone must win when you get down to 2 candidates, which would make the third choice redundant.) The scenario you described is tricky because there's a tie between X and Z for the fewest first-choice votes. If X is eliminated then Y gets 3 second-choice votes and wins 7-3; if Z is eliminated then X gets 3 second-choice votes and wins 6-4. I'm not sure how ties are handled in real life (although of course they're very unlikely in large elections).
Like 3 million other people, I was on the Tube on the morning of the London bombings. 54/3,000,000 = 0.000018. If the same number of people were killed every day I could expect to survive for 3,000,000/54/365 = 152 years.
There's no explicit circuit setup or teardown: the flows are detected by the router rather than being established by the endpoints.
I very much doubt the World Internet Piracy Organization will give them the ruling they're hoping for.
This is a rare case of Diebold tallies matching the exit polls: the machines couldn't remember how the votes were cast and neither could the voters.
I think we need to make a distinction between (a) moral rights, (b) legal rights, and (c) illegal power. In your example of the 14-year-old girl, I'd say it's morally wrong for her to be married against her will; in some countries it's also illegal; in some of those countries it's actually prevented. Clearly I can't expect everyone to agree with my moral position, and I certainly don't expect legal or illegal power to bow to my moral sensibilities, but that doesn't stop me from saying "here is what's right, and there is what's happening, and they're not the same".
The point I was trying to make in my previous post was that if you just say "whatever happens is right" or "anyone who does anything has the right to do it" then the concept of rights becomes redundant and worthless. The value of the concept lies in its counterfactuality: rights describe a possible world, an aspiration, which doesn't necessarily coincide with the actual world.
Not at all. I'm saying she has the right to refuse, even if she doesn't have the power to refuse. That's my whole point: rights and power are not the same thing. To rape her would be wrong, even if you have the power to do so.
Again, the rights you have and the rights you can exercise are not the same thing. Yes, power defines what you can do, but it doesn't define what it's right for you to do. I realise that's probably cold comfort when you've got a jackboot on your neck, but in my more idealistic moments I like to think it's worthwhile to at least assert the possibility that not everything done by those in power is right.
If "rights" are simply grounded in power, then surely anyone who has sufficient power to break the law also has the "right" to do so? So your conception of "rights" becomes meaningless - it's just a label for the way things are. If anyone who does anything inevitably has the "right" to do it, the concept of "rights" is redundant.
Unfortunately the website seems to have died so I guess the project has been abandoned. If anyone's interested in working on a replacement, please Google my username plus "censorship" and email me.
They won't let you in without a ticket. :-/
I don't think intelligent design is what he has in mind. The last sentence of the article mentions "the possibility of resolving the low rate of evolution of organic life by investigating the possibility that the inorganic life 'invents' the organic life." By claiming that DNA is too complex to have evolved spontaneously, he lays the ground for his later suggestion that DNA evolved from simpler inorganic helices, which can be shown to evolve spontaneously.
I'm aware that they don't run on fresh air, but I still believe they have more editorial independence than profit-driven or government-controlled media. Or perhaps I'm being naive and they just cultivate an air of seriousness and impartiality to keep the donations flowing in.